Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1623: Robot Slumps

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about how many negative WAR an average fan would be worth over a full MLB season, discuss an MLB fan survey, what they would want to ask fans, and how much MLB can actually improve baseball’s popularity, break down a baseball music video for “The Adults Are Talking” by […]

🎵 You want me to, but then you want me to do the same as you Hello and welcome to episode 1623 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hello. You made a comment. Evidently, I don't recall exactly what you said, but on episode 615, you said something about the Winslow replacement of a civilian being considerably less than zero. It was when we were talking about Abel Baker Charles. We had to assess the talent level of the unknown hooker. Oh, that's great. Okay. Well, someone was inspired by that discussion to look into this question in depth of how much a civilian would be worth or how little a civilian would be worth.

And there's a semi-viral Reddit thread about this, and it's by the user slightlyyaw__kword. And he wrote about 1,500 words considering this question of how much he would be worth, and with the caveat that he's not allowed to take the field, so he could have gone even lower on the scale if he had said that he would be playing the field, but I guess rightly assumed that he would not because he would be terrible. So even as a DH, he went through all the numbers, the batting, the base running, the positional adjustment, the batting, the base running, the positional adjustment, and he came out to about negative 15 wins above replacement for a civilian as DH. You took a look at this post. Do you agree with the reasoning or the conclusion? Well, first, I'd just like to note that the username is slightly awkward with an underscore between W and K, so it's slightly awkward.

Oh, that's right, yes. There there's no k word i misread that all right yeah pretty good it's pretty good uh logic now it's a lot less fun when you make yourself the dh because it's all the all the fun is in imagining yourself on defense and i think when you really talk about how much damage you could create, it's like that Saved by the Bell episode, you know, where they bought potatoes on margin. Do you remember that? No. Okay. So this was during the Good Morning Miss Bliss years. And there was an episode where, as a class project, they had a little bit of money to buy stock with, and then they were going to see if they could, you know, invest stock, you know, invest in the stock market.

And Zach got this bright idea to buy potato futures. And he bought them on margin or as I believe Screech called it on margarine. And what they didn't realize was that the amount that you could lose if you buy, say, $50 in stock is $50. But if you buy $50 of potato futures on margin, you could lose an unlimited amount. And so when you're talking about the value of a civilian, slightly awkward civilian, as a hitter, all this person can do is make out after out. You can't make more than three outs at once. And you probably can't make more than one, and you're just going to basically have a slash line of zero, which is actually what a lot of baseball players have a lot of games. So you could fit right in. And then you could do base running.

That'll hurt a little bit, but again, the most you can do is make an out. Whereas on defense, it's unlimited. The amount of damage you could do, unlimited. You could have every single player on the other team score every single time infinitely because of how bad you are at defense. And so slightly awkward just skips that step and says, well, of course I would be the DH. I would not play in the field.

And that's logical. No manager in their right mind. Although I think one of our teams, I think, had two civilians. But no manager in their right mind would put slightly awkward in the field. So that's, I think, accurate. No manager would put him at DH either. So if you're going to do it, you might as well go all the way. Well, you only have nine.

I think the presumption here is that you only have, you know, 10 players. And so you have to have him, you know, on the team somewhere because you don't otherwise have enough players although i guess the pitcher would just bat for themselves anyway getting past that it comes to the conclusion that what he would never get a hit even though he cites the enos saris article that concluded that a civilian could get two hits a year if trying but But rather than take those two hits, I think that comes to the wiser conclusion that the best strategy would be to just take every pitch. Further comes the conclusion that he would walk about 3% of the time. I one time looked at this with what would happen if a pitcher never swung. And I think I came to the conclusion it would be

about 4% of the time. So pretty close. I think that's actually probably generous for a reason that is not addressed here, which is I think that the civilian batting would, it would be very clear had no intention of swinging the bat ever. Yes. And because of that, now everybody says, oh, so then the pitcher could throw strikes. I'm taking that into account. I still think pitchers would miss and would walk you every 25 to 50 at bats but i i think umpires would be very ungenerous toward the hitter who obviously wasn't going to swing i think the umpire would just say look if

you're never going to swing i'm not going to waste everyone's time exactly i'm not going to give you credit for anything so i think you would end up with a huge strike zone and maybe walk even less often than that. But yeah, so a 0-0-0, 0-30, 0-0-0 slash line. The base running, since he's only on base 18 times, he comes to the conclusion that he would be the slowest player in baseball by a lot, which I think is true. I think that we don't give the slow baseball players enough credit for how fast they really are. I one time clocked myself going to first and I was worse than, you know, worse than a Molina. And at the time I think I was like a 28 year old healthy person. So concludes what one base running run lost and a total of negative 15 war. And I think

that's probably pretty close. Yeah. I thought he took a good approach to the problem. And there's an essay by Bill James in the new Bill James handbook that just came out recently where he comes up with this new metric called batter game score, kind of an equivalent to his pitcher game score. And it's maybe not quite as useful or as elegant for hitters. But one of the interesting conclusions that he comes to is that most batters, really all batters, concentrate all of their production in a given season in a small number of games. Most of their games, they're terrible. They hurt their teams, they go have 30 good games or something in a season at the plate. And that's where all or most of their value comes from. So in most of the games, you would not necessarily know that Slightly Awkward was who he is and not an actual player. although I guess you would know because he never swings, which if everyone knew that he were not going to swing,

you'd think at a certain point pitchers would just treat that as a break. They'd stop throwing anything hard. I mean, they wouldn't max out. Their cruising speed is still hard for a civilian. But, you know, if they took a lot off, if they just said, okay, I'm going to lob it in there. I'm not going to bother throwing sliders or anything. I'm just going to basically throw change-ups or what would be change-ups to a typical hitter. I wonder if there is a point at which it might make sense to swing if you lull them into a false sense of

security for like half a season and then suddenly, you know. Yeah. Well, so no, it wouldn't because your primary incentive here is to get out of there alive. And the pitchers throwing batting practice fastballs to take advantage of your lack of swinging significantly decreases the chances that you're going to get hit by a pitch and have it kill you. And so I actually think that if you were in a purely... If this were strictly about maximizing your production, then I do think on like an O2 count, you would probably still want to swing and try to get one of those two hits

based on the fact that yes, probably the pitcher is not going to treat you very seriously and is not going to, you know, throw you chase pitches, for instance, on O2, probably just going to keep, you know, throw you chase pitches, for instance, on O2, probably just going to keep, you know, pumping in easy fastballs. And if you can time it after having seen, you know, 100 plate appearances worth of these, you might have a chance of blooping one out over an infielder or at least making contact and advancing a base runner, for instance. So I don't think you would do it with a runner on first and less than two outs because then

you might get into it, hit into a double play. But, you know, 0-2 count, runner on third, nobody out. It probably makes sense to go up, start swinging there. What are the odds that the pitcher is going to throw four in a row out of the strike zone against you? Probably not that good. But as soon as you swing, you have now challenged these people. I wrote about this in the in in the piece i wrote for espn about would you play if you had the chance to play would you uh how what is the sort

of minimum amount of humiliation that you would suffer and would it be worth it and one of the things that i bumped up against was would you would you swing and and if you the the minute you swing you're basically telling the athletes okay now you can humiliate me. Like you, before that they have no real need to humiliate you because whatever quirk of circumstances has forced you out here, uh, you're no threat to them. You didn't, you're, you're not trying to, you know, challenge them in any way. They don't, they have nothing to prove against you. So they're just going to throw their strikes and be, you move on but once you start trying to embarrass them they're going to start trying to embarrass you back and so you can't really swing once the first swing is like

game on for the rest of the league and so i do i think you have to keep the bat on your shoulder the entire time for your own for your own sake and i if this is, if negative 15 is realistic for a DH, then if you were to play the field, and as you said, like the lower bound is boundless, basically you could be almost infinitely bad if you were in the field. But a realistic expectation, would you say like double this? Like you'd be a negative 30 war player if you were playing a position regularly, like the positional adjustment is not going to help you much. Although you might think that maybe depending on the position, you'd be a little closer to the average major leaguer than you would be at the plate. That to

me seems fair, right? I would not be as bad, I don't think, in the field relative to a major league player as I would be at the plate. At the plate, I would be so completely hopeless. I'd be totally outclassed. Whereas in the field, there are easy plays. You get cans of corn, you get pop-ups. I can catch those things. Could I catch them in a major league game with the stands packed and everyone watching me on TV? I don't know. But if the pressure were removed, at least I could make some of those plays, whereas I could very rarely hit any pitch that a major league pitcher throws. Yeah, you would definitely make a lot of major league plays

if you were a left fielder. And so obviously it's worse to be in the field than to not be in the field. No one would put you out there. But what would your war be? I mean, it wouldn't be trying to remember what we decided an eight fielder defense would lose. Didn't we think that Babbitt would go up like 30 points? Yeah, we said it would be big. It would be like the difference between a bad team and a playoff team. It was a question about like, well, what if you took a really good team and you took away one of their fielders,

then could they beat this other team? I think I did that. I'm skimming my article because I think I did conclude that you would catch, you'd catch a fair number of baseball. So you would be better than nobody out there. And there aren't that many plays.

I mean, there are games where a left fielder might not get any plays. And you had a civilian if slightly awkward was in left field then the other fielders would compensate and would play over and try to get everything near them so it wouldn't be as harmful so i concluded that you would cost your team something like 1.4 runs per game if you were a left fielder. And so that is 23 war a year, if I'm right about that. And so you'd be somewhere between 30 and 40 negative war. Yeah.

Okay. That's pretty bad. Yeah. All right. 40 negative war. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty bad. Yeah. All right. So a few people sent us a link to a survey that MLB sent out to a bunch of people. I don't know if there was any method to whom they sent the survey to, but people passed it along to us. And it's basically just a fan survey to ask about why they like baseball or what they like about it or how they started to like it or why they don't like it, what would make them like it more.

They're just basic questions, demographic type questions. And how did you start following baseball and do you like it more now than you used to? And how would you rank all of the major sports leagues and, you know, things that they're using to establish who exactly is answering this question so that they can bucket it later. But there were some interesting questions here, I think, on the survey, basically trying to get at what people want, which is something that we talk about a lot on this podcast. And I'm sure we will never hear or see the conclusions of the survey. MLB has done these things before. They never share data, to my knowledge. Once in a while, Rob Manfred, I think, has alluded to things that they have

determined from these surveys, but we've never seen any of the information. I would love to see some of it, but we haven't. So a couple of ones I thought that we could maybe talk about briefly. Like one of them is if you could recommend one change to make the game of baseball more appealing, what would it be? And there are things here that we talk about a lot. Number one, at least for me, I don't know if this was randomized, but it's multiple choice, faster paced, better broadcasters slash announcers, more music slash entertainment, more freedom more player expression is socks. access to players mic'd up on field dugout interviews autographs or other i like that the

example of more player expression is socks yeah socks i want them to have uh maybe that's like a is that like a stirrups versus socks question i want them to have more colorful socks i don't know but yeah none of it is like i want them to show emotion or bat flip or anything. It's just about what they're wearing, which is not really what people care about most, I think. But there was another question that asked about like Let the Kids Play campaign, and it asked if people are familiar with that. And if so, what do they think about it? And there were four choices. Never heard of it. Sounds familiar. I agree. Let the kids play, or I do not agree with it, which if you're selecting that, you're saying don't let the kids play. I'd love to know the data here, the breakdown, but what would you guess would be the most popular response to this? Or I guess if you want to say what yours is, I don't know. popular response to this or i guess if you want to say what yours is i don't know it's it's almost uh we're in kind of a different category i think like none of the options for why do you watch baseball was because i have to do a podcast about it or write articles about it i need ideas for a

column that those were not choices but did any of these uh choices stand out to you as this is what i would select or this is what i think everyone will select for what would you change the what would you change on there were you threw a bunch in there one of them was speed the game up faster paced yeah i think i think i think that it's got to be like 85 of people are going to choose that i hope so yeah for me it was the first listed one but i don't know if that's randomized or not but yeah a lot of these are just uh you know more access to watching games on tv sure there are a lot of people people who are blacked out on mlp tv would probably choose that number one because uh they can't watch the

game otherwise but yeah what's the phrasing of the question because i feel like more access to watching games on tv even people that are even even people that are blacked out of games, there are like, what, 9 to 13 games available every day, no matter what region you're in on MLB. The amount of access to televised games is considerably higher than it was during the period where baseball was the national pastime and baseball players were more famous than the president so it's hard to say that that more access to games is what baseball uh what would make baseball uh although a lot of people just watch their team now so they don't care if there are nine other games on if they can't see their own team yeah although the you know in most cases

those people can see the games. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that that's more of an answer to like, if you're a baseball fan, what's a thing the league does that super annoys you? It's not what would make baseball the national pastime again. Like that's like a thing where baseball is just really like sticking it to a certain segment of their fan base. like sticking it to a certain segment of their fan base. But it's not what's keeping the 300 million people in the country who don't know anything or care about baseball from picking it up. Yeah, actually, there are two different choices, more freedom for player expression. That was the Sox one, and then a separate one, which was less emphasis on baseball's

unwritten rules, which often those two things go together because they're unwritten rules against player expression. So those are sort of two facets of the same response, really. But yeah, some of these are like expanded playoffs. Probably MLB is hoping everyone's going to click expanded playoffs and then we can say, this is what the fans want. So 16 teams in the playoffs. No, I don't think that'll happen. but some of these are like you know more music more music slash entertainment i guess uh more entertainment would be good but not uh non-baseball entertainment if that is what they mean which is probably what they mean yeah yeah and then there's a question when watching a game online or on tv which of the factors below are important to your enjoyment of the game?

And this is a select all that apply question. And it's my favorite team is playing, player expression slash inclusion. Socks. A close game. In-game analysis slash statistics. Quality of the announcers. Watching with friends slash family or other entertainment mascot gamification music etc and uh gamification is that like fantasy sports yeah probably yeah maybe

gambling i don't know yeah but i mean i guess almost all of those are well important i was going to say they're all relevant i think for for most people, My Favorite Team is Playing would be overwhelmingly the number one. And then A Close Game, I think, is pretty important. And all the others, I guess watching with friends, family. Like in this case, this is online or on TV, so this is not an in-person game. So that changes things. And, you know, quality of the announcers is nice, but I won't necessarily turn off a game because of the announcers. I might turn on a game because I know that the

announcing crew is really great, but it's not usually a make or break thing for me. And, you know, I think most people, they're going to watch it because their team is playing and it's a good game and they like baseball and it's faster. Faster paced is what we were saying. I guess, you know, all of these are fairly basic questions and you hope that there will be a strong response favoring the things that we like or that our audience likes. And I will link to this survey on the show page if we want to cram the ballot box with effectively wild listeners who can express their preferences. But is there anything that if you were designing a survey and you could send out

a survey about baseball, you would want to know what baseball fans think? Or do you feel like you have a pretty good handle on what baseball fans think? Because you are one and you know a lot of them. Well, you asked what baseball fans think and so that kind of throws out the non-baseball fans and the question is whether you yeah right whether the goal is to cater the game to the fans that you have and get them to to watch a little bit more and to maybe to quit complaining so much when they see you um or if the goal is to to grow the game and as far as the the latter as far as the growing the game thing, in the last, I don't know what it is that caused this,

but in the last few months I've kind of gotten, I've felt like the conversation that we often have about all these little details and whether they make the game more or less watchable, we talk about them as though they're crucial to the health of the sport. And I think that the health of the sport, okay, how do I put this? And over the last few months, I have felt like the things that cause massive institutions like baseball to become more or less popular over the course of generations. They just aren't about things like pace or free agency or socks or how much music is played.

It just all feels like the macro trends in the world are just so much bigger than these conversations we have. And what we're really talking about when we have these conversations is what do I like? And maybe as a consumer, what will cause me to watch 5% more or 5% less of it? And we don't just want to talk about ourselves all the time. So instead, we frame it around this question of like, can Major League Baseball be saved? Or is it dying? And this big question. But I just don't think that that's how the world works.

There's so many people. And the things that move millions of people, I just don't think they're things that we usually debate. And so I guess the question of how do you entice 300 million other people to watch the game is not going to be on this survey that it's it's just going to be unsurveyable if i were doing a survey for fans and and i was just thinking of it narrowly along the five percent that i would watch more or less line i i guess i don't know i'm trying to think of how i can phrase a question to get the answer that i want which isn't really the point yeah maybe i have a feeling that there's not enough coverage of the day, that you should have more baseball on,

that it shouldn't all be on at the same time. If you give people the... This is weird, but if you give people the opportunity to watch baseball at 3 in the morning, I feel like some people would. Yeah. I don't know. People watched the KBO when it was on at odd three in the morning? I feel like some people would. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. People watched the KBO when it was on at odd hours in the US.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, obviously you can't have games being played at three. And so then you get into the question of, are you tape delaying it? Okay, nevermind. Forget I said any of that. I haven't thought this out that much.

I would like to establish a baseline for the brand of baseball that people prefer, even if it is not the determining factor for why baseball is popular or not popular. I still would like to just say this number of people like, you know, this number of runs scored per game or home runs per game or whatever, because as it is, we just have no real data, no consensus. just have no real data, no consensus. You know, people just say, well, people like home runs and offense. And other people say, no, it's too many home runs and people don't like this. And there's nothing to base that on except our personal preference and anecdotal information, really. And so I would like MLB to just establish, here is the product that people like, at least people who already like this product. People who are watching baseball want baseball to look more or less like this. And then we can figure out how active do we want to be in actually making it look like this? And is it better if it changes from time to time?

Or do we always want to keep it pegged to that? But that's what I would like. And I think it's difficult in a survey because if you tell people, you know, name how many runs per game you like. Do you like four runs per game, 4.5, five runs per game? I don't know that people can really feel intuitively what that means or, you know, the farther away you get from run scoring. If you start talking about home runs per game or hits per game or whatever, then it's even more and more abstract. So I don't know that it's actually possible to answer accurately with a survey, but I would like to know just like how many people actually like home runs and scoring fests versus

small ball and what percentage of games would you want to be, you know, tight nail biter, one nothing games and how many do you want to be like 10, nine games with tons of offense? I would like to just know that so that we could plan around it or not plan around it, but just not argue about it without any information really. Isn't part of the question though, how much you want to feel like this is planned. Part of the joy is feeling like what is happening is organic and that it is uh the result of players going out there and doing things that lead to unpredictable results and unpredictable outcomes and styles of play that are very natural and so you don't you don't want to feel like you're in a you know like uh i don know, a community that's been too overly planned.

In some ways you want to hide the architecture. Yes, but I think there should be a little more oversight because it just seems completely out of MLB's control and they don't seem to do anything to bring it into some line that everyone agrees on or the majority of people agree on it, it just seems like MLB is less active in monitoring the style of play than some other leagues are and intervenes less often in trying to correct some of these things that maybe most people would agree have gotten a little bit out of control and it's hard to know how to intervene or when to intervene if you don't really know what people prefer or how strongly they feel about it. So I would like a little more information about that. But I do completely agree with you that all these things that we obsess over endlessly are probably less important than many of the macro trends that we can't control and that MLB can't control and no one can control. And it's just, you know, what are people's other entertainment options and how much money is available to them and how much free time do they have? And is there a pandemic? And, you know, all of these other things that...

And also, yeah, I mean, the way that sports, that entire sports have in some ways become, I can't speak that intelligently about this, but I've heard other people sort of speak about how sports were kind of outside of the political groupings, that sports weren't seen as being like a cultural signifier in the way that like a minivan or a type of a car might have been, and that that's also becoming the case. And so if you're, for instance, soccer, the case. And so if you're, for instance, you know, soccer, and you are, I mean, you could do a bunch of debating about some small rules change or about whether to put ads on the uniforms or about what network to broadcast on or what sort of broadcast you have or all those sorts of things. But really like the dominant force for the next 50 years for soccer is going to be like how people see you as a cultural signifier. And that's like a much bigger thing that actually probably will sway tens of millions of people to either embrace or reject you as a sport.

the same way that like it feels like you know the the decision of whether you are a like whether you're a nascar follower probably is is is not really so much about i i about the broadcasters or about the pace you you just sort of know whether the people around you who um you align yourself with are also nascar followers and so anyway, that's just one example of many of like these huge cultural trends that probably totally engulf the smaller PICAU details that we tend to debate because we have some control over them. Which is not to say that commissioners or leagues have no impact on the sports popularity because I think they do. If you're a visionary, if you're Pete Rizzo and you see the way the winds are blowing and you see the TV is going to be huge and you kind of get in on the ground floor and you make football, the NFL, the big TV sport that everyone can see and everyone follows, then maybe that catapults you into dominance. And that is partly a result of those trends that you can't control,

you know, technology and TV becoming available and everyone getting one. But it's also you then taking advantage and knowing how to manage those trends to your advantage, you know. And so if it's Rizal, if it's David Stern, you know, structuring the league and it's marketing around its stars or whatever, I think there are things you can do to recognize how you can benefit or how you can avoid the abyss. And I don't know that MLB has been the most proactive when it comes to those things, although MLB has been good, I think, about embracing the internet and was a streaming pioneer. And MLB TV is kind of a model for other leagues and other forms of entertainment. So hasn't been completely left behind. But I think there are other things that baseball just can't really do much about.

So you just get buffeted by these forces and you have to figure out if you're springing a leak somewhere and bail out as quickly as you can. If you're springing a leak somewhere and bail out as quickly as you can. My moonshot idea for baseball has been that they should, they should basically the leagues, 30 teams should make a commitment to buy a baseball and a baseball glove for every eight year old forever. Like every year, every year you just, you can go redeem your voucher. Like on your eighth birthday, you get a voucher you go down to the sports store and you buy your your your mitt and your glove or maybe it's when you're seven or maybe it's when you're six but i i feel like the likelihood that you are obviously you can enjoy baseball as

as a spectator sport without having felt the the feeling of of catch. But I think that the correlation between having that feeling and having that familiarity with what it feels like to throw a ball and what it feels like to catch a ball and the pleasure that you get from seeing it done professionally is probably significant. And I think that if there's a real reason to doubt that baseball is coming back, it's just that most kids don't play it.

And I just don't know how you expect to appeal to millions of people in their 20s and 30s who don't have that connection with you already established. with you already established. So like if you do the math, if you figure like, you know, 20 bucks per kid for what, 5 million kids a year, that's $100 million. It seems like a lot,

but it's a $10 billion industry. It feels like it's nothing. Yeah, and I have seen Manfred cite the odd time that he has alluded to these surveys. He has said something like our data shows that playing baseball is a big deal when it comes to becoming a baseball fan. And he has said that, I think, to support MLB's efforts, you know, on behalf of youth baseball or softball. But those efforts, I think, could be better and bigger. Those efforts, I think, could be better and bigger. And yeah, there are some obstacles there because baseball can be an expensive sport.

It can be hard to find a place to play it. And I have seen some encouraging data, I think, on youth baseball bouncing back a bit, maybe because of concerns about head injuries in other sports not being as prevalent in baseball. So that's something, I guess. Anyway, I will link to the survey. You can check it out. There are some other interesting questions here about when attending a game, which factors are most important to you, and which of the following baseball-related activities have you done in the last year? Listening to a baseball podcast is not one of the options, unfortunately. But I'll put the link on the show page. Last thing I wanted to mention,

But I'll put the link on the show page. Last thing I wanted to mention, there was a baseball music video that premiered on Tuesday. It's for the Stroke song, The Adults Are Talking, which is on their 2020 album, The New Abnormal. And I really like that album. I really like this song. And I like this video too. I'm not really a music video person, not really one of my favorite art forms. If I like the artist, then I enjoy just seeing the artist play music or fake play music, if that's what the video is. But often, I just have no idea what's going on, and it has nothing seemingly to do with the song. And I don't know if this music video really has a lot to do with the song. In fact, one of the top comments on the YouTube video is, while listening to the album, I thought of a thousand different possibilities for a music video of this song. Not a single one of them was baseball with robots. And that gives away what the music video is. So this is sort of a baseball album already because it has a song called Ode to the Mets. And yet the song Ode to the Mets doesn't seem to have

anything to do with the Mets, and Julian Casablancas is a Mets fan, and I think he says that he wrote this song while standing on the 7 train platform coming back from a Mets game, but it's definitely not directly related to the Mets, and the adults are talking is not directly related to robots playing baseball. But I like this. Basically, the premise for the video is that the strokes, maybe representing humankind, are matching up with robots in various sports and endeavors. It's mostly baseball, but there's some tennis in there. There's even like boxing. There's sushi making. The robot is making perfect sushi. And basically, the robot is perfect at everything. So there's a pitching robot. There's sushi making. The robot is making perfect sushi. And basically the robot is perfect

at everything. So there's a pitching robot. There's a hitting robot. I guess it's the same robot. It looks like a Terminator. And it is playing against the strokes. One by one, they come up. They swing through the robot's pitches. They get hit hard by the robot, but then finally at the end there's some contact and a hitter gets on base and rounds the bases and scores, and then you find out at the end that the score is 56 to 1 in favor of the robots, but the Strokes are celebrating. They're celebrating their lone run getting blown out here, and I don't know what you made of this, but I enjoyed it. I thought the baseball was pretty good. I enjoyed the Strokes custom Astros-style tequila sunrise jerseys that say Strokes instead of Astros.

And I didn't really have any major notes when it came to the baseball being bad, as we often do when it comes to representations of baseball on film. None? You didn't have any? Well, I mean, it's a robot playing baseball. By the way, just an interesting plot detail that you skipped over is that the hitter does not actually score the run. The contact is preceded by julian getting hit by a pitch true yes and then he's on first and then one of the strokes i i looked up which one it was but i i forget and i couldn't even be sure because to be honest they have some resemblance to each

other yeah so he he drives julian in i had a few notes on here. One is that they're wearing plastic spikes. They're wearing Little League shoes. They're not wearing metal spikes. That's a bad. That's a pretty. For safety. It's for the studio.

I don't know. They tape their bat instead of using pine tar. They tape their bat instead of using pine tar. So they've got that really like kind of gym class style tape on the handle of the bat. I don't think that this is a baseball thing. But they have a real thing about putting zeros in front of single digit numbers. So Fab Moretti is uniform number two, but it's zero two. The inning number at the end of the scoreboard says the inning is the ninth, but it says zero nine. And I think both of those are unusual for baseball. Yeah. Let's see. Well, of course the strokes are old. They're

really old. And so if you just look at them, if they were all on the same team in 2020, they would have been the oldest, the second oldest, the fifth, the sixth, and the ninth oldest players in baseball. So that could happen. Yeah. But they're really old. Julian takes off on the pitch, but then once contact is made, he then turns to run. So there's a little bit of a continuity problem there where he seems

to be going but then he's not going he also has a weird way after he gets hit by a pitch he steps on first base and then turns to face the home plate you know as as you would but he turns to his right he turns over his right shoulder which was just interesting it was an odd way of reaching the base and then turning the way that I think most people don't turn. That's pretty small. The jersey, the strokes has a big... Strokes does not read very cleanly across the buttons. And my wife pointed out to me this season

that one of the things that she most admires about professional baseball is how precisely the team names read across these these jerseys despite the existence of buttons despite the way that these shirts are made and she says that's like really impressive and a very difficult thing to do they did not pull it off for the strokes jersey and uh there appear to be two base coaches at one point maybe third base coach maybe first base coach i'm not sure but there's two of them at the same base at the same base they're they're they're yelling at the same time for i think julian to go and lastly there's a huge rain rainstorm that soaks

them all and causes a rain delay but the umpire is totally dry he gets wet at some point but yeah okay i guess maybe that's a continuity problem also but yeah i think i appreciated you know it's i think it's those are mostly nitpicks or yeah the the cleats the the plastic spikes are my main thing i wonder why the robot hits him at all it's a yeah that's a question. It's a super baseball 2020 scenario where you have these robots playing, you know, if the robot is perfection, personified. That's why I brought it up, yeah. Yeah, why would he ever miss that badly?

Yeah, you have to assume that he was hit on purpose. And it's fascinating. Like, that's a great unanswered question in the plot. Why did the robot hit him with a pitch? Yeah. And I take this to me and I mean the question of why they're celebrating getting blown out 56 to 1. I assume that the message here is that the robots are perfect or almost perfect or they can do everything better than we can do it but we have emotion or we enjoy it more they're just these uh soulless machines performing their baseball

exercises and uh julian is is running around showing more emotion than i think i've seen him typically display and uh he's he's happy he's running and sliding and celebrating in their spring champagne and uh i i assume the sentiment is that uh well they may be better at us than everything but they won't enjoy it as much so it's a victory for us uh or it's just like they're not perfect and we still have a chance or something because we didn't get completely shut out so that's something score one for humankind i don't know exactly what the the takeaway is isn't it just like irony like you think that they want like it's just a joke right it's like they start celebrating because they celebrate first and you're like, oh, they won. Celebrate champagne. And then they show the scoreboard and it's 56-1.

So I feel like it's really just a very long buildup to a pretty simple joke. Yeah. Well, it got me. Yeah. I thought it was interesting that in this world we had robot opponents before we had robot umps. Yeah. No robot umps. Still human.

Yeah. Huh. Yeah. I wonder whose side the empire is on here. It's interesting because we have this kind of obsession figure out how good the players actually are with as much precision as possible, separating them from, you know, the weather and the teammates and the ball and the stadium and all those things to try to get as close as we can to saying how good each of them actually is. And if we really wanted to do that, we would not have them play against each other.

We would have them play against robots against some like uniform pitch deliverer and uniform defenses and uniform offenses that would be perfectly consistent against everybody. But of course we don't want that. That looks like a horrible experience. And what we really want is the much messier question, not of who's best, but who wins. And it doesn't matter who's best. It's just who wins. And it's a reminder that the joy is not as John Thorne put it to me one time. And I think about all the time like the, the, the, the central enjoyment of baseball is not determining whether Dwight Evans was better than Harry Hooper or Harry Hooper was better than Dwight Evans. You can debate that, but the point of baseball is not actually to answer that question. And if it was, then yes, we would have robots.

But it's not. We don't want the robot game. Yeah. I just rewatched the hit by pitch, and I think it actually does explain why he hits him with the pitch. So because it's raining and as you said it's raining selectively so some strokes are getting wet others are not the umpire is not but there is a drop of this rain that falls on the robot's eye or his eye sensor and it causes the little glitch yes there's i couldn't figure out why they had that shot okay yeah so that seems like a

major engineering flaw there that well i guess this robot is only able to play in perfect conditions but uh that seems like something that could probably be pretty easily rectified but in this model of the robot he loses the plate if a single drop of water gets in its eye so that's a problem yeah and yeah i wonder what would happen if it were participating in the champagne spraying. That might be a fatal error. But I think that's what I took away from it, that the robots are perfect, but they don't have the camaraderie. There's no shot of the robot teammates celebrating the way there is when the strokes score at

the end and they're all jumping around and spraying each other with champagne. There's no emotion. Let the robots play. They're not wearing any socks. They're not expressing anything. And the strokes still are, even though they're getting trounced. If you were to create a baseball game where the humans were playing against robots, would you insist on them having human-like mechanics pitching and hitting mechanics because there's no actual reason for a a robot to throw like a human you could you could have them throw probably just as hard without a human-like pitching motion yeah and yet they do and it kind of creates a little bit of an uncanny valley here. Like the mechanics are not quite right. It feels like a bad imitation of a pitcher. So would you, do you feel like it will be important when eventually the robots replace the pitchers

that we have them actually pitch like humans or can they just spit the ball out? Yeah, I think they should look like humans, Not exactly like humans, because if they look exactly like them, then you can't tell that it's robots. And that's a whole other dystopian scenario. But I think, yes, because, A, it sets the bar higher engineering-wise. If they can't just look like a pitching machine, if you have to have them mimic human motions, then that's impressive and harder to do. But also, I think because we kind of get a kick out of it, it's like when people watch those Boston Dynamics robots videos where they're like jumping and opening doors.

Nobody likes those. Well, people watch them and I think are terrified by them possibly, but are riveted to them still. I think we like seeing machines that look like they're alive or like they're coming alive or they could be alive. So yes, I think I would mandate that they look like living beings to some extent. I think that you've got that right. I think people hate that and that it makes them deeply uncomfortable.

And the reason they don't like that company is because they they make the robots look like awkward people wouldn't that be good for rooting interest though because then you would root against would anybody root for the robots i think a lot of people would root for the robots is it don't you think it's like scary silent once you get past your favorite team then what percentage of rooting in sports, again, taking away people who are directly cheering for their team. Once you get past that, what percentage of rooting in sports do you think is against people?

You watch the Bucks because you want to root against Brady versus that you turn on a different game because you want to root for some team that you don't otherwise have a rooting interest in. I'd say like 20% just because I think most rooting is because you're watching your team. No, but we're throwing that out. We're taking that out. So like say 60% is people watching their favorite team. So then of the remaining 40%, what percentage of that is shot in 40 rooting? 40%. What percentage of that is shot in Freudie rooting?

I'd say like 40 and the rest is just because you like the sport or you have nothing else to do. It's something to put on in the background. Yeah, most people will root for the underdog. Do you think that they're rooting in that situation? When they turn on a random game, they root for the underdog, whoever's trailing or whoever's lower seeded. Do you think that they're doing that because they really want to see the underdog or do you think they're doing it because they want to see the favorite topple? Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. There are some favored teams that people don't hate, right? Like we talked about how the Dodgers were not that hateable a team, even though they were favored. And maybe that's because they hadn't

won before, so they weren't really seen as an overwhelming favorite but you hate the patriots maybe and you hate the astros and you hate certain teams for reasons that uh you know have off the field origins or just because they're so good and they're always there and you're sick of them but i think a lot of the time you're just rooting for the long shot that's just there and should have no chance but is doing a good job. So the equivalent to baseball against robots would be a sport like, say, downhill skiing where it's like the competitor against the mountain. that most people are rooting for the person to make it down safely or do you think that there's a lot of rooting for for people to crash in yeah i don't know yeah no one's rooting for the mountain really but i guess they're they're rooting for some people and therefore you're rooting against other people not that you want them to die or hurt themselves seriously, but if you want them to not do the slalom well or whatever.

I don't know how heated things get in downhill skiing when it comes to rooting for or against certain people. And obviously there are like national loyalties and all of that involved. Okay, I'm going to give one more sport example okay that i think is similar to baseball player against robot when i i root exclusively for terrible holes in in golf like when i turn on if i ever have golf on all i want is to see like a quadruple bogey i want every every every shot to go far into the rough so i can watch the person get deeper and deeper into this ditch that a bad shot gets you in. And so isn't that rooting for the robot? Yeah, I guess so. I don't know how common that is. Do you think that's a common thing that you're

rooting for the worst possible performance? I feel like good golf shots are so boring. I disagree. I think they're satisfying. There was that incredible hole-in-one recently in the Masters where it was skipped across the water 18 times. Well, if they could do that every time, sure. I saw that, and I was like, maybe I should be watching golf. But this doesn't happen often enough for me to be enticed. But yeah, because isn't it just boring at a certain point?

But yeah, because isn't it just boring at a certain point? Like, you know, if you're just quadruple bogeying a hole and you're just it can be funny sometimes. Like if you're if you have a really good golfer who's just like slamming it against the wall of the sand trap over and over or into the pond or something, then then it can be kind of funny because they're usually so good. So to see them screw up horribly can be entertaining. But you wouldn't want to watch that for like an entire round, right? If someone was just kicking the ball all over the course, that's not much fun. So for the most part, like, okay, so when you're driving, the preferred shot for, you know, off the tee is a very boring outcome. It's just like, you know, somewhere down there in the middle of the fairway. And that's not interesting. You don't really want to see that. So on the drive, you have to root for a wild shot. That's the only interesting outcome of that particular segment of the broadcast is the ball

goes somewhere crazy. And so the drive can't be interesting if it's good. With an approach shot, then they could hole it. That's fun. But if they don't hold it, otherwise, they're just going to hit the big fat part of the green. That's pretty boring too. So yes, I will take a, I will take hole out from the fairway, but otherwise I want chaos. Now, if you're chipping, yes, I think anytime you're chipping, unless you've already got like a, you know, like five on the hole, then yes, uh, you, you chip in your pitch shots, have the chance to be really beautiful. And then a putt, if it's like beyond say like 26 feet, then it's fun to see it go in. But otherwise I think you want it to miss.

I think any, particularly any putt within four feet, you want to see a miss. That's funny. All right. Well, we set out to do an email show and yet again, answered no emails. I have a quick stat blast to end on. Do you have one you want to do? I do. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's do some stat blasts. Some interesting tidbit Discuss it at length And analyze it for us In amazing ways

Here's to Daystop last Who goes first? Mine will be quick. I don't know if... Go ahead. I'll do mine first. And it actually is inspired by an email So their email show

This is from Ian who says My dad sent me a package with some old cigar boxes Full of 1973 Topps baseball cards Drawn at first to big names I was struck by the different eras of baseball Represented among the Hall of Famers alone This led me down a rabbit hole My main question became What is the longest span of time eras of baseball represented among the Hall of Famers alone. This led me down a rabbit hole.

My main question became, what is the longest span of time from the beginning of one player's career to the end of a second player's career where both were active in at least one common year? My first oversimplified and incomplete method to get a sense of how long we were talking about was to look up the longest tenured players and find which players played the longest leading into and out of those careers. So Nolan Ryan overlapped with Darren Oliver in 1993. Their combined run is from 1966 to 2013, 48 years. But after getting the crayons and graph paper out, I think I've maxed it out at 52 years. Deacon McGuire's first big league game took place in 1884. He overlapped a year with Rabbit Randville, 1912, who ended his career in 1935. This is of course

not a conclusive approach, but I am at a loss for a good, read, less time consuming method to arrive at a concrete answer. If you can think of a niftier way to look, I'd be interested to know if there are any longer. It was fun falling into the timelessness of baseball for the last hour. Two people played the same game at the same time. When one started his career, no one had telephones, and when the other finished his, you could ring up

Delta and book a flight. Anyway, not sure if this is anything, but thought you would all enjoy, and I did, and my non-time-consuming method is to ask someone to look this up for me. So I emailed Adam Ott, our sometimes StatBlast consultant, and he quickly got me an answer here. So, of course, this is complicated by the fact that there are strange exceptions. Like there are players who played, you know, appeared in a game years, decades, in some cases. Yeah, you have to settle the Minoso question before you start this. Right. So as Adam says, the top of the list is filled with mini Minoso type players, players who played in a game years after they actually retired. To keep these players from overtaking the entire list, I only allowed each player to appear on the list twice,

once as the earlier generation player and once as the later generation player. So Ian did a pretty good job, actually. Darren Oliver and Nolan Ryan, that's a good one. That is number 15 on the list, if we're not factoring out any of the weird ones. So that's pretty good. Deacon McGuire and Rabbit Maranville, or is it Maranville? I'm not sure. That was ninth on the list. But even that one, like, would you count that one? That one, if you look up those guys' careers, so Deacon McGuire, this is 52 years, McGuire debuted in 1884, and then he played nonstop through 1908, but then he didn't play in 1909, he played one game in 1910. He didn't play in 1911. He played one game in 1912. And, you know, he was 48 by that point. I haven't looked up the specifics, but I'm guessing he was just coming out of quasi-retirement to play one game those cases too. And as for Rabbit, he played continuously until 33, and then he was off in 34, and he played 23 games in 35. So that's legitimate. So I think even that comes with a

slight caveat. And as Adam determines here, I think the longest really legitimate one where neither guy was taking some kind of break and coming back as a stunt would be 51 years so just one year less than mcguire and rabbit and that's early win who debuted in 1939 and played until 1963 and tommy john who debuted in 1963 and played until 1989. And I think that one counts. And as Adam points out, Wynn missed a year for military service. Tommy John missed a year for Tommy John surgery. But those guys were playing, and I think that counts. So if I'm just reading down the list, like the longest, if we count everyone, it's 63 years. And that is Jim O'Rourke, who debuted in 1872, played until 1904, and Charlie O'Leary, who debuted in 1904 and played until 1934. And both of those are obviously

weird ones. So Charlie O'Leary, he played legitimately until 1913, and then he came back for one game when he was, I think, a coach with the Browns in 1934. He was 58. I think they thought he was 50, but he was actually older than that, and he just played one game, one plate appearance. He got a hit. Get out of here. Yeah, he got a hit. His baseball reference bullpen page says, after three seasons with the Cubs, O'Leary joined the St. Louis Browns as a coach in 1934. Late in that season, he played in a single game, becoming one of six players in Major League history to play a game after age 50. Appearing 21 years after his last

game, he singled and became the oldest player in baseball history to collect a hit or score a run. What is even more remarkable is that he was seven years older than his listed baseball age at the time he was actually 58. The only major leaguer to appear older than O'Leary was 59-year-old Satchel Paige. So that's 63 years. So then there's Nick Altrock and Dutch Leonard, 56. Minoso and Ricky Henderson is 55 years. Dan Brothers, Nick Altrock, 55. Nick Altrock and Arlie Latham, Jack Quinn, 54 years. Dan Brothers, Nick Altrock, 55, Nick Altrock. And Arlie Latham, Jack Quinn, 54 years.

Bobo Newsome and Minoso, 52 years. And there are some others that have that same caveat. If you go below Wynn and John, you get Tommy John on the young end going to Jamie Moyer. That's a cool one. That's 50 years. And then Joe Nuxhall, who debuted in his age 15 season. And Nolan Ryan, that's 50 years. Jim Cott, Julio Franco, Huey Jennings, Jimmy Dykes, Nolan Ryan, Darren Oliver, Cap Ensign, Huey Jennings, Charlie Huff, Alex Rodriguez, Warren Spahn, Steve Carlton. Anyway, fun question, fun list. I will put Adam's spreadsheet with the full results

online if you want to check it out deacon mcguire's game one game with the tigers was because the tigers players refused to play oh it was that protest yes over the suspension of ty cobb for attacking a fan so they came up with a substitute game and that was the game where like famously like eight players had their only appearance in the majors, and they lost a lot. They lost a robot game score. They lost 24 to 2, in fact. All right, cool. How have I never heard of Charlie O'Leary?

Yeah, it's a good story, right? Good trivia question. 21 years since his last appearance? Yeah. 21 years. And he got a hit. Oh, my goodness goodness maybe they were taking it easy on him maybe it was like uh they figured it was slightly awkward up there yeah 17 since his uh his last minor league appearance 17 years of career since his last minor league appearance he's a coach so he's probably uh hitting fungos or something staying in shape but that yeah i i think you're probably right that couldn't have been a uh pitch thrown in

in high effort all right uh mine is also a reply to a question this is from greg who asks i'm wondering if there's any difference aside from the obvious additional base between doubles and triples in terms of batted ball profile launch launch angle, exit velo, expected average, et cetera. Maybe I'm way off, but they both seem pretty similar. Just maybe triples are hit into places on the field that are more difficult for fielders to get to. Please tell me I'm way off. Thanks.

And you saw a little, hopefully you've forgotten what I wrote, but you saw a little bit of a reply to this a little while ago. Do you have a do you have an opinion about this question what do you think of when you think of a of a triple compared to a double well obviously a lot of it is dependent on outfielder positioning and the fences and does it take a weird bounce and does the outfielder play the carom right so there are definitely a lot of batted balls that could easily be doubles in some scenarios and triples in other scenarios yeah i guess i i don't know i guess i would think of maybe like you get more triples that are over an

outfielder's head but not necessarily like you know there are a lot of triples that are just down the line and they take a weird bounce off the fence or there's not much foul territory or something. So if you told me that they were the same, I guess I would accept it. I wouldn't say, no, that's completely implausible. I saw some of your answers, so I don't want to spoil that. So that obviously influences my thinking. If you had asked me before I saw your response, I'm not sure what I would have said. But, you know, I guess like you get more bases, maybe on the whole, it makes sense that those balls would be hit harder. But there are a lot of cases where that's not true. So it's sort of hard to say, which is why you looked it up and why it was asked. Yeah. And the answer is kind of interesting

because it's a little bit of both. What I actually sent to Greg and that you saw, we're going to ignore that because that just looked at 2020 and 2020 was a, there were only 250 triples hit in 2020. It was a short year, obviously, and triples are already pretty rare. So I looked at 2017 through 2020 and the difference is both clear, but fairly small. So I have here four different figures that show the difference. A triple has an average launch angle of 19 degrees. A double has an average launch angle of 16 degrees. So that's a clear and significant difference. That shows up in all four years that we look at. The average exit velocity for a triple is 97.6 miles an hour.

For a double, it's 97.2. That's a minimal difference and it doesn't show up evenly across all four years. In fact, what you saw was that there was a pretty significant difference in 2020 in favor of the triples, but in 2017, for instance, doubles were actually hit harder than triples were. A double has an expected WOBA of 683 on average. The triple has an expected WOBA of 722. So clearly triples, I mean, WOBA is just launch angle times exit velocity, basically. And so not times, but like, that's what it's based on those two inputs.

So we already kind of knew that those two inputs favored triples a little bit. And sure enough, it shows up in expected Woba. And then for expected batting average for doubles, it's five 80 and for triples, it's five 55. So in fact, doubles on average are more likely to have been hits than triples.

And that's probably because triples tend to be on more fly balls. Fly balls have a little bit lower expected batting average in some, once the launch angle gets high enough. So that's what we have. There is a difference, but it's, it's, um, it's clear. It's not massive in terms of quality of contact. It shows up more in launch angle than an exit velocity. But I wanted to get a little bit deeper on this because if you just look if you put all these into a spreadsheet and you look at them you see that what gets labeled a double it covers a wide wide wide wide range of batted balls you know there's doubles that are

grounders that just sneak through the infield and are doubles because in fact the outfield has to charge in on them and it's a hustle double and then you have doubles that are like absolutely blasted off of say a high wall and would have been home runs in 29 other parks and might have gone 440 feet and just couldn't possibly look any less than like a hustle double or a flare down the line or something like that. So I wondered about this. And so I looked basically at the extremes. And if you look at the extremes for exit velocities, pretty much all of the extremes are doubles. And that's at the top and the bottom of the spreadsheet. So for the, the 200 highest exit velocities last year, only six. Well, okay. Let me first, let me establish 8%

of doubles and triples are triples. So if you have a hundred doubles and triples, eight of them are going to be triples. 92 are going to be doubles. So you would expect eight of the top hundred. If these were evenly distributed. Eight of the top hundred exit velocities would be triples. 16 of the top 200 would be triples. In fact, only six of the top 200 are triples. So way, way fewer than expected. And none of the top 46 are triples. The top 46 exit velocities for these extra base hits were all doubles and if you look at the bottom it's even more extreme of the bottom 200 only four were triples and and you have to get down to the 136th weakest hit extra base hit to find the first triple so in fact it's not that the triples are the weird weird outcomes like i also had that idea in my head. I thought,

well, a triple is a double where something weird happened in a lot of cases, a triple is a double where it bounced funny. Triple is a double where it was misplayed slightly. A triple is a double where something sort of odd happened. But in fact, the triples are the normal ones. The doubles in a lot of cases are the sort of weird things. And that's, I think, because a lot of cases are the sort of weird things and that's i think because a lot of doubles are homers that barely stay in and bounce back hard to the fielder yeah or they're singles that land in funny places and become doubles so the doubles are the weird things triples are kind of just uh actually sort of normal and if you if you take out the top, I forget, I don't have this in front of me anymore,

but if you take out the top 10% and the bottom 10% of exit VLOs, and then you compare the doubles and the triples, then the gap between them actually shrinks quite a bit. And in that case, doubles and triples really do end up looking pretty much the same. What you actually see is that what separates a double and a triple more than anything else is the handedness of the batter because left-handed batters tend to pull. These, I guess, tend to be

on pulled balls more than balls hit the other way. And so left-handed batters hit a lot more of them. And if you look at the rate of triples for left-handed batters hit a lot more of them. And if you look at the rate of triples for left-handed batters versus right-handed batters, it's a significant advantage for the left-handed batters, just because the difference between a double and a triple is whether it's hitting to the left field corner or the right field corner a lot of times, just because it's a longer throw to third base. Interesting. Okay, cool. One last note on my stat blast. I mentioned that the longest combo was Jim O'Rourke and Charlie O'Leary. So O'Leary, who had that hit at age 58, he was not a particularly good player in his prime. He was a replacement level player for his career. of that combo. He was a Hall of Famer. Here's his story for why he was playing at that point. And Jim O'Rourke, when he got his last appearance, that was 1904. So he was 53 years old at that point, and he hadn't played in the majors since 1893 when he was 42. So here's from his baseball

reference bullpen page. He started in pro ball in 1872 and had his last major league appearance in 1904. Even after that, however, he made an appearance in minor league ball through 1912 when he didn't come to the plate in 1913 on the advice of his physician. The New York Times noted that a string of 36 plus years had been broken. The Times failed to note his years in the National Association. He is the second oldest player in major league history to hit safely in a game. So he got a hit in that game too. According to the Hall of Fame and the U.S. Census Bureau, O'Rourke was born September 1st, 1850, thus when he hit safely for the New York Giants on September 22nd, 1904. He was 54 years old and 21 days old. Giants manager John McGraw was a friend and former

teammates of O'Rourke, so he allowed him to catch this one game. He didn't just pinch it. He caught, and he caught the whole game, I think. Ironically, it was the game in which the Giants clinched the 1904 pennant. So that was what baseball was like at those times. It was weird.

That'll do it for today. Thanks for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. All right. Riley and Zachary Ellenthal. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. One of these weeks, we will get to an email episode when we actually do a lot of emails. Sometimes there's just a bunch of banter. Thanks

to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and we will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. Thank you.