Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1689: Take Artists

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about being fully vaccinated, injuries to Dustin May, Luis Robert, Jesús Luzardo, Jacob deGrom, Shohei Ohtani, and others around the league, grumbles about Tony La Russa’s managing, the Angels’ perplexing, persistent .500-ness, the Mets firing and hiring hitting coaches, and surprising pricing for players on Cameo, then follow up […]

I got dosed by you and closer than most to you and what am I supposed to do? Take it away, I never had it anyway. Take it away and everything will be okay. And everything will be okay vaccinated. That's how I am. Yeah. Pleased to report that the Effectively Wild podcast has cleared the 85% vaccination threshold. We can now relax our protocols, or soon we can at least. And yeah, 100%, in fact, both of us have gotten our second doses. Yes, indeed. And I think that editor Dylan is on his way to a second dose in the near future. So soon the entire extended active Effectively Wild family will be fully dosed. Feels good, huh? It does, actually. Yeah, I'm side effect free.

So I lucked out there, I guess. But yeah, good news. So we have some other news to talk about today. Some baseball news. Some of it not so good. There have been a couple notable injuries that we will have to discuss, a couple firings, a couple responses to conversations that we've had recently that I will read, maybe a stat blast, just a jumble of things to get to today.

So speaking of those injuries, a couple real major blows to teams and obviously to the players involved. Dustin May of the Dodgers has gotten Tommy John surgery. And Luis Robert of the White Sox has a complete tear of his right hip flexor and is out for 12 to 16 weeks, which could potentially end his season. Hopefully not, but we shall see. In one way or another, I hope it doesn't affect his speed in defense. When he comes back, he has been one of baseball's fastest runners. So a couple of serious injuries to very good players who were having good seasons and playing important roles on their teams.

Yeah. You know, we've joked in the past about how pitching is bad for you and no one should do it, but we like that people can. Yeah. Yeah, you know, we've joked in the past about how pitching is bad for you. No one should do it. But we like that people can. Yeah. And, you know, there's never a player who you wish a Tommy John on. So if Dustin May's start to the season had not been the start that it had been,

this would still be a tremendous bummer for him and for the Dodgers and for all of us who enjoy watching the aesthetic of Dustin May. But it's just, he was finally putting it all together, man. Like, you know, the swing and miss was there in a way that it hadn't been and the strike throwing was there in a way that it hadn't been. Not, you know, at all, but he had never, you know, we were waiting for him to sort of take a step forward for his underlying statistics to sort of match up with the stuff and we were seeing that and it was so exciting and you know he's he is also just as a person like visually interesting and so it was it was just this great delight and we we joked coming into the season about the vaunted depth of the dodgers and how, you know, they were, they were just blessed with this problem

of, of having too many good starters, right? So many that, you know, Dustin May as the fifth starter would be the best starter on a lot of team staff. And now they're finding themselves at least in the short term, sort of, you know, uh, light from a pitching perspective, right? They have other guys on the injured list and they do have some options, but they're all going to take a little bit of time to get up to sort of game strength

and up to starters innings. So it's a bummer for him. I imagine that, you know, when we look back on this season that the Dodgers have had, this will be part of like the difficult stretch, right? If they write the ship, which I expect that they will,

when they do the postseason montage in October and they talk about what the team has overcome, like this stretch where they have not been very good as a team in terms of how they have won and they lost May and they've had all of these other injuries, this will be part of a glossy voiceover package. There will be a montage and Smoltz will narrate it and we will all look back and be like, those amazing Dodgersgers but in the meantime like this sucks and we're not going to

see may for 18 months and so that's a bummer and then anytime you have a the phrase like full tear yeah it's not it's not the best it's not what you want i have i have a i have a teeny tiny tear in my in my in my left labrum in my hip because you have labrums in your hips and you have them in your shoulders. And I have a teeny tiny tear. And I am not a professional athlete. And there are times when if I go for a run and I have not stretched well, like I'm a little bit hampered by it. And so the phrase bull tear, I'm like, meh.

And it's just, you know, it's a real shame because he is so, Robert is so fun to watch defensively and he's been hitting well. And you look at the rest of that sort of the most indispensable to their teams coming into the season and robert was on that list because when you have a team like the dodgers like even losing a superstar because they are so deep and so talented and projected so well it matters but in terms of how much it moves the the needle for them from a playoff perspective it can end up being surprisingly small even for a guy like mookie betts or Cody Bellinger. And then when you have really bad teams, if you lose stars, it doesn't matter because you were bad anyway and you weren't anticipated to go anywhere. But for a team like the White Sox

who are in the thick of a competition, it can make a really significant difference. And I think that they're still favored to win the Central from a Zips perspective, but it's just really a shame. They should stop getting hurt. Like Anthony Rendon fell to pitch off his knee last night it's like is something going around I guess I can't really make that joke in the time of COVID anymore we need new we need new viral terminology I need

I need new words everyone give us some new words but yeah it does seem like there's just been a a rash of these lately and to high profile guys and it makes every viewing experience fraught like i just assume and this is completely unreasonable because the severity of dustin may's injury has nothing to do with anyone else's injuries these are not remotely correlated events but now anytime anyone looks sort of remotely dinged up i'm like oh god we're losing them for 10 years i know and there was no warning with either of these injuries. May just threw a pitch and that was it. He was done. And Robert was just running to first base and just sort of took an awkward stride. And that was that for him. I think the Dodgers are obviously better positioned to

weather this injury than the White Sox are. They'll have to muddle through somehow with Clayton Kershaw and Trevor Bauer and Walker Buehler and Julio Urias and Tony Gonsolin when he comes back from his shoulder thing, hopefully sometime soon. But it is a shame because May was finally putting it together. And it's funny how we lament the rate of strikeouts across the league, but then on an individual basis, we're like, why doesn't Dustin May get more strikeouts? Right. Yeah, Dustin May, he's getting more strikeouts finally. It's like, that's how we get the, you know, almost 25% strikeout rate across the league

is that we get more Dustin Mays. But he did seem to figure out what was missing from a contact perspective because it was sort of mystifying. He has great velocity and it all looks nasty. And he just was pitching to contact, surprisingly, for someone who throws in the upper 90s. So he had reduced his sinker and cutter usage and he was mixing his pitches more, throwing more four-seamers and curves. And it seemed like maybe he had made some changes to his cutter and it was spinning more efficiently and the strikeouts were coming. And now he is gone until mid-season next year, one would assume. So hopefully when he comes back, his stuff will

be preserved and he'll be able to take the lessons that he had learned this season into next season and pick up where he left off. But we'll be without him for a while. And yeah, as you were saying, sort of the injury anxiety. I've talked about this before, but I just worry about Jacob deGrom. And I don't want to fret about him too much because it's bad enough when guys get hurt. I don't have to spend all my time worrying about them getting hurt before they do. But he is someone who has had Tommy John surgery in the past. And when I look at the highest velocities among starting pitchers this year, minimum 20 innings pitch, just looking at four-seamer velocity, two guys are tied at the top of that leaderboard, Jacob deGrom and Dustin May at 98.8 miles per hour. And it's not necessarily that May

got hurt because he was throwing hard. There are obviously guys who don't throw that hard who get Tommy John surgery, but it does seem like throwing harder does elevate the risk. And so as the cramp throws harder and harder, I just worry and hope that we're not having this conversation about him. to if you can like not worry about stuff that you don't have to worry about because you sleep better i mean i don't know that that's a problem for you as much as it is for me but like a theoretical person sleeps better theoretically so there's that i think that that kind of anxiety is rooted in something rational right he throws very hard he continues to throw harder we know that there is some linkage there that might put him at greater risk but i'm talking about like when otani got dinged on the elbow i was like oh his arm is gonna fall off yeah he's just gonna fall off now that's what happens he's got dinged on the elbow he can't start tomorrow and the reason will be arm off like

that will be what he's listed on on the rotor world tweet and um that didn't happen thankfully although otani did miss a start we might talk about that later but it it is, I don't know. I got lulled into a false sense of security when Bryce Harper somehow emerged from his very terrifying hit by pitch in the face to be like mostly fine and able to play a couple of days later with no really meaningful impact. Terrible way to phrase that, but. There's definitely impact, but. There's definitely impact, but no broken bones and no significant time lost to the injury. And I was like, oh, we're cruising through. Nope. and making a little more contact,

although it doesn't seem as if his plate discipline has improved. He's actually chasing more this year than he was last year, and he's sort of buoyed by a 4.33 BABIP, so perhaps that would not have continued, but he has produced one way or another a 1.35 WRC+. And so losing him on the heels of losing Eloy Jimenez, obviously if you can lose Eloy Jimenez and then just slot in your mean Mercedes and he turns into one of the best hitters in baseball so far, then that's great. You're not

losing much, but now they will be tested even more. And I don't think that Larry Garcia and Adam Engel and Billy Hamilton, or I guess now they have signed former White Sox draftee Brian Goodwin. have signed former White Sox draftee Brian Goodwin. None of those is exactly going to fill the Luis Robert-sized hole in this lineup and in this defense. So it does seem like it's high time for the White Sox to consider making a trade and maybe sooner rather than later. Why wait until the deadline when you know you have these two long-term absences and vacancies and no shots at Garcia or anyone else.

They're valuable subs and super subs. But yeah, if there are outfielders out there on the market, then make that move now. Don't wait till July because you might actually need every win. Because as Dan re-ran the numbers for the AL Central race, Yes, the White Sox are off to the best start, but this does cut their division winning odds and their playoff appearance odds by, I think, about 18% apiece. So it's a significant blow, gives the Twins a better chance to get back in this race and for the other teams to mount challenges. So yeah, I would not be tentative.

I would not be passive if I were the White Sox. I'd try to make a move as soon as possible. I mean, I might have tried to make a move before I played one of my prospects in a position he hasn't played since what, high school or early college, but there's no time like the present. So we will forget that you showed up late to the party, White Sox, and embrace that you showed up at all. So get going, get doing, I think. Yeah. And we haven't talked much about Tony La Russa this year, and that's probably a good thing. But there was a little item in Jeff Passan's recent column for ESPN suggesting that there's some grumbling going on in the White Sox clubhouse about Tony Russo's managing, which is maybe the better thing for grumbling to be about in that clubhouse based on what the concerns about

Larissa were entering the season. So haven't heard much about him not getting along with players on that team. So that's good. But it sounds as if there's a little frustration. I'll just read what Jeff wrote here. One can forgive Tony La Russa for a difficult transition back into the dugout. He was away for 10 years, and yet at some point that excuse gets tired. And with some of La Russa's maneuvering, one can understand why the patience in some parts of the White Sox clubhouse is growing thin. The latest came last week when trailing by three with runners on first and second and one out in the eighth, La Russa allowed Billy Hamilton and Leroy Garcia to hit, even though Robert was available on the bench. La Russa's explanation after the game was that he was looking for a

single there. It wasn't the only mistake he made that game. After an awful start in which La Russa let his best pitcher, Lucas Di Alito, languish for seven runs in one plus innings, Di Alito had bounced back with a solid six innings. La Russa sent him back out for the seventh. Di Alito wasn't going to ask out of the game. That responsibility fell on La Russa, who after the game said he didn't realize that Di Alito was gassed. He'd made the same error three weeks earlier with reliever Matt Foster and admitted, that's lousy managing. managing. Perhaps this is a sign that La Russa would be best to cede some of the responsibility for pitchers to Ethan Katz, whom the White Sox brought in from San Francisco's aforementioned pitching machine to handle the staff, etc., etc. So this was something Rob Arthur wrote about at Baseball Prospectus recently, that it seems like La Russa is leaving his starters in longer than other teams, at least in certain starts to pitch counts that we don't typically see these days. So again, it's not as if he is managing in some incredibly irresponsible way necessarily, but there have been some eyebrow-raising decisions.

And that's something we talked about when he was hired just based on the 10-year layoff and the degree to which the game has changed in the past 10 years and managerial practices have changed and pitch counts and pulling starters and all of that. And again, that's an area where we'd like to see starters stay in the game longer. But analytically speaking, it may not make so much sense. And maybe La Russa is still managing as if it were 2011. Yeah, it does. Like the Giolito one in particular, you're like, you kind of have one job here, man.

When folks on Twitter notice that he is laboring the way that he is, you kind of expect the manager to be like, I should go get a fresh arm from the bullpen. Especially on a day when, if memory serves, they had had the day off the day before. So all of their relievers were presumably available and fresh. Yeah, I don't think that any manager manages perfectly, right? It's not as if there's Tony La Russa and then 29 other guys who have perfectly optimized their pitcher usage. And I do think that it's worthwhile for us to remember when we're talking about how managers deploy their bullpens, for instance, that teams know more about their guys than we do. And so sometimes the explanation for a pitcher who

seems like an obvious fit for a given situation or a, you know, a high leverage moment, sometimes he is not available for reasons that the team doesn't disclose, but that are perfectly valid. But that doesn't seem to have been the case in any of these situations so i don't know i think we still wonder how much managing over the course of a season can really sway things but it is easy to point to particular instances where a move would have at least put the team in a different set of circumstances than than they were in here like it just seems obvious that you gotta pull giolito in that moment and a couple of moments beforehand.

And that doesn't guarantee that the outcome is going to be better with a reliever, but you at least aren't relying on a tired starter. So I think especially since these guys aren't going to pull themselves, you have to be attentive to it. And like you said, it's good that the reason that we are hearing grumblings are on field issues, or at least that's what's being noted to reporters, rather than some of the clubhouse concerns that we thought might be on the table given some of Larissa's past behavior and statements. So it's the sort of thing where this could potentially course correct. Maybe he's doing other parts of this job

that really, really well. And so if he simply, as you said, seed some of these decisions that might line up differently for him, given his context for the game and when that took place to someone else that like this all works out in his copacetic. But this is part of the problem when you don't have a super rigorous hiring process, because some of this stuff, I imagine, is the stuff that you talk about when you're interviewing a managerial candidate. Like, I'm sure that front office people, when someone is coming in, say, okay, like, let's talk through some of the, like, decisions that you would make in a moment like this.

And they'll lay out a circumstance circumstance kind of like the giolito situation and be like so what would you consider and you know it's sort of like when you go in for like management consulting jobs and they ask you weird interview questions and they really want to know like how you think about it they don't necessarily have a right answer in mind but i think that this is the sort of thing where you want the manager in the front office to be on the same page and you want the manager to be know, managing the game in front of him, not a game from 10 years ago. And I don't think that LaRusso's age

necessarily disqualifies him from making smart managerial moves. But I do think that you have to adapt to circumstances and a sort of state of play that's really different than it was the last time he was in that position. And so if he doesn't feel comfortable doing that or is unsure, or still trying to figure it out, then then asking for help is probably the right way to do it. And

then maybe that, you know, leaves him to do other parts of the job that he is doing well, or at least isn't doing so badly that we've heard about it yet. So I don't know, but it is it is unfortunate when it was an easy, it was an easy problem to kind of see potentially coming. And we hoped that we wouldn't. And it seems like we are. Yeah, I think just because this race could get close by the time it's all said and done, those individual decisions and games that slip away, yeah, they stick on your mind. So just to put a button on our injury discussion, there is a Baseball Prospectus

article on Monday that just looked at the injury data through April and found that injuries are up, even not counting COVID IL stints, just relative to previous full seasons. They wrote, there have been 240 injuries through the first 30 days of the season compared to 213 in 2019 and 191 in 2018. We're defining an injury here as any injury or illness requiring an IL assignment, and it doesn't include the COVID-19 IL stint. So injuries are up, and I don't know if that's just because of long-term trends and velocity increasing or better diagnoses or whether it has something to do with coming off of the short season and the way that players prepared for this year.

You would think that if people were concerned about heavy workloads after light workloads, I don't know whether that would even manifest this early in the season or whether you would start to see those injuries accumulate later in the year. But for whatever reason, injuries are indeed up this season. So if it seemed that way to you, an activity I engage in often. So Jesus Lizardo hurt himself playing video games, apparently, and shades of the Joel Zumaia guitar hero inflammation injury. But in this case, Lizardo somehow fractured his pinky while playing a video game and didn't realize it and went out and made a start and pitched poorly and then got an x-ray and it revealed this hairline fracture. And Bob Melvin's explanation for this was before the game, he was playing a video game and accidentally bumped his hand on the desk as he was playing the game. He came in, was a little bit sore. Training staff checked him out. We threw him in the cage before he went out there, watched him warm up, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm just trying to imagine how this happens as someone who plays a lot of video games. I have never fractured anything while doing so to my knowledge,

although I guess he wasn't even aware that he had done that. But the accidentally bumping his hand on the desk as he was playing the game, I don't know if there were witnesses to this or where exactly this took place or what he was playing. He's a baseball player, so I assume it was MLB The Show or some sports game or Call of Duty or something. But how do you accidentally pump your hand on a desk as you're playing a video game? The obvious suspicion that comes to mind here is that maybe there was some anger component. Maybe he rage quit here. And sometimes you hear that about pictures where it's like, oh, I somehow hurt my hand hand on a desk while playing a video game. I'm just saying that it's, you know, maybe somewhat suspicious wording as someone who has never accidentally bumped my hand on a desk and broken a finger while doing that activity. Well, as someone who's mostly played Frogger when I played video games at all, I mean, sometimes, look, the vultures swoop down on you,

you get splatted by a car, and you're like, I can't believe it, and you get mad. But it does seem like this is just a set of circumstances that I can't fully relate to because I've never been so invested in a video game as to slam my hand, which is what I think probably happened here, right, that he was just like, ah. So then I want to know, like, what I think probably happened here, right? That he was just like, ah. So then I want to know, like, what happened?

What happened in the video game? Like, was it, I don't know. I don't even have the vocabulary to properly describe the circumstance where this sort of thing would happen, but it is something of a bummer. He had to have slammed his hand just like so hard though or at a really weird angle.

Yeah, accidental bumping. I don't know. Yeah, that doesn't really weird angle. Yeah. Accidental bumping. I don't know. Yeah, that doesn't strike me as- Perhaps. Perhaps it could happen, but- I would imagine like perhaps accidentally strong. He did not mean to slam his hands quite so forcefully. Yeah.

He accidentally fractured his pinky. We can say that. I'm sure he didn't intend to do that. Do you think he looked at it afterward and was like oh i might have broken this thing i don't know like he pitched that day it couldn't have been that painful so i don't know but yeah throw your controller that's the the pro move if you get angry while playing a video game okay damage a piece of equipment that is not your finger especially if you're a major league pitcher well and like you know in in a couple different ways

right because you're you know your finger is so valuable to you but also you're doing all right for yourself so you can buy a new controller harder to buy a new harder to buy a new pinky finger did he go back to playing the game after was he like okay i have composed myself i am ready to answer the call of duty i don't know about video games at all ben i don't know if he thought he was capable of pitching then probably he thought he was capable of playing video games half-life i i used to play half-life too sometimes my sister and i would play half-life that's a good one that got tricky ben that was a hard that ended up being a hard game sometimes. Yeah, those face crabs,

they'll get you. Yeah, the face crabs. Wow. I'm having a big flashback to my childhood. We would play Frogger and we would play Half-Life. That's a weird combo

for children to do. In hindsight, that's kind of a strange combination of things. But then again, my grandfather let us watch X-Files when we were really young because he's like i'm watching it so i guess you will too my son-mom wasn't thrilled with that one i have to tell you yeah yeah there's some disconcerting

creatures in the x-files as well so carry a crowbar anyway so you mentioned shohei otani getting hit by a pitch and then getting scratched from a start. And I love that when he gets scratched from a start, he then hits a double and hits a home run. Like when anyone else gets scratched from start, it's like, okay, well, that's it. They're not playing. When Shohei Ot get Tommy John and he had his elbow issue and it was like, oh, but he's still hitting and hitting really well at the time. And that just kind of hammers home, I think, the oddity of what he does and the uniqueness of his current role. But that is a way of sort of segwaying into the Angels as a whole, who are still stubbornly under 500. who are still stubbornly under 500. There just seems to be a force that is like pulling them to 500, not necessarily below, sometimes below, but just in that 500 range. I remember writing something or saying something a couple of years ago about how the Angels had just been like the 500-est team of all time.

Just they were within a few games of 500 over an extraordinarily long time, and they're still there, even though they have these standout performances from Otani and from Mike Trout off to one of the best starts of his career. And a lot of things have gone right, like Fabian Ardaia tweeted the other day or just after the Monday game, I think, that the Angels have the best lineup in baseball now by WRC plus and the best strikeout rate by any starting rotation. And they're 13 and 14. It's like, how is this possible? So many things are going right. And yet the overall results are so lackluster. And I guess it's not really a mystery. I mean, the results have not matched the peripherals for

the pitchers. The high strikeout rate is good, generally a positive sign, but their ERA is 5.04 as we speak, and their FIP is 3.85. And so they have a gap of 1.18 runs between their ERA and their FIP, which is twice as large as the second biggest gap. And that is a good sign in the sense that FIP is more predictive of future ERA than ERA is. So perhaps that augurs a lower ERA ahead, although it's probably not just bad luck. It seems like fielding has played a part in this. And fielding often goes under the radar a little bit. It's harder to see.

It's harder to measure. But if you look at the defensive efficiency leaderboard at baseball reference, that's just the percentage of balls put in play that have been turned into outs. You have the San Francisco Giants very top of that list, which helps explain why the Giants have so far exceeded expectations. And then at the bottom of that list, you have the Angels, far, far below any other team. And it's sort of strange because you don't look at them and think, oh, this team is just going to be a bunch of bad fielders. I guess part of it is that they've missed Rendon for part of the season. So having him back would help, but that accounts for at least part of the difference between the ERA and the FIP.

Yeah, and you don't want to make too much of early season defensive metrics, as you said, but the B-Ref stuff lines up with, if you look at their team UZR, UZR 150, they're at the bottom of that leaderboard. If you look at their team UZR, UZR 150, they're at the bottom of that leaderboard. I mean, Albert Pujols literally played third base for a little while last night, which granted was an emergency situation after Rendon had to exit with that ball that he fouled off his kneecap, which like, that would be another one where I'd throw up. Really confident that that would do it to me. You'd be vomiting constantly. I just would, and i'd be so nervous i don't you know i don't think i have what it takes to be a professional baseball player i've thought about it a lot and i

i think i'd come up short so i'm gonna quit while i'm ahead but um yeah it's the the fielding has not been spectacular and it does make you worry about how, as you said, like how the their ERA and fit might converge over time, because I don't know that, you know, if Rendon's out for an extended stretch, it's not like their fielding is going to necessarily get better. from like a couple of their guys were just a little bit better not even good i think that they would be in a in a totally different spot than they are but they are behind like they're they're behind the mariners right now yeah we've asked we've asked so nicely over the years for just a 500 team around mike trout and there have been years where he has had to pull so much more of the offensive load than he's having to right now, which isn't to take anything away from the superlative season that he's having. But like you said, this is an incredible team and they're stacked up and down that lineup.

And then they're so bad at other stuff. Yeah. lineup and then they're so bad at other stuff yeah yeah this is why i choose them to be my most watchable and fun team every year just because of a couple of guys on that roster and then the rest of the roster doesn't necessarily match up but there's still hope here there's enough talent i think things things could work out but they will need to do a better job of converting those peripherals into results. They're only three and a half games back of the A's right now in the division. It's early, so we will see. Yeah, it's early.

I still think that the top of the West is fairly soft. And so I don't think that they're out of it by any means. But I do, you know, it's not as if they have a stacked farm system from which they can deal come the deadline. So you do kind of wonder like what they're going to be able to do to improve. So you know, it's a sticky wicket, but hopefully they just play a little bit better. And then we can stop talking about this because I just really want to see I want to see Otani and Trout and Rendon in October. I want to see it really badly. And I'd like Albert Pujols to get one more postseason before what seems like an inevitable retirement. Did you see him get thrown out on the base pass

yesterday? Yeah. I know that we have talked about his, you know, he picks his spots well as a base stealer, but he is a bad base runner, which is not surprising given his speed. That attempt to tag up and take second, he was quite lumbering. And I just was like, yeah, I probably think I'm faster than I am now. Yeah. I think I'm as fast as I used to be, and that's probably not true. It's another reason I can't be a professional baseball player. They're just really adding up. Yeah. It's not a smooth stride, not an easy gate. It looks kind of painful. I'm sure he is

faster than he looks, even though he is the slowest player in Major League Baseball. Many of us would watch Albert Pujols highlights and be like, oh, look how slow he is. And then if we were in a race with Albert Pujols, we would probably be pretty surprised about how competitive that race was or how non-competitive because he would be faster. But yeah, compared to the other athletic specimens on the field in terms of the wheels, doesn't really match up anymore. Yeah. To to be clear if i'm able to run like that when i'm 41 i'm gonna feel fantastic about myself so yeah especially with your partially torn labor it's just a little teeny tiny tear it's just like a small it's just a tiny it's tiny

but i do sometimes experience discomfort so when people are like a labrum tear how bad that can that be and i'm here to tell you it can be, you know, it can get in the way. It can be a hard time. Anything torn sounds potentially painful to me. And, you know, we were talking about the Angels defense and you bring up Pujols. Probably not ideal to have him playing the field every day at this stage of his career. He was a great first baseman in his prime, but now not so much. I know you have Otani DHing, but if you could have Jared Walsh as well as he's hitting at first base and then someone replacing Walsh in the outfield

and then, hate to say it, but bench Pujols, who's not hitting either. I know the Angels lost Dexter Fowler, so they're a little light in the outfield, but if and when Joe Adele is ready or if they could go get another outfielder, they might have a difficult decision to make with Pujols, who's probably pretty well-liked

and respected in that clubhouse. I can't believe you haven't extolled the virtues of Otani's home run yesterday. Oh, yeah. The home run and the hustle double. I try to restrain myself just because I know there are so many times when I won't be able to avoid talking about Otani that uh you know if it's 50 50 do i want to banter about shohei today then maybe i sit it out even though i did bring him up anyway but you started it so i took that as permission he uh he didn't even look like he got all of that and he knew right away that it was gone and it went it went far it went really far i like when he does the little hop out of the batter spots or his helmet falls off.

Yeah. Get Otani a better helmet. Nah, I like it this way. I like it. Fair enough. So while we're talking about disappointing team performances, I guess we should devote a moment to the Mets, who, like the Angels, are a game under 500 as we speak here on Tuesday afternoon and took steps to try to remedy that by firing both of their hitting coaches. Hitting coach Chili Davis, as well as assistant hitting coach Tom Slater, and replaced them with their

minor league hitting director Hugh Quattlebaum. Hugh Quattlebaum, and their player development director, Kevin Howard. Both of those guys were hired over this past off season. So the good news is that we get to say Hugh Quattlebaum, but the bad news is that Chili Davis and Tom Slater are out of jobs. So this is early to make this sort of move. I saw the stat in Tim Britton's piece at The Athletic that in the last quarter century, only two teams have made changes at hitting coach earlier than 23 games into the season. The 2005 Blue Jays were 21 games in and the 2019 Marlins were 20 games in so speaks to some lackluster performance by the Mets offense which was expected to be very good and frankly is still expected to be very good but has been mediocre thus far and I know they're coming off a weekend where they scored a bunch of runs and they seemingly invented a fake hitting coach or hitting approach coach which is one of those weird like ball player in jokes which is like not really

funny but maybe we're just not in on it right just let this stuff stay in the clubhouse you know yeah i don't need to it's okay it's not for me so i don't need to be in on it because i'm not gonna find the joke funny because i wasn't there after being tired and sitting around with my pals and i don't know the joke because i wasn't there and i wasn't tired in the same way and i hadn't had the same week and it's okay but you know they try to pull back the veil on this stuff and you just are like i don't think this is no one thinks that i'm funny except my friends either so i it's fine. Like this is a human condition, but it does seem very strange. I guess part of the joke is that you're sending

all of these reporters scurrying to find out who hitting approach coach Donnie Stevenson is and seems to be a fictitious person that the Mets just sort of invented this weekend. And I guess that is what makes it funny to them that, you know, they're name dropping Donnie Stevenson in interviews and it is just a figment of their imaginations. Or who knows, perhaps they were manif it's also about philosophical differences and that this is something that would have happened anyway.

So the Mets are 17th in Team WRC Plus now. They are 12th in non-pitcher WRC Plus, although thanks to the offense suppressing effects of Citi Field, they've scored the fewest runs in the majors. They've also allowed the fewest runs in the majors they've also allowed the fewest runs in the majors but they haven't hit as expected and the players who have underperformed it's like you know francisco lindor hasn't hit at all is that chili davis's fault i don't know like james mccann who was just signed hasn't hit at all i guess dominic smith has regressed you know they're also guys who are hitting well so is it that francisco l Lindor needed better coaching or is it just that whatever they needed to make some sort of change or maybe Davis and Slater weren't clicking with people and they've been through this before.

Like Jilly Davis has had multiple hitting coach jobs with multiple organizations and he was let go by the Red Sox a few years ago and then the Cubs hired him and he lasted a year with the Cubs and then the Mets brought him on prior to 2019. And the thing with Chili Davis is that he's been sort of an outspoken anti-launch angle guy. Some of the terminology here, he'll say he doesn't like guys to go up there and try to hit home runs or to try to hit the ball in the air. And maybe that is okay. Like if he's saying that you can't go up there and try to hit home runs because it'll backfire, fine. If he's saying hitting home runs is bad or hitting the ball in the air, that's probably not so fine. But he is someone who has preached contact and situational hitting and the Mets under his tenure have kind of not pulled the

ball much and have hit a bunch of balls on the ground. And so it seems like he's a bit out of step with the latest lingo and philosophies when it comes to offensive performance. And maybe he has a point, maybe he hasn't adjusted to the lively ball, making certain things more advantageous than they were during his playing career. With the Cubs, at least, he just didn't click with certain players, it seemed like. And sometimes that's neither side's fault, but you still make a change because the players are ultimately more important than the coach. And maybe more details will come out about that here. But both of these guys predated the Steve Cohen purchase of the team and also predated the Luis Rojas managerial regime. So, you know, when ownership changes and the front office changes and the manager changes, then you're kind of like on the chopping block to begin with. So all it takes is, you know, maybe not getting along with someone or saying certain things that don't sound like the current approach or just the offense as a whole underperforming for you to lose your job. And the Mets interim GM, Zach Scott, had some experience with Davis from his days with the Red Sox, their days with the Red Sox. And so it sounded like based on his comments, like he already had some doubts about Davis and was just kind of waiting to see what happened. And what has happened is that the Mets haven't hit so well. So, you know, not that changing a

hitting coach is always some sort of panacea. I think often there are offensive bounce backs following a hitting coach change, which probably has as much to do with or more to do with just simple regression than it does with actual improvements in coaching. But hey, the Mets will try with a couple of new guys, including, as I mentioned, but can't mention often enough, Hugh Quattlebaum. I, yeah, Quattlebaum. This is like a Star Wars day joke. Quattlebomb.

That could be a cantina. I don't want to talk about the Star Wars broadcast. I don't know about that. That's not the conversation. As big a Star Wars fan as they come in, I'm still like, I don't know if I need a Star Wars broadcast. I just don't trust us with the puns at all. Not you and I, but like the collective us. I think that the timing of it is still kind of weird. I don't know that you're wrong. Like he's moved around. And I think that there are things that suggest that perhaps like

his approach is not necessarily the most modern. Although I think that like you said, like it's kind of hard to tell that based on just based on some isolated quotes but i do find it strange like he did seem to be a figure who was well liked in the clubhouse you know pete alonzo came out after the fact and said that he was perplexed by the decision to fire davis and slater tim healy reported he called them uncle chili and uncle slate and outstanding individuals and then tim britain had a quote from lindor that it's just kind of heartbreaking lindor said chili can't hit for me that's on me if i'd have been hitting does he still have a job i don't know and like that's rough yeah probably true though yeah and the answer to that may well be yes but like you said i don't think that chili davis had you know an

effect on lindor that you know if we're not going to credit Julie Davis for Lindor having a hot spring, we probably shouldn't paint, you know, debit him for Lindor having a slow start to the regular season either. So the timing of it just seems strange and it doesn't seem like it is necessarily going over super well with the clubhouse. And like you said, they'll probably start hitting better just because time will have passed and regression is a thing, but it is a bit odd it's

strange that they didn't do it in the offseason right like it isn't unusual when a new regime is coming in and and there were there were all sorts of new regimes coming in this offseason for the Mets it's not unusual at all for a guy even someone who is reasonably well-liked to just end up on the wrong end of being you know not one of the new dudes dudes and so you know i wouldn't have been surprised if they had done a more thorough going sort of cleaning of house on the coaching side perhaps they didn't want to embark on a managerial search but you can do you can do sort of other coaching positions as you as you see fit so i don't know the timing of it is just strange it

seems like they had a better there was a better moment to do it if it was a simple matter of wanting to surround the staff with with coaches who they're more familiar with i don't know the whole thing is just strange i'd like the mets to you should just be less yourselves match you know like we we tell people to be themselves and we mean that a lot of the time because when you're when you're being trying to be someone else it's inauthentic and you often don't do it well it's uncomfortable you should be able to be your authentic true self and and we mean that but we mean it less with the mets with the mets we say be a better version of yourself right like do some yes do some work and self-reflection and

and emerge a different sort of you because there are elements of you we like but there are also elements of you that you know we feel like therapy should have dealt with by now right i meant to mention by the way russell carlton did a study at baseball prospectus on what happens to team offenses after hitting coaches or fired midseason, and he found that there is typically an improvement of about 25 points of OPS. Hard to say how much of that is just regression. I would bet a big part of it, but maybe the Mets can look forward to that. And also one encouraging, if frustrating, note for both the Angels and the Mets, they have been the two unluckiest teams thus far this season in terms of cluster luck,

which is basically how well you sequence your hits or your hits allowed. You know, are you putting a lot of runners on base but not getting the hit with runners in scoring position? Or on the pitching side, are you giving up a bunch of hits with runners in scoring position and not stranding anyone? Typically, those things tend to even out over time. So the Mets have had the worst cluster luck in baseball.

Combining their defensive and offensive cluster luck, they have been the worst in baseball in offensive cluster luck. And the Angels are second worst overall and worst overall in defensive cluster luck or pitching. They've been okay on offense. So that helps explain the disappointment thus far. And again, possibly suggests that better days are ahead. All right. So just wanted to mention, because we talked last week about the odd shifting disparity between the Padres and the Dodgers and how the Padres never shift against right-handed hitters, which seems like it's recommended by the public research. That is, never shifting against righties or rarely is recommended by the public research, whereas the Dodgers shift all the time against righties. And Justin Choi followed up on that piece to look at

the Dodgers shifting pattern specifically. And I think when we talked about that, we mentioned the possibility that maybe it had something to do with the pitchers or the defenders involved. Maybe it's not a strategy that works on the whole, but if you have a certain staff, perhaps it is more beneficial to you. And that's sort of what Justin concluded. He looks at what actually leads to better results with the shift on or what leads to pulled grounders with right-handed hitters up. low in the zone, throwing low and in, throwing harder velocity, various factors that lead to pulled ground balls when right-handed hitters are up. The Dodgers also do those things more often. And so it's kind of a chicken and the egg thing. Like, do they do these things because they are trying to get guys to roll over into the shift? Or do they shift a lot because they already have

pitchers who are pitching in that way and it seems like it might be the latter like Clayton Kershaw he throws a lot of pitches low and in to righties and that would lead to pulled ground balls in theory and he probably has been doing that for a long time and so maybe you build your defense around Clayton Kershaw rather than having him change. So it could very well be that the Dodgers ran a sort of similar analysis and concluded, hey, the makeup of our staff actually suits this sort of shifting. And maybe if the staff changed, then the shifting would also change. change but good look by justin i think at sort of how the the one size fits all analyses of these things might miss just certain traits and tendencies that individual teams have that might make a certain strategy more advantageous and that seems like it could be the case in the

dodgers example well and you imagine that if this is what we're able to find just looking at like publicly available data yeah with our bill you know and I don't say this to knock Justin's modeling abilities whatsoever, because Justin does a very good job. But, you know, it's like when you have an entire baseball ops group with all of the data that Dodgers have access to, it sort of makes sense that there would be something there that we're not quite appreciating. quite appreciating. And so it is reassuring to, if only because I'd like there to be causes for things in the world that make some kind of sense. It's nice to be able to look at even publicly available data and be like, oh, well, of course, like this, this is why they might be trying to do what they're doing. Because we were just, we were so dissatisfied with the obvious tension between two well run organizations doing dramatically different things when it came to right-handed editors. So I appreciated Justin's investigation, if only because it will allow me to sleep just a tiny bit better than I hadn't been able to before. Yeah. So we got this response to a couple conversations we've had recently about the possibility of having umpires be able to just

not make a call. And just to say that was too close to tell. I'm going to throw this to the replay umps and they can make the decision. And one thing that we mentioned in our conversation about that was that maybe umpires would not avail themselves of that option, even if it existed, because they don't want the facade of infallibility to fall. They don't want to show weakness or to suggest that they might not have seen something because it might make them seem less authoritative or something as silly as that would be. But James, Patreon supporter, wrote in with a real-life example of this, though not speaking from experience as a major league umpire, and he says, you've had several conversations

about what umpires should do about a call if they don't think they could make a correct call. I have some experience with this. In college, my work-study job was with the women's volleyball team. I was told I had to get there before practice and games and set up the nets and other equipment and then take down the equipment after games and practice. I also had to stay during practice in case anything came up. Nothing ever did. So I just studied.

At the first game, they told me that I had to be a line judge for this game, which scared me to death. I mean, this was an official NCAA Division I sport and these women practiced a lot and were on scholarships and such. It really mattered and I had no training. Further, I sometimes would see the players on campus

in class or cafeteria or a party and they would recognize me and remind me of a bad call, etc. Oh, my God. Most of it was in a nice joking manner, but they cared a lot about this. The main referee trained me for about five minutes, and I had three signals for a ball that hit the ground. One was point down for the ball being inbounds.

Two was point up for the ball being out of bounds. And three, cover my eyes if I didn't see it or it was just too close to call. And the main referee, who was sitting in an elevated chair, would make the call. This is like the 1992 version of the video review, but with no video. I found that at the beginning, I would cover my eyes a few times a game. But this led to me being teased by the players, either during the game or in those campus run-ins. So over time, I used that move less and less, and eventually almost never. This actually led to the players seemingly respecting me a little more as a line judge, and even accepting calls that I made against them. I found that if I worked their games with confidence, then they appreciated it more. then they appreciated it more. In the end, I don't think any umpire would ever use this,

first because they got to be an MLB umpire by being authoritative, and second, it would probably undermine their position. So it's funny that the players were teasing him for doing that, and therefore they made him more likely to make a call when he hadn't actually seen what happened. And so they may have cost themselves more accurate calls by mocking his willingness to defer to the line judge. But that is interesting. And I bet there would be a similar dynamic at play. And it's so it's funny because, I mean, I'm sure he got better at it as time went on.

Right. As he gained experience doing it. But first of all, it is wild that he was put in that position to begin with like the fact that he had to come up with a way to sort of express his own lack of expertise in a moment where he wasn't attempting to assert any expertise to begin with it wasn't like he got in over his skis. He had skis thrust into his hands, right? Right. And yeah, it is interesting that in an attempt to be deferential to someone who actually knew what they were doing and presumably would have given the athletes in this case a better call, even if it's not necessarily one that they would agree with, that they, by making fun of him, probably ended up with something that was a little more arbitrary than it would have otherwise been. That's wild. He's right.

Those athletes are on scholarship. There are championships given out in volleyball. They play real. There are records. They can't accept tacos from boosters lest they run afoul of the NCAA and they're letting, they're letting inexpert line judges run around. I can't even, that's, I think that in general, it is just, it's best when you don't know something to say, I don't know about that and ask for help because now granted we should

say, and I don't think that the email is suggesting otherwise he says so that like you know the the mob umpires are very well trained and they know all the rules for instance and while they may not have the perfect angle on like you know a tag play they know what that is right like they know what the rules of the game are they're aware of the the the circumstances that they might encounter that is, right? Like they know what the rules of the game are. They're aware of the circumstances that they might encounter that results in a batter being out or runner being out or what have you.

But it's better to ask for help when you need help. This is why we get frustrated when home plate umpires try to make check swing calls. It's like, just ask for help. Like you have a guy up the line and maybe, you know, I know that Sam has had the opinion that those guys don't really overturn the home plate up all that often, that they are likely to sort of agree with one another. And this is part of the issue that we see or we think we might see in terms of the replay sort of deferring to the guys on the field because they don't want to show them up so you still have to take those social relationships into account but you just like ask for help it's okay to be like i don't know i'm back here and that happened up there and that guy saw it so i'm gonna ask that guy because like he's standing there for

this exact purpose yeah and since our discussion last week about hit by pitches and the fact that the hit by pitch rate is higher than ever which was prompted in part by Bryce Harper getting hit in the head. There was another player hit in the head also by a Cardinals pitcher, a different one, but Pirates catcher Jacob Stallings was hit in the cheek, and he is also okay, I think, and I don't think it was intentional or anything. But we got a message from Jake, Patreon supporter, who says, regarding the discussion about increasing punishment to deter hit by pitches, why not implement a flagrant foul system like the NBA has, where if the ref rules a foul was unnecessary contact committed by a player against an opponent, it's a flagrant one, while the more serious flagrant two is unnecessary and excessive contact committed by a player against an opponent. flagrant two is unnecessary and excessive contact committed by a player against an opponent flagrant two results in immediate ejection as does two flagrant ones like red and yellow cards in soccer

after a flagrant foul the team that was fouled gets to choose who shoots the free throws and retains possession of the ball this would allow an umpire to at their discretion say award a second base for a flagrant one and a second base and automatic ejection for a flagrant two this allows the heightened punishment as a deterrent but theoretically avoids punishing the genuine accidents and hit by pitches that are less dangerous i like this yeah i like it i think that it balances well our concern about not wanting to because there is already a disincentive in place for you hitting a guy, right? He gets first base.

And so in instances where a pitcher is just kind of wild and doesn't mean to hit a guy, you know, we want to make sure that we are not over penalizing that pitcher for something that the system already provides penalty for. over penalizing that pitcher for something that the system already provides penalty for. But for guys where there appears to be intense, or perhaps where the injury is particularly grievous, even if there isn't, you know, we talked about wanting to have something that served as sort of a further deterrent, and having that take place in game, so that the other side benefits from it seems to be a more sort of emotionally and intellectually salient way of dealing with that than simply leveling fines and suspensions, although those might end up being necessary also. And so having some sort of differentiated system like this,

I think is a good idea. Anytime you introduce a review system like that, you are potentially slowing down the game, which is the thing that we seem to really care about. So there's that component to it because, you know, they have to stop and they got to go look at the, in the NBA, they stop and they go look at the monitor and everybody kind of mills around for a second. And then they stand there and they tell the camera like, I have watched a lot more NBA this year than I have in many past years, but I don't have a great like NBA referee imitation down yet. I got to work on that. So I like this.

I think that it kind of balances the different concerns that we had pretty nicely and still allows you to make a point when you need to, to differentiate between guys who are like trying to do harm versus guys who aren't. And, you know, I think that if it it's if we want to have a hard and fast rule that like any contact to the head or neck is just like a flagrant two no matter what flagrant two right that's the worst one like if we want to have that rule because you just really need to have a point of emphasis that like this kind of a hit by pitch can be dangerous and damaging and result in really serious injury.

I'm okay with that being enforced sort of irrespective of the intent of the pitcher. And having that happen in game so that there is a consequence, but not necessarily a suspension for a guy who really didn't mean to do anything, also seems to balance right for me. So I like it. I like it too. I went back and forth with Jake a little bit about this. And I mentioned that, of course, sometimes it's tough to tell whether

something was intentional or not. And that's the case in the NBA too, as well, I would assume. But Jake said that the NBA doesn't have a ton of controversy over the flagrants, although they're reviewed and adjusted after the fact for fine and suspension purposes, but the refs seem to do a better job. And he said, you know, I guess the question is whether we're concerned about reducing net danger or reducing intentional harm so that, say, if we had intentional hit by pitches, but they're all on the butt, then is that okay? And I said, you know, I'd be more okay with that, I guess, than the status quo if the intentional hit by pitches actually were all on the butt or in some other low danger area.

But right, I don't have enough confidence in pitchers command to think that even if they're all trying to hit the butt, that they would actually hit the butt because they don't all throw strikes when they're trying to. They don't throw to the specific part of the throw strikes when they're trying to. They don't throw to the specific part of the strike zone when they're trying to. If anything, one would think that when throwing at an unfamiliar target like a butt, that they might be less accurate than usual. So I would think if you're aiming for the batter, then you're shifting the potential distribution of actual locations of the ball such that some of them would be more dangerous than if you're not aiming for the batter, I would think. You're always going to have some number of misses by a certain amount of space.

And so if you're shifting your center of the cluster to someone's body, then you're more likely to hit something that could break and you know he's he said uh if that's the concern then isn't the primary goal to reduce intentional plunkings of any kind and thus over punishing is a risk worth taking and maybe you know maybe it is and maybe you tie it to a specific body part or something and you just say if you hit someone in the neck or the head or whatever, then we're not even going to try to figure out whether it was intentional. We're just going to say that, no, you can't do that. And yeah, maybe that takes away some part of the inside of the strike zone or makes pitchers less likely to throw there or something. But maybe that is a tradeoff that is worth it for the safety benefits.

Ben, I have to break into our podcast with news. Okay. You're not going to like it. Uh-oh. I'm here to tell you that Jacob deGrom has been scratched from his start, but I will say it is with right side tightness and isn't believed to be serious. I'm quoting Jeff Passan now. Another source said the expectation is deGrom will miss only one start.

Still, anything having to do with DeGrom's health is taken extraordinarily seriously and understandably so. Wow. We need to use our powers differently. I know. I think we have to understand them better before we can deploy them to sort of optimal purpose. But I'm nervous about us.

Yeah. We have magic. I think we have magic in us. I only want to speak good things into existence. Yeah. As long as his arm is not included in his side, then I guess that's not so bad. But as I was saying, he gets scratched.

He's just not going to play. He's not going to hit a home run while he's scratched. Most pitchers don't if his arm was included in his side would they would it slap hair on it i would have feel like the hair on the rest of his body why is your arm hair different than your rest of your hair ben someone is like i've listened to five episodes of your podcast and i don't know what you're talking about this is like This is like the Mets Donnie Stevenson inside joke. It's not funny to anyone who hasn't heard our discussion of where you put the third arm if you were going to put the third arm on a baseball player's body.

I still want answers. I still want answers. That's how the NHL does injuries, right? Or used to. It's just like, oh, he is hurt somewhere. He's hurt in his lower body or something. He may have had his foot amputated or maybe he pulled a calf or something like it's marked the same way. So yeah, let's hope that's not the case here. It is a very strange, we've talked about this before, but it is very strange how much we know about these guys and their bodies considering that we don't know them. And sometimes it's not intimate, but sometimes it's mechanical and you're like, wow,

it's a lot to know about a stranger. More than we want to know, frankly. Yes. So I want to close with a stat blast. Just wanted to shout out a Reddit thread that a listener, Kevin, pointed out to us. Someone on our baseball subreddit did an exhaustive analysis

of the best deals for baseball players on Cameo. And we've talked about baseball players on Cameo before. For those who don't know, it's the website where you can pay celebrities to send you some quick personalized message. And so people add themselves to Cameo. And it's always an interesting little laboratory environment because it's like, oh, it's cute that you think you're enough of a celebrity to actually be on Cameo or the pricing is interesting too. I don't know if Cameo makes recommendations to people, but they can choose how much they want

to charge for a Cameo message. And sometimes they underprice themselves and sometimes they overprice themselves. So someone on Reddit here, slightly awkward, who I think is actually the author of a previous Reddit thread that we talked about and just how much they are charging and who is sort of above or below the dollars per war going rate for a Cameo here, which he found to be $3.68 per war. So this is 183 of the 271-ish major leaguers on Cameo have already retired. So their wars are frozen. And interesting, the average war of those players is 26.3, which is pretty good, which makes sense. Like you have to have been a pretty good player in general to think that someone would want to pay for a personalized message from you, but not necessarily. So there are some players with negative wars on here and players who are charging quite a bit. So Adam Russell,

for instance, do you remember Adam Russell? I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, but Adam Russell was a pitcher who pitched for the White Sox and the Cubs and the Rays for a few years, like a decade ago or so, and had a pretty not notable career. And he's charging $100 for a message from Adam Russell, which I don't know, man. Seems like a lot. There may be big Adam Russell superfans out there, but if so, they're paying through the nose. Whereas like Aramis Ramirez is charging $15. It's like, that's a steal. I mean, there are five players who charge $15 for a video and four of

them are not very notable. And then you have Aramis Ramirez, who is a very good major league player. So there's a very broad range here in the pricing. Albert Pujols is the most expensive current player. He's charging $650. And the analysis did not include current players just because their career wars may not. Some of them are on there because they're famous for other reasons. They were broadcasters or something or they're folk heroes for whatever reason, like Bo Jackson, you know, 7.7 career war, but he's charging $400 and, you know, he's Bo Jackson. So that makes some sense. Or like you have players who are also managers on here, like David Ross and Aaron Boone are on here, which is like, it's weird to imagine them like filling out lineup cards and then making their cameos or something. I know it's odd, but like Fergie Jenkins is the cheapest Hall of Famer on here. Only $75 for Fergie Jenkins. You can't even get Adam Russell for that price. And then there are differentials between even great players like, you know, Roger Clemens, technically he has the highest war of any player who does cameos. He's charging $500. Greg Maddox, who has a slightly lower war than Roger Clemens, but A, just seems like a much cooler guy and is also an all-time great. He charges $200.

So if you want a cameo from an all-time great pitcher, you're going to go with Maddox for $200 or Clemens for $500. That's an easy call, I would say. Yeah. And just a couple more here that I wanted to mention. So the most overpriced player, as determined by this study with certain variables, is someone who on a dollars per war basis also didn't fare all that well, probably just as a player, Ryan Howard, which is, you know, he's $227 over the going rate for dollars per win here. And probably for sort of the same reasons that he was, you know, paid more on a dollars per war basis than most players because he won an MVP and he hit a bunch of homers, right? And so he's a much more notable person than your typical 19.6 war player. And that still seems to be paying off for him because he can charge more on cameos. So productivity doesn't always correlate perfectly with fame and celebrity. And like David Ortiz, David Ortiz is going for $750 and he has 51 wars, so overpriced by this method, but people love David Ortiz. Bostonians love David Ortiz. And

like Mariano Rivera also, he's at 750 and that is technically overpriced, but maybe war is underrating Mariano Rivera or underrates relievers or at least underrates how famous and well-known they are and Rivera especially. So a lot of exceptions, but interesting analysis here. And it fascinates me to no end, A, which players put themselves on here and then how they price themselves because it tells you a little bit probably about what do they think of themselves? How highly would they value a cameo from themselves? Nelson Cruz only charges $200. That seems like a pretty good deal. Pete Alonso's charging $265. JD Martinez charging $300. So there's no real standard band here where everyone just kind of clusters according to how good they are, even how famous they are. It sort of seems to reflect their personalities

in a way that I enjoy. Do you think that Mariano Rivera's price went up after he was unanimously inducted? Do you think he was like, this is worth $100 more? Probably, right? I mean, maybe he wasn't on Cameo prior to that, but I would think so. Like getting into the Hall of Fame, that probably raises your price at signature shows and card shows and such. And getting in unanimously, yeah, maybe even more. Interesting. It's such a weird, like, I wonder how long it takes them per cameo to do do they factor that into the pricing model are they like i'm someone who takes multiple takes so

i need to charge more put some thought into my script here yeah because this is gonna like take longer for me to wish you know charlie a happy birthday because i gotta get into the mood and i gotta do it a couple of times. And so I have to charge more. Some of them like donate the money to charity. And I'm like, this seems like an inefficient way to have a charitable impact because just donate the money.

You're like, you're David Ortiz. Don't you just, anyway, I'm not here to criticize the way Ortiz does philanthropy. It just seems like a weird, it's like kind of an indirect thing to do yeah I guess you're making your fans happy at the same time yeah that's a very fair point

and so it's but it does strike me as sort of an odd exercise just in general but maybe that's because I can't imagine wanting like anyone wanting to like buy a cameo of me saying happy birthday because like you don't we're not friends why do you i mean like i hope you do have a happy birthday but why do you care

if i say that like we're not pals it doesn't mean anything though like we'd probably draw about as well as adam russell i would think i don't want to know because what if we didn't you know if we didn't that'd be a bummer yeah we'd feel But yeah, like we don't know what kind of cake you like. So our happy birthday is probably less meaningful than it would be from a loved one. I would imagine. I don't know. I don't think I understand celebrity very well. Like as a concept, I think I'm kind of flummoxed by celebrity as like an idea. Not that we're celebrities, but you know what I'm trying to say.

It's like, I don't, our relationship to this is weird in a way that I don't, I still don't understand. Right. All right. Let's end with a stat blast they'll take a data set sorted by something like e r a minus or obs plus and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's today's stat blast. This will actually be two stat blasts, both prompted by things that happened this weekend that I was curious about or that a listener was curious about. So Sean, Patreon supporter, wrote in to say, Someone in a Padres Discord chat I'm a member of pointed out that in the eighth inning of the Friday game against the Giants on April 30th,

Hosmer, Cronenworth, and Myers took 14 straight pitches consecutively. We speculated in the chat about whether that was close to a record. So my stat blast question is, what is the most consecutive pitches taken by a team, excluding intentional walks, as taken pitches? So I have an answer, at least dating back to 1988, which is when we have pitch-by-pitch data. Would you care to speculate about what the record might be? No.

Okay. I don't blame you. Well, it is higher than 14. So 14 has happened many times. I got the data here from Lucas Apostolaris of Baseball Perspectives. And just in the PitchFX era, which is 2008 to present, or really just the pitch tracking era, there have been 265 instances of at least 15 pitches taken consecutively. So 14 might be a little unusual, might be notable, was noted in this case, but not close to a record. So in the dates back to 1997, and it is in fact 26, 26 consecutive takes, which occurred in the bottom of the eighth inning with the Mets batting against the Rockies on May 18th, 1997. And I will tell you what the sequence here was. And I will tell you what the sequence here was Johnny Ulrud got it started

With a five-pitch walk Against Rockies pitcher Mike Munoz Then there was a Rockies pitching change Bruce Ruffin came in Todd Hundley then took his own five-pitch walk That brought up Ray Ordonez Ray Ordonez took a five-pitch walk And then Manny Alexander came up and took a four pitch

walk. Then Carl Everett came up and he also took a four pitch walk. And that brought up Edgardo Alfonso, who took a called strike, followed by a ball, followed by another ball. And then on the two one count, he swung and he fouled off a pitch so that ended the 26 consecutive takes and this is excluding intentional balls this is just looking at balls and called strikes and 26 and and you can't blame the Mets I guess if if they're going to walk five batters in a row then I guess you shouldn't swing which is what you always hear. Like, hey, if the guy can't find the strike zone, take a pitch, right? Don't help him out. That's what people always say, but often batters do. And sometimes maybe it even makes sense because

someone's been wild and you figure, oh, they're just going to lay one right over the plate just to get that strike. And maybe that's the time to take advantage. And there were some strikes thrown here. There were five pitch walks, so there were called strikes involved, but five walks in a row, not a single mitt took the bat off their shoulder until three pitches into the plate appearance after the fifth walk in a row. So that was pretty interesting. And I imagine it was noted at the time. There was also a 25-take streak. The Expos against the Cubs on September 10th, 2003. There was a 23-pitch take.

The Astros against the Rockies, September 7th, 1996. And then a bunch of 22s. So if it gets up into that range, now you know what history would qualify as. So if you're watching and you're noticing that a team is not swinging, then you can count along with everyone else. And it would take 26 to match the record. Do we have any sense of how the dugouts responded to this set of circumstances? Because I would imagine that if you're a pitcher on a team where the opposing team is just taking and taking, after a while you're furious probably.

You're just like so irritated. Even if they shouldn't be swinging, even if you're wild, even if you're ineffectively wild, like not wild in a good way at all, even if you're just the worst. I'm sure you'd get really mad because wouldn't you just be like, come on, man, like swing at something yeah so i'd be curious if there was if there are any contemporaneous accounts of like how they reacted to this and if they got frustrated if they were visibly frustrated at the hitter were they just frustrated with themselves did they talk

about feeling like failures afterward like i just would be curious what kind of mental toll that would take because i think that you'd notice you would notice well before the 26th pitch oh yeah i would think so yeah yeah and right i wonder then does it become a self-sustaining thing like it's like oh none of those guys swung so i shouldn't either or or do you feel pressure to swing like there are those times like when a pitcher is just mowing everyone down. Like if a guy gets two outs on two pitches or something, you'll always hear that, oh, the next batter is going to take a pitch just so that he doesn't get out of it with the minimum inning, as we have called it before. So I do kind of wonder like how those interpersonal dynamics play into this. Like, does it just get weird if you're the hitting team?

And it's like, hey, I'm a hitter. I'm a batter. I'm supposed to swing the bat. Right. So if all of these guys before me haven't swung the bat, then I better do it just to break the streak or just to pressure on you to continue the streak. Like, I don't know whether the pressure builds on you

to swing or to not swing as the inning goes on. Yeah, that would be fascinating too too because I would think that some guys are just going to be itching, itching to go. Yeah. Especially if, you know, if they take and take and take and it results in a bunch of walks and then you got the bases loaded and you know that this guy, he doesn't have it. Then you're going to, you just want a meatball and you might swing at something that isn't one just because you really want to swing, I would think. Yeah. Anyway, that's the answer. 26 takes in a row.

Now, this other stat blast was prompted by a question I had, and I noticed that on Saturday, Cleveland starter Tristan McKenzie had an outing in which he did not allow a ball in play. He threw two innings. He faced 11 batters, one of them hit a home run, and then he struck out six and walked four. So this outing did not go great for him. He gave up five runs and only lasted the two innings, but still seemed notable that not a single hitter put a ball in play. The defense just could have taken the day off if they

had wanted to while McKenzie was in there. And I was kind of curious about where this stacked up historically, the longest starts in which no ball was put in play or even the longest outings. I think of them as like satchel starts, satchel page starts, or maybe we could call them satchels because of all the stories, some possibly apocryphal, but probably some truth to them that Satchel Paige would just tell his infielders to sit down or tell his outfielders to leave the field because he was just going to strike everyone out and he didn't actually need defenders behind them. So there are some actual outings where that is the case. So we got a message last week from a Patreon supporter named Ryan Nelson, who heard our interview

in our StatBlast with former frequent StatBlast consultant Adam Ott, who has now started his job in Cleveland's front office and was probably watching this Tristan McKenzie start. And Ryan volunteered to help out with a StatBlast from time to time in addition to his Patreon support. He's going above and beyond here if we needed someone. So I said, sure, if you're offering, tell me a little bit about the satchel starts. And Ryan said, what a fun question. Thank you, Ryan. Some more clarifications on what I included. So he counted

intentional walks and he also counted hit by pitches, which I think makes sense. They're all true outcomes. Even if we don't count hit by pitches as one of the three, there's no ball put in play. He says he did not count inside the park homers, which makes sense. So he says, looking back at data from 1916 to 2020, the only years with reliable batters faced numbers, there are 29,161 pitcher outings where all batters faced have resulted in true outcomes. And I believe that McKenzie's is actually the only one so far this year. And the longest outing this season prior to McKenzie's in which they were only true outcomes was Vince Velasquez, who faced eight batters in an appearance against the Mets on

April 6th. And he walked four of them and struck out four of them. But again, no other starts before McKenzie. But we are looking here at all of history since 1916. There have been 222. And Ryan continues, I will not be able to hold the suspense much longer. Before this year, the longest TTO start of all time, true outcome start, was only seven batters faced when Kevin Ritz of the 1991 Detroit Tigers struck out one, walked four, intentionally walked one, and to top it off, hit a batter.

Final line, two-thirds of an inning pitched, four earned runs. Tristan McKenzie obviously blew this out of the water. No starter has even come close to matching this. But McKenzie's was not the longest outing period with only true outcomes. That outing came on August 2nd of 2020 when another Detroit Tiger, Tyler Alexander, came into a game in the third inning trailing 3-0. He faced 12 batters with one walk one hit by pitch and 10 strikeouts we talked about that one right because he uh he tied the record for consecutive strikeouts or something and we were like who right but his final line was three and two-thirds innings no earn runs

the 11th out came when his hit by pitch got caught trying to steal second. So McKenzie's outing was second all time in terms of batters faced. Kiko Calero of the 2003 Cardinals faced 10 on April 27th with five Ks, four walks, and one intentional walk. Pitchers have faced nine batters four times, eight batters 18 times, and seven batters 53 times. Of all those, there were only two starts, McKenzie's and the aforementioned Kevin Ritt's start. So he did in fact make history. It was the longest only true outcome start ever, but not quite the longest only true outcomes outing. And Ryan mentioned one more fun fact or possibly unfun fact. For what it's's worth this is not typically something you want your starter to do of the 222 starts with only true outcomes many ended due to injury only six made it out of the first inning wow only one went back out for the second ryan stanek who i assume was opening for the combined era for those starts is 133.14 yeah so this is not usually good and it was not good

for tristan mckenzie on saturday wow wow yeah it wasn't good he's it's an unusual he's doing an unusual thing and it's gratifying to hear that it is as strange as we thought yeah yeah so ryan sent me the spreadsheets with all of the outings and the starts only and i will link to those if you want to comb through them but good data there good insight and i would assume that we will see more of this it is not a coincidence probably that the longest start ever that was only true outcomes is this season and the longest outing ever that was only true outcomes is this season and the longest outing ever that was only true outcomes was last season obviously more plate appearances are ending in true outcomes than ever so we will probably see this more often and also we're seeing shorter outings in general

by starters so all the factors are aligned here to contribute to these starts but generally not a good thing although i guess it was for tyler Alexander. All right. So thanks to Ryan for his inaugurable stat blast assist, and we will end there. All right. Well, after we recorded, the Angels played another game and they made four more errors. That's not going to help their defensive efficiency. They also lost and fell to 13 and 15. At least Otani will be pitching and probably hitting on Wednesday. There was also some news about Jacob deGrom who had an MRI which revealed only inflammation in his right lat. The Mets aren't putting him on the injured list for now, so that is good news, although it does not make me any less anxious about deGrom's well-being

than I was before I found out that he had a problem. And one more update, we talked about Jesus Lusardo's video game pinky problem. So after we spoke, an AP story came out that said that Lusardo has apologized to his teammates and manager Bob Melvin for the accident. He said, I'm a 23-year-old kid. I make mistakes. I feel like a lot of people don't realize that we are people as well, and we make mistakes, the same mistakes that fans make, the same mistakes that people that work normal jobs make. It was an immature mistake and it was a stupid mistake, but I still made a mistake and that's something that I'm going to learn from and I'm not going to do again. Which almost makes it sound as if he is apologizing for an intentional act, but then it goes on to say that Luzardo noted it's not as if he threw his hand down in anger or out of frustration.

It was merely bad luck, he said. I guess I just don't understand why he is apologizing so profusely about making a mistake if it was just an accident and bad luck. But the story goes on to say on a video conference call, Lusardo demonstrated how his hand came out to his side and hit the top of a table, what he called a reaction to something that happened in the game. He didn't share what game he was playing. There's no way for me to describe this in any other way other than stupid and maybe immature. I've never had something like this happen, and I don't plan on anything like this happening again. I'm just kind of perplexed. It was a reaction to something that happened in the game,

but it wasn't anger or frustration, and it was accident and bad luck, but also stupid and immature. I don't know. Anyway, he plans to keep gaming, but not to keep breaking fingers while doing so. That will do it for today. 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. Colin, Edward Fabregat Rodergas, Marco Gasparro, CJ Labasi, and Julie. 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 podcast.fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with another episode soon.

Talk to you then. Take, take, take, take, take, take, take, take.