Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1526: The Season of Uncertainty

Episode Date: April 11, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about new options for supporting FanGraphs and a potential plan to play the 2020 season with a radically realigned league structure, then talk to FanGraphs writer and ZiPS projection system proprietor Dan Szymborski about how a shortened or canceled season would affect projections for 2021, whether players would exceed […]

My down shifted as I pulled into the driveway The motor's screaming, I'm stuck in second gear The scene ends badly as you might imagine In a cavalcade of anger and fear There will be feasting and dancing In Jerusalem next year I am gonna make it through this year If it kills me.

I am gonna make it through this year, if it kills me. Hello and welcome to episode 1526 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing okay. How are you? Doing okay. We have had a really tremendous response to our membership request, and we were excited to roll out a couple new ways to support the site. So before we get into our topic for today, I'm just going to do a brief PSA on the ways that you can support Fangraphs. If you're in a position to do so, we realize that now is a tricky time to be asking people for help, but

people who are already members at the site had asked us for some additional ways to support Fangraphs, and this week you guys got them. So we now have the ability to gift memberships to other readers, which, I don't know, gave me a warm and fuzzy as a way of helping Fangraphs, but also helping to share the ad-free experience with folks who might not be in a position to sign up for memberships themselves. And I've been really heartened to see how many people want to gift memberships to other folks, giving them away as giveaways on Twitter, certainly in our Facebook group for Effectively Wild. So that's really rad. Thanks to everyone who's done that. I think that I like membership. Ad-free membership is a way to support the site, not only because it helps us out, but I think there are really appreciable differences in

the way that the site functions, especially when you're looking at stuff like the board or the leaderboards where you might have longer load times as the site's doing a data call. So I like to think of it as something that helps us but also helps other people out and makes their user experience better. And so it's been fun to see that be such a popular way to support the site. And then there were folks who just wanted to give us some money, which feels strange, but we appreciate very sincerely. So we also have a donate to fan graphs option that obviously will not be there in perpetuity, but as we navigate the pandemic and the uncertain schedule and then kind of an uncertain advertising landscape,

even if baseball does come back, it's been just really nice to build additional means of buffer into the system. So Appelman has set a're starting from zero. And that number represents 4% of our usual sort of traffic, user traffic in a normal season. So we feel like we should be able to convert 4% of our usual reading audience to membership. But people have just been incredibly generous with their kind words about fan graphs and their signups for memberships and their donations. And we apologize for the need to keep asking. And we appreciate, as I said, that this is a hard time for a lot of folks. So if you're not in a position to donate, you know, reading the site without an ad blocker, that helps too. That makes a big difference. So you don't have to give money to the site to make

a difference, but we really appreciate those who have found some room in their budget to do so and hope you'll keep supporting Fangraphs. So we remain grateful to be a part of this community. It's pretty incredible to see its resolve and its kindness. So it gives me some optimism in the face of a very grim reality that we all might make our way through. Yeah, me too. It's been heartening to see. Tough times in many industries, obviously. Very tough times for media, tough times for sports media, certainly. So the way that people have rallied around Fangraphs and even the Dan Zimborski, and it's going to be a pretty wide-ranging conversation. Ostensibly, it's about projections and how projection systems might try to handle a shortened season or even a canceled season, which is something that we obviously haven't seen before. And it gets into many other topics, whether teams might approach

the offseason differently, how teams could approach a shortened season differently in terms of roster construction and strategy. And we even get into injuries and then streaming and the MLB The Show tournament and even some pandemic projections toward the end. So wide-ranging conversation with Dan, who we've been wanting to have on for a while. So we'll bring him on in just a second. I don't know if there's anything you want to say about the latest leaked trial balloon that MLB has been discussing as a means of possibly bringing baseball back. So I know that we still face a lot of hurdles to getting baseball back and none of the concerns that were raised by the the arizona plan i love how dignified that sounds like the way that we decided to talk about that as an industry sounds like uh you know like we're introducing a constitutional plan or something

yeah exactly you know obviously all of those logistical and testing hurdles still exist i don't know that when he started writing about the challenges, attendant with that plan, that Ben Clemens knew he'd be looking up how much meat everyone eats. But if you haven't had a chance to read Ben's piece on some of the problems that are likely to present insurmountable hurdles to at least a May start for the Arizona plan, that piece is up at Fanagraphs. But I think that one key difference that this plan seems to address is that it's much more feasible from a broadcasting

perspective, right? So if you're not scooting everyone into the hot of the Arizona day in July and August as a means of getting games played for the East Coast, not that it isn't hot and or humid in Florida in July and August. You still have some climate issues there, but it just seems like it would be a much more feasible plan from a broadcasting perspective because you could start games. Heck, you could start games at 10 a.m. because everybody's home, right? Yeah, so that was the Arizona plan.

This is the Florida-Arizona plan where basically we would have the Grapefruit League and the Cactus League that we have the standard divisions, and it would just sort of make the best of what we have or could have potentially. And it would just sort of make the best of what we have or could have potentially. So, yeah, a lot of the same problems and potential barriers that are difficult to predict, as we will talk to Dan about. But as Sam and I said on our last episode, it seems to me at least that MLB should be thinking about this stuff and they are just kind of throwing it at the wall and seeing if it sticks. throwing it at the wall and seeing if it sticks. And I don't know if they are leaking these things to find out what the baseball public thinks of these ideas or to keep people thinking and talking about baseball at a time when baseball is not being played or whether reporters are just doing their jobs and getting wind of conversations that weren't intended to be public. But I think this is the sort of stuff that MLB should be kicking around. And maybe it will go no further than internal conversations and these articles. But if you do want to be ready to

bring baseball back, if and when that's possible, then you have to have given some thought to what that might look like. Yeah. In this trying time, a nation turns its eyes to two of its famously calm and reasonable states as a solution to its lack of baseball. Yeah, right. And another aspect of this plan, supposedly, is that there would be all DHs, so no more pitcher hitting, which is just another one of those things that's probably inevitable, but like robot umpires could perhaps be hastened by just this emergency scenario. So if you end up having to play seven inning games or you have robot umps or you do away with pitchers hitting, maybe it's tough to bring those things back since there was already some momentum toward making those changes anyway. And if we get through a season or some semblance of a season and people don't totally revolt, will there actually be energy to bring

those things back? Or will we just say, well, we didn't plan to implement them this way, but we did it and the world didn't end. And so maybe we'll just stick with this since we were planning to do that anyway. I think that the DH could very easily fall into that category. Yeah. Like, remember how worked up we all were about the automatic intentional walk? We were, oh, we were fussy. Remember when we cared about stuff like that? I never did.

Yeah, I never did either. But there were people who did. They were all worked up. Yeah, I never did either. Some people did. But there were people who did. They were all worked up. I think we continue to underestimate the degree to which people are going to be radically pissed off by the RoboZone because it's very different. It's very different than the strike zone that we're all accustomed to.

I think there will be a real appreciable prickly response to that. And I think that it will be really fascinating to watch. I just hope, you know, the one thing I hope they keep, I hope they keep the need for an explanation for replay decisions. Because I want to see I'm smiked up telling an empty ballpark why stuff is the way it is. Because you're still going to need to. That was supposed to happen anyway. This year, yeah. So, yeah.

And so I guess there's less need for it if there are no fans and everyone's watching at home. the way it is because you're still going to need to happen anyway this year right so yeah and so i guess there's less need for it if there are no fans and everyone's watching at home but still you can still use it and i still want it in the future so yeah i still want it but yeah i think that people will look back at you know not that dhs are necessarily what they once were in terms of the quality the average quality of the hitter that's in that spot in the American League right now, but it's night and day better than the average pitcher hitting. And so I think that it could be the kind of thing where we look back and go, oh, that was silly to hold on to for so long, although I think we will miss some of the late game strategy that was part of that whole thing. But I think that the robo-ump thing is

for me still very much up in the air because, you know, people in this moment in time really want to feel – we just want to feel something that isn't about the pandemic. And I think that, man, people could get real, real worked up about a robo-zone in this day and age. We could just lean into that real good so i don't know if that one will stick around but it is hard to undo those rule changes once they've uh once they've been put in place even if they are being introduced under really wild circumstances so i don't know be interesting to see but gosh it'll feel so good to have baseball back i hope it works me too there's not much other baseball news to talk about and so people are obviously going to scrutinize all of these plans that come out. And that's fine. And it's reasonable to point out why they won't work or why they seem unrealistic. But unless we get to the point that baseball is actually implementing these things

at a time when it seems premature and it seems like it would endanger players or personnel or even non-baseball people, at that that point i think it would be fair to really roundly criticize them but unless we get to that point i'd say take it in the spirit in which it's offered baseball is just sort of spitballing here and we can point out the flaws but i don't know that we necessarily need to jump all over them because i'm sure mlb is aware of those hurdles too and they're just talking about stuff. They're just trying to look for a solution if and when baseball is able to return. And I think that's what they should be doing.

Yeah. It's a lot like Thanksgiving. You don't want to start planning Thanksgiving the day before Thanksgiving. By that time, you should have had pies. You should have your pies. You need to know where your turkey is coming from. We can't look around in July and suddenly be like, oh no, we have no turkey. Just to completely mix all of that up. They have to

try a bunch of different stuff in terms of what's feasible and what's not because there are going to be a whole bunch of weird edge cases and things that we haven't thought about. And you only find those when you have conversations about what you need to do to bring it back. So I think it's totally reasonable to talk about. And like you said, unless they're actively jeopardizing someone's health at this point, it's just conversation to figure out what we might do if and when we get to a point where it starts to look reasonable to play empty stadium games or what have you. Scott Boris has been sort of silent lately, but you just really stepped up with that Thanksgiving analogy. Yeah, it's a lot like that. It's like, yeah, baseball in a pandemic is just like Thanksgiving. It's exactly the same.

Don't think about it anymore. Okay, let's get to our guest. So we are joined now somehow for the first time ever on this podcast. I'm not sure exactly how that happened, but we are rectifying it today by Fangraph's author and founder and proprietor of the Zips projection system, Dan Zimborski. Hey, Dan. Hey, Ben. How's it going? Okay. We're going to make up for lost time today. I don't know why we haven't talked to you for the last several years. You've been around, but we have a bunch of things to get to today.

So we'll cram it all into one interview and maybe we'll have you back sometime in the next seven or eight years. So I wanted to talk to you specifically because of something I saw at Baseball Perspectives that Rob Arthur wrote, which was about the way that either a canceled season or a shortened season would lead to a lot of uncertainty in ways that we're not used to and ways that would particularly impact someone who handles a projection system. Because this will be the first time that we have had a shortened season in the projection system era. And obviously we've never had a canceled season. And so I hope that we won't and that you won't have to figure out what to do in the event of a canceled season. And so I hope that we won't and that you won't have to figure out what to do in the event

of a canceled season. But have you thought about it and what impacts might that make or even a shortened season? Well, naturally, like, you know, in my baseball panic, I have given it a lot of thought. The complicated thing is it's in a way like modeling something like a virus, which is completely unknown, because when we project things we're basing it off existing baseball history and what happens in baseball history and certain structures of baseball history and certain truths there's 162 games and these teams play each other x times a year i mean you can go with that but when there's a lost season you don't really know what to do because there's no there's no guidepost we can

talk about a missing season we never had a missing season uh we had players go to war but there still was baseball but this is uh affected baseball in a way that's just highly unusual it's not really everybody was prepared for a strike i think at some point but not quite this right and so you usually have this structure where you take into account a certain number of previous seasons and you weight them based on their recency and everything. So what if, I mean, worst case scenario, there's no 2020 and you're running your Zips projections for next year and you can't, as you say, you can't really base it on previous years and say, well, here's what worked last time. So you just kind of have to guess, I guess. Is there any sort of modeling you can do to help guide your decision? And what do you think it might be? Well, I don't think mathematicians would admit it, but modeling is as much art as science because of how you approach it. You almost have a philosophical approach with some of the questions like bias versus variance. There's all sorts of questions that you have to deal with. I think that a shortened season is much

easier to deal with simply because we do have those in history. One thing I've done is I've looked back at 1994 and 1995, and I looked at the numbers after their season to see what kind of predictive value those 94 and 95 numbers had on the future performance if it was reduced compared to previous full seasons. In that case, it looked like what you would expect from shortened seasons. They were less predictive of future performance. But with a missing season, it's tricky because we've had individual players that have missed seasons, and there's quite a lot of players who have missed seasons due to non-injury

reasons, early retirements, going off to World War II or Korea, or things like that. Even, say, holdouts for the luxury tax people like Dallas Keiko. What we don't have, of course, is everybody missing a season. And it's going to have a lot of guesswork. At some point, Zipf is going to probably fill in what the projection was, but it's going to increase our errors considerably when we look at the 2021 results. I guess the solace I take is that everybody who projects things is kind of in the same boat. There isn't one guy who has the answer. I don't know. Maybe Rob Arthur does. Who knows? I'm curious if you think, you know, we obviously don't really know what's going to happen here,

but is your intuition or your baseline expectation that players next year and what will hopefully be a very regular season with a full slate of games that they will outperform or underperform what ends up being their Zips projection for that year, given this gap that we're likely to see? to see. I think it might actually, my suspicion or hypothesis, I actually think on some level this hurts star players more because they have more to lose in an ability standpoint. When you talk about, say, a marginal, say, major league role player compared to a AAA player, there's not a huge amount of difference between those players when you're talking just the general, you know, how many runs are they worth on the field? I think someone who performs at such a high level, especially a pitcher, I think that that could, I'm not sure if it will, but I think that could have a larger consequence for those types of guys. Yeah, I was wondering about that too, whether we would see more pitcher injuries or fewer pitcher injuries, because this is just a long layoff and guys get

to fully heal again we're in a canceled season hypothetical scenario here where maybe you get such a long time to heal that players typically don't get at all in the middle of their careers unless it is injury related or something and then that's another issue whether you would see just you know elbow ligaments regenerate in a way that they don't typically get to even over a normal offseason. And maybe we would see fewer injuries or maybe the long layoff and losing whatever strength you've built up. Maybe that would hurt players. I mean, they'd all be in the same boat to a certain extent. So whether the long rest helps them or the rustiness hurts them, they would all be dealing with that to some degree. And maybe it would all just kind of cancel out in terms of performance. But in terms of health, I don't really know what it would do. Hopefully it would help. Yeah, the canceling out would be very helpful because that would be a nice, neat, tidy way to tie everything up. It doesn't usually work that way, but it's nice to imagine.

I think some of the next season performance, if we have a lost season, it'll also depend on what type of team activities we actually see teams be allowed to do. Because I think that when you have 1,200 players on 40-man rosters, you can have a great deal of difference in how well they keep in shape, how well they keep their game up over the course of what will be more than a year since they played baseball. And I think that could be one of those unknown factors. But say that there was an approval and say the season's canceled and MLB and MLBPA said

we approve team workouts over the offseason that we don't normally do. Maybe that would get players back into better shape quickly. But at this point, we just have so many unknowns. We don't even know what the parameters are going in. Hopefully they don't cancel the season. Let's have some baseball. this would affect the projections for players in a different way based on their age or experience level, because so much of the aging curve that is kind of built into projection systems, it's based on, you know, just kind of physical changes, but it's also based on experiential

changes. It's based on seeing many, many pitches and getting better at pitch recognition and that sort of thing. And so I wonder whether when you're talking about prospects, let's say, or young players who, yes, maybe you would project them to get a little bit better because they're getting stronger. But on the other hand, they're not getting the benefit of the typical season that they would have where they're getting experience, they're getting reps. And so in that sense, it's a lost year of development in addition to a long layoff. And so maybe you wouldn't expect them to take the step forward that they would otherwise. And maybe, I mean, this is sort of extreme, but maybe you're talking about like completely different aging curves or career patterns because players are not getting the seasoning that they normally would at a crucial point in their development. I think that's a very real thing. When I looked at players that have, say, lost injury seasons early in their career or players who joined baseball later on, like Ryan Miner after basketball, to an extent, when those players get into professional baseball and they're playing again, for a little while, they develop faster than other players their age because of the missing time, making some of that up. But they never really catch up.

Those years that are lost are really, to a large extent, lost forever. And I mean, that's not satisfactory. It's just the way it is. But then, of course, the question is, when everybody misses the season, maybe it just makes the level of play in Major League Baseball go down a little bit. That could be the end result of all this. It's really, really tricky. with a fixed waiting or whether it uses kind of a rolling period, calendar years or something, where it waits more recent events more heavily. So if you did just skip a year, would you change the waitings of the previous years or would it just kind of remove an older year? What do you think you would do there? Well, normally when a player is injured, Zips tries to fill in playing

time based on the projection and the loss due to, say, an injury. It can't really do that in this case. What Zips would do in this case, it does look at discrete years. It weighs different stats differently going back in time. For instance, a player's most recent strikeout rate is going to have a lot larger impact on the baseline than, say, players' doubles rate the previous season. Zips tries to fill in things because that's just the approach that's worked in the past. I don't quite know if that approach will actually work in this case. It's one of those things where I would probably learn a lot from the missing year

and tell us more about how players age and develop if they've missed a year because we've never had you know a thousand players suddenly miss a season due to non-injury reasons but that's something that would help us for the next one which i really hope there isn't i'm curious so we're going to talk about some of the i think we can call some of them outlandish certainly optimistic proposals that have floated around in the last couple of days about how the league might approach a season, assuming there is one. One of the questions that I know you wrote on for Fanagraphs this weekend, we've all gotten is we don't want to think about anyone benefiting from the pandemic. Obviously, everyone would rather just be playing right now. be playing right now, but there are certain rosters that are positioned to get guys back with the layoff and suddenly players who were slated to miss half a season maybe are going to

be available on opening day or close to it. For the folks who have not yet read your piece that went up on the Yankees this week, what are some of the rosters that you see as benefiting the most or sort of getting the most time back from players who they'd like to see rather than, you know, replacement level guys from AAA should the season start in July, June, later on this summer. Well, from a projection standpoint, obviously, as you mentioned, the Yankees got the biggest boost. That was always the conventional wisdom, but I wanted to measure how much of a boost was it? Are they the team that gets the largest benefit? And in this case, much of a boost.

And was it, were they, are they the team that gets the largest benefit? And in this case, it, it verified the, yes, they are at least as the projections see it. The Astros do also have a benefit and they get Justin Verlander back from

his groin surgery, hopefully 100%. Unless you don't like the Astros right now, as most people don't. But if you look at the Astros depth, their rotation, they, they've lost.

They do not have just that deep stable to reach back into at this point. So having Verlander back is pretty important. The Indians, they will get Carrasco back for one, which is pretty important because they're in a similar situation. They've traded off some of their pitching in recent years.

It's just thinner than it used to be. And the Reds, they get Eugenio Suarez back, which is also significant, just not as big a deal as some of the other returnees. And what surprised me, actually, is how few players are actually really, really injured right now and could return, not counting the Tommy John surgeries. a couple of guys like Chris Sale who are going to now just miss the season because they've elected to undergo surgery. How did that decision end up swaying some of this stuff? Did it make things considerably worse for the Red Sox or were they already in a tough spot to begin with? Where they were is they were still contenders, but kind of the second tier of the group. Better than the White Sox, but worse than the twins or indians if you look at it in kind of a tier uh point of view because people were calling the red socks and

leaving them for dead but there's a lot of uncertainty about the future and they do have significant pieces on their roster uh significant players who are you know have a lot of upside it's just 2019 was a disastrous season for them. Without Sale, that took away most of their real big upside opportunity. They still have a chance of making the playoffs, but it's a lot longer. They're kind of in the White Sox zone right now, where things could happen, and I'd probably be more optimistic for the White Sox than I would be for the Red Sox. But it's not something that would be the craziest thing ever if it actually happened. I think on some level, it just feels really odd that they could win the Mookie Betts trade. benefit from starters coming back and getting more playing time as a result of a reduced season.

But you've also written recently on the effects that a reduced season has on playoff probabilities just generally. First of all, I'm curious how you went about breaking Zips open to allow you to adjust it for season length and then what you ended up finding. Where's the tipping point on a season length where we start to see really funky results and teams sneaking their way into playoff contention? Reconfiguring zips in this manner actually took longer than I thought because I realized I had hard-coded in 162 games and everything just broke when I tried to put it back to 130 in 110 games. Generally speaking, once you get under half a season then things start to get really

weird then you start to see the tigers and the orioles have actual percentages of making the playoffs that don't round to zero anymore which is pretty odd uh i found the teams that got the most benefit are probably not that different from what you expect it's those second and third tier contenders that could be better than a top team for 80, 100 games. But 162 games is just that much harder. I think of the Milwaukee Brewers back, and I think it was 2014 when they had that really hot start

and then they spent the entire rest of the season slowly losing the division. With 100 games, they would have won the division. And I think the teams that would get a benefit from this are those teams that need help. I think of the Rangers, the Angels, the White Sox, the Blue Jays, the Red Sox. These are teams that are not in the middle of tanking. They're not tanking 2020. I mean, the Red Sox are kind of in a way, but they're not a 60-win team. They're probably an 80-win team. And 80-win teams, when they only play 100 games or 80 games, they do finish at the top of the division quite a bit, at least

from a projection standpoint. So it would probably make the races more exciting, but it makes greatness less valuable in a way, which has its own drawbacks. Yeah. So something you mentioned in your Yankees article or injuries article is that if they get a two-win boost, that doesn't sound like a lot, but two wins in a shortened season, let's say, would really up their win probability or their chances of winning the division by something like 10 percentage points. So it's sort of this strange situation where on the one hand, talent matters a little less because there's more randomness and just small samples and anything can happen. But on the other hand, every win that you can add to your projected total matters really disproportionately because it's making up a greater percentage of the season. So every win really counts however you can get it. It's because of this that I'm a fan currently of my only, I seem to be the only one who has this idea or wants it. I'd like to see

divisions kind of eliminated this year if we're going to have an 80 or 100 game season, simply because some of the downsides of having one big league is if someone gets you know ahead of the pack and has a 15 game leading july and nothing else really matters when you have an 80 or 100 game season it's a lot harder for one team to kind of mess up a no division league i think it would be pretty exciting and if we're changing the structure anyway, as they're talking about with, you know, having the Cactus League and Grapefruit League essentially be the 2020 leagues, I'd like to see baseball at least experiment. If nothing else, it'll give them some information for the future. When we have more regular seasons, what kind of changes they could

make? Yeah. What did you think of the no leagues idea? I like it. I think that it's going to be a weird season anyway. So be weird in a non-terrible way, because really the AL and NL, they don't really mean that much anymore. They used to be actual different leagues with real league presidents, but it's not anymore. It's essentially accounting right now. The leagues are an accounting fiction. They play every day. The DH is probably going to be the rule in both leagues in our lifetimes. So I don't see anything that's sacred about the leagues at this point. things just by necessity, but also because new things can be cool and fun and illuminating. But I think there is a certain point where it crosses over for me mentally from this is a real season. Yes, it's a shortened season, but I'll think of it more or less like I think of all the other seasons to just this is a weird outlier. This just doesn't count. It's kind of an exhibition. I'm glad baseball's back maybe

we'll learn some things it'll be fun for us all to have something to watch but I won't really think of it in the same mental classification as I do a typical season and if there is say a winner at the end of it I might kind of discount that in a way that I wouldn't if you just lopped off some games I'd still kind of count it mentally. But if there are really massive structural changes at a certain point, it tips over for me into this is just not real baseball. It's still good. It's still fun. I'm glad it exists, but it's different somehow. So I don't know where that line is for you or whether you agree that there is a line like that. What fascinates me about the kind of philosophical belief of what a season is, is that at this point now, we have statistical gatekeepers that that he had 4191 hits for a long time.

But the data guys, the data gang have said, no, you know, 4189 because we had some hits that were counted twice. And everybody who looks up Ty Cobb's numbers will come to Fangraphs or Baseball Reference or one of those sites, and they'll see, you know, 4,189 hits. If fan graphs and baseball reference, if the data providers believe it's a season, then in the long term, it'll become a season. Maybe people won't feel it that way, like in 2021, but in 2040 or 2050, people will look back, they'll see the stats in a player's career, they'll see the standings, they'll see it considered like any other season.

And it becomes a season in hindsight almost no matter what happens this year. So that fascinates me on some level. I don't know if it just fascinates me if it is. I'm curious what are – let's assume that there's a season. I know that we would learn a lot of grim things from the lack of a season. But assuming there is a season, depending on, I guess, the final form that it takes, what are some of the projection questions that you think we could potentially answer based on some of the oddities that are going to emerge from a shortened season or reconfiguring divisions or seeing guys come back from injury? What are some of the questions that if we're going to find a silver lining to

all of this that you think we might be able to answer or at least answer a little bit better than we currently can? I think things like additional time off are relevant in projections and are always tricky. Like what happens if a player retires and comes back? That kind of projection question is easy to answer. And it also tells us a little bit about how these seasons scale. I have 94 and 95 as shortened seasons, and then I'll have another shortened season, which kind of because the weights are pretty important. It's very tricky doing weighting in recent seasons because it's all based on history. As I always say, the problem with analyzing baseball and predicting the future is everything we know about baseball comes from baseball. There's no experimental data.

There's no scientific research where a player can play a million seasons. We only can pick up from what happens. So when anything different happens, we learn something from it. And not necessarily what we expect. I never expected back in 94 and 95 to actually use that data in this way, you know, 25 years in the future. So I think the consequences of a short season could be pretty interesting. There are questions like, what does a half season do for a pitcher's endurance in the following year? There's a lot of things we might be able to answer, and I don't think we'll even know all the things we'll be

able to answer until it actually happens. Okay, so now not from a projection perspective, but just from the mind of Dan Zimborski, what, what, what, yeah, could be we don't know what, what oddities would you be interested in seeing, you know, we've gotten some of the possibilities from these leaked proposals, like introducing right away a robo zone to minimize the amount of contact that an umpire would have with a catcher, although presumably he's still going to have to handle baseball. So I don't know how useful that is to actually limiting the potential spread of disease. But what are some of the rule changes or sort of funky oddities that you'd like to see baseball embrace this year, either to get an answer to how it might play in a regular season or just to amuse you, Dan Zimborski.

Well, robots always, always amuse me, and I've been probably one of the larger advocates for robo strike zones. So I would like to see that. I'd like to see less coaching on the field. I like to see players make more decisions for themselves. So if there's no first base or third base coach, I'm not necessarily against that. I like the idea of player communication on the field being what they have to do to decide things and let players make more decisions. decisions. What I don't know is how it's going to feel without a lot of fans. Because even in a Marlins game, there are some fans, not a lot, but there's some noise. And one thing I've learned, I mean, it's not really a sport and it's a different thing, is watching wrestling, is it does feel very different based on how the crowd is reacting to things. And it's something you don't really notice unless it's a completely empty arena.

I wish I had gone, I was out of town at the time, I wish I would have gone to that, the Orioles, White Sox, the quiet fanless game. Yeah, the one in 2015. Yeah, 2015. That would have been interesting. One thing that amused me was the Chinese Professional League. I talked a little about it in one of our COVID updates this week, but they're bringing in actual mannequins and dressing them up as fans. So I kind of wonder, maybe you have to pipe in some crowd noise, like a laugh track for baseball. It might actually make it better to watch at home. Weird if you're at the park,

but better if you're at home to hear fans. There's one other little factor that might affect how things play out this season, which is the schedule and the strength of schedule. I know that you're planning on writing something on that topic for Fangraph, so people can look out for that. You haven't really run the numbers yet, so you don't have an answer, but I wonder, would that fall into the same category as the injuries where it probably won't make a major difference, but even minor differences are actually major in this situation? start fresh or something that might lead to one strength of schedule or if it decides what we'll just pick up where we were supposed to be at this point in the schedule then certain teams might benefit or be hurt because they miss out on some easy games or some hard games disproportionately it could be a pretty big deal when we talk a shorter season because the seasons aren't

symmetrically laid out laid out in that way. So when you go in and you just kind of truncate the season, then you can create some significant differences in the strength of schedule, which again, the shorter the season, the bigger a deal that is. I think back, I believe it was an Indians-White Sox, like 2015, 2016, before the White Sox rebuilt, where the Indians had a September schedule that was something like 50 points, 50 percentage points lighter than the team they were going up against. I think it was the White Sox. I wish I had remembered that anecdote off the top of my head. But in a pennant race, that makes a pretty big deal. When I changed it to make

their strength of schedule identical, it had a huge change, a huge effect on the probabilities. And I think that if you just truncate the season, you're creating another bit of uncertainty and you're making a situation

where schedules that are hard to balance become even more grossly unbalanced, which also makes divisions even harder to justify. I think if we go the Grapefruit Cactus League route, that'll help the schedule situation, because there is no existing Grapefruit Cactus League season schedule to alter. But I do like more balanced schedules, especially in leagues where we have wildcards, because I think if you're

going to determine things by wins, I think you want to be as close to fair as possible. And I think some of these weird things they do with the designated team rival and the like, I think it kind of just manipulates the schedule in a way I don't really like. So Sam and I talked on our last episode about things that MLB could do if it wanted to reduce the variance and put more weight on true talent. In other words, you could have, for instance, run differentials determine who wins games instead of the actual score, or you could have one run wins or extra inning wins count for half because those tend to be a little more luck influence. Those were Sam's ideas. And I don't

know whether we'll see that or whether MLP will just decide to embrace the chaos. But for teams, do you think there is either any existing roster construction that would tend to hurt or favor teams in a shortened season, whether it's a certain amount of depth? Does depth matter more or less in a short season? Or is it better to have a great bullpen or a great starting rotation? Or does one of depth matter more or less in a short season? Or is it better to have a great bullpen or a great starting rotation? Or does one of those matter a little less? Is there anything like that? And again, we don't even know what rosters will look like or how many

players will be on rosters in the season if it's played. But is there any attribute of teams that you think would be beneficial potentially? I think that I go back and forth on this. We were talking in our Fangraphs live stream. We actually talked about this somewhat in the shortened season because we were watching the virtual Dodgers play and the Dodgers have a lot of depth and we were kind of going back and forth thinking, well, does it benefit them or hurt them? Because one level, you're going to have fewer injuries just because you have a shorter season. So there's less of a need for those plan B's and plan C's.

But on the other end, if it's like 1995, we're going to see larger rosters, especially at the start. And in an odder league year like this, we might have 30, 35-man rosters or something like that all year. In which case, it does benefit a deep team like the Dodgers who have a lot of tools and could almost have an all-righty, all-lefty lineup if they wanted to. So I'm kind of in the middle on that. I know it's an unsatisfying answer, but there's really a case to be made either way. And I'd imagine that the prevalence of double-headers and how many days off is probably going to make a big difference in the answer to that question too, right? Yeah, double headers. Because when you have a lot of double headers, then all of a sudden the pitching depth becomes way more important because teams are not going to start pitching all their

starters on three days rest in any case, but certainly not in a season like this. Right. Yeah. Is there sort of, could you potentially go to kind of a season-long bullpenning model? Would that even make sense? I mean, I guess if you had double headers, then you'd almost have to do more bullpenning unless you do happen to have a very deep starting rotation. But I wonder whether just besides roster construction, whether there's anything you could do in terms of in-game tactics and strategy to maximize your chances in a short season. I think long relievers could make a comeback because we do see long relievers occasionally still, especially in some of these long, long postseason extra inning games. But I think that if you have this situation, then all of a sudden those quadruple-A pictures,

I think like, I mean, he just retired, but Jeremy Hellickson would be quite useful in a situation like this, or Chris Young when he was having his better seasons. We don't really see a lot of relievers these days throw three or four innings, but I think that if we have a lot of doubleheaders and a lot, a really compressed schedule to fit in a lot of games, just having those guys, especially in blowouts, because teams still don't really use long relievers and blowouts as much as you would expect them to. But in a situation like this, I think there's an argument that they really should be doing that. talking a lot about uncertainty and how we're just going to know a little less going into next season

than we typically do, whether it's literally looking at projections and having a little less signal there than usual. Just I wonder how that will affect how teams operate this offseason. And even beyond that, of course, it's complicated by the economic impact of having a shortened season and everything else that's going on in the economy. So teams just may have less money available or be less willing to spend the money that they do have because of those sort of external factors. But how might it affect how teams approach, I don't know, long-term planning or even this winter in free agency, the fact that we may not

have had recent performance to go on if the season is canceled, or there will be at least less performance to go on. And so if you were thinking of signing someone to a long-term deal or extending a young player, let's say, you may be a little wary about that. It's just sort of a blank on the resume on the top line. And that might be sort of scary if you're thinking of making a major commitment. Yeah, I think that if I were a free agent heading towards free agency this year, I would be much more open to a one year big single season contract like Josh Donaldson a couple of years ago. I think I'd be way more open to that than I would be in most seasons. Because as you say, we have fewer games,

which means less information about players. And when you're going to spend $250 million to $300 million on a player, you kind of want to have all the information you can get. Economic uncertainty, because even if we had, say, like a V-shaped rebound in the economy, even if we get back to baseball, we're still not going to have a vaccine.

We could literally have a second wave of this happen next spring and be doing this all over again. Hopefully not. But it is a real possibility that can't be ignored. So I think that teams are going to be very conservative this year and probably with more economic justification than in most years, because some of the teams that say they have no money this offseason might actually not have any money. And that's kind of a weird change. It'll be interesting to see also how

teams sort of treat this because they plan to be competitive at certain times unless you're the Yankees or the Dodgers and you plan to win every year. Other teams, they sort of time things and they have a five-year plan and they say this is when we're going to get good and this is when we're going to spend. And I wonder how this might disrupt things if there is a canceled season and some teams kind of miss out on a rebuilding year or they miss out on a year within their window when they expect to win or if there's a shortened season and you do get some sort of fluky stuff happen where a team that is expecting to win misses the playoffs or a team that really wasn't planning even to invest in its

roster happens to sort of luck into a playoff appearance then does it become harder for that team to kind of go back to the plan and say, well, we weren't actually planning to win yet, so we'll just go back to not winning for a while? Or is it hard to sort of, I guess, keep that in perspective and say, well, we shouldn't put as much stock in that playoff appearance we just made and we can kind of start losing again? Or do we just fool ourselves into thinking, oh, no, we're actually good. It wasn't just the short season. We're just ahead of schedule. And now we are actually going to really ramp up when maybe we're not actually ready for that yet.

I suspect that most teams will go the stay the course route, simply because everybody knows that 2020 is going to be a very odd year if we have baseball. And I think, and you know, decisions made from surprises and emergencies tend to not be the best ones long term. So even if you lose a year of rebuilding or a year of contention or whatever, I think that on some level you have to say, well, that's just lost and there's not much we can do about it. And, you know re-evaluate the roster without being too 2020 heavy i think teams that take a different performance or a surprise in what is just an unreal series of events i think those teams will regret that and i think the teams like the orioles like if they have a they wouldn't I don't think but say they went 50 and 50 in 2020 right I don't think that they would be inclined to change too many things

about the the ongoing trajectory but of course then as we talk about the money issue is wrapped into this because if it isn't expensive to sign free agents next season then that could have an additional altering effect on the course the team takes. And then, of course, on the back end of COVID, which, of course, isn't going to go anywhere. It's just going to depend on our vaccine and therapeutic approaches. We have the potential disruption of the new CBA negotiation after the 2021 season. So it's not like there's going to be a lot more predictability

in terms of the number of games played in the next couple of years. I don't know. I'm not a labor lawyer, so I don't know the obstacles to this. But I would think that from the players' and the owners' standpoint, that even if it's not ideal and there's some serious things that need to be changed, that just agreeing on an extension for a year or something would be beneficial to all parties. I do have one more thought on the projections issue, and this may not help you as much as it helps teams. But obviously we do have data out there on players, and teams have even more data than we do that wasn't available in the past. And so when you're constructing zips initially and you're just going on sort of the results

stats, and I know that you and other architects of projection systems have started to integrate some more advanced stuff, whether it's batted ball data or even some stat cast information. But teams do have technology now that in theory allows them to assess true talent in smaller samples and so in that sense i suppose teams are better able to make accurate appraisals of player performance and projections than they would have been in the past you know if you only get 100 games instead of 162 but you also have stackast information and you know how hard guys are hitting the ball and how hard they're throwing the ball, and maybe you're even getting some of this Hawkeye information that's giving you even more granular detail, then maybe there'd be a

little bit more confidence in the true talent level of these players than there would have been in an earlier era, whether you have access to it and the other public projection systems have access to it. That may be another matter, but that's something to take into account, I guess. Yeah, this would have been a larger problem for me, I think, four or five years ago. I've done a lot of work integrating some of the more advanced stats and developing some of my own. I like to think I've done some pretty clever work with minor league defensive data from the play-by-play information and i've talked with teams i know i i have an idea on a lot of the things they're doing

they don't come right out and tell me for obvious reasons but you know when you've been around enough you can kind of suspect things i think that i i do have done i have done enough work with with some of this advanced data that I could probably keep the projections from being too awful. I was going to ask whether you can tell how much that's helped, because I know that Jeff used to say that even though we've gotten smarter about baseball and learned things about baseball, the projections hadn't really demonstrably improved over the 10 to 15 years or so prior to whenever we had that conversation. I wonder whether you have seen any small gains based on StatCast stuff or whatever

else you've been able to integrate and what has helped the most, what source of information that you didn't used to have has decreased the error slightly. I found that our gains for, say, the mean projection, we haven't really made huge gains there because we've done all the low-hanging fruit. And as it turns out, the normal statistics actually do a pretty decent job once you make a few adjustments, batting average with balls in play,

basic things like that. The actual performance is actually pretty important, which is kind of a good thing in a way, because you kind of want the performance to be, you know, meaningful. Where I have seen a better gain is long-term projections. Some of the velocity data I use for pictures I found has more value when you're talking how they're going to age long-term than how they're going to pitch next year. So I think that data and we're still very early in the study of this data because we really don't have that many seasons of StatCast and that kind of information. And nobody really has, you know, 50 years of that kind of stuff.

So a lot of the stuff that we see, I keep saying stuff, a lot of the things we see, like some of the StatCast defensive data, we're still getting a handle on how predictive that is. And MLB, they have a lot of sources of data that we don't have access to easily, but they still have the same problems in terms of demonstrating the predictive value. So in the meantime, we don't have real baseball, but we do at least have MLB The Show. And you and others at Fangraphs have been streaming. And now we know that there will be a bigger scale MLB players tournament. There will be players from each team competing in this MLB The Show league. And it's starting tonight, Friday, if you're listening to this when we're putting up the podcast. So are you excited for this? And what have you found the response to your stream so far to be? Because I wrote something earlier this week for The Ringer about esports and whether we will see some non-esports fans embrace esports while traditional sports have gone away. And you'd think that there'd be people who are interested in making that leap. And there are some, of course. But if you look at the surveys that have been done or even just the Twitter replies to my tweets about that article, a lot of people are not interested in making that leap. And the odd thing, I think, always to me is just how militantly opposed some people are to even the idea of esports.

I certainly understand why you might not be interested in it. There are a lot of things that we're all not interested in, but the thing that always kind of confounds me is that people can't seem to understand why other people would be interested in it, even though it's an entertaining thing for millions of people. It's high-level people, very skilled, competing in fun competitions, which is something that seems like you should be able to at least understand in theory, even if it's not for you. But one thing that we've seen is sort of digital analogs of real-life sports. So we've seen NBA 2K on ESPN. We've seen a lot of racing sports have their online equivalents be broadcast even on major TV networks.

And now baseball is trying to get into that. So as you've been streaming, have you found that anyone has kind of gotten on board if they weren't already on board? I've heard from a few people, at least, that they really enjoyed it, that the lack of baseball made it more exciting than they thought. And a lot of people who aren't into kind of video games don't really always know just how good the graphics have gotten. I mean, I've always been a video game guy, and I started playing with an Atari 2600. And those graphics and realism were very different than the games you see streamed right now. And you look at platforms like Twitch and YouTube's streaming and Microsoft's streaming service, and it's a huge demographic of younger people that are into this kind of thing. And that's something that sports do need to capture because you need to get people interested in your sport.

And you have to reach out to that generation in a different way than you'd reach out to someone who's, say, 60 or 65 that didn't grow up with these things as being normal. I mean, Twitch is almost the whole subculture of the internet. The memes, a lot of them come from Twitch. I think streaming is just going to become bigger and bigger. And you've already seen sports teams put their toes kind of into the water here. I mean, NBA teams have esports departments. A friend of mine works for the Houston Rockets, and he just does esports for them. He's not a basketball analyst or anything. So I do think that the younger crowd will embrace these kinds of things, because it's cool to see players playing baseball and virtual baseball against each other. You see

a lot of NBA players playing a lot of NBA 2K against each other. And I mean, some people are never going to kind of get into that thing. But for the people who are open minded, it's a different thing. And it's a lot of fun. And it's also one of the few things we have right now that we can do socially. Yeah, Hannah Kaiser wrote something for Yahoo on Friday about how, for her, least, the simulated games that we're seeing, whether it's Stratomatic or Out of the Park Baseball or maybe even MLB The Show, just kind of reminds her of what we've lost, you know, where it's sort of a poor substitute, I guess, for a lot of people. And so when they see the simulated box scores or whatever it is, they just are reminded of the absence of baseball, whereas

other people have kind of latched onto those as, well, it's the best we've got. And there are people gambling on those things. There are people playing fantasy based on those things. So I could see how it could fall into kind of an uncanny valley for you where it's close enough to the real thing that it really just reminds you that it's not the real thing. But on the other hand, try it. You might like it. Some of the faces, Ben. Some of the faces are so real. Sometimes you're a 33-year-old who only played Frogger as a kid, and then you watch the – it looks like Jock Peterson, except that there are fake people behind him at the ballpark. It's very unnerving, but then you listen to the smart people you work with and you

see that people want to watch it. You get over it. That's just one very specific example. I love fan watching in MLB The Show. I will frequently just hit pause and just look at the crowd and the things that happen and pick out little

graphic errors because there's only going to be so much, you know, computing power devoted to making the crowd realistic in that way compared to the players. And I love watching the weird guys screaming at the wrong moment or looking there, putting a hot dog up their nose. I had the realization when you guys were live streaming the last time that, you know, if I did my people watching thing with fake people, like I can make fun of fake children. I can't make fun of real children because that's that's in poor form. And I'd probably get angry emails. But like fake children, they don't have real parents who care about them. Those fake kids have no one. So I can make fun of those fake kids all day. Kids have no one, so I can make fun of those fake kids all day.

And some of those fake kids literally have no one. Because if you look and follow the crowd over the course of the game, people actually leave the game. But you'll see kids left behind just by themselves. The other day I was playing a Royals Tigers game. And there was this lonely kid wearing sunglasses. He was the only kid in the row. And he was the only person in the row uh and he was the only person there wearing a tiger shirt everybody else around him had a royal shirt so i went back to an earlier play in the game and i did a replay and there were other people next to him wearing tiger's gear so

what i think happened is they left him in kansas city and they went home without him and he doesn't even know. And since it's a fake kid, it's funny. It would be less funny for the real kid, obviously. But I like constructing things like that and watching those fans. Home Alone 4 left at the ballpark. When I was talking to Trevor May for my esports article, he's a very serious streamer, not just of MLB The Show these days. He'll be participating in the Players Tournament, but of many online games.

And he was obviously in a great position to see the overlap or lack of overlap between the audience that follows him because he is a professional pitcher and the audience that follows him because he is a streamer. And as he said, there is this sort of macho resistance that he sees where people just kind of instinctively say, oh, it's not a real sport. They're not real athletes. They're not out there using their muscles and sinews and sweating or whatever, even though esports can be quite physically training in some ways too. But there is that kind of resistance. And I think one really interesting area of crossover is the NASCAR and F1 version of esports, whether it's NASCAR iRacing or Formula One Grand Prix, because that, unlike basketball or hockey or soccer, baseball, the online version of racing is essentially racing. It's not physically on the the track But it is the pro racers

And it is them in Very realistic rigs In their homes or wherever they are On the tracks that they would normally Be racing on which are very Painstakingly modeled and so It's a very close equivalent to the actual Thing and you're watching the best

People in the world do that whereas When you're watching NBA players play 2k or MLB players play the show, they might be good at it because it's something they like. And obviously the esports demographic tends to overlap with the professional athlete demographic. the best in the world the way you would be if you're watching Overwatch or Call of Duty or Counter-Strike or whatever it is. You're watching the best people in the world at that. Whereas in MLB The Show, you're watching the best baseball players in the world play a video game that they may or may not be actually good at. So if you're watching for the highest level of play, maybe doesn't perfectly map on. But if you're in withdrawal from mlb personalities then yeah give it a try and it gives you an opportunity also to hear from the players in real time which is something that we all like when they're mic'd up in spring training well

when they're playing the show they're playing and they're trash talking each other and that can be another element of entertainment but maybe in the future that technology would happen because when we talk formula one drivers you have a wheel you have you know gears pedals you can do that pretty much at home you can't really put a baseball at home but you know they've had if you remember star trek holodecks they had actual simulations so if it was canceled the season was canceled they could go into the holodeck which obviously is probably not in our lifetimes but there could be something like that just way down the road

I actually found I like the Formula 1 video game better than watching normal driving because car racing always kind of freaks me out a little because it has such a high fatality rate and I don't like watching sports when people get crippled or killed which, I mean I watch football but I'm always kind of uneasy about it rate right and i don't like watching sports when people get crippled or killed uh which i mean i

watch football but i'm always kind of uneasy about it and and the rates of driver fatalities in racing just it does take away from the excitement for me personally because it's it's you don't like to see that thing happen i i don't know who would but you know in a video game nobody gets injured hopefully except maybe carpal tunnel or something. Yeah, or emotionally injured because there was a driver who rage quit in the middle of a race, which is a better way to have it derailed than to actually crash. So that's something. And I've also seen that there's some MLB broadcast teams like the Giants broadcast team and the Mets broadcast team have called games in the show in real time as if they were calling a real game. And that can be entertaining too. And it does

kind of show you that the canned commentary that comes with a baseball game is just inevitably, you know, it's gotten a lot better over the years, but it's not nearly as good as the organic conversation between actual broadcasters. So I wonder whether it would be more entertaining to have the Mets broadcast booth calling these players tournaments with maybe some players kind of speaking up in interviews in the middle, or whether it's better to just hear the players talking to each other because they are somewhat distracted, obviously, by actually playing the game. And I think there will be some commentary that's a part of this tournament, too.

I remember when they first had broadcasters in video games, kind of in the early 90s. And I remember on Sega Genesis, they had Sports Talk Baseball with Lon Simmons as announcing the game. And at that point, the technology was far worse. So he was always a couple batters behind, which was always amusing in its own way. But what was kind of neat is that Tony La Russa baseball had some pretty interesting announcers. And it's too bad that some of those guys aren't around today, because it would have been cool to preserve them, because it's much closer to reality than it used to be. Yeah. So the last thing that I wanted to ask you about is something that you addressed

in a Twitter thread this week. And I've had a couple of people mentioned to me that the energy that they typically put into looking at baseball projections or box scores or whatever, they've sort of transferred over into looking at pandemic projections, you know, just morbidly refreshing those things to see how bad is this going to get. And obviously, we've all been paying close attention to that. And you maybe have been paying closer attention than most, or at least have a little more personal experience in that realm than most. Baseball doesn't map perfectly onto pandemics, obviously, and those are tougher to project in a lot of ways. But it seems like you have some sympathy for just how difficult the task is and how hard it is to misinterpret those things.

I mean, people always draw the wrong conclusions from baseball projections. And now we are literally talking about life or death matters here. And there's so much uncertainty that the projectors are having a hard time, but doing the best they can with the data that's available. Yeah, it is tough. I had a long Twitter rant when I got set off about someone saying, oh, the models are wrong. They should pay, which is kind of a weird stance to take. But it does make me happy that I project baseball things and nothing life or death

i don't have that sense of responsibility i mean if i get mike trout's projection really wrong i i look dumb but everything else is okay which is fine that's the that's the amount of responsibility i can take uh naturally i have looked a lot at the data i don't do that much work with the data because it's you know it's not my area of expertise and I don't have a lot of the raw data that they have access to. But so mostly I've done a lot. I've done as much statistical nannying online than I have in any time in recent memory. Well, since you often will kind of coach people on how they should interpret baseball projections or some of the wrong lessons that people draw from baseball projections? Is there anything similar you can pass along, whether mistakes that projectors have

made or mistakes that people have made when actually consuming these projections? Well, I go back to the old phrase, George Box said that all models are wrong, but some are useful. And I think doing so much work with models, I know how wrong I'm going to be. And I'm going to be very wrong. And if you're not used to being wrong, you shouldn't be modeling. People, it's weird that the disbelievers in projections think that they're far more accurate than the people who actually do projections think they are. projections think they are. When modeling something like a pandemic, especially for, you know, the novel coronavirus, which is not acting the same way that flu viruses act or more serious things like Ebola, the errors that you're going to have are necessarily just huge.

And there's not much you can do about that because models aren't time machines. You're guessing what the answers are going to be ahead of time and trying to make a reasonable model that gives you something that's useful that you can draw from it. I think that people should take models seriously, but they should know that it's not that people have a secret agenda for making the model come out a certain way. Trying to make a biased model like that is actually harder than using the actual data. I think people need to understand that, yeah, you're going to miss a lot, but that's not the point. The point isn't to be 100% accurate. It's to give, to shed light on things that we have to do. And in the pandemic, it says, you know, this many people could die if we don't, you know, go to social distancing and shut things down. It doesn't

matter if it's mathematically within 100,000. I mean, that's not the point of the exercise. And I think people who think that is don't really understand the point of modeling to begin with. Yeah. At the same time, there's sort of a responsibility that if you are putting a model out there, obviously we've seen some that were from people that seem to have no experience or no idea what they were doing or weren't basing this on actual data. Those things people can seize on them to say, oh, see, it's not as bad as other people are saying it is. And then if that gets in front of the wrong eyes, then maybe it influences policy and potentially people could die because of this model that's not done with the rigor that it should be. So yet you do have to have a certain level of sophistication if you're going to put these things out there publicly, because there is a

danger that they will be used irresponsibly. I think with a model, it's important to read the fine print. But for people who distribute these models, it's also important to be as transparent as possible. What are your assumptions? What is going in? You don't need to give out all the secret sauce. I don't give out every last bit of zips to the public for obvious self-interest reasons, but people have an idea how I'm projecting players. I try to be as transparent as I can in that sense. And it's the same with these models. For instance, IHME people, they've written quite extensively and saying, like, this model assumes a certain type of behavior from the people, that we will have social distancing, that it will continue through the end of May, and that states that aren't doing it will adopt these protocols. And it's important to have those kinds of details given because, you know, you had models before given that would go hit, you know, all the hot take news sites out there, you know, like Drug Report and all those that, you know, 2 million dead, 3 million dead in the US. And that just, if you don't know why that projection is, and they're saying, you know, if we do nothing, that's how many people might die. That's a huge difference. And you need to know what's going into the model before you know what meaning're doing. Baseball's been played for 150 years at a high level. There's a long history of this that we can extrapolate from. Whereas when you're dealing with a disease that

no one's seen before, I mean, not only are you projecting how is it going to infect people, what's the mortality rate, but then also what's going to be society's response. Obviously, that changes things dramatically. And then you have different reporting rates and different levels of detail. And do you want to use infections or do you want to use hospital admissions or people on ventilators? They're just all of these different factors. And there's been so much written, I think, about why this is kind of uniquely difficult to do. So people can take that into account. It's not that predicting baseball is easy. We talk all the time about how it's impossible to do perfectly, but predicting a pandemic just seems like a whole different level of problem. Yeah, predicting baseball has made me

probably even more sympathetic to the people having to do these medical projections, because I know how difficult it is to project baseball. And as you say, baseball is essentially a closed system. We have a specific number of events. We know exactly, we don't know how many doubles are going to be hit in the game or triples or strikeouts, but we know what the events we're looking for are. And we know that they happen. We know that if someone hit 35 home runs in a season, they hit 35 home runs more or less. I mean, you could go to 19th century data, but those are just errors essentially. But we don't have a player that hits 40 home runs and saying, well, he might

have hit 20 home runs and 20 of those might've been doubles we misreported, or some of those home runs might've been strikeouts. We don't have that. We actually know the data we're working with, and it's still difficult. All right. Well, we went too long without talking to you on the show. I'm glad that we finally have, and we will do it again sooner. So you can all find Dan writing regularly at Fangraphs. You can look at the projections, and hopefully there will be a season at some point, and we can actually judge those projections.

In the meantime, you can also find him of course, on Twitter at D Simborski, which is S Z Y M B O R S K I. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me. It was fun to finally be a guest.

All right, that will do it for today. Thank you for listening to this episode and all of our episodes this week. As always, you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going. Chad Jobin, Matthew Lang, Chris Finger, Matthew Lee, and Emily Thompson. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. As always, I will link to many of the articles discussed on this episode

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We hope you have a happy and healthy weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Now I've swallowed the only thing that's left is us. So pardon the silence that you're hearing. You're drowning into a deafening, painful, shameful world