Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1572: Baseball on Borrowed Time

Episode Date: August 1, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the coronavirus spreading to the NL Central, the difficulties MLB faces compared to other sports leagues, the dramatic changes that the pandemic has imposed on the sport, why robot umps aren’t part of the pandemic makeover, the jarring visuals of virtual fans, the promotion of Nick Madrigal and the […]

When I was younger Everything's simple but not so clear Living on borrowed time Without a thought for tomorrow Living on borrowed time Without a thought for tomorrow Hello and welcome to episode 1572 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing all right. How are you? I'm good. It feels like I haven't talked to you in such a long time. I know. Got used to talking to you a few times a week. Yeah. Now we're down to, well, one or two. You're going to be doing probably a few more episodes going forward, so that'll be nice. Yeah, it will be nice. Although, very good to have Sam back in the fold. Yes yeah so i guess we should do our daily or episodally corona roundup before we get into other things and maybe some emails we'll see where this goes but we had more developments in that area on friday we learned that there is another outbreak or i don't know how many cases you need to label it an outbreak,

but we have another team affected now. Two St. Louis Cardinals players have tested positive for COVID-19, and as a result, the Cardinals-Brewers game that was scheduled for Friday has now been postponed. As we speak, they are somehow still scheduled to resume that series over the weekend and play a doubleheader, apparently. We'll see whether that actually happens. That seems pretty tenuous. But now this has expanded the problem beyond just the Marlins, beyond just the Phillies, beyond just the NL East. This is now an NL Central problem. And of course, the Cardinals played the Twins on Wednesday. And as we speak on Friday afternoon, there's been no news about a Twins postponement, but there's concern about any exposure there too. So it keeps spreading. And on Friday, we're going to have a fifth of the teams in Major League Baseball not playing, right, or postponed because of this,

and what, eight teams have had games postponed or rearranged because of this, so it has already just over a week into the season become a pretty pervasive problem. Yeah, I think that on the one hand, the response to this situation seems to have been both more careful and certainly swifter than what we saw with the Marlins. But that's sort of cold comfort. You still have two players who have tested positive. You still have the potential risk of exposure beyond those two players. So, you know, it's very concerning. I think that there will come a point, and I don't quite know how many teams it has to involve, but it doesn't seem like it would be too many more than we already have where we start to wonder, would it be better to sort of shut things down for a little while again and then reemerge with a schedule that is perhaps very different than the one that we had planned on,

perhaps something resembling more like tournament play. So I don't know. It all feels very tenuous, feels like we get a day. We get a day at a time where things feel slightly less tenuous, and perhaps that we're on the other end or about to be on the other end. And then there's just another thing, which I suppose is not so surprising because we are trying to stage a baseball season in the middle of a pandemic. So it would be weirder if things actually went smoothly, which I don't mean to sound flippant, but we just aren't given very many good days, Ben. Yeah. I mean, as soon as you get multiple people or players with the team testing positive, then it seems like you almost have to shut it down for a little while, right? I mean, you can't just say, well, we'll be back tomorrow if no one else tests were from Wednesday, you played a game with Clubhouse and dug out time. You had two nights in a hotel. We've seen COVID spread widely within the Marlins and more Marlins have continued to test positive.

And he said, I think you have to assume other cardinals could be infected and incubating quarantine five days. See what happens. quarantine five days, see what happens. And if you do that every time you have a positive test, which you probably should, then you don't have many teams affected or many positive tests before you're really in trouble because it's such a short season to begin with. And you can't really reschedule that many games. I mean, I know they're trying to cram in more games with these seven inning double headers and everything, but you can't have people playing two games per day just indefinitely. So I don't know what you do. You can't just press forward and say, we'll play tomorrow. And yet, if you keep pressing pause on team after team, then eventually you just really have to press pause on the season. Yeah, I think that there's been talk of being willing to sort of determine the playoffs with an uneven number of games, which I guess there's the potential for that in any given year, but they're pretty stringent about making up games that have been delayed because of

weather or what have you, if it's going to have any kind of playoff implication so i think that on the one hand we have accepted by virtue of there being a 60 game season by virtue of our playoff format we are already in some ways a nerd to the idea that this season will not be representative um certainly of baseball as it is normally played and likely not baseball as it necessarily involves the best teams having some sort of a postseason experience. But I think there does come a time when you're now involving multiple teams that have serious playoff aspirations. And I don't say that as if what is happening with Miami would have been acceptable had

it only involved Miami or the Orioles, because in the very beginning, I think there was sort of a sense among some that, well, it's like these teams aren't really going anywhere either. But now you've, you know, you have multiple teams that are in tight races that might, that might benefit and sort of require as many games as possible to allow us to understand which of them is the best and to be able to decide who's going to make the postseason. So I don't quite know exactly how many, as I said, you need to have missed time and how much before you can just sort of throw the entire season format as we have it out and say, look, we're going to do some kind of a tournament. But I feel like we're rapidly

approaching that point. You know, like the Central, the NL Central is one of the more sort of tightly contested divisions in baseball and this now involves the Yankees who are in a very tight race I would imagine will be in a tight race throughout the remainder of the season with the Rays so I don't think it's as simple as a binary state of sort of you know meaningful competition versus not there are gradations in between and I think that we do risk having this all feel very silly and given the the stakes that are asserting themselves quite dramatically in this conversation it does feel um i guess it always was going to feel kind of silly to be doing this in service

of baseball when people are at risk but it just continues to feel worse and worse. So welcome to our baseball podcast. Zach also tweeted, I mean, you're quarantining the Phillies for more than five days and they had a visiting clubby, home clubby, and coach test positive. Is two players on the Cardinals really that different? Even if you can trace them to getting affected away from the team, there's too much risk here, in my opinion. And Mark Saxon, the writer for The Athletic, tweeted that a prominent Cardinals player informed him on Friday morning that he wants to play tomorrow and said, quote, can't let this all crumble. that sentiment, but it's such a dangerous sentiment to have. It's just like, it's the same sentiment we've been fighting as a country and just as a community all along where we want to come together to deal with hard times and we can't come together. That's the worst thing we can do right now. Or we want to reopen to show that life can go on and we won't let the virus

win, but that's how you make the virus win. So you always have to fight these impulses that normally are pretty productive, but in this case are really counterproductive. And it's the same thing here. It sounds like this Cardinals player is sort of reacting in the same way that Miguel Rojas did with the Marlins or that other Marlins players did when they voted to go ahead and everyone wanted to keep playing. And then that seems to have exacerbated the situation. And even having seen that, a prominent Cardinals player who maybe has some influence in that clubhouse is saying,

we've got to press on because if we don't, it's all going to fall apart. But that is just the worst thing you can do, really. And I understand why they feel that way. And that's kind of why even before the season started, I sort of thought, well, they'll finish this thing if they start it because they went through all this to get to this point and they have money at stake and all of these other things at stake. And so they're just going to want to keep rolling as long as they can. And that goes for MLB and it also goes for the players in some ways so that's why i suppose mlb has belatedly raised the idea or put in place a policy of having

some kind of coronavirus compliance officer which i i haven't seen the details on on who that is or what that position would entail exactly or what authority they would have. So one would hope that at this point, the unnamed prominent Cardinals player is not actually making the decision here. But still, that's the sentiment of all involved. I think we got to keep going, just, you know, whistle past the positive tests, because if we don't, it will all crumble. But maybe it has to crumble. Yeah, I have a very hard time imagining that, and I hope to be proven wrong, but I have a very hard time imagining that the person who is the designated compliance officer is going to be sufficiently empowered to, you know, to really do much here. I mean, I think that there are probably settings under which that person has greater success, right? So I think that when it comes to, you know, monitoring guys being isolated in their rooms during travel or having a specific seating arrangement on the bus or what have you, that

there's probably greater odds of success. But, you know, I don't want to pick, I don't even want to put a specific player in this situation because I don't want to insult their dedication to limiting the spread. But let's say that Johnny Ballplayer is an all-star on the Cardinals, right? Is Johnny Ballplayer going to listen to a trainer? They're going to listen to a compliance officer from the league who they don't know and have never met. I mean, I think that we have recent evidence of how sort of those observers sent from the league to enforce rules on the league's behalf are treated under far less serious circumstances. They're often circumvented. So I have concern there, although I guess we'll kind of see. It's just such an interesting psychological dichotomy because I know we don't yet know exactly how the coronavirus was introduced into the Marlins Clubhouse. And candidly, for the moment that there is, that there was some sort of dereliction of duty when it comes to the health and safety protocols, and then you also assume that these guys are sort of willing to try to apply a like grit through it mentality to playing. It's just such a weird balance, right? They want to play so badly, their impulse is to do whatever they can and to sort of view the coronavirus as weird

adversity that has to be overcome. Though to your point, the very attempt to overcome it is often allowing it to succeed more, but maybe also want to party and so they don't observe protocols when they're on the road or whatever whatever the case may be so it's just a they're an interesting lot those baseball players uh and i think that having a person who can can really say like no no please stop high-fiving you know how you know how we've featured like a chaperone or something right touching right you know how we've we've featured all of your cool dances on social media for the last five years? Yes, you got to stop that. Yeah. And it's so strange to have these really negative stories and really positive, exciting stories happening at exactly the same time.

Like back-to-back tweets on Jeff Passan's timeline. Right now it's like Cardinals testing positive and games postponed. Right now it's like Cardinals testing positive and games postponed. And then, hey, the White Sox are calling up Nick Madrigal, which is like a joyous occasion. I've been looking forward to seeing Nick Madrigal, super excited to see Nick Madrigal, happy that we're able to see Nick Madrigal. And yet having to balance these two things in our heads, it's like, man, I able to see louise robert hit these 115 mile per hour lasers and john carl stanton topping that even with balls he's hitting and nate pearson coming out and mowing people down and shane bieber looking incredible and all this stuff happening at the same time that it feels like the wheels are kind of falling off and so i am kind of just constantly ping-ponging during the day

whenever I look at baseball headlines or stats or leaderboards or games themselves. It's just like, you know, in one game something really cool and exciting is happening and then another game is not happening at all because it's postponed and you never know which team is going to be struck by that next. So there's a part of me that feels like that Cardinals player that it's just like, yeah, I want to see Nick Magical. I don't want this to crumble, but also I don't want Nick Magical to get COVID-19 or to spread it to someone else.

So it's just constant kind of warring, conflicting emotions and thoughts. Yeah, it's very hard as a viewer to know exactly where to rest your attention as, you know, as an assigning editor. It's hard to know what the right tone is to take in any given moment. I mean, I want to, you know i there are cool stories happening right like uh when you have three catchers interference calls in a day you gotta you gotta write about that right you gotta do it to to honor to honor jeff sullivan's weird legacy at your website but you know that is it is very it would not only be irresponsible i think it's impossible to ignore the the fact that 20 of the league isn't going to play tonight because of coronavirus

concerns and you know even those teams that that are playing i got my first taste of the cgi crowd yesterday ben oh yeah what'd you think I did not care for it. Yeah. No, thank you. Let us spend a moment on this. Let us spend a moment on this. So I was watching the Cleveland-Minnesota game, and this was played in Target Field, and the Twins' approach to the fan cutouts,

at least behind home plate, is to do fatheads of prominent Tw and twins-affiliated folk. Yes. I should be clear. They are not prominent actual twins. They are individuals who have played for the twins. Right. That sentence reads funny out of context.

They didn't just put a bunch of twins back there and be like, here are some famous twins. Those two, very famous for being twins. So anyhow, they have these fat heads. And so that's weird because it's just the heads, it's just floating heads. And they're big, they're too big. So they all look like they are sort of peeking at the game.

Like they are hiding behind their seats being like, oh, hey, baseball's going on. I shouldn't be here. I'm not authorized to be in these seats. Let me peek. Oh, peek. And so that's strange on its own. And then, Ben, they still had the CGI fans. And they don't have the CGI fans all the time, right?

Because it would be impossible to have them all the time. So you will get a Twins player striking a you'll get a twins player striking out against shane bieber you know 13 of them did so uh you get that and they're walking back to the dugout and the seats are empty in the in the background because of course they are but then you know you get nelson cruz hitting a home run and as he's walking down the line he is walking through cgi people yes he's like clipping through them like an old video game character it's so strange yeah and so you have the normal size fake fans cgi fans then you have the two big fathead fans who are not literal twins they are simply affiliated with the twins organization it's all very disorienting and so there are not literal twins they are simply affiliated with the twins organization it's all very

disorienting and so there are not many moments where you are able to not be aware of the circumstances we find ourselves in and i don't say that like it's a bad thing like i think if we were able to be fully distracted and totally forget, that would be really concerning also. But it's, yeah, like I just pulled up MLB.com and they're showing a highlight of Christian Vasquez hitting two home runs. And this is a city field. There are no fans. Oh, then there are fans. Then there are no fans.

Yeah. Fans, no fans. On the replay, no fans. While he's doing it, fans. And they're excited. Why are they excited they're supposed to be mets fans christian vasquez plays for the red sox so like it's very hard to distance yourself from the reality and then as a writer oh and they have no lower bodies see and so then

i i'm sorry i know that describing a thing that no one else can see is not good radio but so my thought process as both a writer and an editor is well this is some deeply meg shit and i should write about it but then i feel like is that trivializing if i am enjoying the weirdness am i not taking this moment which is very serious seriously enough so it's it remains fraught and i don't like said, I don't think that's bad necessarily because as soon as it becomes easy to forget what's going on, the likelihood that we do not maintain the vigilance necessary to try to do this remotely safely, it goes up.

But it's very strange. Yeah. You see a lot of coronavirus stories on mlb.com when you were there ben i i don't want to i don't want to i don't think this is the fault of any of the individual writers i don't want to make that clear but no sir i do not yeah i do see a headline related three early feel-good stories to which i want to say surprised you could find three. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I really have found myself not looking at the standings at all, and I don't know whether I will at some point. Maybe it's just that we've been playing for a week

and it feels ridiculous to look at the standings because it's so early. I mean, it would be early even if you multiply it by 2.7 or whatever, even if we were three weeks into a season, I still don't really look at the standings at that point. But I just have a hard time imagining myself really scrutinizing the standings all that much, both because of the 16 team playoff format, but also because it just seems almost beside the point. And I know that's partly because I'm a writer and I'm not a fan. And if I were rooting for a particular team, I'm sure I would be looking at the standings. But it's just that does not interest me all that much right now.

I'm interested in teams that are playing really well or not playing well, which I guess is sort of a similar thing. And there have been meaningful changes in teams' playoff odds. I'm just looking at the playoff odds report now because I brought this up. Since the start of the season, the Diamondbacks' playoff odds are down just looking at the playoff odds report now because i brought this up since the start of the season the diamondbacks playoff odds are down by 21 percentage points the rockies are up by 17 percentage points so are the padres so there have been big shifts considering the small number of games but i'm more interested in players who are doing cool things or weird gifs or whatever than I am about records or playoff odds right now. It just, A, it seems somewhat dubious that we will get to that point. But B, it just seems like I'm just more interested in sort of the individual stories right now

than I am in team level stories because the team level stories can be taken away at any moment. Because the team level stories can be taken away at any moment. But it is sort of striking that as other sports are starting, like NBA is back now, NHL is about to be here, I think, because A, the timing of when MLB's season fell. So their season had not started yet. Players had not been paid. Whereas in NBA, NHL, those regular seasons were mostly completed. Most of the pay had already been settled. There was not as much uncertainty about all of that. And NFL, of course, is not back yet and has been able to have some time. Not that we've figured everything out as a country in the meantime, but at least they didn't arrive at the very height of things. And I think MLB kind of drew a tough hand in that sense and didn't play that hand especially well anyway. But I think also they weren't really able to do the bubble. I mean, they were widely criticized

when they contemplated the bubble. I think understandably, there are just too many people in the orbit of baseball teams to do a bubble. The baseball season as originally scheduled is too long to do a bubble. You would have had to confine so many people for so long to do what is much more feasible for, say, a basketball team to do. There are so many fewer players. Most of the season was completed, et cetera. And so MLB was really maybe banking on the country getting its act together and the pandemic not being such an enormous problem in the late summer now as it was in the spring. And that just hasn't really turned out to be the case. And so I think they kind of got hit with a double whammy there. And so if MLB were to stop

right now and you had NBA in full swing and NHL in full swing and the NFL season starting. That'd be bad. You know, that'd be bad for baseball. I mean, I understand why they want to avoid that fate. I think everyone would just immediately forget about baseball and be watching these other sports. And that couldn't be great for the long-term popularity of the sport. So it's an unfortunate situation. And I think they may still have to just concede to it. But I think it's worth remembering that, yes, MLB has mishandled

aspects of this situation, certainly, and maybe is continuing to. But also, they maybe had the worst situation of any of the other major sports. And so much of this is just down to the national and local responses to the pandemic in general that has very little or nothing to do with MLB. And so it's just a bad situation that is not really of MLB's making. That said, they have not made the best of it. But I don't know that there was something great that they could make of it. Yeah, it's a hard one. You know, when the places that are the most, when the places where you can most easily do the bubble are two of the states with like the worst case rates in the country. One of, you know, like Arizona is both

literally and figuratively a hotspot right now. Yeah. I'm not laughing because it's funny. I'm laughing because everything is a hellscape. So that's certainly tricky. I think that if you want to play all 30 teams, a bubble is not really practical, which doesn't mean that the decision should have been, well, let's just soldier on with a suboptimal plan.

But I do think that, you know, like Ben literally calculated, other Ben, you know like ben literally calculate other ben you know other ben literally calculated like how much meat they would need there's a lot of meat ben you know you need a lot of protein and uh places for people to stay and you'd need to be able to ensure i mean it's not just the health and safety of the players and team personnel. You'd have to be able to ensure the health and safety of the person who cleans their rooms and cooks their food and drives the bus. Who is driving this Marlins bus, Ben? The Marlins coronavirus bus. Yeah, did they find a bus driver who tested positive and is okay? I mean, I assume so.

I don't know. Is it okay? I mean, like... I assume so. I don't know. Like, and so I think that you are right that they have, they've messed up in a lot of ways that are quite important and profound and should not be forgotten. And also, they face just like a wild logistical hurdle. The operations know how one would need to have in order to do this would be like a business school case study.

Now, the perfectly rational response to that is, well, if that's the case, then why are you doing it? But here we find ourselves. So I have heard, Ben, I have heard that, so the WNBA is playing in a bubble, and they're calling it the Wubble? Yes. Are they calling the NBA's bubble the Nubble?

I do not know. They should call it the Wubble and the Nubble. Yeah. Because we should get a few goofy things out of this that we can feel genuinely good about. Yeah. We should call it the Nubble. The Nubble and the Wubble.

Oh, trouble in the Nubble. Oh, boy. In baseball, I guess it'd just be the bubble. Right. Which is not very fun. Gosh, we're still the most boring and conservative thing in the middle of a freaking pandemic, Benjamin. It could be the mubble. Maybe it's the mubble.

Oh, the mubble. Because they've muffed the bubble. That actually works really well. Yeah. The mubble. Because they've muffed the bubble. That actually works really well. The mubble.

One last thing about this, just prompted by the fact that we're now going to have seven-inning major league games for the first time. It is kind of shocking how many fundamental things about the sport have changed. And this is not a sport that alters fundamental things lightly. The game evolves. alters fundamental things lightly. The game evolves, but in terms of the rules and just kind of the core, nine innings is a baseball game, and this is how big a roster is, and this is how you play extra innings, and this is how many playoff teams there are. It's not something that varies dramatically from year to year, and there's always a bunch of discussion about, can we do this, and how are we going to do this. All those things have changed just all at once this year. And it's not like they came out of nowhere.

Minor leaguers were playing with the automatic runner rule and with some seven inning double headers. So, you know, it was kind of ported over from a close equivalent of MLB. But still, like there would have been much more resistance to those things in a normal year. And I don't know if they'll all be kept going forward, but I think a lot of them will. Certainly the DH almost certainly 10 playoff teams. And maybe this seven inning doubleheader thing sticks. And so all these things are changing, these things that have been proposed and discussed for years. But this has been the impetus and they've all kind of hit it once. And you really couldn't have imagined a year ago that we would be talking about all of these things happening in Major League Games in 2020.

a year ago that we would be talking about all of these things happening in Major League Games in 2020. And it does sort of surprise me that we do not have robot umpires right now because given all the other barriers that have been broken down and all the other traditions that have been overturned, it seems like that would have been the perfect time to do it because you could have sold it as a social distancing thing. that would have been the perfect time to do it because you could have sold it as a social distancing thing. You could have said, well, umpires can stand farther back now and they won't have to be right behind catchers because they will be responsible for some calls and appeals, but not for calling balls and strikes. And I think that would have been more palatable to a lot of people.

And then you would have had that system in place and then maybe it would have been tough to roll back so sort of surprised that didn't happen i guess maybe it could have been just because of the timeline and everything else they were trying to figure out to get the season started in order to have robot umps you would have had to have all sorts of conversations with the umpires union and with the players union and that just might have been too much on top of all of the rest of it. And also maybe there was concern about the Hawkeye system replacing Trackman. And if there were inaccuracies or little blips there, then that could have caused problems with the implementation. And when you do it, you really don't want to screw it up.

You want it to go smoothly the first time. And as we have learned on previous episodes, it did not go that smoothly in the Atlantic League, for instance. So I guess that was probably why. But if you had been in a situation where you were more prepared to do that, then I think they probably would have gone ahead with it because this would have been the perfect time to sort of slip that in and say, OK, we have to do it for this year. And then if it went well, then they could have just kept it. It also would have been the kindest moment to do it for the umpires because then everyone's first exposure to the robot zone would be aided by a broadcast. Right. So you could have the broadcaster saying, hey, fans, remember RoboZone, right? And so I think it would have been good

to have it on the broadcast. Although I wonder if there would have been, at least in the beginning, some confusion because do we know what the process is going to be for each of the broadcasts to update their understanding of the zone for the strike zone they display no i haven't heard that because i could imagine that well first of all it's going to take everyone batters pitchers certainly fans time to get used to a true rulebook strike zone right that's going

to take time which is why i worry about fans yelling now there wouldn't be any fans to yell at the umps for a call that they had no control over although somebody might condition the fans to do that the fake fans but not the fat heads because they can't talk so i could very easily see it being useful to help people get used to the zone, but I think that is predicated on the assumption that the broadcasts are able to adapt and display a real rule book zone because you're right, people's expectation is going to be that it's perfect even though we know it will not be. And if we are given a visual cue, here is what the strike zone is, and that strike zone does not match what the Hawkeye zone is, it could get really messy in terms of what people think they're seeing. And it's going to be hard for them to know, is it that the K zone on the broadcast is wrong or that the Hawkeye is

miscalibrated or what? So I think that that is a very long way to say that i imagine that the difficulties of implementation on the fly are probably what prevented that particular update from being made but it would have been very funny to see fake fans heckling an ump for a robo zone yes that would have been funny robots just uh interacting robots just interacting with each other. Yeah, turning on each other. Not robot friends, robot enemies. Yep, yep. I feel like I've seen that movie. So we have actually plans to talk on our next episode to someone who is handling the fake crowd noise for a Major League team. So I think that'll be fun and perhaps

enlightening and we also do hopefully want to have Eric Langenhagen on sometime soon to talk about the wave of prospects who have arrived recently because we've now passed the service time day when everyone calls people up even though it's like a week into the season which is strange but we have Pearson and we have Robert and we have Madrigal and we have many other guys who have made it to the majors. So I want to get a little bit of background on those guys from Eric. And also I want to do a little prospect retrospective with him about Shane Bieber just because I'm always fascinated by guys who do that kind of Bieber de Grom type trajectory where they weren't really top prospects or big prospects at all. And then suddenly they're one of the best players in baseball and it happens very quickly.

And then you can do these kind of interesting dissections of, well, why did people miss this? Or did they miss it? Or is it just that he got really a lot better in an unexpected way? And how and why did that happen? And what can we learn from it? So hopefully we can talk about that too. But do you want to talk a little bit about the Astros? We're playing the hits today. We've got coronavirus and the Astros, just the best positive storylines. Sure. So Jim Crane gave an interview to USA Today, to Bob Nightingale,

sort of looking back on the last year for the franchise. And there are a number of things that were addressed in there from the team's response to sign stealing to Brendan Taubman. And I want to preface this by saying that I think there are a lot of really good, there are good people who work for that team. So what I'm about to say is not meant to discount the work of those good people, both within their organization when it comes to baseball stuff and also within their organization when trying to improve the internal culture that they have to live with. But I found it very disconcerting that Crane spent time in this interview sort of sympathizing with Taubman, and we don't need to rehash his incident in the clubhouse after the ALCS last year, but

Crane's quote reads as follows, Brandon Taubman didn't commit domestic violence. He just made a comment. It's nothing you can defend. He had a few cocktails. He was happy. I don't work for the Astros. I don't know what it feels like to work for that team today versus what it felt like to work for that team the day after the ALCS. But I will admit that I found this very dispiriting, especially because later in the interview, he goes on to talk about how he bristled at the suggestion that the Astros culture is bad. He called that sort of, we don't have a culture problem they're isolated incidents that are unrelated this is in reference both to taubman and to the sign stealing and i would really rather never talk about this ever again it bums me out i had a very hard time writing about this at the

time it is discouraging still to hear the owner and therefore we could say the both literal and figurative head of the organization seem to not understand even now exactly what was wrong in that moment. Even if we want to call Taubman's outburst an isolated incident, He did have a history of being frustrated with the reporter in question calling attention to Osuna's domestic violence suspension every time he would pitch. And I think that my preference would be that the owner of a baseball team confronted with that say, you've committed these transgressions, you've done this, and you're out of here. And I don't want them to spend time thinking about having sympathy for the person who chose that particular moment to deputize someone else's domestic violence to sort of stick

it to female reporters. And it doesn't suggest to me that he has a really firm grasp on what the issues are here. So I found it very disheartening, Ben. Yeah, it's not surprising, the comments, but it is pretty revealing, I think, of his mindset, the way that he spoke in this interview. And all of it was really just sort of lamenting the situation that the Astros are in. Like, he does apologize, and he does walk back some of his earlier comments about how the sign stealing didn't alter the game and all of that. But it all amounts to just, again, sort of an insincerity or just sending the wrong message.

And I was going to say, I can't believe they keep letting him talk about this, but I guess you can't stop your owner from talking about things if he wants to do that, then he's going to go ahead and do that. But thus far, he really has not managed to say anything about the situation without making it worse. And I don't think that changes here. He sounds more contrite in certain ways, certainly, but also just kind of consistently plays almost like a victim card or makes it sound like the Astros are the ones who are kind of imposed upon here by the response to their actions. is, you know, when he's talking about firing Luno and Hinch, he says, you hate to see what happened to those guys because they didn't instigate this thing. It started at the bottom, but they both know about it. So I had to do what I thought was best for the franchise. What if I left them in

there? How much shit would I get? It was the only choice. And again, he's not saying I had to fire them because they were derelict in their duties and they knew about these things and they didn't do anything to stop it. And that wasn't acceptable to me. He's saying I had to do it basically because, you know, people would have criticized me and the team if we didn't do it. And he says, I hate what happened to them, not what happened under them, but what happened to them. And then, you know, I hope these guys get back in the business, but it could be difficult because people are still mad at us about this. Or same thing with Taupman. I hated to see him lose his job, but we had no choice.

Not I hated to see him say what he said or do what he did. You know, about that, he just says he made a comment. It's nothing you can defend. But he doesn't say he hated it. No, he hates to see him lose his job. And then same thing when he's asked about the Osuna trade. He says we didn't anticipate the Osuna thing would catch that much heat. So, again, it's all about the response. It's not like, oh, we didn't realize what message we were sending by trading him or what effect that could have on people or why they were upset about that. It's all just we didn't anticipate that people would actually call us on it and be mad about it. So when he says, we broke the rules, we got penalized, we were punished,

there's no doubt it weighs on all of us every single day. It sounds like mostly what's weighing on him is just the fact that people are still mad about it and that he had to fire some people just to, he makes it sound like, you know, appease the mob or something. Like he doesn't actually say cancel culture in here, but it sounds like he's thinking that basically. And so he does just almost kind of present the Astros as the ones who were sort of hurt by this situation. He says, we're sorry. He says, we apologize. But then he says, no matter what we did, it wasn't going to be enough, et cetera, et cetera. They wanted more, which maybe is true. There's some truth to that.

He wasn't the one who was responsible for disciplining the team. That was Rob Manfred. That was MLB. And MLB's hands were tied in some ways. And it's possible that there was just nothing that they realistically could have done that actually would have satisfied people because a lot of people just want Joe Kelly to go out there and fire fastballs at them, frankly. So I understand what he's saying. But again, like when you have your apologies and your mea culpa is accompanied by all of this sort of language about I hated to discipline anyone and it's, you know, we can't appease everyone.

It just, it really undercuts the message completely. So again, he's just the owner and he's not the players and he's not the people who work for this team and his comments shouldn't necessarily tar everyone with that brush. But when you have this person speaking for the organization and this is the way that he continues to speak for it, it's just it's not great. And it continues to fan the flames. Well, and I think that it's just another example. example there's a sort of a through line to a lot of the blundering that the astros have done on the pr front that i think is sort of showing itself here again which is that he seems to jim crane seems to misunderstand that like forgiveness and second chances aren't given on the timeline of the

transgressor yeah right like he doesn't get to decide when we all move on from the Astros having traded for Roberto Osuna. He doesn't get to decide when we move on from an executive choosing to yell at female reporters in the locker room while they're doing their jobs. He doesn't get to decide when we move on from our frustration at his franchise compromising the competitive integrity of the

sport he doesn't get to decide that that's not on his timetable and it's not surprising to me that a person with his life experience might struggle with that reality but i think that this is the consistent error that both crane and some members of his organization have made, which is that they don't get to determine the timeline there. And they keep extending that timeline by behaving this way and sort of demonstrating that, as you said, the part that they seem to be genuinely sorry about is that they didn't get to retain the people they wanted to, not that the people they had to let go were derelict in their duty, were abusive to reporters, what have you. So I will reserve judgment on the sort of current shape and character of the Astros culture because they do have new

leadership and they are theoretically going to be sort of forging ahead in a new way. And if they're able to do that and Click is able to kind of right the ship and other members of the organization who are still there are supportive of those efforts, then maybe you do end up with a new Astros organization. I guess we have to give them some time to demonstrate what their character is when it comes to that but in terms of giving another chance um i i think that the crane needs to think about how the team can earn that rather than assume that it will be granted just because they issued a couple of apologies that aren't particularly sincere so um yeah i would rather not think about Brandon Taubman ever again. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's in Crane's heart if he has one, but it's just not really

expressing the remorse that people would want to be in there. And look, if he doesn't feel personally responsible because maybe he didn't know about it or he wasn't the one doing it, I get that. And I certainly think the Astros were a great baseball team, sign stealing or not. And so I understand why it could be frustrating if people think it was entirely the cheating that caused them to be good. I don't think the evidence supports that, but you just kind of have to live with it and demonstrate that you're still good without doing that stuff. That's just, I think, the only way forward. And it doesn't mean that they deserve to have people throwing fastballs at their heads. They don't deserve that. And MLB sent a signal that it doesn't think they deserve that, And MLB sent a signal that it doesn't think they deserve that. But they do maybe deserve or at least have earned some verbal barbs being directed their way. And frankly, it's year one of this.

It's not like it's been seven years and we're still talking about this. This is the first season. This is the first time people have seen the Astros play. This is the first time they've taken the field since all of this happened. It's a matter of months, not years. So, you know, wait a while. Like the half-life on a scandal like this is not measured in weeks. So you just got to sit with it for a while yeah i i wonder if privately jim crane assumed that we would forget because we're in the middle of a global pandemic yeah i keep having an amused uh tone when i say that because it's just very it remains bizarre but um you know i wonder if he privately thought like yeah people are going to be focused on COVID. They're going to be appropriately concerned with their safety and the safety of players.

And there aren't going to be fans there. And so we're just going to kind of sneak it in under the wire. And I think that Jim Crane has never been on the internet before. We don't remember anything or forget anything, I should say. We remember it all in a disconcerting fashion. Yeah. All right. Well, let's see if We remember it all in a disconcerting fashion. Yeah. All right. Well, let's see if we can wrap up with a couple emails here

because Sam and I didn't get to as many as we had planned on our previous episode. So got a couple saved that I had planned to take on that episode. So this is from Malcolm, and he says, I was reading Fangraph's positional power rankings, which are fantastic. Thanks, Meg. Thank you. And Eric Langenhagen's release point graphs for the bullpen rankings got me thinking. Assuming there is some real benefit to having relievers with varied release points to throw

off a hitter, could a single pitcher imitate the same thing? My thought is that a two times through the lineup type of guy could theoretically get another go around if he switched up his mechanics for the third rotation. Maybe this is ridiculous and I'm massively underestimating the difficulty of developing big league pitching mechanics, but if not, I would love to find out if anyone has ever tried this or whether you guys think it could work. Oh boy. I'm trying to think of someone who massively varied on purpose yeah i mean i don't know if there's anyone who has gone entirely from one release point to another release point in a second or third time through the order but there are definitely guys who will vary their arm angle up a little bit and drop down, you know, like David Cohen is someone I remember from my formative baseball years who would drop down

and throw sort of a sidearm fastball that was different from his regular fastball just to give hitters a different look. So that sort of thing is done and maybe should be done more, but it's hard. I'm yeah it's not easy to do that yeah i think that sort of practically it's difficult to do in a way that is repeatable and does not i mean you wouldn't necessarily injure yourself like we are like we just said there are guys who do this sort of purposefully but i do think that there is a i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of guys are warned off it both because you are worried about injury if you have that much variation and also because you know if you think about trying to

tunnel certain pitches off one another sometimes having a single look within a given pitcher is to your advantage, right? Because it makes it harder for the hitter to discern what the pitch is going to be in advance. So I think when Eric talks about sort of biodiversity among a team, it is more about making sure that particularly among your relievers, you have a variety of looks so that you're not able to, from an advanced scouting perspective, just say like every pitch I'm going to see from an Astros reliever is going to be, you know, over the top or what have you. But I don't know.

It would be interesting. Maybe we can put that on our list of things to chat with Eric about when we do a prospect episode because I can like hear him yelling it's this guy and that guy and also this dude and you forgot about this guy too so yeah but mechanical consistency has its benefits both from an injury prevention perspective and also from a pitch tunneling perspective but you're right there are dudes who will sort of purposefully drop into a different look and then the batter goes, whoa, and swings wildly and it's a web jam. Yeah, and there are guys, I mean, everyone who does throw sidearm on a regular basis didn't start out throwing that way

or just about everyone, they dropped down at a certain point maybe because they couldn't hack it as a starter or a conventional reliever. And someone said, well, your only choice here is to stop playing baseball or to drop down and throw from the side and try to succeed as a specialist. And so maybe those guys could occasionally break out their original arm angle. don't know the muscle memory aspect of it is tough though because so much of success at that level is performing these same motions over and over and over again with a great deal of precision and for a lot of pitchers it is a positive if you repeat your motion perfectly every time right that's something that is said to be and i think is associated with good command is if your release point is not just varying from pitch to pitch and if you're able to repeat that and so we're saying go completely away

from that right and do a totally different arm angle which again like if you have that elite I guess spatial awareness and body control that you are able to do that, then I think it could certainly be beneficial because hitters see you for a few pitches and they pick up your release point and they're able to concentrate on that spot that the ball comes out of and they can pick up the pitch type earlier. And so if the ball comes completely out of another place, all of a sudden that has to help. And if you could show them a different angle in a subsequent plate appearance or something, I would think that would probably cut down on the times through the order effect,

but there is probably a penalty associated with your own performance. And if you don't have the same stuff out of that arm angle, like Clayton Kershaw actually is another guy I'm just thinking of now because he had like a drop- down fastball that he started incorporating. I think when he started losing some of his velocity, he's, you know, very over the top, but he had sort of like a three quarters type of fastball that I think was faster. And I don't know if he's still throwing that, but he was incorporating that into his repertoire for a while so if you can do it great yeah and he's an interesting one too because when he was being scouted part of why some of the hesitation around him not that there was like

a ton of hesitation around Clayton Kershaw but the the because his mechanics are somewhat unusual there was some concern about his ability to sustain and repeat right but yeah i don't oh now i'm gonna now we're gonna i guess we haven't gotten a kershaw start injuries yeah freaking worse i was gonna say we should we should make him go look and see nope can't do it ben yeah yeah it does fascinate me though i don't know at what point in the pitching instruction process you would try to incorporate that, though. It's just like, you know, if you don't need to do it, like if you're good without doing that, then the impulse is probably, well, let's not mess with what's working for this person. We don't want to screw them up by saying, hey, just show them a totally different arm angle. Who knows what kind of bad habits you could get into there. So it seems like a case-by-case basis, like either you need it because people are picking up your pitches too well, or you're just so comfortable with doing that that you pick it up on your own. But it's hard to imagine it being a standard part of pitching instruction because pitching instruction is so tough as it is.

But that concept really does fascinate me, like the different looks, the biodiversity, which is something that Jerry DePoto has, I think, publicly spoken about, wanting to have those different looks, different stuff, different arm angles in his relievers. And I've seen a couple of studies on that, which haven't been all that convincing to me either way. It's kind of a tough thing to do just analytically because you have to control for all these other factors to figure out if it's actually that variety that is actually helping as opposed to the million other things that it could be. So it's a tough problem to solve. But intuitively, it seems like it would work. And I bet if you talk to players, a lot of them would say that it's something that they struggle with. So I would not be surprised if it's a thing. I just haven't seen that really convincingly demonstrated. Yeah, I haven't seen any studies that I find to be particularly conclusive either. And you're right, it's just like a wickedly difficult problem to solve but it is a thing that you know teams think about and some teams seem keen to employ and then

other teams that are also very successful again are all gonna we're gonna make them all pitch the same way because that way works really well um throw 100 anyway yeah so it wasn't like just give them a high riding fastball so i don't know but i would imagine that the repeatability probably is more positively correlated to good performance than purposeful variation but i don't think that we really know yeah it's kind of like the question of the knuckle ball hangover effect which some people have written about, I've written about in the past. And similarly, that is also a difficult quantitative nut to crack when you try to figure out if you have a knuckleballer in your rotation. Is there a penalty on the opposing hitters either that day when he comes out and a more conventional pitcher comes in?

Or maybe in the future when you have a different starter going the next day is there still some hangover there and right and that's that's kind of tough to tell too or you know people will even say well do you want righties and lefties in your rotation do you want them together do you want to break them up and i think russell carlton has written about that and it doesn't seem like it matters all that much but that's the question like how long does that hangover last because we know that within a single game there is certainly a familiarity effect and you pick up things about a pitcher each time you face him in a game but then does that kind of reset if you go away from the ballpark and you get a good night's sleep and you come back the next day do you still have that mental image in your head of that pitcher you

were facing yesterday or has enough time passed and maybe you've taken batting practice and that just kind of goes back to the baseline. So I am curious about that. fascinating analytical questions that's still out there for me is the impact of deception for pitchers because we've quantified so much of everything else or at least made attempts to you know we we know velocity we know movement we know spin rate we know location we've done some things with tunneling we know perceived velocity you know where do you release the the ball do you release the ball closer to home plate and does it look faster because of that so we've isolated and analyzed and quantified a lot of those things that go into pitching but one thing we still haven't really is deception is the idea of hiding the ball and partly that can be like where you release it and some guys

just release it closer to the plate and so it looks like it's getting on you faster or it could be your arm action like if you're short arming it or if it's your effort level like maybe you don't look like you're throwing that hard and so when you actually do it takes hitters by surprise or just like turning your back to the hitter or having your arm behind your back for a longer period of time so that the hitter isn't able to pick it up as quickly. That's something that I've really been interested in for quite a while now. And it's hard to look into because there isn't really any public data about it. And so it's tough to quantify, but there is more and more private data, at least, about that. There's systems like KineTrax that have been online in big league parks for years now that are able to track players' mechanics. And now Hawkeye, which is part of MLB's stack cast system, is doing the same thing. And so they're able to see potentially like when does the ball become visible to the hitter. And so I would assume that teams have done some work with that. And that's kind of like, I don't know if it's a final frontier because we still haven't really figured out like pitch selection and pitch calling, which seems pretty important too. But I really am interested in those deceptive guys, those guys that hitters just reliably say, oh, I am not picking up the ball well, or it looked slower than it was, or it looked so

low effort and smooth that it kind of took me by surprise. So that's what I really want to learn more about, I think. And I wonder whether we will sometime soon, just because at least MLB is getting that data now. And I think it was after Johnny Cueto's first start, Darren Willman of MLB tweeted this graphic of Johnny Cueto's shimmy, you know, and it's like a wireframe of Cueto's body as he's in his windup and, you know, pausing and going backward and going forward. wind up and you know pausing and going backward and going forward and if you had that on every player and you were able to break it down which i think some labs and teams have been able to do privately just with like tracking bobbles attached to players arms and hands and trunk and all of that then in theory you could actually figure that stuff out and maybe you could evaluate prospects better by breaking them down in the same way and saying, oh, he hides the ball and that's worth X or that makes him this much better. So I want to know more about that.

And I hope we will sometime soon. And that Quato shimmy is kind of it's not quite what we were talking about with the release angles, but it's sort of similar. Right. And that he's varying timing and looks and he does that in a way that no other pitchers do or very few other pitchers do for similar reasons like it's it's tough to just like pause in your delivery and do different things from pitch to pitch and not screw yourself up and he is able to do that but but most guys aren't. Well, and I have heard Eric talk about how there are definitely a lot of amateur guys, regardless of the game state or anyone's on base or what have you, who they try to do a shimmy. Yeah.

And we don't see it then translate up. You know, Quato's delivery remains quite unusual in the majors. So I don't know if we should take from that that it is different in a way that major league coaches look at and say, let's clean this up and make this easy. Or if the particular guys who are trying it are just not expert enough at it and it doesn't translate for them in the same way or what. doesn't translate for them in the same way or what but yeah it is um it is a popular affect of many uh an amateur prospect that then gets sort of drummed out as they as they move up the the ladder but yeah i would love to know more about that you you find out you hear anecdotally about a lot more guys just to circle all the way back talking about how they find success once they find an arm

slap that is more naturally comfortable for them than you do guys who talk about how the variation is productive. But that doesn't mean that for the guys that there aren't guys who could find variation to be very useful. So yeah, it would be interesting to have sort of better and more conclusive data on that. Yeah. yeah it would be interesting to have sort of better and more conclusive data on that yeah the guy i always think of in this kind of category is yusmero petite who i always hear described as someone deceptive someone whose stuff is surprising who doesn't on paper seem to have

the greatest arsenal and yet is really consistent and good year after year. And he's now 35 with the A's, and he's coming off a great season with them, really a great couple seasons with them. I mean, over the past four years, he has amassed a 2.8 ERA in nearly 300 innings, and he's not like a hard thrower or anything. And he's someone who's just described as like hiding the ball really well. And some years ago, I think when I was at Grantland, I got like a mechanical breakdown,

like a biomechanical breakdown of Petit, I think from his agent maybe, because I was trying to write about deception and I was going to try to use him as the poster boy. And so I got this analysis from when he had gone to ASMI or some other place that tracks players and wires them up. And it had all these readouts and angles and I could make no sense of it. So it wasn't like I saw it and I was like, oh, yeah, there it is. It's this angle. He's got the thing behind his back there. He's got the thing behind his back there. I just couldn't really. I didn't have the knowledge to dissect it, and for whatever reason, I never went ahead with that.

I probably still have it in my email somewhere, but there's going to be better data on guys like that. So that could be something that enables you to find breakout guys before they break out because you might see some pedestrian subpar radar reading and it won't look all that impressive but the results will be good and some people say well it won't work at the highest level because he's only throwing 91 or whatever but then it turns out that he has some elite baseball hiding behind his back ability and that that actually will translate so yeah yeah i hope to find out more about that through a perfect fifth inning with one strikeout to earn the win sunday versus the angels okay so before we wrap up we should pass along a little news that is related to something we already talked about today if there's one truism about 2020 it's that if you keep talking long enough there will be more bad

news and there has been more bad news although i guess in this case it's that if you keep talking long enough, there will be more bad news. And there has been more bad news, although I guess in this case, it's not really news so much as it is just people saying out loud what we already knew. So Jeff Passan has reported at ESPN that Rob Manfred has had a call with Tony Clark on Friday and told him, quote, that if the sport doesn't do a better job of managing the coronavirus, it could shut down for the season. This is according to sources who spoke to Passon. The gist of the report is that the league knows that things are not looking great and that this weekend is a critical juncture given everything that's going on that we already talked about. It says, should another outbreak materialize

Manfred who has the power to shut down The season could move in that direction Multiple players briefed on the call Fear the season could be shut down as soon as Monday if positive tests Jump or if players continue Not to strictly abide by the League's protocols state and local

Governments have pressured baseball About players skirting the mandates Outlined in the league's protocols State and local governments have Pressured baseball about players skirting The mandates outlined in the league's 113 page operations manual Sources told ESPN And then he mentions the Broadcasts that have shown high-fiving And spitting and non-mask

Wearing that have left government Officials wondering how seriously players Are taking the protocols Sources said further There is concern about off-the-field choices Government officials wondering how seriously players are taking the protocols, sources said. Further, there is concern about off-the-field choices, with one high-ranking official saying there are some bad decisions being made. Boy, isn't that the case about everything these days? That's just a blanket statement about everything that has happened this year. But yeah, sounds like the clock is ticking here unless there is some sort of improvement. And I don't know how much of this is the player's fault or how much the players are to blame here.

I think it sounded like from the tweets and the headlines and the initial response, I think people were taking this as Manfred calling Clark and sort of telling him that he has to get his act together or something or that the players are going to spoil this thing. I don't know if that was actually the tenor of the call or if it was just, hey, we collectively are not in a great spot right now, so we have to do whatever we can to improve this. Yeah, I think that we don't know exactly. We don't know the exact contours of the conversation apart from what Jeff has reported. I think that whether he acknowledged it on the phone to Clark or not, there is plenty of blame to go around. I And so every person who walks into the ballpark on any given day is a potential vector for COVID-19. And so it's very important that the players take it seriously. seriously and the league has an obligation to come up with protocols that are going to be practicable and work and that are well enforced and well thought out and the limitations of the

operations manual they released are not limited to the bad judgment of young men in atlanta right we don't know for instance where guys have been hanging out during rain delays. Even though the operations manual specifically says the teams are required to provide a well-ventilated space where social distance can be maintained. So I think that there is a lot of the finger pointing is not particularly useful because fingers could land anywhere. That's a weird thing to say. Nope. There's just a lot of blame to go around. There we go. That sounds less bizarre. And so I think that this is going to be a massive

collective effort. And if baseball can't come up with a way to write us a health and safety manual that players will abide by, that teams will abide by, that team personnel will abide by, we're not going to have a season. So this is everyone's responsibility. And I think that there are a great many people who are taking it very, very seriously. But I think that many is probably not sufficient for our purposes. There's just too much risk. There are too many teams playing in too many communities with rampant community spread for many to be enough. We all have to, everybody has to do their part and we can bemoan the lack of a governmental or institutional response that put us in this fix and we should. have a season, then baseball needs to do better. And that means the league needs to do better,

the teams need to do better, and the players who have not previously been taking this as seriously as they ought to need to do better. Because I'd like us to be able to have baseball safely played. And I'm really very tired of spending my Fridays wondering if people are contracting a deadly respiratory disease in the course of doing their jobs. And I'm pretty tired of wondering if we're going to be able to keep ours if there's no baseball. So I would implore people to take this seriously. Like if we see, I hope that when I turn on a game today, every single person in that ballpark is masked because if they're not, what are we doing? Yeah.

Yeah. Anthony Rizzo tweeted on Thursday because the Cubs and Reds had a rain delay. Right. The game was not postponed for hours. And so he tweeted player safety question mark at MLB. Let's sit around for eight hours plus inside the clubhouse. I'm sure I can find that somewhere in the 113-page player safety protocol. So yeah, there's plenty of blame to go around bad decisions being made as the line goes.

And yeah, it's players not doing their part maybe, but also protocols that just aren't sufficient really to cope with this. And even if the players were perfectly adhering to this, that doesn't mean there's a guarantee that there wouldn't be some sort of outbreak because it's not perfect. Even if you wear a mask, you can still spread something, you can still get something. And there are times when you're not going to have the mask on 24-7. So yeah, it's just doing what you can to cut down on the risks that are ever present. And that just goes for life in general. I think most people are complying with these things and most people are being mindful of these things, but there's a minority who are not. And when you're talking about spreading a disease,

that's something that anyone can do and a minority of people can do and the people who are complying with the guidelines are not necessarily protected and yeah perfectly protecting others either so it's just there's no real way around it so pass and tweeted the conversation between manfred and clark was not a threat but a reality check that was relayed to players and has spread quickly among them. We, all of us, need to clean this up because if we don't, Major League Baseball in 2020 is going to be over. this seriously like i said so i don't mean to imply that they aren't i'm in a weird way encouraged that this was was the response that the last week brought right if we were simply marching into the weekend sort of accepting that 20 of the league is not going to play at any given time because of covid and that outbreaks can pop up and that players and personnel and their families and the poor person who has to drive the freaking bus from philly to miami it wouldn't be safer to fly whatever it doesn't

matter i mean it does matter but like that's not the purpose of this little addendum to our show but you know i think it would be worse if there were not indications that the league is taking this very very seriously and that they understand that the stakes are very high in the situation quite grave because because otherwise we're like watching running man just with less schwarzenegger it was running man right or marathon man i get the man movies confused yes it was running man running man, because it's the show. He's on Running Man. They've got to run, run, run through the race. So it is better that we hear that there is serious consideration being given to suspending play because it would be completely ridiculous for that to not be the reaction that the league has and horrifyingly ghoulish and just in you know showing

a terrible indifference to the the effect that this could have on people's lives and long-term health so i am uh encouraged in a weird way by that but i just like you said even if everyone does everything right there's still a risk because we're in a pandemic and so we really really have to do everything right because then at least you know if we get to a point having done all that where we're like this is not safe we cannot do this and we probably are there but we're just gonna i guess pretend for the moment that we're not at least if we do that we can look back and say we did everything we possibly could. And now we're making a decision in the best interest of our players and our team employees and, you know, the person driving the bus who probably has to go to work. And that would be one thing.

But if the thing that calls the season is another outbreak and continued spread and we just remain indifferent to that for a long time. I struggle to believe that the sport will have an easy time recovering from that. And I don't know that it should. So yeah, Friday, Ben, I'm drinking a beer. It's four and we are in, you know, a hellscape and are recording a cast that is conveniently titled for editing purposes. Baseball is doomed addendum. a cast that is conveniently titled for editing purposes baseball is doomed addendum so here we go yep all right yeah this is when the bad news dumps come out right so that's all we have these days it's all we have we have that we have masks we have hand washing we have hopefully a renewed sense of our obligation to care for one another and continued frustration that

that obligation is falling to individuals and not, you know, government entities empowered to fix it. I don't know, man. But in the meantime, here we are. Still have baseball for at least another day. Well, I guess we have talked long enough

so we will be back with some fun stuff early next week, assuming there is still a baseball season. Or maybe even if there isn't, we can still talk about fake crowd noise and prospects who debut because we need to talk about something. So we'll see what happens and hope for the least possible bad news until then. Okay, on our last episode, Sam and I just briefly touched on why the automatic runner rule in extra innings works, why it shortens games. Because you might think that it just puts both teams in the same position, right? It just puts an extra runner on second base, but both teams get that extra runner. Their run expectancies increase by the same amount in the top and bottom halves of the inning, so why does it actually work? Why does it bring games to a

quicker close? And I just briefly offhand shared my understanding of that, but we didn't delve into it and Sam hadn't really thought about it at length, so we just moved on. I think what I said more or less captured it, but a couple of listeners have written in with more thought-out explanations, so I will give you the less mathy one first and then the more mathy one second. So this is from listener Mitchell. He says, I was thinking about Sam and Ben's discussion about why the new extra innings rule ends games more quickly, and I think I know the answer. It's true that each team still has the same odds of scoring, but I think what speeds it up is that the odds of scoring a run are closer to 50-50. Imagine that extra innings were decided by a coin flip. You win if you flip a heads and the other team flips a tails. However, the particular coin used by MLB lands

on tails 75% of the time. In this scenario, there is a 62.5% chance that the coin flips are both heads or both tails, continuing the game, and a 37.5% chance that one lands on heads and one lands on tails, which would end it. If you replace the unfair coin with a fair coin, however, you'd expect 50% of the two flips to land on the same side, and 50% to land on different sides, thus making it more likely for games to end more quickly. This, I believe, is what's happening in MLB games. With no one on and no one out, the chances that a run scores that inning are much less than 50%, so you end up with a similar situation as the unfair coin. Starting with a runner on second must bring the chances of scoring closer to 50%. Think about what would happen if the runner started at third. That runner would score for both teams most of the time,

and so it wouldn't speed up the conclusions of the games as effectively as a runner on second does. That's my hypothesis, and Sam responded to that to say, this would have been my explanation too. If Ben had given me 15 minutes to walk around, that was what I landed on that evening. Basically, you want to have the most likely outcome be as unlikely as possible to reduce the probabilities of matching half innings. And here's the more mathy explanation. I'm going to read some numbers now. And this is from a listener who specified that no on-air credit is needed, so I will not share his name. But he says, hey guys, so here's the mathematical explanation for why the bonus runner rule shortens extra inning games. Without the extra runner, the expected outcome of a half inning is roughly a 73% chance of zero runs, a 15% chance of one run, a 7% chance of two runs, a 3% chance of three runs,

and a 2% chance of four or more runs. With the extra runner, the expected outcomes become more spread out, higher variance, which is essentially what I said. In that scenario, you have a 39% chance of zero runs, down from 73%, a 34% chance of one run, up from 15%, a 14% chance of two runs, up from 7%, a 7% chance of three runs, up from 3%, and a 6% chance of four more runs, up from 2%. The odds that the extra inning fails to determine a winner is, warning math, the odds of both teams scoring zero, plus the odds of both teams scoring one, plus the odds of both teams scoring 0 plus the odds of both teams scoring 1 plus the odds of both teams scoring 2, etc. In math terms, you square each of the values and add them up. So 0.73 times 0.73 plus 0.15 plus 0.15, etc.

For the old rules, that comes out to a 56% chance that the game is still tied after one additional inning. For the new rules, the odds are only 30% that the game is still tied. This is a huge difference. Under the old rules, you had a 10% chance that a game tied after nine innings would reach the 14th inning. Under the new rules, it's less than 1%. We also got a third email about this literally as I was reading these two emails. This one's from Thomas, a Patreon supporter who compares it to chaos theory. And this sums it up pretty simply. He writes, when more scoring happens, you're more likely to end the game. Tied scores are just much rarer than not tied scores. So hopefully that clears it up. But if I were teaching a math course or probability and statistics course, I think I would use this as an example because it's fun to use

sports to illustrate probability. And because this is a question that's kind of confounding on the surface. So sort of fun to think about. Thank you to our math-inclined listeners for writing in. All right, that will do it for today and for this week. Thank you, as always, for listening. Enjoy Madrigal's debut. I will link on the show page to the feature I wrote about him this March, just in case you're not up to speed on why we are interested in Nick Madrigal. Thus far, signs seem to be pointing toward the strikeout rate increasing yet again, despite the introduction of the DH and the NL this year. Although it is early,

it's always hard to analyze rate stats in these early season samples because you may have number one pitchers accounting for a disproportionate amount of the sample, so I wouldn't read too much into those stats yet. But strikeouts are not down, that's for sure. But Madrigal is here, and perhaps he can help with that. And again, best wishes to the Trouts, Mike and Jessica, on their impending parenthood. 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.

some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks chris pascoff ryan p sullivan jacqueline julie and loco sports thanks to all of you you can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and spotify and other podcast platforms you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance.

We hope you have a swell weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. You can do the same for me. Just one, one weekend, love. I'll feel so fine just delighting in your company. Just one, one weekend, love. You don't have to sleep. Just tell me what you're thinking of. I'll be all right for one weekend of your love.