Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1705: Spit Takes

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about another prescient player prediction (this time involving the Phillies’ Luke Williams), Nick Madrigal’s hamstring injury, another aspect of the baseball scene in A Quiet Place Part II, and a few observations about the foreign-substance scandal, including teams’ culpability, how the perception of sticky stuff use may mirror the […]

Like two bitter strangers And now I'm seeing the moment short of it And I can make it last Well, I could spit on a stranger Pull me out You're a bitter stranger Pull me out Well, I could spit on a stranger Pull me out, well I could spin on a stranger

Pull me out, you're a bitter stranger Pull me out, you're a bitter stranger Hello and welcome to episode 1705 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs podcast. What? Oh no! It's a baseball podcast, Ben. It's brought to you by Fangraphs, but also our Patreon supporters. And I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, and you're Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. How are you? I'm doing all right. How are you?

I'm fine. I'm so excited to share a tidbit from the Fangraphs newsletter that is relevant to our listeners that I got ahead of myself. Please do. myself please do yeah i don't know if you had a chance to read the fangraphs newsletter that came out this morning but as i was editing some of the copy that went into this i noticed a quote that is relevant to our interest ben so did you happen to watch the uh phillies braves game yesterday i did not well in that game the phillies walked off the braves. Luke Williams, who was very recently part of Team USA and has been called up to the Phillies, walked them off. He hit a two-out walk-off home run on Wednesday. And now I'm going to be quoting from the newsletter that Jeffrey Ballone puts together

for us, which is well worth your time in the mornings if you are in the market for another baseball newsletter. I think this one does a really good job. It was the first time a Phillies player had hit a walk-off home run in their first career start. We kind of spoke it into existence, said teammate Zach Elfin, to watch the heroics in the trainer's room after starting and pitching six innings. We were like, he's going to do it right here. Captain America is going to end this right here. The next pitch, he clubbed it. It was awesome. And so Ben, my question to you is, does this suggest that just every single event in baseball is predicted by the people on the field,

or are they predicting them more often having heard the success rate of late? Until proven otherwise, I will just assume that every player predicts a walk-off on every pitch or every play because it just seems so common. We talked about it with Luis Rios. We talked about it with Miguel Sano. Obviously, it's not a new thing. We've talked about this before and how it gets reported disproportionately if these things happen. But there's been a real rash of them lately. And now that we're talking about it all the time, we'll probably get more examples sent to us. So I just have to figure that there are people constantly predicting positive outcomes,

and we only hear about them when they happen to get them right, which inevitably they would sometimes. I mean, yeah, it's just a lot of large numbers, or at some point, you're going to call these things correctly. I do like the confidence that goes into this particular prediction because, you know, you raised the specter of sort of uninteresting predictions given the circumstances, right? That you would walk it off in extras given Manfred Ball is like not very interesting to you because the odds are sort of in your favor. But this one, this seems relatively bold as a prediction given both the player's lack of major league experience and also the lack of real franchise precedent for such a thing. So I think this is officially a bold prediction, which a lot of the others have really not been. They have not been especially bold, but I think that this one counts. So that's something at least.

Yeah, this one is bold. I wonder if there's a bias toward making bold predictions because if you just make run-of-the-mill predictions, then who cares? I mean, I guess Luis Urias' was considered bold enough for it to be reported, but there's probably going to be some selective sampling there, right? Where if it's just, yeah, I think he's going to throw a fastball here, we're probably not going to read about that in the game story. But if someone predicts a walk-off by a rookie in exciting circumstances, then we're more likely to hear about it. And maybe players are more likely to just throw it out there because it's like, oh, this is outlandish.

I'm kind of kidding. It's tongue-in-cheek. But if it happened to hit, wouldn't that be swell? So I think that's probably part of it, too. I've always been interested in, you know, you hear broadcasters all the time, typically former players who are guessing along with the pitcher and are saying, oh, this would be a good spot for such and such a pitch in such and such a location. And very often they're right.

Very often they're completely wrong. And then there's always a little awkward silence or a kind of chuckle or, well, I guess I got that wrong or he got that wrong or whatever. So I wonder if you tracked that over the course of a season, whether those ex-players would be any better at that than the typical fan or than projections or just looking at like league average splits by count, especially now that pitch usage has changed quite considerably since earlier eras. So a player who was playing in the 80s or 90s or something

might not be the best equipped to make those predictions now. Sometimes I hear a potential topic for a piece and I think to myself, it's really a shame that I don't have the time to write as much as I used to because that sounds great. But then I think I hear ones like this and I'm like, that's something I would spend too much time trying to answer. So perhaps sometimes editing spares me from my own worst impulses as a completist. I don't want to step on a potential future meet a major leaguer segment because I told you before we started recording that I have one in mind. It is not Luke Williams that I want to spend a little bit more time on than I had to spend

today. And so in some ways, I've cheated you if Luke Williams was yours, but I do enjoy very extreme debut lines. And this isn't his debut. This was his second game, right? But his current line is 600, 600, and 1,400. He has a 441 to be RC plus because he has had five plate appearances. That's all. And they've gone well. And so that's delightful. He gave a very stirring and moving interview after he walked off the Phillies yesterday. His family was there, and it was clear that that meant a great deal to him, and so did this moment. So it was very nice.

It was a very nice thing, and it would have been nice even if no one had predicted it. This is not so nice. This news just broke before we started recording. Nick Madrigal is injured and possibly out for the season, which is a big bummer. Here's a tweet from friend of the show, James Feagan. Rick Hahn says Nick Madrigal is going on the 60-day IL due to a proximal tear of his right hamstring. They're still weighing season-ending surgery or rest and rehabilitation. So first Jimenez, then Robert, now Madrigal, taking away all that is fun and good with the White Sox. Not all. There's still plenty of good and fun, but a considerable portion. Yeah, that's pretty gnarly. And it's the sort of thing where you worry, you know,

guys come back from hamstring injuries, and they come back, and they're athletic and strong and fast. But I worry about a hamstring injury for a guy whose whole game is like contact and legging it out. But that's a real shame. Gosh, poor White. Yeah, so if that is the end of his season, which I hope it won't be, his slash line is 305-349-425, which is certainly solid. That's a 11-team WRC+. He struck out in 7.9% of his plate appearances, which is a little higher than I would have liked, but still extremely low relative to most other players. So he was a constant source of fun for me, and hope he will be again someday soon ish at least yeah

hamstrings those will get you don't care for hamstrings they're one of the few injuries where when i see a guy pull up on the field with one i feel somewhat confident saying oh no that's a hammy and i hate that i want to be wrong although sometimes when it's not a hammy it's an achilles and that's even worse so even worse um so maybe I actually would prefer to take the lesser of those two evils. But yeah, be well soon, Nick Magical. You are weird in today's game, and we are famously fans of that. So there you go. Yeah.

Well, we'll see if they get rid of the sticky stuff. Maybe that will depress strikeout rates. But on the other hand, Nick Magical will be gone, replaced at least for now by someone who strikes out more often than Nick Magical does. So that will send those rates up again. I guess it's Brian Goodwin called up to replace him. So we'll see. One other little follow-up from last time. I started that episode by talking about the baseball scene in A Quiet Place Part 2. And I was focusing primarily on the Killian Murphy character's comment about sliding versus diving in a baseball scene. He said dive, where it seems

sort of strange that he wasn't saying slide. And it turned out there was a narrative reason for that, a kind of contrived reason that came back later. Well, we got an email from another listener who has seen the film and pointed out something else interesting that I had not picked up on. Dakota writes, I was listening to episode 1704 of the show where Ben discussed the baseball scene in A Quiet Place Part 2. This is also spoiler-free, by the way. Ben's analysis primarily centered on the action of the youth baseball game being shown on the screen. However, there was a second baseball aspect during that scene that I think warrants some discussion. In this scene, John Krasinski and Killian Murphy are both watching the youth game while simultaneously listening to the Red Sox broadcast on the radio. As they're

listening, announcer Dave O'Brien can be heard exclaiming about a play where Mookie Betts takes an extra base to score a run for the Red Sox. We won't nitpick about how O'Brien, the TV announcer, is being played on the radio broadcast. It seems innocuous enough, but Mookie scoring a run on this play is actually a critical piece of world building. From the first film, we know that day one of the alien attack takes place in the year 2020 because of a tombstone or a grave marker that says so. And since the attack occurs on a sunny day during baseball season, it's likely sometime in the summer. So in the Quiet Place cinematic universe, the Red Sox never ended up trading Mookie Betts to the Dodgers in February of that year.

Furthermore, since the invasion presumably ended Major League Baseball forever, Mookie would have technically retired or more likely been murdered by aliens as a Red Sox lifer. All this is to say the only universe in which the Red Sox decided to keep Mookie and pursue another title in 2020 is one where an alien apocalypse also occurs. But as a Red Sox fan, I'm tempted to say that trade-off is worth it. So this is an important point, I think, not only in establishing that the Quiet Place timeline is different from ours, which is reassuring, I suppose. But also, I know that Dakota is joking here, but I would say that as critical as many were of the Mookie Pets trade and trading a franchise icon like that, Alex Verdugo plus Jeter Downs plus Connor Wong plus no alien apocalypse, that is probably a worthwhile deal. Yeah, I think that the plus an alien apocalypse

does some really important heavy lifting in that sentence. And I do not say that to knock the players he was traded for, some of whom are producing quite nicely, none of whom are Mookie Betts. We have made our feelings on that trade known, so I don't need to relitigate them here. But yes, not being attacked by uh very strong very big sound monsters are we also running out of ways for monsters to be monsters like are we are we light on available monster

attributes is that part of the takeaway here i mean it is a compelling premise i just haven't as i said last time i haven't seen it i just didn't i didn't see it right like i also didn't get stoned and watch cats like i planned and now it's too late because we went through a pandemic and it feels weird to me for reasons I can't explain. So here we are. Anyway, I think we're out of good monster attributes after this one. Like this might be the last compelling monster attribute. Then we just have to focus on people, the greatest monsters of all. You had a quiet place.

You had bird box, different varieties of ways to kill you. But yeah, I think everything has probably been tried at this point and something several times. And Anton also wrote in because I had mentioned briefly in that segment that I still think that baseball is overrepresented in movies given its popularity in the country and the world as a whole. as a whole. And Anton wrote in to say that you had mentioned how baseball gets an unreasonable amount of clout in movies. There's actually a really good YouTube video about just why. And he linked us to a video called Why Baseball is the Best Movie Sport, which was published in March by Patrick Willems. I will link to it. Anton says, if you don't have time for the whole thing, which I have not yet because it's 40 something minutes. Here's a list of the points I remember. More types of movie available due to varied stakes. So Sandlot games all the way up to MLB, which I guess that applies to a lot of other sports to some degree too.

Less equipment to hide the actor's faces. That is a good point. Oh, yeah. Action is more predictable and close up. Pitcher versus hitter. Close plays at a bag are easier to follow with the camera. I guess the one-on-one nature of it maybe makes it more suspenseful in some ways. And it has more settings available due to the longer history and

worldwide appeal. So that's true. They play baseball in a lot of countries. That's not true of every sport. And of course, if you're doing a period piece, you can have baseball at times when you can't have other sports. And Anton also says one more that I don't think he brought up, but it's probably easier to find actors who can fake being a baseball player because body type is not such a big factor. Not many big name Hollywood actors can fake being in the NBA or NFL, which is a good point. Surprisingly, few can fake being in MLB as well. But I think, yes, in terms of physical characteristics, it's probably a bit broader. So I think that's true. And I still think it has a lot to do with the Americana and national pastime and wholesomeness and sort of these maybe outdated ideas that are associated with baseball. And I

think this is a good thing. I'm all for more positive exposure for baseball, but it does stand out to me. So I will link to that video. I think that's a good point. I wonder from a Hollywood casting perspective, what their preference is, because I could see the visibility of the face being something of a double-edged sword and the sort of availability of actors who look like they could be credible baseball players, that is a positive. But because you see their face, I would imagine it also makes it harder to obscure when you do need to use like a sports double. True. If you, you know, and there have been pieces about this, like if you are having football players portrayed on screen, like there's a whole industry of guys who fit that mold and they're easier to have in some respects because they're wearing a helmet. So you don't see their faces. I imagine that hockey is sort of an in-between there.

But I wonder if the availability of athletic enough to fake it looking actors and the sort of advantage you gain of being able to say, well, that's, you know, Chris Evans playing a baseball player. And I know it's him because I can see his face is then like, oh, now Chris Evans has to be a credible baseball player. I don't think he's ever been in a baseball movie. He just looks he's Captain America. So it's like an Americana thing anyway. been in a baseball movie he just looks he's captain america so it's like an americana thing anyway so i wonder how they think about that in terms of the relative advantages and disadvantages because it's like yeah that's him then it's like oh that's him you know yes right it doesn't have to be a him at all but you know in terms of the the baseball movies we've seen most of them have centered around him famously so yeah i guess there would also need to be fewer players visible

at any given time, which would be a good thing, right? Like if it's football, you need dozens of people on the field or soccer, you need a lot. Basketball, fewer. But in baseball, you could get away with probably just a couple at times. If you're cutting from place to place and you're doing a batter pitcher matchup or something, you don't have to have someone standing at every position. So that might cut

down on the demands a little bit. So I have a few emails and I have a few additional thoughts on the topic of the hour and the day and the week and the month, foreign substances. So one thing I wanted to mention, do you recall when we talked about this, I guess it was probably back in March and MLB sent that memo around and made it clear that the league was going to be using stack cast and spin rate analysis to try to flag players who had suddenly soared above their baseline for spin rates. And one of the unintended consequences that we speculated about that could come from that is that you might be more motivated to start using those sticky substances below the major leagues so that when you get up there, you're already using it. And so if you're getting kind of a fingerprint of a player's spin rates, then the first data on record is already enhanced. So we wondered if teams or players would be more likely to embrace

those things. And I was just reading Brittany Droli's piece at The Athletic this week, and she wrote, this spring, MLB sent out a memo informing players and teams that it would be enforcing illegal substances on the mound and looking for out-of-the-ordinary spin rates that collected warm-up pitches and occasional game ones, while many organizations, already a step ahead, continued to implement sticky substances at all levels so as to avoid a pitcher having a suspicious uptick when he reached the big leagues. So apparently that happened, at least in some places and with some teams and some players. So that's another thing to keep in mind as we single out Garrett Cole or whoever else has sudden spin rate drops. As we were saying

last time, this is very much an institutional issue where the situation was allowed to fester by the league and teams have encouraged it as well, which is not to say that you're not entitled to ask a pitcher anything you want, but we should probably also frame it within that context of just encouraging pitchers to use it. Yeah, I agree. And especially because it requires an institutional solution. I think that keeping the context of how this sort of environment was allowed to spring up and how pitchers were encouraged to participate in this way, it is going to be more effective if we acknowledge that reality rather than trying to focus our

ire on a couple of bad actors, one, because it's more than a couple, and also because I think that understanding the dynamics of a situation like this is useful not only in addressing this particular circumstance, but anticipating future infractions that might not be sticky stuff, but might be something else. And I think that the more we come to understand this as an ecosystem that is dynamic and is individuals responding to institutional incentives and then institutional incentives adapting to some of the sort of early behavior of individuals, the more likely we are to sort of nip the next one in the bud much sooner. We seem to keep needing to learn this lesson, both, you know, in society more broadly, but also within baseball.

So maybe we can do better this time. Yeah, when the sticky stuff settles and we have the spin rate data and we can analyze things after the crackdown begins in earnest, if and when it does, then if we get a better sense of how pervasive the use was and we see that, well, oh, actually not that many pitchers spin rates did decline even after they were inspected and supposedly prevented from using it. who suffer these sudden precipitous declines, then I might be more willing to point fingers and say so-and-so is a scapegoat for this or not a scapegoat, but rightfully receiving some disproportionate attention or condemnation for it. But as it is, based on everything we know, it certainly seems like it's so pervasive that I don't really expect that to be the case. Although

it could be the case that almost everyone is using something, but a minority are using something that really juices their spin rate by hundreds and hundreds of RPMs. So it may just be some guys who suffer the steep declines while other guys have more gradual declines, but we will see. We will hopefully learn a lot from that process. We will see. We will hopefully learn a lot from that process. And another thing I wanted to mention is that this reminds me, as we said last time, a lot of previous cheating scandals and obviously the science dealing situation, obviously the PED situation. And one thing I wonder is whether a lot of the factors that have come together to cause or exacerbate the strikeout issues and the low batting average and all of that, whether there will be a tendency to say, oh, it was just sticky stuff, like this will be the sticky stuff era or something like that. It depends really on what

happens after this enforcement goes into effect. Like if we do see a sudden huge decline in spin rate and whiff rate and everything, then maybe that would be fair. But if not, then I hope it doesn't get disproportionate attention relative to all of the other factors that we've discussed on the show, because I still feel like the steroid era, as it's called, or the PD era, maybe it's the availability bias. But when you know that someone is cheating in a very sensational way, we know that people were using PDs and probably still are, but we're doing it maybe more so than they are now, hopefully. And you know that about an era, then you associate whatever happens in that era with the PDs.

Oh, it's the PD era. It's causing all of the offensive effects we saw at that time. Or even with the Astros, maybe they were stealing signs. That's why they were good. That's why they won. And there may be other things happening at the time, or even with the Astros, maybe they were stealing signs. That's why they were good. That's why they won. And there may be other things happening at the time. I've written about this before, but I really feel like the PD era and the offensive rates and the home run rates that we saw at that time were probably partially affected by PDs, but I don't think that's the whole story. I do think it affected aging curves, And certainly there were players who at ages when

they would typically decline suddenly became superhuman. That is extremely suspicious. But and in some cases, we know what was happening. But I think there was more going on. I think the ball probably changed around 1993 or so. There were multiple rounds of expansion. The strike zone changed. Ballparks were torn down and rebuilt and were maybe smaller. There were multiple rounds of expansion, the strike zone change, ballparks were torn down and rebuilt and were maybe smaller. There were all sorts of things happening in that era that I think contributed to that. And if anything, the fact that we've had even higher home run rates in the past several seasons when we do have PED testing and hopefully the problem is a little bit more in check, that just goes to show that it's entirely possible that the ball or other factors were responsible for it 20, 25 years ago as well. So that's just kind of what I hope that the thing that becomes the big story doesn't become the only story, especially because unless eradicating the sticky stuff really does just rectify

of the offensive issues and aesthetic issues that we've talked about at Nauseam, then there will need to be more changes made. And so to say, mission accomplished, we got rid of the sticky stuff, that could be counterproductive too. Yeah, agreed. I think that it seems unlikely to me that it will arrest the trends such that we do not have to contemplate other changes to the game just because of how long we've been seeing a rise in strikeouts right this is an issue that predates the pervasive use of sticky stuff it you know it predates this podcast right like this has just been the general trend throughout the history of the game and so it it seems unlikely to me that it will be enough on its

own i suppose that it could be and how nice would that be? It would be kind of nice if all of a sudden we could say, oh, we don't have to monkey with the mound and we don't have to contemplate banning the shift. We can just curb sticky stuff and that will be enough. But I think that when we look at the evidence that is presented for why the offensive environment looks the way that it does, some of those things are going to be affected by pitchers not being able to use sticky stuff, but like a lot of them won't be right. Like getting rid of sticky stuff doesn't change the way that fielders are being positioned and how effective they are at gobbling up the ball when it is put in play. And so I would be surprised if it's enough on its own to sort of course correct the way we want it to. And, you know, I, I always think that it's valuable for us to be aware of the, the way that different factors interact with one another to create an offensive environment, because then the next time we do have some sort of imbalance that we feel the need to adjust so that the game is more in line with the aesthetic

that we want we're not looking back being like well we got rid of the sticky stuff so i i do declare i don't know how else we will fix this problem right like it is useful for the anticipation of future necessary correctives for us to be aware of how all this stuff interacts with each other and to not be overly simplistic in our diagnosis. But I think you're right that we do tend to flatten all of that stuff into one thing, either the thing that we think is the most responsible or is the most visible or is the most scandalous. And so it is an instinct that I think we will have to actively combat. Yeah. And for anyone who's curious about how much using sticky stuff and having higher spin rates or Bauer units can depress offensive performance,

Devin Fink took a really informative look at that subject for FanCrafts this week, which I will link to on the show page. And he showed that it is conceivable that there could be a big difference in offense, but it's really entirely dependent on how many pitchers are using this stuff and what stuff they're using. So we will perhaps find out soon. So one more thing that I wanted to mention, or possibly two, Pete Alonzo weighed in on this subject on Wednesday. Pete Alonzo has entered the chat. Yeah.

And he did so in sort of a, sir, this is a Wendy's way. And I guess he weighed in on this subject very briefly before he then pivoted to an entirely unanticipated subject. So he was asked about the crackdown on foreign substances, and he said he is not on board. He doesn't think it's necessary. He's fine with pitchers who throw 99 using stuff to help their grip so that he doesn't get hit in the head, etc. through Throw99, using stuff to help their grip so that he doesn't get hit in the head, etc. Then he pivoted to what he thinks is a bigger scandal that should be paid attention to. He said, the biggest concern is MLB manipulates the baseball year in and year out, depending on free agency class or guys being in an advanced part of their arbitration. Then there was a

follow-up about that. He said that it's something that players talk about and believe in. He said, oh no, that's a fact. He said in 2019, there was a huge class of free agent pitchers, and then that's quote unquote the juiced balls. And then 2020 was a strange year with the COVID season. But now that we're back to playing in a regular season with a ton of shortstops or position players that are going to be paid a lot of money like high caliber players. I mean, yeah, that's not a coincidence. It's definitely something that they do.

And as far as I know, there has been no response from the league as of yet. But I don't think that was a hypothesis I had heard before. We get questions all the time about should MLB change the ball from year to year to vary the offensive environment or from game to game even. But I don't think I've seen it suggested, at least not widely, that MLB has been tampering with the ball to suppress free agent salaries. So according to Alonzo, not only is it definitely true, but a lot of players think it's true. Okay. So this is such a weird one to talk about because I don't think that I'm overly generous toward the league in terms of their indifference to how the changes

they make might affect player salaries, right? Or their desire to get players paid as much as possible. Like I think that my skepticism of those things is sort of well documented. This goes a little too far for me, Ben. For one thing, I think that if you have this kind of year-to-year inconsistency and you have some years where you are changing the ball to the benefit of hitters and others to pitchers, well, those years where the hitters are good or the pitchers are good do count in their free agency case, right? Like in theory, this is only altering their walk year which is an important year like i don't mean to say that doesn't matter also like garrett cole got paid after 2019 yeah and strasburg signed a big deal that year too if i'm remembering correctly so i don't think that pete

alonso is wrong that the the relationship between the league and players is at times quite antagonistic sometimes openly so and there's definitely an indifference to this aspect of quality control that i find totally crazy which we've talked about before like the fact that this aspect of the of the game is one where there is such extreme variation year to year and where the problem seems to be so difficult for the league to get a handle on, especially now that day because the fact that we cannot predict it is just ludicrous. This is an issue that you really don't see in other sports. But I don't think that this is where the league sort of comes together in an effort to suppress salaries. I do think that there are things that the league does that are akin to this, right? When LRD issues recommendations for arbitration to teams and then teams engage in

file and trial to try to get guys to accept a lower arbitration number, that is this, right? But I think that that we can substantiate in a way that is much more meaningful than the idea that there is sort of this year to year variation and that you are looking at who are the marquee players who are coming up on free agency and then let's calibrate the ball in such a way that it will suppress their value. I just don't know that I necessarily buy that in part because like, you know, when you look at a lot of adjusted stats, like we adjust for the offensive environment. So guys still look good relative to one another. Yes, exactly. Right. This presupposes a number of things that seem like stretches to me.

A, it presupposes competence on MLP's part when it comes to tinkering with the ball. I suppose it's possible that MLP has been sandbagging all along when it comes to its own control or knowledge over the ball because it's part of this vast conspiracy. And so when they say, yeah, we don't know what's happening here, they actually do. You know, how deep does the rabbit hole go here for Pete Alon think that teams that are going to be bidding on free agents would probably be able to adjust for the ball to some extent. And, you know, if every hitter is affected, then if you're still better relative to other hitters, then you. Guys who are just scraping a bunch of balls over the fence, they might be the big losers from this. And maybe the shortstop class or something is more represented by those guys. But it seems like a bit of a stretch. It's also difficult to anticipate a free agent class. A lot of times we've had like, oh, this is going to be the mega class where every good player is a free agent. And then half of them sign extensions. Right. They sign extensions, they decline, they get hurt. And then suddenly that winter rolls around and it's nothing special. So unless you can just change the production

of baseballs on a dime, then I don't know how feasible that would be. And I guess the elite free agents help set the top of the market and pull up everyone else's salary. So if you could do it, I guess it would be beneficial. But it just sort of seems like a stretch to me. I wonder how much of this is driven by Pete Alonso's own power outage relative to 2019. I mean, he's hitting well this year, better than last year, but his isolated powers are more in the two-something range than the three-something range. And he hit 53 homers in 2019, and maybe he is suddenly feeling like, hey, the balls don't go as far anymore.

I'm not hitting as many home runs. Arbitration is approaching. They are personally targeting me. So that might be part of this, too. But I think it does speak to two things, even if it is implausible, even if there is no truth to it and Alonso didn't offer any proof. But I think the fact that he is saying this, for one thing, reflects the fact that MLB has been really bad about messaging when it comes to the ball and just no one trusts the league to be open

and forthright about what is happening with the ball. And some may conclude that's because they're hiding something. Others may conclude it's because they don't know what they're doing. But either way, it's hard to take the league at its word. So this is sort of a symptom of how they have mishandled the whole ball saga over the past several seasons. And then it might also be a reflection of the tensions between the league and the players association now that a player either thinks the league is colluding in this way or is saying so to try to drum up some sentiment around the league. I don't know how much of this is PR and how much of it is what Alonso actually thinks, but the fact that players are coming out and saying that MLB is manipulating the ball to

suppress salaries, that gives you some sense maybe of what the player's collective mindset is heading into what will be a contentious CBA negotiation. So that's something to keep in mind too. Yeah. I do think that the more sort of important canary in the coal mine here doesn't have anything to do with the way that the ball is handled, although we don't think the way the ball is handled is good. It is what this suggests about the sort of simmering and underlying level of distrust and mistrust between the players in the league. And I think that this, you know, there's been this thread in the discussion around sticky stuff about how this is sort of fortuitous timing from the league's perspective, because you have an issue that is potentially very divisive among

players as they are getting ready to go into a CBA negotiation and one that allows the league to sort of paint the players in an unfavorable light publicly. And, you know, my mileage on that kind of varies. Like, I think that there was already tension between pitchers and hitters when it comes to the use of sticky stuff that has been ramping up. And just because it is now being made more public doesn't necessarily mean that this wasn't already sort of an issue of a contentious issue within clubhouses prior to getting more sort of public attention. And I think that the ways in which this gets addressed are actually pretty straightforward. The enforcement is going to be tricky, but in terms of the agreement around the existing

rule and then how it is enforced, I think that that's actually going to be relatively straightforward to sort out. But I do think that this is going to be a really unpleasant winter. And CBA negotiations can be unpleasant and still be productive. And as we've said before, the relationship between labor and ownership is inherently antagonistic, even if it is necessarily collaborative at various points. But I think that last year was really eye-opening for both sides in terms of where they stand and how far apart they are on some of these issues. And I think that it was a year that

brought a lot of players together in terms of their solidarity around some of these questions. And so it is unsurprising to me that they would have a skeptical and indeed conspiratorial view of the way the league conducts itself. Because even though I don't think that this is a way that they are trying to monkey with player salaries, I think that having a concern that these deals and processes in which their salaries are determined are not always executed in good faith is a completely reasonable one. So that sucks. Yeah. And the last thing that I wanted to mention about sticky stuff is related to something we talked about recently, which is the precedent of banning spitballs in 1920. And

we talked about the aftermath of that and how the small sample of pitchers who were allowed to keep throwing spitballs because they had already been throwing them went on to pitch quite well because they were the only ones who had that advantage available to them. And that helped some teams and hurt other teams, et cetera. So one other thing that I think is interesting is that the lead up to the banning of the spitballs, I think also mirrors what's happening today because that was not instant either. There's been a lot of criticism of, well, why didn't MLB take steps to stop this sooner? And some of that is justified. But as we have noted, circumstances have changed.

And we know about spin rates now, and we know how much that can enhance performance. And pitchers have started using more sophisticated substances, and everyone's worried about whiff rates and strikeout rates. So things have changed, and that is why the crackdown is coming now. And that was sort of similar to the evolution of the spitball and the lead up to the ban. And I was just reading a piece by Craig Wright in a page from Baseball's Past, which I cite often and will link to.

Subscribe at baseballspast.com. He wrote about how the roots of the spitball extended way back into the 19th century. And the reason why it wasn't banned until 1920 was that pitchers perfected the spitball. So they had already been throwing it, but they started throwing it better and spittier, basically. And that's sort of similar to what's happening now, where pitchers have been using something on their pitches since time immemorial, but now it seems like they have figured out how to use some things that have more of an effect and throw those pitches more often. So I'll just read a little bit from Craig here. The use of spit to get extra movement on a breaking ball is as old as the game itself.

There are solid stories of Tommy Bond and Chick Frazier throwing what could be termed a spitball back in the 1800s. Bobby Matthews was one of the game's first great pitchers, and his drop ball was actually a spitter. There's an account of Matthews using this drop pitch when he was 16 years old, which was way back in 1868. But apparently, no pitcher from the 1800s had such an electrifying spitball that they used it as their main pitch. Unlike the next generation of spitballers, the early practitioners of the pitch seemed to be going for a more mild form of the pitch that could be easier to control, and the detailed descriptions of their technique generally involved just moistening the tips of their fingers. And then there was the second coming of the spitball

with pitchers who were getting a huge break on the pitch. Rather than wetting their fingers, they focused on moistening a spot on the ball itself. Some were described as slobbering on the ball, and a few even licked the ball directly with their tongues. If only gifts had existed in those days. One spitballer of the new generation described his method as wetting a spot on the ball about the size of a half dollar. The big breaking pitch was tough to control, but for those who could master it, it was such a superb weapon that around 1904, we began to see for the first time pitchers who were using it as their dominant pitch. Craig goes on to note that there was a letter that was written in 1920 by umpire George Hildebrand, who had been a player himself and was evidently instrumental in the innovation of the second

generation spitball. And Craig writes, in 1902, while George was with the Providence Grays in the International League, he was warming up with a pitcher named Frank Fiddler Corden. He showed him his spitball, and in the old style, Corden was just wetting the tips of his fingers so he could better control the pitch. As an outfielder, Hildebrand simply enjoyed the novelty of the pitch and didn't care about control. He wanted to see how much break he could get on a pitch. He got really impressive results when he used more spit on the ball. He wrote, I held the ball the same as Corden, only wetting it a great deal more. And in an appropriate distinction from Corden's old style spitball or drop ball,

Hildebrand called this pitch a wet ball. So he introduced that to Corrigan, who I guess is technically the first spitballer or the first practitioner of this type of spitballer. And then it started to spread around. So Hildebrand was from San Francisco, and in 1902, he played for Sacramento for the extended season of a league there. And there was a pitcher there named Elmer Strickland who had hurt his arm and lost his fastball. And so he learned the new spitball from Hildebrand and he mastered the pitch and went on to success.

And then Jack Chesbrough faced Strickland and he said, hey, what's that guy throwing and how do I get me one of those? And so he started throwing it and it just went on and on from there. And Ed Walsh, Hall of Famer, who was one of the best pitchers of the era, became maybe the primary practitioner of the pitch. And suddenly it was everywhere.

And then hitters started to complain, which, you know, they hadn't really before because it was just moistening the tips of the fingers. No big deal. But as early as 1907, Craig Wright's hitters began complaining and said that the spitter was the toughest pitch to hit. And that just built and built from there. And you had concerns about scoring and not enough hits and runs and also just pitchers who were dominating and also concerns about the hygiene involved here, especially in the wake of that pandemic. I think the spitball was at least temporarily banned in some places in 1918 because of that, but it sounds absolutely disgusting. There's a quote here from the Hall of Famer Sam Crawford who said, I think Walsh's spitball disintegrated on the way to the plate and the catcher put it back together again. I swear when it passed by the plate, it was just the spit that went by.

it back together again. I swear when it passed by the plate, it was just the spit that went by. So yeah, it sounds gross, but you know, that's what happened. Like at first, maybe it's just a moderate advantage. Everyone's okay with it. And then someone figures out, hey, if you just put a whole lot of loogie on here, then it can be even more effective. And then that catches on. You just need one Johnny Applespit to introduce this to everyone in the league and then it requires action. So I think that's sort of similar to the progression that we're seeing now. Yeah. I mean, there's no new stuff, right? No, there really isn't.

There's no new stuff. We only get sequels these days. So, yeah. Now I'm just thinking about all the spit and licking a ball. At least it's not spit. At least it's spider tack and firm grip and pelican grip or whatever. It's not spit. Now I'm thinking about licking spider tack. I think you'd have to go to the emergency room. It'd be like the Christmas story. Yeah, it would be bad. Okay. Let's answer a few emails here. I've got, this one comes from Nick, Patreon supporter, who says, in Ken Rosenthal's recent article on the

state of the Yankees, he noted that the team leads the majors in outs on the bases. My question is, would this outs on the bases metric be a reasonable way to evaluate third base coaches? Could it be the foundation of a whirr-like metric for third base coaches? Does such a thing already exist? If so, what does that leaderboard look like? Phil Nevin, the Yankees' third base coach,

seems to be well-regarded, but he may not fare so well on such a leaderboard should the Yankees be scouting the minor leagues for the third base coach with the best outs on the bases number and retire Phil Nevin to special assistant. So a little context here. As everyone knows, the Yankees have underperformed offensively this season and everything indicates that they have hit the ball better than the results they have been rewarded with. And we could cite any number of metrics.

I know they've hit pretty well this week because they played the twins and that's always the magic elixir for the Yankees. But up until then, at least they were having trouble converting hard hit balls and base runners into runs. And as we speak here on Thursday, the Yankees have the biggest gap in the negative direction between their weighted on base average and their expected weighted on base average, 25 points. That's not great. That is underperformance. They have the worst offensive cluster luck of any team by a good margin. They lead the majors in grounding into double plays. They've done it 60 times already. So it could be a function of slow guys. They hit

a ton of homers and they hit the ball hard, but they don't run that well perhaps. So they're grounding into double plays. That's a problem. But also they just haven't performed with runners in scoring position, which is part of that issue with the double plays and everything. The average TOPS plus for a major league team this year with runners in scoring position is 108. Teams tend to hit about 8% better than their overall OPS when runners are in scoring position. The Yankees are dead last at 84. So they have been a good deal worse with runners in scoring position. And I guess the last stat that I will cite is the one that was referenced in the question. The Yankees, according to baseball reference, have made 29 outs on the bases. The next closest team is the Orioles and also the Cubs with 22 apiece.

And outs on the bases, as baseball reference defines it, that's like out advancing on a fly ball, out attempting to reach another base on a hit, doubled off on a line drive, or out attempting to advance on a wild pitch or pass ball. So it doesn't include pickoffs or caught stealings or forced plays. These are like toot plans, basically. So I don't know if they have missed first base or missed home plate, Brian Hayes or Bobby Witt Jr. style, but they have run into a lot of outs on the bases, and that has contributed to their offensive underperformance here.

So do we blame Phil Nevin for this? I don't think so. I mean, well, like you blame him a little, right? Sure. I know that the question is, how much do you blame him, Meg? Like that's the whole question. I appreciate that that is what I'm being asked. But I think that, I don't know, this is the sort of thing I'm reticent to weigh in on

without having watched a lot more Sens than I have. I'm just looking at the sprint speed leaderboard sorted by team. So here I'm looking at the Yankees. They don't have a lot of fast guys. So that's surely part of this. That's surely part of this, although I imagine that also informs the decisions that Nevin makes when he's trying to decide whether to send a guy or not or wave a guy on. But I don't know if they have a series of reckless base runners, if they're blowing through him putting up the stop sign and they're trying to go anyway i i wouldn't have a hard time believing that given sort of their general offensive woes that they might be the individual players might at times feel compelled to press where they might be better served to stop at um a base where they would be safe but they're like oh we just got a score you know i that i don't struggle to believe that that would be true but that strikes me as something that every guy probably bears a little piece of

absent me having watched every single yankees game and just saying like ah this is this is a result of one dude being particularly bad at at either paying attention or or nevin being overly aggressive in his sense but i think that when you combine a team that is not very fast generally with the offensive situation they have found themselves in, I don't know that I necessarily lay that at the feet of the third base coach. Yeah, right. I think it depends on the personnel and do they have a track record of being bad on the bases?

Do they suddenly get terrible or have they always been bad? It also, I mean, there are multiple base coaches on the team and Phil Nevin is the third base coach, but Reggie Willits is the first base coach. And I believe because he is a speedy guy, he is also the base running coach or at least the primary one on the Yankees. I think that's the case. So if you were to lay it at either of those coaches feed, I guess maybe Willits would be the better scapegoat. But I think if you studied over the long term somehow, would outs on the bases be correlated with the quality of the base coaches? Yeah, maybe. I guess so. But I doubt it's a one-to-one measure. And it probably isn't great to just be as simple as,

oh, lots of outs on the bases, bad third base coach or whatever. With all the information that is available to teams these days, you probably could come up with a third base coach war, but it would be much more complex than that. okay, where was the base runner and where were the fielders and how fast is the base runner and come up with an expected success rate for every hold or send decision. That would take a lot of work, I guess, but you could do that, come up with some framework, some model to spit that out for every team and that would probably be the way to go. So Russell Carlton has made the case before that a lot of third base coaches are too conservative and that there's a bias against sending someone and then having yourself look bad because he got thrown out and that teams should generally be more aggressive than they are. So I bet that's something that teams study, at least some teams. So as far as I know, no warlike metric for third base coaches exists, certainly no public one. But I wouldn't be shocked if teams had studied this and had talked to coaches on occasion and said, hey, we studied the numbers here and maybe you could stand to do this a little more often or a little less often.

So yeah, I think you could, in theory, come up with something like that. It would just be, you'd have to account for everything basically and not lay every out at the feet of the base coach. I also think that we tend to undervalue really good plays leading to outs. Not undervalue them, but we don't account for them sufficiently. Sometimes a guy just makes a really good freaking throw, and you're like, oh, well, you being sent there made sense. You're reasonably fast, and that was far away, but he just nailed you. That does happen.

I don't say that to excuse the circumstance they find themselves in. I doubt strongly that if we went back and watched every single relevant you know, relevant play from the Yankee season, that our takeaway would be, wow, they just really ran into guys hitting their like 90th percentile projection for defense on any given night. Like, I doubt that that would be our understanding of it. I'm sure there are some bad sense and I'm sure that there's some inexpert base running. And, you know, we've seen Ruben at a door run into catchers at home while in a Yankees uniform. So they're definitely, I bring that one up not because it was like, it's the only at home like bait running play I remember seeing from the Yankees this year because he bowled over a catcher in a way that was very scary for both of them. So that's why it stuck in my mind. But, you know, I'm sure that it would be a mix of those things.

mind. But I'm sure that it would be a mix of those things. But I think that in much the same way that we sometimes forget that really good hitters face really good pitchers. Sometimes a guy just gets got because the other guy playing against him is really talented. And that happens occasionally too. So I bring it up not because I imagine it makes Yankees fans feel better, but because it's good to acknowledge the skill on the other side of the ball too. So there you go. Either systematically or just mentally on the fly, which is difficult. You have to try to calculate some kind of break-even rate for whether you think it makes sense. How often will he make it?

How often will he get thrown out? I think that it justifies the risk, and so I will send him. And sometimes even if it was a good decision, it doesn't work out in any individual case. That's the whole process versus results argument. So, all right. Question from Matthew. I was listening to episode 1703 and was interested in your conversation about outfield positioning is because the position a player is fielding does not change. Someone is playing left field no matter where they are in left. Compare that with cricket, where the position a person is playing depends to a greater degree on where they are standing. Below is a chart of cricket positions I am including, mostly so you can laugh at the names of the positions. I will link to that on the show page so you can all laugh along. But notice that there are 35 fielding positions for 11 players. No player is a silly mid-off in the way that Reese Hoskins is a first baseman.

Rather, a person will be positioned that silly mid-off for a few pitches before moving somewhere else based on a number of factors. I'm not sure why this developed, but I can say that shifting defensive positioning is much more of an integral part of the game in cricket. So my guess is naming positions after places a player might stand made more sense than the baseball way, naming positions after the general area a particular player always stands. Now that we are in the age of the shift, I think we should adopt the cricket style of position naming. In other words, we should stop calling someone a center fielder and say they are positioned deep straight away or short left center, etc. If we had more names for outfield positions, maybe we would notice more when they moved. This would have the added benefit of

changing the way we score games to more accurately reflect the play. At the moment, knowing something was a 6-3 put out does not tell you much about where the ball went. What do you think? And if you agree, what silly names should we adopt to differentiate positions? I think we should just steal the cricket ones because they came from the top. Yeah, geez. But I think this is a conversation that came up a few years ago. I remember writing about it way back when, when the shift was really taking off and we were seeing players play totally out of their traditional positions. And I talked to some official scorers, I think, about should we change how this is scored? Is this player playing a different position now, technically? And the convention was just, no, it's the same position. They're just moving around. And we won't really record that in any way in a box score, at least.

And of course, StatCast quantifies that in some way under the hood, but doesn't really spit out those stats. So should we do this? Could we do this? I guess we could do it. I guess we could do it i guess we could do it do i want us to do it hmm i mean i think that uh uh i don't know it's weird the part of it that i am struggling with sort of in the question as it's initially posed which is that it isn't as applicable for every position, defensive position on the field equally, right? Like we know where the catcher is and, uh, yeah. And, and the, the sort of change in depth away from the bag for a first baseman, for example, is different than it is for other positions, right? There's been recent writing on this as well, which is what I think inspired our initial conversation on it.

So I am a little, I'm getting gummed up on the idea that we would have some positions where you are sufficiently anchored to be called a thing, right? You are a catcher, right? Which is also kind of a funny position because it's am i gonna be right about this apart from pitcher it's the only one that describes the action rather than the place you are i guess that's true and it's the only one where you can't move you have to be in the catcher's box before the pitch is thrown which uh all of you who send us emails from time to time saying why doesn't the team because you can't catch? It's in the rules. Because you can't do it.

Right. That's why. It's because it's in the rules. That's why you can't do it. No, I wonder if it's just that I should talk less about having read the rule book because then they're like, Meg will know. Yeah. I'm not some rules expert. I just read it a lot because I'm strange.

But so I'm getting kind of hung up on the fact that there would be some positions where you could do this and others where you couldn't because they don't move around as much. But maybe the fact that the pitcher and the catcher are the ones where you're describing the action and there's more sort of variability and flexibility for the others would allow for a naming scheme that made good sense. And perhaps I'm being small minded. Yeah, well, this would be obviously a heavier lift for official scores to figure out where someone was on every play or every pitch. Like, yeah, I'm just trying to think about how you would score a game. How would you score a game? I mean, players are moving between pitches

based on the count. So analytically, there would be some value to knowing where everyone was on the field at a particular time with greater precision. I mean, that stuff is sort of tracked already via StatCaster, via video stringers, but it's hard for the public to look up. But yeah, I shudder to think of how scoring a game would work and not just the need to keep updating it, but also like how do you determine if he's this position or that position or their lines on the field? I don't know how they handle this in cricket to decide if someone at that moment is mid wicket or deep square leg or silly mid on or deep mid wicket. I just wanted to read some cricket positions. Wait, how can you be deep mid wicket? Aren't you either mid wicket or deep mid-wicket. I just wanted to read some cricket positions. Wait, how can you be deep mid-wicket? Aren't you either mid-wicket or deep wicket? Oh, no.

Yeah. Well, you might be gully or sweeper, perhaps. Fantastic. There are other good ones where that came from. But yeah, it would be a hassle and it wouldn't be consistent with the hundreds of years of box scores that we have, which, you know, I guess it's not that big a deal because we've added information to box scores as we've gone on. But the standard box score doesn't have a provision for that. So I don't know that I would use this all that much. Esther, just to have the specificity of sort of setting the scene, if we're not looking at the outfield, you could say, oh, he's not in left field or the left fielder is playing whatever the center fielder. I mean, you hear, you know, guys are shading to the left or right or playing

straight away or shallow or deep. And maybe that is sufficient as opposed to codifying it as, you know, oh, he's not a left fielder. He's a short left center fielder right now. Yeah. I feel like we have the existing sort of vocabulary to describe positioning on the field. And I think that as the shift has become more prevalent, broadcasters are more and more aware of where guys are on the field at any given time and feel the need to specify so that folks watching at home, maybe if for whatever reason they don't have a graphic to show at that moment can be cognizant of who different guys are. So I feel like we have the tools necessary to address this already. I do like funny words,

though. So that is sort of holding me back. Maybe we could rename one position. What one would you rather, what would you want to rename? Also, I'm fine with us coming up with more nicknames for particular positions because from an editorial perspective, it makes for a more interesting copy because then you're not repeating yourself quite so often. And, you know, I find the keystone to be a boring way to describe a thing. Like it thing. It sounds like a beer. I don't know. It's just not for me. So I'm in favor of us coming up with additional nicknames for the bases themselves and thus for the people playing them. Because then we get more, we get sort of spicier words.

We get spicier copy. your copy. But I think that the point of both scorekeeping and broadcasting is to help people understand what's going on and what the action on the field looked like. And yes, the shift does pose some challenges to that from a scorekeeping perspective, but the vocabulary we have to describe where guys play most of the time, I think is clarifying more often than it is confusing. And so a wholesale switch like this muddies the picture so that you're less likely to get an accurate mental representation. Like if you're listening to baseball on the radio, then you would be if we simply described the action on the field using the existing position names that we had, which I think is what we really want, right?

We want to be able to describe to someone what happened. And if we get wickets involved, that's just out the window, mid, deep, or otherwise. What does it describe? I don't want to know. It doesn't matter. I mean, it matters to a lot of people. It just doesn't matter to me in this particular moment. So if we were going to do it, I guess I would want it for third base. Maybe there's more room to roam in the outfield and we're probably least aware of where the outfielders are positioned typically. But with third basemen, you could be playing in, you could be playing on the line, you could basically be playing the traditional shortstop spot. There are third basemen who basically switch over in the shift to play second or they're in right field or something. So there's a lot of variability at third base.

So I think we have some terms for that and some shorthand for that already, but that might be the most helpful just because it can vary so widely. Yeah. I think that there could be improved specificity there um that would account for more of the uh situations in which they find themselves so yeah i think that's a good answer but i have i'd never thought about how so many of the all of the positions except for pitcher and catcher describing where they are not what they're doing yeah no it's true i mean i guess they're they're fielding right fielder is fielding, but it's not very specific. No, it's not. Whereas you're catching it. You're pitching it. You're doing,

I mean, we have other words to describe what they do, but those are the ones that really get to it, don't they? Yeah. Well, while we're on the subject of whether baseball could borrow from international sports, here's one that kind of blew my mind, and I wondered whether this was a prank at first, but it isn't. Matthew, Patreon supporter, says, I'd like to draw your attention to the world of Australian rules football, specifically to a unique rule they have for player acquisition called the father-son rule. The gist is that if someone plays 100 games at the top level for a club,

then that team can call dibs on drafting any of that person's children. Yeah. To do so, the team sacrifices their second round draft pick. If there are multiple sons, quote unquote, eligible that year, they give up their third round pick and so on. Because teams also have professional women's sides, there is an equivalent father-daughter rule.

Once it's relevant, it will likely expand to mother-son-daughter too. If an eligible amateur's parent met the minimum for multiple teams, the player can pick which team calls dibs on them. And if the player doesn't want to be picked by their parent's team, they can decline to have dibs called on them. Do you think baseball would be better off if they established a similar rule? No. It could allow for young top prospects who want to follow in a parent's footsteps the

chance to do so, but by allowing players to opt out of that commitment, it wouldn't force it. So if Kevin Biggio really wanted to be an Astro, he could be. This is complicated by the absence of an international draft. Like if Vladito had really wanted to be an Angel or National, he probably could have been. So maybe this would only apply to domestic amateurs and i couldn't believe this was real this reminded me of an email that sam and i answered years ago

about when clayton kershaw had a son yeah someone asked like i remember that and i was like that's a creepy question it was a creepy question like yeah like what would you bid for the baseball rights to click for Shah's infant son right now? No, no, do it. If that player does decide to play that sport, then the team that employed their parent gets a better chance to get them if they want to be gotten and to follow in that parent's footsteps. So I see aspects of this that could be kind of a cool tradition, but it's also sort of icky. I think the best way to ensure that a player gets to play for the club that his father did if he wants is to just get rid of the draft altogether and then they can bid for that guy's services. Yes. I think that we are not far enough on the galaxy brain chain in this question. Why settle for the ability to opt out when you could just opt everyone out of the draft and then people can opt into whatever contract they want to.

That's what I have to say about that. Let's not over-determine the futures of babies. Babies have enough pressure on them already. They got to learn how to walk. Then they got to learn how to talk. I guess they do the one- Play Australian rules football. Right. I love the need to clarify.

They're not obligated to play the sport. It's like, yeah, you don't make a baby sign an employment contract. It's a baby. Yeah. I think that it is. I mean, like, I'm glad that they have an opt out because as much as I would like to, I don't think that we should assume that everyone has a healthier, productive relationship with their parent.

And you might want to be very far away from wherever your father or mother or whomever played the game. Like that might not be great for you at all. But I think that if what we're wanting is for people to be able to carry on traditions that are meaningful to them, and it works from a club perspective, that the way to do it is to just let everybody, you know, be a free agent right away. And then they can sign them to a development deal that that makes sense for them. So, you know, go bigger

galaxy brain is my thought on this and and don't overdetermine the lives of babies. I think that's a good take. Yeah, I'm for baby freedom. Lightning round here. Here's another sort of icky one, but might have real implications this season. Colby says, how will vaccination affect trade values this season? If you're right on the threshold

for 85% vaccinated, is there a value in moving an unvaccinated bench bat for a slightly less talented but vaccinated bench bat, assuming salaries are comparable? Why will the A's be the team to figure out how to work this

to their advantage? There's something to it. Yeah. I mean, a lot of general managers have talked about this and managers have put it in terms of competitive advantage, which is weird because it's like a public health thing. But also- But it's being put to them in terms of competitive advantage right so like i i will give them a tiny bit of grace when it comes to that because the league is actively trying to incentivize right players well and tier one people more broadly i guess we should say that like the biggest population of those folks is players but but it isn't exclusively players.

I actually don't know if it is the biggest, but it is certainly the most prominent. It's probably the biggest though, right? From a people perspective. Anyway. I think so. So it is being put to them in terms of competitive advantage to try to incentivize folks who are hesitant to get the vaccine to get the vaccine. Oh, boy. I don't know how this will factor partly because my sense, and you tell me if this sense is wrong, because it very well may be, I get the sense that teams at this point aren't clearing the

vaccine threshold by a little bit, right? They're either under by a significant amount or they're over by a meaningful amount. But my sense of that might be wrong. And so the reason that that is relevant here is that I would imagine that there is more wiggle room than you might anticipate there being. I also think I saw, at least in the case of the Mariners, and I don't know if this is true across the league, that my sense is that the vaccine rate among minor leaguers is higher than it is among major leaguers maybe because you can clear protocols to join the big league team in the event of a call-up more quickly if you're vaccinated. I don't know if that remains true from a numbers perspective. This is why i wish we had a little more information

although i understand why we don't have more information yeah and i wonder what teams know and opposing teams right that's a really good point teams know about their own players but are they allowed to know about other teams players do the players have to consent like presumably there's some sort of hippa thing there there, right, where I would think, you know, maybe this stuff just passes through back channels and through the grapevine anyway in practice. But, you know, technically, I guess you're not necessarily supposed to know. So that could enter into it. But, you know, it would be a consideration, I guess, if you knew. Would it be a huge consideration?

Probably not. Probably not. Consideration, I guess, if you knew, would it be a huge consideration? Probably not. But especially if you're acquiring a player who's under team control just for a couple months, really, by the time you get him, then if there's a greater possibility that he's going to be rendered unavailable for those months, then yeah, you take that into account. I think it's something that would cross your mind probably. And I don't know whether that would make players more willing to get the vaccine if they want to get traded or vice versa if they don't want to get traded. Yeah, geez. Yeah. Yeah. I guess the place where it becomes meaningful is if are barely over 75 percent and then you trade a vaccinated player for an unvaccinated player and all of a sudden you're presumably back in a more restrictive mode of having to play then i assume that it would matter more we're at what i think

the last the last accounting we had was that 22 teams had cleared or were about to clear the 75% threshold for Tier 1 employees. So they either had 75% of their guys two weeks out from their second dose, or they were in that two-week sort of in-between period, but we're going to clear. So I also wonder if there are enough remaining unvaccinated guys on the 25-man rosters for it to be possible to trade and dip below. I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, I don't know either. Well, here's one last one on another gamesmanship wrinkle of the strange circumstances we find

ourselves in. Colin says, in the past week, I guess this was the previous week, Cleveland has postponed four games to seven-inning doubleheaders under questionable circumstances. On Saturday, they allegedly couldn't get the tarp on the field after playing through rain and wind, and today, it's not great in Cleveland, but it's certainly playable. There were many confused

slash angry looking fans downtown in light drizzle today. Is this just a coincidence, or does the state of Cleveland's rotation, Bieber and Savali and Pray for Rain, create a moral hazard with regard to the relative ease of setting up seven inning double headers? Put another way, should there be league oversight on postponing games in 2021? And is there an opportunity for gaming seven inning games the team is potentially taking advantage of? So you're going to have to tell me more about the procedure for calling a rain delay.

I think it's harder to game this than people really appreciate, right? Like if you said we're calling, sometimes games will get delayed by whether that you anticipate coming in by the time the game starts but if like somebody looks at the radar and is like it's going to be 75 and sunny all day then they can't just do whatever they want right like i think that there is some amount of feedback that goes on between the grounds crew the home team the umpires i don't think that the league necessarily gets involved in those conversations, but

I also think that if a team were trying to goof this, that it would get reported to the league office in pretty short order, right? Am I being naive and thinking that this is harder to do than I might expect? I would hope so. I think the home team and the home team's manager has the say before the start of the game on whether or not to delay the start. Right. I just said I read the rule book and then here I am not knowing the rules hoisted by my own pitch. I think before the start of the second game in a doubleheader, the umpire in chief of the first game has sold discretion over delaying the start of the second game. So for regular season games, at least it seems like the home team can decide

before the game starts, at least if it's the first game in a doubleheader or the only game that day. And then as soon as the batting order is handed in by the home team, then the umpire is in charge and only the umpire can call for a delay or a suspension due to weather conditions. So, yeah, I think and you've been sort of speed reading the rulebook here. And that seems to confirm that the home team does have some power there before the game begins. So in theory, I guess you could. I guess you could, although if it is clear skies and sunny and you're doing this multiple times, then one would hope that people would catch on. Your own players probably wouldn't be thrilled about this, I would guess. Right.

And your fans, your alienating fans who were planning to come to the game or bought tickets or maybe even showed up only for it to be canceled unless you did it far in advance. So there are a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to do it. Right. And even those double headers are only seven innings. I don't know that I can see that you necessarily want to play a bunch of those. So I think the incentives here are generally aligned away from shenanigans. There's always going to be a case where you want some shenanigans there's there's always going to be in a case where you want some shenanigans but i think that the ability to do it willy-nilly without any repercussions are actually probably pretty limited because as you said the the pre-game call is the home teams but after that they leave it in the hands of the umpire specifically so that you can't goof around and get a game to you know to official to an official game length and then say, oh, well, the weather, you know, like they do it on purpose so that teams can't, you know. Yeah, there are definitely times when teams will take their time, you know, try to run out the clock effectively, so to speak. But yeah, just to go for seven inning doubleheaders.

And I guess players might appreciate having more off days, but then also it's tough to play 14 innings in a day and you're costing your players some playing time and maybe some counting stats taking away a couple innings there. So and concession sales and such. So yeah, TV ratings. I think there are some incentives set up not to do this, but would I be shocked if it happened from time to time? No, I'm sure there are plenty of precedents in baseball history for this sort of gamesmanship. And considering what we were talking about at the beginning of this episode, we should probably assume that if there is a loophole or some edge that can be exploited, someone somewhere is thinking about doing it or actually doing it.

Yeah, I think that we should just be skeptical. Be skeptical sorts, but also not paranoid sorts. It's a really tricky line to tread. Yeah, the pedulanto is on one side of it. The head of that needle is very – eye of the needle. Eye of the needle is very narrow, so it's a hard one to thread. All right. Well, we can end there.

All right. I'm going to leave you with one more question here, which I had already answered via email because it's kind of instructive, kind of a cautionary tale. This one comes from Steven in L.A., who wrote to us on June 2nd and said, As of writing this, John Gant, that's the Cardinals pitcher John Gant, and said, as of writing this, John Gant, that's the Cardinals pitcher John Gant, has pitched 50 and two-thirds innings to the tune of a 1.6 ERA and 2.13 runs allowed per nine innings. He just finished wrapping up six scoreless against the Dodgers last night.

He's also got a whip of 1.52, a FIP of 3.98, an XFIP of 5.05, and an expected ERA of 5.11, while being the Cardinals' most valuable starter by baseball reference war. I understand that we're still firmly in small sample size territory, but I'm wondering if there's any other explanation for his wonky stat line other than luck. The Cards have a great defense working behind him, but he's got the best ERA in their rotation and it isn't particularly close. Is there something else potentially going on with the way he approaches batters with men on base versus bases empty?

Or something about his particular pitching style that lines up with the card's defense? This is probably just small sample size wonkiness, but his results are just so incongruent with his peripherals, it still feels notable. And I wrote back the same day, you'll have to take my word for that, and I said, right around this point of the season in 2012, I wrote an article about Derek Lowe, who through 11 starts had outpitched his peripherals and succeeded despite a low strikeout rate.

I pointed out some potential for regression, but was still semi-optimistic that he could keep it up. Over his next 10 starts, he had an 8.77 ERA and lost his spot in the rotation. I learned my lesson. I'm not saying Gant's going to collapse like that, but he has the second lowest strikeout minus walk rate among pitchers who've thrown at least 40 innings. No one else in the bottom 10 has an ERA below 4. He hasn't really allowed weak contact, his velocity has declined, and the Cardinals haven't even really had an elite defense this season overall, their ninth in defensive runs saved in defensive efficiency. His high strand

rate and low home run per fly ball rate have really been bailing him out, and neither one was in the same neighborhood prior to this year. So yes, it would be fun if he could keep this up, but it looks like a case for the small sample size song. And after that exchange on June 6th against next start against Cincinnati, he went four innings, gave up seven runs all earned, three walks, two strikeouts, two home runs, and a hit by pitch. That inflated his ERA by more than a run to 2.63, which is still sterling, obviously, but is probably going to keep climbing. And I mentioned that not to pat myself on the back too hard, because I think that kind of regression was pretty obvious. But just to note that even I have fallen for this before, I mentioned the Derek Lowe piece. It's really easy to talk yourself into someone outpitching their peripherals. Maybe he's doing something special.

Maybe he has broken baseball. And it's just tough to beat the system. There are, of course, certain pitchers who allow weak contact and low batting averages on balls in play year after year, but they're really the exceptions to the rule. And until you get a large sample size of them consistently doing that, it's probably best not to buy into it. You can just really want it to be true and kind of talk yourself into it and find some sort of statistical justification, but in the end,

it's usually quite tough to sustain. So it's been sort of tough times for the Cardinals lately, great times for the Brewers, who were my preseason pick to win that division, and the big three that they have of Woodruff, Burns, and Peralta. Not seeing an awful lot of regression in store there, as long as they can stay healthy. Those guys are good. That's one of the best big threes that we've seen in some time. 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 amelia newberg dan o'laughlin christopher mitchell eric wolf and mary barnes 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 fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with one more episode before the end of this week. Talk to you then.

Tell me What should I really try to believe? Conspiracy Yeah, tell me I will try to believe conspiracy. Yeah, tell me. And I will try to believe your conspiracy. Conspiracy.