Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1682: You Make the Call

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about why they haven’t been talking about Bryce Harper, follow up on previous points about the automatic-runner rule, optional home run trots, and player switcheroos, discuss the latest report about the Mets’ front-office culture and team president Sandy Alderson, and answer listener emails about two automatic-runner-rule variants, first base […]

And don't talk, talk anymore Don't you talk anymore Don't talk anymore You want to find your old friend You want to find your old friend You want to find your old friend You want to find your old friend Hello and welcome to episode 1682 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing okay. You know, I was just thinking, I have not thought about Bryce Harper for a while. Have you thought about Bryce Harper for a while?

thought about Bryce Harper for a while. Have you thought about Bryce Harper for a while? He just has not really made himself at the top of my mind in a way that he was for years and years. It's like I haven't really talked about Bryce Harper. I haven't written about Bryce Harper. I haven't read a whole lot about Bryce Harper. It's just like he went from omnipresent. Maybe this is just my skewed perspective. Obviously, if you're a Phillies fan, you've thought about Bryce Harper. But in terms of the national conversation, Bryce Harper has receded from it after dominating it, maybe in ways that were even disproportionate for years. My main memory, recent memory of Harper is that there was a lot of consternation because he got off to a somewhat slow start, I think, in his early Phillies days. But he ended up having almost like a five-win season

his first year in Philadelphia. And so I think that my most recent check-in on Harper was somewhere during that 2019 season to be like, oh, this is, he's, it's fine. Yeah, he's still good. He's still good. Yeah. I don't think there's been a Fangraphs article on him since he signed with the Phillies. I could be wrong, but just quickly looking before we started recording, I don't think there's been one.

And I'm not saying that there should have been one. It's just like, yeah, he's fine. He's still good. But like, not in a way that really calls attention to himself which is odd just because Bryce Harper was one of the contenders for unofficial face of baseball status for years and like not only was he great and a phenom and on the Sports Illustrated cover when he was 16 and all of that and the natural and just a ton of attention. And then early in his career, he was up and down a bit, but he was great at age 19. And then he had the MVP season in 2015 when he was unbelievable.

And since then, he's just been good. He's just been good. And I don't really mean that as a criticism. I guess it is in the sense that he has not repeated that MVP campaign, but it's just odd for Bryce Harper to be in the position of just kind of blending into the background. He's just another good player now, whereas for so long, he was the center of attention because it was all of the the prospect type for Harper and then the Trout versus Harper battle, who's better, who you got. And that has pretty conclusively been decided in favor of Trout. And there was also, I think, a perception that Harper was overrated, like when there would be those player polls every year. I forget who did them. Sports Illustrated maybe would like poll all the players on who's the most overrated player in baseball. And it was always Bryce Harper.

I think as recently as March 2019, he was identified as the most overrated player. And I don't know if he's become underrated, but it doesn't feel like he's overrated right now. It feels like suddenly no one's really talking about him all that much. Because like, if you're going to talk about someone who is roughly his age, who is amazing, then you're going to talk about Mike Trout or Mookie Betts. And if you're going to talk about the next generation, then you're talking about the Acunas and Sotos and Tatises, etc. And Bryce Harper is just good. And he's not really demanding our attention anymore, which is odd. It's an unfamiliar situation for Bryce Harper to be in. I wonder if it tells us a little something about just how important the team context for even very good players is. Because Trout has played on bad angels teams for most of his career, but he's Mike Trout. bad angels teams for most of his career but he's mike trout and he's had because he is the best player in baseball and multiple mvps and and this and that he's he's pretty hard to deny plus we

just won't shut up about him so you know there's there's that part of it but harper you know his best year was a pretty forgettable year for the nationals he left dc before they won their world series his first you know philly hasn't made its way back last year was the strange pandemic year plus they had that disastrous bullpen so even his 2020 which you know again like 60 games but was quite impressive like he had 151 wrc plus he was worth almost two wins in just uh 58 games so he had a and he walked 20% of the time. Good gravy, Bryce Harper. Wow, look at you. So he, and you know, he hit 13 home runs, but it was 2020. And we were, I think we're just not, we're still not mentally attuned to who was good

last year and who wasn't. And he was on a team that wasn't particularly good. And they were just so painful to watch with that bullpen. So I think that part of it is just that, you know, he was sort of like the prince who was promised in DC and then it didn't materialize into a world series when they obviously had post-season runs, but they never materialized into sort of an extended stretch. And then, like I said, he left before they went on their 2019 run and Philly just hasn't been able to take the step forward, um, on the back half of their rebuild. So, yeah, he is interesting to forget because he's also, he does a really good job of like, I don't want to call it cheap.

Like he has a very good PR sense, right? So he, you know, he wears bandanas that have the fanatic's head and he has, you know. He's very like pandering to Philly's fans. Maybe that is too strong. He seems toering to philly's fans maybe that is uh too strong he seems to know he knows his audience appreciate yeah he has a really good sense of his audience and when he signed with philly he and his family talked a lot about like wanting to be in one place forever and really establish themselves as part of a legacy of a franchise and be connected to the philly's stories for a long time. And I think

that like whatever brashness he had that might've rubbed people the wrong way in the beginning of his career sort of modulated in a way that makes him both, you know, I think a guy who has a really good sense of the franchise he's playing for and is trying to connect with the fan base there, but also has maybe modulated him down enough that it's not sort of breaking through on a team that hasn't had October success yet. So it is an interesting, it is an interesting thing because I never quite knew how fair it was to call him overrated, like how much of our expectations of him we really could ascribe to anything that he had cultivated, he had done it with his play and obviously when you have a a nine win mvp season like we're all gonna sit up and be like oh my god bryce

harper did you know that he is good but it's always hard to know how much we should really fault players for our own understanding of them being over underrated and so yeah he's just a really he is a fascinating case i think you're're right to point out. If you were able to look at like, I don't know, percentile ranks of like traffic to fan graphs pages or something, and you looked at where Bryce Harper ranked from like 2012 to 2015 or a little bit beyond that or wherever, and where he's been over the last couple of years, I bet there would be a pretty precipitous drop there, even though he remains a very productive player. And yeah, he's 28 years old. He's not like older over the hill or anything. It's not like his luscious hair has all fallen out or anything. It's just that he's not the new hotness and he is also not the historically incredible Trout or even Betts quite. So he's just like a very good all-around player the shape of his stats like he's a 250 260 ish hitter which these days is like a high average yeah that would

have been average in the past but you know he'll like give you a pretty good obp and he's patient and other than that one year before he signed the free agent contract when it seemed like he was kind of taking it easy on defense a little bit. His defense has been fine. Like he's still, you know, on a Hall of Fame trajectory. I think we can say, but it would be an unusual case where like in 2012 when he comes up and is good at his age 19 season or 2015 when he is incredible and wins an MVP award. You might have said, oh, yeah, Hall of Fame and he'll be like inner circle Hall of Fame whereas now maybe it's like I don't know maybe his career war ends up being in the like Carlos Beltran Scott Rowland range or something

which is like still I think a deserving Hall of Famer certainly couldn't call him a disappointment but it might be just one of those cases where it's like yeah you know maybe other than that one year where now we can look back and say oh well his uh his wobah sort of outperformed his expected wobah which was something that people noted after that season that it seemed like he had gotten better results on balls in play than perhaps he quote unquote deserved or were expected but he was still really good and now he's just sort of settled in as like a three to five win player and that is still very valuable and will produce like one of the the best careers of all time if we're not being too

exclusive about it and yet maybe for the last i don't know how long he'll last or play at this level but we could be talking about you know 10 15 years of being good to very good instead of just like the you know on everyone's lips all the time that he was for the first several seasons well and who knows you know who knows what the next many, many years of his tenure in Philly will bring. You know, it is a funny thing when you have a player page up and it says contract 13 years, and then it gives you the final year of the deal. And you're like, wow, 2031. Yeah, but it's not the longest or the biggest contract.

He's been surpassed. He's been surpassed. But, you know, he has many, many seasons left to go in Philly. And you have to think that at some point things are going to kind of shake out the way they need to there and that he'll get his shot at more sort of memorable october moments but yeah it'll be interesting to see what that does for our perception of him because even though as you said he's only 28 and it's not like he's over the hill or you know starting to you know to be considered a bad or even average player.

He will be a diminished version of himself from the last time we saw him play in October, assuming that it doesn't happen this year or the next. So it'll be interesting to see how that kind of shifts our perception of him and whether he has a second act that makes the sort of intervening couple years of the back end of his time in D.C. and the beginning part of his run in Philly seem like a lull that then crescendos up into something more impressive. Yeah, this could be a snapshot of the perception of Bryce Harper at this moment, or at least my or our perception. And maybe he'll turn it on again and he'll have another MVP year. And then it'll be weird that there was a time when we weren't talking about Bryce Harper. But yes, I think

you're right to point out that the team context is important. And I wonder if the Nationals winning the World Series in the first season without him made him appear more dispensable. Not that his presence was holding them back or that they won because he wasn't there or anything, but just having him leave and then winning immediately without him, it was like, oh, well, I guess we didn't need him. The team wasn't just built around Bryce Harper and then going to Philly and Philly being pretty mediocre in his first couple of seasons may have cemented that. So yeah, just an observation, just talking about not talking about Bryce Harper. his baseball demigod his entire career that was the way that we understood him coming into the league and at the very end of that essay and i do not i do not credit myself with being prescient in any way but just that i needed a freaking way to end this thing after it being very very late

a thing that i am still sorry for that you know they had some options internally like we had this sense of juan soto as a potential harper replacement at least in terms of his production at the plate and i think you're right that there was this shift that occurred not only because they won the World Series, but because the folks who had sort of a Harper-sized hole in their hearts could just look at Juan Soto and go, oh, but we have a Juan Soto now. So I think that that definitely shifts things around. There's something to be said for being perceived rightly or wrongly as sort of indispensable and irreplaceable and again that's not to knock harper you know i think that we all appreciate that we get to sort of delight in the soto of it

all but it does i think kind of taint your understanding even if it maybe smooths the way out of town for you right i think that fans can build up resentment pretty quickly when a big free agent leaves town and then the team is like immediately terrible and then they're like, yeah, screw that guy. And you probably get a few more boos in the ballpark when you come back than you might otherwise. But it is sort of a very abrupt transition.

I don't think that that happens quite so dramatically very often where you're like, oh, we just literally have one Soto now and have won a World Series. Like normally there's sort of a, you know, an in-between phase where you're like, we missed that guy, but this is fine. You know, it's rare for it to be quite such an abrupt shift in focus. Yes. So a few follow-ups, responses to our discussions on the previous episode, and then maybe a bit of news, and then a few emails since we didn't get to a ton last time. So Sam Normington tweeted at us to say, I love Effectively Wild, but the amount I heard ghost runner this episode hurt me in my pedantic soul. Extra innings runner is very much not a ghost runner. Maybe we should call them a zombie runner because the last player from the lineup the previous inning is raised from the dead. And yeah, valid point. Ghost runner, as I typically understand it, even though I was saying it to refer to the extra innings automatic runner, it's like when you don't have enough players to play and so you have an imaginary runner on the bases. This is not that there is a real runner on the bases. So even though that runner was not a hitter in that inning, I guess we probably should not use the same term to describe it. Although I think probably everyone understands what we are talking about. But I kind of like zombie runner. I mean, the runner is alive, but he was sort of brought back from the dead after ending the previous inning. So I kind of like zombie runner i mean the the runner is alive but he was sort of brought back from the dead after ending the previous inning so i i kind of like that i like it because in addition to sort of its accuracy because you know pedantic edits appeal to me as an editor we know that in the zombie film canon there are different kinds of zombies right there there are the slow plotting

zombies where you're like you can probably get away from that guy and there there are the slow plodding zombies where you're like you can probably get away from that guy and then there are the fast zombies right they're like the the ones from like 28 days later where you're like oh no i am about to die and so i i like the potential for us to sort of superimpose the um the the various different uh forms of zombie onto base runners because they too vary in their speeds. So I like that very much. Yeah, that's a good one. And then a couple people wrote in to respond to our discussion of players swapping places secretly in a game. And there's no documented case of this happening in baseball or other sports, but there have been some conspiracies. And I was saying that it would be fun even just to speculate about this possibly happening. And there is some speculation that the Canseco twins may have done this at some point.

There was a long Reddit thread coming up with possible times when they might have done it a few years ago. And I think there was a switch that they pulled in Ken Seiko's celebrity boxing post-baseball career where I think Jose switched places with Ozzy. And even though they were twins, you could tell Jose and Ozzy apart facially, at least I think you can. Jose and Ozzy apart, like facially, at least I think you can. But there was some suggestion that perhaps this could have happened and did happen in boxing. And then I had forgotten, but my colleague at The Ringer, Roger Sherman, broke down a controversy back in 2017 about whether the NBA player Marcus Morris had subbed in for his injured twin brother, Markeith Morris. And Roger did an exhaustive breakdown about this because apparently Markeith had an ankle injury in game one of the series, and then he looked healthy in game two, perhaps too healthy, suspiciously healthy. So Roger examined the evidence there. But the idea has been proposed in the past, even though it has not necessarily happened.

I guess that it just goes to show that if it has happened, it is a far better con than we were giving it credit for because we just haven't noticed. Although, as we said in our conversation, as I think these follow-ups show, the number of instances in which it could really happen, fairly limited. And so it probably has not but i like the idea that some someone's sitting out there having perpetuated one of the better baseball cons of all time and they can't tell anyone about it they just have to be satisfied yeah don't take it to your grave if you did this just you know even if it's a deathbed confession right let us all in on the secret years later. We also got an email about our discussion of what would happen if home run trots were not required. Would players actually stop trotting? And Mike wrote in to say, did you know that in men's league softball and probably others, running the bases on a home run is not required and is considered bad form?

Partly this is due to the time limit most leagues have since it's a waste of everyone's time. Once the ball is over the fence, you're supposed to just turn around and go back to your bench. I've definitely seen people get hot over this. And I just Googled it and I found a thread on the slow pitch subreddit from a few years ago. And it says running the bases on a home run. This is only my second season playing softball and first in this league,

so I'm learning a lot of rules as I go along, but I'm confused on an etiquette issue. Should I run the bases on an over-the-fence home run? We've given up only one over-the-fence home run so far, and the guy did not run the bases, so that inclines me to believe that I should not run the bases. However, the ball player in me says, don't be lazy and run the bases after your home run.

What would be the proper thing to do? And there's a whole long thread here of people going back and forth on what is the correct thing to do after hitting the home run. Someone says, 99% of the time you don't run the bases. It's asinine and wastes time. Most games are played with a timer

and nobody wants to watch you circle the bases. Then someone else says, trotting is the best part. I've never seen anyone in any of my leagues skip it. I personally never would, et cetera, et cetera. But apparently there is a hit and sit philosophy in at least some softball leagues where you're just expected not to do it

because why would you make everyone watch you want to run the bases? So you make everyone watch you run around the bases? So that is a point in favor of the suggestion that maybe if they made this not required in MLP, it would eventually fall by the wayside. But then there would be people who would push back and say, but baseball is not a timed game and we got gotta you know we gotta make them touch them all and i maintain that the biggest problem with this proposal is that it would just quickly devolve into the dumbest possible conversation about what it all signifies and means but i understand that i wonder if

there's an exception in sort of like rec league softball if you are drinking a beer while rounding the bases because then you've increased the degree of difficulty because you don't want to spill right yes good point we also got some questions about automatic runners but maybe we can get to those once we officially transition into the email segment so before we do that we wanted to just follow up on the story about the Mets investigation into harassment inside the organization. Much or most of what we are finding out about that situation is coming from reporters. followed up on their previous reports and documented further instances of harassment and other untoward behavior in the Mets organization going back a few years. And this is not just the Mickey Calloway and the Jared Porter situations, but what seems

to be a more pervasive problem. And they extended their look to look at some non-public facing front office employees, some employees who were not in the baseball operations department, but had reputations for this sort of behavior and many instances and reports of this type of behavior. And I guess what is getting much of the attention related to this report is team president Sandy Alderson's response to that reporting, which was not the best. No, we'll read here just so that we can give everyone a sense of what went on in case they haven't had a chance to read the article. This is toward the end. In an interview, Alderson chastised the Athletic for what he felt was an unfair characterization of how the organization handled allegations of wrongdoing.

He also felt some stories spotlighted employees who were tasked with gathering information but were not decision makers. Let me try to make a point as strongly as I can, okay? Not every instance involving men, women in the workplace is a capital offense, okay? Every time something happens, that doesn't mean somebody has to be fired, Alderson said. There are a lot of intermediate steps that can be taken, and we've done that in a variety of different cases and have included capital punishment as a consequence in some cases, but not every case rises to the level of execution. And that's what, honestly, I think is happening with these articles in The Athletic. People are being executed, including women, by the way, for reasons that are unjustifiable. And I think that there's a little bit of trickery going on in this comment that is worth pointing

out because Alderson is not wrong that there are certainly instances of behavior that makes someone uncomfortable that gets reported to HR and is addressed by human resources. And that person is informed of the behavior that has made someone else uncomfortable and is sort of put on notice that that behavior is unacceptable in the workplace and goes on about their jobs. And that's that. And I don't think that anyone who is examining either the Mets culture specifically or baseball's broader culture, is suggesting that every workplace incident necessarily rises to the level of being a fireable offense. There's obviously gradation in these, and no one is saying that all of them are equivalent behaviors, even if we can recognize that they are inappropriate in their own way. But it's hard to look at this quote coming at the end

of a story that outlines years of this behavior clearly being known, well known enough that one of the individuals mentioned is brought up to a potential hiree as someone who is bad to work for in the interview they have for that job, and then say that the intermediate steps are necessarily being either properly applied, applied at all, or effective in addressing this behavior. And so, you know, I know that there's a sort of ongoing investigation that Steve Cohen has initiated with an outside law firm to look at the way that the Mets conduct themselves as a workplace and the processes and procedures that they have in place to try to alleviate behavior like this. But it's clear that that hasn't been effective and that a lot of it is being overseen by the same person. And so I don't know why we would have

confidence that things are necessarily going to change when this is the perspective that Alderson has. Like there are definitely going to be times when someone needs to be let go for creating a hostile work environment and for harassing people. There are going to be times when warning or training might be a more appropriate response. And to say that what is being demanded is sort of a zero tolerance policy isn't accurate. And it elevates this to, you know know a scenario where you might have someone who's inappropriately disciplined but the organization needs to demonstrate that it can appropriately discipline people before we start to worry about them being overzealous so this is disconcerting i don't know that you know anything is necessarily going to come of it when it comes to alderson's

continued involvement with the organization but if i were were Steve Cohen, I'd find this remark to make me worry that he's not the right person to oversee a shift in organizational culture. And the degree to which this seems to have been pervasive from, you know, you know, someone on field like Mickey Calloway to the GM's office in Porter, and then down to other people who have seniority in the organization and the ability to make someone's life miserable is really discouraging this piece points out more people who have left their chosen profession because of the workplace harassment that they've endured so yeah like that's that's the those are the stakes for the people who are on the receiving end of harassment like this.

And I don't mean to downplay the stakes that the harassers have, but then don't harass people. Yeah, it's not even as if heads have really rolled in a figurative sense. Like, I mean, it's not like there have been mass firings over this. They rehired one of the guys who did this. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah. So Alderson is sort of implicated here. One of the guys history, but it sounds as if one of his first acts when he was hired as team president was to bring back one of the main characters of this article, someone who has a history of just generally being creepy and flirty and gross with women who were working with and for him. And someone, multiple women, according to the article, raised the issue with him and said, why are we rehiring this guy? And

he was just like, oh, I'll talk to him or something. It was just like, he deserves a second chance or whatever. And maybe the guy does deserve a second chance i don't know but like white guys get a lot of second chances and uh and this guy it sounds like had a history of this and so yeah i think if you did something like that and if this is all just coming out for the first time now and if there's a history of just sort of sweeping this stuff under the rug or not really responding to it than for your first reaction to be like, oh, we're still talking about this? It's not like it's ancient history or something that's been litigated and re-litigated. This was clearly a problem and now that problem

is coming to light and hopefully shining a light on it will help remove the problem. But again, it's sort of like with all of these scandals, it's like in a different way what we were talking about with the Astros where it's like, okay, can we move on already? And it's like, well, you don't necessarily get to decide when people move on if you were the guilty party or if you were involved here and if this didn't come to light for a long time and now it finally has. there has to be some sort of reckoning with that you know whether it is a change in personnel or just a change in structure and process but something clearly has to change and you know mickey calloway still has not been fired officially on the angels coaches page mickey

calloway still listed as pitching coach. The result of this investigation better be a tome. It better be like a lengthy report that justifies like the months and months that have been devoted to this investigation thus far. And clearly we're not trying to lay the Angels dragging their feet on Calloway at the Mets feet, right? They don't have any say in the personnel decisions of the angels. But I think you're right. The folks who enable institutional cultures like this and do harm like this don't get to dictate the timeline on which other people move on, especially when they're not expressing all that much contrition, right? I think that you don't get to dictate the process

by which someone sort of heals and moves on from, say, being, you know, put in a position where they feel the need to leave a chosen profession because their workplace environment is so hostile. You know, that isn't a thing that you get to like set your watch and be irritated when they don't go as quickly as you'd like them to, but you especially don't get to do that when your answers are prickly like this and indicate that you want to move on, not because you want to make sure that the place that you oversee is welcoming to people and is a workplace that is defined by treating others with respect and having appropriate boundaries and ensuring that they're able to, you know, be judged on the merits of their work rather than, you know, other considerations that shouldn't have bearing in a

professional setting. But you just want to stop talking about it because it's embarrassing for you and it makes the organization look bad. And that doesn't fill me with a ton of confidence that you're the right person to ensure that like the best the best and brightest people regardless of who they are get to go to work every day and feel safe and respected and that's that's a bummer because as we've talked about like this team does have a really fun roster and we want to be able to like feel good about the Mets but it's very hard to do that when these revelations keep coming out and when the response to them is so wanting so i think that like i don't generally love to like call for people's jobs but i'd have a really hard

time like where does alderson go from here right like if you're you know if you're a young person if you're a young woman a young non-binary person who's applying for a job with the mets like do you feel confident that it's gonna go great if you you're hired? Like, I wouldn't. So, I mean, and we should also say, like, it is very likely that the Mets are not alone in having a culture problem based on, you know, how frequently we're hearing about this stuff and how, you know, different organizations are presenting either a tolerance for it or an indifference to it that makes makes you think that they're not particularly keen to like have hard conversations and and really put procedures in place that would guarantee a good workplace. But they've been in the news a lot. So we're going to talk about them because they're the ones where we can point to a crummy quote from their from one of their executives. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they have these very prominent public-facing figures, Callaway in the past and Porter more recently, and that maybe prompted these deeper dives.

And if you were to do these deeper dives with probably many other organizations, you could come up with some similar behavior along the way, which is not to excuse the Mets. It's more just to say that this might be more of a pervasive problem. And right now we are hearing about the Mets. But I think one of the more telling parts of the piece was about this guy, Joe DeVito, the team's executive producer for content and marketing, who is one of the people who was implicated here and I guess left the team last month. But he was apparently texting women employees just to be like, well, at least I'm not Mickey, right? Like really, that's kind

of the cringiest part of this thing that it was such common knowledge that Calloway was a creep within the organization that someone else who was also creepy, but maybe not creepy in exactly the same ways, was comparing himself favorably to him. And this isn't even like a player or a coach or someone in baseball operations. This is someone in an entirely different department. So if it was such common knowledge that he was a creep, then you have to think that everyone knew about it and didn't do anything. Yeah, it just underscores how pervasive this all was. And yeah, when the bar you're clearing is that you're not dick pic Mick, don't be, that's not a pat yourself on the back kind of moment.

No. That's a moment for continued reflection. Yes. All right. So let's transition to a few emails here. So a couple automatic runner follow ups and this email uses ghost runner throughout, but I'm just going to edit it on the fly here in the interest of Sam and his pedantic, but well taken critique. So Daniel says, listening to the discussion of the automatic runner or zombie runner, if we're calling the runner that in episode 1681, I had the thought that if the primary goal of the zombie runner is to prevent games from taking too long, then why not tie it to time played rather than what inning it is? So perhaps the rule should require a zombie runner

starting in the first extra inning, which begins more than three and a half hours after first pitch, not counting the time the game was suspended or delayed. This would have the benefit of introducing the zombie runner much later in a pitcher's duel than in a slugfest. Personally, I very much dislike the zombie runner rule and think that games should just be allowed to end in ties after a certain point. But this time-based rule is slightly more palatable to me than the rule as implemented. And someone else wrote in to say that that was sort of a hidden benefit of the rule that you proposed when we spoke, which was that it would be tied to scoring in some way.

And so if you had a pitcher's duel, then you would want to maintain the scarcity of runs. Whereas if you had a slugfest, then, well, what the heck, just the floodgates are already open. We might as well do this. And one benefit of that is that often a high scoring game will be longer. And so you would need the zombie runner rule more, whereas a pitcher's duel may have moved swiftly and it might be less imperative that you implement this rule at least right away. So that's what Daniel is saying, sort of, except he's saying why not make that explicit and tie it to the time of game. I think that that's a good idea. It seems like the only way that we might get some wiggle

on this question from MLB, because as we discussed, we're just very skeptical that they're going to do anything that might give room for for longer games again. But this is this seems like another happy potential medium. Right. I know that it doesn't satisfy the folks who look at this and just say that baseball should be the same regardless of the game state. Right. That the rule should not shift depending on time, because that violates our sense of what the game has been before. And if that's your position on this, I think that's perfectly defensible.

And this clearly does not alleviate that problem because it does have you managing to a clock, even if it's not quite as omnipresent as you might otherwise end up with. So I think that there's some merit here because it gives us, more often than not, it will give us breathing room to appreciate the really good pitching matchups that we talked about last time. But when a game is just ludicrously long and therefore likely to be not a blowout, see, we need a new word for that. High scoring is what I mean to say.

Then I think you can kind of help people get home so they can go to bed. Yeah, right. And we also got an email from Justin who said, I was listening with interest to your suggestions about how and when to modify the terrible runner on second rule, which to be clear, I do hate. I had an idea to make it more exciting. 10th inning, normal. 11th inning, runner on first. 12th inning, runner on second. 13th inning, runner on third. 14th inning, runners on first and second. 15th inning, runners on first and third. 16th inning, runners on second and third. 17th inning, bases loaded. I don't have any idea what to do after that. Dial it back down in reverse, start over at normal. Doesn't matter, really. I don't see it getting that far. Every time the teams remain tied, it would raise the stakes. This would be incredibly stressful and exciting for fans, as not only would the likelihood of scoring increase with each inning, but in all likelihood, the relief pitchers would

probably start getting worse. If a game should continue on for a few more extra innings, it would be must-see television for sure. I mean, this is madness, but I kind of like it. I don't think you'd have to start over. You just leave them loaded and see how long it goes. I mean, gosh, can you imagine if you're the offense that can't drive in a single run? You'd never get there, but yes.

Yeah, we would never, ever, ever get there. I mean, there's very little risk that it would ever reach that point, but it would be sure fun if it did. Yeah. I kind of like this, like if we're going to do it, which again, not in favor of it, but I do like the escalating intensity as opposed to just the abrupt change from regular baseball to totally different baseball and the same brand of totally different baseball, no matter what extra inning it is.

and the same brand of totally different baseball, no matter what extra inning it is. So I like it starting a little bit later, and I do kind of like that it gets more and more anxiety-inducing as the game goes on. In one way, it makes it seem even more like Calvin Ball or Bourne's Ball or whatever, if we're just changing to different rules every extra inning. But if we're tossing out the regular rules as it

is, then I guess we might as well go whole hog and have fun with it. So again, strongly in favor of doing nothing and just leaving it the way it was would even be more in favor of ties than doing any of this, I think. But I kind of like this. This sounds like it would be sort of fun. But I kind of like this. This sounds like it would be sort of fun. And I like that fun is a priority, but that it maintains tension. And as you said, it builds tension and sort of has things escalate. And you still have the potential for normal play, right?

But then if you've squandered normal play, then they say, okay, well, now we're going to really put the screws to you and see what you can do with it so i i think that this is good but again that the i don't think the league would ever go for it because again you they they just want this stuff done so fast it's it's really interesting that that is such a priority but that there is a sort of philosophical bright line around ties yeah it is a curious bit of insight into how the league understands the game and like what is the most essential to it in a way that like i wonder how constant that will stay you know now that there are zombie runners will there forever be zombie runners because part of it too is that the circumstances around the pandemic are hopefully going to be different in the 2022 season and so the justification for this

as somehow related to sort of health and safety stuff, that excuse is going to fall by the wayside, one hopes, after this year. And then there will have to be a more sort of explicit conversation about time spent on the field as bad, even when there isn't a potential health concern. And so I will be very curious to see how they phrase that if they try to bring it back again.

It's always interesting when the game and its practitioners sort of reveal something about how it understands itself. And this is one of those moments. Yeah. All right. John says, I've heard some broadcasters say that the replay review folks shouldn't know what the call is when they're reviewing a play. The idea is that because the replay officials are also umpires they're reluctant

to overturn their colleagues calls do you think this happens with the replay officials not knowing the call on the field make for a better system interesting i wonder if this maybe misunderstands the concept of care that one might have for one's colleagues, because there's like the showing up the umpires on the field aspect of it. But there's also the part of it that is the home team is potentially going to be really pissed at you, depending on what you call and so my my instinct would be that if what the replay umpire is trying to do is sort of maintain the well-being of the umpire on the field that they would sacrifice the momentary embarrassment of having your call overturned for the more vocal embarrassment and sort of consternation of having the home crowd yell at you a lot. And so I wonder what the sort of preferred way of expressing sort of solidarity or camaraderie with your pals would be, assuming that we think that they all like one another, which,

you know, that might be a pretty big assumption on our part. But I think that it's a good thing to have an understanding of, provided that what we're trying to do is you need clear and sort of convincing evidence that the call on the field is wrong you know you have to change that standard in addition to telling the the replay ump what they what they called on the field what do you what matters the most to you when it comes to replay accuracy yeah and so the i think the standard is what really needs to change. And once the standard changes, there's no obligation to inform them of what the call in the field was because the standard is, is the call right or wrong? Not, is there enough present here to indicate that an error was made unless we have to overturn what the call in the field was, right? Yeah, right. I mean, if they know what the call is, whether or not they're inclined to make their colleagues look good or they think that they'd be showing them up, just knowing what the call was will influence their thinking, right? I mean, it just kind of

anchors your thinking like, oh, this other qualified person who does the same job I did saw it this way. So it's almost like the burden of evidence has to be higher for you to overturn it. That's the way the system works. The call stands if you can't conclusively determine that it was wrong, right? So I think you could say that if you wanted just the most unbiased look at it, then yeah, just show them the play, have them call it the way that the first person called it, except with more time and better angles and information. I guess you could say that if you think there's any benefit to being on the scene, like, are you losing any information from not being there? I guess the whole point of the system really is that you get a better look at it, or at least a different look if you go to the replay booth and you get to examine it from all sorts of angles.

So unless there's some extenuating circumstance that you don't know unless you're standing there physically in the ballpark, and I just don't know that there would be really in many cases. So I don't know that you actually would be losing anything. I would say that it may be difficult to cut out the call at times. I mean, sometimes the call is just signaled immediately and sometimes the umpire is in the frame. So just as a matter of mechanics, it may be tough to show them the play from every angle without also showing them what the call was. So practically speaking, I'm not sure that it's actually always feasible. But yeah, maybe. I don't know if there's some benefit to just having fewer calls overturned

so that you feel like as you're watching the game, you have to take the plays with less of a grain of salt. Like maybe it's better to have plays overturned more rarely just so it feels like what you're watching in real time is legitimate and it lends credence to the idea that umpires are good at their job. So I don't know if it benefits baseball for there to be fewer calls overturned and more, you know, upheld if not confirmed.

So there are a lot of considerations here, but I think there is something to the idea of if you could do it, just having them make an unbiased call without knowing what the ruling was. Yeah, I think that it would certainly remove the potential for them taking some understanding of sort of colleague care into account one way or the other but as you said it might be it might be kind of difficult to manage given the camera angles that we give them which is a lot of camera angles there's very many yeah all right sean says i have yet another question to add to your stockpile of if baseball was different questions. What if the catcher could wear a mitt the size of the entire strike zone?

How would framing be different? Would all of the good framers get worse and the bad framers get better, making everyone average? Would bases be stolen at will because catchers can't get the ball out of their glove? Would every plate appearance just end in catcher's interference? I really want to watch a whole game with this. Almost certainly they would just just end in catcher's interference? I really want to watch a whole game with this. Almost certainly they would just all end with catcher's interference, right? Yeah, it would be hard. That would be a big glove, and you wouldn't have good,

you know, your little fingies only reach so far up into the glove, and so you wouldn't have good articulation on the outer edge of it and it would just be flapping around and and so you'd you'd probably end up hitting the bat a lot and it would i think that it would result in just way worse calls not because calls are being more expertly framed but because calls that would otherwise be called correctly would just the umpire wouldn't know what to do with it. Because I think it would be hard for them to visualize. I mean, like, they're not comically large, but they would be very large. I think it would be difficult for them to visualize exactly where in the zone the ball was caught because of the flapping without your little fingies to make it close around it.

Probably drop a lot of pitches, right? Because it would be hard to squeeze the strike zone-sized glove hard enough to actually keep the ball in the pocket. Unless the construction were changed in some way, could you even close the thing? Would your fingers have the leverage required to close the glove tightly? And if not, if baseballs were just leaking out of this thing, then would that lead to fewer strike calls? Because umpires think that if the catcher drops the ball, that it wasn't in the right spot or something.

But that's in a world with glove-sized gloves as opposed to strike zone-sized gloves. And in this case, I wonder if you would get more or less accurate pitch calls. Obviously, with the state of affairs that we see today, umpires do, if even inadvertently, use the catcher's actions and the position of the glove and the movement of the glove. They do factor that into their strike calls and perhaps they shouldn't, but in practice they do. And in this case, there would not be that source of bias really, because I mean, I guess you might have to move the glove a tiny bit or shift your body a little bit, but mostly you would just sit there and hold the giant glove up and the ball would hit it no matter

what. Like maybe you'd still have to move it a little to get it to hit the right part of the glove, but that would be less of a source of information for umpires about where the pitch actually was. And so, I don't know, maybe they would have to focus harder on the location of the pitch as it crossed home plate. Maybe it would actually lead to more accurate pitch calls. But yeah yeah framing metrics would just be torpedoed i guess there might be something to it but i think there'd be a lot less differentiation there and yes more steals so if we want to bring back base stealing then this would be one way to do it i guess although you would probably also block everything how could anything get by you yeah so there'd be

fewer balls going to the backstop so yeah but just imagine what the transfer would be like yeah if you're trying to throw it a second that would be a freaking nightmare you'd be reaching in there it'd be like you're mary poppins reaching into your carpet bag to be like and here's the ball and also a floor lamp. Yeah. So yeah, probably not a positive change, but I agree. I would want to watch a game with this. Maybe not multiple games,

but I'd be curious what it would look like. They need to do this, the ever-expanding clown shoes, and everyone else with smaller gloves in the same game. Yeah. This might just be a Savannah Bananas promotion is what I'm describing. Yes. All right.

Jordan, Patreon supporter, says, My friend Sid made a joke about DH standing for designated hugger, which in turn made me think that if I were a baseball player, I would make a prop bet where if somebody lost, they'd have to try and hug the first baseman with their consent, of course, if they got a base hit. Now, aside from this maybe violating the rule against fraternizing at first, which everyone does anyway, it made me wonder which first baseman would be the most willing to hug a player who got a base hit.

I looked at your positional rankings to come up with some obvious candidates. Max Muncy, Jose Abreu, Anthony Rizzo, Jiman Choi, Freddie Freeman, decidedly not Luke Voigt, when I realized that there seemed to be a rough correlation between huggability and production at first base. Is this a coincidence? Narrator, it was. Or do you think there is some legitimate correlation between affability more broadly? Because what is huggability, if not simply a more overtly grandpa level of affability,

and being stationed at and then being productive at first base. Do nice guys tend to get funneled toward first base in the minors? Does it seem like there's a first base personality? Maybe it was Scott Hattaberg's step into my office personality that made him a good fit for first base rather than being a picking machine. I doubt that it is like a trait that is is selected on but i do think that we and we're all about to experience what a year of not having practice that this is going to do to our

ability to like go out in public and not you know reach out your hand to shake someone's hand and accidentally lick them on the side of the face or something. But I think that we get better at social interactions through practice. And arguably, first basemen have the most practice of anyone on the field. And so I think that the sort of traits in the profile and the tools that are being selected on there probably don't have much to do with the social acumen. But I would imagine that it sort of progresses in lockstep with the amount of time

you spend there because you just get used to to chatting with a guy because it's awkward to stand there and be completely stoic and still i mean there definitely are times when that is what the the game kind of calls for and you know there are tense moments and there are teams that don't like each other and have rivalries and i'm sure that they're a little less chatty when they get to first but i would imagine that you know it's like anything else. You got to practice. Yeah. I mean, obviously, first basemen tend to be chattier because there's a lot of traffic at first base and they're holding runners on. And so there are many articles that I could link to a few on the show page about what exactly do they talk about during these conversations. But I don't know

if that means that the position selects for affability or whether it just encourages it because it's awkward to stand there and not say anything to anyone, especially if people are talking to you. So maybe it's not that they're actually more affable than anyone else, but because we see them chatting so much, we conclude that they're extra affable because we always see them chatting up base runners. And so we think, oh, that must be a nice guy. He's always making conversation. But

you have to make conversation, really, if you're at that position. It's the social niceties. So I think that Jordan's rankings or his picks are pretty good. And I do wonder, like, I would imagine that over the course of one's career, maybe you become more talkative or more affable. I don't know. You pick up on how these conversations tend to go and you want to make people comfortable at your little home on the field. Or I don't know. Maybe is there a competitive advantage to not being friendly because people are uncomfortable around you? Or is there a competitive advantage to being so friendly that the runners are distracted because you are just chatting them up? I would imagine that the advantage comes in a precise understanding of sort of what the social moment calls for, right?

sort of what the social moment calls for, right? So it is not that one is always affable or that one is always taciturn, but rather that one assesses the situation and engages in the social sort of moment or the social interaction that the moment calls for. So sometimes you're Jesus Aguilar and you're playing Atlanta and Ozzy Alves is at first

and you're like, I'm gonna pull his hair because he took his helmet off and I'm gonna pull his hair and it's gonna be playful and we're all gonna look at it and we're like, I'm going to pull his hair because he took his helmet off and I'm going to pull his hair and it's going to be playful. And we're all going to look at it and we're going to go, oh, Jesus, you're such a, you're such a scamp. And Albies is going to be like, oh, that guy's nice. And then there are going to be times when it's like a very tense moment in a playoff situation and you really have to have your wits about you. And you're probably not going to be super chatty then because you, you know, you need to do your job so part of it is about being able to execute

on your your own set of tasks and part of it is that you know you want things to be tense and you want to be sharp and you maybe know that while distracting the other guy by pulling his hair would distract him and that would be to your benefit you also know that like it kind of isn't what the social moment calls for and that people are going to be like, well, that's rude. Like you got to, you know, keep your let him keep his wits about him. You're keeping your wits about you. So really, I think that people just have to have some amount of like social IQ and adapt to the moment. Maybe a guy's in a bad mood and you can kind of tell you're like, oh, he's having a bad day.

Like maybe is, you know, he had a fight with his wife or he has to file his taxes and he forgot. And so he's like, I got to do that when I get home. They're not doing their own. But you know what I mean? Like he's like, oh, did I did I take the recycling to the curb? I don't remember. Is the pilot light on? Who's to say?

And so he's preoccupied. And you're like, I'm just going to let leave him be. And then next time when he steps into my office and he's in a better mood, then I'll pull his hair in. Yeah, I was thinking about this. I was just reading a story in the great newsletter that I seem to cite every week. Craig writes pages from baseball's past. And he wrote for Jackie Robinson Day about Jackie Robinson early in his career being a first baseman, which is something that a lot of people forget or never knew about, that Jackie was a first baseman in his rookie season. And at the beginning of his second season in 48, he was still playing some first, and it could very easily have become

permanent because Leo DeRocher, the manager of the Dodgers at the time, liked this young infielder named Eddie Mixis, and it seemed like he was maybe going to be ticketed for starting at second base. And if that had happened, then Robinson might very well have been a career first baseman in the National League. And that didn't happen because Eddie Mixis did not pan out and he wasn't hitting. And then Jackie was shifted to second. And then Gil Hodges, who was like the number three catcher for the Dodgers at the time, he was shifted to first base and the rest is history. So that was interesting to me, not just because it's a

cool alternate history to contemplate, but also I wonder what that would have been like socially for Jackie Robinson. I mean, I guess in you know, in his first year, that's something that I don't think about much, but as he was the source of this controversy and as he was getting harassed and taunted and hounded sometimes by opposing players, he was also playing first base. And so there were a lot of opportunities for small talk. And I don't know whether that made the integration more difficult or less difficult that like people who might have been inclined not to support his presence there, like if they got more of an opportunity to talk to him and said, oh, I like this guy and it humanized him for them or whether there were any awkward situations. You could imagine that if there was some other intolerant player on the opposing team, he would have more opportunities to interact with Robinson. And who knows what that could have led to, some sort of interaction that blew up or became visible to everyone else. So I would be curious.

I would have liked to have heard Jackie Robinson's first base small talk during that historic 1947 season. But that is an element of his breaking the color barrier that I had not really considered before this. Yeah, you know, having a pleasant or even just neutral social interaction requires two parties. And so, yeah, I hesitate to be optimistic about it, just knowing what we know. But yeah, it would be interesting to hear what that experience was like for him and hopefully how it shifted or improved if it started out badly. But yeah, I can't imagine that it wasn't, you know, it was probably something that he at the very least approached with trepidation because, you know, we know what was said

about him and to him you know in the early days of his career especially so I hesitate to say it was good but I hope that I'm wrong alright I've got two more here this is Ted Patreon supporter

he says I'm sure you saw that the Nintendo theme park recently opened in Japan, the Nintendo World, Super Nintendo World. This got me thinking, what attractions or rides would a baseball theme park have? The Hall of Fame is a museum and certainly doesn't have anything that could be considered a theme park ride. And the previous attempt at creating a baseball theme park seems to have gone poorly. I will return to that in a second.

Still, I do think it would be fun to face a Garrett Cole fastball, try to rob a Mike Trout home run, or maybe even journey to the home plate of the living baseballs from the deeply disturbing episode 1587. Do you think you could fill a whole theme park with baseball-related attractions? And if so, what ride would you be most excited about? So the previous baseball theme park that he cites here is something called Boardwalk and Baseball, which was a theme park built near Haines City, Florida, and it opened in April 1987, and it closed in January 1990. So it did not last long. It was not a success.

But here, according to Wikipedia, are the attractions at Boardwalk and Baseball. Baseball City Stadium plus five other ballparks host two daily ballgames. Baseball City Royals, a Kansas City Royals farm team, was the professional home team. Additional games are by amateurs, including high school and college teams. Starting in

1988, the Kansas City Royals held their spring training and exhibition games moving here from Fort Myers. So part of it was just actual baseball games going on. Then they had batting cages. They had bullpen test your pitching skills, whatever that means. They had

the baseball card studio. Have your own baseball card printed with pictures taken in any Major League jersey. They had a fielding test. Again, we'd have to look into exactly what that consisted of. The Hurricane, a main attraction at the park. This was a wooden coaster and was carried over from Circus World.

In 1990, the coaster was sold and moved to Magic Springs in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It was operational there in 1992. The Taste of Cooperstown exhibit, which was a display on loan items from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and a theater which showed the film Great Moments in Baseball. Well, in the modern version of this, you could have, you're not going to recreate baseball necessarily. Like you might, but that might be kind of boring as like a theme park. But you could pick up on aspects of the game

and then use them as themes for other rides. Like you could have a really, really fast roller coaster that's like a stack-ass themed. It could be like about launch angle or something um you could have like a launch angle roller coaster yeah i don't know what i'm describing you could have you know like at disneyland they have sworn over california which is like a hang glider right so you could be in a baseball that's going through the air and it could it could take you on a tour of all the different parks, right?

Because you're not really on a hang glider and sworn over California, Ben. So it doesn't have to be realistic. You could just be in a baseball that's flying through the air. Sure. And you could be like, oh, I've been launched. I don't know. It's a hard thing to, you'd have to maybe dig into some of the baseball movies and develop theme rides around them. Do they ever do anything good there?

I think it'd be kind of hard is what I'm getting at. I think that you would just be like doing a bunch of roller coasters and then pretending that it's like the home run launch or something. Yeah. About home runs. I don't really need a baseball theme park. No. Because like we have baseball theme parks. They're ballparks.

Right. Basically, right? Like you need a Nintendo theme park because it's like, oh, it's like these virtual digital worlds, but it's in real life. So it's kind of cool to walk around the Mushroom Kingdom and it's actually a physical thing. I don't know. Frankly, the Nintendo theme park doesn't look that great to me. It looks kind of cramped, but I understand the appeal of the wizarding world of Harry Potter or Galaxy's Edge or whatever with Star Wars, where it's like, oh, these are these imaginary worlds that we like picturing ourselves in,

and here is an actual representation of it we get to be in. And you can go to a baseball game at many levels and see the baseball. So I don't know that you need a baseball theme park really. And you can certainly play baseball yourself locally, even if it is just in your Bear League softball or whatever. So again, I don't know that we need it, but if you were going to do it, yeah, I don't think that just having exhibits on loan from Cooperstown is going to get you very far, because then why not just go to Cooperstown, I guess, unless it's farther away for you. And things like batting cages and, you know, testing your pitch speed and all of that, like

there are so many places you can do it. And I guess it's still fun to do that when they have the pitch speed machines at the state fair or something. So yeah, you could have that. But I feel like ultimately VR is probably going to be the best baseball theme park that you could come up with because they already have systems that are in use by many major league teams where it just simulates facing a major league player. And that's the part I think that would be most compelling for us is to stand in there and actually feel what it would be like. So whether it's VR where you can't get hurt by the fake fastball, or if you were to simulate that, like, you know, if you could do like a West

world, except it's MLB and you could just be in an actual game. Like the technology is beyond us right now, I think. But if you could do that, whether in VR or with animatronic baseball players or something where you could feel like you are actually stepping on the field in a major league baseball game and it were convincing, that would be fun. So until we reach that point i don't think that i would be that compelled to visit a baseball theme park you could have a bungee jumping ride and they could call it the seventh inning stretch yeah except what do you do in seven inning

doubleheaders do they even stretch they don't stretch in like the fifth inning or something do they i think they do do they probably do yeah i mean maybe i i don't know i know that when i've been to extra inning games that have gone 14 and they do a second seventh inning stretch right in the 14th so you know it seems the same amount of time where you're not stretched and you need to stretch whereas do you really need to stretch in the fifth inning you haven't been sitting as long so i think that it probably isn't relevant to the question of the bungee jumping ride. Probably not, no.

I think it's fine for it to just be a bungee jump. Ride is a misnomer, but when you go to the fair, sometimes they do the mini bungee jump deal, and it stretches, so it's the seventh inning stretch. If you just had a regular theme park, except it's lightly baseball themed, except it's like lightly baseball themed, it's called Baseball Names and there's baseball art or whatever, then sure, I guess. But in that case, it's just another theme park essentially. And it's just a baseball veneer. You would call

it Field of Dreams and it would be very small. so there are some things you could do but i think the the premise is somewhat flawed in that you can see real baseball and you can participate in baseball already without the theme park so unless i feel like i'm really in the game and i've had the legitimate major league experience then i'm not gonna travel across the country to the baseball theme park i don't think all right All right. Last one, Jesse, Patreon supporter. What do you think is the best position for remembering some guys? A Reddit user named PMOEHRIN does the series during the offseason where we guess the MLB season based on players and their teams. It's pretty great.

Anyway, I saw this post for backup catchers, and the remember some guys vibe was incredibly strong. I mean, Taylor Teagarden, come on. If you ask me, catcher is the most remember-some-guys position in baseball. It's arguably the hardest position, so the players tend to stick around forever. Even casual fans hear about these guys because odds are your team signed many of them on flyer-slash-spring-training-invite deals, or they filled in for a game or two at some point.

And if you want to get more specific, backup catcher might be the peak remember some guy position within a position. Backup catcher is really high on the list. I mean, relievers are their own thing. So maybe we set them aside for now. I would say backup catcher is a really good one. I would say like the sort of up the middle utility guy

is probably a really good spot because like everybody needs a backup middle infielder so you probably uh you probably have one of the you know one of those on your roster at least um so that's a spot and then like fourth outfielder i think is probably the home of remembering some guys because you want a spot where there's a low enough bar to clear but enough roster um necessity that they're're going to have to sort of run dudes through over the course of the years. I turn on the TV now and I'm like, well, I think Guillermo Ferreira is on the Braves and I don't remember that happening, but he's a guy. Not a good one, but as a person, I don't know. Again, this is like, you just need better words.

But I think like the sort of bench backup middle infield guy, you know, the guy where you're like, you're not really a good shortstop and you're not really a good second baseman. Like you're kind of stretched at both of those spots, but you know, you're good enough. And we need to make sure that if somebody goes down in the course of the game, we can feel the spot. So that would be my, I think that would be my call. If pitchers count, then just from the fact that there are more pitchers than there are players at any other one position, then they're going to yield more guys to remember. And also pitchers, like even if they're not prolific pitchers, when they are on the field, they're the stars. So maybe it's more likely that you do remember them.

And they also have distinctive windups and mechanics and mannerisms. And so maybe that helps with the remembering. But can't quibble with your picks or with catcher if we're talking about position players. And I am kind of curious what will happen to the practice of remembering some guys down the road when we're dealing with the situation now where there are so many guys, there are so many players now from season to season, not just because there are 30 teams, that's been the case for a while, but because there are just so many pitchers used and players shuffled in the back of benches and bullpens.

And frankly, not only will I not remember some of these guys, but I'm not aware of them now. So will we reach a point where like we won't have the lingua franca? We won't be able to remember the same guys because there are just so many guys and like baseball is regional local fandom now and so if you're watching your team you're not going to remember the eighth reliever on this other team's bullpen like will we still be able to remember guys i i guess the threshold like it'll just be a smaller percentage of the overall player pool that will actually be memorable. But you'll have to be careful because you can't assume that those guys will be remembered. There are just too many guys to hold in your head.

That's so grim. That's such a grim read. I don't know that you're wrong, but I hope you are. But there are still guys that are going to stick around forever. I was watching the D-backs game earlier this week when Zach Gallin came back for his first start, and I thought to myself, I was like, Estrebo Cabrera's going to play forever.

I mean, he's already been playing forever. He's going to play forever. He's not good in the field anymore, but he can hit, and that guy's going to be around forever, and we're going to remember that guy. I mean, he's probably on the high end to remember some guys because he's had a truly productive career but it's like you know some of these dudes they are just gonna stick and there will be some guys who i think are guys who we remember and then we will remember them yep all right well i will

leave you with a reading recommendation which is uh Rob Arthur wrote about the baseball. And this is relevant to what we talked about yesterday. Basically, just kind of backed up what we found in spring training and what we discussed on our previous episode. But he has some data in there and some facts in there. So I will link to that on the show page. And basically, again, exit velocity is up, drag is also up, and those things cancel each other out to a certain extent. And the net effect seems to be that the ball is roughly as lively as it used to be. And it seems to have been shrunk slightly, the ball. That was the goal, at least, or that was what MLB said it was doing. And that could be responsible, at least in part, for the increased air resistance or slowdown due to air resistance, as well as the increased exit velocity. But it doesn't seem that there was a corresponding deadening that would decrease the speed off the bat. Balls are coming faster off the bat than before. So we will track that as the weather warms up And also, if I can just plug a piece of mine

We haven't talked about it and probably don't need to talk about it at length But I wrote something about Billy Bean and Brian Cashman this week That I will link to as well if you're interested in those guys This is a long one even by my standards So it's not a quick read, but hopefully it's an engaging read. And I just wanted to dig into these guys because I don't know if people notice this, but they are in their 24th seasons running their respective baseball operations departments. And as far as I can tell, that ties the all-time record for the longest

uninterrupted tenure running a team's baseball operations department in any kind of equivalent position. Not an owner who's doing it or an owner-manager, but a GM or what we would call a GM these days. Ed Barrow, the early Yankees GM, one of Cashman's predecessors who's in the Hall of Fame, he also made it 24 seasons. And I think that's it. I think they are now tying Barrow. And if they make it one more year to 2022 and they are both under contract for next season, that would be their 25th seasons and I believe record-breaking seasons for the longest stint with one team. And it's pretty incredible. And I kind of got into how they have done that and what they have in common and how

they're different. But I really like juxtaposing these two guys because they're opposites in so many ways, like physically, you know, in terms of the path they took to their positions and obviously payroll, like, you know, one of the lowest spending teams, one of the highest spending teams, and yet both very successful in different markets, different circumstances. And they have both managed to outlast everyone during a period of rapid upheaval. And they're sort of the last guys standing from that GM class. And they also happen to be really close friends, which was something that I was not really aware of before I was sort of tipped to this story and worked on it. They're just good friends because they go way back and they kind of bonded early on.

And so the story sort of built around the 1997 Kenny Rogers trade between the A's and the Yankees, which was Bean's first official trade. And Cashman was still the assistant GM at that time, but he was handling that deal. So it was sort of his first trade too. And that brought them together and they've been kind of close ever since and they've gone from being the young guns to the old guard

and I think it's a really interesting juxtaposition of characters and stories so hopefully people will enjoy that yeah it's a good it is lengthy but it is worth it and what a nice thing to take into the weekend with you if you didn't have a chance to look at it already this week.

All right. So we will leave you with that. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. 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 monthly amount

to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Mike Snyder, Michael Melia, Harry Stanwyck, Ian Jessup, and Matt Laquidara. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. 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 podcastwithfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. And you know I found that there were confidence men all over town

And soon I'm sure they'll bring me round Cause that's the thing, they're all around me And you know I found that there were confidence men all over town And soon I'm sure they'll bring me round Cause that's the thing, it's all around me I'm sure they'll bring me round. It's not a thing. It's all around me.