Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1555: Baseball Ambivalence

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the long-in-the-making announcement about the MLB season starting, touching on the resolution of the dispute between the league and the union, their deeply conflicted feelings about baseball being played during a pandemic, the strangeness of a 60-game season, how to reframe fandom and reorient rooting interests in a short […]

All the bush league batters are left to die on the diamond. In the stands the horn crowd scatters for the turnstile. For the turnstile For the turnstile For the turnstile Hello and welcome to episode 1555 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs.

Hello, Meg. Hello. So on paper, this is the podcast we've been waiting for, right? This is the one where we finally get to declare baseball is back or about to be back or theoretically it will be back. There is an agreement or not an agreement, but at least an arrangement by which baseball will be back. There is an agreement or not an agreement, but at least

an arrangement by which baseball will be returning. And I think we're both a bit ambivalent about it. It's the time that I think we've all been sort of looking forward to for a few months, and I wish that we could feel better about it and wholeheartedly and full-throatedly support it. But under under the circumstances it's difficult yep yep ben it is uh it's tricky i will i'll just admit i feel i feel some relief yes i feel guilty about that sense of relief because it is selfishly motivated because i like my job a lot and i like the website i work for a lot me too and i like my friends who work in baseball whether it's in baseball media or who work for teams in various capacities a lot and i i want everyone to still have jobs yes that's a thing that i think is okay

to desire but obviously it is not something that you can desire without acknowledging the trade-off which is that there is risk involved here to a lot of people not just to the players and their families but to you know many of those uh friends who work in the game and a lot of people, not just to the players and their families, but to, you know, many of those friends who work in the game and a lot of other people who we don't know who will be far less visible, potential sufferers of COVID. And so it's just going to be a weird, uneasy time. And I think that there's a non-zero possibility that the virus just says, nah. Right. Nope, you don't get to.

Exactly. We'll talk a little bit about what the season supposedly will look like, but take that with a giant grain of salt because it could all be called off at any moment, which we will also discuss. We will have a guest on in this episode, Zach Binney, who is an epidemiologist who has worked in the sports field for years. So he's going to give us the skinny on MLB's plan, health and safety protocol, how they are hoping to come back and play amid a pandemic and how realistic that is and what the risks are. So that is a very informative conversation. But you and Shakia and Bradford responded to this news just a little bit as it

was breaking on our most recent episode. But just to step back a bit, the season is scheduled to start now on July 23rd or 24th. It'll be 60 games. It'll last for 66 days, and the players will be reporting to their respective home cities on July 1st for a second spring training or first summer training or whatever we're calling it at this point. Spring training doesn't really apply anymore. But the way that we got here, I'm happy about aspects of that. At least I'm happy that the acrimony of the last couple months is over for the moment. acrimony of the last couple months is over for the moment. It's just hibernating, of course, for the CBA talks, but it's nice not to have the headlines about baseball every day being the Players Association and the owners sort of publicly sniping at each other and leaked letters coming

out where they're very snippy. And that was not a great look for baseball, obviously, how long it took to get an arrangement. I don't know how much sooner it could have conceivably come back anyway safely, given that we're not sure it can come back safely now. But still, that was just not great. Not great endless news cycles of no baseball, but lots of baseball people yelling at each other and people responding to that news. So I'm sort of glad that that's over. And the way that it happened is MLB in the middle of last week, for the first time, made a proposal that included the prorated salaries that had been agreed to in that late March agreement. And that was a 60-game proposal. The players came back and said, no, let's do 70 games. The owner said, how dare you? We reject

that proposal. And then they came back with another 60-game proposal, which the players then finally rejected this week. And they said again, hey, just impose a season. Just tell us when and where we're playing, as MLB had the right to do under that March agreement also. And that was a somewhat risky move, I guess, for the MLBPA to do that. It worked out well, but they were taking some slight risk that the owners wouldn't just cancel the whole thing, in which case the narrative in some circles might have been the players killed the season. They rejected the deal.

And they, I think, also took the chance that people wouldn't perceive Rob Manfred as the savior of the season, right? Oh, he finally imposed it because the two sides couldn't agree. But I'm happy that it is done and that it worked out. And from a negotiating perspective, the Players Association, because they didn't agree to those deals, did not agree to expanded playoffs, did not agree to, say, advertising patches on uniforms and games. So they sort of kept some of the things that are most desirable to the owners. So in the next round of bargaining, those things will be surfacing again. But because there was no agreement, because it was kind of an imposed season,

the season will look more like the baseball that we know than it would have otherwise. There will be no expanded playoffs this year. It'll still be the 10-team playoffs, and there will be other things like a universal DH, which is just in place temporarily for this year technically, although I hope, and there are changes to the schedule. So teams will be playing mostly their divisional opponents and their counterparts in the geographically corresponding division in the other league. So all of that will look a little strange and different, but it's not quite as different as it could have been. But one way or another, that part is over, and now it's the specter of the coronavirus and all of this is happening amid many players and team personnel testing positive like as we're talking about all this stuff which just makes it seem naive or over optimistic or perhaps even irresponsible to

proceed with this as the worst case scenario which is that a lot of players and people are going to catch this is happening essentially. And so you kind of have to wonder about, and we'll talk to Zach about this, but what are the odds realistically that this will not continue to happen and sabotage the season before it starts or before it finishes? Yeah, I think that the worst case scenario that i've sort of rolled around to is not that a player or team personnel will contract the virus and then suffer adverse health consequences to be clear that would be very bad and then the leak shuts down i think that the the worst case scenario is that those things happen and we kind of soldier on anyhow and i don't know i don't know how likely that is i don't know how sort of susceptible to public opinion around that the league and teams will end up being and so i don't want to speak out of turn that i you know as if i know that there's some grand design to be you know just wholly indifferent to speak out of turn that I, you know, as if I know that there's some grand design

to be, you know, just wholly indifferent to the effects of the virus as it plays out. But I think the worst thing would be to be presented with really just concrete and very terrible evidence that baseball needs to shut down and then to have that evidence be ignored. So I think that's part of what's contributing to my sense of unease, which is that the decision to resume any kind of a season at all means that there is some amount of COVID related suffering that we have determined we are, well, we haven't determined, not you and I, Ben, we wouldn't, we would never. But that baseball has determined it is comfortable operating under, right? Because if the answer were, you know, no positive tests or, you know, significantly lower community spread than we're seeing in a lot of the markets where baseball plays, we wouldn't be playing right now. We're about to be playing right now. So I think that we have some reason to suspect that cooler heads will prevail at some

point, but we also have reason to suspect that the profit motivation will be too strong to really address things as quickly or as decisively as might be needed to keep people healthy. And that's not a great feeling to have about a thing you love a lot. Right, yeah. And I have these two conflicting impulses kind of whirring within me. Like my instinct is to be excited about baseball, right? Like naturally every fiber of my being would be going baseball, baseball, baseball. We've been deprived of it for so long that it would be great to just be really happy about it.

And there are certain things that, of course, I would be extremely excited about. I want to see Dodgers fans actually get to watch Mookie Betts in their team's uniform before he hits free agency. I want to see Shohei Otani be a two-way player again. I want to see Mike Trout not miss an entire peak season. I want to see Yu Darvish throw his new pitch. Yes, Yu Darvish has a new pitch because that was the knock

against Darvish. Not enough pitches. He has used his time to invent an 11th pitch, which he is calling the Supreme, which is wonderful. And it's some kind of mix between his sinker and his splitter and i just think that's great i want to see that in a game so of course i want to see all of this happen and i don't want to be a scold and shame people who are looking forward to watching baseball

and i'm not going to be standing there on opening day going don't watch this game turn it off stop smiling obviously i am personally motivated by this too. We host this baseball podcast. It would be nice to talk about actual baseball being played in this country at a high level. That would be great. But it's really hard to act that way and to think that way. And I don't know if we all have to be conscientious objectors and just say, well, we're not going to pay any attention to this because it's wrong to play baseball. Like if baseball comes back, I will presumably be writing about it.

You will be editing pieces about it. We will be talking about it on this podcast. And I imagine that at least at times it will bring us some pleasure and some happiness, right? If not complete solace and stress relief, it won't make us forget everything else that's going on in the country, nor should it. But there would certainly be moments where I would enjoy the baseball being played. And so I don't want to come out and say, no, do not be happy about this in any way. circumstances, it really does seem A, kind of irresponsible and perhaps dangerous and B, maybe just unrealistic, period. And if we all get our hopes up that this is going to somehow happen and be safe and go smoothly, and then it all gets called off right before it starts or it starts and has to stop, in a way, that would be a bigger blow to our morale, I think, than if they had just said, you know what, it's not happening this year. Yeah, I struggle with what I think the honest.

I struggle to remove my own incentives for there to be baseball because, like, you know, I like to be able to buy food. This is not the only way I could do that, right? So that's part of the calculus. But I like my job. And the angel on my shoulder is saying, this is just horrible and we should not do this. And the devil on my shoulder is saying, well, the players did vote to play.

I mean, they voted not to take the owner's proposal, but they seem to want to play, but I know they don't all want to. And I know that it will not be safe for everyone. And it's very strange to feel apprehensive about the return of baseball. Like I get why there are going to be people who opt to not participate in, in it this year. And I think that that is perfectly defensible and I won't begrudge those people wanting to sit out both as players certainly and as fans. I will watch and I hope that like 10 years from now, I don't look back and say, oh gosh, I was complicit in something

really terrible. I mean, I don't have the authority to like cancel a baseball season so I guess I have a little bit of daylight in my choices between what I can do and what I maybe should be obligated to because I can't do it I can't say no to baseball but it is you know my enthusiasm is dampened somewhat by the the realities of the last couple of weeks and also the almost certain reality that players and team personnel will face. And it feels really terrible to have yet another aspect of our collective lives be defined by sort of, you know, crossing our fingers and hoping everyone behaves well. That's a bummer because when presented with that option, a lot of people are doing the right thing,

but some people are having dinner. And when it was a few months ago and we were talking about bubble plans and MLB was kind of throwing all this stuff at the wall and some people were saying, we shouldn't even be talking about this, they shouldn't be thinking about this. And at the time I said, it's kind of their job to think about it. And it's all so far to predict, well, where will we be as a country

come June or July? How available will testing be? How prevalent will cases be? That I think you had to lay some groundwork if you wanted to have any realistic hope of coming back. So I didn't have a problem with discussing it as a theoretical idea. Now that it's here and conditions are still pretty dangerous. I mean, things are not as bad, at least in a lot of places, as they once were, but in other places,

they're worse. And more than 40 baseball people tested positive for COVID last week, and others have continued to test positive this week, and it's still very prevalent. So now I think that it's real that players are on their way to start training and start playing games. I think it's fine and right to have serious concerns about it in a way that we wouldn't have a few months ago where it was all just so far on the horizon and just seemed all so unrealistic that I didn't think there was any harm in it. Now that it's happening, there is potential harm that could be done. And I don't know if the potential good that can be done of just giving us all something that we like and letting players play a game that they like playing is enough to outweigh that. i mean it almost certainly is not like it just almost certainly

is not i think that you know in this respect folks who are employed by the game in some capacity have slightly firmer ground to stand on because they have a much more real vested interest in there being baseball this year and most of those folks are not people who are going to be, and I don't say this as if the health concerns of players are not valid, but a lot of those folks, they're working people. They're not making the money that players make. Players should not be forced to subject themselves to these health concerns either.

So I don't mean to say that there's a number after which, eh, whatever, just show up. You got to play for us. But there are people in this ecosystem who are better equipped financially to sort of weather a lost season than others. And I have sympathy to the others who don't because I'm one of them. But in terms of the value to fans, no, like that trade-off is almost certainly not worth it. I'm relieved that if the season is canceled, it now would be kind of convincing that it was because of the coronavirus, right? So you wouldn't get the worst-case scenario for the long-term future of the sport where it was all called off because of economic issues in the middle of a pandemic when people have zero patience for that. I think really even worse than that would be if it takes something terrible to end this experiment, right?

So yes, it would be nice that if the season doesn't start or if it has to stop before it's completed, it will be because of something that no one can really blame MLB for. it will be because of something that no one can really blame MLB for. You can't blame MLB for there being a pandemic, but you can blame MLB for trying to play through a pandemic. And so if we get to that point where really something terrible happens, then that's an even bigger stain on the sport. So yeah. Yeah, that's my concern. I think you're right that in a lot of ways, having the money drive the decision is very damaging and would have been very damaging. But given what it will likely take for the pandemic to bang the season, I think that that's going to be worse.

bang the season, I think that that's going to be worse, right? If someone gets sick and dies of COVID-19 because of their exposure to baseball and the exposure to the virus that they had because of baseball, I don't quite know how the league handles that. I don't know how we talk about that. I don't know how we recover from that. It will not be the most egregious sort of lack of care exhibited over the course of this pandemic, but you don't want to be in that race, right? You don't want to meddle in that. So I feel very nervous. I do feel relieved.

It would be disingenuous for me to say I don't feel relieved, but I feel very nervous. I feel guilty about how relieved I feel, which I'd like to thank baseball for adding just another thing to put on the docket with therapy. I do feel relieved, but I feel very nervous. Keep listening to our baseball podcast? I don't know, man. Like, where do we? Yeah. And, you know, if you're sitting there thinking, oh, they're being alarmist and these are elite athletes and they're not epidemiologists anyway, so I don't care about their medical opinions. Well, we were about to have an epidemiologist on and he's pretty nervous about all of this, too. So I think the experts who really do have the credentials and know what they're talking about, they're echoing these concerns too. So it's not just us. It's not just writers on Twitter who were scared about what this means. We're kind of basing those opinions on people who know what they're talking about. Yeah. It's just going to be a very strange and uneasy season. I think that all of the writers involved with this will just ask for people's patience as we kind of feel our way through the right way

to talk about this season. Yep. Because, you know, there are going to be times when it feels really good. Yeah. Because, you know, there are going to be times when it feels really good. Like I'm not going to pretend that I am an elevated enough being for that to not be true. Yeah.

So there are going to be times when it feels really good. And then there are going to be times when it feels really awful. And, you know, yeah, for all the folks who are like, oh, they're young and strong you know dusty baker is like 71 yeah i want dusty baker to make it through 2020 me too yeah and like the tactical part of my brain the the part that likes engaging in weird hypotheticals and playing them out and wondering what they would look like. Normally, I would be intrigued by certain aspects of the season. You know, like I'd be curious about, well, what will we learn about home field advantage, right? Is there still a home field advantage if games are played without fans?

Or is it mostly an umpire effect that's driven by fans? Maybe we'll find out something about that. Or how will teams handle prospects and player development and expanded rosters and what will the makeup of those rosters look like and will you put prospects on them or will you put players who are sort of major league ready right now on them and how will you handle pitchers because you don't want to overtax their arms and there's this weird start and stop and start again structure to the season and yet yet every game is pretty important. So you want them to throw as many innings as possible, but you don't want to hurt them. And there are all these considerations that would be kind of analytically interesting. But then you remember why we're talking about all these things. And it's not just that we decided to have an odd experimental season so that we could learn stuff about baseball or see how teams or players would respond to strange circumstances. It's because we're trying to cope with conditions that really don't make baseball advisable or even

necessarily possible. And so we're looking for ways around that. And that kind of takes whatever fun might have been in these sort of thought experiments out of it. Yeah. We did not walk into a laboratory. The laboratory imposed itself. Yes, exactly. And so it's a lot less fun to, I don't know what people do in labs do stuff with test tubes those test tubes it's less fun I don't know this is where we miss Jeff this is the only place he could make good laboratory analogies yeah it's

I don't know man like I when I do get to write stuff it tends to like picket that kind of those little things right and find the stuff that's interesting there and what those what they what it says about other stuff beyond baseball you know i have a piece i've been working on for a little while now and i just i don't know you know it's like it's a very meg piece it's got

a bunch of it's got a bunch of guests and screenshots it has some questions about life and baseball from tiny nonsense and i don't i don't know what the appetite is for that i don't know what the market for that kind of writing and work is right now um i just don't know i don't know if it'll read as a welcome sort of respite from this awful thing that we do have to take some breaks from thinking about just to maintain some semblance of ourselves, but also have to be vigilant about. The vigilance is the key to finding our way through. So I don't know.

I just don't know. Yeah. And I've been thinking a lot about how to reframe fandom or sort of reorient our rooting interests in this odd season. Even if we assume that the season proceeds, even if we assume that it's mostly safe or that there aren't any obvious tragedies, it's going to be so strange in so many ways and just a 60 game season and you know it could have been fewer games so i guess we can be happy that the owners didn't go ahead with 48 games or 50 games which i'm sure they wanted to but didn't probably just because the players retained their right to file for grievance and so if the owners had gone from offering a 60 game season to then implementing a 50 game season that would have been kind of a

red flag for an arbitrator to say they didn't play as many games as they wanted to. Whereas now, you know, they still stalled for weeks or months, but when it came down to it, when they finally did impose a season, this is about as many games as you could play without going later than the regular season was scheduled to end. So we've got 60 games and 60 games is just not a lot of games. Like there's no point at which we're going to be able to stop saying small sample size. The whole thing is a small sample. And Dan Zimborski wrote about this at Fangraphs and he ran the odds in a 60 game season. And he wrote, even without the expansion to a 16 team playoff format 2020 will go down as

the season in baseball history when the relative talent of the teams was the least important in determining the playoff field and the eventual champion and that is inarguably true and it's not that 162 games is some magic number and that there's no randomness involved there because of course there is but there's a whole lot more when you have a 60-game season. And MLB could have said, well, we're just going to go away from the regular format entirely. We'll do a tournament or something. We've talked about those ideas, but they didn't do that. It's going to be some semblance of a regular season with the divisions we're used to and the playoffs we're used to, except that it's two months of games and

we all know how teams can have hot or cold two months that aren't really reflective of their true talent or what would be their full season performance and in this case that will be the full season performance and i don't really know what to make of that like in dan's odds the dodgers were the one team that have a greater than 50% chance of winning their division right now. And even them, it's like a sub 60% chance, whereas it was like well over 90 in a full season. And there are aspects of that that sound appealing. Like if you just told me, well, it's kind of a free for all and, you know, bad teams and mediocre teams have a chance. free-for-all and you know bad teams and mediocre teams have a chance and the the greatest gainers in terms of playoff percentage or world series odds are like the white socks and the diamond

backs and the rangers and that's exciting like these are teams that weren't in the playoffs last year and then they spent and they tried to get better and and the blue jay is another one so in one way that would be nice that like super teams can't just lock this thing up before the season starts. But on the other hand, just inevitably, I will think about this season totally differently from any other season. And I'm just not going to look at the champion in the same light that I normally would. And I'm not saying we need a literal asterisk or anything. I wouldn't do that. I think we just all know what happened, right? What the season is like. And I'm not saying that the players won't be trying

and that fans won't be wanting them to win or that they shouldn't be happy if they do win, but it's just not an accomplishment that is as reflective of the team's true talent as usual. And maybe sports are all meaningless and what does it all matter who wins or doesn't win and 162 games is arbitrary and so whatever. But generally, I like the idea that in baseball, the good teams are getting rewarded for being good and the teams that are not so good are suffering some consequences for that. And granted, baseball is a sport where already the best team doesn't usually win. If you look at World Series champions, and Neil Payne wrote an article about that for FiveThirtyEight, and compared to all the other sports, baseball is the most fluky major sport. But still, getting to the playoffs, at least, usually reflects a pretty high talent level. And yeah, when you get there, we all accept that it's sort of random, but you still have to be pretty good to get there. And this season, being good gives you a better chance for sure. There's certainly some signal there, but there's also a lot of noise and there could

be some not so good teams that get there and you'll never really know what would have happened in a full season. It takes about 67 games to get to the point where a team's record is half skill and half luck. So this is close to that. You learn a lot more in those first 60 games than you do in the second 60 games. So it'll be pretty telling, but it'll just be less telling than every other season ever. And I don't think that means it's inherently less enjoyable. I think you just have to enjoy it in a slightly different way. So I don't know how exactly to root for things this year. And like, it's easy for me to say because I'm pretty impartial and I cover the whole game

and I haven't had a team fandom affiliation for many, many years. But I feel like for just this year, we just kind of have to try to approach it a little bit differently. Like this isn't going to tell us definitively who the best teams are. The winner won't be viewed in the same light.

So just enjoy the aesthetic experience as long as it lasts and as long as it's safe. Root for safety and health, first and foremost. Root for good games. Root for good stories. Root for unique occurrences. Root for players that you like to perform well. Root for statistical quirks that we wouldn't see otherwise. Root for unique strategies. Root for novelty. having a season, an outbreak could end it at any day, just don't lose sleep over one run losses. You know, it's not going to look like any other season. Don't root the way you would in any other season, even though in any given game, it might resemble a regular season. So I don't know how

achievable that is to tell people who have, you know, been hardwired to root in a certain way to just kind of like, hey, just enjoy whatever we get and whatever happens and roll with the punches and indulge in the weirdness and don't sweat the wins and losses so much. But that's how I am going to try to approach it and would try to approach it if I were still really a fan of a particular team. You know how in life you'll, you like know a thing is coming and then something will happen that makes that really just throws that sort of hypothetical possibility into very sharp real relief so i was editing dan's piece this morning this is such an obvious this is so

obvious like of course of course even the very best teams weren't going to have a projection for like 40 wins but like the dodgers are only forecast to win 38 games this year and they're they're they're projected to have the best record in baseball by a win with 38 wins there's a three there's just a three in the front of that number and of course there is it's only a 60 game season and this is an obvious thing but i was just i was like wow yeah you know the flip side of that is like oh the orioles are only projected to lose 41 games the orioles were projected to win 19 games man like here's a here is a terrible thought this isn't funny because the things that would have to happen again for them to cancel a season would be devastating in all likelihood. But depending on how long we're able to play,

we might not see the Orioles win a game at all. It's possible. They might not win a single game. The Mariners might be like, no, all of our losses got clustered up front and then we realized it was not really not safe to play and we had to bang the season and and so then they just didn't win at all it's possible a winless season yeah wow yeah and i am interested in how much of this will linger beyond this year like you know once you take the nldh out of the bottle,

I don't think you're putting it back in because that's been coming for a while anyway. But like, will the shortened season make it more likely that we have shorter seasons in the future? Not that we're going to go to 60 games or anything, but, you know, will people be more willing to go to 154 or something just because every game will be more important. And that is the upside here. You know, it's almost like moving closer to football where you have so few games that everyone

is like almost make or break. Baseball will be a little closer to that this year. And so as a day to day spectator experience, if you're not looking at the full picture and saying, well, ultimately, this is even more meaningless than usual possibly, but every game matters more. For once, we can say that it actually is a sprint, not a marathon, and sprints are exciting. And so maybe we'll see more of that in the future, or maybe all that talk about expanded playoffs, I'm sure makes it more likely that we'll see expanded playoffs in the future, et cetera, et cetera. And I hope that that's not the case for the starting extra innings with a runner on second rule because that one, like, I don't know how you feel about that, but I don't really

know anyone who likes that rule. I'm not anti-rule change in general. I think it's fine to tinker with a sport and address certain problems, but no one likes that rule. I mean, I'm sure someone does, but I've never really encountered anyone who likes that. And it's been in place in the minors for the last couple of years and it does work. It does what it's designed to do. And JJ Cooper just had the numbers on this, where if you compare the last two minor league seasons to the previous two

minor league seasons, there is a real difference in how quickly games end when you start extra innings with the runner on second. So over the last couple years, according to Baseball America's numbers, 73% of games in the minor leagues have ended after one extra inning, whereas prior to that, it was 45%. So it does actually end game sooner, and I see why that would be desirable in this season, where maybe you wouldn't need quite as many players if you don't have the potential to have 19-inning games, and maybe it's just less time that people are spending around each other. So I get it for this year, but I hope that doesn't stay, because that's just

something that i'm fine with it in spring training or the minors or something but honestly i'd rather have ties than to just end games by having this weird thing that isn't there in any of the other innings something about that really offends my sensibilities yeah i i agree i don't i don't care for i don't especially like the idea of ties either i don't like it but i'm fine with weird baseball and long games i i know that it's odd from a spectator perspective and entertainment perspective to say yeah we don't really know how long this would last it could go on forever for all we know and there are costs to that of course in terms of like fatigue and having to replace players and all of that.

But I still sort of like it. And it's rare enough that it isn't a huge problem and we enjoy it. At least those of us who are weird enough to like watch those whole games or stay for them. And so I would miss that. But yeah, even ties like ties are OK. This. No, I wouldn't do anything, but I definitely wouldn't do this. Yeah. Yeah. yeah yeah no no thank

you so anyway we'll just monitor this and hope against hope that nothing bad happens and that this can actually proceed and that we can talk about it in kind of a morally uncompromised way i don't have that much hope that that will happen, but we will hope for the best and hope to enjoy whatever baseball we get this year. Yeah, I doubt very much that the folks who listen to this podcast need to be reminded of this fact, but our individual ability to alter the course of a global pandemic is small, but those little actions pile up and failing to do basic stuff is where we can start to bring leaks in the dam. So everyone wearing a mask will not ensure that baseball is safe to return, but it'll help. And in the meantime, it'll keep a lot of other people

you're probably more likely to directly interact with safe so do your part please you know please so that's what i i'm tired of having to scold people but i go to the grocery store and sometimes people still aren't wearing masks yeah they must not be. And then I give them a very dirty look and they give me one back and I'm like, well, whose fault is this interaction? It's not mine. I can't even tell you're giving them a dirty look because you're wearing a mask. Yeah. I still reflexively smile at people. I'm like, you can't see that because my mouth is covered, but I still do it. And I'm like, oh, gosh, they could tell if you frown, I guess. If you're narrowing your eyes and knitting your brow,

they can tell that you're expressing some disapproval there. Yes, I've been told that I have an expressive face. So I'm sure that it is conveyed in some way. But yeah. All right. So before we bring Zach on to school us all on the MLP health and safety protocols, can I leave you with a brand new Scott Boris analogy? Oh, I love nothing more, Ben. Okay.

This one flew under the radar compared to the rectal thermometer one. It's not quite as arresting, I suppose, as that one, but it certainly caught my attention. So this is from an Anthony Fennec piece in the Detroit Free Press. And it's all about the Tigers rebuild and the new draftees they have and the prospects that they've gotten and their farm system building up and everything. And Scott Boris was quoted extensively in this article. And of course, he is interested in the Tigers spending money, hopefully on his clients. And this is how the article ends, so I'll read just the last few paragraphs here. The Tigers are still stocking,

growing that core with an eye toward building this the right way, as Christopher Illich says often, but one day Boris thinks they will be shopping again. Perhaps then Boris will be in front of the cameras again at Comerica Park, just as he was in 2004 when the Tigers' last rebuild shifted into overdrive. All right, here we go. It's like flowers in a vase, Boris said. The flowers are just going to fall on the ground if you don't have the vase to put them in. That's what free agency is. It's the vase of championships.

What? What? Free agency is the vase of championships. What? Free agency is the vase of championships. I need the whole thing again, Ben. I read it multiple times.

It's like flowers in a vase. The flowers are just going to fall on the ground if you don't have the vase to put them in. That's what free agency is it's the vase of championships okay but wait a minute so i okay hold on so are the players flowers in this i think the flowers are the championships i think the core that the tigers have assembled here are the flowers.

So the flowers are like the prospects and their top draft picks and the good young guys that they have coming along. They're the flowers. But if you don't have the vase to put the flowers in, then the flowers are just going to fall on the ground. To support the flowers. Right. So that's what free agency is. It's the vase of championships okay but here's a question then so what happens after spencer torkelson is able to reach free

agency and then he a flower would be leaving potentially yes if there's no contract extension so then or new deal signed i should say so then then i know. He is both a flower and a vase. Yeah, then at that point, he's no longer a flower. He becomes a vase. And doesn't free agency tend to spread the seeds is such a weird thing to say here. But I think I, Scott, it's not your best effort. It's one of his worst, I think. It's the language.

It's not the most flowery language, so to speak. But the rectal thermometer, that was maybe a little more vivid than we needed. Oh, it sure was. But it made sense. I get it. I know what he was going for. Granted, he stopped and explained himself and went back, which is not a great sign, but still, like, I got it. This one I had to read several times, and I still won't, like, if the point of an analogy is to make things clearer because you're using some imagery that people understand to explain a more complicated concept, this is the opposite of that. This is making it much harder for me to understand, and it's almost like the terms in this analogy are just interchangeable. Like if you told me that the flowers were free agency and that the vase was the core, that would work just as well. In fact, that'd probably work even better. I would say that free agency is the flower. And if you have the vase, but you don't

put flowers in it, then what's the point of having the vase right like right to me that makes more sense the vase should be the team yeah so free agency is the flowers of of champion yeah and then uh the well i think that the the core the core like the flowers and then the free agents you know well it kind of depends on the sort of free agent right like if it's um if it's a a veteran that's gonna add that last little bit of wind on the wind curve maybe they're like um they're like they're like baby's breath you know they um they hold everything and or maybe free agents are like um that that uh squishy weird green thing they put in the bottom of flower arrangements to keep all the flowers in or maybe yeah or maybe it's like the fertilizer, it's watering the flowers. Or like the little packet of stuff you get when you get a bouquet of flowers.

Plant food, yeah. Yeah, that keep it alive longer and vital, right? That's what he should have said. He should have said free agents are like that little plastic packet of plant food you get. Yeah. And then everyone would have known exactly what he meant. Yeah. Or he could have just said, like, sign some free agents because they'll make your team better.

Like, I would have understood that, too. He needs better, like, plant and animal metaphors. This all makes me think that he's, like, never been to a farm. Yeah. I mean, he's not a farm guy. I'm not exactly a farm boy either, but I would not come out with this one. Like even using the elements that he supplied here, the flowers and the vase and the free agency, like he arranged them in the worst possible way. If you would randomly put these elements in order, it almost inevitably

would have made more sense than the order that he put them in. So I think this was a total failure on just all fronts, but I enjoyed it. So if the point is to entertain, look, I would not have read this article otherwise. I saw it in the Facebook group because our listeners are eagle-eyed and always catch Boris analogies and bring them to our attention. So I would not have read what he had to say about the tiger's rebuild if he had not come out with the flowers in the vase. But I don't know that he would have made this more comprehensible to anyone who is not in the business of evaluating every Boris analogy. Pretty funny that he couldn't come up with a good arrangement about flowers. Okay, that's a good kicker.

We can end on that note, which is better than his note, I think. So we will be right back with Zach Binney to talk about all the details of MLB's health and safety protocol and how likely it is that this season will actually be played to completion. Keep your distance Keep your distance When I feel you close to me What can I do but fall? Keep your distance

Oh, keep your distance With us it must be all But none at all All right, our guest today is Zach Binney. He has a PhD in epidemiology from Emory University, where he will soon be an assistant professor of quantitative theory and methods, and he is also a writer for Football Outsiders, where he has covered football injuries, and he's also consulted for teams in multiple sports about injuries and other issues. Hey, Zach.

Hey, Ben. Hey, Meg. How are you? We're doing all right, And I assume that your background, the union of sports and epidemiology, has made you a pretty popular person over the last couple of months when it comes to people looking for interviewed guests. So thank you for talking about it yet again. My pleasure to join y'all. It has been definitely a little bit of a weird time the last couple of months. I got into this when I actually used to work in palliative and end-of-life care. I applied for an analytics internship down with the Jacksonville Jaguars, and they said, hey, we really like you, but we want you to work freelance

because you have an actual career, their words, and you would be a fool to give it up for this. So can you work freelance? And by the way, you're in healthcare, you must know about injuries, right? And I lied through my teeth and said, absolutely. And then over the last seven years or so, that's been what I focused on and where my research is. And I think I've gotten smart on it. And, you know, so I work at the intersection of epidemiology and sports, but this was never how I saw my expertise becoming useful. But here we are, and I'm just trying to play my part and get good public health information out to the sports world and sports fans. Yeah, now you actually do know things, so you will not have to lie through your teeth today. That's right. That's good.

Well, I've had a number of infectious disease colleagues who've vetted a lot of things that I've said and have made sure that I actually sound smart. So thanks to all of them. So you've been paying attention to the restart plans or in baseball's case, start plans now for months. And in baseball's case, going back to the bubble plans in Arizona and Florida and things have evolved and changed quite a bit. But now we have an actual plan that is being put into motion. We have a hundred page protocol that you have read through. And I guess just a general question before we begin, how challenging do you think baseball's task has been compared to other sports when it comes to the play on the field and just how baseball works structurally? And also the season itself and the length and way that it's organized.

And then I guess how do you think the sports response has compared to other leagues? Yeah, well, when we talk about the pros, there are certainly some sports that are easier to do with social distancing and avoiding close contact. Among the team sports, baseball is probably the best of those, because if you're in center field, you're not transmitting the virus to anybody. Sure, you've got a runner on first and the first baseman and you've got the hitter and the catcher and the ump at home, but otherwise there's a good amount of distancing. But, you know, if you're a professional sports league thinking about coming back, I think every plan that I've seen has really focused on making a huge upfront investment to make sure nobody sick gets on the field to begin with. And I think that that's the right focus, is to be focusing further

upstream, not trying to keep players safe once they're on the field. Like, there should be a very low probability that anybody who is sick gets onto the field in the first place. So, you know, baseball, baseball is safer to play, I would say, more if you're in like a youth or high school team or something like that. Like I'd much rather play youth football than youth basketball right now. But when you get to the pros, I don't know if it's all that much of an advantage because you're already having to make these huge upfront investments to prevent infections because you have the resources and

because it's an optional thing and that's what you need to do to provide a reasonably safe environment for your players and staff. Now, MLB's plan is great for Germany or South Korea or Vietnam or New Zealand. I have sincere doubts that it's going to work in the U.S. with the sheer number of cases that we have and are going to continue to have for the foreseeable future in at least some MLB markets. Some will be fine, but some won't be. And I can get into the details of why I think the plan is insufficient if you'd like, but I'll stop here for now. I guess before we get into the details, I have just sort of a broader and more general question, which is given those sort of failures to perhaps understand the situation on the ground, when you read through this, given your expertise, does this document

actually read like it was written in consultation with epidemiologists and public health experts to you? That is a really difficult question to answer. But I mean, we know that MLB has been consulting with at least one epidemiologist from the University of Nebraska. So I'm going to go ahead and assume that he had a role in contributing to this protocol. But obviously, it's going to be a give and take with who they're talking with. The players are going to have things that they need. The league is going to have things that

they're willing to do and not willing to do. And then there are going to be recommendations from public health professionals that run the gamut from, you have to do this, to this would be nice to have. So this certainly doesn't strike me as something that was written not in consultation, how seriously everybody's suggestions were taken. I'd be purely speculating on that, and I wouldn't want to do that. Fair enough. We will not make you speculate, but I will ask you to imagine for a moment, in earlier iterations of the league's plan to resume play, there was talk of Major League Baseball pursuing a solution akin to the NBA solution, which was to

gather everyone together, keep them in a couple of discrete locations and basically establish, you know, baseball biodome as a way to finish the season. Given the state of affairs on the ground in so many of Major League Baseball's markets right now, do you think that that would have been a more practical and perhaps practicable solution to the situation they find themselves in? Well, in theory, yes. But then you go back and you remember what were the three places they were thinking of establishing a biodome? They were Arizona, Texas, and Florida. And those are the three places that are doing the worst right now. Yeah, we probably could have picked somewhere that wasn't like the party school equivalent of our states, right?

Right. But then again, you know, you're also, you've only got a finite set of places where you could do this, right? And Arizona and Florida are the natural choices. And you just had to kind of hope that those states would both allow you to operate, which doesn't seem to have been a problem, and take containment of COVID-19 seriously, which has been a problem. So, you know, would I still like to see some sort of centralization and sequestering? Yes. It's possible that Arizona and Florida will look better in a month or two. It's also possible that they'll look worse. It depends on policy responses and individual responses. You know, even if the states continue to open up, what do people do? Because we saw that people, and I'm very proud of them actually, really cut their movement and social interactions well before states were telling them to. So, you know, depending on what happens and how that affects the epidemic, that will have a huge effect on whether Arizona and Florida look like

viable places to centralize folks. But of course, you have other issues with that. The players never liked that idea, is my understanding, because A, it's hot, and B, you are being dragged away from your family for months on end, and that's not pleasant socially or psychologically or mentally for anybody. It's a really hard ask, so there's a lot of drawbacks to that too. Lately, what I've been thinking maybe you could do is sort of a bubble in home markets. So the key there would be players aren't living at home and aren't living with their families, but you're establishing a couple of hotel blocks

and a sort of closed loop transportation between those living spaces and the stadium. And those are the only places that you go. And like the NBA, if you leave that bubble, hey, you're always free to, but it's gonna take you two weeks to get back in if you didn't have prior authorization to do that. Maybe with rigorous testing of family members, you could arrange for occasional visits, or if you had the resources, maybe you could even bring the family members into the bubble. But I think that's sort of what you'll need to do to

prevent an explosive outbreak in at least some markets, given the sheer amount of disease that we have right now. There's a lot of testing involved in the plan, of course, and we can get into the details of that and the efficacy of that. But before we get into that, I wanted to ask a little bit about the ethics of that and whether that's still a concern. Because when we first heard that baseball was going to try to come back and that there'd be frequent testing, I think everyone was concerned that, hey, there's still a lot of people in the country who can't get tests,

and will this take tests away from those people? And MLB announced that it has a drug testing facility in Utah that would be specially manufacturing these tests for MLB's use, so it's not coming out of some general supply, at least at the end of the chain there. And maybe they're donating some tests also to the community, kind of like a carbon offset or something if you're polluting. But I wonder whether that is still an acute concern now that we have, you know, half a million people or so every day getting tested in this country now.

That doesn't mean that everyone who needs or wants a test can get one at any time, but is that still something that we need to feel kind of queasy about, that MLB will be taking all of these tests for a non-essential activity? Right. So we're doing about 500,000 to 600,000 tests a day in the U.S. right now, which is good. It's not where we need to be yet. And the availability of tests really varies a lot from area to area. So for example, here in Atlanta, anytime I want to drive across the border to Fulton County, I live in DeKalb County, but if I want to drive over the border to Fulton County, I've been able to go to a drive up facility and get a test these last few weeks.

Don't have any symptoms, any referral. In New York any referral. Do that too, just show up for free. And it's pretty easy or has been for me. Yeah, yeah. So I can get them, but not everywhere is like that. And so one of the things you need to look at is the test positive percentage in the areas that you're playing in. If it's under 5%, the argument is generally speaking,

you've kind of got enough tests. But if it's 15 or 20%, like we're seeing in Phoenix and in some Florida markets, that is an indication that the tests don't exist to the extent that they're needed in the community. And that's a real question then, if you're using those tests for an optional activity like baseball or like the NBA would. That's actually one of my major concerns for how their bubble, which I actually think is quite strong, could pop is just they can't ethically be testing everybody every other day when there are people around them in Orlando who can't get a test.

Like, how could you do that? But epidemiologists like to think in counterfactuals, and I don't know if you've ever had anybody discuss what those are on your show. But the question for me is, would there be fewer tests available were MLB not coming back? Right. And if they're just pouring money and resources at the problem to generate more tests than there would have been in the world otherwise, then I don't really have a problem with it. But that depends on what the kind of rate limiting step in the production of these tests is, right? If they're using up all the reagents or swabs and that's why other people can't get tests,

then that's a concern. But if they're throwing more money into the world so there are more tests and they're not taking up lab capacity because they're using their own facility in Utah, then I don't really have a problem with it. But the issue does remain, if you have tests in an area that is desperate for tests, and you're not using that

testing capacity to help out your surrounding community, I definitely do think that that raises some very serious questions. So the league's health and safety protocols don't come with a specific code of conduct for players and team personnel's behavior when they're away from the field. Indeed, the manual says, and please forgive me for reading a big quote here, MLB will not formally restrict the activities of covered individuals when they are away from club facilities, but will expect the covered individuals on each club to ensure that they all act responsibly. The careless actions of a single individual places the entire team and their families at risk and the covered individuals on each club should agree on

their own off-field code of conduct for themselves and their family members to minimize the risk to others. I'm curious in your experience when you're in the process of issuing guidance to try to intervene in a public health crisis like this, what are the factors that you're taking into consideration to try to put people in a position where they have the information that they need and they're taking steps that not only will ensure their health and safety, but that they are actually likely to take? Because I imagine that you could design a very rigorous and perfect system of compliance, but if it's not something that people are actually going to do, then it's not worth a whole lot. So how do folks think about

that balance and what are some of the factors they take into consideration when designing that kind of guidance? Yeah, boy, that's a great question. I would say that you want to be specific. You want to give examples of what's good and bad behavior. You want to be clear, but you also want to be realistic. And you want to understand what people are going to do and what's just a non-starter, right? idea of harm reduction in public health, where we actually, the perfect example for this is HIV, where we know that just telling people not to have sex, just be abstinent, that doesn't work. It turns out that Ben and Meg, I don't know if you know this, but people actually love to have sex. So just telling them don't do it is not really a great option. You can offer them safer alternatives. That's like condoms, right? So, okay, we recognize that you're going to have sex and it would be ideal if you didn't, but if you do, please use a condom, right? So I think that's what we need to be thinking about broadly in the

general population and which CDC is starting to do, to my great happiness, is give people options for things that are safe and things that are less safe. And what we're really understanding is that it's gathering indoors for an extended period of time. That's the worst thing you can do. Gathering in large numbers for an extended period of time still isn't great and we want to avoid it as much as we can, but definitely, definitely indoors. My understanding with MLB is they're having teams sort of come up with their own guidance, particular to their markets. And, you know, I think you can communicate that to players and staff, but ultimately you're going

to be relying on them to adhere to it. So you have to be clear. If you can get kind of peer champions, if you will, like some of the leaders in the clubhouse to maybe talk it up to some of the younger guys, be like, hey, this is really serious. Like if you violate this, you are putting the team at risk and maybe get some peer pressure. I think that can be very powerful. That's a lesson that we certainly think about in public health communication. It's a lot easier to, you know, get you to wear a mask if all your friends are wearing a mask, for example. So I think those are some of the lessons that you can take when designing those sorts of communication systems and protocols. Meet people where they're at, make sure that you're giving them something they can do,

get as much peer pressure as you can, and go from there. But you're still, you know, if you're not enforcing it, then there's still a lot of risk that people aren't going to adhere. One of the reasons why it's hard to be optimistic about this plan is that the idea of players and other team personnel testing positive isn't hypothetical. It's not this could happen. It's currently happening. And it's been happening quite a lot over the past week or so. And MLB just closed some of its team training facilities over the weekend for cleaning because there were outbreaks across several teams and in multiple locations too. And just after the protocol was agreed to, Charlie Blackman and a couple other Rockies players were reported to have tested positive. So this seems to be happening left or right. And I guess the question is, is there a reason to expect that this would not continue to happen? Obviously,

this protocol has not been in place necessarily everywhere. But if this is happening right now, even before players are congregating in large groups and everyone has reported, is there any reason to think that it will not continue to happen constantly once they actually all show up? I have been searching for reasons why that might be the case. And I'll tell you, I've come up with exactly one, which is you saw the outbreak at Philly spring training. Maybe ballplayers will take it seriously now. The fact that that seems to have originated with a bar visit, maybe the rest of baseball will look at that and go, oh, geez, this is no longer a

hypothetical for us. We really need to avoid that. But, you know, this is a long time to ask anybody to adhere to really strict protocols like that. So I'm definitely still worried. And, you know, at some point I look around, I see there was an outbreak from going to a bar among LSU football players. I see it in the NWSL's Orlando Pride. We saw it with the Phillies. So how many more examples do you need of this clearly not being enough so far? Maybe it will be in the future, but that's a heck of a gamble. And it only takes one wrong night from a few people at the wrong bar and your team has to shut down. Because I know, you know, we're talking about the 60 man pools and all of this and, oh, if somebody

gets sick, hey, it's just next man up. But to me, if you get three or four cases in rapid succession, you really should be shutting your team down for two weeks because the chance that you have an outbreak is pretty high and you don't want it to get any worse. You probably have more than three to four people already sick or who will become sick. So it's only going to get worse. You don't want to wait until it's 10 or 12 when it's obvious that you should shut down. So the extra people only help so much. Yeah, the whole idea of the 60-man pools

and the expanded rosters, I mean, some of that may be because these players won't be built up and you won't be able to use pitchers the way that you usually would. But with the whole taxi squad idea and all of that, it just seems almost like planning for attrition it's like we know a certain number of people are going to catch it and when they do

we'll just call someone up it's not even like pretending that you might avoid that it's just like we'll just throw numbers at it and we'll just keep putting healthy people in there when people get sick and that presupposes i guess that they won't all just catch it from each other. And if one person gets it, then suddenly almost everyone will have it. It's the Zap Brannigan plan against the kill bots. We'll just throw wave after wave of men at them. Right. No, it's, look, so I study injuries, right? That's actually my main area of focus. So I think there's a lot of value to having the expanded rosters and trying to limit workloads. I think that's smart.

I think you are going to have more injuries and you want a backstop for that. And I also think it can make sense for, you know, if you get one or two COVID cases, right, and you need to replace somebody for two weeks, that's sort of an extra burden above and beyond what you've seen in previous years. So it makes sense to have some cushioning for that. But if the numbers get much higher than that on a single team in rapid succession, I don't think your problem is that you don't have enough men to replace them. I think your problem is you have an outbreak and you need to shut down. Let's talk for a second about some of the specifics around the protocol. And I'm particularly curious about your take on the idea of sort of symptom

and temperature checks as a sufficient proxy. I know they'll be coupled with frequent testing, but not daily testing for COVID and for both the players and for other personnel that are sort of in and around the ballpark. Is the timeline that baseball is laying out here where covered individuals will undergo a temperature check and a symptoms sort of survey a couple twice a day, I believe, and then a couple of tests a week. Is that sufficiently rigorous from a diagnostic perspective to actually head off a couple of cases before it becomes an outbreak? Or would we need to look at something more frequent when it comes to testing? Right. So symptom screens will certainly head off some cases, right? But the issue is that the CDC estimates that around 35% of COVID-19 cases never show symptoms, but they can still spread the disease to other people. We also know that

you can spread the disease, even if you We also know that you can spread the disease, even if you do develop symptoms, you may be at your most infectious actually right before you show a fever or a cough or another symptom. That's one of the things that makes COVID-19 so difficult to contain in such an insidious disease. It would be easy, comparably so,

if we could say, hey, if you have a fever or cough, shoot, go home right now, right? And stop spread that way, but you can't. So you have to couple it with testing of everyone, even if they're asymptomatic. So you're kind of looking at this layered plan here, right? If you have symptoms, we want to catch that really fast, like within 12 hours. And if you don't, we'll test you, you know, every 48 hours maximum seems to be the plan. That's for these tier one individuals, the players and a few other people in very close contact with them. My worry with that is that, let me lay out a timeline

here. So let's say I get tested on Tuesday. I become infectious on Wednesday, but my test result comes back negative on Wednesday from the Tuesday test. I don't get tested on Wednesday. I get tested on Thursday. The results come back Friday. By then, I've been infectious for two days, two to three days, depending on when on Friday my results came back and when I became infectious on Wednesday. So that gave me a good amount of opportunities to spread the disease. Even if I'm wearing masks and minimizing my time indoors, there's still the possibility that I could spread it. And so we want to minimize those opportunities as much as we can, which is why more frequent testing is better than less frequent testing to cut down on that window

between when you become infectious and when you either show symptoms or when you test positive. We really need that window to be as narrow as possible. So would this layered plan of every other day tests and symptom checks be sufficient? Yes, in Germany. Yes, in markets with a low baseline risk of COVID-19 in the surrounding city. Like if there are very few cases around you, then, you know, okay, a case might sneak through this protocol now and then, but maybe, you know, you can still catch it within a couple days and there's not a huge chance of it blowing up into something. But if you have a whole ton of disease, like if you're in Houston right now and the baseline risk of

catching the disease in the community is higher and then there's a greater chance that a number of people sneak through that system and then you're just playing dice and hoping that you roll the right numbers over and over again to avoid a big outbreak. You know, I'd much rather only have to roll two sevens than five sevens in a week to prevent a big outbreak. The analogy that I came up for is like a subpar shortstop. That's what this plan is to me, this testing and symptom checks. this plan is to me, this testing and symptom checks. So maybe you can hide him if he only faces a few ground balls. Maybe one gets through, but you don't really know that he's that bad because you just don't see him fail over and over again. That's a situation where you have a market

without a lot of disease. But if you've got him facing 20 sharply hit ground balls a night, a lot of them are going to get through. And that's when you really know you've got a bad plan and you've got a problem. And I'm afraid that that's what we're going to see in markets with a lot of disease, which I think at least one or two MLB teams are going to be in markets like that for the foreseeable future. Yeah. And do we know much about the false positive and false negative rates on the various types of tests? Right. So when it comes to the diagnostic tests, the main concern that I've heard about false positives is at the end of a disease course. So where you're shedding fragments of a virus or dead virus that turn up positive because these tests just look for the genetic material, even if it's not infectious anymore. But I don't think you, I haven't heard a lot about false positives right at the offset. So, you know, you would test somebody and mistakenly say that they are sick if they're developing a new case. I don't think that's a very common thing.

False negatives can arise either because the test itself fails or because you haven't done well with collecting the specimen, as we would say, or the sample. So if you have to have the deep swab back at the long of your nose, that's a really hard thing to stand. So sometimes it's not easy to get a good sample from back there. That can lead to a false negative. MLB has opted to go with saliva tests, which I think there is some promising preliminary data on, but the NBA, for example, still seems to treat as a little bit more investigational. So, you know, I'm not a testing expert. I don't really want to stand here and say saliva tests are absolutely as good or they're absolutely worse.

There are certainly much easier samples to collect, so you avoid that. But is there sensitivity to catch cases as high? I hope so, but I don't know what the exact false negative rate will be other than to say it's not zero. And in some of the other diagnostic tests, like the nasal test or the swabbing the back of your mouth test, we know that the false negative rates can be 15 or 30 percent or even higher. So even if you are truly positive and infectious, we may not catch it every time, which is another argument for having frequent tests. So even if you screw one up, maybe you won't screw up the next one. And if you have to wait a week for the next one, that's a problem. If you have to wait a day, that's comparably less of a problem. Yeah. And I meant to mention that one of the Phillies players who tested positive had never

been flagged in the temperature checks or symptom checks. So as you were saying, that's hardly a foolproof screening method. So I also wanted to ask about what happens when you get it. You can go on this COVID-19 injured list, and it's a special designation where you'd be quarantined and it wouldn't be like a 10 day or a 15 day or a 60 day. It would just be however long it takes essentially for it to be safe for you to come back. And so there are various checkpoints that you have to cross. So you have to test negative twice, at least 24 hours apart. You can't have had a fever in at least 72 hours. You must have taken an antibody test. And there must be a doctor sign-off and sign-off of a joint COVID-19 committee created

by the league and the union. So you have to be approved to return to play. So there are a lot of hurdles there, and that's good. Do we have any idea how long that might take or what the average stay on a COVID-19 injured list might be? Yeah. So this is the one area of the protocol where actually I think you could argue MLB as being a little too strict, which is really interesting. I know a lot of, for example, healthcare facilities actually have a different protocol that's just based on time rather than consecutive negative tests. They say, and there seems to be a good evidence base to back this up, that after you test positive,

you wait 10 days if you never develop symptoms, or at least three days after your symptoms resolve, whichever one of those is longer, and then you're good good to go even without a test. So certainly adding in the requirement that you have a test, a negative test or two negative tests 24 hours apart, that's good. I mean, that adds strictness to it, but you do run into that false positive issue where you may be shedding virus, but it doesn't, it's not really infectious. And I believe the protocol does actually address this and say, hey, you know, if's not really infectious. And I believe the protocol does actually address this and say, hey, you know, if you keep testing positive, as long as your symptoms are resolved, we reserve the right to sign off anyway. So it's a little bit of a soft requirement, that testing.

I don't think that will get people back a lot faster often than the 10 days or three days after symptoms thing. You know, I would think that most players, you know, out maybe 10 days to two weeks, but that's a guess with a lot of variation. I mean, we've seen even elite athletes struggle with COVID-19 symptoms for weeks or months. So it's possible that somebody could be out for the season. But most of the time, I would suspect it's maybe going to be 10 to 14 days or a little bit longer. And I would hope that there's no pressure put on the players to come back sooner or no obscuring of anything. I mean, you know from working in football and following concussions and everything that

very often you have to have these very strict protocols because otherwise players will want to come back before it's safe for them and for others. And teams will either explicitly or just kind of quietly put pressure on these people to do things that aren't in their best interest in the long term. So I guess in that sense, it's good that you have many obstacles that you have to get over because otherwise you could imagine, well, if someone's asymptomatic or something and you have ultra competitive athletes and teams that want to win, there's no telling exactly what would happen there. So you kind of have to take it out of the player's hands and the team's hands,

I suppose, to be safe. Yeah, that's a fair point. You really want something objective, like a negative test. Yeah, you just have to balance that against the possibility that some people may be kept out a little bit longer than they need. And, you know, people can always lie about symptoms. And that's the thing about symptoms, right? Is I can't, I can't diagnose you with a headache. You have to tell me you have a headache. I can track a fever. Uh, sure. And, uh, so, you know, if you waited until three days after the fever broke, hopefully you would be able to be reasonably confident that, that that person is no longer infectious. Uh, and it's a little bit hard to hide a cough too, at least if it's bad.

The one interesting thing on the fever point is, as far as I know, the CDC guidelines are actually 99.1 Fahrenheit and MLB and other leagues are setting it at 100.4 Fahrenheit. So I could have a fever of 99.9 or even 100.2 and not be dinged by this protocol if I don't have other symptoms, which seems a little bit questionable to me. I would probably want to set the threshold lower. I think a lot of fans have sort of this vision of the typical person who's going to have to navigate these protocols being the players themselves who on average are younger and have are hopefully in pretty good health considering that they're professional

athletes i don't mean to minimize the risk that covet 19 poses to young people because i think there has been some false perception there that young people are sort of immune from this it just seems to be slightly less dangerous for them which which isn't to say that it isn't dangerous. So with that caveat in mind, obviously players aren't the only folks who are going to be in these facilities, and there is a much wider age range and theoretically a much wider range of sort of pre-existing health conditions that exist for other non-playing personnel who will be at the field. Do you think that the protocols as they're laid out do enough to protect that swath of folks who are going to be in close contact with one another? Or are they sort of managing to, you know, the healthiest among the folks who are going to be

at the ballpark every day? Right. What is that John Kruk quote? Something along the lines of a lady, I'm a ball player, not an athlete. But setting that aside, you know, these guys are generally in pretty decent shape. But I have a few responses to that when people say, hey, these are young elite athletes. Why are we even worried about them? Right. Well, number one, if they get sick, you're still creating a new case in the middle of a global pandemic. They can spread it to other people. That's not good. And not everybody involved in this sport is a young elite athlete. You have umpires, you have coaches, you have medical staff, and you have family members. If you're traveling home or living in a multi-generational household with an older family member, that is a major concern.

And it's probably a bigger concern, honestly, for staff than players, because most staff are paid less and have fewer resources than players. I definitely think you want to be designing a system with the highest risk people in mind. I think that that's really important. You don't want to have too much of a tiered system. I think MLB's plan has some reasonable additional precautions for higher risk folks to take, and I like that they're letting players who can demonstrate that they're high risk opt out without penalty, obviously. But really, mostly, everybody in the system should be taking the same precautions, and they should be

doing it to protect the most vulnerable among them. Like everybody should be wearing masks. And one of the bullet points that MLB has in its protocol is, well, yeah, but you should like extra wear a mask when you're high risk. And to me, that was a little bit of a weird thing to read. I understand why they wrote it, but it's still a little bit weird. So, you know, I do worry for them. And the other thing to keep in mind is that while the risk of death may be low for a player, A, it's not zero, and B, death is not the only thing we need to be worried about. I don't know if you know anybody who's been on a ventilator, but in my prior work in end-of-life care, I knew quite a few.

And that is a deeply unpleasant physical experience. It does really bad things to your body. It keeps you alive, but there are a lot of other negative effects. So for an elite athlete who is at the peak of their performance to try to come back from a trip on a ventilator, I don't even know if they would be able to do that. And if they did, it would take weeks or months or maybe even years. So, you know, it's interesting that even relatively mild effects from the disease actually are almost more of a concern if you're an athlete because it can alter or even end your career. We don't know how common these effects are, especially in the long term. That's just knowledge that we don't possess because the virus hasn't been around in people more than about seven

months, but it's definitely an ongoing concern. So there's a lot in here that will kind of govern how players interact and behave on the field. Things will look a little bit different. Obviously, the lack of spitting, the ban on spitting that has received a lot of attention and no high fives, no fist bumps, no hugs. We'll see how well players comply with those things, which are really sort of instinctive for them at this point. And I don't know how strictly they'll be policed and, you know, are you going to suspend someone for a fist bump or how do you exactly prevent them from doing that? But even assuming that you can, I'm kind of curious about some of the equipment-based measures that are in here because, of course, touching someone or spitting

and projecting many millions of droplets, that seems like a bad idea. But what have we learned? Because I know it's been somewhat mysterious about how long the disease can linger on surfaces and how that varies by surface, because you have things in here like hitters have to bring their own pine tar rags and donuts and other equipment with them to and from the on-deck circle. And pitchers have to bring their own rosin bag. And, you know, they all have to get their equipment if they're left on base. Or baseballs used in batting practice can only be used for that day. And then you have to clean and sanitize them.

And, you know, better safe than sorry on all of that. But I wonder how important that is relative to say the air-based or touch-based transmission. Right. So definitely one of the things that we've learned is that person to object to person transmission. So I'm holding a baseball in my hand, I cough on it, I drop it, Ben, you come over and pick it up, and then you touch your face. That is absolutely a way the disease can spread, but does not seem to be a very common route of transmission. Most cases appear to arise from direct person-to-person respiratory droplet transmission. So I breathe or talk in your vicinity. I produce a fine mist of droplets that you can't even see from my mouth. You walk into them.

You breathe them in. That's how you get the virus. So that said, all of these object and equipment-based things, hygiene protocols, are good. They really are. But to me, they're a little bit of the cloth covering on a Kevlar vest if you don't have some other things right. So I don't want people to lose the forest for the trees. I think these are going to have relatively small effects on the degree of transmission of COVID-19. The most important things by far are whether you can sequester players and staff either in market or in some

sort of centralized bubble, but cut contacts between those within the league and those outside the league, which is not currently done by MLB because players are living at home and relying on them and their families, by the way, or roommates in some cases, to be responsible. Second most important thing is frequent testing to identify cases when they inevitably do occur and stop them from becoming outbreaks. Then there's a pretty big gap in my mind down to masks, which are still really, really important, and they should be worn at all times except when you are directly on the field or lifting weights or something like that. The fourth is severely restricting indoor group time. So team meetings, showers, locker rooms,

all of that needs to be kept to an absolute minimum and everything that can be moved outside should be moved outside. Then everything else for me is kind of way down the list. So I have a sort of non-COVID related question, which is this is an opportunity for us to just really grapple with how gross some aspects of baseball are. It's very strange that you go to work and you can just spit everywhere and people are fine with that. If you worked in accounting upstairs in the team's office, they'd probably frown on you spitting. They'd probably look down on that. So are there any aspects of this protocol that,

just from a general disease transmission perspective, unrelated to COVID, that you hope will persist into the future after we have hopefully found our way through the pandemic? That's an interesting question. Probably spitting less would be good, but it doesn't seem like we've had massive outbreaks of anything from that before. Probably far and away, it's going to be hand sanitizer and just washing hands and a renewed focus on that. I mean, people forget, but it hasn't actually been that long. It's been maybe a century and a half or a little bit less since we really understood that hand washing is an important way to prevent the transmission of disease. The guy who originally tried to make that popular, Ignaz Semmelweis, was drummed out

of medicine, basically, because they thought he was crazy. Right. And Joseph Lister, basically, because they thought he was crazy. Right. And Joseph Lister, too, right? He was the surgeon who was like, hey, we should probably, you know, sterilize before we plunge our hands into someone's chest cavity. Right. And people thought that was crazy. Yeah. People thought that was crazy. So I hope that, you know, this renewed focus on, you know, washing your hands for 20 seconds and having more hand sanitizer and stuff around,

I hope that sticks around. Yeah. Can't hurt. Yeah. So there's no concrete answer to this, but I'm curious about what you think. What would it take to stop this, to derail this? Because it's not, well, if we get a few positive tests, we'll shut it down because that is currently happening. And dozens of people in baseball have tested positive and it's still full speed ahead. So given that and given the economic incentives and just how much it took to even get to this point where players would be reporting, what do you think would stop it, would make MLB say, okay, we can't go on, we surrender? I mean, is it one entire team getting taken out and everyone's testing positive and you basically can't feel the competitive team? Is it more of a widespread outbreak? Is it just the public outcry that would happen if someone got seriously sick?

What do you think would be the thing that stops this? And hopefully that doesn't happen. Hopefully it somehow all goes smoothly, but I wonder what you think it would take. Yeah, that would really require me to speculate completely. I can tell you what should and maybe speculate about what would. In terms of what should, you know, what I'm going to be watching out for is not the cases that are happening now, because outside of the Philly Spring Training Facility, like if a few cases show up and they haven't been spending a lot of time at the team facility or training, I would think that those were just sporadic cases

that arose from the community, which again happens when you have an uncontrolled outbreak like we continue to have despite what some people believe in the US. So one case is not enough to shut down a team. If that's going to be your threshold, then don't come back. I think that's totally defensible, by the way. If you say, you know what, even one case is too many, so we're just not going to come back, hey, I applaud you. That's great from a public health perspective, but that doesn't

seem to be what most people are saying, and I think it's fair to say conditional on us coming back, one case doesn't shut us down. If you see a cluster of three or four cases on a team in rapid succession, I think you should shut that team down. I don't know what that threshold will be, and different teams will probably have different thresholds if MLB doesn't actually set a strict one, like X number of cases and Y number of days. So, you know, if you got like 10 cases, I think most teams would shut down. If one of your players went in the hospital, or God forbid, if a player or a coach or another high profile person died or went on a ventilator, that might be enough to derail the whole season. But what I really foresee is having outbreaks in areas that aren't doing a good job containing the virus, those outbreaks bleeding over to teams,

causing enough cases, like three or four, that should shut down those teams, and that happening three or four times over to different teams. And at some point, so many of your teams are going to be able to play, MLB is going to have to look itself in the mirror and go, how can we really hold the season? Will the financial incentives outweigh that? Maybe. But we did see those sports worlds shut down when we initially discovered COVID back in March. The NBA went and then others quickly followed suit. So I would like to think that something like that would happen again if things seem like they're getting out of control and it really becomes apparent that their plan is not working and they need to, at minimum, take a league-wide break and rethink what they're going to try to do. But will it happen? Gosh, who knows? I guess to close, my question for you personally is, what conditions would need to be met in sports before you will feel comfortable going to a baseball game again?

Oh, going to a baseball game as a fan? Yeah, I mean, clearly that's not going to, well, I say clearly. The Texas teams are like, well, think about it. But for most fans, that's not even going to be an option this year. But the hope is that the 2021 season will see fans come back to the ballpark, even if it's in a reduced capacity. And I think that people's risk tolerance for that is going to vary. But for you personally, as an epidemiologist, what would it take for you to feel comfortable

going back to the ballpark? Is it a vaccine or? When I can get vaccinated. Yeah. So it's not even just that there's a vaccine, it's when I can get that vaccine. That's what a lot of people forget is even if we are able to develop a vaccine by the end of the year, sorry, Meg, Ben, the three of us are not getting vaccinated in January, 2021. It's going to take time, even with Project Warp Speed. That's not producing 330 million, or if you need two doses, 660 million doses of the vaccine right off the bat. It's going to take time. One of the best case scenario I have for a vaccine in my head is actually for the NFL, which would be some of the first people to get a vaccine will probably

be healthcare workers. So if we're very, very lucky, and I do not want people to bank on this because I think it's maybe a 10% chance of happening, but if we get an effective vaccine by December or January, maybe you could have sports fans big return be a Super Bowl for the vaccinated healthcare heroes, right? Wouldn't the NFL love that? So, you know, that's the best case scenario that I can see. I really don't want to see fans at a ballpark otherwise until they're vaccinated or until, God forbid, we have herd immunity because we just completely lost containment and a few

hundred thousand or north of a million people are dead. I would really prefer to avoid that scenario. Yeah. The one other thing I want to say about fans, this is a little bit of a soapbox for me, is people like to talk a lot about personal responsibility. And there is no such thing as just personal responsibility with an infectious disease. Your choices are not just your choices. Your choices affect everybody else. So for example, I could choose not to go to a Texas Rangers game because I think it's too dangerous.

Sure. But I can't choose to go to a grocery store with anyone who's been to a Texas Rangers game or to not do that. Right? I can't control that. So you're still getting people together for something that is completely optional just to put money in your pocket

and you're causing, in my opinion, a very real public health threat. You've got the potential for a super spreader event because people are not always going to stay apart, especially in areas with a lot of virus. There would be the real potential to generate a lot of cases from one of those events and then spit them back out into the community.

And I don't think you should do that just to make money. And just to broaden this beyond sports for a second, just because we don't have an epidemiologist on the show every day, based on the recent trends across the country, I mean, maybe we should. You could be a permanent co-host. Your knowledge is much in demand right now. But given what we've seen lately with the positive cases rising, the positive test rates rising, deaths not really rising fortunately yet, which maybe they will, or maybe it's because younger people are getting exposed now than previously. But what do you think

it would take to stop this? And are we sort of doomed to having this linger at this level just because of the reopening that's happening or because people are less acutely afraid of this right now or because the shutdowns, the lockdowns have sort of relaxed? Can we actually fix this without kind of going back into our individual little bubbles or has that ship sort of sailed? Yeah, I'm really afraid that we can't without another lockdown in some areas. Like, for example, if I lived in Wyoming, I would be comfortable with Wyoming if they had the testing that they needed and a real good contact tracing program in place, they're working from such a low level of disease that that's something that you could keep contained. I don't think you can contain Texas or Arizona or Florida or even California, at least LA, with that right now. So the goal was always to get to a very low level of disease and then have this like test trace isolate to keep things where they are. Keep the R naught, the reproduction number around one. But if you start from a high

level and you just kind of stay at that plateau, that's not great, which is a little bit more of what we've seen like here in Georgia. Although we may be at the beginning of another spike right now, it's hard to tell. I don't know what it will take for areas like Florida, Texas, or Arizona to shut down. Probably refrigerated morgue trucks, something like that, like they saw in New York. Will it get to that point? I don't know. Even if it does, will they walk things back? I don't know. That requires total speculation, and the truth is I don't know. There's a lot I don't know and that we don't know. That requires total speculation. And the truth is, I don't know. There's a lot I don't know and that we don't know as a profession still. But you would have liked to see things get a little lower before we started opening back up. And you would have liked to

see a lot more testing and tracing and isolating plans in place than we have before we opened back up. But we had a very slow national response. Some would argue we had virtually no national response or an actively harmful one. They're not going to get into that on this show, but there's certainly been a pretty miserable response from some quarters of the federal government. And that's left us behind the eight ball relative to a lot of other countries. And I think all you have to do is look around and see that Germany has the Bundesliga back. Even Spain, which got hit very hard, has managed to recover to the point where La Liga is back. Taiwan, South Korea have baseball. New Zealand, which effectively eliminated COVID for a time from

their country. They've gotten a few imported cases right now, but they're doing a lot to contain those. Had full rugby stadiums last weekend. I still think that was probably a little reckless, but you could argue that they've earned it. We haven't earned it and we're reaping what we've sowed. And it looks like we're going to continue to do that, but not everybody is going to at the same time, right? So that's the thing, is we don't have one epidemic in this country. We have a whole bunch of little localized ones. So some areas are going to be fine, and some areas are not, and those areas that are doing fine should earn the right to have more things. Maybe

have, you know, outdoor bars open at some capacity or be able to return, you know, zoos or museums or something like that. But other areas haven't earned that right. And unfortunately, I don't think a lot of people are looking at it like, oh man, we got to eat our vegetables to get our dessert. Right. Okay. Well, thank you for being so available and for educating all of us. And you can find Zach Binney's website at NFLInjuryAnalytics.com. You can read his writing at Football Outsiders, and you can find him on Twitter, which we will link to at ZBinney underscore NFLINJ.

Thank you very much, Zach. Well, thank you very much. I hope we get more than a month or so of baseball, but I'm really afraid that this plan is set up for MLB to be able to start the season and not be able to finish it because too many teams get knocked out. So I'm worried about that, but I'm hoping for y'all's sake and for my sake that we get at least some baseball before everything goes pear-shaped. Agreed. All right, I want to relay a couple quick follow-ups or fun facts. On episode 1552, I did a stat blast about the players with the least amount of playing time for each year of service time. So among players with, say, two years of service time, who has the least playing time, who's made the most plate appearances or faced the fewest batters, etc. This was inspired by the oft-injured pitcher Anthony Reyes. And it's mostly players like him, guys who had Tommy John surgery or some other injury while they were on the roster so they kept accruing service time while they were hurt. And I noted

in that stat blast that I was looking for players who had played in the big leagues in either 2018 or 2019 because I was trying to find active guys. But because of those conditions, I excluded someone who fits very well in this category and was brought to my attention by listener Andrew Varga who writes, one player who I don't think was mentioned during the episode was Julian Fernandez. He has two years of service time, the entire 2018 and 2019 seasons, and did not face one batter. The Giants selected him in the Rule 5 draft for the 2018 season, but he needed Tommy John during the season and spent the year on the 60-day. The Marlins claimed him off waivers in the following postseason, but he again didn't pitch, meaning he has two years of big league service

time without facing a batter in the big leagues, or above a ball for that matter. True. So I would certainly say that he has the least playing time among players with at least two years of service time. Can't have less playing time than zero. And some people might say, well, good work if you can get it, except that I am quite sure that Julian Fernandez would have preferred to be playing rather than having surgery and going through a painful rehab process. Hopefully someday he will rack up some service time while actually being in the big leagues. And the other fun fact I came across, courtesy of a tweet by a friend of the show, Christopher Crawford, is that the player with the most home runs ever in a season of 60 games, a player season of exactly 60 games, obviously not a full season of 60 games, we haven't had one of those until now, is, by coincidence, Tony Clark. Tony Clark hit 13 homers in 60 games for the Tigers in 2000, and no one else has ever finished with

exactly 60 games played and more homers than that. By the way, check out Tony Clark's 2005 season sometime. He was 33 years old, he got 349 at-bats for the Diamondbacks, and he hit 30 homers. 30 homers and 349 at-bats. That is quite a ratio. In fact, the only player to hit more homers than that in a season with 350 or fewer at-bats? Mark McGuire in 1995 and 2000, and Mitch Garver in 2019, who hit 31 homers and 311 at-bats for the Twins. So, only Mark McGuire, one of the best homer hitters ever, and a player who was playing in the highest homerun rate season of all time. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks.

Farhan Arif, Dan Wiley, John Sagal, David Myers, and Danny Madden. 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. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with another episode a little later this week. Small sample size, small sample size, small, small sample size, small sample size, small sample size, sample size. It's a small sample size, small sample size, it's a small sample size.