Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1578: Welcome to Planet Earth

Episode Date: August 15, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Cardinals finally returning to play and attempting to complete their overstuffed schedule, the teams with the most movement in playoff odds since the start of the season, Cleveland’s clubhouse problems with protocol-defying pitchers Zach Plesac and Mike Clevinger, the joy of watching Mookie Betts and Betts’s proclivity […]

There's no action There's no action There's no action Action Every time I hold you I just wanna put you in Every time I hold you I just wanna put you in

Every time I hold you I just wanna put you in There's no action There's no action There's no action, there's no action, there's no action Action, baby, come on, let's do it again Hello and welcome to Planet Earth, a debacle, and also episode 1578 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs.

Hello, Meg. Hello. So we've got good news. If you're a Cardinals fan, your team is about to play baseball again. So much baseball. It's been a while. Yeah, I know. And they will make up for it by never not playing baseball for the remainder of the season.

Yeah, I know. And they will make up for it by never not playing baseball for the remainder of the season. It's, um, look, I guess we're doing this and it is probably best from a, well, I don't even know if I believe what I'm about to say, Ben. I'm going to say it and then we can assess if I actually believe it. I guess it is best from a competitive sort of integrity perspective for them to endeavor to play as many games as they can. But they have to play so many games in such a short period of time. Here's the rundown. They will play 21 games in August. They will play four doubleheaders. It is August 14th.

They will play 21 games in August. And it is August 14th as we sit here and record this from the planet Earth. Yeah, they last played on July 29th. They got, what, five games in. Yeah. Jack Flaherty hasn't started since opening day. Yeah, and then they will play 32 games in September, including seven doubleheaders.

Jay Jaffe did the math when he did an update to his update on the cardinals for fangrass they will average 10.8 innings per day assuming of course that nothing goes to extras they should be able to skip extras or start with the bases loaded in extras i think is probably an approach the runner on second in every inning yeah for the cardinals games exactly so it is it is just a it is a wild amount of baseball to have to play i will note that at the end of mlb's press release sort of outlining this resumption of play plan they did say that the postponed double header between the cardinals and the detroit tigers which was originally scheduled for yesterday as we're recording this on Friday, will be rescheduled at a later date, which would suggest that they are prioritizing their play within the NL Central and that that game against the Tigers, who are surprisingly competitive but are not an NL team, might end up getting just booted entirely.

I guess if MLB determines that they have played a sufficient amount of the schedule to not monkey with any of the postseason stuff. But it's a wild amount of baseball. I will be very curious to see if this results in any players on the Cardinals deciding to exercise their opt-outs. Yeah. Yeah, I'll just be very curious to see what their reaction to this is. But it's just so many doubleheaders. That's 11.

And it might be 12 if the doubleheader with the Tigers gets rescheduled. And it could be more if there are any other changes that have to be made to the schedule. This makes every other team, particularly in the central divisions, not having an outbreak just even more important than it already was. Yeah. I didn't really think they were going to try this when Rob Manford said something about a week ago or within the past week about how he wanted to get them to a credible number of games. He did not specify what credible would be. So I figured they would just get somewhere in the neighborhood.

And as they have planned it thus far, they are actually intending to get to 60 or have they left themselves some leeway there? I think that there's some leeway, right? Because they don't yet have this. They're at least down to 58 because they have this double header that hasn't yet been rescheduled.

So I don't know if they will make it all the way to 60, but it seems unlikely. I wonder if they'll get to a point, you know, this happens in a normal year. There are games that get postponed for weather or what have you. And then toward the end of the season, if they are not necessary from a playoff perspective, it's not unusual for them to just get banged entirely, which is why you don't end up with every team in baseball playing a full complement of games every single year. So I wonder if they will, even though they have not announced anything to that effect yet, and I don't know anything insidery about it.

But I do wonder if as we approach the end of September, if they will look at the schedule and if, you know, the Cardinals are way out ahead or way behind or other teams that they're slated to play are way ahead or way behind and not really in the playoff picture, if they will just proactively bang games. But it seems unlikely that they will do that because the playoff field is 16 teams.

So a lot of teams are theoretically going to be in it for a while. So yeah, the Cardinals are now, I think, at the top of the ranking that I have just done in my head of teams that wish that the old playoff format were still in effect because they would at least get something of a break on the back end of the schedule if they make the postseason, provided they're not one of the wild cards. But now if they succeed in this strange, very strange year that they're about to stage, they'll just have played so much baseball in such a short amount of time even if we end up

with expanded roster rules which seems like it it must be likely right that they will change some of the roster rules to allow people to move up and down from the alternate site without exposing them to waivers i know jj cooper of baseball america proposed something along those lines that you want to have some amount of flexibility so that you can call up fresh, I mean, arms more than anything else. But the way that the roster rules are laid out in the ops manual, with a couple of exceptions, some guys have to be exposed to waivers before they can be moved around. So that would be bad. Yeah, they called up their top prospect, Dylan Carlson, and several other guys just for reinforcements, just for warm bodies here. And that was something that I think came up when it wasn't clear when they would be able to resume play. People wondered whether, well, could you just kind of promote a whole alternate Cardinals from the alternate site, just like the second stringers and just have them kind of cosplay as the Cardinals

for the rest of the season. And I'm glad that they're not trying to do that because that would feel, I don't know, the whole thing with Manfred saying that he wanted to get to credibility, whatever that is, I feel like the bar for being credible is pretty low this season just because of everything that has happened and the weird schedule and the playoff format change and the different rules and all of it just makes me feel like, all right, well, if you only ended up at 52 games or something, is that really going to put my nose out of joint?

I don't think so because look at how we're deciding everything this season. So if you have to end up with winning percentage determining things, that's fine, I think, or at least it won't bother me more or significantly more than just the general structure of the season and all the pandemic imposed limitations. I mean, we're all just trying to make do with this situation here. So I don't know that they need to get to 60, really. And it's nice that they are trying, I guess. But if it turns out that it's just too much baseball to cram into a short time, then I hope they will take it easy just in the interest of health again, because I'd be kind of worried about particularly the pitchers on this team who've just sort of been sitting around for a few weeks now.

And for most of this time, they have not been able to practice or congregate or scrimmage or anything. I don't know if they've been able to individually work out, stay in shape at least. But we've seen the potential pitfalls of the abbreviated ramp up to the start of the season in all of the pitchers who've gotten hurt so far this year at a really elevated rate and i would think that just sitting out three weeks after having just gotten started when almost every other team has been in action it's got to be pretty tough just to get back up to game speed but also just to keep your arm conditioned so it's long enough that you might really start to lose that condition if you weren't doing anything over that time.

So I would hope that they will be careful with their pitchers just because of what we've seen happen to everyone's pitchers so far. Yeah, I think that we would be right to be nervous about the health of their arms, but I think also, as we've seen and we've talked about on this show some of the you know some of the other stuff that position players might have to grapple with you know are we going to see more tweaked hamstrings and sort of other soft tissue stuff that will further sort of monkey with this already strange situation that they find themselves in i think that the reaction to it has been, you know,

part of it is the duration, the length of the layoff that they've experienced relative to the Marlins. But, you know, the Cardinals were supposed to be a contending team, right? This was supposed to be a team that was very much in the mix for the Central. You know, I think that they have demonstrated why it was very unkind of me to ask our staff to make predictions. I picked Jack Flaherty for the NL Cy Young. That seems quite unlikely now.

Even if he is able to sort of return and look himself and pitch really well, he just won't have pitched very much. And I don't know how people are going to think about all of the wonkiness in their schedule. So that's just, it's just really, it's really a problem and we can't afford, I don't think, any more significant outbreaks. So everyone needs to behave themselves. Zach, please Zach. Yeah, we'll talk about that. According to the Fangraphs playoff odds, the Cardinals are still a playoff favorite right now. At two and3, they have a 52.1% chance to make the playoffs, which is down only about 6 percentage points since the start of the season.

But I'm not sure that the playoff odds can accurately account for the effect of taking three weeks because most of your team got COVID. It doesn't really seem like something the projections are constructed to handle. So maybe bigger than usual error bars on that one. But yeah, kind of funny that it hasn't actually changed, which I guess makes sense because they haven't lost games. They just haven't played them yet. Yeah. Let's see. How many are we at now? 15, 16. I guess this makes sense we're at exactly 16 teams with 50 or better odds of making the postseason it checks out yeah makes sense that would be true but i'm dodgers and yankees it's nice that there are some things that still make a good deal of sense right um there is

some comfort to be had and like the dodgers looking like the dodgers and the yankees looking like the yankees and i don't know the cubs looking like the 2016 cubs so we're just throwing back to a prior happier era all the way around i guess yeah yeah the biggest changes now since the start of the season are let's see the rockies i guess are the the big winners they're up to about 70 percent right now so they're almost 40 a little more than 40 percentage points up since opening day and no one else is quite in that range on either end but you have the cubs and the a's are up 20 something percentage points and who's down the the nationals are down about 25 percentage points angels are down 20 something uh the red socks are down 44.8 percentage points which on our preseason staff post at the ringer where we had to pick flop teams bauman picked the red socks and i thought well can they

technically be a flop team? Because I don't know if anyone expects them to be all that good because they were not a playoff team last year. And then they traded Mookie Betts and then they lost Chris Sale. So the bar was already fairly low, but I kind of understood what he meant because the pitching staff just looked so thin and without Eduardo Rodriguez, even thinner. and it's been really bad I mean they just have no pitching on that team and so even though they didn't enter the season with high expectations they still sort of have been the flop team so far because they're 6 and 13 and they have looked quite terrible and their playoff odds are down more than any other teams

so that was probably a pretty good pick. Then again, I ended up taking the Phillies as my flop team instead. And unfortunately for Phillies fans, that's been pretty spot on too. Yeah, I'm trying to think who I... We'll do it this way, Ben. We'll look at our staff predictions post. And I will not run our poor listeners through the multiple iterations that this took in my google sheets actually I will because it's funny and it's a Friday and we were like what are

we going to talk about let's find stuff to fill with and this is funny Phil so Ben we're going to share it here here it was 2020 Fangraph staff predictions that was back in March then in July we had 2020 staff predictions 2.0 then we had 2020 staff predictions 2.0. Then we had 2020 staff predictions 3.0. Then we had 2020 staff predictions 3.0 for real once the actual form of the playoffs got clarified. That was funny. But so I am trying to think which of my staff predictions

I'm going to end up regretting the most. I'm going to end up regretting the most. And I think that I probably overestimated any of the teams in the Central. I took Cincinnati to win, which I don't know, it looks kind of okay. Yeah, I took the Cubs to win, but the Reds to win a wild card. But that was before we had 16 playoff teams

when we made those picks. I know, see, the benefit of them running late is that you get to redo them as if you meant to have them be involved in a 16-team field all along. I guess the question is, Ben, it's this when it comes to the Cardinals, because I think they're an interesting kind of case study for us, which is, does baseball have one more sort of protracted absence as a result of COVID in it? Or would one more team that has to go through something resembling the Cardinals force a reimagining of the entire schedule?

Because I'm still not quite sure that we have a good answer to that. But I don't know that baseball can endure another Cardinals level outbreak. And like they, they managed it better than the Marlins did in terms of the quarantining procedure they seemed to observe and how they reacted to the news that they had a positive test and how quickly they informed people and how long they kept people in isolation. I feel like we're approaching that point where if we have another contending team, you're going to have to rework a lot of stuff. And if it's a bad team, it's still going to require perhaps reimagining the back half of the schedule because I just don't know how you could fit any more than, gosh, what did I say? 10.8 innings per day. You couldn't really do much more than that. 10.8 innings per day you couldn't really do much more than that yeah i mean in one sense i think the longer the season goes the more likely it is to be completed no matter what like when you had multiple outbreaks within a week of the season started it really seemed like we were on the

verge of the whole thing getting canned and that didn't happen but we were like a few days away i mean the reports were you know on friday on on a Friday that Rob Manfred was warning people that the season might end on Monday or something. It seemed that know that another outbreak like the ones that we've seen so far could actually derail it. I think if you had a situation where it was clearly being communicated between teams so that they could not continue playing like in these cases with the Cardinals, it was like, all right,

well, we'll just take the Cardinals out of action. But at least after the initial not knowing what to do, everyone else kind of kept going. So if it's that sort of situation, I think if you've got 28 or 29 teams that are in pretty good shape, I guess you just kind of keep going and get in as many games as you can. So I think if you got to the very end of the season and there were a team that was taken out of action like this, then maybe they would just say, okay, that's it for you guys. Especially if they are not really on the playoff bubble, which is different from in the playoff bubble because there might be a playoff bubble. But if they were not a contending team and you had a couple weeks left or something, then I think you would just say, okay, everyone can just go home or don't go home because you don't want to spread this, but stay in one place. Don't play baseball.

I think that could happen. But yeah, at this point, I think we're past season getting canceled territory unless something worse happens, unless something more happens than happened before, which is possible, but so far so good, at least lately. Yeah. But I think it does, and we will use this as our transition to talk about the reaction of certain members of Cleveland's baseball team, perhaps. I think it does underscore the necessity for individuals to behave responsibly, even though individual action cannot be the sole sort of reaction to a pandemic but i think that if i were zach plesak's agent i would tell him to maybe take a break from social media ben i'd tell him he's not well served by instagram as a platform he could do better

elsewhere perhaps i agree yes so zach plesak was one of the two players on Cleveland who was reported by MLB security or was caught for breaking protocol, breaking curfew, going out, leaving the team hotel, having dinner with some friends, going back to a friend's place and congregating with some other people and then coming back to the team. And so he was sent home. Cleveland essentially called a car and whisked him away for a few days to isolate him from the rest of the team. And then it turned out that Mike Clevenger had been with him as well and was not outed at the same time for whatever reason and also did not come forward and say, at the same time for whatever reason and also did not come forward and say, okay, you caught Zach, so I'm going to admit that I was with him. He just sort of stayed silent about it and traveled with the team for a while. And I don't know how that eventually came out, but it did. So their teammates were not pleased and had some pretty harsh words in some cases.

Adam Pletko said something about how they have to earn the team's trust again. And I think Francona said something along those same lines. And instead of just totally owning it or staying silent, because both of those guys, Clevenger and Plisak, had made comments earlier in the year about how important it was to abide by these regulations and how it shouldn't be that hard to stick to these things for a while and you got to put the team first and all of that and then they broke that commitment and plesak was evidently not pleased about being the bad guy even though he kind of was the bad guy and he made a six minute or so instagram video in which he was driving and also holding the phone, I guess. I'm not clear on the camera work there, but he was driving and filming and also had his seatbelt on improperly vilify the way that he has been covered.

And he said the media is evil and fake and has been portraying what he did in some distorted way. Although even after listening to his rambling explanation, I'm not entirely clear on what he believes was misrepresented. I guess his case is that he was not going clubbing or something, was not partying. He says maintaining social distance and was with a fairly small group and that according to some CDC guidelines, maybe it was not an unsafe thing to do, but he does not dispute the fact that he broke the protocols and the curfew and did something that you're not supposed to do as a baseball player so i don't know that he's actually gotten that bad a rap here and i don't know that the video really helped yeah my initial

reaction to this was to focus on the fact that he was driving because it just was a, you know, it's a funny visual when you're trying to sort of fussily assert that you take other people's safety seriously to be distracted by filming while you're driving. I imagine he had, you know, one of those little deals you put on the dashboard that holds your phone. I bet it was that. Yeah, maybe. Although it changed, the angle changed a little bit, which was what confused me. But anyway. like changed the the angle changed a little bit which was what confused me but anyway i struggled with this though because on the one hand i think that you know the the entire project of playing baseball in the middle of a pandemic is just sort of ridiculous when you stop to think about it for

any length of time and i think that we and a lot of folks have written about this are sort of ill equipped as people people to think about more than the individual responsibility we all have in this moment to think about the broader sort of institutional responses that are necessary to actually successfully combat such a large-scale public health crisis, right? But you do have some responsibility, and I think the part of it that I found the most sort of dispiriting was that the risk is not abstract in the case of cleveland right like they have you know carlos carasco who is recovering from leukemia and is high risk and terry francona has had a variety of gastrointestinal issues which he has spoken about with a shocking and disgusting amount of candor. I will not be writing about it.

It's too icky, even for me. We are glad that he is on the mend. But you know, there are real people who he who both of these guys interact with every day who are higher risk, and you would hope that that sort of concrete person in front of you representing the risk of not taking this stuff seriously would be sufficient. So I think that he would have been better served to either say nothing or just to say sorry. You know, there have been other players, there have been other players who play for Cleveland who have goofed this stuff, right? Like, you probably don't remember that like Fran Milreis was held out of camp for the first couple of days because he had seen friends or something. He had done something in violation of the protocol.

And when he came back, he just apologized and owned it and said, I shouldn't have done that and I won't do it again. till I brought it up just now that that had even been an issue because there are people who react to stuff like this and are going to hold it against a player forever and aren't going to be reasonable but I think that we all understand in a moment like this that we are we are all of us just doing our best none of us are probably doing anything perfectly and Plesak is not wrong to point out that the guidance on what is and is not safe and the exact contours of that have changed over time although they are not quite as changing as he seems to suggest they are in that video. And so I think that people are broadly sympathetic to the idea that we have to do our best. And even when we do our best, that there are still going to be people, unfortunately,

who fall sick with COVID-19 because it's a highly infectious disease that's spreading in communities. And so he should have just said sorry. If he had just said, I'm really sorry, I won't do it again, and I look forward to regaining the trust of my teammates, that would have been enough for reasonable people. And you don't have to react defensively to unreasonable people. I mean, I say that as someone who's never done it ever because i am perfect in every way but i understand it's a tempting thing to do but like

you should just apologize to reasonable people and then get on with the business of trying to like be a better teammate yeah if he wants to placate his teammates like this doesn't seem like the best way to do it i mean just releasing this long video about how actually you weren't as bad as people are making you out to be. I mean, he didn't deny the basic facts of it. Right. And he's not like a COVID denier or anything. Like, you know, he said like his mom is a nurse and his brother's at risk for COVID or especially vulnerable class. And so he wasn't really minimizing it. And he was making the point that maybe what he did in certain places and for

certain people would be fine. Like he wasn't at the Smash Mouth concert with the bikers or anything, but still he's on a baseball team and he has to be around all these people all the time and they're all making these sacrifices and staying in their hotel to ensure that the team can continue to play and everything so it's just kind of like a putting the team first sort of thing right just to ensure that you don't get a situation where well i mean the cardinals or the marlins that's the worst case but even just if you can't play for a few days or whatever, like which is kind of true. Like, it just doesn't seem like it should be that hard to make the sacrifice. You know, the season is not that long.

Just hang out in your hotel. Don't see your friends that day. You'll have other opportunities. You're a young man. You have many saturday nights before you so just take this one off yeah and i don't know that i think it's like not hard i think that it can be quite hard but also i think that it is important enough to do despite it being difficult and you know i think the the sad reality is that the worst case

scenario is not a huge disruption to one's baseball calendar right the worst case scenario involves a member of your team getting very ill from covid and not recovering or not recovering fully you know not to make him feel i don't think that's actually cyclists and start a podcast but like not to make him feel worse than he already does but here i'll tell a story about myself rather than continue to to um to some poor zach plesak a couple weeks ago i had to i had to do a an errand run right and i went to i had to go to target and i went to target and i was wearing my mask as everyone in washington is required to do and then i was was done at Target and the Target is located near a Best Buy. And I

thought, oh, I could use some new stuff to watch. So I'm going to go see what's in the discount DVD bin. And I walked into the Best Buy and there was no one there. There was hardly anyone there. And I'm sitting there and I see that the great movie Jumanji, Ben, was for sale for $6 on Blu-ray.

Blu-ray Jumanji, $6. And I picked up6 on Blu-ray. Blu-ray Jumanji, six bucks. And I picked up that. We make our original. The original, please. Okay, yes, thank you. I have self-respect. And so I grabbed that, and they had the 20th anniversary edition of The Princess Bride

also on SuperDuper sale, and another thing on Quadruple Super sale. And so I picked up a couple of things, and I'm walking up to the register. And again, there's no one there there and everyone's wearing a mask but i had the thought as i was walking up to the register what if i contracted covid in this situation and then i had to tell my mother i got covid because i wanted to get you money for six dollars but on blu-ray ma so it was worth it like i would feel totally ridiculous wouldn't you feel terrible and and silly if carlos carasco got sick because you wanted to open packs

of cards with your buddies at their house like you would just that you know those things are important things in your life there's stuff you look back on fondly and they help to constitute like the fun stuff you remember doing with your friends and that you look back on years later and they're like, yeah, my pals. But we're in a weird moment. And so we just have to keep the stakes of the weird moment further forward in our minds and definitely don't record videos while driving. No. And put the seatbelt over your shoulder. Put your seatbelts on right.

Man. Not under your yeah you know how many people you know we have spent a lot of time in the last couple of months being reminded by people who are being ridiculous and making terrible arguments about the pandemic about how dangerous driving can be so put your seatbelt on sir yeah apparently police hack has now deleted the video cleveland president chris antinetti said i think if he had do-over, he may have said things a bit differently. Terry Francona said, I was disappointed. And breaking news, evidently, they were reinstated, but then immediately optioned to the alternate site. an open forum at the team hotel on Friday morning. Clevenger and Plesak talked to the team. There was some kind of Q&A, and I guess whatever they said didn't appease the other players, because now they're going to go to Eastlake for at least 10 days. Antonetti said, I do think there was a feeling like we want to be able to focus on the team,

all pull in the same direction, and go out and just try to focus on winning games, not deal with anything else that doesn't directly contribute to helping us win games. Now it's up to them to go down there, put the work in, and be an option for us moving forward. Pletko suggested the ordeal cast a cloud over the team during its two-game series against the Cubs this week. With this decision, the team has attempted to dismiss any further potential distractions. Huh, wow, real consequences, taking two of your best pitchers away from the team for a good chunk of the season. Evidently, the clubhouse had much the same take on the situation in the video as we did. Do you want to say something about Mookie?

Ben, I don't know. I think there's Mookie Betts as a future in baseball. I agree. All I wanted to say was that Mookie Betts hit three home runs against Chris Paddock. Well, they weren't all against Chris Paddock. They were all against the Padres. One three home runs against Chris Paddock well they weren't all against Chris Paddock they were all against the Padres one of them was against Chris Paddock I was upset about that part because I enjoy watching Chris Paddock play but I enjoy watching Mookie play also Ben Clemens looked at the first of Mookie's home runs and noted that it is just it was thrown in a part

of the plate where uh bets does not historically really hit for power which is not a knock on mookie because that kind of home run is sort of out of character for anyone based on where it was in the zone but um i just love that in a year like this when we have to worry about zach plesak not driving safely and the pandemic and the cardinals playing 175 000 games in the space of six weeks that we can still marvel at Mookie Betts, probably not actively adding a skill, you know, but having done a thing he's not really done before on a night when he hit three home runs and moved into some pretty exalted company in terms of the number of three home run games he has enjoyed in his career,

which now sits at six, I believe. He is one of only three players in Major League history to have six three home run games in his career, joining Sammy Sosa and Johnny Mize. That is such a strange thing. I think Jeff and I talked about that after he hit his fifth three-homer game, and we're puzzling about it then. And now it's even stranger because the two other guys that have the six three-homer games, as you mentioned, you've got Sosa, who of course has 609 career homers, and you've got Johnny Mize, who has 359 career homers. has 359 career homers. And then you have Mookie Betts, who has only 146 career homers, and yet he has concentrated 18 of them in those three games. It's very odd. He has more three-homer games than A-Rod and Mark McGuire. Those guys have five apiece. And so the proportion is all

out of whack. I don't know what to make of that. It could just be random, but it could be some kind of true talent for having extremely hot games where you're just in such a groove that you hit a home run every time. like you would want your home runs spread out more often if you could choose because in the six games that he's hit three homers in his team unsurprisingly has won all six of them by an average margin of seven runs which is just like overkill there was one one run win in there but if he were really like repeatedly a guy who tends to hit more of his homers in bunches and i guess we'll see over the rest of his career whether he actually continues to do that or whether it's a pure fluke. But you would want to spread them out a bit. It doesn't go as far when you put them all in one game because then you tend to just blow out the other team. It's weird, though.

It is weird. I think that for the typical player, you are absolutely right that you want to spread your home runs out more because they, you know, first of all, you personally are only going to hit so many and you want to get, you want to kind of sprinkle them throughout a season. But I think that one of the really great things about being a player of Betts' caliber is that you can afford, in terms of of people's perception of your offensive contribution in any given season, you have the wiggle room to bunch up a little bit and have a game like this that everyone goes,

wow, and writes headlines and inspires pieces about your home runs and inspires someone to look at all the ones you've hit before. You have offensive buffer built in because you are otherwise so productive at the plate that you can sprinkle it in and still feel as if you have contributed throughout the rest of your schedule. So that's what I think that's one of the things that makes Star Stars is that they have room for this kind of stuff in the resume. Yeah, it is arguably more fun this way.

And plus, then you get the chance at least at a four-homer game, which would be very memorable. At least in some of those games, you get an opportunity to do that. So that's fun. It made me, you know, this game very quickly, indeed, after Betts' third home run, the lead stretched to nine for the Dodgers. It was an 11-2 game.

And, you know, it was the only game. Yesterday was a weirdly light day. I feel like there should be baseball on 24-7 because of our current predicament. But yesterday was. Just make the Cardinals play around the clock. I'm really worried about all of them. I'm deeply concerned. But, you know, this was the only game on late.

And so I had it on and probably would have anyway. But when the lead stretched to nine, I thought about turning it off. And then I was like, no, I need to leave this on because Mookie's going to get one more plate appearance. And then when he only single, I was like, ah, nuts. I'm so disappointed. Yeah.

He was my preseasonseason nl mvp pick and uh he would be the second player ever to win mvp awards in both leagues if he does that after frank robinson so right now i guess uh no one can hope to catch mike yastrzemski but if if anyone does maybe it'll be muki or fernis. We'll see. Oh, all right. This is a good moment for us, too. I know that you and Sam did some Is That Guy Good? But let's just do a little check-in on the ward leaderboards here at Fangraphs.com because it's fun. Because this is starting to look a little more normal.

Yep. In a way that I appreciate. So as you alluded, so we have Stremski and Fernando Tatis Jr. tied at 1.5 war. Stremski does have a WRC plus edge there. None of this matters. It's like 88 plate appearances. But Betts checks in at third with 1.3 wins. Blackman, 1.2, whose batting average has fallen to a disappointing 472.

Charlie, are you even trying anymore, sir? And then we have Brandon Lau lau of the rays donovan solano man yeah that's still happening dj lemahue starling marty mike trout is at nine top 10 yeah top 10 we're approaching something resembling normal and then bryce har Harper checks in at 10. I should note that LeMahieu, Marte, Trout, Harper, as well as Aaron Judge all have one win above replacement. David Fletcher, who is having just a lovely little year, checks in right outside that with 0.9 wins. So we're starting to have it look like something we would have expected going into the season. Although I guess there are a couple of exceptions. There was a little while earlier this week where Jacoby Jones was in the top 10.

That was wildly confusing. Although I'm glad that Tigers fans are being given a really strong offensive performance to enjoy. Because that is not always a given with the Tigers. Even though in the last couple of years their entire squad has been made up of DHS playing out of position. And at 18, oh, Ben, I'm going to transition in such a nice way. You're going to be so proud. At 18 is Ramon Lariano, who just had his suspension reduced.

Four games for Ramon. Ben, I will admit that I have not yet gotten to listen to your and Sam's earlier episodes from this week. Did you guys talk about his quote? We did not. I want to cross-stitch his quote and sell it on Etsy. Tell us the quote. Ramon Lariano, in response to the Astros hitting coach Alex Andron egging him into a brawl, said, I regret charging him because he's a loser

and look that's that's objectively not a super nice thing to say i think that it is an appropriately mean thing to say to someone who apparently insulted uh ramon lariano's mother which you just shouldn't do because uh that's not nice and you don't know her. But I think that this would be a useful approach to life for many of us, myself included, especially those of us who have to interact with the discourse on Twitter. We don't have to always comment on everything. We can let some stuff go because the people who are saying it are, I won't call them losers because it feels mean, but it's obviously unserious and we need not rise to the occasion. So I think Ramon Lariano deserves a lighter suspension, not only because he did not instigate the fight, but because his perspective on it seems to be pretty great.

Yeah. If nothing else, these players sniping about Astro's brawls have given us some great quotes. There's that one and there's the Joe Kelly one that I referenced at the beginning of this episode. Welcome to planet Earth. A debacle, which is just a very handy quote in this year. I don't think the debacle he was talking about is very high on the list of debacles on planet Earth right now. But yeah, that just sort of sums up an attitude about everything. So thank you, Joe Kelly.

Yeah, that was delightful. And then this week also gave us Steven Strasberg getting ejected from a game where he was sitting in the stands. Oh, yes, right. Did you interact with this at all, Ben? Yes, I saw that. He was sitting behind the dugout

as he is required to do for social distancing purposes in a mask and started heckling the home plate umpire and said a very naughty word that was captured quite loudly because there's no one there and uh and then he was ejected and he achieved a thing that ben i feel like i have been unable to successfully affect out in the world which is he he was wearing a mask but his smile radiated all the way up to his eyes and you could just tell that he was like yeah fine inject me what are you gonna do whatever like i'll just go sit i don't know did he go sit on the concourse like is he

then sitting in the clubhouse i suggested on twitter that he should take advantage of a rule in the rule book that allows both managers and players, when ejected, to change into street clothes and then go sit in the stands, which he was technically already doing, but wouldn't it have been great if he had gone to one of the outfield rows where all the home runs were getting hit out to left and had just been sitting there ready to shag home runs?

That would have been fantastic. Yeah, I would have enjoyed that. Yeah, so we're going to allow ourselves to enjoy these tiny bits of whimsy in a terrifying year because everything is awful and that's the only way we're going to get through. So there we go. I want to share some history here before we end. Sunday is the 100th anniversary of the fatal beaning of Ray Chapman. Oh, gosh. fatal beaning of Ray Chapman. So this is not going to be a very uplifting note, but I wanted to mark that occasion because I was just reading about it in one

of my favorite newsletters by Craig Wright, which I mentioned every now and then pages from baseball's past baseball's past.com. Go check it out. And of course he was beamed by Carl Mays and he was killed and he is thus far and hopefully forever the only player who has been killed in a major league game that way and so there were some things that I wasn't that aware of about this story and Chapman was evidently just an extraordinarily popular player he was one of the most well-liked players in the league at the

time, and so people were extremely upset about this. And Carl Mays was kind of on the other end of that spectrum. People didn't really like him even before this happened. He was just kind of a cold, taciturn type, or maybe not the most socially adept. So these guys were kind of opposite ends of the personality spectrum, but they met up at this tragic moment. And one thing that I think people are maybe aware of is the fact that probably a contributing cause to this was that the ball was very hard to see at the time. So there was a new rule about spitballs. You were not allowed to throw spitballs anymore in other foreign substance pitches unless you were grandfathered in. And in the game, the other starter, Stan Kowalewski, was a legally grandfathered in spitballer, which is a weird

thing. You'd think that if you decided that this was cheating and that it was perhaps unsafe, If you decided that this was cheating and that it was perhaps unsafe, it's like there were guys throwing spitballs for years and years after that just because they had been throwing spitballs before, which I guess I understand. If you built your whole career around being a spitballer and then it was decided that that's cheating, it's sort of unfair, I suppose, to change the rules on you midstream after you've devoted your whole career to pitching in a way that was legal. So I guess I get it. But on the other hand, it's kind of weird. You could just say this is cheating, so you're not allowed to do it anymore. Too bad. Anyway. No, it's weird.

I think you should have conviction in it being weird because when other rules change, there's not much that gets grandfathered in right like when we got instant replay we didn't say oh but like for this year uh anyone who you know isn't a rookie this year gets to still employ like the neighborhood play and we didn't do that right yeah yeah that'd be weird yeah i guess in this case it's because it's like a skill or it's like you might have only gotten to the big leagues because you were adept at a spitball or maybe you spent your whole career practicing and refining your spitball. Sure. you can't throw sliders anymore or something. Yeah. But it's, you know, and if it hadn't been cheating before and suddenly you're saying it's cheating, then it's kind of like, well, you didn't say it was cheating before.

Sure. So I built my whole career around this, and now you're telling me I can't throw this pitch anymore? But I don't know. I think the safety consideration is a more compelling argument there. But, like, we didn't say every, you know, left-handed reliever who has been up in the majors gets to work their way around the new uh three batter minimum rules right true

yeah weird point yeah so anyway stan kowalewski was pitching that day and he was one of these legally grandfathered in spitballers and they had been replacing the ball more often in that season but because there was a legal spitballer and because Mays was not someone who was known for doctoring pitches evidently the umpire Tom Connelly had allowed the ball to be in play for quite a while and it had gotten very dirty and people said it was tough to see and evidently according to most of the eyewitnesses Chapman just didn't seem to see the pitch at all. He just barely reacted or didn't react. And Mays was a submariner, and so he was throwing from a weird angle, and his pitches were kind of hard to pick up

in the first place. And this is kind of an unpleasant paragraph here, but when it actually happened, the sound was so loud that Babe Ruth said he could hear it from right field. And the ball ricocheted into fair territory, and so Mays didn't even realize what had happened, and he thought it had hit the bat, so he fielded the ball and threw to first base. Not until then did he even realize that he had hit Chapman. And Chapman seemed kind of okay at first. He lost consciousness, but then they were able to revive him. And he walked out to the outfield and he was conscious for a while while he was waiting for the ambulance. And then even in the hospital, they did some surgery and relieved some pressure. And he was talking and it seemed like He would be okay potentially

But then things took a turn for the worse And he didn't last through The rest of that night But this was a very poignant Story this is sort of sad But while he was waiting for the ambulance In the clubhouse he was conscious And he tried to say something to the team

Trainer but he couldn't get the words Out so he ended up Point something to the team trainer, but he couldn't get the words out. So he ended up pointing to his ring finger and the trainer realized what he was asking for. Because one of the trainer's tasks was to hold jewelry for the players that they didn't want to wear on the field during games. So Chapman had given him the diamond ring that had been a gift from his wife. He was fairly recently married, I think, and had just found out that his wife was expecting. So the trainer gave him the ring and he got it on his finger before he was unconscious again. So that was quite sad to read that little anecdote. And because he was a good player and such a popular player,

of course, there was a great outpouring of grief when this happened. And the game was canceled, of course, the next day's game and then the game when the team attended the funeral and the flags were at half mast. And on the day of the funeral, games were stopped everywhere for a few minutes for moments of silence and in Cleveland, I'm reading here from Craig's newsletter, the outpouring of grief was remarkable. The family declined to have Ray's body lie in state at the ballpark for public visitation, but when thousands of fans crowded around the funeral home, they ended up allowing 3,000 members of the public to file past his

casket there. In less than 48 hours after Ray's death, his fans raised $1,500 that paid for a huge floral arrangement and swelled a fund that was raising money for a bronze tablet to be displayed at the ballpark in Chapman's memory, which I believe is still on

display all these years later and was lost for a while but was found again. And one of the really sort of shocking things about this is that nothing changed, nothing happened as a result of this. Like even though this was the worst case scenario, and of course players had been seriously beamed and even had their careers cut short or endangered before, but this was the worst possible thing that could happen. And you'd think that it might

force some change. Like people are always saying baseball doesn't act or people in general don't act until something terrible happens and then they react belatedly. So people say that about pitchers getting hit by comebackers sometimes. Like, oh, they're just not going to do anything unless the worst case happens. And in this case, the worst case happened and nothing happened anyway so they started replacing the ball a little more frequently but that was about it like people talked a little bit about some sort of protective headgear but nothing came of it the hit by pitch rate went up in the following season it was another more than 20 years until the first team, the 1941 Dodgers, started using protective inserts in their caps, not even helmets, but just inserts. And then it wasn't until the 50s that that became more widespread. And I think 56 was when you had to have some sort of protection or insert. And then it wasn't until 1971 that you were actually required to wear a batting helmet. And there, again, speaking of players getting grandfathered in, if you were a veteran, you didn't have to wear a batting helmet. What?

Yeah, which is an even more nonsensical application of the grandfather rule, I think. Because it's not like, you know, you put a helmet on and now you can't perform anymore. You can't hit. I mean, maybe it's mildly uncomfortable or distracting or something, but come on. Like if you decide that this is a life or death thing and you have to protect players, then I would think you don't say, well, you were unsafe before. So you get to continue to be unsafe indefinitely. So that's really weird.

But again, like more than 50 years until you had to wear helmets and granted they may not have had great technology for modern style batting helmets in 1921 but still like it took more than 20 years for any team to have really any kind of consistent protection other than an individual player here or there and decades more until it was commonplace, which is just really kind of incredible that it took that long, even though there was a very clear example of the risk that people were taking. And fortunately, this didn't happen, although there were other costly hit by pitches, of course, but it's kind of amazing that even presented with that object lesson. It was just like, well, it didn't happen before that.

So let's hope it doesn't happen again. I think I will remember that detail about him wanting his ring for the rest of my life. I know. It's very sad. Gosh, that's devastating. Yeah. I am going to transition to a thing that is going to sound funny and i don't mean it to when did when uh when did ballplayers start wearing cups that's a good question i don't

know and i i don't ask that question because i think that it like says anything meaningful about what men value themselves i'm not suggesting that that's not what i'm suggesting but i'm curious if if it is this would be an interesting question for us to put to to to thorn maybe like what is the was it it was it truly a technological issue where they just didn't really have anything beyond the inserts that they thought was particularly effective? And so players are just like, eh. And how did that sequence with other, not just cups, but other pieces of protective gear that we now just assume to be givens in modern game? Although there are players who eschew cups now. Although I have to wonder if after Mitch Hanager's saga,

if every man in baseball wears one now. Yeah. Even just like going to the store, you know? Right. Driving somewhere. But yeah, I would be curious if it is a signal of being sort of entrenched and stubborn and feeling that it interfered with your ability on the field

or if it was just that the technology had not quite caught up in a way that made it obvious that this was superior, right? Because even with an insert, maybe you're thinking, well, how much does this really do? But gosh, the ring thing is devastating just to bring it full circle to the more serious matter rather than me. Yeah. Quick Googling suggests that the first cup wear

may have been catcher of course it would be a catcher yeah claude berry in 1904 perhaps may have been the first and he wore a steel cup so so cups came around before helmets that's for sure yeah i guess you can read into that what you will. Well, especially for a catcher, you're more vulnerable probably more of the time. And catchers had helmets. Right, right. So that doesn't seem like it, you know, that's not like a Malcolm Gladwell anecdote. Or maybe it is because it doesn't actually say anything. Yeah, yeah.

Or maybe it is because it doesn't actually say anything. Yeah. I'm feeling a little free and sassy on a Friday, Ben. I think we can gauge that. In addition to my blackberry cucumber Le Cruy, which is one of the ones that comes in a tall can. I'm not cheap. I am one third of the way through a beer. So maybe that's contributing to my

sassiness. A couple more things about the Mays and Chapman situation. Mays was kind of known as a headhunter. People had actually written before, like, he's going to hurt someone years before this actually happened. And most people seem to agree that this particular case was unintentional, although there were teammates of Chapman who believed that it was on purpose. But there was actually an incident that spring, and a teammate of Mays' Chick Fuster was hit in spring training and was quite seriously injured. quite seriously injured. And after that point, it seems like Mays' hit-by-pitch rate went way down after he saw that up close. That was just before he hit Chapman several months before, so his hit-by-pitch rate had fallen by that time. And then it fell further after the incident with Chapman. And after that, he did not hit batters more often than the average pitcher did. And Chapman was actually someone who tended not to get hit as often as the average batter,

although he did have a tendency to lean in and then sort of spring out of the way. But this was interesting. Yankees manager Miller Huggins was a lawyer, and he had Carl Mays in the district attorney's office by 1 p.m. on the day of Ray Chapman's death to get out in front of calls for legal punishment of Mays, such as a manslaughter charge. That worked great. The DA's office interviewed no other witnesses, nor did they do any background investigation into Mays' history as a pitcher. Based simply on Mays' interview, the DA's office exonerated Carl that Afternoon deciding it was purely

An accidental death and that no further investigation Was warranted no action was Taken against him in baseball although A couple of teams Detroit and Boston Made threats about refusing to play If Mays was pitching So clever I guess by Miller Huggins but if anyone was wondering

What happened with that That is the answer there. Apparently, Jeff Pfeffer was the noted headhunter at the time. Jeff Pfeffer, who came up in episode 1500 because of his brother, the big Jeff Pfeffer and Edward Joseph Pfeffer. Edward Joseph Pfeffer. Another thing about this is that while later in his life, Mays evidently seemed somewhat cold or not very remorseful about his role in Chapman's death, he was quite remorseful in the immediate aftermath of it. And the assistant DA who interviewed Mays said that Carl was tearful and full of regret.

Mays told the press, it was the most regrettable incident of my career, and I would give anything if I could undo what has happened. Chapman was a game-splendid fellow. But then, despite whatever regrets Mays had, he never accepted any blame for Ray's death and was quick to say someone else was at fault. His target the day of Chapman's death was Hall of Fame umpire Tom Connolly.

Oh my god. Yeah, if Carl Mays had had an Instagram video, he would have been going on and on about the umpire evidently. Mays told the press it was the umpire's fault. A roughened spot on a ball, sometimes even a scratch

Will make a ball do queer things The ball that hit Chapman Was a fast one that took a fierce jump As it approached the plate Umpires are instructed to throw out balls That have been roughed This one was allowed to stay in the game By Tom Connolly who was umpiring at the plate

Somewhere along the way This morphed into a mistaken detail Often still used today That before the fatal pitch either Mays or catcher Muddy Rule asked Connolly to change the ball And that Connolly refused As far as Craig has been able to determine neither Mays nor Connolly ever said anything to support that And certainly not in the days immediately following the tragedy But still just to be like yeah it was the umpire's fault

I mean even if you just said well it's baseball and it's part of the game and I hate that it happened, but it was an accident or whatever, fine. But just to be like, it was the umpire's fault. And just to say it was the umpire's fault because the ball was scuffed up, like, A, you're throwing the ball, so you know it was scuffed up. throwing the ball so you know it was scuffed up so if it's unsafe to throw a scuffed up ball then aren't you the one who's taking that risk and endangering the hitter i mean like maybe it's the umpire's responsibility to say something but still like take a little response it seems like you know if he were saying it were it was an accident that's one thing but if he's saying it was the ball right no better than anyone else the condition of the ball was in your hand yeah i i also think that if you need to have some self-awareness if you are a pitcher who has a reputation for headhunting yeah you know who was

at fault all the other times right yeah right you know you just need to know who who both who you are and who you are perceived to be and uh and and have take some some responsibility especially because this guy was clearly affected by what happened and acknowledged it as a tragedy you know wouldn't he have been better off saying it was just a horrible accident rather than attributing it to a piece of the equipment that, like you said, he held in his hand? Right. Oh, gosh. Yeah, not great. One other thing that is happening this Sunday, another centennial, is the centennial of the founding of the Negro National League. Actually, it's not the actual day. That was earlier this year, but MLB is celebrating it this Sunday, and all the players and umpires

and managers and everyone will be wearing patches with a logo for the centennial, and there will be MLB Network programming and various other things going on to honor the centennial. And of course, we've done some episodes about the Negro Leagues earlier this year. And just wanted to mention something I wrote about this that's up now because it was prompted by an Effectively Wild listener email, and it led to kind of a cool thing. So a few weeks ago, we got an email from listener Philip Hahn, who said, do you think the Negro Leagues will ever reach quote unquote major league status. In 1968, MLB decided that the Players League of 1890, the Union Association of 1884, and the Federal League of 1914 to 1915 were all major leagues, and they have been considered so to this day. So why not the

Negro Leagues? This raises the question of which of the leagues and which years were truly major, but I think these questions should be explored. What do you think? And I didn't know the whole history here, so I sent Philip's email to a couple historians and scholars, and one thing led to another, and then I ended up talking to a bunch of people who were very familiar with this and learned a lot. And so it's true that the Negro Leagues technically are still classified as not major leagues because this committee, the Special Baseball Records Committee that was convened in 1968 to settle this question of which leagues had been major so that they could make the big official definitive baseball encyclopedia and know what to put in there. They just decided that it was all of these earlier leagues and, of course, the AL and the NL, and they didn't even say in their decision anything about the Negro Leagues. And the five all-male, all-white members of that body are now long gone. But I spoke to David Neft, who has been a guest on the show before, and he was the person who put together that encyclopedia. And so although he was not technically on that committee,

he was familiar with what it talked about and he was at its meetings. And he says that the Negro Leagues never even came up. It wasn't even that they decided that, oh, we can't count the Negro Leagues because the stats aren't comprehensive or because schedules were irregular or something like that, just didn't even seem to cross their mind. It wasn't on their radar to even think about it, which— That's worse. It is probably worse.

And that decision stands today. So, I mean, that's the official position of Major League Baseball. And, you know, MLB has done some good things, I think, to raise awareness of Negro League history and greater appreciation of all that. And in a way, I was probably only looking into this, and maybe the question was only prompted because of those things and because of the Negro League's Baseball Museum's efforts to publicize this centennial. But still, it's kind of when you think of all of the honoring that will be happening this weekend and the players that they are honoring are still

not considered major leaguers according to the records and the classifications and the rule books. And so if you go to baseball reference, for instance, the Negro Leagues are still grouped with minor leagues and foreign leagues instead of these leagues that the SBRC decided were major. And so I am certainly not the first person to think about this. And Negro Leagues historians and researchers have been bringing this up for decades now. And in fact, there was a book that came out last year called The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues that is a collection of essays by a lot of great writers and historians. And they made the case in many very convincing ways that the Negro Leagues deserve to be classified as major leagues. And so I brought this to John Thorne, the official historian of Major League Baseball.

brought this to John Thorne, the official historian of Major League Baseball, and his position on this has changed because he used to think that some of the reservations that the SBRC had about the National Association, which they said was not a major league because of irregular scheduling and records and that sort of thing. He thought that would also apply to the Negro Leagues. But the thing is that a lot of the nitpicks, all of the nitpicks really that you could have about the Negro Leagues, like the fact that the season lengths varied or that they played a lot of exhibition games or barnstorming or that it wasn't well covered or that sometimes the crowds weren't great, like all of these things that you could hold against a league was clearly related to the fact that the conditions at the time were totally working against them.

I mean, they didn't have capital. They had to do all these things to make ends meet. They didn't own their own parks. They had to barnstorm. They had to do whatever it could to survive. And, of course, they weren't going to get covered in some papers. And there were people who weren't going to go to those games or, like like the fact that people didn't cross from one league to another, which is something that like with the Federal League or some of these other leagues, you had a lot of former or future major leaguers in them. Whereas in the Negro Leagues for a lot of that history, of course, you didn't have that cross pollination, but we know why that was.

And so you can't really hold it against them and say, well, they were discriminated against at the time. And so the records aren't great or these other caveats that we could apply. And so we can't make the major league now. No, you could just say, well, we understand why that was the case and we're not going to hold it against them now. So John has changed his stance on this. And I went to an MLB spokesperson to ask if MLB has considered this or would consider changing this classification and took a few weeks because of everything else that's going on. But they have actually started to explore it and discuss it. And it sounds like there's maybe some momentum toward forming a committee of some sort with a bunch of experts to figure out how to do this, because there are some complications

like which Negro Leagues do you include and when does it start and when does it end? And how do you meld the stats with other major league stats and what source of stats do you use? So there are a lot of details to be worked out but it sounds like there is actual movement and that this could happen sometime in the near future because i think they just realized like okay we're we're celebrating the negro league centennial and we're saying black lives matter and also we're in the midst of this 60 game season where teams are just not playing for weeks at a time and we're changing the rules all the time so this is like as erratic a season as you could imagine and yet we're still

abiding by this decision of this committee from 50 plus years ago that didn't even give them a chance and i think they have realized that that position is pretty indefensible. So there is real momentum there. And, you know, obviously that is a testament to the players themselves and to the researchers and historians who have spent decades making the case for the Negro Leagues that I relied on in my article. So they're the ones who deserve the credit for this,

but it's kind of cool that it was a question from a listener that prompted this more immediate discussion and possibly some change here. So thank you very much to Philip for bringing it up. Yeah, that's fantastic. I think, like you said, we have to not only take into account the social conditions at the time and the racism that kept these players out of the major leagues and also led to gaps in the coverage of them at least in the white press but also like you said like so much has been done in the last

couple of decades to unearth the history that there is which is quite extensive and the records are you know they're often harder to find but they're being resurfaced and found and we have a much better understanding of the statistical records of individual players and games and teams. And so I think that that's, you know, if we were to make that move, it not only acknowledges those players as they were, but all the efforts that have come on since then to make sure that, you know, they are recognized and sort of remembered, not just in contrast in opposition to the league they weren't allowed to play in but to acknowledge their very real accomplishments on the field i mean the level of play before integration was very different than

it was after because those players were purposefully excluded so seems seems only fitting that we would acknowledge them as a major league and give the credit where it's due. So that's fantastic. Yeah, doesn't change anything about how good those players were or the facts or anything. But still, it just seems like a very obvious thing to do to recognize their skill and why they were in that league. why they were in that league. And just, I mean, if you're going to call AL and NL major during those years when a lot of the top talent were not in those leagues, then I think you have to do the same. So it's just, it's one of these things that I think no one thought about it at the time, clearly. And then, you know, time went by and, and in 1968, I mean, obviously, everything was different.

But in terms of the Negro Leagues, you hadn't really had the extensive efforts to put the stats together. And Robert Peterson's book that rekindled a lot of interest in the Negro Leagues had not come out yet, and that was before you had any Negro Leaguers in the Hall of Fame. So it was a different time in many ways. And so just to not overturn that and revisit this for all this time, I guess, you know, it just kind of slipped through the cracks, I think. But now that there's so much attention, fortunately, being paid to the Negro Leagues, it just seems like, okay, let's undo that or at least do something different now. Yeah, it's encouraging that our understanding of both the historical record as it is as an artifact of history and where that era sits in terms of an unfortunate

aspect of our country's past is shifting and the way that we want to think about those things and acknowledge them as changing too. And so pretty cool. Yep. Okay. Well well we will wrap it up there have a good weekend i'm gonna go buy some stamps ben oh yeah please do yeah i'm gonna spend some money on stamps they have they have scooby-doo stamps ben they have henry james stamps don't know what that's about excited to figure it out they have uh they have a save vanishing species stamp which is about tigers not the postalal Service. But they look pretty snazzy. So I'm going to go buy some stamps.

Okay. Get a lifetime supply. Get all the forever stamps. Yeah. That'll do it for today and for this week. Thanks to all for listening. 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 Thank you. Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other

podcast platforms. 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 wonderful weekend. We will be back to talk to you early next week. Bring on the major leaves Bring on the major leaves Bring on the major leaves