Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1538: KBOpening Day

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about KBO season excitement and answer listener emails about MLB precedents for Warwick Saupold’s KBO complete game, whether MLB fandom would work if teams didn��t play games in their “home” cities, the ethics of time travel in Tommy John surgery rehab and if and when it makes sense to […]

Shouldn't this be easy? I always find a way to complicate it It takes nothing at all to be complicated Something familiar Something familiar Something familiar Something familiar Something familiar Hello and welcome to episode 1538 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast for fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Evan Gerd of The Ringer, joined by Seb Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben. The other night when baseball Twitter was kind of collectively watching the first game of the KBO on ESPN and everyone was really excited, which was fun to see. It seems like it was very cathartic for people to see baseball on their televisions again with some recognizable broadcasters and some recognizable names, but I was just thinking when I saw a tweet

from Jeff Passan who said bat flips and lawnmower ump and Warwick Sopold shoving and web gems galore and Carl Ravitch handling technical difficulties like a boss and the sound off Dixon Machado's bat and side-arming relievers and 2AM suits.

Good to have you back, baseball. See you again tomorrow. Two of the players he named there were players who would be familiar to 2017 and 2018 Tigers fans. And prior to that day, I would not have been thinking of, I would not have been thinking, I really want to see Warwick Seppeld. I want to hear the sound off Dixon Machado's bat. Given the output that he produced when he was with the Tigers, I would have guessed players who I think we would have considered pretty forgettable prior to this moment. And I don't think anyone was really going back to watch 2017-2018 Tigers games to see these two guys. And yet when KBO comes back and there's no MLB, suddenly it's exciting to see Dixon Machado and Warwick Sappold.

Suddenly it's exciting to see Dixon Machado and Warwick Sappold And I was trying to figure out what that means really for why we enjoy baseball or how we enjoy baseball Because how much of it is we'll just take whatever we've got So if there's just scarcity, if you can't watch MLB Then the next best option, the next highest level of play suddenly becomes as entertaining as MLB? Does that mean that it's really just about the competition? Or is there something about the talent itself? Or is it when you transplant what seems like a fairly mediocre talent in one league to maybe a lower level league that's, say, around AA, and suddenly those guys are very good and they seem very impressive, then well, we're impressed by them. So what does that say to you? I guess if

MLB were just to go away, would we just adopt the next highest level of baseball and say, well, this is the best baseball that's being played. So we are equally as entertained by it. So we are equally as entertained by it. Well, you would, I mean, if it happened gradually, then yes. I think that there's two things that are nice about watching a baseball game. One is that the game itself is aesthetically pleasing and there is a storyline that starts with the first pitch and ends with the last pitch and you can get caught up in the suspense of it. And you're sort of as a baseball fan attuned to those particular rhythms and you find it pleasing. The other is that it is an ongoing soap opera that has been going on for 150 years and the characters just keep changing and replacing each other.

But you're interested in the drama that happened yesterday and how it's going to play out today and what is going to pay off tomorrow that has been being set up for years and all that. And so if Major League Baseball disappeared overnight, then I think that a lot of people would not make the transition over because they don't have the background and the characters, right? They don't know the soap opera storylines. But as far as the first part of it, which is just appreciating the game and the aesthetics and the characters, right? They don't know the soap opera storylines. But as far as the first part of it, which is just appreciating the game and the aesthetics of the game

and the rhythms of the game, then yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've seen some people who are, by the way, I'm outside today. My house is a catastrophe today. This is just going to be an episode where I'm outside. There's going to be cars.

There's going to be planes. There's going to be construction. There's going to be a lawnmower right now I'm never outside these days so it's nice to hear what it sounds like you might hear a butterfly flat by this is a very good microphone that Ben picked out for me I've seen some people

some people who are like I don't know exactly how to phrase this but I've seen some apologies for the level of play in the KBO, like from people who were like, oh, no, you're going to have a good time. Don't expect it to look like the majors. It's a little, you know, it's not quite at that level, but you can still enjoy it. And I watched and I thought if you hadn't told me that, I would not have thought, oh, this is not at the level of the majors. If you hadn't told me that, I would not have thought, oh, this is not at the level of the majors.

Most of us are not nearly attuned enough to the difference in skill level between the best player in the world and the 2000th best player in the world that we can spot it in play. Now, obviously, we would know if the best player was playing in a league of only 2000th best players, then yes, Mike Trout could probably, probably make some sort of farce out of it. But if you, if you have an evenly balanced competition level, there is nothing about this that looks lesser to me other than maybe some hittable pitches that are, you know, not smashed, but you have to be paying really close attention to that because in the majors, tons of hittable pitches don't get smashed. And sometimes what looks like a hittable pitch doesn't get smashed because all these pitches are really good. Even mistakes in the majors are still, relatively speaking, miracles of physicality. And so maybe it wasn't smashed because in fact,

it's hard to smash even hittable pitches. So anyway, I've seen a few of those apologies, like kind of preemptive apologies, and I have found them totally unnecessary. The level of play looks just right. And I think if we knew, if we had invested in these players' stories throughout their, you know, from the time they were in secondary school until the time they're 41 years old, and we knew all of their career arcs, and we had their bold ink in our mind and everything, it would be 100% the replacement. Every game you're having to learn the vocabulary of this league's accomplishments, like who led the league when and which team is which. And you keep hearing it put in analogies, like these are the Yankees of Korea or this player is the Pete Rose of Korea. And so we're not fluent in their league's history. And so it's a different experience. And so that takes a long time to

build and really, I mean, maybe takes a lifetime to build. But yeah, as far as being able to turn it on and say that it is a baseball game and you know that there's going to be, you know, with two on in the eighth inning of a 5-2 game, which was where, you know, the game I watched yesterday was a 5-2 game in the eighth inning and there were two on. I knew exactly what that meant. I knew what the player at the plate was capable of doing. I knew what it would mean for the team that was in the field to get out of that if they did. And it was a wholeheartedly suitable replacement. So yeah, I think that, I guess to answer your question, I think I heard your question at the beginning of

this. It is that to a layman and on television and at this level, the difference in play is essentially invisible and that's why it fits perfectly in place. Yeah. As long as the two sides are evenly matched, it is pretty tough to tell. There are some giveaways, I guess, or if you have velocities and you see that guys aren't throwing as hard as they are in the majors or that sort of thing. But for the most part, it really is about the even matchup. And I've seen a lot of people say, well, we don't have to keep putting the KBO on MLB terms. We don't have to keep putting the kbo on mlb terms we don't have to keep saying this is the yankees of kbo or making these comparisons and you know i think that that's just an attempt to try to

translate for people who have not been watching this league for a long time it's like the power of analogies that's kind of how we understand things we know this thing and so to better understand this thing that we are not as familiar with, people make comparisons between the two. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. But when you have people apologizing for when we were watching maybe the second lowest level of professional baseball for a year when we were with the Stompers in 2015, like, you know, you could tell that that was not Major League Baseball because there were people who would make defensive misplays that you'd really never see in the majors and no one was really throwing hard. And so it was pretty clear it was still, you know, in any given plate appearance, very competitive and impressive and equally inconceivable to me that I could do those things.

But at that level, there are giveaways. So I don't know how far down you have to go before it becomes something that your mind just keeps pinging at you. Oh, this is different. This is lesser from the baseball that you're used to but i don't think it's the kbo i am 100 certain it's not the kbo yeah yeah it's it's much lower than the kbo i mean it is it has been a joy to see real baseball played and uh there was a play i think it was in fact the exact situation i was describing where it was the eighth inning, 5-2 game, two on, one out, ground ball smashed in the hole between third and short. Third baseman dives to his left,

gets up, throws from his knees, turns a double play. And it was perfect. That was what I needed to get out of a baseball game was that moment. You watch the whole game looking for that moment and there it was. Yeah. And a lot of people like the style of play in KBO even maybe better than MLBs because it is a little bit like rewinding to an earlier era of MLB and that there's more contact and other aspects of baseball that have changed, have not changed quite as much in the kbo and we got a question about that which you answered via email and you probably can't see your email right now because you are outside but we got a question from dan who said i feel like you absolutely have to talk about the opening day performance of warwick sapled in the kbo nine innings one walk two

strikeouts i'm wondering how long it has been since someone threw a complete game with fewer true outcomes. I feel like there are probably a hundred different questions that could be asked about the performance as well, but I need an Effectively Wild breakdown of it. You answered, and it hasn't been that long since we've seen starts like that in MLPs. So you said the last time with fewer than three true outcomes, it's a strikeout Walker-Homer, was Jared Weaver in 2016. The last time with no more than was Rick Porcello in 2014. So it's maybe only going back a couple of years, but that kind of thing would be more common there. So if you're interested in more contact, KBO is your league. By far the most jarring thing for me has been seeing pitches at the knees consistently called balls.

Yeah, a little bit of a different strike zone. I will say, though, that it's a lot of fun, I think, when a player who's maybe marginal in the majors goes to a different league and is suddenly a star. You know, it's like Kal-El coming from Krypton to Earth, and the sun's rays make him Superman. It's like Warwick Sappold or Dixon Machado going to the KBO and potentially being a standout player. I think that's great if those players are happy and thriving, and often they find that they really like the culture and the people and the style of play and the fans of their new team adopt them, and it's just a fun story and just a little tease for an upcoming episode. Meg and I may be speaking to a player like that, so stay tuned. All right, anything else before we get to some more emails?

No. Okay, so some of the more recent reporting from Jeff Passan makes it sound as if when baseball comes back, if and when baseball comes back, there is still a possibility that games could be played in local markets. But this question from another Sam is about the plans that called for baseball players to maybe be isolated in Arizona or Florida or both. So he says, I wonder what the impacts on fandom would be if MLB's plan to place all the games in either Arizona or Florida became permanent even after this potential season. I think there would be real benefits to this scenario, foremost among them reducing the massive environmental impact of all of those flights. Besides that, maybe players would be fresher if they weren't traveling constantly. I do wonder how this would affect fandom, though, aside from considerations like teams losing a lot of money from lost attendance revenue. How long could the Boston Red Sox remain

the Boston Red Sox if they played all their games in Fort Myers? How important is it to the fan experience to be able to go see a game in person, even if it's only once a year, even if this is not possible for many fans due to lack of proximity to the park, how important is it that fans feel like the players live where they live or might eat at their favorite restaurant or something? Could fandom survive if the connection with the place the team represents becomes more symbolic than physical? Yeah, I think it would be hard.

I have thought about this quite a bit lately, wondering whether a TV only game could thrive. And given the costs of having games in physical places, whether I don't know whether whether I could imagine going to TV only. only I just don't think that you would have any, any reason for putting a city name in front of a team after a while. And if you don't have a city name in front of them, I don't know how the strange arbitrary attachments we formed to teams would otherwise attach. It's weird how much the power of a geographical name carries. And I don't know why we respond to they're from my city the way we do or they're from my region or they're the closest thing to me. If I live, I can live, you know, in Fresno and I don't really feel any cultural relationship to, say, San Francisco

or Los Angeles, and yet, because one of those cities is slightly closer than the other, I might choose to put all of my emotional investment in the performances of baseball players in that city. It is a very odd thing. And the psychology of it is baffling to me. And I guess maybe if the psychology of that is so baffling to me, then maybe I should just assume that the human mind will always find a reason to attach itself to something like that, to some tribal rooting interests like that. And so maybe it would develop, maybe there'd be another way that we would develop our rooting interests. But I worry that it wouldn't, that we would just say, well,

like if every team were basically named after a brand, which I think is probably what would happen, teams would become sponsored as they are in other leagues. But those other leagues still have geographic attachments. But let's say that teams were known for their brands. I don't know if I could see everybody forming those attachments so passionately, particularly very early in life when you're kind of creating your identity. And maybe you as a seven-year-old really are building your identity around where you live and where you're from more than you would be building your identity around you know something that was more arbitrary than that yeah i mean it's probably some evolutionary thing where it's advantageous to care more about the people that are close to you around you who are helping protect you and your offspring but i don't know that that really applies to baseball. And obviously in

this era of baseball, it's not even like the players are staying in the same place for all that long. They're obviously not all from that city that they're playing for. They're not really playing to represent that city. Some of them maybe. They develop a relationship there. They become fond of it. But a lot of them are just there because they were offered the most money or because they got traded there or drafted there and they had no say in it so it is sort of silly and yet to have that relationship i i think a lot of it probably is that you can go see the team or you could if you wanted to and they're playing in the ballpark that you recognize to be associated with that team so even if you're not going and even if there are no fans in the park, they're still there.

They're still in that physical location that you have this long association with them being there. I think that matters. And I don't know, like we've talked about the psychology of rooting for individuals in individual sports, tennis or golf or whatever, and those aren't really bound by region. I mean, maybe you root for someone who's from your area. Well, they're not bound by region, but they're also quite – they're very – they're much flimsier ties than we have to team. Yeah, true. And even the people who responded that they are Jordan Spieth fans,

are Jordan Spieth fans, the description of their fandom of Spieth is much flimsier than a Red Sox fan or a Marlins fan or any other team's fan. I think that the proportion of Marlins tattoos, even Marlins tattoos, to Jordan Spieth tattoos is huge. All right. So I think that obviously we know that the players are not from the area, don't really represent the area, and are not planning to permanently reside in the area. But what we do know is that the fans of the area reside in the area. area reside in the area. And I think that one of the reasons that we form such strong attachments to the team in our area is that our friends are, you know, there's an emergence there where our friends are more likely to root for them. The newspaper is going to focus a lot more on them.

The radio talk is going to be about them. And our parents and our parents' friends and our grandparents and all those are more likely to be from that area and also support that team. And so, you know, I feel like I'm reaching back for an analogy that I made about Radiohead when I was in college. And it's probably better just to like not reach too far for it. I don't think I need an analogy here. cannot reach too far for it. I don't think I need an analogy here. So the tribal aspect is really one that's shared among the fans. And the team itself is just kind of like the god that we all

worship together. And if you broke that up and your neighbor was likely to be rooting for a different team than you, and the neighbor on the other side was likely to be rooting for a different team than you and and the neighbor on the other side was likely to be rooting for a different team still uh then you just probably wouldn't have that critical that critical mass of of support that makes you feel like what you're doing is important and that you have a role to play in supporting that that local god yeah i think that the being so i think that's one reason that it really is important that you have a regional attachment because your exposure to people in your neighborhood is just so much more than your exposure to people outside your neighborhood, outside your region. The other thing is that you can't totally feel that through one-on-one interactions with people around you. You can feel a lot of it. Like you can share a fandom with your mother you can share it uh fandom with your with your

mother or with your best friend or with uh you know your church youth group or whatever but you can't really feel the full manifestation of it until you go into a a stadium that has 50 000 people that are all doing the same thing like the power of the crowd the power of what is essentially like this giant like kind of indoctrination rally is probably pretty significant to the formation of that feeling that something very big is happening around this team that you're a part of. So yeah, I think that while you don't need to go to, I don't think you need to go to 20 games a year to be a fan, but I think that you probably generally do need to go to, well, you at least need to somehow experience the power of a full stadium sometimes in your life

in order to feel that power. Yeah. In esports, there are teams that are not really regionally based and people follow those players or they follow those organizations and sometimes they have teams in multiple games and I don't know if the loyalty is as strong to those teams as it would be say a Red Sox fans attachment to the Red Sox after multiple generations of their family rooting for the Red Sox, that sort of thing. And like in the first couple of seasons of the Overwatch League, which is an esports league, but is geolocated. So it does have teams that play for certain cities, but for the first two seasons of the Overwatch League, every team played in LA. And so you would have teams that were sort of nominally based in China or in Korea or in the US or in Europe, but they all played in LA. And this season, they were supposed to actually play in their local markets, and then

the pandemic prevented that plan. But again, that was the beginning of the league. It has always been that way. And the esports fan base is different from the baseball fan base, younger, and maybe more online. So I don't know that you could just switch baseball over to that model now and actually have it work and produce the same sort of attachment. I think eventually you just wouldn't really be able to claim that it was the Boston Red Sox if they were playing in Fort Myers. I mean, maybe like in Fort Myers, there is an attachment to the Red Sox already because that team, the spring training team,

has been there for a while. Or maybe you have a lot of Northeasterners in that area. Maybe it works for some teams in some places. But on the whole, I don't know. I mean, we root for laundry as the saying goes. But if you take the laundry out of the place where the laundry is done, I just, I don't know if it works as well anymore.

Okay, so let's agree that if all the teams played in Arizona and Florida and they simply slapped a city name on each team's name, we would, over the course of time, the name of that city would come to seem kind of meaningless, not that powerful. And with that, our ties to teams would break down and the sport would die. All right. So what if there was a, what if they did that, but there was another way besides geographic proximity to actually tie the team specifically to the region? So for instance, like what if all the front office members were elected by a region, like a city council, like you if all the front office members were elected by a region like a city council, like you elected your team council and they had to be they had to reside in the city? Or what if you I don't even know how you would do this, but like if you had a draft where teams were given advantages to sign players that were from their region or you had to

have say a certain number of locals or you had uh you know public ownership of the team and that the team was actually owned by the um you know by the public in a public yeah or you crowdsource the in-game decisions yeah local. Local area or something. So then you could probably imagine this and then you would have all the upsides. Now, you still wouldn't have the ability to go visit a game in stadium. And so that would be a loss. You know, for some people, that would be a huge loss. Other people, probably the in-game experience is more of a, you know, a once in a while occasion.

But but obviously it would be it would be a very different sport. But I can imagine then you would have all the same regional loyalties while having a much lower environmental footprint and being able to have the athletes not have to travel as much, which I think takes a lot more out of them than we allow and also slows the season down a lot because of all that travel. So there'd be upsides to that. Yeah, that could work. And for one season, I don't think any of this matters. If it's all just temporary, strange circumstances,

we all understand that baseball will come back the way we're used to. No one's going to not watch. I mean, it'll still be weird to see empty ballparks and to not hear fans really but i don't think that will bother us all that much and we certainly won't feel any less attachment to the teams because it is just a stop gap so yeah all right question from mike let's say we have a superstar pitcher who has to get Tommy John surgery. It's the end of September, and the team desperately needs this pitcher to get them through the playoffs, but now he needs TJ.

A baseball god comes down from the other side and says the team can put the player in a time machine. The player would go into the machine, go through his rehab process, then come back stronger to pitch in the final weeks of the season and into the playoffs. The only problem is that the pitcher does physically age.

So he'll pitch in 2019, let's say, but his body is 18 months older, however long rehab takes. Is this worth it for the player to shave off a year plus of their life? Would it be unethical for the team to push the player into this? Their contract slash service time would not increase since they're returning to the present. Yeah, I tried to reply to Mike and I couldn't. I couldn't. And that was two weeks ago.

And my mind is still no clearer. I hope you read this because you've come up with a great answer. Well, I don't know if I have, but he's not actually shaving off years of his life right because he's still living the rehab i assume he's not just it's not like cryogenic sleep or something and he's he's going to sleep and the next thing he knows he wakes up with a healthy ligament but he's shaved a year plus off his life like if he's going into the future and he's doing the rehab and then he's coming back no i don't think he is i think that the player's going into the future and he's doing the rehab and then he's coming back no i don't think he is i think that the player would go into the machine go through his rehab process

so that suggests that he's wherever this machine takes him at some alternate dimension where he's on a field in arizona doing like stretch exercises with with a rehab coordinator but i don't know if i i the rest of the email does not make me think that it makes me think that this is a sleep pod yeah where basically his body is encouraged to age 18 months but in a much much quicker time period and so everything everything ages including the ligament which heals in that time period. But while he is asleep in this super fast aging process, the rest of his cells are also degrading. And, you know, he's moving closer to death.

Well, if that's the case, I would say it would be unethical for the team to push the player into it. Would it be worth it? All right, good. We have settled. You cannot take 1.5 life years off your employee in order to have them ready for the postseason. No, thumbs down on that. But would it be worth it for the player

to shave off a year plus of their life? I mean, I wouldn't do it, I don't think, if the player is so competitive. You do sometimes see players who are willing to risk their bodies in certain ways because they want to win or something. Maybe it's a college senior or something who doesn't really have a future in pro ball and so throws 180 pitches or something in a game because this is the pinnacle of their athletic achievement is whether they win the College World Series or something and they don't really care what comes after and that sort of thing I'm okay you know as long as they're not going to ruin the rest of their lives and and be in pain constantly then you know that's fine

it's a different calculus I I guess. And you might see that with a highly competitive player at the big league level too, where it's like, well, I want to win more than anything, and this is my best chance to win. And so I'm fine with taking off future lesser attempts to win in order to maximize my chances here. But... All right. I want to give a twist to this hypothetical. Let's say that this is not a baseball podcast that we're talking about, but it's a tennis podcast.

And this is an individual performing in an individual sport for individual glory. Then the question of whether it would be unethical for a tennis player to do something similar becomes very different because he's doing it only for himself and he is measuring his value of those 1.5 years of life lived against the ability to be available for what is you know what what he has been working his whole career for right so i'm not i'm by laying out this hypothetical i am not uh i'm not presupposing the answer i am uh just asking it would it then be would it be ethical for this machine to exist and what furthermore would it be ethical for this machine to be invented by the player himself. Because if it exists, then you could say, well, then it becomes something like, say, steroids,

where maybe the existence of it for any player then forces all players to consider doing it, even if they don't want to, simply so they can compete at that same level. But let's say that the player invents it for their own use and their own use only. Would it be an ethical use of one's life? than a baseball question, but I guess it depends on if you do this as the player, you are potentially costing the people who love you some time with you, right? So I mean, I think it's probably different if you have a lot of loved ones who are depending on you or their happiness depends on your presence in their life. And so if you're saying, well, I'm choosing this athletic accomplishment over spending a year with you in the future, that's not nice.

That doesn't seem very ethical. And I would think that for the individual player, I mean, like people make choices all the time that in theory cost them life expectancy, right? I mean, whether it's the habits that you indulge in or it's the activities you do that maybe have some danger associated with them. I mean, we're all constantly making this calculation. How much do we enjoy this thing? And is it worth it to us to potentially end our lives or shorten our lives to some amount? And obviously people are always making that choice to risk some portion of your life in order to enhance the portion of your life that you know you have. And so this is not so different from that if you're saying, well, I've devoted my whole life to being a baseball player or a whatever sport we're talking about player, and this is my chance to reach the pinnacle, to accomplish everything that I've wanted to accomplish. And I'm okay with sacrificing a year of my life when I'm not playing the sport. And maybe I'm more limited physically or mentally in certain ways, and I'm not able to do the thing that I love the the most i'm okay with cutting off some part of that to get the most out of this yeah especially

because you are not you are say you're gonna live until you're 90 by doing this you're not making yourself die at 89 instead you're still gonna die at 90 you're just lopping off a year in the middle in which you still exist you're just not actively living so then another twist on this question was what if instead of this whole like you know like you continue to age what if it was actually just this tennis player in order to recover needed to live in an isolation pod for for a year then would that be ethical like there's no there's no like magical force at play even might still retain consciousness but has to like live in a cave or has to like like is it if you i don't i don't, I don't. So I, it's, right. I agree with you that it is very, I think it's a tricky question that it probably for

the tennis player, I think it is a sort of extreme or unfamiliar application of the decisions that, you know, we all make all the time in how to live our own lives and balance risk versus fulfillment made queasier by just how, I don't know, we recognize that the pressure that sports might put on a person to damage their own life in order to reach the top of a sport.

But then it becomes much trickier. I think not even trickier. I think that once you introduce the team aspect to it, then it becomes unethical not to have the team ask them to do this. It is clearly and obviously wrong for the team to push the player into this. But to simply have it as an option creates an invisible pressure on the player. You can't socialize a person into a group. And then if you are the group, wash your hands of the decisions that that person makes, the self-harming decisions that that person makes in order to further the group.

Because the reason that they are making that decision to further the group is because you have socialized them into that group. And so you have created the system where this person feels the need to sacrifice for the group. So all sacrifices are essentially pushed for whether or not you are actively pushing them to make that sacrifice, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, this is why a lot of people feel uncomfortable and kind of queasy watching football now,

because we know what playing football can do to an athlete's body and quality of life and life expectancy. And in the past, maybe players were less aware of the sacrifice that they were making by playing football. And maybe the NFL was not upfront with them about what it knew about those sacrifices. But it's sort of similar to that. It's sort of similar to players taking various substances that may be harmful to their health in the long run in order to stay on the field or get back on the field. And that sort of stuff makes us uncomfortable, I think, because we're kind of complicit in it, maybe, by encouraging indirectly those players to do that by being part of the culture that rewards them for what they do. imagine myself making, really. I don't think. Like, if someone said I could take years off my life and, I don't know, write some amazing book or something, I don't think I would do that. I just, I think I value the experience of being alive too much to take away anything from that knowingly.

But I don't know. There's probably some scenario you could present to me that i'd at least have to think about it so to me this would not be a choice that i'd ever make but if there is no pressure on the player and they are aware of what they're doing and it doesn't create pressure on any other players as you were saying then i suppose i would understand it yeah but as long as you're on a team it's going to create pressures on other players yeah unless like you are somehow the only person who could possibly do this and no one else would have the possibility of doing it because you did it and no as long as it benefits if it's to the benefit of your team then the pressure is going to be on you to do what you can to benefit the team the only way that it wouldn't is if maybe theoretically only you were aware that this was a possibility and that nobody would ever know that you had chosen, you know, the quote unquote, this is going to say, the quote unquote selfish choice to live a full life.

Because otherwise you're going to risk that your teammates are going to feel that you did not do the thing that's best for them. I mean, you can't count on your other 24 people on your team to want what's best for you. When you put the group together, then the power of the group wants what's best for the group. And so I think that you just can't have this as an option. You would have to immediately outlaw this if this existed and even if you were the only person who could do it would it still be unethical to do it because it kind of messes with competitive balance i mean you're the only person who can have a torn ligament and come back immediately because you're going into the time machine and so if you were to play out the season normally, your team wouldn't have access to your talents. And that's part of the thing that determines who

wins in a typical season. Injuries are part of the game. And everyone's doing their best to come back from injuries as quickly as possible or to prevent injuries. But there are certain things that seemingly we've collectively decided are too far when it comes to that. So we're fine with contact lenses or LASIK surgery or even maybe painkilling shots or something, or inflammation reducing shots. But if you actually take steroids or something, well, we've decided that's too much, or if you do some other kind of treatment that's not approved. And so this is sort of like that. It's cheating in a way. I mean, you're getting a do-over essentially that no one else is getting. So you're sort of destabilizing that too. Yeah, I think I'm now against this in any sanctioned activity,

any activity that is a competition between individuals governed by some shared set of rules and limitations, I think it has to be out. I think the only reason that a person should be allowed to use this machine is if it is for a non-competitive individual pursuit. to complete a marathon for your own benefit, or if you wanted to visit Greece by your 40th birthday or something like that, and you needed to use this to shave a year off your life, then you can. But not if you're competing against anybody else, I think. I sort of feel there's been a lot of... I keep seeing in conversations about whether baseball is going to be played this year. I see references to players want to come back. And that phrase is really making me uncomfortable. Because what percentage of players need to want to come back for it to be enough, for it to be fair?

for it to be enough for it to be fair and like if 70 of players want to come back then the other 30 just have to like what go into virus town like what like that doesn't really feel good and then you can't once you get to a certain like once you even ask a player that with anything other than anonymity then there is the pressure, given the culture of baseball that you're part of a team and you're supposed to be always wanting to compete, there's just such a pressure pushing you to say yes. That's not to say that players can't say no or that they don't have the agency to say no or anything,

but it's just, it's a lot easier to say yes than no, even if you're kind of leaning to no rather than yes. And so I find the players want to come back conversation to be really sort of potentially misleading and fraught. And so it's tough because I mean, whether players want to come back is really an important part of this calculus. But I don't feel like anybody who has said players want to come back actually can say that. We don't know if players want to come back. And we certainly don't know if all players want to come back. And some players have expressed reservations about some of these plans. And just this week, Colin McHugh of the Red Sox said that he doesn't think you can make this season mandatory, that

you should give players the option to opt out and not report if they're uncomfortable with it. He said, you can't make this mandatory. You can't tell a guy you have to come play or else your roster spot is not going to be here when you come back. You can't tell a guy to risk his life and the life of his family and the lives of anyone he chooses to be around to come play this game. There's probably going to have to be some waivers signed and whatever else you need to have done to make guys feel comfortable coming back and that's true but even if you do say it's not mandatory there's such a pressure you know there's so much so many incentives so much peer pressure it would be tough for a lot of guys to say no and some of them would probably say yes and be uncomfortable doing that so yeah you can't make it mandatory, but you also can't.

There's no real step that you could effectively take to make it not feel mandatory. So, I mean, at a certain point, if you can't guarantee the safety of everybody, then you might start looking at whatever solution for this season emerges. It might be teamless, you know, like the teams that exist, the 30 teams that exist in the larger history of baseball might just not be able to exist. The players might need to shuffle into new teams this year so that there is not that team pressure on anybody to come back. I don't know. team pressure on anybody to come back. I don't know.

I mean, this is all extremely, extremely hypothetical because you'd have to find the situation where it's safe to play, period. And we don't know any of the details about when that might happen and under what circumstances it might happen. But I guess what I'm saying, rather than saying what I just said, I think what I'm saying is that the team pressure is a real obstacle to pulling this off ethically and safely. And I'm sure that people who are involved in the decision making, both from the league side and the player side, are aware of that. But I just certainly hope that they're aware of that and that they're making allowances for that fact. Yeah. Okay. Do you have a stat blast?

I do. All right. So this is a stat blast song cover by listener Ben Scruton, and it includes a cameo from his dog on backup vocals. And I have to warn you, this does include your pet peeve, which is a lead singer vocalizing or harmonizing with himself. Are there, what about hand claps? No hand claps. Someone do a hand clap cover. Okay. I like this one though. It's the start

Take a data set Sort it by something like ERD9 Or solo PS Plus And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length And analyze it for us in amazing ways Here's to a stat blast all right so uh before i get to the to the heart of this one the great great great great great baseball historian peter morris wrote a piece that ran on john thorne's blog on mlb.com about two weeks ago and it was about a man named Spud Johnson. So Spud Johnson, Ralph Johnson,

was an amateur ballplayer. He played in semi-pro and sandlot teams in Chicago, but not professional. He was not playing professional or certainly anything like Major League Baseball in his late teens, in his 20s. He would play, you know, casually. He was good. I'm going to read from Peter. In the ensuing years, Ralph Johnson continued to build on his reputation as one of the most feared hitters on the Chicago Sandlots, but he was also following in his father's footsteps

by accepting a position with the Traders Insurance Company and with a wife and infant daughter to provide for. There was no reason to imagine that baseball would ever be more than a sidelight. Ball playing was still a risky proposition at the best of times, while insurance was as stable as could be. So Ralph continued to turn down all overtures from professional teams. And then in 1886, he turned 30. As Peter writes, he had yet to play a single game in organized baseball but something decided has changed his mind uh around that time and so peter speculates that it could have been that player salaries were were going up it could have been that his family had sort of settled

settled in he only had the one child and so maybe he felt like he didn't need quite so secure of an income. But for whatever reason, when he was 30, he decided to start playing professional baseball. And so he joins a minor league and hits 434 as a 30-year-old in the minor league. Two years later, he makes kind of a major league. Like he's playing for the Columbus Solons, S-O--l-o-n-s i don't know how to pronounce that solons solons in the american association the american association as peter puts it was quote very much a major league when launched in 1882 detractors made unflattering comparisons to the national league and dubbed it the beer and Whiskey League. By 1889, when Johnson made his debut with Columbus, the upstart circuit was a very worthy rival for its more straight-laced counterpart. By this point, he was 32 years old. He was okay in his first year,

he was okay. But then in his second year, he led the league in RBIs. As a 33-year-old who hadn't played a professional game until he was 30, he led the league in RBIs as a 33 year old who hadn't played a professional game until he was 30. He led the league in RBIs. And, um, and then two years later he was out of the game entirely. So this, this Spud Johnson came out of nowhere, was the best hitter in a major league for a year, and then was essentially again, gone out of nowhere. It's a great story that caused me to, to be thinking about this, but you know, great story. All right. So the reason that I'm talking about this right now is because Spud Johnson did not know that he had led the league in RBIs. As Peter writes, RBIs were not a stat yet.

He would have gotten this crown retroactively, but he didn't know at the time. He would have known that he was in contention for the batting crown he hit 346 for columbus that year but he didn't win the batting crown and peter writes he reportedly grumbled that he had been robbed of the batting title by the preferential treatment given to william chicken wolf by a hometown official scorer I've been wondering for some time about the official scorer bias. I think it makes sense that official scorers might feel some affinity to their home team, to their home players,

or they might be more likely to put a ruling on the board that is more likely to cause the fans to cheer rather than boo. It's a small thing, but you could imagine it being a real thing. You sometimes hear about different scorers having different standards for hits and airs. I sometimes get confused. I can never really quite think of which way the score would go, because if you call something, say the visiting team gets a hit or hits the ball,

and the shortstop tries to make a play and doesn't make the play, if you call it a hit, then you're making the home team's pitcher mad. But if you call it an error, you're making the home team's shortstop mad. So I don't know necessarily which way the bias would go, but I don't know. Presumably there's a bias. Maybe there is. We're going to look at the stats. We're going to blast them and see if that's true. So I went back to 1925, which is when we start having reached on air data at Baseball Reference. And I looked at the rate of reached on air. I guess I took all the hits minus home runs.

And then I looked at the reached on the airs. So I looked at the rate of all of those looked at the reached on the airs and then i so i looked at the rate of all of those that were ruled reached on air okay so hypothetically you got one air you have 11 hits you have one of those hits as a homer then you'd have one air out of 11 non-homer batted ball reached base this is very confusing but you have a percentage you follow yeah okay so you have that percentage at home across the league and you have that percentage on the road across the league so all all the teams are grouped together for this and i look to see whether essentially balls are more likely to be scored in error at home or on the road.

I think that sentence is clear. Yes. So from 1925 throughout almost all of history, a batter who reaches was much more likely to have said to have reached on an error if he was on the road than at home. So that means that the scorer has a bias to giving hits to the home hitter and also to giving errors to the home fielder to protect the home pitcher. Does that make sense? So it's a pretty significant, in 1925, it was a pretty significant gap.

So about 13% more likely to be an error on the road if you hit it on the road in 1925 and kind of like that for 75 years. And in fact, there were a couple of years where it dipped down to even or where even the home, there were slightly more errors scored at home, but those were just like little one year blips. For the most part, if you group this into, say, five year rolling averages, you see it's very consistent, about 10 percent, 10 to 12 percent more likely for the first 30 years I looked at and then about 5 percent more likely for the next 80 years I looked at. But then in 2000, that changed.

years I looked at. But then in 2000, that changed. So starting in 2000, it dipped from 6% down to 2%. And then in 2002, it actually went the other way. So in 2002, home batters were more likely to reach on an error than visiting batters. And then that stayed true for each of the next one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight years. Since then, it has gone back and forth a little bit, and I would say that it's about even. So just to reiterate here, for most of baseball history, you were a lot more likely to have your batted ball scored an error if you hit it on the road. And then in 2000, it switched. You were more likely to have your batted ball scored an error if you hit it at home. And then since 2010, it is about even. Now, what do we make of this? This is not, I don't believe this is an accident. So I think that for most of baseball history,

it is true. And it was anecdotally acknowledged that there was a hometown score bias. I think we saw it. The scores generally favored their home hitters and their home pitchers. And we're perfectly willing to give the home defenders an error in order to protect the pitchers earn run average. And we're also eager to give the hitter hometown hitter a hit to protect the hometown hitters batting average. And that seems to be very consistent and very true up to 2000. Around 2000, the league actually, as I understand it, did kind of work to to get rid of these biases. So yes, so scores, they communicate with each other more, there are more standard practices about what is a hit what a hit looks like what an air looks like so it's more consistent from park to park and then

in 2000 2011 or so i i think it was like the second to last collective bargaining agreement that they put in place the provision that players could complain about an official call to major. I'm going to just read this. This is from Tim Kirchhen's book. I'm fascinated by sacrifice flies, which I will now read. The biggest change in the scoring system was collectively bargained three years ago and is now part of the new basic agreement. If a player coach or manager has a complaint about an official scoring call, he has 72 hours to send it to major league baseball offices for review. Every team has an operations person in charge of being 72 hours to send it to Major League Baseball offices for review. Every team has an operations person in charge of being a liaison to Joe Torre, who looks at all plays under review. In 2014, Torre reviewed 366 plays, roughly 100 more than in 2013,

roughly 200 more than in 2012. Torre, quote, usually reverses about one third of them. So in fact, scoring got more consistent. The bias seems to have disappeared. Now, however, last thing about this, it does feel odd that it would dip into reverse territory and then go back up. I think if you think logically, you're more likely to make an error on the road than you are at home right yeah and so you would expect home hitters to reach base on errors more often than visiting hitters and when the league apparently put an effort into removing scorekeeper bias sure enough home hitters reached on errors more often than road hitters that that was true for pretty much all of the 2000s that decade and then it started crawling back up and now it's about

even you could say well about even therefore the scorekeeper bias is gone but i think the true state of what it should be is more errors when home hitters are hitting. And so the fact that it is even suggests to me that while the bias is much smaller now than it used to be, that scorekeepers have nudged it back up and that they're still finding a way to have a little bit of a bias that looks like it's not there because it's balanced even for home hitters and road hitters but it shouldn't be even for home hitters and road hitters so i think there is still a little tiny tiny bias in favor of giving errors to plays where visiting hitters are hitting and that that scorekeepers after a decade of of having this suppressed found a way to bring it

back yeah that makes sense and it is interesting that the scorekeepers sort of save the pitcher at the expense of the fielder, or used to, when there was a bigger bias. And I guess that's because ERA matters more, right, than fielding percentage, or certainly it does now. No one really pays much attention to fielding percentage these days, whereas ERA, there are better stats out there, but that's still a big one. That's still something you see on the screen when the player comes in. So I guess it just matters more from a kind of career perception standpoint or making money in the future for the pitcher to have that unearned run than it does really for the fielder to have another error on their record. Yeah, you it wouldn't surprise me if you looked back at the last century and saw that that

there was a bias for a hometown bias in favor of the very, very, very top defenders who might be like in contention for gold gloves. So like it wouldn't surprise me, I haven't looked at this. But if Ozzie Smith, for instance, made a lot more errors on the road than he did at home, officially ruled errors, because the scorekeeper was protecting him, or anybody else who was in gold glove contention. But otherwise, if you're not Ozzie Smith, then yeah, I mean, you know, nobody wants to be called for an error, but it's not on the back of your baseball card. Most people don't really aren't going to notice the difference between 21 and 19 errors at

the end of the year. Whereas for a pitcher, an ERA really does get swung based on an error here. The other thing, too, I guess, is that a fielder commits an error and that's either zero error or one error, but a pitcher allows an error or maybe a hit. And that could be the difference between seven earned runs and no earned runs if a whole bunch of runs score after. So the potential impact of that ruling on the pitcher is a lot bigger. The range of that impact is a lot bigger for the pitcher. Right. Okay. I had a very quick statblasty type question. This is from Leo, who says, I was texting my uncle and he threw a fun fact at me that I wonder if you could verify. This is sort of a Spud Johnson type question. In 1941, Johnny Sturm was the starting first baseman for the New York Yankees and had 572 plate appearances in that season. It was his only year in the majors. To my uncle's knowledge,

he is the only player who played one season in the majors with enough at-bats to qualify for a batting title. My uncle has never been able to find another. Is this true? Has there been another player to qualify for the batting title in their rookie year and then never play again? And I feel sort of guilty about robbing Leo's uncle of this fun fact. But unfortunately, no, Johnny Sturm is not the only such player. So I sent this question to Dan Hirsch at Baseball Reference, and he looked it up. And there have actually been 12 players like that, 12 players who I think Dan looked up, what did he look up? 500 plate appearances. What has constituted qualifying for a batting title has changed over the years, but there have been 12 guys who have had at least 500 plate appearances in their single season, starting with Charlie Homburg in 1890, and then Irv Waldron, 1901, Goat Anderson, 1907, Scotty Ingerton, 1911, Al Boucher or Boucher, 1914, Dutch Schliebner, 1923, Art Mahan, 1940, Johnny Sturm, 1941, Buddy Blair, 1942, Moon Mullen,

1944, Bob Mayer, 1945, and Sparky Anderson as a player in 1959. So the most played appearances by any single season guy is Irv Waldron in 1901, who managed to have 651 played appearances or switched teams midseason from Milwaukee to Washington. And he actually led the American League. That was the first season of the American League. And he led it in plate appearances, games, and at bats by a player who played one season in the majors that figures. And he was decent. He was a better than league average hitter and a pretty good player. So I don't know why he didn't come back. I mean, things were unstable in those days. And he did go on to play in other leagues. And he played in the Pacific Coast League, which was a very high-level, desirable league in those days. So that might be why.

Maybe it was partly his choice. And Johnny Sturm, his story was that he was the Yankees' regular first baseman that year, and he was not very good. But he enlisted in the Army. He served in World War II after that season, and he lost the tip of his right index finger in a tractor accident while he was in the military. And then he tried to come back, but he broke his wrist. And between that and I guess the fingertip, he didn't do it. But later on, he played a role in discovering Mickey Mantle. So he still made a major contribution to the Yankees, gave Mickey Mantle a tryout. He was a scout and a minor league manager. But this is something that hasn't happened to a lot of guys, and most of them weren't very good, and that's why they didn't get a second season, but not entirely. It is kind of interesting, though, that all of these are concentrated in really the earlier decades of baseball. This doesn't happen anymore. It hasn't happened since Sparky Anderson in 1959, and even then it hadn't happened for 14 years before that, which I guess goes to show maybe that teams are handing good enough to be back for a subsequent season maybe that is what that means or or that they wouldn't underrate a guy who was good in that

one season and never let him play again so could also be that a few of those seasons happened during world war ii when players got called up to replace other players who were in the service and then those players came back and that was the end of the line for their replacements but one way or another this is just one of those things that's sort of a relic of an earlier era of baseball. I wonder how many of those players just never played again, like not just didn't make the majors, but they just didn't play anymore. They went, well, this pace sucks,

and they went back to selling insurance like Spud Johnson. Spud Johnson had a very successful career after he left left baseball probably a lot of people looked around and went there are a lot of careers that are not this yep yep that's probably it too all right should we end there do you have time for one more uh i guess let's do one more all right this is a question from craig patreon supporter over the last, advanced statistical analysis went from baseball counterculture to a huge component of front office decision making and general sports discussion and analysis. Given baseball's general intransigence on so many issues over time, it's actually a bit stunning to step back and think about how much things changed in the last plus or minus 10 years.

I suspect and assume that each of you, talking to me and you and Meg, spent a lot of time over that time period challenging the once-dominant paradigm, and I know you spent a lot of time discussing, testing, debating, and improving many of the concepts that we now take for granted as the norm. This is awesome because challenging things makes things better. Well, I guess you can debate whether it's made baseball better, but in general, sure. My question is, now that advanced statistical analysis has become the norm, to what sources are you looking in order to continue to challenge yourself? If challenge makes us better and makes systems better, then whom or what do you enjoy reading or consuming that helps you challenge and revalidate or even improve your thoughts and assumptions? challenge and revalidate or even improve your thoughts and assumptions what recommendations can you pass along to us not to concur with what we believe but to challenge and improve

our thoughts or our processes man craig just caught me not challenging myself i feel i feel i feel uh exposed yeah uh i don't i don't consciously do this, I don't think. I think I'm more likely to read something if it's novel, and I'm more likely to feel challenged by it if it's novel. And so, I mean, I don't think I read the same article or even type of article a thousand times. And so probably just like seeking for something that is going to stimulate me does this to a large extent. But I will be honest, I have not actively sought to

better myself through deliberate challenging of my own beliefs. So great question. Yeah. I don't know if I've thought about it in those terms. I think there are things that I am less likely to write about now because they're just kind of common knowledge. I mean, things that I might have written for Baseball Prospectus when I was just starting out a decade ago or a little more than that now, they just wouldn't really be worth writing now because everyone knows it. Everyone's written it already. I think the audience is just kind of more literate when it comes to sabermetric stuff now than it was then. And, you know, even when we started doing this professionally, things had changed quite a bit.

So, you know, when we got to baseball prospectus, like, you know, I think a whole lot of our predecessors had done a lot of the heavy lifting there when it came to making inroads in Major League Baseball. I mean, Keith Wollner had been hired by a team before we got to baseball prospectus. So those early years of really being a counterculture and having this sort of oppositional us versus them thing and no one in baseball paying attention to them, I think we kind of missed that. Obviously, there has been a continued evolution over the last decade or so. But there are things that like I will think, oh, I probably would have written an article about that in 2012. And now I just wouldn't. Or like certain things that I've been very excited to write about, like catcher framing, for instance, when that first really came to the fore. I was writing about that constantly because it was new and fascinating, and it was still something that a lot of people didn't really believe in. And so you could kind of convince them that it was true and show them evidence. And now you wouldn't do that because most people are already on board. I think they understand that. So you wouldn't

really write the article. Yes, it's real and it's valuable. And here's how you can tell. I've written maybe some other things about it, about how the gap between teams and catchers has shifted or shrunk, but not writing about that nearly as often as I did in those early days.

So certainly there are kinds of pieces that I just wouldn't really be excited to write about anymore because often when I'm writing something, I am trying to make myself excited about it or I am excited about it, and I hope that my excitement will translate to the reader. And so the kind of thing I like writing is where I don't even know the answer or I don't know what I'm going to say necessarily, or I just have a question that I want to figure out the answer to. And so there's some mystery to it and discovery to it while I'm writing. Otherwise, if I just knew everything already and I were just summarizing what I knew, that wouldn't be very fun for me.

So in the sense that I guess there's more that I know about baseball and that we all know about baseball than we did a decade ago, there are probably fewer topics that interest me that give me the same sort of excitement. And maybe that's a factor in why I've written less about baseball as a percentage of my overall writing. But there's still a lot that we don't know. Yeah. Yeah. This is going to be probably an email that I will be walking we don't know. Yeah. Yeah. This is going to be probably an email that I will be walking around and thinking about. Yeah, and

as we get more information, certain things come to light that you can write about, like when we got PitchFX, suddenly there was a whole world of articles we could write and questions we could explore. When we got StatCast, maybe that opened up some new avenues,

or like the recent player development revolution. That was something I wasn't thinking about 10 years ago, and I just co-wrote a book about it because it was all new stuff. So in some ways, the more you learn and find out, the more you can potentially write about that wouldn't have occurred to you before, wouldn't even have been possible before. So it doesn't only close off avenues of exploration, it also opens some. And the fact that teams might know more than we do doesn't really affect what we can write, I feel like, because our audiences don't know those things and we don't know those things. So we might take a more humble approach and say there's probably stuff that we don't know those things. So we might take a more humble approach and say, there's probably stuff that we don't know that teams don't know. But since our audience doesn't

know it either, that doesn't really prevent us from writing about it. The other funny thing too, is that one of the things that we learned in the process of the last 15 years was to not be so dismissive of the previous paradigm. And so like a lot of what challenging ourselves was in the last six seven years was to not just to to not immediately assume that something is false just because we've heard it before like to not to not fetishize the new and novel um and to to be a little bit more open to notions of passed down traditions. Yeah. So I'm in some ways I'm more I think I'm more skeptical of the new things now than I was 15 years ago. And you could make the case that that is the result of having challenged myself or you could make the case that it is a sign that I've become entrenched

and that I am no longer open-minded, but that I am now, I've moved into get-off-my-lawn territory. So I'll have to think about that. Yeah, okay. Well, thanks for the thought-provoking and kind of disturbing question, Craig. All right. Okay, I have a couple more statblasty questions here that I have answers to and that were on my list, so I will mention them here. We got a question from Derek who says,

Brian LaHare has a career baseball reference war of negative.2. Is that the lowest career war for an all-star? Yes, I'm a Cardinals fan, and this question is thinly veiled schadenfreude. The answer is no, Brian LaHare does not have the lowest career war of any player who has ever been an All-Star. In fact, if I have done the play index query correctly, he is not even in the top 10. He is 11th. There have been a lot of lousy All-Stars, or at least players who made an All-Star team, but were not great over the course of their careers. I'll count down from 10th lowest career war to lowest career war. So number 10, Ken Harvey, then Eduardo Nunez, whose bat, of course,

is famously preserved in the Hall of Fame. Then we've got Biff Pokoroba, Cito Gaston, also the subject of a Jeff Sullivan era conversation. I think he was the player who had the highest percentage of his career war concentrated in a single season. That's a case where he was actually great when he was an all-star. In 1970, Cito Gaston was a five-win player. The problem is that he was a more than negative five-win player in every other year of his career. career war. Then we've got Billy Hunter, Steve Swisher, Jerry Morales, Ken Reitz, Joe De Maestri, and at the bottom or the top, I suppose, depending on how you sort, Meryl Hoag. Meryl Hoag, 1939 All-Star with the St. Louis Browns. Also received an MVP vote, had a 31st place MVP vote finish that year. In his All-Star season, he was worth negative.7 war, and overall, he was worth negative 4.7 war. So, Meryl Hoag, by this definition, the worst All-Star ever.

And the last question here comes from Riley, who says, In my experience watching baseball, it seems Joey Votto has an undeniable ability to foul pitches off before settling on a pitch he likes. Is there a way to quantify which batters are the best at selecting or fouling off pitches? This is a subject that has fascinated me that I've written about before, and Votto is definitely great at selecting which pitches to swing at, or at least which pitches not to swing at, but I am generally pretty skeptical of the claim that any modern hitter can purposely foul pitches off. There was an article at the Hardball Times back in 2007 by John Walsh where he looked at this.

There was a claim at the time that Itro could foul off pitches at will until he got one he liked. And Walsh looked into this and he found that maybe there was some small ability there, but it wasn't that dramatic. And as he wrote in that article, Look, it's hard to hit a baseball at all. The idea that the average batter can hit a ball in such a way to send it foul without missing it, well, it doesn't seem very plausible, does it? If a batter had that kind of control, why couldn't he hit it fair somewhere? I guess it's true that if all you wanted to do was foul a pitch off, you could do kind of an

excuse me swing maybe and just try to tip it. But again, it's very difficult to make any kind of contact these days. And to choose what kind of contact you make is also quite difficult. And hitters these days in general don't have very pronounced two-strike approaches or two-strike swings. You don't see a lot of guys choke up a ton or just try to put the ball in play because there's less of an emphasis on avoiding strikeouts and more of an emphasis on hitting the ball hard. Granted, Joey Votto is not an average batter, but this is pretty tough even for him. So the way that Walsh looked into this was he concentrated on how often Itro fouled off two-strike pitches because he figured that if Itro did have a special foul ball ability, it would show up there. That's when he'd really be trying to just foul pitches off. And he found that each row did hit fouls slightly more often with two strikes than with fewer than

two strikes. So just looking at the percentage of swings that resulted in a foul. But again, it was only by a little bit. And even that small effect doesn't show up for Votto. So going back to his first full season in 2008, we have that data via Baseball Savant, Fado's foul balls per swing rate has been 40.1% before he gets to two strikes and 40.4% with two strikes. So that is almost identical, and that's actually smaller than the league average increase in the foul percentage. Over that same span, 2008 to 2019, the league as a whole had a 36.8% fouls per swing rate before two strikes and a 37.9% fouls per swing rate with two strikes. So less than a one percentage point increase from before two strikes to two strikes.

So that kind of confirms that on the whole, hitters don't really have an ability or at least don't really try to use an ability to foul off more pitches with two strikes. So I don't think that Votto has a preternatural ability here, or at least that he's demonstrated one. I was curious to see if any hitter has. So I looked at Baseball Savant again over that same 2008 to 2019 period. That's the span for which we have the pitch data. And I don't know exactly what sample size you need here for this to be an actual reliable indicator of true talent. Swing rates stabilize and get meaningful pretty quickly. Maybe foul rates do too, I don't know.

But you still need a sizable sample here to be confident that this isn't just noise. So I looked at players who during that period had at least 1,000 swings on two strike counts. And I compared their fouls per swing rates on those counts to their fouls per swing rates before they get to two strikes. And do you care to guess who the player with the apparently most pronounced preference or ability for fouling off pitches with two strikes is? If you're guessing, I can't actually hear your guess, but I would guess myself that this might be one of the more popular answers. It's David Eckstein. Of course it's David Eckstein.

So again, this is only covering the last three seasons of Eckstein's career, but during that time he had a 35.1% fouls per swing rate before two strikes and a 43.1% fouls per swing rate with two strikes. So that's a difference of eight percentage points. And I think that's probably meaningful. No other player on the list has an increase higher than 6.5 percentage points. So Eckstein is sort of an outlier here. And that's precisely the type of player you would expect to show up at the top of this list if it were a real thing, right? Eckstein choked up on the bat, so that gave him good bat control. He wasn't trying to hit for power.

He was trying to put the ball in play. So I think this is probably a real thing. Just for comparison's sake, Ichiro's increase was 3.8 percentage points, so Eckstein had more than twice as big a difference. Now I'll give you the rest of the guys at the top of the list. Rene Rivera, Eric Young Jr.,

Brandon Geyer, Kosuke Fukudome, AJ Pollock, Marco Scudero, Emilio Bonifacio, Eric Sogard, So mostly contact-oriented guys, not really big power hitters who would be swinging for the fences on two strikes. So I think there are some guys who have a slight ability here. Don't think Vado is really one of them, but again, it's pretty small on the whole. It's just tough to make contact, and it's even tougher to control what kind of contact you make. You can control supporting this podcast if you are so inclined. You just go to patreon.com slash effectivelywild, sign up, and pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get yourself access to some perks. And the following five listeners have already done so,

for which we are very grateful. Vince Capodano, Kenji Sakino, Neil Campagna, Nathan Connor, and Kareem Kassam. 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 coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance.

You can buy the paperback edition of my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It includes a new afterword, as does the digital Kindle edition. Now we'll be back with one more episode this week. Talk to you soon. If you love yourself you better get out, get out, get out, get out now Do the right thing, do the right thing Do it all the time, do it all the time Make yourself right, never mind

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