Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1577: Chaos Theory

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about whether the idea of sports as a distraction from the pandemic has panned out, whether unexpectedly hot-starting teams like the Rockies and Tigers should “go for it” (and what that would entail), and what, if anything, MLB should do to address the curious case of Trevor Bauer’s spiking […]

I would leave the outside world behind me if I only could If I could keep myself together and realize that things were better It would do me good I'm so distracted, the simple fact is I need to practice letting go. I'm so distracted. The simple fact is I'm too attracted by the glow. Hello and welcome to episode 1577 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by ESPN's Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben. So, you know, a few months ago when people were talking about whether sports could come back, should come back, etc. One of the things people some people would say is, oh, it would be such a welcome distraction from all the sort of sadness going on. And then there was that discussion of whether there should be a distraction or whether it was actually, you know, it's actually like something that we should be in national mourning and paying a great deal of attention to. And I saw both sides of that being kind of debated in public

and i think that what we can say a few weeks into the season is that there has been nothing remotely distracting about the season from covid like you watch the games and you just like the whole thing is just this giant flashing reminder so like gardening for instance could be a distraction from from COVID because you're just out gardening. But when you turn on the baseball game, it's just like screaming, you know, everything's destroyed. And I think that the the peak of that for me so far was a couple of days ago, when the Mets broadcasters in the middle of a you know, of a of a typically creepy, eerie game. We're discussing whether there would ever be handshakes again in the world.

And Keith Hernandez came down on there will never be another handshake. Like as a species, we have moved on from handshakes. There might be hugs, but he wasn't willing to say but definitely the handshake era which lasted like like what how many 35 000 years or something uh is is over i don't know when the first hand was shook yeah yeah that's so that's what we're discussing during ball games yeah just your idle banter between pitches yeah i felt that way too there are moments where I get engrossed in a game and I'm just thinking about that game, but it wasn't as if every single waking second of my life was devoted to thinking about COVID before. So I don't know if it's crowded out everything else.

And it wasn't only COVID that people were talking about baseball or sports being a distraction from, but yeah, that's true. I mean, you can't look at the standings and see some teams with very few games played or all the players who've opted out or on the injured list or even just pitchers getting hurt because of the strange structure of the season or all the other ways that it's weird without being reminded of that. So I agree. It's not as if we've all just blissfully forgotten everything because baseball's back. And now everyone's talking about a bubble plan for the playoffs. Jeff Passan has reported that that's being discussed. So yeah, it's a constant concern, of course. certain teams should be acting any differently because of how they have started this season.

I guess the most likely candidates for that would be, say, the Rockies and the Tigers, right? As we speak right now, they have raised their playoff odds the most of any team since the start of the season. The Rockies right now are more likely than not to make the playoffs and the Tigers have had a winning team too and so that's kind of put the pressure on them to call up Casey Mize for instance they seem like they could maybe use some help in the back of the rotation and before the season started when people were saying oh the Tigers should go for it they should call up Manning and they should call up Mize and they should just really give it their all because it's a short season or the Orioles should call it badly Rutschman or whatever. I thought, well, yeah, maybe if they get out to a great start or something, I don't know that I would change the way that I was going to go into the season because it's a 60-game

season. But if you happen to fluke into a winning quarter of a season, let's say, or who knows, maybe it's not a fluke. But those teams have done that at this point and there is a trade deadline coming up as strange as it is to think about that in just what three weeks less than three weeks now at this point and so if you were one of those teams that's off to a start where you can be kind of competitive and have real measurable playoff odds would you adjust your thinking based on that would you call up your prospect who's at the alternate

site who wasn't part of your plans just because hey you you had a few hot weeks and suddenly things are looking realistic so before i answer that last year at the trade deadline the reds traded for trevor bauer and they had now that was of course not just for last year at the trade deadline, the Reds traded for Trevor Bauer. And they had, now that was, of course, not just for last year. That was for last year a little bit and then for, you know, for this year a lot. The Giants, as we remember, opted to make some trades but to not punt the whole season. They kept some very good players or, I I guess some tradable players and decided that since they were over 500 and they were in the wildcard race, they weren't going to give up. And they had 6% playoff odds last year. So the Reds had 5% playoff odds at the deadline.

The Giants had 6% playoff odds. Diamondbacks, similarly, they traded Zach Gran cranky but they also added uh that guy uh who's on who's been on every team mike leak mike leak they added mike leak instead you know what you want to guess who i almost said who who mike leak is confused in my head with kyle loesch is who i almost said anyway so those were all teams that decided that they were kind of in it at five percent six percent and ten percent not totally in it but kind of in it right now the orioles are at 6.5 percent playoff odds so that just to put that into perspective the orioles who started the year as basically the one team that was getting no boost from the expanded playoffs in the short season uh they were at i think one percent they had had gone from like 0.2 to 1 with the expanded playoffs.

And from, you know, of course, 0.0000 to 0.2 with the shortened season. They are now up to 6.5%. And anyway, to answer your question, yeah, the Tigers should, of course, they should be going for it. My belief, I thought a lot about what the stakes of the season really are. And what I've come to believe is that losing will not really hurt anybody. Nobody's going to be too upset when they lose. I think that like even the Dodgers and the Yankees, when the moment comes that they get knocked out, they will not be that disappointed that they got knocked out. They will

be all of the disappointment that they that we had an anomalous season will sort of come crashing down like dorian gray on them and they will feel a great letdown by the season itself but not from necessarily from getting knocked out of this weird thing i think all 29 teams will just go okay well we did that and they'll go home but i think the champion will for the most part feel pretty normal i think it's all upside as far as the winning part of the playoffs part. So I don't think that it's going to feel bad for the Tigers particularly. It'll be silly. They'll feel a little silly. They'll feel abashed, but they'll be happy and they'll take it. Now, anyway, that's not the main reason they should go for it. They shouldn't go for it because October is going to be so

fulfilling. There's a decent chance we'll never get to October, that there won't even be a playoffs, a decent chance. But the reason they should go for it now is because there's a decent chance that next year is going to look a bit like this one, that it will also be odd for various reasons. Not, I mean, certainly not a certainty, but there's a decent chance that next year is also shortened, that next year also has travel restrictions, that next year also has weird rules where some teams are only playing other teams and games aren't getting made up and the stands are either empty or only like 25% full and cheering is not allowed. There's all sorts of scenarios where like there's no promise that if you punt this year

for next year, you're going to get the payoff that like say the 2013 Astros could count on back in the more normal times. Yeah. And there are no minor league games going on. If you're Casey Mize, presumably you're getting some development in because you're at the camp and you're playing some sort of baseball and doing drills. So you're getting some development there. It's not like you're one of the minor leaguers who's just sort of sitting at home. But I think they should go for it just because it would reflect poorly on them, competitively speaking, if they didn't. I think you could make the case that it's such a weird year. It's not really worth going for because who's going to put much stock in winning anyway? because who's going to put much stock in winning anyway? But if you're a team that is kind of, the Tigers are past the low point of their rebuild, I think,

but you wouldn't say that going into 2021 necessarily they're a favorite. I mean, they could have a chance if some of their top prospects are ready, but if they were to win this year, it wouldn't be like, oh, the Tigers are ready. They have made it through, and now they're good again. It would it would be like well they weren't really expected to be good right now but you kind of lucked into a happy year that shortened the rebuilding by a bit and so i think your fans would feel sort of cheated if they had that hot start and you had these strange circumstances that conspired to give them a real chance and they didn't take advantage of that. And that might stick with them more so than just a losing season would.

You know, if you ignore that opportunity that is given to you and you don't call up a guy, maybe you'll be happy that they didn't call him up several years down the road when you have an extra year of that guy. But I don't know. It might stick in your craw even more that there was that chance and you didn't take it. So I think that they should do whatever they can reasonably do to sustain this. One last thing, too, is I'm not optimistic. I mean, I'm not. You just heard me. I'm not even that optimistic about 2021.

I'm certainly not optimistic about October by any means, but there is also a possibility that the country makes significant strides between now and then, and that by October, we are enjoying this a bit more. That, I mean, you know, that if you look at countries that went from lockdown to sports, you know, to safe sports, like in Europe or maybe elsewhere, you can make a lot of progress in six weeks if you do everything right now. Again, we're not on path to do that. But like I'm looking at Arizona's cases per day and a month ago they were at 4000 cases a day and it was really terrifying. And now they're down to 1000 cases a day. And a month ago, they were at 4,000 cases a day. And it was really terrifying. And now they're

down to 1,000 cases a day. And I don't even know what Arizona did, but presumably they closed their bars and they convinced people to wear masks. And when you do that, you see a lot of progress has made, which is to say that there is some chance, not a great deal of chance. I'm not optimistic. You know, there's a motorcycle rally going on with a quarter million people right now. And Smash Mouth. So I would say that I'm pessimistic, bordering on hopeless and depressed. But there is a chance that October is fun. And you might just, if you're a team that has a chance to be there, that feels like,

wow, we're really sort of sleepwalking through this weird season right now. It's hard to get excited about these games. You're not getting any real feedback from what you're doing and i don't know if it's if if it's a good time for them you might be thinking that october could be a good time and you want to be there for that so to be there for that you have to make the playoffs you don't want to be one of the teams that doesn't make the playoffs when suddenly we're having some fun. If that happens, which again, like 2% chance of that. That's like lower than the Orioles playoff odds, but it's out there. Right. Okay.

And the other thing I wanted to mention, you briefly brought up Trevor Bauer, and a lot of people have been bringing up Trevor Bauer lately because people have noticed that his spin rates have spiked massively. And this is not a new thing. He actually started doing this last September, and it was very glaring and obvious, but people didn't really notice because he had his full season spin rates at that point. He had months of work with his old spin rates, and then suddenly it seemed like he started experimenting. He may have started using some sort of sticky substance On his fingers

Which he has often talked about other pitchers doing And has demonstrated is effective When it comes to raising your spin rate And people have written about that Ben Clemens wrote about it for Fangraphs I wrote about it for The Ringer before the season started But now that he is off to this fantastic start He is tied for the war lead among pitchers

He has the highest strikeout rate in baseball among starters, highest strikeout minus walk rate, etc. And everyone has noticed suddenly that his spin rates have increased by hundreds of revolutions per minute. And it is very suspicious, suffice it to say. There's no proof of anything, but Bauer himself has said in the past that there is no way to raise your spin rates naturally by that amount and that he has done it in the lab. He's done it off the field and demonstrated that you can do it and that there's no other way that you can do it. And so the implication is that he has done it, whether to prove a point, who knows, or whether just because he wants to be good because he is going into free agency and wanted to pull out all the stops, who knows. But people have written articles about his spin rates. People have written articles about the Reds' spin rate as a whole. And I wonder how you

handle that as MLB because you have, on the one hand, not a smoking gun, but about as close to that as you're ever going to get handed because many pitchers have been using this stuff on their fingers since they got into pro ball, if not even before. It's very common. I think Bauer himself estimated that 70% or 75% of pitchers are doing it. And when I was writing about it earlier this year, people I talked to said it's even higher than that. It's just so incredibly commonplace. But MLB has said that they want to curtail that or eradicate it entirely. And maybe that is by legalizing it in some way. Maybe they just say, okay, everyone's allowed to use this certain substance and it's just there on the mound and have at it. Or maybe they can come up with a ball that is tacky enough that you don't need the sticky stuff because pitchers will say, oh, I need it to control the ball. I don't want to hit anyone. Some batters will even say that. Anyway, MLB has suggested that maybe they could use spin rates that you get from StatCast to

monitor this. And if someone has a huge increase all of a sudden, that that's something that could maybe lead to a warning or at least telling an umpire, hey, go check this guy. I talked to some officials at MLB who've said that they could consider doing that. And here you have Trevor Bauer, and he's not necessarily succeeding right now because of whatever he may be doing. He has, of course, been good before when he didn't seem to be using that stuff, and he wasn't great last September when he was doing whatever he is doing now. So it's not really a direct correlation, but it's suggestive at least. And so I wonder if

you have a pitcher like Bauer, let's say that he continues to pitch well, maybe he contends for a Cy Young award. And meanwhile, the discourse about him is, hey, look at this massive increase in spin rate. That sure is suspicious. What would you do if you were, say, the person at MLB whose job it is to police that? Would you tell an umpire, hey, go check this guy out because this sure looks odd? Would you want to catch a player in the act is it awkward because it's bauer and you know he is one of the most outspoken players and he is going to make this all about him and roast you for whatever you do or do you make an example of him well on rules like this that mlb doesn't really want to enforce the main downside for mlb is that if they

don't enforce the rules then some sort of form of vigilantism will happen instead and bauer is of course almost taunting the world if indeed this is what's happening now of course it's conceivable that in fact he did that he did figure this out that he i mean you laugh but like what he was trying to do it it's not like it wasn't his goal to figure out how to add spin rate right yeah you can't you can't assume if somebody is trying to do a thing and they do it then you at least some party you has to say well yeah that that is what they were trying to do. It is not irrational that they would be working toward that outcome. So at least you have to, I mean, have open that possibility that he has been trying to figure out how to add spin rate in a normal way. And he might have done it.

But let's just assume. Let's assume he doesn't. I think if he did, he'd probably be telling everyone apart. Well, maybe, probably. It does seem like it has been in his, traditionally when he has, he has not kept his things secret, like he specifically.

You would expect most players to maybe not if they had the golden grail, holy grail, golden something, then golden ticket. They would keep it to themselves, keep it secret. But he hasn't typically done that. So anyway, let's just assume though that, let's just assume for the sake of this hypothetical conversation that uh yes he

has adopted the the methods that he had been accusing other people of doing and let's just even further assume that he is going to start taunting everybody more directly and start like putting codes into his podcasts and things like that. YouTube channel. Podcast? YouTube channel. Yeah, maybe both. I don't know. Then you would worry that the league would have to step in if there started to be some sort of physical retaliation against the Reds over this. They have an obligation to protect their players.

And what they don't want to see is that sort of ugliness. If that's not happening and the league is not prepared to enforce this rule which they have known that they have known that players have been doing this fairly openly for years and they haven't wanted to enforce it and they presumably don't want to enforce it unless they're forced to i think that they just have to not enforce it and know that the other team has the option of asking the umpire to check so as long as the other team is not asking the umpire to check the pitcher which they have the right to do which they could

be doing then i think you have to assume that the other team is making their decision for them they're willing they're willing to sort of go into the into the competition with this even playing field even like kind of equal equal cheating that is accepted by both sides. Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. Other teams could say, and usually they don't. They've always had that option, but often they don't because they know that, well, if we make them check their guy, then they might retaliate and make us check our guy, and our guy is probably doing it too. retaliate and make us check our guy, and our guy is probably doing it too. So that's a problem. In this case, there's a possibility that Bauer is just doing it better than most people are because he has come up with some special mix. He has talked about how he has created combinations

of substances that produce a great effect when he has tested it. And so it's possible that other guys are just getting their sticky stuff off the rack and he is in the lab tinkering for the perfect mixture. And that's why he has had this very dramatic improvement. Maybe he is getting a greater improvement than the typical pitcher does when they use foreign substances. And in that case, you might say, well, even if it hurts us, it would hurt them more for him to lose this ability. And so it would be worth checking. But I do wonder because, you know, MLB sent a memo around this spring and there was some discussion of, do they mean it? Are they really

serious? But it suggested that they were really going to be kind of cracking down on this and monitoring it more closely. And if you want anyone to believe that that's true and that there are any teeth to this, then I feel like you can't just let this seemingly, not conclusively, but possibly blatant example of someone starting to use something go by without even making any attempt to stop it. And for all I know, they've warned him, maybe they've said something to him, I have no idea. But it is something that I wonder, as he continues to pitch well, if he does, you know, it seems like more and more people are noticing this and bringing it up. And it would be kind of a constant storyline for the rest of his

season. So curious to see how that goes. And yeah, he has not talked about it recently, as far as I know. When I was writing during spring training, I requested a conversation with him about it, and he was not interested. He declined at the time, and I believe Jeff Passan also tried to talk to him about what happened with him last September, and he declined that request too. So he has suddenly seemingly gone silent on this topic, which is somewhat suspicious given how open he's been about it before. But again, we shall see. All right, let's answer some emails. This is a question from Daniel, and this was sent before the season started. I think he says,

so with all this time away from sports, I've done a lot of thinking about just what I love about them. While I know that you guys have covered this on episodes before in various amounts, I'm more interested in how you feel about projections and what pleasure you derive from them. On the one hand, when I listen to you guys, particularly Ben, you seem almost thrilled when a player bucks the projection that was expected of him. On the other hand, I can't imagine that you'd enjoy a world in which every player does the opposite of what they were expected to do, Mike Trout at the bottom of a war leaderboard. So in each of your perfect worlds, how accurate do projections need to be in order to continue to enjoy them? How much chaos do you want in your baseball lives?

in order to continue to enjoy them, how much chaos do you want in your baseball lives? And of course, we are in the midst of the most chaotic season we can recall. So I guess this is a good time to talk about this. Mike Trout, by the way, is not currently at the bottom of the war leader board. But I don't know, have you noticed that he has severely negative DRS? Yeah, I have. His offense has been great. Right, his offense has been great. And so, you know, 15 games of DRS, he hasn't even played 15 games, is arguably nothing. A combination of an odd series of attempts that were presented to him, or it could be, I mean, it could be any sort of number of things. You would not, what I'm saying is you would not take it seriously. But the point is that at the moment, Mike Trout's war is frustrating me. Yeah.

Jeff Sullivan had a tweet that i think about a lot this was june 11 2011 a little less than a month before mike trout debuted and when he was the greatest prospect anybody had ever seen exaggerating there but not by much and he tweeted baseball would be so much more interesting if mike trout failed and I think about that tweet all the time because I wonder if Jeff believes it now. At the time, we thought Mike Trout would be a star, a pretty good, I mean, we thought he'd be a star. He was the best prospect in the game. And for the best player in the game you expect,

I don't know, you're thinking, well, he might have, what would you guess? The median, if you count people who, if you don't count people who failed, like the people who actually failed, which not naming names here, but some top prospects in baseball actually do fail. But for the most part, they don't. They have long careers. And probably the median war for those players is like, I don't know, 40 or 45 war.

And, you know, some of them are what you're really thinking is that you're going to get a perennial MVP candidate. And maybe you're thinking 70 or 80 war Hall of Famer. And you don't expect a player who's the greatest player through age 28 in history and is on pace to maybe have 140 war. So I wonder if Jeff still feels that baseball would actually be so much more interesting if Mike Trout had failed. I think that probably not. I think that what I'm saying for the most part is that there's a certain amount of joy when a projection nails a player,

like right on the dot. There is a even better joy when a player dramatically outperforms. Yeah. Like a Max Muncy or a Mike Trout. Mike Trout is dramatically outperforming his projections, and it's been super fun. And I think that there is very rarely much pleasure in seeing a player underperform. You need to have enough so that it's somewhat interesting so that there's tension so the sport has tension but i think that i don't take all missed projections equally is what i'm saying yeah well even if mike trout were just a garden variety great player then maybe you could

make more of a case that it would be more fun if he had failed just because there are a lot of garden variety great players that's what garden variety means but mike trout is just so singular that that has been maybe the greatest source of joy in baseball for me since he came up any one thing that is probably the one thing and so certainly would not want to sacrifice that under any circumstances but i think it's true that baseball is probably more entertaining if some top prospects fail. You do need to have some. It's true. You're right. Baseball is much more interesting because fill in the blank whoever you're thinking of right now failed.

Yeah. It just is more interesting because of that. It just is more interesting because of that. I mean, especially because every failure, every great player who doesn't develop, every great player who gets old super rapidly, it's its own kind of story. It's different reasons. And in fact, it can often be harder to explain. It is harder to explain. It's a lot harder.

I still find it harder to explain brandon wood than mike trout and i there i said the name you were thinking him i was only because i knew you were thinking of him because you've written about him before but but yeah yeah i i think you want some joy when a player does turn out to be great. And if every player who was supposed to turn out to be great turned out to be great, then wouldn't be special. You need some uncertainty, some unpredictability. There has to be some danger and some tension and some chance that that player's not going to pan out or else, well, okay, we saw this coming 10 years ago and la-di-da, he's great.

So that's true. And it can be sort of fascinating to contemplate how an individual player failed when he had everything going for him. And maybe you learn something from that specific case, or maybe you never do. And it just remains a mystery forever. But I agree with you that it is far more exciting on the whole when a player comes out of nowhere and gets good all of a sudden, and no one was expecting that player to be good. That was kind of the type of player the MVP machine came out of. That's why we were all so enamored and remain enamored of Rich Hill and others like him who just had a breakout when no one was expecting one. And baseball is far, far more fun because there are guys like that.

And so, yes, absolutely. When some players buck the projections in that way, I love it. On the other hand, if it were completely random and if nothing were predictable, then it would just be like a bunch of ping pong balls in one of the draft drawing machines or the lotto machines. It would just be, I guess it would be still exciting. It's exciting if you win the lotto. But I think if everyone were just kind of bouncing around and some guys happened to be good and others didn't happen to be good and there was no rhyme or reason to any of it, then it would all

just feel so chaotic that I wouldn't enjoy that either. So there was that season, which season was it? One of the recent several seasons when the standings were just upside down, right? And the upside down standings were closer to the preseason projections than the actual standings. It was like everything was reversed, at least for, I don't know, half the season or something. And that was really weird. And I think it's nice to have a season like that every once in a while, but I do value some order in the world. And I like the teams that I think are good to be good for the most part. And so, yes, I want some flop teams and some surprise teams. But again, I want to feel like I understand the rules of the sport and that I know what I'm seeing here,

or else it would all be so incomprehensible to me that I couldn't actually enjoy anything that happens. And I don't think baseball has really gotten any more predictable or much more predictable when Jeff used to do his posts about preseason projections and he had collected all the projections back to the beginning of the projections era, which is only what, like 2005 or so. that projections had gotten more accurate in recent years. And there's so much inherent randomness in baseball that you might not be able to tell anyway because there's just going to be a certain amount of miss every year. Even if you predicted everything perfectly, you can't predict luck and random variation. And so there's enough of that baked in that we're not at the point where I feel like

things are getting too predictable or we have stack- cast stats and advanced projections, and so I feel like it's all solved and I'm just watching something play out that I already saw on the preseason projections or something. We're not even remotely close to that, and I don't feel like we're even getting closer to that. I read a thing recently. I don't remember what it was but it described the heel turn in

wrestling in a way that as a non-wrestling consumer i had never really understood i thought that the reason that you had heel turns was basically to keep the storyline unpredictable that it was a way of basically like having the plot twist in unpredictable ways. And the way that it was described in whatever I was reading, was that basically the character of the hero has been wrung dry. And so then in order to get new value out of the character, they flip it. And now all of a sudden you have like a whole new character. And so you can wring that character dry. So it's a way of a sudden you have like a whole new character and so you can ring that

character try so it's a way of basically doubling the character arcs that are possible for a wrestler and i don't find that that's necessary for baseball players i don't find that i'm looking for new new new arcs for players for the most part if a player is doing well i i'm not like well i'm bored of this give me something different and so in that sense if you think about a flop or a collapse as a heel turn which it's it's it's a different thing but as a as a heel turn then i don't find those that welcome but there you do still have the the surprise aspect of it which is still somewhat useful and i agree that the year that the playoff standings were all upside down and wrong i don't remember thinking that that was fun but i think

that it does have value for the other years to know that that yes right yeah yeah i do like it when players add a new skill that you didn't know they have even if they were good before how much have we enjoyed that with mike trout right when he gets good at throwing or he gets good at plate discipline, or suddenly he can hit high fastballs or something or whatever. He's more strikeout heavy power guy now, or he's a more speed and defense guy. That has made him more interesting, right? If he were just a 10 war automaton and he got to that war total the same way every year, that would be less interesting. I think I wouldn't want a total about face where suddenly he's bad, but if he's good in a different way, I think that enhances my enjoyment.

All right. Question from Eric Hartman, who says, Joshian had an interesting tweet, which read, When this is all over, can we talk about how using pitchers less and less and less isn't actually producing more healthy pitchers? This has me thinking about how pitching staffs should actually be run in today's game. Let's say you had full control of a team, again, and did not need to worry about buy-in. How would it be run for starters versus relievers and lengths of starts? And this does feel like the sort of thing where a handful of

years ago we would have just said, oh, bullpenning, because that would have been the cool, fun experiment that teams hadn't tried. And now that we've moved further and further in that direction, it's either boring to say that because teams are already doing it, or we found out that actually we don't enjoy this as much as we thought because it's kind of fun to have a starter who stays in there for a while. Yeah, I think that part of the challenge is that any strain you take off of pitchers, they find a way to use elsewhere they're the whole i mean the whole exercise of elite athletics is pushing people to go as close to their breaking point as they can it's like a it's a it's like really in a lot of ways it's it's like the disturbing part of sport and it's that way in almost every sport and so when it comes to pitchers i think that we had an idea that yes if you if you have them throw fewer innings or if you have them throw fewer pitches in games or if you

have them take more time off between starts they'll stay healthier and i can't say this for a fact but i mean that has coincided with tremendous increases in velocity and tremendous increases both in peak velocity and also average velocity, how many pitches they throw at full effort. And the thing is that I don't think they're at their max yet either. I think that I did an article a couple years ago, I think, about every pitcher's fastest fastball relative to their average fastball and what happens when they throw their fastest fastball relative to their average fastball and what happens when they throw their fastest fastball and i was sort of surprised to find that that like on average i think every pitcher throws a fastball at least one fastball that's like four and a half miles

or four miles an hour harder than their average fastball and so they could i mean if you had a pitcher throw one inning a year that would probably be safer but i am a little worried that a they would even in that one inning they would throw every pitch obviously that's an extreme example but they would throw every pitch at their max and they would still be training to throw that pitch harder than they are capable like Like every day they go out to train to throw harder than they can at the start of the day. And so you still have these incentives for them to put more strain on their body. As you take some strain off, they put more strain on. And so I, because of that, because there's just such an incentive for professional athletes who are just so driven to achieve things

that they set out to achieve. It is very hard to create a system where they're not at risk of breaking themselves. And again, that's true in every sport. It's true not just in team sports, but individual sports. It's true for 13-year-olds and it's true for 40-year-olds. I don't know what to do about it. I think that that's like a real issue with modern sports, a real challenge. Yeah. At some point it stopped being about protecting pitchers' health, I think, as much as it became about getting out and making pitchers better. Because around 2000, whenever it was that BP debuted pitcher abuse points and 100 pitches became kind of the hard limit for a lot of guys. That was about protecting pitchers. That was about not overworking pitchers. It wasn't at that time about times through the order or about bullpenning. It was purely health

related, I think. And then at a certain point, it became more about, well, if we just bring in a fresh arm, he can throw even harder. And if we just bring in a fresh arm, he can throw even harder. And if we take this guy out sooner, then he can throw even harder when he's in there. And we can have hitters getting fewer looks at pitchers. And so it's partially about protecting pitchers, of course, but it's also about that. that and there's this weird feedback loop where the shorter the outings the harder guys can throw in their remaining innings right and so then it's almost like you have to lower their innings even more because now they're throwing super hard in the time that they're out there and that is endangering them in a way and now you have to ease off the pedal more. So it's like, even if you limit how many

pitches they're throwing, it seems like the fewer the pitches they throw, the more max effort they throw. And therefore, you're not necessarily minimizing the injury risk. You're certainly minimizing it relative to if you had guys going all out from pitch one and you were also leaving him in there for 120 pitches but it seems like because that has coincided with hey throw as hard as you possibly can it doesn't really seem to have cut down on injuries and i would throw out this season entirely i think this is an anomalous year and we've talked about the reasons for that and why pitchers have gotten hurt at such an elevated rate this year. But I think in general, it hasn't really been a protective measure for some pitchers. Maybe it has, but for others, it hasn't. So I don't know what you do other than

having bionic arms or something or figuring out biomechanics in a way that protects pitchers dramatically more than you had before but just limiting pitch counts doesn't seem to have had the effect that it was supposed to yeah all right do you have a stat blast i sure do okay by the way that year that the standings were all topsy-turvy was 2015 which i i thought was the case but i wasn't positive but yes there are a bunch of articles from that year about, is this the year that the projections failed? And yeah, it was, but not permanently. Okay. So StatBlast, I have maybe one more StatBlast song cover here still. It's been weeks, months since I used the actual original StatBlast song. So I'll get back to that

soon, but people have continued to send in covers. So this one is by Russ Hull, and it is a trombone ensemble take on the Stat Plas song. I don't know what I have not heard from Jeff in the 12 minutes since we talked about that. I don't know what he would answer, but I wonder if what he might answer is that, in fact, baseball is more interesting that Mike Trout didn't fail, but it would be more interesting now if he suddenly failed. At every given point of his career, it has been more interesting that he has pushed his career to a higher and more unthinkable level. And maybe you could even argue that his success has been more unpredictable than his, you

know, a total failure would have been. And so in that sense, he has been more, baseball has been more interesting because Trout has not failed. But I wonder if Jeff would actually say that right now baseball would be more interesting if Mike Trout came out and hit 160, 210, 230, and was out of the game in two and a half years. Like depressing, miserable. Like I don't know if Jeff's a sociopath, but more interesting maybe.

Yeah, well, Jeff works for a team that has to play Mike Trout's team sometimes now, and he no longer has to do blog posts about Mike Trout, so different incentives for him. I should just write blog posts about what Jeff would say about Mike Trout and then get him in trouble for those. All right, my stat blast. Exactly, yeah, it's going to be a little bit about Mike Trout.

So Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a home run, I think, yesterday Or maybe it was a home run we talked about Got me thinking about something that I actually had looked up a while ago And thought about doing a stat blast on And didn't, and now I've redone it I did the work, lost the work, redid the work Because Tatis reminded me of it This was asked to me by someone named derrick in october

2017 he said i have an article idea how many homers would guys like ruth aaron bonds etc have hit if they batted second or even first that's actually kind of an interesting question because they didn't they batted later in the order and nowadays if you were Babe Ruth in the year 2020, a lot would be different. And one of the things that would be different is you would probably would hit second. Well, you might not, but you might. You might hit second. So I was thinking about this because Fernando Tatis Jr. is a leadoff hitter, and he homered. Ronald Acuna Jr. is a leadoff hitter, and he homered three times the other day.

They're both very young. They're probably not going to challenge the all-time home run record, but they might. They're both young enough and good enough, started early enough, and they each have the advantage of right now batting leadoff. And so I wondered actually how many home runs behind are Barry Bonds and Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron based on the fact that they hit later in the order. So I took each player's starts in every spot in the batting order for every year of their career. And then I assumed that they would, I put them in the leadoff spot instead,

and I put them in the number two spot instead to see how many extra plate appearances they would have had if they had batted in those spots which is basically getting an extra plate appearance every nine games for each spot in the order that you move up and then i multiplied those extra plate appearances by their home run rate that year to see how many extra home runs they would have. So first of all, the number of extra plate appearances that they would have, to me, is kind of staggering. So like Hank Aaron, if he had batted leadoff for his whole career,

which, you know, like he could have. He was certainly fast enough to for much of his career. We have lots of players who aren't fast at all who lead off these days it's quite normal to have slugging players hit lead off even if they're not prototypical right we all know that he would have had 855 extra plate appearances which is almost like that's a season and a half of hank aaron that his team's just left on the table. Is there any sport that does that? Every other sport, it seems like, can and does load up on how much they rely on their best player. Baseball actively suppresses how many times their best players come to the plate, or at least they have

traditionally, by having their best hitters hit third or fourth in the lineup. And I know that they had a certain logic to that. It's not a logic that held up to statistical scrutiny at the end of the day, but there was a logic to it. But it's just really weird that you would say that your best player is going to bat a lot less frequently than your third or fourth best player or worse. less frequently than your third or fourth best player or or worse yeah and you i mean we all know that that's happening and that that was happening but to hear that 855 plate appearances of hank aaron's career were just you know like taken off the table so that he could bat later in the lineup like you know tradition said it's kind of crazy i guess you wouldn't want him hitting lead off technically you might not want him hitting lead off although it's i i know that

like it's probably a little better to have him batting second than lead off but it's there's a case for for each anyway leading off or batting second still several hundred if he had been batting second barry bonds leading off would have had 744 more played appearances than he did. Babe Ruth leading off would have had 672 more played appearances than he did. Albert Pujols, I'm going to bring him into this, would have had 727 more played appearances than he did. And then Mike Trout, actually, because he is a modern ball player playing with a different understanding of the lineup,

bats second most of the time as it is, and would only have 174 more plate appearances if he were leading off. And yes, like you say, maybe leading off isn't even right. Batting second is quite possibly the more justifiable and now orthodox place for Mike Trout to be. Anyway, to the home runs, because all we care about is getting these players as many home runs as possible. Barry Bonds, if let's say Barry Bonds knew that he was going to chase the all time home run record and he did lead off for the start of his career, just like Tatis and Acuna currently are. And by the time they moved him down, he was a superstar and maybe had some some leverage and could have said, hey, I'm chasing the home run record.

I know it seems silly to hear me say that right now, but that's my goal. So I want more plate appearances. Please keep hitting me leadoff. If he had done that and let off his entire career, he would have hit 47 more homers, which by changing nothing except a batting order and making sure that the best hitter got the most played appearances

we'd have an 800 home run hitter in the major leagues right now hank aaron same same premise he would have had 45 more homers and uh landed on 800 exactly uh babe ruth same premise would have it 41 more homers and uh albert pools would be over 700 right now he would have 38 extra homers i don't i i don't think i personally i'm starting to think albert's not going to get to 700 and if he had uh batted first for a bunch of his career he might already be there sorry i lied he has 659 so he would be at 697 right now. All right. Mike Trout has only lost nine because he plays in this era, right? It's a big difference. Only nine. If they batted second, which as you note, makes perhaps a lot more sense, or at least some sense, more sense.

Barry Bonds would still have 30 extra homers, which would put him at 792. Hank Aaron would have had 26 more homers, which means that if his manager had figured this out, but Barry's had not, Hank Aaron might still be the home run champ. Babe Ruth would have had 24 and Albert Pujols would have had 22 more. And Mike Trout has only lost three. And I'm bringing Mike Trout into this just to show that the modern superstar doesn't suffer this penalty, doesn't pay this tax. And so when I say that Ronald Acuna and Fernando Tatis are kind of get a leg up, they really

do. Like they're losing, they're going to get these home runs that Babe and Barry and Hank left on the table unless they move down the order, which they might. So anyway, that's the answer. By the way, I also, there are some games where they didn't, where maybe they started in the sixth spot or the seventh spot because they were at a phase in their career where they weren't very good anymore. And I redid these numbers where I took all those games out

because they couldn't justify batting first or second in the lineup and it didn't really change much those are a small number of games and they tended to come in the seasons when they weren't hitting home runs at a very fast pace anyway so that matters slightly but just like one or two off of their total so a pretty big number i i think you can almost say that like if if tatis or acuna can convince their their teams or if their teams simply make the rational decision to have them bat first or second throughout their superstardom, they basically start 25 to 45 home runs ahead of the home run leaders. Yeah, that's very interesting. I had not thought of

it that way. Okay. All right. Someone has a follow-up to your comment about liking the new extra innings rules, but also being interested in having some window every year where maybe we would bring back regular old extra innings just so we wouldn't entirely lose the epic marathon game. And Jake, Patreon supporter, says, To me, the solution to liking the new extra inning rule but also wanting 20 inning games isn't abandoning the rule one day a week or one month a season instead it's abandoning the new rule after the 13th or 14th inning oh yeah i like this right that's great good yeah he says i think 10 to 13 or 14 innings is the this game is too long to be fun and not long enough to be fun again zone so wouldn't this allow most games to end quickly

but allow the ones that are going to last to really last and i think he nailed it that's that sounds perfect to me because if you get there the odds are so against you getting there now that if you do it's just like all right well we tried we couldn't end it you all just want to keep playing so we'll just let you go here. Have fun. So I like that a lot. And it would be quite rare. So again, you would achieve the goal here, but it would allow it to happen. And it would allow it to happen almost naturally. You'd feel like you earned it.

So I like that a lot. I mean, I agree. I think that's a really elegant solution to this, and I support it. I agree. I think that's a really elegant solution to this and I support it. And you would feel like if it were after 13, you would really feel like you would accomplish something and broken through to this new phase in the game. So it wouldn't even feel monotonous that you are now going into the monotonous part of the game. So I like that. The reason that I doubt that it would get implemented is that the main reason that they do this i think is actually to prevent the 18 and 19 inning games i think that yes it doesn't it doesn't speed the game up i guess it doesn't bring the game to conclusion that much faster than the old way and so i just don't i

don't know that the powers that like this rule would like it if all it did was like, okay, when we talk about things on this podcast, a lot of times the whole point of the suggestion is to make baseball weirder. And we're not even trying to solve a problem. It's like, hey, if we did a weird thing, would it be like a more fun weird or a less fun weird? And we decide. And that is not what Major League baseball is is thinking as it goes

through these rule changes they say we have a problem does it solve the problem and to them the problem is games that go 17 to 19 innings and create maybe like a perhaps a a health hazard that players really hate that create a a hangover effect that teams just really hate that create these you know pictures of barren ballparks because nobody could stay awake long enough to see the game and i really think that they don't see a problem with with like 11 or 12 inning games as much as they see the problem with 18 and 19 and maybe 15 and 16 in games and so i don't know that they would want to introduce the continuity disrupting rule change if they don't even solve the problem that they think they're trying to solve yeah that's true all right one

more this is from adrian in london ontario he says i was thinking about zach grenke giving the signs to the catcher the other night for anyone who missed this, the latest instance of Zach Greinke being Zach Greinke was that he just started hand signaling his catcher the pitches that he was going to throw. And then he left and went out to sit in the stands with the cardboard cutouts. And Adrian continues, I feel like if the batter saw signs, A, they wouldn't have time to figure out a sequence. So B, it would seem like it would provide an advantage if a team did that, say one inning a game. Just for confusion alone, it would add a new element for the batter and would likely throw them off as they wouldn't be able to help trying to guess would it even be possible to figure out if this was providing an advantage for a game or for a season? And there's some precedent to this happening before. I guess Trevor Bauer, that man again, did this in one spring training outing this year, although I think he was tryingx was documented to have done this at times. So the idea is, could you just have the pitcher signal these things as a distraction? I guess if you saw a pitcher out there suddenly start signaling, I mean, I think when Granke did it, it was so surprising and unexpected that it could be a competitive advantage if you just broke that out every now and then, which seems strange, again, because the whole point of catchers calling signs

is that you are hiding the signs so that the batter doesn't know what's coming. And this is the opposite of that. This is signaling so that the batter can see. But as Adrian mentions, if it's only for an inning or only for a game here and there, you might not know what he's signaling for. And also, it might just be so surprising if it's rare enough that you would be kind of out of your comfort zone anyway, because you're not expecting to see this. And then you're wondering, is he messing with my head, right?

Is he saying he's throwing this, but really he's throwing that? The messing with the head part of it has a long tradition in stories told after the fact and i always wonder how true they are yes the catcher who says it's a fastball coming and i guess that's from uh i think bull durham has that scene too right yeah yeah and i never know whether i believe those stories no i'm sure it's happened but it's probably apocryphal sometimes it would a hundred percent mess with my head yeah i think so and as for whether you'd be able to tell analytically if it was providing an advantage i don't know i guess you would just look at how effective that pitcher was when he was doing that relative to when he was doing it the conventional

way right you know what they need to do is, I think this is actually the solution here. They should both signal all the time. And then you make it doubly hard to crack the signs because you don't even know who's signaling who. How do they know who's signaling who? It's all predetermined. Okay, and you just vary it by inning or something? You vary it by inning or you vary it by you know

like outs plus one or whatever like you just have a you have a system to it's another indicator you have an indicator on top of the the signs yeah that's true worth a shot anything no one else is doing i mean we've talked about random pitch calling and just having a random number generator do it or something and that's different there's no distraction element there although there would be an element of unpredictability because you're not following any kind of set pattern so this might be following a typical conventional pitching plan but the hitter wouldn't know and wouldn't be used to it being called that way so it'd be fun they'd both they might both shake each other off. But one of them would know that it was all an act. Yeah.

They'd have to act. Yeah. Like the whole Johnny Cueto thing where Johnny Cueto sometimes shakes off signs that haven't been put down because he wants the batter to see him shaking. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Well, this is why Grinky is great that he will do things no one else will do. But maybe someone else should take a page from his book here every now and then break it out okay we will end

there okay i want to wish a happy birthday to friend of the show and patreon supporter ben gibbard who composed the music you're hearing right now and that you hear at the end of every episode ben is just a few months older than fernando rodney and he recently covered center field in a performance at T-Mobile Park. Despite his mixed feelings for the song, I'll link to the video. I think he did a nice job with it. It's a distinctive take on a divisive song. Thanks as always for listening, and please keep your questions for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thanks to all of you. podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Matt Slingsby, Sam Falkoff, Eric Wall, David Hassler, and Doug Nazarian. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to

Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. And you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins as always for his editing assistance. And I will be back with Meg for one more episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Same place, some grace, your turn, my turn Stand it, stand it Something involving a lie Something between you and I The light fades away and the day turns to grey

And you say, say