Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1570: The Season So Far

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss several takeaways from the first weekend of the MLB regular season, starting with the COVID-19 outbreak among the Miami Marlins, the apparent inadequacy of MLB’s health and safety protocols, and the season’s tenuous state, before segueing into game action including sac bunts, pitcher usage, parity, the pace of games, […]

Given all of those prophecies never read The start of the meltdown, this time we're dead Fabled last season, such We've let ourselves into Good morning and welcome to episode 1570 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller, ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello.

We are going to talk about takeaways from the first weekend of the season. I mean, at this point, there's so much up in the air that it would not surprise me entirely if by the time we publish this episode, the season has been canceled. Nothing at this point would surprise me. No. I think the positive tests of a dozen Marlins is somewhat shocking, even I think, for the pessimistic view of this, of this season, I think that the idea was that with a lot of testing, and with some social distancing,

would prevent 12 people from testing positive at once, I think that was like the idea was that it could maybe be contained. And so just the fact that 12 people could test positive at once or maybe 14 people just really goes to show just how virulent this virus is, how out of control it is, how little, I guess, control and knowledge we have of it and how precarious all this is. how little, I guess, control and knowledge we have of it and how precarious all this is. And so, you know, I think that one way we're going to talk about takeaways from the weekend and I don't know, maybe this will be our, if this ends up being our recap of the season, I think that it will still work. I mean, I think that we want to kind of look backward a little bit and just talk about what we watched for three days and what we

noticed and what it was like and all that. But acknowledging fully upfront that this is not like the full conversation about baseball right now. The looking forward part is very, very, very much up in the air. And I don't know where it's going to go. And at this point, I think to some degree, we're kind of waiting to see what the next couple of days bring to figure out what's going to happen. Yeah, it's about five o'clock Eastern on Monday as we speak right now. We sort of waited around a little while to see if there would be some definitive announcement. And there hasn't been except for a couple of games getting canceled or postponed. So the Orioles were supposed to have the Marlins home opener on Monday.

That's not going to happen. And the Yankees and Phillies game, that has also been postponed. The Phillies played the Marlins over the weekend, and the Yankees would have been entering the clubhouse that the Marlins had just occupied. So that's off, and now the question is, are the remaining Marlins, the healthy Marlins, going to travel to Baltimore and play their series with the Orioles? It's really hard to imagine that happening, although that seems to be the plan right now, because how can you even be confident that the remaining Marlins right now will actually continue to be healthy and not test positive? That's sort of the thing. Like on Sunday, a few of the Marlins tested positive and they decided to play the game. And I really mean that they decided that seems to be the case it seems like the Marlins just decided yeah

we're gonna play and no one else really had any input into that there was just like a group text reportedly where they just said yeah we're gonna go out there and Don Mattingly said they never considered not playing and so they just did and And there's no oversight, seemingly. There's no medical professional who gets to rule on whether this is a good idea or not. It's just the team decided to take the field and that's that. And it sort of reminds me of that first weekend of summer camp when things started and then immediately everything ran off the rails. And that was a holiday weekend. And so it was tests didn't get shipped and samples couldn't get there in time, but it was sort of an ill omen that things went badly as soon as they did. And granted, over time, things settled down a little bit, but then we started traveling.

Teams started getting on the road, and they're having contact not just with other players and with themselves, but with airport people, with hotel people, with other people you come across as you travel across the country. So it's not necessarily just them at risk. And so when you have essentially a third of the team now, the Marlins, have tested positive and a couple of coaches, and there's no real telling whether it will end there because you can test negative one day and you still could have caught it already and then you'll test positive the next day. And so if you play in the interim, then you run the risk of spreading it to other people. So back in early July, I think it was Dan Patrick asked Rob Manfred what it would take to cancel the season.

to cancel the season. And Manfred said, in the vein of competitive integrity in a 60-game season, if we have a team or two that's really decimated with a number of people who had the virus and can't play for any significant period of time, it could have a real impact on the competition, and we'd have to think very, very hard about what we're doing. And that's essentially where we find ourselves after one weekend here. Yeah, I'm not the only person who's pointing this out, but the idea that this is going to come down to thinking very, very hard, that's the problem. The problem is that there were not objective standards put in place that took this decision

out of Rob Manfred's hands. It's simply, it is a, I don't want to say it's a lot to ask. I just know that if you put this decision in the hands of people who are trying to decide whether now is the moment to quit or whether 10 minutes from now is now the moment to quit. And then an hour later is now the moment to quit. It's, you're going to get boiling watered, right? Like that's the way that you end up feeling too much pressure from the people that are already there to keep going. There's inertia, right? Like that's the way that you end up feeling too much pressure from the

people that are already there to keep going. There's inertia, right? And it keeps you from making the decisions that are the right decisions. And I feel like not having those very clear and objective standards in place, both for a single game, as the Marlins and Phillies had on Sunday and for the season is like, I don't know, by pushing the decision to future versions of themselves, they almost guaranteed that A, those decisions would be too lax, would be made lax, and they made the decisions too hard for themselves. I think if they had had an objective set of criteria, it's quite possible that they would have gotten to summer camp and like whatever the criteria was,

it probably would have involved community, community incidents of the virus. And as we saw Florida and Arizona and Texas and California cases go up, it's very possible that whatever standards they had set might have triggered the end of the season, a couple of days into summer camp because that's when the spikes were happening. And once you saw them sort of not even acknowledging those spikes and just keeping on going,

you realized it was going to take something really extraordinary for them to pull the plug. It's hard. I mean, it's going to be really hard for Rob Manfred at some point to finally say, all right, now we're shutting down the billion dollar industry and sending everyone home after a month. And that doesn't make it any less necessary or any less right. It just, it goes to show why it's so important that you kind of take it out of Rob, you know, Rob Manfred's hands or out of people's hands. Each day that you don't do it, it almost becomes easier not to do it the next day.

Because it's like, you know, well, on Monday, a third of a team tested positive and we didn't say that was the end. So on Tuesday, what has to happen to clear that bar? So it's like, you know, and this is a conversation that we were having and people were asking in summer camp because they were canceling practices. Like if someone tested positive or if they didn't get their samples tested or returned that day, they would cancel the practice. And people were asking, well, what happens if this occurs again in the season? Do we just cancel the game or what? And it seemed like no one knew. They didn't really have an answer for that. And I see how all of this has been difficult to arrange. And maybe three, four months ago, we hoped that the situation in the country would be better than it is right now. But certainly a few weeks ago, they I said I sort of thought that if they started they would finish just because what could actually stop them at that point there's just so much momentum behind finishing this thing that you

had to clear all these hurdles to start doing and it seems like that's the case now and you would think it would take something dramatic happening but this is something pretty dramatic for an entire team really a third of a team to be sidelined and i mean yeah you can just call up people from the taxi squad and you can sign people like the the marlins signed justin schaefer the pitcher who had been designated for assignment by the reds like come on down justin welcome to the marlins clubhouse good news you have a job bad news it's the marlins so i like, who wants to watch that really, if it's not even the team, and you're just so conscious of the fact that it's the second stringers and you're just trying to win this war of attrition where you're just plugging in bodies until they get infected. Not great.

No. It's not great. It's not great. And Stan Kasten in an interview to the Dodgers president said, I don't believe there's going to be any panic just yet. I think we understood that there might be occasions like this, which is why we had our player pool as big as it is. Hopefully this is the worst outbreak we have for the rest of the season because it will teach us some things. I do think we expected something like this at some point and maybe getting it out of the way because it will teach us some things. I do think we expected something like this at some point, and maybe getting it out of the way early will help teach us things to

avoid the repetition of this. And I don't know why you would think that it gets it out of the way. It might just mean this is the first time it happens, and it will keep happening, I guess, until eventually everyone's infected and then it can't happen anymore. But I don't know what they learned from it other than this is inevitable. I mean, there was a call, a conference call of the owners on Monday, which I think was regularly scheduled. And it seems like all that came out of that was that they're just sort of doubling down on the protections that they already had in place, which clearly didn't work so well. No high fives. Yeah. Reinforcing no high fives. They're serious this time.

Yeah. This time they mean it. So, and the players have to wear masks in clubhouses. I mean, it just, it seems like this, if we learned anything, which I don't know that we did learn anything, because as Dan Kasten was saying, they expected something like this to happen and went ahead with it anyway. But if we learned anything, it's just that whatever protections they had in place, whatever process they had in place was not really sufficient. And I don't know whether saying, okay, now we're serious.

We're really going to stick to those provisions now. I don't know that that is actually an adequate response. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I mean, I keep thinking about like, if you, there's all sorts of ways that we, we, we recognize that a decision is going to be hard in in the future for ourselves. And so we take steps now to make it easier. So like if you have a I don't know, maybe if you have a new jogging, you're going to start jogging. Maybe you go and invest a bunch of money in jogging shoes because that way you know you'll feel guilty if you don't use them. And so like in a way you're tricking future you into jogging, right? Or if you quit smoking, they say to throw away all your ashtrays and your lighters so that it's like there's that

extra step where it's a little harder for you to make the wrong decision in the future when, you know, your emotions might take over. And I just feel like nobody said like, this is going to be really hard to, to, to make the call. And so we need to take it out of our hands. I felt so, so obvious. Yeah. And the fact that they, they just don't have like clear answers for where's the line, where, what is the, just don't have like clear answers for where's the line where what is the what is the thing that would cause this to end in dry clinical statistical language right it makes it a problem yeah and probably because whatever that point is already would have been reached and they didn't really want to reach that point that might be part of it just after everything they went through to get

this going and the money at stake i mean they may just not have wanted to put that decision in someone else's hands but yeah i guess the jogging shoes thing might actually be the opposite maybe they've bought maybe they figure they bought the jogging shoes and so now they gotta run yeah maybe maybe i picked i accidentally picked the wrong sort of a psychological lesson from the jogging shoes now we've got like sunk cost fallacy right going on so anyway we talked about it friday when we were sort of cautiously pleased to be watching baseball again but on opening day it was like hey we've got baseball but also juan soto tested positive so you just you can't have one without the other and it's just a question of how much of one we're going to get before it takes away the

other. And there've been fun things happening. Like there've been a lot of things that I enjoyed over the weekend and that I am happy to have experienced. And maybe we're about to talk about some of those things, but let's talk about some of those things. Yeah. I, I will say that separate and aside, I'm not saying this to like make a case for the

value of it or anything like that. I will say that separate and aside, I'm not saying this to like make a case for the value of it or anything like that. I am just saying that I really enjoyed the baseball I watched for those for the for the weekend. And if that if that's all we get, then I'll be happy that you know, those things brought me some happiness. Not to say that they were it was good. Not to say that it was that my happiness is a priority here.

But I did not expect to enjoy watching the baseball as much as i did and i actually did find it to be very enjoyable yeah me too i think part of it was the scarcity of it for so long like when i opened up my mlp tv app on saturday and sunday and i just saw this full wall of games. It was like a cornucopia. It was like all these storylines going on after months of just cold turkey with baseball. And suddenly it was like, oh, that guy's pitching. I've been wondering how he'll do this season or that guy's pitching or these two teams are playing or, hey, here's an exciting situation. It was just like almost hard to focus on any one thing because we were suddenly just it was a deluge of baseball and fun stuff happening after months of nothing and negative news, if anything.

So how do you want to do this? You want to alternate? Okay, sure. All right, I'll start. Let's see. I will start. Okay. Singer made his major league debut and his, his parents were, uh, his parents went to Cleveland to be with him, but they weren't allowed in the stadium. So they were in Cleveland, but apparently like watching the game from a hotel or something like that. Again, not knowing whether there's going to be a season ahead of us or anything like that. And not knowing whether I'm, I'm suggesting a good idea or not, but I feel like maybe the pitcher's parents i'm not saying this like in a flip way maybe the pitcher's parents should be allowed to sit in the stadium behind home plate

i i think that rather than having only the cardboard fans i think it might be kind of cool if each starting pitcher could have one or two fans and then those one or two fans could sit like 30 feet away from each other but in view of the camera 30 feet away from everyone else or 100 feet away from everyone else and they could just be our designated cheerers now if not them if because i think it would be really fun to see brady singer's parents on like that whole time that would be great i think that would be fun and if see Brady Singer's parents on like that whole time. That would be great. I think that would be fun. And if not his parents, because it's not his major league debut, maybe it's a friend from college who happens to live in that area of the country.

Or maybe it's a kid. Maybe it's a 10-year-old kid who, you know, is the first to reply to the guy's tweet. is the first to reply to the guy's tweet. Now, I know that I'm suggesting bringing marginally more people into this apparently very dangerous zone, but I think if I understand the virus correctly, sitting outside many, many, many meters away from anybody else can be done safely. And it would add a lot to the game to me

to have two designated cheer for each team i will also say one last thing about actually no i won't say one last thing i was like two last things about that one if my plan doesn't work then secondary suggestion is the players who are who are not in the dugout and who are supposed to be sitting in the stands to watch the game because they're not allowed in the dugout because they're not in the game that day and that's part of the social distancing. If they're in the stands,

they should have to be behind home plate. They should not be allowed to tuck away somewhere I don't get to see them. Let's get some, if there are any people in that stadium with a rooting interest, put them on camera. You are a scarce resource at this point.

I would like to see the team cheering for their own players or not cheering maybe being distracted put more baseball players on screen the last thing i will say about that is that my mother asked me uh was she watched a game this weekend or she turned on a game and this is a direct quote from her when i saw the giants dodgers game last night with the view from the pitcher i burst into tears upon seeing the cardboard people it was like a horror movie it is a horror movie she reinforced in a phone call horror movie it's like a horror movie now i don't personally find the cardboard people that creepy except from behind but i do i do think that we should keep in mind that different people have different perspectives when they're watching the game and the cardboard

people are they they can be kind of creepy and throwing a few people in there whether they are brady singer's parents maybe brady singer's parents could be in every game i don't know how you're gonna do it maybe it's the teammates anybody but Marlon's man seems to me a good idea. Yeah, I kind of like the idea of having a designated representative of each fan base, like one of the celebrity fans of that fan base, maybe not Marlon's man, but, you know, someone who's at every game, who's really closely associated with that fan base and who has some special relationship with fans where they like adopt this person as their avatar almost if you had that person in the ballpark and one of those people for each team

then i guess you could get some back and forth right because you could get taunting like across the the rows of empty seats and you could hear all of the taunts they could just yell really loud and it would get picked up which would be kind of fun i mean you know in a performative way i guess because they would be putting on a show essentially because they would know that they were on screen all the time that's the only thing i would worry about is if you were to put brady singer's parents or the family of any debuting player out there that they might almost feel like under the microscope. I mean, if they're the only living people in the stands. You're not kidnapping them and putting them there. Everybody gets to say

whether they want it to be there. Yes. Okay. But it's always cute when you see that like in a full ballpark and you have the sideline person go and sit next to them and interview them during that half inning or something that's nice but you know you show reaction shots every now and then but they're not just like constantly on the screen but you know i'd feel a little self-conscious if i were that person knowing that i'm probably on camera the whole time or potentially on camera the whole time but i'd still want to be there to see my kid or my brother or whatever make his major league debut. So I agree. That'd be nice if it were safe and if you could award that in some fair way that no one would be mad about. I think it'd

be nice to have flesh and blood representatives in the park. Just one or two here or there. That'd be nice. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Well, I've been kind of curious about sacrifice bunts. I guess that's a weird first thing to talk about. But I've wondered whether we would see any, whether they would just be completely extinct this year now that we have a universal DH. And as expected, we've seen very few so far. So through Sunday's games, we had seen three sacrifice bunts and they were all in different conditions different circumstances and so there was one that was an extra inning sacrifice bunt so we saw a few extra inning games with the automatic runner on second and this was one of those this was in the cleveland kansas city game uh the royals eric mejia bunted the runner over, and that run ended up scoring,

and the Orioles ended up winning a one-run game. So that worked out well for them. Just kind of curious to see how often we will see teams actually employ the bunt in that situation. Then there was a sacrifice bunt with Drew Butera, and Drew Butera is not quite a pitcher-hitter, but he's about as close as we get to pitcher-hitters at this point. He is one of the worst hitters in Major League Baseball, if not the worst. And one of the best pitchers among— Yes, that's true, too. He's been almost a two-way player at times.

So he laid down a bunt in, I think, the seventh inning of a game. And then the last bunt was probably the strangest and most inexplicable. It was in an Orioles-Red Sox game. It was in the top of the fourth inning, and DJ Stewart, the number nine hitter for the Orioles, laid down a sack bunt with men on first and second, no outs, up by two runs again in the fourth inning. So not really sure what he was thinking there that's a weird punt in any era or at least any recent era so maybe he just decided to do that on his own but again number nine hitter for the worst team in baseball so maybe that's not so surprising that that would be the person who would do it if someone were going to do it so did you see it i did not see

it so conceivably bunting against a shift, maybe bunting for a hit. I don't think it was because I saw a tweet from Joe Trezza, our Orioles preview guest, who said that it was surprising that it happened and didn't say anything about a shift or anything like that. So I assume he would have mentioned that, but I did not confirm. So if so, I guess you might still see the odd renegade position player who thinks that bunting is good and wants to get those high fives, except you're not allowed to get high fives anymore. But whatever commendation you get now for sacrificing yourself. going to see far fewer sacrifice bunts than we have ever seen and we've been seeing fewer and fewer with each successive season but they're not extinct and some of them will be the weird extra inning ones but we will still see the occasional position player sack bunt yeah i am i think i'm going to write about the weird extra innings but i have been slightly surprised i guess that the well that that the

bunt has not been the norm in those situations you said mejia is the only one there have been what four such games right so i think so eight eight starting situations and only one bunt which when they did this in the pacific association which is obviously a very different league extremely different league and they started with two on, but there was a bunt basically 100% of the time. And I was somewhat surprised when Cleveland didn't bunt after they got runners on first and second with none out in the bottom of the 10th and they were down by one. And Cleveland has been one of the more bunty teams sacrifice bunty teams in the american league over the past you know over the francona years and so i thought

that we would see a bunt there get both runners into scoring position get the tying run to third with one out and um didn't happen although i think there was actually one bunt attempt i think cesar hernandez bunted one attempt fouled it off and then did not uh bunt again after that so yeah uh so yeah i guess we're they're they're figuring out how to play that inning but i might have i might have expected that they were going to start with a lot of bunts and then move away from the bunt and um instead they're they're not starting with the bunt yeah i'm not that surprised because a you have the run expectancy tables. You can figure out whether it's a good idea.

At least the front office can tell the manager whether they think it's a good idea before the games start. And also, you do have the two minor league seasons where this has been tried, and you can look at the data from those. Or even like Mets manager Luis Rojas, who had an X-Rating game, he has managed minor league games where this rule was in effect, so it was not new for him. And you would think that it would be more common for the home team in the bottom half of the inning if the game is still tied, right? Because then you know you're playing for one run, whereas in the top half of the inning, you want to score as many runs as you can. And there is data on this, how often it has been done in the minors. Mike Petriello ran the numbers on this at MLB.com, and he found that 2018 to 2019, there were nearly 3,000 extra inning games in the minors. Don't know if these rates vary by level of the minors, but on the whole, the visiting team bunted to start their inning 22% of the time. The home team, when tied, bunted to start their half of the inning 31% of the time. The home team, when tied, bunted to start their half of the inning 31% of the time. And the home team, when behind, bunted 13% of the time. So it

has been fairly infrequent, even in the minors and in the majors. There's just been such a trend toward less bunting in general, or less sacrifice bunting among position players at least that I didn't expect to see it all that often but it's gonna happen every now and then so we'll see more bunts because of that and we'll see the odd Drew Bittera or DJ Stewart just taking it upon himself yeah the let's see in the four extra inning games the first team to bat has scored three times and so we haven't had we've only had one instance where the home team had a chance to win with that individual with that single run what did you think of the extra innings in general i'm gonna get back to you on that okay

i'm gonna close watch them over the next day and then i'm gonna figure out what i thought about it okay i don't like it at least I didn't like it coming in I understand why it's in place for this season alone but I hope it doesn't become permanent and thus far nothing has changed my mind I mean it's not like an embarrassment to baseball I don't think but I don't like it all right so I one of the things I'm interested in watching in the this season is to see what happens with home field advantage. I could see a case for a much more extreme home field advantage. And I can see a case right now if you're traveling, you really are confined to your hotel in a really weird way.

It might be a lot more uncomfortable. You've got all these sort of like protocols in place to keep you from being comfortable on the road at all. And so it could just be like a really disruptive thing to be on the road. I don't know, hypothetically. But I could also much more easily, much, much, much more easily imagine virtually no home field advantage. My hypothesis coming in is that there will be essentially no home field advantage, partly because, well, largely because the fans won't be there to either give an emotional boost to the players or to sway the umpires, and also because there's not going to be much travel generally. And so you're not going to have that situation

where you're on the third leg of a three-game trip to Toronto, Philadelphia, and Baltimore if you're in a West Coast city in that long flight trip. So maybe it'll just be easier to travel in general i don't know who knows we're not even going to get it's not even going to be a big enough sample to know this year and also there's too many variables to to narrow it down and so we're never going to know what home field advantage i don't know what i'm saying is that this is all worthless but in just the first weekend a very odd thing happened not

somewhat odd all things are odd in three games but uh the home team and the away teams split 23 23 okay so do you have any do you know more than that have you well i i know that this was the first time since 1954 right that no team started out 3-0 or 0-3. So that is unusual. And for many of those years, there were fewer teams. So it could have happened even more easily. So don't know whether that means anything. You can potentially make a case that it does, and maybe you're about to. But it was weird. It was weird to see no one winless or or or undefeated through three games yeah i have a friend who is a scientist and he uh did the math and he plugged in some win expectancies and a basic assumptions about home field advantage and he found uh that this should

happen about 0.9 of seasons in his words he says for me i'd say that is an effect size of huh that is neat so neither freaky uh not not something so odd that it needs to be attributed to some variable uh just neat kind of neat anyway the point is though 23 and 23 not the whole story for two reasons one reason is that the teams that were at home were shockingly better than the teams that were away, like on paper. So if you just look at the projected standings and then split them into teams that opened at home and teams that opened away, it looks like a conspiracy. It's way more lopsided as a statistical phenomenon, I bet, than this no one starting 3-0. Like the 14 of the 20 best teams started at home. In fact, 15 of the 21 best teams started at home and the nine worst teams all

started on the road. And so if you were just to compare their projected winning percentages, you would expect home teams to have actually done much better than away teams, even without accounting for a home field advantage. In fact, if you assume there is no home field advantage, and you just look at the projected standings, you would have expected the home teams to win almost exactly what the home field advantage normally is, 54%. You'd expect the home teams this year are projected to be 540 winning percentage. The away teams, the teams that opened on the road are projected this year to have 460 winning percentage. And so the fact that they opened 23 and 23 rather than, you know, home teams running away with it is already kind of interesting. But there's another detail, which is that in fact, home teams were so much better than the away teams on a performance level.

They split 23 and 23 on wins. But if you look at, for instance, the Pythagorean record, the run differential, it's a run differential that's double home field advantage normally. The home team outscored the away team 215 to 181. The home team had an ERA run lower than the away team. The home team had an OPS a little bit more than 100 points higher than the away team. The home team had an on-base percentage a little more than 50 points higher than the away team.

So if you just look at the run differential differential it would be consistent with a much better group of teams playing mostly at home which is what they were and so i'm just noting that that was a thing that i was looking at and it was all kind of weird and a jumble this week yeah last week when we drafted things we were looking forward to this season craig and meg and i that was one of the things i drafted was hoping that we would figure out something about home field advantage. And like you, I sort of expected that it would be either non-existent or reduced from where it usually is. And like you, I noted that we may not actually have enough of a sample to say, especially if games get canceled and never get made up, which we're in a situation now where

we might get unequal numbers of games for various teams if we even have a rest of a season. So that cuts into the sample further. But I do think we could tell about the umpire part of it, whether fans actually influence umpire calls, because that's something that you could and should be able to pick up on fairly quickly. So looking forward to getting enough of a sample to say something about that. All right. Pitcher usage is something that I think we were all curious about coming into the season. Would this look like the beginning of a typical season where guys are really just ramping up? Would it be all bullpenning? Would guys be going deep into games? And I think to me, it seemed fairly normal, certainly fairly normal for a start of a season

and this is as odd of a start of a season as there's ever been but if you look at the average pitch count of starters who have made starts through Sunday it was 75 pitches but that's including Corey Kluber who came out of a game with an injury after one inning that's including including Shohei Otani, who didn't get an out, which maybe we can talk about that. That's including Tyler Anderson, who is an opener. So, you know, it's including a bunch of guys who didn't really get full starts. But people who did get full starts were sort of allowed to pitch full starts. I mean, Lance Lynn threw 108 pitches. Trevor Bauer threw 105 pitches,

Kyle Hendricks threw 103 pitches, Madison Baumgartner threw 100 pitches. These are all veteran guys and some of them known for being high pitch count guys or workhorses, but the point is they were allowed to do that. They were allowed more or less to pitch as they normally would. And there were then, I think, another 14 guys who had pitch counts between 90 and 99. So it wasn't like guys were getting yanked super early or that you were seeing a whole lot of three-inning starts for non-performance-related reasons. And I think that's sort of what we were seeing in summer camp, too. I saw various tweets from reporters who were sort of surprised that guys were going five, six, seven innings in

exhibition games. So it seems to me that guys are more or less built up or are being treated as if they are built up. And so we may still see some difference in pitcher usage just because you can, just because you have bigger rosters and you can use more relievers. But I don't know that pitchers are really being treated with kid gloves, and maybe they should be because another thing that we saw or seemed to see was a lot of injuries. And I don't know if it was really a notable or abnormal number of injuries because pitchers are getting hurt all the time. But we saw quite a few, right? I mean, Justin Verlander with a

pretty serious injury, Corey Kluber with a pretty serious injury, and other guys with more minor or nagging issues and not all arm related, but Clayton Kershaw and Marcus Stroman and Steven Strasburg was another one. So you did see quite a few. Ken Giles with an elbow thing too. And that is one of the things that I was wondering about coming into the season was would we see more injuries and particularly more pitcher injuries because there is usually a spike in pitcher injuries and especially elbow injuries right around spring training in the beginning of the season because guys are ramping up and sometimes they take on too much too soon or they had an injury from the previous season that didn't

actually heal and they just hoped, well, I'll be quiet about it and I'll rest it for five, six months and then I'll come back and it'll be fine. And then it isn't fine. And that's when they finally have to disclose it. But you would think that ramping up in spring training, shutting it down again, ramping it up again in summer camp can't be good. I don't know that it's necessarily bad, and we don't really have an analogous season to point to and say, yes, it's definitely bad. But it would seem like having to build up twice and all the uncertainty and the fact that pitchers were kind of on their own for months at a time and may or may not have been training as hard as they should have been seemed like the risk was elevated, if anything.

And thus far, we have seen a bunch of guys get sidelined. So I don't know that that proves anything. I don't know that that means that we're going to see many more pitchers getting hurt. But it is something that I was watching, and therefore my confirmation bias kicked in. Okay, I would like to talk about masks during mound visits but not really a little bit mount mastering mound visits because one thing i noticed is that even though so a pitching coach i saw one pitching coach wear a mask during a mound visit and he still covered his mouth as they you know as they do like to keep people from reading his lips yeah but he was wearing a mask and then i saw others make the

choice to walk out there with a mask but then pull the mask off presumably so that they could speak sotto voice how do you how do you say that we can we get jesse in here sotto voce yeah and and they covered their mouths i just saw i, I believe I just saw Matt Herges, while I'm recording this, walk out. And he had the mask on over the mouth, but under the nose. And that's really what I want to talk about. I saw a real lot of managers who are wearing the masks under their nose. And I can't, I genuinely, seriously, I cannot abide that. You've got to wear it over their nose. And I can't, I, I genuinely, seriously, I cannot abide that. You got to wear it over the nose. It's, you cannot wear your mask under your nose. And

one of the, I, you know, I really struggled with this season because I was trying to figure out whether it would add more cases to the world or not. And there are so many factors at play. Yeah, because the baseline isn't zero because some of these guys got infected before baseball started up again. Some of them would have gotten infected anyway. So the question is, is it more or is it the same number?

Yeah. It's not just that they would have gotten infected or that they had gotten infected, but these are a group of people who are a high-risk population for spreading it to other people, right? They go out, these are young adults. They're the types of people who feel a certain amount of invincibility relative to the rest of the population. I'm not talking about these players particularly, I'm talking about, you know, men in their early twenties. And they go out they go to gyms they are presumably they're interacting

with more people than the average person and they are likely to be asymptomatic if they have it which means that they're likely to spread it and so you could imagine that these people uh these ball players would be in all their their various hometowns some of them would get it and then they would spread it to the larger population. And putting them in a situation where they get tested and contact traced a lot is actually, like, that's what we're saying we need for the whole society, right,

is daily testing and lots of contact tracing. And so I could imagine us that the counterfactual here would be that the average ballplayer who gets the virus might spread it to fewer people if they're in this situation than if they're at home, unoccupied, hanging out, living their life. I don't know if that's true. I just thought about it a lot. You know, I was thinking about that a lot. And while I was thinking about this, I would think about all sorts of other things. And one of the other things I'd like, like, for instance, is there a benefit to having

entertainment on TV that people have to stay at home to watch? Are people less likely to go out if they're watching baseball on TV? Maybe. I don't know. But maybe that helps keep spread down. I honestly, there are so many different details that go one direction, and there are some that go the other direction. But one of the things I thought about was, how is there a social value to showing a bunch

of athletes wearing masks? Is the person who's at home skeptical of masks going to be persuaded when they see all these athletes wearing masks, when they see Mike Trout wearing a mask while he's running, while they see people who are not infected, who have been cleared to manage in a major league baseball game, nevertheless wearing a mask, could it help normalize mask wearing in a really positive way? And I thought that seems like a real possibility that's a potential social gain and so then i see mike metheny with the mask around his chin and i see frank kona who i love with the mask under his nose and i see all these managers with the mask under your nose and i just don't like it i i think

that you really need to if you're the league're the league, you got to be telling every one of these guys immediately, if they're on camera with the mask under their nose, that they got to either fix that or go home. Because wearing a mask under your nose is not wearing a mask. It is not any better than wearing a mask as a bracelet. So you just got to stop that. We got to stop that. That is my personal bugaboo. I know everybody's got their thing that they're seeing where the protocols are being violated, like celebrating a walk-off with kind of a big dog pile or giving high fives or spitting or any of those. Everyone has the little thing they notice.

And the thing I notice is the manager with the mask under their nose. Yeah. And we've seen some things like there was one team that had like an air high five celebration And the thing I all in a way. Because it's like if you think you're protected in some way and you're not because you're not wearing it properly, then if anything, it's even worse. Like if you feel like, oh, I have the mask on some part of my face and so I can go closer to this person. But really, it's not protecting them in any way or protecting you so yeah I do wonder whether we will see more compliance with that now that this Marlins scare has happened you know not that it should have taken that but for instance I think

Bryce Harper was wearing a mask on the field when he was playing on Sunday because some Marlins had tested positive and so he was taking that extra precaution. And then you have like Davey Martinez of the Nationals who said, you know, he was already concerned, but he said his level of concern went from like an eight to a 12 and he's scared now. And he had a heart condition and missed some time last year. So I think there will probably be more compliance with that, but I agree. Whatever beneficial value there is, whatever PR value there is to showing athletes and heroes to some people on the screen doing these things is probably undercut by some of them not doing them right.

All right, so I wanted to talk about the time of game or pace of game, which as far as I can tell is nothing, nothing to report at this time. But I've heard a lot of buzz about it. And this first came up for me on Wednesday when I was on MLB Network and Brian Kenney asked me if I thought games were going to be shorter or move more quickly because no fans were in the stands. And I kind of hemmed and hawed because it honestly hadn't even occurred to me. And when he brought it up up I really didn't know which way to go with it I think he based the question partly on the fact that the Freddie Gray game from 2015 which had no fans on the stands was like a two hour six minute game so I guess the implication was maybe that had something to do

with the lack of fans on the field but I I really had no idea, and I could have made a convincing case either way. I mean, I could have talked myself into, yeah, games will go faster because, I don't know, there's less distraction. There's nothing for players to look around at between pitches or something, and so maybe they'll just go about their business. But I could have also been convinced that the opposite was the case, and that maybe lower adrenaline levels and less excitement, and they'll just kind of lollygag around and not hurry. So either one would have been just about equally persuasive to me. And we got an email from a listener and Patreon supporter, Andrew. I think it was just after Friday's games. And he said, or maybe it was even just after Thursday's and some of

Friday's. And he said, based on a few games that had been completed quickly, he said, you know, can we declare that games have gotten shorter? And we both answered and we said like it was something that we were paying attention to. But I said, no, we can't officially declare it, certainly based on just a handful of games. And so right now, through the 46 games that Baseball Reference has tracked to this point, the average time a game has been three hours and seven minutes, which is really typical. It's like the average of what it was in the past two seasons. And I thought, well, there are confounding factors there. Maybe the pace is different because I heard this on the Mets game on the Mets broadcast

on Saturday. Gary Cohen brought this up and he said that he had noticed both in the games that he was calling and in the games that he had been watching that it seemed to him as if pitchers were working quickly. And the other broadcasters in the booth seemed to concur or didn't disagree with him. And I kind of talked myself into it, too. Yeah, I'm seeing that. I'm noticing that. I told Andy that I definitely had noticed it in the games that I was watching because I'd have my little timing mechanism where I walked the lap around the house and I was not getting back in time. Yeah. So maybe we all convinced ourselves of that or we saw some

games where it was the case, but it doesn't seem to be the case on a larger level. I got some data from Baseball Perspectus. Lucas Apostolaris sent me some pitcher pace data, and they don't have it yet broken down by runners on base and bases empty, which is ideal because pitches take a longer time with runners on base. But just looking at the overall average time between pitches, last season there were 122 days on which there were at least 4,000 pitches thrown. So that's basically like a full schedule of games. And the average time between pitches in those games was 22.1 seconds. And this.2 so an average of 22.2 that's uh actually a little tiny bit higher than last season but basically unchanged so it seems like there's essentially

nothing there so you know it's possible that some guys are working more quickly than usual other guys are working more slowly than usual and you just happen to see the ones who are working more quickly than usual. Other guys are working more slowly than usual. And you just happen to see the ones who are working more quickly. Maybe you form an impression of the games going faster. But based on what we've seen so far, I don't see any compelling evidence that that is actually the case. Yeah, I'm the same way.

I had that feeling after the first, I don't know, maybe three games I watched. And I have now, I've given that up as simply a fluke of watching three games yeah okay speaking of which here's my last takeaway from the week i am curious to know what your flipping pattern is what your channel switching pattern has been i know that in the we've talked about this in the past what what you like to see and i think my recollection is that you flip i'm not gonna put words in your mouth you can tell me what you normally flip to and i think my recollection is that you flip you know i'm not gonna put words

in your mouth you can tell me what you normally flip to but i realize that what i have traditionally flipped to is a lot of stat chasing you know i want to see whoever's leading the league in home runs to see if they hit another home run or if someone's you know working on some fun fact or maybe maybe has a you know on pace for a record or something i flip to that a lot or really just i you know i see someone who's got some stats and i want to see if they get some more of those stats and this year i don't have any interest in any of the stats this year not to say that they won't have value to the players or anything like that but i think they won't even really have value to the players i think that for the most part you're not going to hit any of your

round numbers and the rate stats are all, you know, more or less meaningless because it's a small sample. And so someone hits a home run and I don't have any particular context for whether it means anything in the home run total scheme of things. And so I have not been flipping for that. And in fact, I have not been flipping. I've, what I've committed to this year, what I've been doing this weekend, what I did this weekend, and what I'm kind of committing to this year is that I'm watching games. I'm going to, I'm sort of only watching whole games now. I want to get, I'm using this year to get back into the rhythm of competition of a team trying to win a game and the process of trying to win a game over the course of three hours.

And so getting much more into the ebbs and flows, you know, seeing leads built and chipped away at and seeing pitcher management. And rather than watching, you know, 40 different pitchers throw, you know, 12 pitches a day, I'm sticking with the games to see the whole story of individual games. So this weekend I watched, I don't know, maybe six games, but watched pretty much all of them front to back. And I don't know if I watched six games front to back all of last year before the postseason. And so I have felt like that's what this year is kind of built for, for me, taking me out of the individual,

taking me out of viewing individual, taking me out of the, of viewing the game through individual achievements or through particular statistics or collections of, of statistics and much more into the way that teams try to win. Yeah. I didn't flip so much for stats. I don't really usually do that. I think I really like the concept of the game changer, the MLB red zone equivalent. And so Dan Hirsch's game changer tool at the baseball gauge I've experimented with in the past and promoted in the past, but it doesn't work on apps. If you are watching MLB TV on your Xbox or your PlayStation, which I'm generally doing, you can't use it there.

And so you have to change manually and I'm just sort of lazy. And so I change less than I would. If I could sort of subscribe to that service that would take me to specific batters or situations and I could customize it all with a great degree of detail, then I might do that. But I don't flip around all that much. But I was flipping a fair amount just to see some guys that I hadn't seen in a while. That was kind of like my whole thing was like, oh, hey, Corbin Burns is pitching and I'm really interested in Corbin Burns' season and seeing if he totally regresses and his terrible luck from last year reverts to the mean.

And so I watched some of Corbin Burns' start and same thing with Mitch Keller, who was also starting this weekend. I just kind of wanted to see, oh, here's Mitch Keller starting his season, his attempt to not have a historically unlucky campaign. And then, of course, I settled in to watch the entire Angels game on Sunday because Shohei Otani was pitching, and that didn't last all that long, unfortunately. So I did switch away from that, and I missed the Mike Trout homer. But I didn't switch a whole lot. But generally, I'll start with a pitching matchup that I want to see. And then if the game is still interesting and close, I might just stick with it. But if it gets out of hand in one way or another, or that pitcher gets removed or something, then I'll just

look at the scoreboard and I'll see, okay, are there good teams playing each other that are in a pennant race that matters? Or is there someone who's in the bottom of the ninth and it's a one run game or something? And I'll sort of switch around based on that. But like you, I have not really sat down to watch full games a whole lot in the past several years. So I don't know whether I'll do that this year because I almost feel a pressure to see as much as I can because it could very easily be taken away at any moment. And I feel like I should try to see as big a sample of the season as I can. Like, what if the season ends and I haven't even watched a team yet or I haven't seen this guy hit or pitch? So in a way, I feel that pressure to skip

around, but that's maybe not really conducive to relaxation or enjoyment. All right. So just a couple more things I wanted to mention. Otani, as I said, that was a great disappointment that he did not get an out in his outing. I don't know how down to be about that. I'm trying not to make too much of it because we've seen him struggle, say, in spring training in 2018, and that ended up not meaning anything. And he had struggled with his control and command in summer camp, and I didn't know what to make of that. Then he came out and he walked a bunch of guys and he gave up a couple hits and he didn't really seem to have his control. He didn't really throw splitters and also somewhat worrying, he didn't have his usual velocity. He was, I think he topped out at 95 and he was sort of sitting 91, 92, 93. And I think I saw a quote from him

after the game where he said he wasn't letting it eat or he just situationally didn't feel like throwing the splitter or something. So he didn't say that eat or he just situationally didn't feel like throwing the splitter or something. So he didn't say that he was in pain or uncomfortable. And I hope that it is just rust and adrenaline and getting a feel for how his elbow works again after all this time. But that was obviously a letdown because I've been looking forward to seeing him pitch again for years. And I hope that it is not a sign of things to come. And this is, I don't know if it's a make or break season for his two-way attempt, but you know, he only has 10 starts this season and now one of them is over

and it was a complete bust. And so if that continues to be the case, then maybe that does end the two-way attempt. Like if he just doesn't have the same stuff anymore, and again, it's way too soon to say that, then that could kind of put a stake in it. So I really hope that that will not be the case and that next time out, he will look more like his old self. So we can wrap up there and just say, enjoy it for as long as we have it. And, you know, there were fun facts happening. There were heartwarming things happening. Daniel Bard pitched again for the first time in years, and he did have his control. And Tyler Matzik, too. Yeah. He's like, not Daniel Bard, levels of absence, but, you know, somewhat similar journey. Yep. And G-Man Choi,

after years into his career, he's usually a lefty and he decided to bat righty against a righty and he hit a home run and can i i want to quickly just stop on that one because okay so he he decides to switch hit that day like that day he's announcing that he's going to be a switch hitter for the first time in his major league career any homers in the second at bat all right later in the game ninth inning the tying, or maybe it's the 10th inning and the winning run is on and he's up, he comes up and the other team, who's the other team? The Blue Jays have their right-handed reliever on the mound. Now, as it turns out, the right-handed reliever is Ken Giles and Ken Giles goes on the disabled

list with an elbow injury after the game and was, you know, clearly, clearly non-functional by the end of that outing. And so the answer is kind of easy if you know all that. But at the time, they didn't know that. Ken Giles is the reliever. He's put a bunch of guys on. Here comes G-Man Choi batting left-handed. Now, I'm thinking at that point, you have to bring in a lefty because he's going to switch to righty. And I don't care that he hit a home run earlier in the game. A guy who is switch hitting for the first time in his life. Well, yeah, not in his life. Not in his life. He did it in the minors.

A little bit, a little bit in the minors. But for the first time in the majors, I have to think is probably not good at it. Like I have to think that the right-handed homer was sort of a fluke that maybe he could prove he could prove us all wrong but i sort of have to think that he can't really be a good right-handed hitter and so i would have brought in a lefty to to dare him to to do it again and they didn't they left giles in until giles went to a 3-1 count. And then Giles had to leave for injury and a lefty came in and then walked him on the fourth ball.

But I wanted to see someone dare him to bat right-handed with the winning run on third or on second or whatever it was. Yeah, yeah. Well, to do that 860 plate appearances into your career, I don't know if it's unprecedented, but Baseball Prospectus in their write-up of it said that they couldn't find an example of someone who had started doing that later in their career, that Ray Olmedo had done it after 251 plate appearances in his career. And guys will give up on switch hitting at a certain point, but usually you don't see them go the other way. So that was fun. And Mike Trout hit a home run on a 3-0 count, which he's never done before. So we got a little Trout fun fact out of it. If nothing else, there's that.

And I'd encourage everyone to go read our recent guest, Shakia Taylor's article at Baseball Perspectives about the protests or lack thereof, the kneeling, the standing, the BLM logo on the mound that was quickly replaced by a FanDuel logo. So this is not a time for a full discussion of that, and we're not the ones to have it at this moment. But I will link to her article and go check it out because I wasn't sure personally what to take away from all of that. Certainly an important takeaway that something was happening at all. But as Shakia pointed out, it was sort of hollow and performative and brief in certain ways too. So I think her take

on that is very valuable. All right, that will do it for today. Thank you for listening. A fond farewell, by the way, to actress Olivia de Havilland, who died on Sunday at age 104. She was really a legend both as an actress, a two-time Oscar winner, and a star of Gone with the Wind, but also as kind of a Kurt Flood of old Hollywood who helped break up the studio system. And I enjoy old movies and I enjoy history. And it delighted me that we had this living link to all of that Hollywood history and all of those great movies in Olivia de Havilland. So I'm sorry to see her go. And I recommend checking out the episode of You Must Remember This,

the great podcast by Karina Longworth, effectively wild Patreon supporter, about de Havilland. I will link to that on the show page. But I mentioned this just to say that before she became a great and decorated Hollywood legend, de Havilland was a baseball actress because she made her on-screen debut, not the first movie she filmed, but the first movie she filmed to be released in the 1935 baseball rom-com Alibi Ike starring Joe E. Brown. It's based on a short story by Ring Lardner of the same name, and I'll link to that story. It's not great, frankly. I just read it. I was hoping to watch the movie, but it's not streaming anywhere, and there was a shipping delay if I were to order

it online. But it's about a player who's kind of a compulsive liar, and he keeps making excuses, so they call him Alibi Ike. Lardner may have based that character loosely on the player King Cole. The film's supposed to have its charms, and I may try to track it down, but I enjoy the fact that the beginning of her 50-plus year film career, and 85-year career as a celebrity, came in a baseball movie, Alibi Ike, where she played Dolly Stevens. It's not Gone with the Wind, but you have to start somewhere. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. 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.

Shmarleton Shmim, probably not his real name, Dino Champlone, Stephen Rush, John Randall, and Nathan Wamser. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Sam and Meg via email at podcastoffangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and whether or not Major League Baseball will be back, we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. For a little peace in any season I'd give up anything but your love

I don't want to trade just to be happy That's only play anyway But if I dream about it, it makes me wonder. For every good thing must you get back. But I won't worry. Because if I'm living on borrowed time, I'm just going to keep on. The way I'm going, keep on. The way I'm going.