Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1654: Home Plate Rump

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about having baseball on the brain and the NL Central’s measly World Series odds, then answer listener emails about umpire underwear and repeated pants-splitting, an eccentric baseball billionaire who wants his son to break Cy Young’s career wins record, whether they would pitch a big-league game in exchange for […]

I couldn't stop it now There's no way to get out You're standing far too near And how the hell did you get here? Sitting naked in somebody else's room I'd give my whole life to see it Just you stood there only in your underworld Patreon supporters, I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of VanGras. Hello, Meg. Hello.

You ever have baseball on the brain so much that you think something is about baseball when it isn't at all? Because I just had that experience today because I had been reading some baseball stuff, and then I was reading some reviews of recent albums. Not necessarily music I'm interested in, but just sort of seeing what's out there. And I was reading a review of an album called Popular Monitoress by this artist named Wobbly. I think his real name is John Leidecker, but he goes by Wobbly. He's like an experimental electronic musician. And I was just reading the all music review and it says,

Following 2019's Monitoress, Popular Monitoress, continues wobbly studies in machine listening using mobile devices running pitch tracking apps and synths in order to generate improvised music. And I was thinking to myself, pitch tracking apps? He's making music with like, what? Is this like the MLB app? Is he like using Game Day? Is this like Rapsodo or something and then i was looking back at the review for monetrist the precursor album and it says he composed it using several mobile devices running pitch tracking apps which convert signals into midi data and activate synthesizers i really was thinking about this for

a minute or two like wow he's making music using pitch data that is so interesting. Got to get him on the podcast. It took me like a minute or two to realize, oh, wait, pitch as in like notes as in is that high or low, you know, like because this is music and not baseball. So my brain is broken by baseball, I guess. Ben, I feel like that is such a delightful way of saying that you're excited for spring training to get going. Yeah, let's interpret it that way. That sounds good. So we've got a bunch of emails today. Got some good ones. I've got a stat blast for you. Just wanted to briefly bring up one little tidbit from Ben Clemens' post at Fangraphs about the playoff odds. Just want to steal this little fun fact or unfun fact, as the case may be. It's about the NL Central. So he added up the World Series odds of every team in the NL Central.

And I did that too. And it comes out to 3.6%. So essentially, you put all of the NL Central teams together, and there's only a 3.6% chance that any one of them will win the World Series in 2021. And as Ben pointed out, that is less than the chance that the Blue Jays alone will win. And the Blue Jays are not even projected to win a division. They're projected to finish second in the AL East, which is pretty good. But their World Series odds are 3.7%. So the Blue Jays alone, according to the Fangrass playoff odds, have a better chance of getting rings than anyone and everyone in the NL Central. Yes. I will also note for folks who listen to our conversation about these playoff odds and

then Red Ben's piece that the Cardinals have eked ahead ever so very so very slightly um of the brewers for for first place in the nl central but we should note that it is it's like a tenth of a win so they are for all intents and purposes sort of tied atop the division but yes there there are a number of fun facts that i think we're going to be able to construct around the mediocrity of the nl central and uh barring some pretty significant signings over the next little bit here i don't see anything that's going to really move the needle away from that. Yeah, even post-Arnado deal. It's just two years ago,

I was writing an article about whether the AL Central was a historically weak division. And now it's the NL Central with the strongest case. And I think as Ben also mentioned, if you go to the projected standings page on Fangraphs, which is different from the playoff odds page, playoff odds page takes the schedule into account, the strength of schedule. The projected standings page does not. So it's just sort of a schedule neutral estimate of how good the teams are. And not a single team in the NL Central has a projected

record of 500 on that page. It's like the 1994 AL West. Everyone's under 500. Obviously, they do, I guess, have projected records of barely above 500, like 82 games maybe on the playoff odds page because they get to play each other. But on the schedule neutral page, it's like Brewers and Cardinals are at 489 so yeah it's not great it's not great uh it just goes to show that the back end of your rotation is important and uh you know very good individual players move the needle some but the roster construction has to be a touch more holistic than that and uh yeah the the nl west is going to be where it's at for the NL. Although I shouldn't give the East short shrift.

It would be rude of me. Don't want to be rude, Ben. Yeah. All right. Well, I hope that someone out there is working on making music with pitch tracking apps. Just how cool would that be? Just throw a bullpen session and you get to make an album out of that somehow. Maybe Wobbly can do that for his next

album. But let's get to some emails because I've got a bunch of good ones. So should we start with umpire pants? Yes. Seems like a natural starting point. All right. So this is an email we just got from listener Kyle who says, I regularly pack lunches for my kids to take to school and sometimes include a little note from a set called lunch notes from me each note includes some sort of wacky fact and a usually bad joke these lunch notes are not actually from you kyle you are outsourcing these lunch notes to the company that made the lunch notes but that's okay i'm sure your kids don't mind kyle continues i tore off a note to stick in a lunchbox this morning, and the next note in the stack caught my attention. I've attached a picture of the note, which reads,

Major League Baseball umpires are required to wear black underwear while on the job in case they split their pants. I don't recall hearing this before, and I'm skeptical. A few quick searches turned up some miscellaneous online lists of similarly wacky sports facts, Reddit threads, Yahoo answers posts, etc. But I didn't see anything authoritative about this in my admittedly non-exhaustive search. I have not listened to the entire Effectively Wild back catalog, so perhaps this has come up before. But is this actually a thing? If this is a thing, what led to this becoming a rule or guideline?

Was it to preemptively address a purely hypothetical possibility that an umpire could split their pants? Or was there a string of embarrassing pants-splitting incidents where umpires were wearing Looney Tunes-style white boxers with red hearts? Should MLB instead spend a little more on more durable or more frequently replaced pants? Catchers aren't required to coordinate underwear colors with varying uniform pant colors, right? Again, my first instinct here was that this is a myth, perhaps with a nugget of truth somewhere, like maybe it was true in the 1930s or something at best. Do you know? I should point out that I responded to Kyle. I have no idea.

But I responded to Kyle, I have no idea. And on the one hand, the pull of finding out if it was actually true and thus learning what precipitated the rule is very strong. But on the other hand, I sort of didn't want to investigate it at all, like even a little bit, because I want it to be true so badly and would be sad if it weren't. Because, Ben, let's get the obvious question out of the way, which is how would one enforce this rule? That's a good question. Who is checking? Who is making sure that these fine gentlemen have on black drawers?

Who is the one who's making sure that that is true? The crew chief, presumably, right? Pants check, underwear check. Very awkward. Who checks the crew chief presumably right pants check underwear check very who checks the the crew chiefs yeah it's a very awkward bit of of business i imagine that if this is a real rule that the idea is that one's pants could split and no one would notice at all because because you're right your your your pants and your drawers, same color. And so people would be like, he has intact pants. So that's one thought I had.

The other thought I had is that are the pants actually like true black? Aren't they kind of gray? So wouldn't black underwear show if the pants split? And maybe they don't have to be more adorable but maybe they should be we should give people pants that fit because like presumably you know like if you look at it if you look at a baseball player's pants like a catcher when he's in his crouch right so that i have a reason to have noticed this um you know they have a little they have a little insert they have a little like dart a fabric right in the crotch that is presumably there so that when they are crouching and their pants are

tight to the cup that there's like some room to maneuver right so like player pants have anticipated this problem i imagine that catcher pants or excuse me that umpire pants the the split danger is in is in your bum it's it's because you're bending over as you are trying to see a pitch you're bending over and then all of a sudden oops your bum and and i'll point out it would be the sort of thing where like, if you were the catcher and you were in your crouch, and you know, umpires put their hands on the back of, on a catcher's back so that they can get in there

and see the pitches it's coming in to determine if it's a ball or a strike. So like there, it's an intimate relationship that you have with the catcher. And if you're a catcher and the first pants split can you hear it over the sound of the ballpark are you like i think that joe just split his pants do you say that and then you do do you do you do you stop things like you would if the ball came back and hit him in the mask right brush off the plate walk around hey joe i noticed that you split your pants there do you need to pretend that you got injured in some way so you could go change your pants yeah yeah it's a potent pant splitting combination because you have guys who are crying you have guys who are wearing slacks who are crouching who are not always the most physically fit people

on the field let's put it that way so you can imagine that it would happen so i have an answer here i am going to sadden you at first and then i'm going to try to cheer you up again so i forwarded this email to an actual umpire, Dale Scott, who has been on Effectively Wild in the past, was a major league umpire for more than 30 years, was a crew chief for decades. And did I debate whether I wanted to actually send him this question? Yes, I did. But ultimately, I decided to do it. And Dale has been a good sport about these kinds of questions. He's actually working on a book with friend of the show Rob Nyer as well now, a memoir that I think is coming out next year. So don't know if this will be covered in the memoir, but just in case, he says, I have never heard a mandated requirement by the league to wear black undergarments, although many do. There have been rare instances where pants have split during a game. I was fortunate not to have that happen to me. But no, there is no requirement as to underwear color. So thanks to Dale for indulging this question. And Kyle's right. This is everywhere on the internet. If you Google this, you will come up with many citations of this supposed requirement, come up with many citations of this supposed requirement, all of them uncorroborated and unsourced. But it's just one of those internet things that someone said at some point and now everyone repeats. There may be a basis of this, in fact. I don't know that there has never been

such a rule in any league at any point. But according to Dale, who was in the big leagues up until 2017, no such rule existed to his knowledge. Now, here's where I will try to cheer you up again, because I did some searches in the baseball literature to look for examples of umpire pants splitting actually occurring. And let me tell you, they're pretty numerous. This is not really a unique occurrence. I'll just go in chronological order here. This is a RetroSheet box score and play-by-play log. I'm just going to read you the bottom of the second inning here. This is a White Sox-Cleveland game played in Cleveland on August 7th, 1936. So here's the retro sheet play log for the White Sox second. Bonura grounded out third to first. Appling single to center. Hayes grounded into a double play. Second to shortstop to first.

Appling out at second. Ump Moriarty left the field after ripping his pants dusting off the plate. While repairs made, McGowan manned the plate and Cole's first base. Zero runs, one hit, zero error. Zero left on base. Okay, so now I have a new set of questions for you. One pair of pins split.

It does mention later in the fourth inning, the bottom of the fourth, Galehouse singled to left, Moriarty returned and umped first base. So it took from the top of the second to the bottom of the fourth for Moriarty, George Moriarty, who was the home plate umpire that day, to come back on the field after ripping his pants. So presumably he did not have a spare set ready to go or it wouldn't have taken more than two innings. So maybe that is the amount of time it took

to find someone who could like stitch his pants back together again. I don't know, but seems prudent that when he returned, he moved to first base. Just, you know, don't want to test those pants again. So Ben, now I have two things for you the first of which is so he was bent over using the little broom that they have to use yep did he finish dusting off the plate i hope so he's a pro or was the plate half dusted? And then he said, wait, I have split my pants.

I must address this pants situation. Yes, and then McGowan came over and finished sweeping it. So that's the first question I have. I think that we haven't considered the actual potential impetus for such a rule, although I still think the rule, rule again should it have ever existed would have been a little imprecise because i think the important rule for the purposes of pants splitting is not that one wears black drawers and i will i will say in the time that you were describing the the retro sheet stuff i googled and these pants look very much to be

gray to me so if there ever had been such a rule it would have needed to be updated to have the the color of one's underwear in compliance and and sort of um in line with the the colors of the pants that modern mlb umpires wear so that's one thing. I think that the real concern is not what color underoos you are wearing, but that you are wearing them at all. Yes, that's true. Because the thing that you really don't want, I mean, splitting your pants open in public, that's embarrassing no matter what color underwear you're wearing. If anything, maybe you want to be wearing silly underwear because then people are going to be laughing. They're laughing at you, but they're also laughing at your silly underwear and you can laugh

along with them be like oh that's silly underwear like daffy duck what's he doing down there yeah the really bad thing would be if you had on if you were going commando and you had on no underwear at all and then you're leaning over to brush off the plate and you split your pants and you're bare ass in the whole ballpark and a tiny child's, you know, questions and be like, wow, look at that grown person's rear. So, um, I, I, I thanked Kyle for this email and I meant it at the time, but I don't think that I, uh, was, was sort of boisterous enough in my thanks. Cause this is easily one of the better five minutes I've spent in the last year.

So thank you very much for this. I'm not done. I got more. Oh, no. Oh, no. April 8th, 1939, the Boston Globe. The mystery as to why umpire Cal Hubbard suddenly withdrew from an exhibition game

three weeks ago has been solved. Yesterday, the same umparadical pants split wide open again. Again? This is just a one paragraph note in a larger column. Poor Cal Hubbard. This happened to him twice within a span of three weeks. I really like

unparadical as an adjective here. Unparadical pants. Fantastic. Really, you would think Cal would have learned his lesson the first time just get some bigger pants i guess it was the 30s and you know times were tough and the professional landscape of baseball was just different across the board right um but they don't have two pairs of pants he doesn't have two pairs of umpiring pants like i would imagine that modern umpires they probably they travel with a couple

pairs of pants i mean we have talked before and this is not a generous thing to bring up again but i'm gonna do it that you know um because they are uh normal folks and not athletes you know sometimes in the summer when it's really hot they'll stand up after they've been umpiring behind home and they have like a they have a sweat spot on their lap like that makes them look like they peed their pants not split their lap like that makes them look like they peed their pants not split their pants but peed their pants because their bellies have been have been making contact sustained contact with their laps uh for the last half inning and they they stand up and they're like oh boy and i imagine that you know you're you're doing a whole series

so um presumably you you're uh not always able to go to the dry cleaner and you'd have this splotch on your pants and so you would need to have another pair a different pair of pants to to wear the next day when you're umpiring and so i i feel like rather than having them repaired you would just you just put on a different pair of pants both for expediency and also because you'd have to be very confident in that stitch uh go back on the field and not worry about splitting your pants open again. But again, in the 30s, probably a different set of considerations for any number of reasons. Depression was on. So the next story I came across, I'm going to send you a link because there's an accompanying picture.

Oh my god, I'm so excited! This is from the Vancouver Sun May 1964 I will link to this for everyone to enjoy but this is an umpire caught in the act or really the umperadical pants caught in the act

of splitting as the umpire is dusting off the plate. This is poor umpire Joe Frizzell in the Pacific International Baseball League and we could do the ringer press box podcast game of guess the strain pun headline but

you've already seen it. Split decision at home plate. So good! And he is just bent over. And let me tell you, he was not wearing dark underwear on this day. But critically, was wearing underwear at all. He was. But it is shining white and shining out for all to see. And I guess that's why he made the paper.

If he had been wearing dark underwear that day, probably wouldn't have been as obvious, probably wouldn't have been captured for posterity here. So this is great. I came across somewhere a comment by an umpire at some level who said that he had actually been instructed to face the field, not the fans, while dusting off home plate in case his pants split. And then someone else disputed that and said, well, I was instructed to do that too. But it's really just so that I'm not mooning the fans.

It just seems less rude that way. So umpires do tend to face the field, I think, when they dust off home plate. But whether that is to spare themselves the possibility of pants splitting in front of the fans or not, I cannot say for certain. I think the best part of this is that, you is that you look at the picture just as a little clipping, and you're like, how big can it be? And then you see that there's a preview of the entire front page in the corner, and you're like, this man's split drawers were like half the...

This picture goes below the fold. Yeah. If it bleeds, it leads. And if it splits, then it also bleeds. So here's the next story I've got here. This is from June 1966. And this is in the Fort Worth Start Telegram. And it's an article with Emmett Ashford, who was the first black umpire in MLB and real trailblazer pioneer. But this is about his uniform and his equipment. And he says here, Ashford says he never has had trouble with a pair of suspenders breaking, but once found himself in an embarrassing situation because of a weak pair of pants.

We were at San Diego one night and I bent down to dust off the plate, Ashford explained. And when I went back behind the plate, I heard some woman yell, hey, Emmett, your pants are split, which is helpful. I guess he hadn't realized. Fortunately, I kept my composure, stepped toward the stands and announced, ladies and gentlemen, an emergency exists, but it's too late now to do anything about it. Then I turned around and went back to work, but I made sure I took short little steps so it wouldn't be too obvious. Oh my gosh. I mean, I have to say, I cannot imagine the composure to be able to make a joke about it in the moment. That's spectacular. And also, that's a very high stakes version of making sure that someone sitting across from you in a restaurant knows that they have something in their teeth.

Like imagine if that woman hadn't said anything, how long? Also, though, why don't you know your pants have splintered? Yeah. You'd think you would know. You'd think you would notice that. Yeah. All right. So this is from the Journal Herald of Dayton, Ohio in July 1974.

This is about umpire Ralph Wilhelm, who I think was an amateur umpire. So it says that he is willing to put up with all the hollering from fans and players and umpire for $12.50 a game. And it says, why he umpires for stretches as long as 21 straight days. Why he didn't quit after becoming embarrassed

when in the first game he ever umpired on the second pitch he ever called, his pants split down the middle and he had to work the game with a jacket tied around his waist. So that's a solution if you don't have a spare pair of pants. Aw, he's a middle school girl

getting a period for the first time. I'm allowed to make that joke. I lived that life. Yeah, this happened his second pitch ever. That sounds pretty traumatic here. Wow. All right. January 1976, the Orlando Sentinel, and this is umpire Harry Wendelstadt, who is a well-known umpire. Being an umpire can sometimes be embarrassing, as Wendelstadt knows from experience. It happened in the first game Harry ever worked as a professional. See, there seems to be a common theme here. Maybe these rookie umps are more likely to split their pants.

It was opening night in Brunswick, Georgia, and I was behind the plate. Wendelstet recalled, as I bent over to call the first pitch of the game, I heard a sickening sound behind me. The seam in his pants had split. You can imagine what that looked like with the white underwear showing through, Wendell said. The fans were on me the rest of the game, but there was nothing I could do. As if

that weren't bad enough, when the local newspaper came out the next day, there on page one was a large picture of Harry taken from the rear with an arrow pointing to his dilemma i'll never forget the caption above that picture says harry it said official opening oh my gosh the arrow seems unnecessary yeah yeah that seems like you gotta you know first of all it's gonna be more satisfying for people to laugh at if they find it themselves. Also, that seems rude.

I wonder if part of the solution here would be they have the little belt bags where they keep a couple extra balls so that they can switch them out without always having to go to the ball boy to get more. You should just pivot that around and preemptively focus it right down Main Street so that if there's a rip, there's some natural cover protection. Yeah. Might be able to feign ignorance for a little while. I've got two more for you.

This is March 1988, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. And this is a story where players are talking about umpires. So this is something that the player Calvin Chapman said. So this is something that the player Calvin Chapman said. One of the funniest moments for Chapman, a former New York Mets infielder, was the day Eric Gregg, a 300-plus pound National League umpire, tore his pants as he bent down to call balls and strikes. It's something that happens to every umpire sooner or later. Is it? It didn't happen to Dale Scott, according to Dale Scott. But not everyone does it before 50,000 spectators.

It was in about the second inning in a tense series between the Mets and Cardinals in St. Louis, said Chapman, 31. I remember Dwight Gooden was pitching against Joaquin on Duhar. Everyone was tight until Greg blew out the back of his pants. That kind of broke the tension. I mean, Greg's pants most especially, apparently. Everything was tight, too. Yeah. I mean, Greg's pants most especially, apparently. Everything was tight, too.

Yeah. They don't wear like, they're not made out of stretchy material. This is what you get for putting umpires in like, you know, mall cop pants, which is what they look like. Yeah, it continues. Players on both teams had fun teasing Greg that night. He had to go in and get a pair of sweatpants to finish out the game. It was hilarious, Chapman said. That sounds unpleasant for Greg.

Probably not so hilarious for him. And the last one I've got for you here is December 1990, Arizona Daily Star. This is about the umpire Ed Montague. He started in the California League in 1972. His salary was $300 a month. Money was tight. So were his bargain basement pants. He was behind the plate for his first game in Modesto, California. He leaned over and the seat of his pants split open.

He picked up a local newspaper the next day and there was his picture on the sports page. It wasn't my best side, he recalled. And the headline read, opening day. wasn't my best side he recalled and the headline read opening day okay but now i have another question for you because given a seam to split in one's pants i would think that you would want the back instead of the front probably although it's so much more visible to everyone really certainly to the fans and yeah i guess of course you know like if you're if you're crouching behind the catcher like no one can really see while you're in the crouch at least so in most social situations i would agree with you as an umpire as a home plate umpire not sure

well i guess that this helps to explain how it is that umpires seem to withstand managers yelling at them in the run-up to an ejection because like if you split your pants in front of 50 000 people you're not gonna you're not gonna budge when a manager is yelling at you and swearing it's like listen i have been exposed to the world sir you do not intimidate me with your words my yeah my hinder has been out there before what a gift though to the local sports page and to the headline writers who all had with your words. My hinder has been out there before. What a gift, though, to the local sports page and to the headline writers who all had some similar ideas.

All right. Well, thank you to Dale and thank you to Kyle for this question. Wanted to get through a lot of questions today and then we spent like half an hour talking about umpire pants,

but let's see how many we can get through here. Okay. This is from Nathan, Patreon supporter. Everyone's favorite baseball figure, the eccentric billionaire,

purchases a team and loads it with enough all-stars to make it a team talented enough to win 120 games every season. Unfortunately for the fans

of that team, his only motivation for purchasing the team is that he wants his son to best Cy Young's all-time wins record of 5'11". Even worse for the fans

of that team, his son has no pitching talent and is only capable of throwing the equivalent of 60-mile-per-hour batting practice fastballs with enough control to at least throw strikes. Once his son turns 16, the owner insists that every time their team is leading in the fifth inning, the starter must be pulled with two outs and replaced by his son,

making him the winning pitcher of record if he can hold the lead. Once he either gets the final out of the inning or blows the lead, he will be pulled. Assuming this is implemented every game until the son's 60th birthday, could he accumulate 512 wins? How many games would the team win per season? P.S. I'm aware that the scorekeeper isn't required by the rules to make the Sun the winning pitcher in this scenario, but traditionally this pitcher would earn the win, so let's pretend the scorekeepers don't rebel. So I guess the part of this question that I, I mean, I don't know that, I don't think that he could. I don't think so either.

I think that he would, I mean, apart from anything else, if you're really going to throw every single game, I think you'd blow out. I think he'd just blow out. I think he'd get hurt and not be able to pitch for long stretches in the back half of a season at the very least, right? Maybe. Every day. Also, what does the son want? You know? The son has been groomed from birth to just fulfill his father's dream for

him here so yeah but what are his what are his real hopes and dreams maybe he wants to be a teacher or a potter or work at a gas station like who knows what that kid wants what does that kid want 16 what is he not gonna go to school i school? I think the owner would be in jail for denying his child an education and for being horribly conniving. At a certain point, the son has to grow up and say, Dad, I don't want to do this anymore. He's not obligated. No, I can't imagine it would be much fun for him. And I will say, he doesn't have to pitch every day necessarily because he only comes in when the team has a lead. And he only throws 60 miles per hour, which is like the hardest he can throw.

But still, maybe he wouldn't blow out his arm, although it depends how long it takes him to get this one out that he needs to be the pitcher of record. Which, if you're throwing batting practice fastballs to major league hitters who know that that's the only thing you can throw, could be quite a while. So it might take a while. The only way he's really going to get an out is when someone hits a 110 mile per hour line drive directly at someone and it happens to be caught. Otherwise, it's going to be a lot of line drives. So yeah, endurance might be an issue, even though he only has to retire one batter here. I think one problem, even if the official scorekeeper doesn't rebel, I think the team would rebel.

Yeah. Because the team is not going to like their whole season being subordinate to the eccentric billionaire owner's dream of getting his son above Cy Young. So like maybe the first season they can't do anything about it, but no one's going to sign with this team. No one's going to want to play for this team. The clubhouse will be a disaster. They'll only be able to recruit the worst players. No one will want to play. There will be zero morale. So I think the team just descends into anarchy and is unable to acquire enough talent to actually have a lead very often so i guess if that's not in the spirit of the question either if we're presuming that this experiment somehow gets to be run endlessly i still kind of think it wouldn't be possible i

don't know because like sometimes you'd have a giant lead and yeah maybe this guy can get it out before like 10 runs are scored or something but i don't think he's gonna hold many one run leads really it comes down to just how long you think major league hitters can tee off on someone who is throwing bp before they actually make an out and think about again i just can't get over the psychology of subjecting your child to this because you're right. The team would be terrible.

No one would want to sign there. The people who did sign there would know about this dynamic and it would probably be really terrible to him in the clubhouse because he's just this constant reminder that their own talent isn't what matters, but what actually matters

are the maniacal schemes of a billionaire. And, you know, we get enough reminders of that in our daily lives as normal people. And so he would get ridiculed and people would probably put sticky stuff on his seat so that he would, you know, sit in something and maybe he would split his pants because somebody messed with them. And so I just, I think it would fall apart pretty quickly. And at some point, I imagine the league would intervene and say, hey, man, like we get you maybe love your son.

Hard to tell based on this scenario, but presumably there's some affection there. But you got to run your franchise in a more, you know, logical way because this is getting really this is getting out of hand. I think that at a certain point, the commissioner would call and be like, look, pal, we got to do something about this. Though, again, I think the more likely scenario is that eventually his son would just be like, I will strike out on my own and I would hope so. Work at a gas station. Yeah, agreed. Don't think this is doable. All right. Related question about the psychology of pitching when you're not qualified to pitch this is from Andrew about 24 hours after mistakenly tweeting that Trevor Bauer was signing with the Mets Bob

Nightingale tweeted that Bauer is in line to make as much as 1.328 million dollars every time he takes the mound for the Dodgers over the next two years. On the subject of having a bad day at work, my question is how much money would it take for you to start one MLB game as a pitcher? Let's say you have to get through 75 pitches and that you would go down in baseball history, presumably as the worst pitcher of all time. Would Bauer's $1.328 million per start be enough to convince you to do it? And we've talked about scenarios like this before. Sam wrote an article a few years ago about whether you would be willing to endure the

embarrassment that it would take to play a game. But in this case, you have to be a pitcher. You have to be a starter, let's say, and you actually have to stay in there long enough to really get knocked around and well so you're staying in you're staying in for 75 pitches is the minimum yes i submit the following to you ben i think that's like one inning for me right yeah so it would take a while but that's like one innings worth of work and what am i being paid 1.328 million yeah i would do that yeah i mean look like i i'm fortunate to live you know even in our pandemic lives like i you know i am

not in danger of like losing my home and i can you know pay my bills and buy salad and you know what have you but like there are a lot of things that would just become easier in my life if I had a million dollars. And for, you know, a little bit of embarrassment. Yeah, I think I would probably do that because it's it's the sort of thing that like I'd get a great piece out of it. Right. You know, I'd get a really good article. There would probably be plenty of people who don't like me who would mock me mercilessly. But when your own expectation is that you're going to be terrible at something, when people make fun of you for it it it sits a slightly different way if you go in knowing that on the back end of it uh you're going to have a million dollars i'm familiar

with the first part of that sentence less the second part but i i think i would put up with that for for a million dollars like i you know and i i'd have a jersey with my name on it that baseball reference page yeah fan crafts page yeah i'd have a i'd have a page on my on my own website and i think i'd i'd put up with that for a for a little over a million dollars this is fine yeah i think i would do it too i don't know if i'd enjoy it but i think i would do it for the story. Yeah. I guess I would get booed. I'd rather be compelled to do this somehow so that I'm not just hogging the spotlight to do something that I'm clearly unqualified to do and I'm ruining everything for my teammates and people who want to see that team win.

If there were some way for me to do it in a self-deprecating way where I'm not derailing the entire season in that experience. I mean, I think people would watch this. I think people would be entertained by seeing me get absolutely tattooed. So there would be some entertainment value in it. And I would try to convey via my facial expressions and body language that like, I didn't think I would be good at this. Like I know that I'm bad and I understand that. So then I guess the question is, well, why am I doing it anyway? And, you know, just to be a big leaguer and to get a million plus bucks, I think probably worth the embarrassment and like being the lead topic on first take and having Stephen A yell at me or

whatever. I'd probably put up with it. For that, it would be something to write about and a story to tell. Oh, yeah. I think that if I could add a condition to this very realistic hypothetical, I think that if this were the sort of thing that was in the works, I'd want to be on call to be the person who gets put into the rotation when a guy gets hurt. You find out, oh, our starter can't go tomorrow like we thought because something happened during his side session and he's got to get an MRI. And then rather than calling up a guy from AAA, you could say, aha, well, this is what we have Meg for one time. And then people's expectations would be low. Although, you know, that gets morally tricky, too, because I don't want to deprive some AAA pitcher of service time.

So maybe that's actually worse. Yeah. So the exact, like, ethical needle you have to thread to not be weirdly a jerk when you are subjecting yourself to other people's humiliation like there are some considerations to be had there but assuming that I was like truly someone's last gasp

I guess the best thing would be if you're sort of the on-call pitcher and then you go out there and you get shelled and everyone's like I feel really bad so here's a million dollars to help you get over your embarrassment. That would be the ideal scenario. But yeah, I mean, like to be clear, I wouldn't eat bugs on TV because that's gross. But I could get like 2000 words out of this. So the calculus is a little different.

Yeah. You would also be the first woman to play in Major League Baseball, which would be kind of cool to be a trailblazer. But then also, this is maybe not the way that you want this barrier to be broken. Exactly. That's another consideration here because I don't want some, you know, I'm sure it would only be one guy. Only one guy who would be like, this is what I've been telling you. And I would say, actually, no, the takeaway you should glean from this is that the difference between us and major leaguers is wide yes the gap is huge and uh my gender doesn't have anything to do with it so much as the fact that you know you play in a beer league softball

league and i write about baseball that yeah i mean like some people eat bugs what protein is gross is really culturally determined so i don't mean that to be like a sassy thing but i bugs at uh mariners games i did that one time for work see there's the exception to the bug eating rule i will do a lot of things to be able to write about them yeah yeah this reminds me of uh of that time when like most of the tigers didn't play a game in protest because tycob was suspended and then they just got a bunch of non-players to play for the team that day and so like alan travers started for the tigers and he went eight but he gave up 26 hits and 24 runs and he walked seven guys like this was in 1912 so you would have a very alan travers-esque baseball reference page where it would just be like one of those historical oddities where just a non-player

played for strange circumstances so on the other hand you would get more than a million dollars which alan travers did not so worth it. I just accidentally clicked into the tab that had the picture of the oomph with his pants. I just want to say, Ben, it's still funny. Yes. All right. Seth says, in the discussion around the Hall of Fame and the character clause, I wondered why we never hear the argument in reverse. Nelson Cruz on the Twins is actually what made me think about it. In his case, even is tricky, as mentioned below. By the stats, he would seem to be at best a borderline case and most likely on the outside looking in. However, he seems to garner pretty unanimous accolades for his clubhouse presence and his intangible impact on a team,

which maybe is part of what the character clause is getting at. Should this be part of a consideration for him, or should the character clause always be viewed as a possible detriment? Cruz's case in particular is extra complicated given the previous PED suspension, but there are probably a handful of other players who could fall into this category. As upcoming Hall of Fame voters, I'd be interested in listening to a discussion around this concept. So I will say that I think this was the original intent of the character clause, like to give guys a boost, but probably just as a tiebreaker, you know, to put someone in if they're on the edge. And I would be okay with using it in that

way. I think, I guess I'm more hesitant to give someone a positive boost than I am to take away from someone just because I feel more confident if we know something bad about that player that that player did that bad thing whereas I don't know enough about players to say that oh yes they have great character whereas we do know certain things about certain players where we can say oh they maybe do not have great characters or at least did not exhibit great characters in these specific incidents. So I'd be a little wary of basing my case around, oh, this seems like a great guy, because you never totally know for sure that they are a great guy. And then you might discover someday that they actually weren't a great guy. But it's something that if someone was on the border of J or whatever and i thought it might kick them over into the induct

them camp i might do that yeah i i agree with that i think that you know the argument that i share your trepidation at assuming that we know all of the unsort of documented aspects of a person's life because we often don't and sometimes we have i mean the scale is a great example of this right where there were revelations that really contradicted sort of what the public perception of his personality and character were so i i share your trepidation there but yeah i think that when you have sort of well documented good guys it's fine for that to give them a boost i mean if we're gonna think about a person's resume as a human being, then I think that, you know, we would be, we'd be silly to not take into

consideration, you know, they're doing a lot of really good work in their community or they're, you know, important advocates for somebody or what have you. So yeah, I think that it's tricky business to do. And I think you do occasionally set yourself up for heartbreak. But I think that especially as time goes on, and we just know so much more about these guys, because the way that we this guy who has a sterling reputation is hopefully who we think he is. And then you have to be willing to admit when you're wrong and adapt to new information when it's presented to you. But yeah, Nelly is an interesting case because the PED thing, even if his resume as a player were different, I think would probably be just a non-starter for people. But he is just one of the more universally beloved guys in the game. And the ways that he takes care of younger players and some of the stuff that he has said around not wanting young pros to go through a bunch of hazing just just because he did is like I think thoughtful and and sort of self-reflective in a way that's really admirable so I'm comfortable with Nellie in like

a hall of the very good he buys fire trucks for his hometown in the DR like he's you know he's a solid sort so yeah there's a limit to how much weight I would want to give this and that's true in both directions I mean that's part of why we had this whole hand-wringing discussion about the character clause when it came to keeping people out, because I think the Hall of Fame has the most utility when it's sort of, well, these were the best baseball players. That's sort of the purpose of the plaques part of it, at least, is just to recognize who the best players are. And so when you start keeping out some of the best players because of things they did off the field, then, well, are you sort of distracting from the mission of the Hall of Fame? Is this diluting the purpose of it or how representative it is of who the best baseball players are? And there may be people who did such abhorrent things that it's still worth

keeping them out. But that whole debate wasn't, are these Hall of Fame people? It was, are these Hall of Fame players so reprehensible as people that we can't even celebrate them for being good at baseball? Because to do so would be to endorse or condone or enable their wrongdoing. And I think it's understandable that there would be disagreement about whether it's acceptable to decouple those qualities. But the reason why we were having that argument at all is because we were starting from the presumption that the point is to recognize or anoint the best baseball players. And so I think if you were to go in the other direction and say, well, this guy was not a great player, but was a real hall of fame person. And you start putting in people like that, then suddenly it's just like, well, what are we

doing here? What are we giving these plaques out for? There are already awards for character and community service and that sort of thing. And I don't want to suggest that that's any less important than being good at baseball. But if the point of this exercise is to decide this is the pantheon of baseball players, and does this person deserve to be there based on their in-game performance then if you start factoring in well was he nice or did he do good things for people then you're just recognizing something else really it just you know it makes the mission of the hall of fame or at least the induction and the plaques part of it less well defined i think so that's why i wouldn't want to just put anyone who was a

nice person in. But again, it could be a good tiebreaker. All right. Another Hall of Fame related question. This is from Sam. I'm an Atlanta fan and noticed that they had at least one Hall of Famer on their active roster for all but one season, 1984, since Warren Spahn returned from World War II in 1946 until Chipper Jones retired in 2012. If Freddie Freeman and any of the Hammers' young stars are one day enshrined, the streak could extend well into the future. Additionally, in the lone exception year of 1984, the team was led by Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre,

with Bob Gibson and Luke Appling on the staff. The 1985-2012 streak didn't seem particularly impressive by itself because it just represents a year of Bruce Suter followed by Tom Glavin and Chipper Jones's long careers with a few teammates in tow for various stretches. But the trend of having a Hall of Famer on the roster for all but one year since World War II did strike me. It seems particularly surprising since the team was not regularly contending for pennants for much of that time. Is this remarkable or is it more or less normal to have a Hall of Famer on any given team's roster almost every year? So this would be a good stat blast question, but Bill James already answered it for me.

He did this basically as a stat blast in the most recent edition of the Bill James Handbook. There is a whole long essay where he researches this question of how common is it to have a Hall of Famer. And he found that from 1900 to 2014, he took all of those teams and he found that 73.5% of them had a Hall of Famer. But he said he also expects that figure to rise to roughly 80% as more players get inducted. Because if you look at the current percentages for teams in the early decades, like up to and including the 1950s, those percentages are already well over 80%. And they're in the high 70s through the 1980s. So eventually we'll get to the point where about 80% of teams had a Hall of Famer. So it's pretty common. Even so, the Braves are above average. They have had a pretty remarkable run of having Hall of Famers. And Bill had a leaderboard where he ranked every franchise by the percentage of seasons in which they had a Hall of Famer. a Hall of Famer. And the top of the leaderboard was the New York Giants, who, while the Giants were in New York, they had a Hall of Famer every single season, which is pretty impressive. But after that, it's the Milwaukee Braves, also 100%. That was 1953 to 1965. And of course, they had Aaron during almost all of that time. And then the Atlanta Braves, 1966 to 2014, are at 93.9%.

And if you take all Braves seasons combined, so 1900 to 2014, it's 91.3%. And that's the second highest after the perfect Giants. So even the Yankees from 1900 to 2014 had a Hall of Famer in 91.1% of those seasons. So the Braves at 91.3, even higher than the Yankees. So yes, the Braves did have a pretty remarkable run of having a Hall of Famer every year. That's spectacular. Yes. Well spotted, Sam.

Okay. Question from Kieran. When the season got shortened last year, my immediate initial reaction was, oh, wow, what a boon for these pitchers to get a mid-career break. The subsequent reaction over the past year from, as far as I can tell, literally everyone has been the complete opposite. Now all the talk is about innings limits, six-man rotations, et cetera. Now this seems to be gospel among baseball teams,

which are universally smarter, better funded, and have better data than an idiot like me, so I accept that this is probably the case, but I still don't get it, really. There's about a million caveats here, but take a pitcher who has an established level of work in the big leagues, then had a healthy but short season or opted out like Stroman or Price last year. It just seems to me like that pitcher should be easily able to return to the previously established level of work, but the overwhelming consensus is otherwise as far as I have seen. Part of my thinking comes from my experience training for marathons, which obviously doesn't have a ton in common with pitching, but is a high-injury-risk train wreck of an activity for the human body. Having trained successfully for a couple of marathon cycles, taking a down cycle really refreshes my body. It's not like I have to go through a full cycle of only training for a 10K marathon cycles, taking a down cycle really refreshes my body. It's not like I have to go through a full cycle of only training for a 10K after I take downtime. It's used to the grind and can hop right back in. So I emailed this question to Glenn Fleissig, who is the research

director at ASMI, the American Sports Medicine Institute. and he studies pitching mechanics and pitch counts and workloads and injury risk. And I thought his perspective might be useful here. So he responded, the question about whether there will be an increase or decrease in pitcher injury rates in 2021 is a very good one. As pointed out below, there are factors suggesting that the decreased workloads in 2020 across baseball may lead to fewer injuries this year and other factors suggesting that there may be more injuries this year. I don't have a crystal ball on this, but I do think players and leagues should consider several factors, including the number of innings pitched in 2020, number of months pitching or not pitching in competition in 2020, and any injuries

in 2020. Players and teams should consider longer preparation time in spring training, et cetera, for players coming back from long layoffs. Preparation includes pitching and throwing drills, but also comprehensive strength and conditioning programs. Players and teams might also consider ramping up their pitch counts once the season starts. This is all highly individualized and athletic trainers and others on staff need good, honest communication with players to monitor their progress. My final point is that the specifics within these generalized statements vary not only player to player, but also by level. Whereas MLB pitchers are approaching a full season after playing a COVID-shortened 2020 MLB season, many minor league pitchers are coming in not having pitched competitively

for a full year. The specifics also vary for our youth, high school, and collegiate pitchers who had their own unusual 2020 seasons and are not physically mature like professional pitchers. Yeah, I mean, I think that the fact that this is still both an unsettled question generally and one that is hard to feel confident in the answer in, that's an awkward way of saying that, but at an individual level is going to be one of the defining things of this season which you know sort of a an obvious thing to say but i imagine that we are going to see very sort of methodical and purposeful ramp ups in the spring that managers and player development staffs are going to be very conservative with sort of load management when it comes to major leaguers and kush like i don't i i guess it kind

of depends for the minor leaguers what if any action they did see i mean they won't have in most cases have pitched in in sort of traditional game settings but some of them might have you know been at the outside or done instructs or played you know internationally this winter during winter ball but i imagine that it's going to, unfortunately, there are going to be guys where, you know, they, they think one thing and, and an arm suggests something different after they've started throwing, but I don't know that there's a really great way to predict that in advance. I mean, my instinct is to say that for guys who are coming off of injury, the lack of sort of new strain on an arm might be good,

but you're going to have to go really, really slow as you get them back into game shape. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if we see sort of fastball velocities depressed for longer than is typical at the start of the year, because I think guys are just going to have to go very slow and steady because they don't want to risk blowing out. I don't know. Yeah, I think Kieran might be onto something for some pitchers. I think if you are younger, less established, less experienced, or if you got hurt last year, that might not bode well. But if you are physically mature,

if you have pitched at that level for a while, I think it could be helpful in the long run. I wouldn't be surprised if we do see some pitchers, you know, last a long time at a high level and maybe attribute that to the long break they got in 2020. Because if you do get that time off and you also keep yourself in shape and you ramp up for the season appropriately and take whatever time you need, like all those injuries came about last year because pitchers didn't have the time that they needed and they tried to compress it and rush it and that had ill effects.

But I think if you just had more rest and more time to heal, more time in the middle of a career than pitchers typically have to rest and repair your UCL or whatever, just let the body knit itself back together. I think as long as you don't try to rush it when you come back, I think it could be beneficial for some pitchers in the long run

again. But I think you probably should try to take it easy just as you're coming back because your body may not be built up the way that it would be coming after a regular year. Yeah, I think that that's right. Okay. Andy says, I'm a lifelong Pirates fan in my 30s. Sorry, Andy. The team has never won a traditional playoff series in my lifetime. We got to experience a sense of euphoria in the middle part of the last decade, only to be dashed by the debacle that is the wildcard playoff game.

It's obvious that we are in a new rebuild phase. Can you explain this new phase we're heading into, like a parent explaining hard news to a child that is terrified of another 20 years of consecutive losing seasons? The fan base is naturally and understandably jaded since the 1990s. And I can't say, just looking at the board,

at fan graphs and the farm system rankings, the Pirates, after trading everyone who was left, essentially, are now fourth when it comes to projected value from their farm system. It goes Rays, Padres, Dodgers, Pirates. So that's encouraging, I guess. Yeah, I think that the thing to keep in mind, and we'll have updated farm system rankings as we get further into the list here, but this is a legitimately good system. And I think that ought to be encouraging to Pirates fans for a couple of reasons. The first of which is that I think that there is much about this new regime that seems geared toward taking advantage of that in a way where we don't have to rehash the high-profile

trades that have gone badly for Pittsburgh. But they seem to have a sort of better handle on player development in this new regime and your ownership group is pretty disinclined to reinvest in the team and so the nice thing about having good young players is that you might field a good competitive roster even though your ownership group is cheap. So that's promising. And you got that beautiful ballpark. And so, you know, I think that it's very easy to kind of get stuck in a particular team identity. Like I'm a Mariners fan. I am aware of that propensity. But I think that it is worth giving new team regimes a little bit of time to figure themselves out and to course correct for some of the mistakes in the past and really see what they can do. And then, you know, if they let you down, then you can be mad at them also.

But I, you know, I think that some of the reaction that we saw to some of the trades that Pittsburgh made this offseason was like, oh, those pirates again. And it's like, well, I get that. But this is a new group of folks. And they seem pretty savvy. And they are headed by someone who has a good reputation for player dev. And they seem committed to winning. And so we don't have to excuse the sort of cheapskates' impulses of ownership. Everyone knows I am disinclined to do that. But, you know, I think give the team part, the actual players and team personnel folks a chance to kind of right the ship because they're pirates. Good one.

Yeah. I didn't mean to do it. Good one. Yeah. I didn't mean to do it. They have Ben Charrington who assembled a championship caliber core in Boston and helped develop some good players in Toronto. And then they've got John Baker now as the director of coaching and player development coming from the Cubs. And they signed Aza Campo late of the Astros. So they are recruiting people from other successful organizations who have some

track records of putting talented teams together. And yeah, ultimately it comes down to Bob Nutting and his unwillingness to spend, and that might lower their ceiling for as long as he is their owner. But given the prospects that they have now and the people who are in charge now, you'd think that they could at least do as well as could be expected given those budget constraints. So lower your expectations appropriately, but also raise your expectations appropriately in other ways, I guess. Yeah, I think that that's right. Okay. I've got two more here on my list. This is from Emily with Dustin Pedroia officially retiring this week. It got me thinking about episode 1627,

in which you come down pretty definitively against almost all forms of heckling. What would you say to Red Sox fans heckling Manny Machado, though? We can say with near certainty that Machado's dirty slide into Pedroia during a game in April 2017 is a large part of the reason why Dustin never effectively made it back to baseball and led to his early retirement. So am I allowed to heckle him using this line of attack? I say yes, and I certainly have, but I'd be interested in your take. Some other related items I've been mulling. For all intents and purposes, Dustin has at least publicly moved on from the incident and has said he's not upset by it anymore. I'm still upset, though. And as far

as I can tell, Machado has never expressed any form of remorse. Pajoria himself is well known for his heckling, although it's usually been portrayed in a good-humored type of way. This was not an isolated incident for Machado, and he's done other things that have contributed to his less-than-savory reputation in baseball. This would lead me to think that he is more hecklable than most. Could Dodgers fans heckle him for not exactly hustling to first in the 2018 world series would they have to stop now that they have finally won lastly the padres are a really really fun team and heckling machado feels like heckling them by proxy which i don't want to do i think that if the player who was injured has said that he has moved on,

then you kind of have to roll with that, right? You kind of have to roll with him having moved on. So that's my instinct. I mean, look, I don't like heckling because it is not comfortable for me personally. It is not the way that i engage with fandom anymore i have heckled in the past but it just feels kind of uncomfortable for me now and i think that it you can heckle if you're doing it in a way that isn't overly personal but then what's the point of the heckling like heckle creatively yeah what does that even mean ben what does that mean that i just said i don't know i i just don't i don't love i think

boo boo heartily yeah hearty boo nothing wrong with that you know it gets the point across it can cover all manner of sins right right? It's also just a thing that you as a person who is rooting for the other side in a contest to win can express free of any weird recrimination or getting overly personal with someone who you don't know. So I would say if I could offer an alternative, and again, I think as long as you're not heckling in a way that's like icky, that you can kind of do what you want because these guys really don't pay attention and can't hear you unless you're there in the, you know, in the on deck circle and you're right there. They just don't really hear you. But I might offer booing as an alternative because it's, you know, it's still forceful and it's loud and it could, you know, it just can be both.

What is the word? Like you're chastising them, but in like a safely general way. I don't know. I don't know. What do you think, Ben? Do you think, what do you think about heckling? I don't like heckling. I think, well, yes, I'm not really pro heckling to begin with.

But I think if a player has a really well-established and deserved reputation as like a dirty player or a headhunter, then I'm okay with certainly booing that player, expressing your disapproval of that behavior somehow. This particular play, I don't think, is an open and shut case of a dirty slide. I mean, this was much disputed. I just went back and watched it. I mean, this was much disputed. I just went back and watched it. And again, it looks to me like it could very well be an accident and probably was just sort of a late slide and his foot kind of kicked off the base as he was sliding. And then he very quickly showed remorse and checked on Pedroia. Like, it does not look intentional to me, you know, despite Machado's reputation for other plays like this. And so I am kind of with Pedroia in not blaming him for this. And Pedroia said earlier this month, I'm not upset about anything anymore. When he was asked about this, that play could have happened my rookie year. When you play second base and you play second like me, you hang on until the last possible second to get the ball because you watched it. If there's a slim chance at a double play, there's one guy on planet Earth who could turn it and you're talking to him.

He hasn't lost any of his bravado, but he doesn't seem to hold a grudge. Looking at the play, it really doesn't look like it was clearly dirty to me. And it really needs to be like I need to be sure. And like the player has to be like gloating about it. Like, you know, then I'm comfortable mocking him or heckling him or booing him or whatever. But this doesn't rise to that level for me. And the Red Sox retaliated against him and threw at him and almost hit him in the head, which I think is worse than what Machado did.

So even if you think that he deserved some sort of punishment for that, he already took it from the Red Sox on the field. So yeah, I would let this go and I would not get on Machado's case because of the Pedroia slide personally. Yeah. And it persisted for a while. And at one they were they were still coming at Machado and Pedroia was in the dugout going that's not me that's not me like trying to communicate to Manny Machado that he was not directing this on the part of his teammates so I think that it's absolutely an unfortunate injury and we're not trying to downplay that and again I don't I don't think that baseball players really hear fans that much. And so I think as long as you're not using language that's objectionable,

not only for the player, but for the people around you, that I'm not going to sit here and get overly fussy about it. It's not the way that I express displeasure, but I understand that it is the way that some people do. But I agree with you. I think that it really has to be obvious that it was intentional. And I don't think that this case is sort of unambiguous in that way. So I would offer a hearty boo as an alternative. But I'd also say that if the person most affected by it can find his way to kind of moving on from it, that we might invite ourselves to do the same thing.

I agree. All right. Last question. This is from Mona, who says, I saw MLB Network's top 10 short stop list on Twitter today. And regardless of how much people do or don't agree with the list, I noticed that almost all of the players listed are excellent, much less at least very good hitters. Some of them like Tim Anderson and Xander Bogarts particularly seem like they stick around to hit more than to field. This stuck out to me since for most of my life shortstops have been considered fielders first and hitters second, much like catchers and center fielders. I wonder if league-wide or at the very least for the top 10 shortstops, stats like WRC+, OPS+, and particularly slugging percentage to a notable extent are higher than they have ever been, even with league-wide slugging taking to the skies in general.

Outside of the stats, I'm particularly curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not this may establish a trend of teams trying to squeeze more hitting out of their shortstops in the future and leave other positions, particularly in my mind second base and center field, out of mind to lean more toward necessitating dazzling fielding. Let me know what you think. So Mona is on onto something here. She has picked up on an actual trend. And I think if you search the electronic pages of Fangraphs,

you'll come up with various posts about a golden age of shortstops. And we are in an era when shortstops are hitting better than they have ever hit before. There are a couple of ways you can look at this. You can look at performance as shortstop. So when players were actually playing shortstop, that is a split on the Fangraphs leaderboards, but it only goes back to 2002. Or you can just look at players whose primary position was shortstop, even though they didn't necessarily play shortstop all the time. And that goes back to the beginning of baseball. And I looked at both of those methods and looked at the live ball era or just the 2002 to 2020 period. And 2020, regardless of which way

you look at it, was the best offensive year ever for shortstops. Smaller sample, of course, but shortstops had a 102 WRC plus last year, which is the first year ever, I believe, that shortstops have ever hit above the league average, at least in the live ball era. They were never higher than 90 prior to the past few years and were generally well below in the 70 something to 80 something WRC plus range. So that is notable. So that is notable. And if you look at the top three seasons of all time, it's 2020, 2019, and 2018. And 2017 and 2016 are right behind. So this was not a 2020 fluke. Shortstops are actually hitting better than they have ever hit before. And so the question is, does this mean anything? Does this tell you anything about the position? And it might, but I think that's a little harder to say because a lot of this is cyclical. So you see that, you know, a great crop of players happens to come along at a particular position and they hit really well for a while and then those players age out and things swing back in the other direction. So it was just a few years ago that people were writing about like a golden age of second base hitting

and people were speculating about, well, maybe because of the shift, you can play anyone there now, you know, you can put Mike Moustakis or whoever at second base and you can just position them better. You don't have to have the traditional second base skill set

so you can have some sluggers there. But that hasn't really continued in the last couple of years, you know, since sluggers there but that hasn't really continued in in the last couple years you know since then offense there has receded somewhat and there's just an ebb and flow to it across history so it might mean something it might not like you know we're in a high point for third base offense too now so maybe you could say that infielders in general are hitting better or with more power or just because of the shift or positioning, like there's a less rigid understanding of,

you know, you have to have this particular body type to play this position. Like I do think the definition of positions and just like, do you have to fit this profile? Teams have gotten a little looser about that. I think they're more willing to put people at positions that historically they might have been shunted away from. But, you know, will shortstop always hit like this collectively? I would guess probably not. I would tend to agree with that.

I think that there's an ebb and flow to these things. And, you know, good defensive positioning from a variety of up the middle spots allows you to be a little looser and prioritize offense there. But I think you're also right that this happens to be a wildly talented crop of players, many of whom hit the big leagues really young and were athletic and able to do a bunch of stuff. So I don't know that it is a permanent shift in the position but i think it's a great deal of fun to watch while we have it yes i think that the place where you're likely to see if i had to pick an infield spot where i think the defense is going to not not matter but continue to be shift aided it's it's more likely at second probably than at short but i think that you're right that there's a lot of

ebb and flow over the years with this kind of stuff so yeah yeah and like catcher offense has been bad lately which you know could be because of prioritizing framing and suddenly that seemed to matter so much and so catcher offense hit a low point but i think it's bounced back a bit and of course if you get robot umps at some point, then that won't matter at all. And suddenly catchers will probably be hitting better than they have before. So sometimes conditions change and that causes these changes. And sometimes it really is just a cyclical sort of random thing. Or, you know, maybe a Cal Ripken comes along and people think, oh, you can be big and play shortstop. And A-Rod plays short or whatever, and you get that crop of mid-90s shortstops. And I think it's partly related to the juiced ball, too. That's kind of leveled the playing field power-wise because now it doesn't take as much pop

to get the ball over the fence. So players at positions that haven't traditionally been the province of hulking sluggers can still hit for power. And there have maybe been some advances in unlocking swing changes and pulling the ball and hitting the ball out front province of hulking sluggers can still hit for power and there may be been some advances in like unlocking swing changes and pulling the ball and hitting the ball out front that can help littler guys hit like bigger guys i know that the correlation between height and isolated power

has been a lot lower in recent years than it has historically so while we've seen plenty of big guys play short we've also seen some smaller guys like Francisco Lindor learn to tap into power that they weren't expected to have but again they come and go so enjoy this golden age of shortstop offense while we have it but yeah don't necessarily know that it will last forever but I think people talk about positionless basketball and I think there's some of that in baseball now too where you see like the Dodgers for instance instance, will just like, you know, Max Muncy will play second base sometimes and then he'll play first base or like Chris Taylor will play center and then play second. And guys are just roving all over the field. So I think there's more willingness to do that.

So maybe there will be less clear distinctions when it comes to like the offensive baselines for various positions. For one thing, teams carry so many pitchers on their rosters these days that they need their position players to play all over the field. But I think you can get yourself into trouble if you try to connect these things to a trend. And sometimes it really is just, well, you happen to have a bunch of good players at a particular position at a particular time. Yep. Okay, that is the last question I have. It sets up our episode ending stat blast. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Okay, this step blast was inspired by an edition of the Joshian newsletter from earlier this week where he wrote about the Angels, and he noted that the Angels have trying to contend and still were not getting any

pitching. And Joe was wondering, why were they not one of the serious Trevor Bauer bidders, given that they seem like they could really use a durable top of the rotation type, and yet they were not a finalist for his services. And now they're trying to cobble together a rotation out of non-aces again. So I was inspired to look up the worst or least productive positions on all teams over the past five seasons. So it's sort of like Jay Jaffe's replacement level killers exercise. But I've always liked looking at the least productive positions, especially over a period of years, like when there's a failure by one team to fill a position for years on end. So it's like, you know, not just one year things went wrong, but you failed for a long time to put a productive player at that position. And I've forgotten a lot of things that I've written about baseball, but for some reason, I remember writing a transaction

analysis for when the Royals signed Omar Infante to a four-year deal in 2013. And at the time, I looked at how unproductive Royals' second baseman had been in the four seasons preceding that move. And they had been not only the worst second baseman, but the worst position, period. It was like Chris Goetz and a bunch of other non-hitters. And so I had a little leader board in there. And I thought, well, Omar Infante, that will solve their problems because he's been pretty good lately. And spoiler, it did not solve their problem at all. In fact, over the next four seasons,

they had the fourth least productive second baseman in the game, according to Fangraph's War. So Omar Infante didn't even last that contract with the Royals, I believe. They released him before that contract was up. On the plus side, they won two pennants in a World Series during that time. So that's another thing I like about this exercise is that you can have a terrible position and still be a good team. It's hard, but it's doable. So it's not always just the worst teams that have the worst team was at each position over that period. And then I compared the positions. So I looked for

basically the worst position relative to its peers at that same position and then ranked them by that. So not just like the least war at any position, but the least war relative to the positional average and how that stacks up to the other worst jobs at getting some production from a position. So if we want to start with the best, I'll go best to worst. So the best worst position is actually the Angels starting rotation, which has been worth 28 war over the past five seasons, led in playing time by Andrew Heaney, the late Tyler Skaggs, sad to see his name, and Matt Shoemaker. And I also looked to see whether they have solved this problem. So I at the fangraph step charts to see how do they stack up in 2021 and this problem well it hasn't been solved exactly the the angels project to have the 17th best starting rotation which is better than the worst but their projected leader is still

andrew heaney and you know they've added cob and they've've added Quintana. Like there are players there. They could piece together something good here, but a lot has to go right. They don't have like an ace. You know, they've failed to bring in the Cole or the Bauer or someone like that who could right the wrong here. So still like middle of the pack rotation at best after years of being the worst. Yeah. And I guess, well, have dylan bundy too yes they do yeah there's some talent there but yeah there's some like yeah there there are some

guys toward the back of their rotation who i still think are like i still think griffin canning is interesting but yeah it's it's not you don't walk into the season finally going, yes, we shall see Mike Trout in the postseason again. Like, angels ho. Mike Trout can't pitch. But there is Shohei. Let's hope. Fingers crossed. I want that so badly for him and for you, Ben.

I know. I know. I have like four Shohei shirts that my effectively wild secret Santas have sent me for the past three years. I need an opportunity to wear them. So, yeah, you know, there are some promising players there, but still. My effectively wild secret Santas have sent me for the past three years. I need an opportunity to wear them. So yeah, you know, there are some promising players there, but still up in the air. Anyway, the Angels rotation was 1.3 standard deviations below the mean for starting rotations when it comes to war. Now 1.4 standard deviations below.

That is right field, the Blue Jays, who were worth 1.3 war from 2016 to 2020. And that was Jose Bautista at the end of his career, Randall Gritchuk, and Teoscar Hernandez. And Teoscar Hernandez, still the projected war leader at that position for them. They rank 14th in projected war from right fielders in 2021. So again, problem not necessarily solved, but they brought in George Springer and now Teoscar is in right and they have some depth there. So middle of the pack, at least that's better than bringing up the rear. All right. The next worst position, also 1.4 standard deviations below the mean. Second base, the Giants. Giant second baseman, 3.8 war

over the past five seasons, led by Joe Panik, Donovan Solano, and Kelby Tomlinson in playing time. Giant second baseman project 17th in second base war this year, and Tommy LaStella is the leading projected war getter

there. So, problem, again, not solved, but at least addressed somewhat. Improved. Yeah. All right. Next one, also 1.4 standard deviations below the mean. Royals, third baseman, third base. The Royals were the worst. 5.1 war from their third baseman over the past five years. Mike Moustakis, Chesler Cuthbert, and Hunter Dozier. And this year, they project 21st in war from third baseman, and Hunter Dozier is the leading projected war getter there. Yeah.

All right. Next is center field, and you could probably guess which team is bringing up the rear here. Again, 1.4 standard deviations below the center field mean with a total of 2.5 war from their center fielders over the past five seasons. It's the Mariners, led in playing time by Leonis Martin, Guillermo Heredia, and Malik Smith. And the Mariners project 18th in center field war this year, led by Kyle Lewis.

All right. Next up, this is shortstop. Shortstop 1.6 standard deviations below the mean. The Brewers have gotten 2.6 war from their shortstops. Orlando Arcia, Jonathan Villar, and Eric Sogard. And Brewers shortstops project to be 25th this year, again, led by Orlando Arcia. So same guy. No surprise that this problem is not really solved.

All right. Next up, first base and 1.7 standard deviations below the mean. We have the Rockies with negative two war. Negative two war. I think this is the most embarrassing one pen it's it's up there uh we may get more embarrassing but negative two war from rocky's first baseman over the past five years mark reynolds ian desmond daniel murphy and here's the kicker they project to be the worst in 2021 as well and actually their top projected war getter at this position is colton welker who is projected to get like 35 plate appearances at first or

something because everyone who is projected to get more playing time at first is sub replacement level so not only is this problem not solved it is as bad as it has been for the past five seasons. So there you go. The Rockies. All right. Three positions left. Next up, 1.9 standard deviations below the mean. Catcher, the Tigers.

Tigers catchers have produced negative 3.2 war over the past five seasons. Led, if you can say that in Playing time by James McCann Former effectively wild guest Grayson Griner and John Hicks And this year Tigers Catchers project to be 24th With Wilson Ramos Leading so problem not

Solved okay second to Last position 2.2 Standard deviations below the mean Left field and It's that team again it's the colorado rockies the only team that shows up at multiple positions on this countdown is the rockies and uh ian desmond is kind of a common element here in first place in left field he is actually fourth in playing time in left over that period. It's led by Gerardo Parra, Raimel Tapia, and David Dahl.

And again, projected war by Rockies left fielders in 2021, 30th, led by Raimel Tapia. So not only are the Rockies on this list twice for having two of the worst and least productive positions in baseball over the past five seasons. But in both cases, they still project to be the worst in 2021, which like if you've been the worst over an extended period, like at least you could say, OK, we know what we have to fix here. And it shouldn't be hard to like at least be better than worst you know better than sub replacement like rocky's left fielders over the past five seasons negative 3.1 were like come on you can do better than that and yet they do not project to do better than that and there's something about those two positions which are so far down the defensive spectrum being so bad in literally course fields that just strikes you as insulting in a in a weird way i wish that he and desmond were better because me too i finally remember what team he's on and

it's not for a good reason no all right and last place here with a war that was 2.3 standard deviations below the mean at that position we're up up to the bullpen now, and it's the Marlins. The Marlins bullpen. Marlins have gotten zero war, a nice, neat 0.0 war from their relief pitchers over the past five seasons, led in playing time by Kyle Barraclaw, Dustin McGowan, and Harleen Garcia. And this year, the Marlins pen projects to be 27th in baseball, led by Yemi Garcia. So again, what strikes me here is that we're talking about the worst positions in baseball

over the past five seasons. Only one, only Blue Jays' right field projects to be better than average in 2021, and just barely 14th in baseball. And most of these teams that have been bringing up the rear are still basically bringing up the rear. So this is like extended futility. And this can happen, you know, if you happen to make a bad bet on a particular player, such as Ian Desmond, let's say, and you think that that hole will be filled for years to come, and then it isn't, and it turns out to be an even deeper hole than you thought like

it might be tough to escape that for a few years and maybe your farm system just didn't happen to produce a good player at that position for a while but really when we're going on several seasons of just like an abyss at that position like do something to address it you know

you don't have to be the best at that position but even just like getting to above replacement level would be a big leap for these teams at these positions yeah man all right so that's that i will put the spreadsheet online if anyone wants to see where their teams rank at every position over that span. And that will do it for today. Wear pants that fit you. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. I will just note as a brief follow-up to our discussions about Mickey Calloway and Jared Porter

that the league has instituted a couple of changes in response to those reports. I'm reading from Lindsay Adler's article at The Athletic, which I will link to. Major League Baseball has updated its workplace code of conduct pertaining to sexual harassment and discrimination. After two stories revealed alleged harassment by now former Mets general manager Jared Porter and current Angels pitching coach Mickey Calloway, the league will also provide a third-party anonymous hotline for reporting incidents of harassment and will require anti-harassment and discrimination training for club executives during spring training.

The league recently proposed the changes to the MLBPA, which agreed to the modifications. So just letting you know that some small measures have been taken to address this problem, although I'm sure much more remains to be done. Who knows how much this training over Zoom will actually help, but the anonymous hotline seems like a good idea at least. It's a start. Check out Lindsay's article for more details.

You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small amount of the amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. John, Zach Campbell, Ben Magnuson, Gordon Balfour, and Rob Orkowski. 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 Meg coming via email at podcastatparagraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and we will be back with one more episode before the end of this week. Talk to you then. Let's go back and touch the past One more night is all I ask Get that feelin' That old feelin' Get it healin' Feelin' Feelin'

We can patch it up, baby