Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1804: Trees of the Trade

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about one of Ben’s most laborious baseball-writing experiences, answer listener emails about playing MLB games at minor league affiliates’ parks, how scouting reports affect the times-through-the-order penalty, and what they would do if they discovered that Roberto Clemente had been credited with one hit too many, share a Stat […]

Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu

Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Cynhyrchu'r Cynhyrchu Take a walk to the trees, so I can talk. I'm dreaming in a dream, in a dream. Hello and welcome to episode 1804 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer.

Ben, how are you? I'm okay. How's Fangraphs redesign day going? The redesign we talked about last time is now live. It's here. I think generally pretty well. I think that we have heard some feedback about things that people like and things that people don't.

Some of that feedback we will act on. Others of it we will say, allow the change to wash over you and see how you feel. But I don't know, pictures are good. I hope that this strikes the right balance between inviting new folks who are less familiar with the site to come to the landing page and be like, I want to look at that piece that looks nifty and people who have been long-time site users being able to find what they're used to. So I don't know.

I think it's good. Change is inevitable and sometimes productive. Sometimes it comes with big pictures. So there you go. Yep. Everyone, check it out. Hope you like it. And we have a guest a little later in this episode.

We're going to be talking to Aidan Gruber, who designed a new site called MLBTradeTrees.com. And this is something that I've been hoping someone would make for years because maybe the most traumatic memory of my baseball writing career is an article I did for Grantland back in 2014 called MLB Transaction Trees. And the idea was just to look for the longest chains of transactions. So someone gets dealt, other people get dealt back to that team, those people get dealt to other teams, and it goes on and on and on through the years. And I tried to trace the longest trade tree for every franchise at that time, which was a good idea, I think. It was a fun topic and it was an absolute nightmare to do because I didn't automate this in any way. I did it by hand. in any way. I did it by hand. So I had to go through basically everyone who was, I don't know,

on a 40-man roster at the time for each team, I think, and then figure out how they had gotten to that team and how far back the tree went. And it just, it took forever. And someone helped me with the graphics and it turned out okay. I think people enjoyed it. And as I recall, it started a lot of discussions and people shared it a lot. But it was just the worst research process ever. It took forever. And it was impossible to do perfectly, too. There were just too many ways to miss something or screw something up. So I think we had to update it once or twice after publication. Sure. Just because people pointed out, Oh, you missed this one or this one went a little bit further back than that or whatever it was. So it was just a horror for me and fun for everyone else.

And in the year since occasionally, periodically someone will say, could you update the trade trees article and i say no no i cannot until hopefully someday someone will actually do this in an automated way and aiden has done that and so he has built a site called mlb tradetrees.com where you can look at every trade tree in theory throughout history and he has all the data he has all the stats you can look at every trade tree in theory throughout history. And he has all the data. He has all the stats. You can look at war.

You can look at the graphics and see how far the trees go back in time. You can look at the longest trees. You can look at the biggest mismatches and lopsided war exchanges. You can go by team. You can go by player. It's just a ton of fun. And he is continually refining it and indulging me when i ask him to add even more things to it so we're gonna talk to him shortly about why he did

it and how he did it but i think that our audience would enjoy this site and hopefully hearing from as well what other things are like this what What are other things that we, because this site is super fun and I know that it will probably change and improve a lot. It's already changed and improved a lot since he went live with it. So it will become even closer to the frictionless trade world that you would like to see.

That sounds like I'm talking about crypto and I'm really not. But there are other things like this where you're like, why is it hard to look that up? And like, you know what my thing is? Can I tell you my thing? Sure. Days toward rookie eligibility. Why are we calculating that by hand still? Why is it that just sitting somewhere? And you might be listening to this and say, hey, Meg, don't you like help to run a baseball site that does stat stuff? and i would say you know touche like maybe we should figure that out but it's it's weird that we

have to do that by hand it's weird that we can't just look at someone's page and know here are the roster days that count toward whether or not they're an eligible rookie i'm not just saying this because i'm someone who has to help edit prospect lists and sometimes it gets real close and then we feel nervous but yeah i'm'm not saying it for that reason either. There's always that confusion going into a season. Is this guy rookie eligible? Whenever someone makes me make picks for rookie of the year. I always have to figure out.

Is that guy still rookie eligible? And Fangraphs and other sites will have like a rookie filter. But it's based on playing time. Not necessarily your days on the roster which is another way that you can lose rookie eligibility correct it is it is based on the the innings pitched in the at bats thresholds rather than days and of course this recently changed right where september days count now so anyway yeah i don't know if days remaining in rookie eligibility.com would be quite probably not but you know i'm useful for us right i'm i'm self-identifying as a person who would

find that useful so you know um this is this is more fun we wouldn't talk to the person who designed that website for a half hour we, we'd run out of questions very rapidly. But I'm just saying if anyone's out there and wants another coding project, go with God in a swift wind, I say. Yeah, we're pretty spoiled, I think, when it comes to ease of accessing information and the depth of that information. Wildly so. Wildly so. I mean, more so than any other sport, more so than almost any other field of human endeavor. other sport more so than almost any other field of human endeavor. Baseball has a lot of great stats. And sometimes someone in another sport will be writing an article. I was corresponding with a cricket writer recently who was working on a piece and he was asking me for some baseball

data and nothing equivalent was available for cricket. And I felt sorry for him. And just because of baseball reference and baseball perspectives Baseball Perspectives and Fangraphs and all of the wonderful work that RetroSheet does, we just have just this cornucopia. I mean, we are totally spoiled, but there are a few things here and there. I guess for me it would be injury information, which I discussed recently on the show. It's just hard to find injury information for past players but even for current players and your day-to-day injuries are tough to find or just total time on the il or whatever i mean there are some places to do that but generally only for very recent years so i'd like more

specificity and more ease of injury analysis would probably be at the top of my list. Yeah, yeah. See, like this is what we should use the lockout for is just continuing to improve our analysis of a baseball that doesn't necessarily guarantee itself come April. Yes. that I had planned for the previous episode, but we got sidetracked with important matters such as whether bat boys and bat girls are subject to child labor laws and whether live animals are eligible for the Mascot Hall of Fame. So when those pressing issues come up, I mean, that takes precedence

and you just have to pivot, right? And you say, I'll save this for the next time because this is something that we absolutely have to deal with immediately. That was intended to be an email show. It didn't end up being one. I did have a couple of quick emails and a stat blast. So maybe we can cover that here. Patreon supporter sent us a timely question, and he noted that in episode 1801, we discussed the decision to abandon the Tampa Bay slash Montreal split city split season plan.

And we mentioned that Rays owner Stu Sternberg said that sister city plans will be in the future for all sports. We disagreed with him, or at least we hoped that he's wrong, I think. Craig Goldstein wrote a nice article about that this week for Baseball Prospectus, the idea that partial seasons are going to be the wave of the future. Max says, it leads me to think about a fun idea. What if teams played one to two homestands a year at their minor league affiliates? Maybe not all of them, but some. It would give fans of those potentially smaller markets to see the place where all of their local players graduate from and potentially expand the fan base to their minor league markets. I live in Durham, North Carolina, where the Bulls are their own brand and play high level ball,

but it would be fun to see the Rays once a year and get a glimpse of the past talent. I would love to hear your thoughts. And I think this is something that came up in the wake of the Field of Dreams game where everyone was thinking, where are they going to go next? What kind of weird little sideshow and off the beaten path ballpark can they choose to play a Major League Baseball game? So Max is suggesting just show your minor league affiliates a little love and play there every now and then. I think that's a great idea. I think that with the realignment of the minors, the sort of distance gap between the big league club and their highest affiliate has shrunk in a lot of cases. So what I'm about to say might not be quite as

impactful as it would have been a couple of years ago. But I think the idea of showcasing the big league club in a ballpark that, you know, might generally cater to a fan base that doesn't have the opportunity to go to the big league club as often is a really cool idea. I like to bring the team through and say like, hey, you're, you know, you're supporting the franchise a lot of the time. You're doing it in a slightly different way given what baseball you see. But like you're, you know, you might be fans of this team. I know that it kind of depends where

you are. And, you know, if you're, I don't know, if you're a person who goes to like Arkansas travelers games, you may or may not be a Mariners fan, right? Cause they're quite far flung, but I think that that's a really cool idea to like take the big league club through and and for a lot of the folks there they might have seen those players at a very different point in their careers and then they get to see them again like that would be really rad yeah that would be kind of nice a homecoming old home week I guess obviously there would be some cost to attendance and concessions and all of that right because you'll have lower Capacity and maybe It'll be tougher to broadcast Those games so

There are logistical issues there And maybe some financial Issues there that teams would not be thrilled About and then there's the quality Of the facilities now that Maybe should not be as big an issue After the minor league Reorganization or downsizing or whatever we're calling it.

One of the stated ostensible reasons for that was that they wanted to up the quality of some of those facilities and maybe get rid of some of the parks that were not quite up to code. So in theory, all of the minor league parks should be able to host a ballpark. But, you know, they're not going to be quite major league quality in terms of lighting and all of that especially like tv broadcast lighting i imagine that they might have to upgrade that if they were going to broadcast the game so you know there are issues there and then you're probably not going to have stack cast necessarily there are some minor league parks that have full systems installed. Not everyone, maybe.

I mean, they all have something, but maybe they don't all have stat cast at that point. So you might lose a little detailed data, which would be unfortunate for people like us, I suppose, and probably a headache for database people. But beyond that, I think it would be fun. Base people but beyond that I think it would be fun I mean like from a utilitarian Perspective I guess there might be Fewer people able to go to the game And there are

Teams that own their minor league affiliates And teams that don't And so maybe the former Would be more motivated to do this Because like what's the point Of cultivating a local Following for your affiliate if you might just change affiliates the next year so if you know that you're going to be there for a while

and you want to build up some goodwill and maybe choose the minor league team's attendance then i guess that would be a decent way to do it but you know they're not all the durham bulls obviously like the the durham bulls that's one possibility that was mentioned as a successor to the Field of Dreams game because, hey, it's another 80s Costner movie associated setting. But I don't think that they would all obviously have that history or story that goes with them. Right. Yeah. I think that the quality, the sort of aesthetic quality of the ballpark is probably going to be variable, both in terms its broadcast capability and then also like i mean like that durham ballpark is just gorgeous right so so pretty yeah when the when the jays played in buffalo i think that they had to upgrade the lighting facilities right to make it up to snuff for major leaguers so yeah so there are you know there is some expense that could potentially be incurred

here that would make it you know less appealing for for some but i think it would be neat i think it would be nifty like if the mariners play in tacoma that's probably not as compelling because it's like his home is just down i-5 i mean traffic is bad but it it isn't that bad but you know for some for some teams whose affiliates are a little further flung, at least their AAA parks, I think it would be cool. It would only be a couple of games. We can do without StatCast for a couple of games. We have a couple of games every year where the StatCast goes wonky anyway because something

funky happens with the array. So I think it's survivable. We all could deal with every team playing one game a year in a different ballpark. It'd be fine. other, I don't know, natural landmarks or recognizable places in the country or the world where it would be cool to play or just playing, I don't know, like some other sports like hockey, playing outdoor games or whatever. I mean, I guess that's not quite as special for baseball where you play outdoor games all the time, but there are some special settings that would be even further from the norm than just playing in a dinkier ballpark

in a smaller city, essentially. So, you know, maybe it's not the most creative solution, but it would build some goodwill throughout your organization, potentially. Right. And build it without having to build something new. I mean, like that part is appealing. I think that we were all like, we're, you know, we're not going to be taking over America's cornfields everywhere. And I think that we talked about other places that teams could play, but having some existing baseball infrastructure,

even if it requires a couple of upgrades, seems like a more sort of cost efficient way to manage this process. And you still get to go to a place where you know people want to play and like if if teams are really worried about the the cost thing from a ticket perspective and like attendance like you have mechanisms by which you can say like no we're going to cap this at whatever it just is it requires a lot of work so right and i guess fans of some minor league teams are not necessarily big fans of the parent club. Right. Especially if the affiliations have changed recently.

But for sure, we're still not going to turn down a chance to see big leaguers playing in the local park. So I think it would be well attended or as well attended as you could have a game be when you might have only a few thousand fans able to fit into the stadium. Yeah, agreed. All right. And another question from Dan, Patreon supporter, and he's talking about the familiarity effect or the times-to-the-order effect. And he says, When I've heard the familiarity effect discussed, I've imagined it as batter X basically thinking,

I faced that slider five times in recent memory, so now I can visualize it and therefore better hit it. Okay, great, that makes sense. But is it conceivable that it's actually a battery side issue instead? Pitchers have an attack plan for every hitter, but they presumably can't roll out the same sequence each at bat. If batter X knows it's high and in, then away away away, he's broken the code. So again, presumably, the battery has plan A, plan B, plan C, etc. for each batter, with each plan being less and less optimized for batter X, so by the third time through, they're running out the third best sequence. Maybe instead of familiarity reflecting a heightened level of comfort on the part of

batters, it reflects a suboptimal attack plan on the part of the battery. Note, if I'm simply expressing the familiarity effect as it is commonly understood, please refrain from humiliating me on the air. aspect of it that I hadn't really considered or hadn't dwelled on before because I do generally think of it as just getting to see the pitcher and see the pitches. So you are familiar with the release point and the way the arm action works and where you pick up the ball in the delivery and you're familiar with the speed and with the movement of the actual offerings. I mean, that's what I tend to think of more often. But Dan is right here that there are scouting reports and maybe part of it is that you might have a great way to get a guy out once, but it only works once because you have tried it already

and it will not work as well the second time. So I hadn't really thought of this before, but could be a contributing cause, I suppose. Sure. I think so. I mean, I promise I'll say something more substantive than this. I think it's time for some game theory, right? This is definitely a consideration. This is something that I don't know if they would necessarily articulate it in those terms. I'm sure there are clubs that do, or if it's just something that is sort of more intuitively understood between the pitcher and the catcher. But I imagine that there is, you know, some aspect of familiarity that they understand

to be a function of sequencing. And so, you know, they're trying to sort of short circuit the batter's calculation on that. So yeah, I think this is definitely an aspect of it. How, how strongly it factors into the sort of scouting of an individual pitcher or hitter. I wonder,

but like, you know, when Ben Clemens just wrote about guys who throw sort of distinct sinkers and four seamers, and this was part of how he was thinking about it. Like, as you are preparing to face a batter you probably know if they are good at you know if they are a fly ball hitter or a

ground ball hitter and that might affect which of your sinker or four seamer you throw but then they know that you know that but then they know that you know that they know that and so you know it can kind of cascade from there and very quickly sound ridiculous. But yeah, I think it's definitely something that the teams and pitchers and hitters are trying to suss out in any given interaction. And it might account for some of the way that they are able to adjust to particular pitches

or seem to anticipate them well. Right. That's a good question. It is a good question, yeah. As an aside, aside like i think we we don't try to ever humiliate people with their with their questions like sometimes we we will say like the premise of this question is flawed but we only do it when we think it will yield more interesting conversation after we we don't want to make anybody feel bad that's not the

purpose of this podcast no we may humiliate ourselves unintentionally. Oh, often. Often. Right. Yeah, I guess the only thing I'd say, I mean, I don't know that it's necessarily as clean as, okay, here's our plan A and here's our plan B and here's our plan C and we're just going to start with the most optimal approach. And then we will go with bad ones from then on and then we'll just go into sending order. I mean, I think probably there are times where you hold something in reserve. I mean, that's one way that pitchers try to combat the times through the order effect is that they'll throw a lot of fastballs their first time through the order and then they will start mixing in some off-speed stuff and some breaking balls more often the second or third time through so that they are showing hitters different pitches than they had seen the first time. Now, I guess

if you knew that someone was a great fastball hitter and couldn't hit a curveball, you might still throw him the curveball in the first inning just because you know that that's his big weakness. But maybe you save something in reserve for the second or third time you face him because unless you're a reliever you know or you're hoping that you're going to see this hitter more than one time so probably you're planning for this to some extent and maybe there are multiple strategies that you think would work just as well right i mean maybe you know that he has a weakness here and he has a weakness there or or he's not great at this pitch type, but he's also not great at that pitch type. So I don't know that it would be such a clean sort of stepwise, you know, here's my plan A and next

time I will just have to try a worse plan. And as you said, I mean, you could stay with the same plan and maybe the hitter will be so flummoxed because he'll be expecting a different plan that it'll work just as well. So I don't know that it maps on perfectly and i would guess that still seeing the delivery seeing the actual pitches is probably a bigger part of the effect but this part of it the advanced scouting part of it is something that i had not thought about so much and probably i should have so i think it's a good suggestion yeah I think it I think it's a very good suggestion yeah all right last one which came in just as we were recording this is from Landon who says here's a messed up question for you while we await baseball news

what if as you're mucking around your newspapers.com subscription you notice that one of Roberto Clemente's hits was erroneously double counted or just shouldn't have been counted as an official hit for some reason. Would you report that finding or just put it in your pocket? What if, say, you're the managing editor of a baseball website and some enterprising writer comes to you with this story? Would you run it? So, of course, Roberto Clemente finished with exactly 3,000 hits before, as we discussed with Dane Perry, he was tragically killed in a plane crash. So if we knew somehow we learned that one of those hits shouldn't have counted, would we ding him and knock him back down to 2,999 or would we hold our peace?

$29.99 or would we hold our peace? So I guess like, hmm, what a thorny ethical question to put to me at 10.59 a.m. on a Friday. Yep. So I guess I would say the following, which is that the way that I think about baseball record the more wiggle room for mistake there might be in the record keeping of the game. So I don't know that I necessarily would need to correct this. I guess we also have to contend with the fact that like in any career, any storied career, you know, there's probably a guy who is benefiting from like, for instance, a batted ball that was called a hit in his favor, but could have been deemed an error, right?

And then it wouldn't have counted. And what often happens is that we don't have human tragedy sort of intervene quite so precipitously so that you are done right at 3000 right you have wiggle room to sort of absorb that error this is a i'm talking to avoid answering the question is what i'm doing because i don't know what i would do with this like on the one hand i don't know what like historical value there necessarily is to correcting it this way but also like it's not as if roberto clemente's legacy hinges on him being a 3 000 hit hitter right like is his legacy in the game both on the field and off is is not you know it's not as if we only care about him because he has 3,000 hits. And if it was 2,999, we'd be like, oh, that schlub, right? Like his impact on baseball as both a sport played on the field and a cultural institution

transcends his hit total pretty profoundly. So I don't think that correcting the record would really diminish his legacy in any way. And I am a fan of precision. I think that correcting the record would really diminish his legacy in any way and like i i am a fan of precision like i think that we should attribute you know we should we should accurately represent the stats that we have because they are an important part of our historical record beyond any individual player so i don't know but it also feels like kind of mean sorry to swear you know like i would i wonder what questions i would ask of, the writer who came to me with this to be like, but why? Why did you go looking for this? Like, why was this a thing? I mean, I suppose that we can attribute a more generous motive to the writer and say that they simply stumbled upon something like this. say that they simply stumbled upon something like this. But also, what archival evidence would you find that would make you confident that your conclusion around this is accurate?

Right. I mean, yeah, I don't know if you could find it in newspapers.com. Maybe if you looked at game logs from the Hall of Fame or something. I mean, there are some famous examples of records being corrected, as you alluded to earlier. And there are some famous examples of records being corrected, as you alluded to earlier. And there are some famous numbers that have changed. And there are races that have ended up going the other way long after the fact. I mean, Ty Cobb, for instance, I think it was Pete Palmer discovered that he had had a game double counted. And so he had more hits than he should have.

Right. And those hits were eventually taken away from his total. And that also would have changed the outcome of the 1910 batting race. And so Nap Lajue would have won that instead of Ty Cobb. So there are examples like that. And, you know, I think if you know about it, I think you have some obligation to change it, I suppose. I mean, first of all, just like as an editor, I guess, you know, your fiduciary duty to fan graphs of attracting an audience, I think that people would read this

article. There'd be a lot of interest in it. So, you know, not that that's necessarily your number one consideration, but this would generate a lot of attention. It's newsworthy, I think. And also, as you were saying, like, I would probably encourage us to care a little less about these arbitrary round numbers. Right. So, you know, I know that the 3,000 hits milestone means something historically, obviously. And it would be a bit of a bummer if you had to retroactively take someone like Clemente out of that, especially because of the circumstances. And he's right on 3,000 hits and why he ended up on 3,000 hits. But look, as you said, it's not like he's any less great a player or person. It's not even like he was just scuffling along to get to that last 3,000th hit as some people have. And

then he retired the day after. I mean, he was still an absolute star at that late date. I mean, even though he was in his late 30s by that point, he was still a great hitter. There's no doubt that he would have gotten many more than 3,000 hits. story, you know, like, look what I found. So we can finally take a hit away from Roberto Clemente. I mean, I would not be overjoyed about that. But I think just in the interest of balancing the books and being intellectually honest and consistent about things, you know, can't put your thumb on the scale or take your thumb off the scale if it should be there. Oh, I would be so nervous before that piece went up though. Oh my God. Cause it's like a, you know, you really, you really want to thread the needle on that because you're right that people would want to read that story, but you wouldn't want to take delight in it.

I don't know. It's just such a strange- Publish apologetically. Like, sorry, everyone. We don't want to tell you this, but- Yeah. Hack Wilson is another one. His famous single season RBI record.

That one, he had an RBI taken away from him from that 1930 season. He went from 191 to 190 long after the fact, after an extensive review. And, you know, sometimes people have been hesitant to make these changes. But yeah, you know, we have a commitment to accuracy so and also i mean i guess if you're taking a hit away from him then you are saving some pitcher who allowed that hit in theory maybe right i mean assuming you have the double entry bookkeeping going on right then there's uh someone who has to have some cost on the other side yeah i just you know what I would do? You know what my approach to this would be, Ben?

Because it is like a, I think that we do get too fixated on these round numbers and I just spent time talking about how Clemente's legacy far exceeds like the number of hits that he has. But I do think that this is the kind of thing that people take personally. He is so important to so many people

and the milestones are a part of that even if they aren't the most important part so i would make it a group project is probably what i would do i would go i'd go to craig at bp and i'd go to sean foreman at baseball reference and i'd go to whoever has the take down the 40 man guys button at MLB and I'd say, guys, friends, pals, we have a problem. We need to all collectively say, we're updating this record because you don't want to be the only site that has Roberto Clemente at 2,999. That's a lonely road. You don't want to walk that road alone.

You want to do it with the help and support of the other people who are entrusted with sort of record keeping on this score. We need to go to Retro Sheet and be like, hey, bad news. So I would make it a group project, which would be the very first time in my entire life that I have welcomed a group project. Yeah. It would not be like discovering that Early Wynn's 300th win

should have been his 299th or something. I mean, you know, sorry to Early Wynn's family, but not quite as much significance tied up with that. And that is more of a case of, you know, sticking around to try to get that milestone. Right. I guess he was pretty good in his last season there but you know like with clemente there's just such a mythology tied up with that

hit and a legend tied up with that hit just because it came so close to his demise and and there's the video where you know they flash the message on the scoreboard about how he has the 3000 fit and he tips his cap or whatever. It doesn't seem like it was a huge deal in the ballpark at the time. Off of John Matlack, a player that we will shortly discuss with Aidan Gruber. But, you know, you could say, well, he thought he had the 3,000th and he got to enjoy that moment and take his bow and everything. Maybe it kind of cheapens it for you if you think well it wasn't actually his 3000th but i don't know it's also arbitrary about whether you get a hit

or not i mean you play in this ballpark instead of that ballpark or this era instead of that era or you sit out this day instead of that day or get this injury instead of that injury and that's what determines it which is why it's special i guess because a lot of things have to go right for you to end up with that number but you know at least he got to celebrate it would it make you feel any better that like roberto clemente would never know that his 3000th hit was taken away yeah i guess i guess so i mean i i think that like we have to view our obligations to history in a comprehensive way right and we have an obligation to i do think we have like an obligation to the statistical record of the sport because we use it to categorize people and

their you know their performance and how sterling or not it is. And so I think that having it be accurate, or as accurate as we can know it to be is part of our obligation, right. And I also think we have an obligation to the people of the history of the sport. And that doesn't mean that we can't, you know, decide ultimately that we need to balance the record in favor of precision. But I think how we do it should take care, you know, it should take care of people and sort of be mindful of what these milestones mean to them. And so yes, I think it actually does meaningfully change things for me that he is not here to know that we've done that. Although, like, if he were, he'd have more than 3 000 hits anyway and then we wouldn't be in this terrible fix so yeah you know it's a it's a thorny one i think ultimately yes we want to if we were presented with compelling and sort of decisive evidence we would want to make that change but i don't think that like crowing about it would be the way that we would go

because that feels sort of mean-spirited given you know what he means to so many people who are still around and are able to would be able to voice their disappointment at learning that the the milestone was a little ever so slightly less shiny than um than it to be. Yep. Oh, man. I feel like I'm back in grad school. The thorny ethics question to discuss with the class. Thanks for that, Landon. Yeah, the trolley problem of this baseball podcast. All right, let me end with this stat blast. They'll take a dataset sorted by sunset like ERA- or OBS+.

And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to DASTPLOST! Okay, so I played a little less of an active role in generating this stat blast than I normally do. Sometimes I do the stat blast myself. Often I'm the intermediary. I'm the go-between who fields a question From someone and directs it To someone else. In this case I had nothing to do with it Other than, I guess, co-founding this podcast

Which ultimately led to this question Being asked and answered with no intervention From me. So this all Went down in the Effectively Wild Discord group for Patreon Supporters and there is a StatBlast channel in there Where Ryan Nelson frequent

StatBlast consultant is a member And sometimes he will pop up And give people a much More thorough answer than they had expected And so another member In there who goes by the Username Plum said This reminds me of a totally non-statistical

And purely subjective thing I researched in 2020. Mike Trout and Mookie Betts were the consensus best players in each league and played in the same town. Don't at me, Los Angeles people. I wondered if that had ever happened before. The best I got was Mantle and Mays in the early 50s and maybe Bonds and Giambi when Giambi was an athletic, though I think Giambi was a bit underrated by the consensus.

Kind of curious to do the same thing with pitchers at some point because of Cole and DeGrom. And Ryan Nelson just jumped in and went above and beyond as is his want. So as usual, I will link to the spreadsheets he produced here. But he answered it for hitters and for pitchers. And he came up with a method where he generated the moving average fan graphs were of the previous, current, and following season for every player with 200-plus plate appearances since 1900. So, you know, you have to figure out who's the best player In the league at that time One way to do that is to look at what They did that season but also in the

Two surrounding seasons and The original question said Consensus best player obviously That's not going to match up Always with the Fangraphs War Best player but hard to do A stat blast about the consensus So Ryan Generated the top five in

fan graphs were in each league in a table and then he was able to find when players in different leagues but in the same city were both in the top five and then highlight them and so he came up with eight pairs of position Players to be the quote Unquote best in their league and Be in the same city at the Same time and this was more Common earlier in baseball History when there were fewer players

And fewer cities sure there Was more likelihood of an overlap but 1914 Gabby Cravath Of the Phillies and Eddie Collins Of the A's were both in Philly. 1927, Rogers Hornsby of the Giants and Babe Ruth of the Yankees were both in New York. 1930, Mel Ott of the Giants and Babe Ruth of the Yankees both in New York. 1936, Mel Ott again of the Giants and Lou Gehrig of the Yankees. And then 1938, Mel Ott of the Giants and Joe DiMig of the Yankees And then 1938 Mel Ott of the Giants and Joe DiMaggio Of the Yankees so Mel Ott and Three different Yankees did it During the 30s then as

Plum was suggesting 1955 through 1957 Willie Mays of the Giants And Mickey Mantle of the Yankees And that could have continued for Two more years had Mays And the Giants not relocated to San Francisco. So that really was, I mean, that's where you get the whole mythology of the golden era of baseball and Willie Mickey and the Duke and all of that.

Must have been pretty cool. I mean, maybe that has been lionized too much and people are sort of sick of the boomer or pre-boomer nostalgia for that era. People are sort of sick of the boomer or pre-boomer nostalgia for that era. But it was sort of special to have those three teams in that town at the same time and to have Maze and Mantle overlapping. I mean, which one do you go see? If you're a neutral fan in town at that time, you can't go wrong either way. So that was a solid span of three years interrupted only by the Giants moving. Then it didn't happen again For almost 50 years

And didn't happen until Barry Bonds of the Giants and Jason Giambi Of the A's as Plumhead Speculated and then another 20 years until Mookie and Mike Trout if you count the Angels As a Los Angeles team So it has been far far

Rare in recent years, as one would expect. And some other contenders that didn't technically have the best two, but were close for several years, from 1904 to 1906, Chicago had Frank Chance of the Cubs and George Davis of the White Sox.

From 1917 to 1921, St. Louis had Rogers Hornsby of the Cardinals and George Sisler of the Browns. And from 1922 to 1926, Frankie Frisch of the Giants and Babe Ruth of the Yankees also in New York. And some other contenders from 1949 to 1953, you had Jackie Robinson and various Yankees. In the mid-'80s, you had Ricky Henderson on the Yankees and various Mets. The late-'80s, you had Ricky Henderson on the Yankees And various Mets the late 80s You had Ricky Henderson on the A's And various Giants

95 Barry Bonds on the Giants And Mark McGuire on the A's And then 2014 and 2015 Buster Posey on the Giants and Josh Donaldson of the A's And also an honorable mention During World War II Auggie Gallon and Snuffy stern weiss of the dodgers and

yankees respectively deserve a mention for the names alone i think snuffy yep and then the pitchers so pitchers this is a lot rarer it has hardly happened yeah the best pitchers in the same city at the same time Only two times has it happened 1971, Fergie Jenkins with the Cubs And Tom Bradley of the White Sox And then 2020 Jacob deGrom of the Mets And Garrett Cole of the Yankees

So that's it, only two times But there have been a bunch of close calls Here are all the cases where One was the best player in the league And the second best Was in the same player in the league and the second best was in the same city at the same time you had irv young of the braves and cy young of the red socks in boston in 1905 1907 to 1909 you had mordecai three finger brown with the cubs and ed walsh of the white socks brown was second behind christyy Mathewson each of those years. 1914,

Pete Alexander of the Phillies and Eddie Plank of the A's. 1918, Hippo Vaughn of the Cubs and Eddie Seacott of the White Sox. 1919 and 1920, Pete Alexander again of the Cubs and Eddie Seacott of the White Sox. 21, Pete Alexander of the Cubs and Red Farber of the White Sox, 25-26, Dazzy Vance of the Dodgers and Herb Pennock of the Yankees. And then, not until 1985 with Fernando Valenzuela of the Dodgers and Mike Witt of the Angels. And other notables, Sandy Koufax from 63-66 was first all four years for the Dodgers. Dean Chance of the Angels was fourth, third, fourth, and fourth. Kind of close. 2005, Pedro was on the Mets and Randy Johnson was on the Yankees.

2010 to 2011, Clayton Kershaw on the Dodgers, Jared Weaver on the Angels. And 2014 to 2016, Jake Arrieta of the Cubs and Chris Sale of the White Sox. So fun question Fun answer kind of wish That this happened more often these days Although I guess it's good to Spread the wealth around and not Spoil people who are in the same city

Especially because you probably Have people in that city who are A fan of just one of the teams and Are not availing themselves often of The option to watch the other best player or pitcher in the league at that time. So maybe it's better to have the geographical diversity, but it is sort of special when there is that kind of overlap. I wonder how good a job, I mean, I think that now we probably are really clued into this, just given what the landscape of baseball media looks like

and the existence of sites like Fangraphs and Baseball Perspectives and Baseball Reference where some of the ins and outs of the stats we can kind of track in real time and we do a lot of work to do that. But I wonder, are you aware always how special it is what you're watching? I think that the not necessarily being

a fan of both teams thing would be a gating factor certainly and you might know that they're like good but you might not know how good so i i wonder how good a job we would do in noting this in real time so that people can really pause and say like i'm watching something pretty remarkable especially apparently on the pitching side yeah savor it while it lasts yeah all right so let's take a quick break and we'll be right back with aiden gruber to discuss trade trees and emmettletradetrees.com 3,000 3,000 steps Through heaven and hell 3,000 steps Forget about 12 3,000 steps

Might as well be the moon 3,000 steps from you 3,000 steps from you All right, we are joined now by Aidan Gruber, who is the founder and proprietor of MLPTradeTrees.com. Aidan, welcome to the show. Alright, thanks for having me. So tell us a little bit about yourself, where you are, what you do, and how you eventually developed the idea for MLPTradeTrees.com. and how you eventually developed the idea for MLPtradeTrees.com. Yeah, sure. So I'm from Toronto, Canada, but I currently live in Ho Chi Minh City,

Vietnam, and I'm a teacher here. I moved away from Toronto about three years ago, got some teaching experience under my belt, then COVID hit, took a little bit of time to think about what I wanted to do and I realized I wasn't really comfortable being in the classroom all the time so I wanted to switch up my careers so I took a little coding course about six months ago and was thinking of some some ideas for projects. I wanted to incorporate baseball, so I ended up doing this trade thing. Yeah. This is a good little project to put on your resume if you're applying for a coding job, I guess. What's your background as a baseball fan? I assume you were a Blue Jays fan,

but how did you get hooked? Yeah. So I was born the year after our back-to-back World Series win, so I kind of missed the peak Jays era right there. But yeah, I've been a Jays fan my whole life, been to games since I can remember. And actually, the main thing that got me started thinking about like the trade trees was thinking about Roy Halladay. We traded Roy Halladay back in, don't remember. You probably have that information. Check the site. Yeah, exactly.

We traded a Halladay back in 2009. Yeah, that's right. 2009. And I always like, I always thought, you know, like what happened like with the guys that we got for him, cause I just don't really remember. So, yeah. So I thought about all the old Jays trades that we did back in the day and that kind of got me going. Travis Darno, Kyle Drabeck, and Michael Taylor.

That's right. And then we got rid of Travis Darno, which was also not the best trade, but you know, it was for that playoff push. Can't complain too much about it. Sure. So I think that every writer has tried to go down this wormhole at some point. It is fertile territory in the offseason in particular to look at the most lopsided trades or the most beneficial trades to your franchise, the ones you wish hadn't quite gotten away. But just from a technical perspective, I know you said you were using this as sort of a jumping off point to coding, but where did you gather all of this data from?

And what were some of the challenges you found in trying to collate it in this specific way? Because I have to say, this is, I was joking before we started recording, I'm gonna probably sit with this all weekend and try to just look at a bunch of different transactions and what they spun off, you know, and let's try

to dig deep on whether the Rays are really getting the best from their trades. But what was the technical process like for you in pulling all of this together? Yeah, so it all started with that when I was thinking about Roy Halladay and I wanted to look up the information. It brought me to, of course, baseballreference.com to see all the transaction history. And then there's just a little disclaimer under the baseball reference saying that the transaction information is from RetroSheet. So I did a Google about RetroSheet. And basically, my entire site could not have been done without that organization. It's very, very cool what they do over there. So if you don't know, they just basically collect all of the transaction data from like the 1800s and put it all in a nice database.

It's open source. Anybody can look through it. And yeah, that's where the main data came from. How did you learn to code, by the way? Did you take a specific course? I did a course on some Udemy stuff, some Codecademy stuff, lots of just figuring things out by myself. There's a lot of good resources out there.

Yeah. So you get the RetroSheet info, and then you have to figure out how to display it all. So it's not just getting everything into a table. You had to figure out some user interface, something that people could look at to trace the trade. So that's kind of complicated, I imagine. And then there's a lot of data cleanup that you have to do inevitably with this type of project. And then I messaged you via Reddit and gave you another assignment because I came across your site and thought it was cool, but thought of another thing I could heap upon you

that might make it even cooler. So yeah, take us through some of the other steps because you've done a bunch of updates and made it prettier and cleaner and easier to navigate. Yeah, sure. So once I knew I could, I had all the data available to me. It was basically finding out the cleanest way of kind of presenting it in the tree format. So I found there's like this, an open source Google, like Google chart,

like kind of, I don't know, like a template that you can use for websites. And I basically use that to display all the information that you see when you go to the site. That's my biggest thing right now is actually I want to change that whole thing because I think it can look a little bit ugly sometimes, but that's for the future. So yeah, so I use that wonderful Google kind of template to display the information. And when I first started out, you talked about getting feedback that will from yourself but from other people as well so when I first started out it was

really just like a block with a name it was just like a name to another name with like no information it didn't say the date it didn't say the team like the team traded to it didn't say any players involved in the trade. And once I got that first, like my first kind of version up and running, I just kind of posted it immediately to Reddit. I got like hundreds of upvotes, but the good thing about it was that so many people were trying it out and telling me what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right and everything I should add.

And then I kind of just got the ball rolling from there. I started adding more details to trades. I involved some stats. And then eventually a few months later, we're at where it's looking right now. Right. So when you look at any of these transactions, you can see the money that was acquired.

You can see the games that these guys played in, the plate appearances that were traded back and forth. What are some other features that you're hoping to bring to the site in the coming months? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm pretty happy with how a lot of the information I have right now. I'm happy with what I have. I want to be able to just display it in a lot better way.

Because right now, it's hard to even tell. But if you go to any tree and you highlight with your with your mouse just over any any tree uh any node in the tree it shows you like a breakdown of like specific players stats and with like the google template that i'm using right now it's it's just really ugly and there's nothing i can do about it so i need really need to change that so i can present the stats a little bit better. But in terms of some other stuff, I'm really want to think about adding like a team team specific pages. So if you wanted to, let's say, I don't know what what what what teams do you guys do you guys root for? Do the Mariners? The Mariners?

Okay, so they've been quite busy lately so yeah should be good so i would i would want to like kind of have let's say a mariners page that shows everybody on their 40-man roster could click on their name and it would tell you kind of how that player got to your team because right now i'm just showing the trades if you search in a player, but I kind of want like a reverse of that, where if you like you can find out how your player got to that team, if you can understand what I'm going with. So yeah, that would I would like to add that in the future. What else I want to be able to show and search for Hall of Famers in a tree. I think that would be interesting.

And I know all the data is there. I just have to clean it up and make it presentable. And yeah, those are kind of the two main things I want to do. But other than that, I'm pretty happy with what I have so far. And you've got war in there, which is fun, so that you can see who won in terms of value produced post-trade, if that's how you want to judge it. And I guess just in terms of how you define a tree, what ends a tree, I mean, I guess it's

fairly straightforward. A player gets traded to one team, other players get traded back, and you follow, you trace the careers of those players. And as long as they are still with the team that acquired them in that trade, then you're counting it towards that initial tree. And then the little quirk that I introduced to the process that had been in my piece for Grantland was the comp pick system. years in old CPAs, you used to have comp picks that were tied to specific players so that if a player left via free agency after getting an offer to stay, let's say, then that team would be compensated with a specific pick and that pick would be tied to that spot in the draft. And then if that comp pick was used for a player, then you could say, well, that player was part of the tree. I guess you could be a trade tree purist and say, I only want players who were acquired directly via the trade. But

in my mind, at least that's part of the value that you ultimately got for that player, right? If he walks away, you get some compensation for him. And then that compensation turns into another player and on and on that branch of the tree goes so is that about it i guess it's kind of complicated to display because you look at some of the trees and there are many branches right and some of them are short and some of them are very long so there's a lot of scrolling this way and that way sometimes but i guess it's fairly straightforward i mean sometimes there are issues with names and ids and you might have duplicates and so you kind of clean some things up but conceptually speaking i guess it's fairly straightforward yeah uh so going on what you just

said about the the duplicate ids that was one of the main problems with me at the uh at the beginning uh there's some like wonky weird trades back in like the like 1950s with like players being traded for themselves players that were involved in like in like the same tree like maybe 10 years down the line i don't know maybe the just the pool of players were smaller back then so yeah there were lots of like duplicates like that. The most interesting one if you can look at a tree quickly, there's this guy named named named Jeff Turpko. He I think he played maybe one season for like the the Washington Senators back in the in the 70s. And he's the only player that I've come across that he's he was traded for himself like four months after the fact.

So he was a player to be named later. And then four months later, the team just like sent him right back. So that transaction kind of messed with my site for a while, trying to wrap my head around it. But I got it under control at some point. So as you've gotten feedback from people on the site, are there any particular trades or transactions that have really just thrown people for a loop? Not saying that there's anything wrong with the way that they're displayed or anything like that, but just particular trades that are getting more traction from viewers than others? Any that stand out? Yeah, definitely. So everybody likes just the like the long wide, like the biggest, the biggest trees that you can find. So I think we were talking before me and

Ben, they're the biggest one that is currently ongoing is the Jerry Dubzinski tree. I hope I said that right. So he was traded away in 1983 by the Indians. And it goes down all the way until the last transaction in 2019 with Corey Kluber when he was traded away from the Indians. So that's like a 40, 40 something year span. People love that one of course. There was surprisingly Bartolo Colon had a very cool tree. He was traded away from the Indians to the Expos in 2002. And that trade tree leads to tons of people in the Indians organization from the Carrasco trade and from the Bauer trade, actually. That's all connected to Bartolo Colon, which is very cool. Yeah, I'm rooting for Emmanuel Class A because he's keeping the Jerry Dibzynski trade going. Yeah, it's and, you know, he's still young and maybe he will be there for quite a while.

He's under team control, obviously, with Cleveland. So as long as he's there or they trade him, if he is very good, then very likely the guardians will trade him at some point because that's kind of what they do. And then the trade will continue. So yeah, I think we all have to root for that one to keep going. 1983, that's a long time. That predates all of us. We have to root for him to not be on the team right we have to root for him to go away from the team actually you're right we do have to root for him there's one more trade that that everybody loved trevor hoffman that was another one that i thought a lot of a lot of hits a lot

of discussion trevor hoffman was he was uh traded from the the marlins in 93 and then that tree goes all the way down again it's it's it's active now with like the david phelps trade but the cool thing about this this one is is just the the the marlins accumulated like so much negative war from this they traded away trevor hoffman who was an all-star they got gary sheffield who they just traded away Trevor Hoffman, who was an all-star. They got Gary Sheffield, who they just traded away a few years after. And that just led to... They got Mike Piazza. They traded him away. It's just a bit of a disaster for them. But it's a nice looking tree, even though the war's not set yet. Could you just read the Dibsinski tree? There are a lot of branches, but if you could just sort of summarize just to give people an idea of how convoluted, how many links in this chain there are, that would be fun.

Sure. I'll try to do a nice little direct, find the direct route. Okay. So we have, oh, I'm going to mess up these names. I know it. All right. Jerry Dabinski in 1983, from the Indians to the White Sox. Then they got Pat Tabler. They traded him away for Buddy Black in 1988. And then Buddy Black, they traded Buddy Black to the Jays for Alex Sanchez. Then they got Willie Blair in 1991. Willie Blair led to Kenny Lofton in 1997. Another all-star, I think. Then Kenny Lofton, they got David Justice from the Braves. Then Justice goes down to Jake Westbrook in 2010. And then Westbrook down to Corey Kluber. Yeah, that's amazing.

That's a lot of luminaries in that tree. It's very cool. Are there particular franchises that stand out as being adept or not at trading? And does it vary by era? I think if I could request a feature, I know you have the year span option, and you can also look at franchises. But I think it would be fascinating to be able to look at different regimes within a given franchise and how their trade acumen improved or diminished over time. That's a very good idea. Yeah.

So when I first, one of the main kind of bugs I ran into in my first release of this that Reddit pointed out to me was I had a bunch of trees that actually ended once a team like changed their name or changed their city, because the Retro Sheet data doesn't have some sort of like franchise tag. They just have like team name to team name. So I actually had to add like all the franchise tags to the Retro Sheet data. So once I had that, I could kind of link together the teams in a franchise. But I like that idea about seeing kind of a breakdown of the teams within a franchise.

I might have to look into that. I'm writing that one down. It's a good idea. Yes. Piling on to your list. Yeah. It's sorry to give you homework. That's all right.

So when I did my piece for Grantland in 2014, I think the longest at the time was the Mets, right? That was even longer than the Dabczynski trade. And that one has since ended, but it continued for a little while, at least after I finished my piece. So you want to run through that Mets trade, which went from 1967 to what, 2019? That just ended with the retirement of David Wright, I think. Yeah, that's also another really nice one

that not many people, well, originally it wasn't even on my site as something. Right, that relies on the comp pic, right? Yeah, exactly. That's why I contacted you about that, yeah. Yeah, so that was actually the best suggestion I had and it really just took me a little bit of effort to get those picks in, but they're here now and they're good to go. So I'm happy about that. But yeah, before I added the picks, that tree was really

just like, I don't know how long, like five years. It was nothing because it went from John Milner to Pete Falcone. And then Falcone left. He was a free agent and I had no pick data, so it couldn't go any more. But then this past couple of weeks when I got the pick data in there, so now the tree goes from, I see 77 until yeah, 2019 when David Wright was released. Even though I don't think he really played the David Wright play in 2019. No, not that recently. Yeah. Does that one start with John Matlack in 67? Yeah, sorry. It's John Milner with John Matlack.

Right. Yeah. And then Tom Grieve, Pete Falcone, Stan Jefferson, Kevin McReynolds, Brett Saberhagen, Arnold Gooch, Roger Cedeno, Mike Hampton. And that was another key, right? Because Hampton left for the Rockies, the Mets got a pick, and then they used that on David Wright. Yeah. Wow. That's a nice pick. Are there any others that spanned really far back that are recently retired, much like David Wright? I don't know about ones that recently ended i have a whole list on

the site of trees that are currently like on ongoing and you can look at the all-time longest as well the the non-active trees that are long ones which i was just sorting by that too and it looks to me like the longest ever tree is 47 years which started with a vern stevens trade from the browns and then that continued right up through 1994 so 47 years i guess that is about the max length for a trade tree in baseball yeah and i don't know if we're gonna beat that anytime soon but you never know. Yeah, I guess Dabzynski's got a ways to go still. Yeah.

But the interesting thing about the Stevens one is that it's the total transactions, there's 54 transactions within the 47 years. Yeah. But I think the Dabzynski trade is it's 37 years and only 21 transactions. So it's only like half the amount of actual transactions. It spans for a similar amount of time, not too much less. Yeah. And also you have war on here. And so you can look at net war and that's a way to maybe look at the most lopsided trades, which is something I did a stat blast about at some point on the podcast and then just wrote about earlier this week because I was talking about Curt Schilling and some of the early trades in his career, which were historically lopsided. So you do see those when you go on here. By net war, the most lopsided, I guess, technically is the 1899 trade that was really more of a transfer between teams with the same owner, the Louisville Colonels and the Pittsburgh Pirates. That was the Rube Waddell and Hannes Wagner and Fred Clark and other luminaries were in that trade, which was not really a trade.

But if you count it as one, then we're talking hundreds of war there as a mismatch. But I think some of the notorious trades, the infamous trades are on that list, but because these are not just single transactions, these are entire trees, then there are maybe some surprising ones. I mean, you have the colonel's pirates trade that has a net war mismatch of 267 wins above replacement just because of what all of those players went on to do and there were a bunch of Hall of Famers involved in it. I mean, that's a famous one, but then there are others that are maybe not quite so famous that are still up there. You know, the late Eddie Robinson, former podcast guest of ours. He's in a tree that went 23 years starting in 1953 and had a 91 war mismatch.

So, you know, you've got your like Christy Mathewson for Amos Roussey kind of lopsided swindle. But then you also have some that you wouldn't expect. And some of the lopsided swindles, maybe if you look at them in terms of the entire tree, are not quite as lopsided because maybe the players that the team ended up getting made up some of the deficit over the years. So interesting way to look at things. Yeah, definitely. That was the hardest part about getting the stats involved is because at the end of the day, it's kind of hard to put real stats on these trades. I don't count World Series victories or playoff appearances. And that's a big factor when it comes into

these trades. You could incorporate awards voting right not just the hall of fame but you know cy young's exchanged or mvp's exchanged that might be interesting if debilitating to some franchises yeah that's very true yeah or i guess just standard stats i mean war is fun but it'd be kind of cool to see, I don't know, home runs or hits or whatever. Once I try to figure out the best way to display it, then it's definitely going to happen. The problem is I don't like having everything too crowded right now. It's a bit overwhelming for some of the trees, but I would love to get as many stats in there as possible because that's what baseball is about. It's all about the stats.

Is there anything on the the franchise averages i know that you have a page or a tab yeah where you can just see franchise averages i mean is does anything stand out there i guess you know franchises that have been around the longest will obviously have the most trees and most transactions and all of that. But are there differences in like, let's see, average number of players or average tree war? I guess that probably wouldn't vary that much, but there are some disparities there. I do definitely want to kind of rework this.

The Louisville Colonels have an average tree war of negative 136 because of that we just talked about worked out well for them um but i think for for the most part the the franchise average page i wouldn't it's it's more kind of just to see the different franchises that are available to search through i kind of want to rework this a bit because right now it takes into account like every tree but i think it would be more interesting to see that like see the trees maybe with with more than five transactions and get the averages from that i think it would be more interesting or just set a certain threshold so yeah right now the the averages are nothing so amazing but but at the same time you have someone like you have a team

like the or franchise like the orioles and they have like an average of 21 players per tree which is which is pretty like that's pretty high yeah i think if you take into account that counts all of the like that counts like the one transaction trees the two transaction trees so when the franchise has like over 21 average players per tree i think it's pretty good yeah i guess the ones you're the most interested in are the ones at the extremes right so you either want to see really big war from just one trade that then dies like you know i i just looked up the the current balance of the Fernando Tatis junior trade, which we always knew was going to be bad. But gosh, does that look terrible?

Because it just ends. But you're, you know, you're interested in those ones that are either really big war differentials in one guy or the ones that are, you know, a lot of different players or a lot of war spread out pretty far. It's ones in the middle that are i guess probably a little less compelling to people yeah definitely i would say the majority of the there when i when i uh generate all the trees for the uh for the the data for the tables there's about i think like close to 20 20 000 yeah there's about about000 trees, but the real kind of like exciting chunk of them are probably less than 2,000, I would say would be like really exciting. Most of them are just single transactions, just over a few years. It's nothing too exciting.

So yeah, so the majority of the trees are actually pretty not interesting, but we ignore those ones. Right. And it seems like your strategy for promoting it, I mean, I saw you mention it on baseball subreddit and you've posted, I guess, on some of the individual team subreddits as well, or at least some fans have posted there too. I mean, it seems like you've posted some of the notable ones and that those have sparked some conversations. So have you seen people organically using it to reminisce about certain trades or lament certain trades? Yeah. So it always gets a lot of traffic once I, you know, I post it whenever I have a new update. I tend to post it to either the Jays subreddit or the baseball subreddit. And then there's a lot of traffic,

you know, when it's kind of on the front page there. But other than that, it gets, you know, some, it gets like constant traffic throughout the day. It's nothing, nothing overwhelming, but that's what it's there for. It's there for you to check it out when you have some time and you want to get lost in some baseball history. So that's all. Nothing more than that. And so far, it's been good, the discussion. It's always nice when people kind of figure out where some of their favorite players came from, where they went to. And yeah, the best part about it, I think.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. And I'm grateful that this has been automated because still painful memories. You can write another article. It'll be a lot easier. Yeah. And we had the people from baseballtradevalues.com

on the podcast when that site came out as well, which kind of endeavors to tell you whether certain trades are fair proposals. So maybe there's a merger that could happen here with baseballtradevalues.com and mlbtradetrees.com, just a one-stop shop for all of your baseball trade needs, historical and current. But love the site. Look forward to seeing how it continues to develop. And I'm sure a lot of our listeners will enjoy perusing it and discussing it also. So again, go check it out, mlbtradetrees.com. We will link to it on the show page. And if you also have suggestions for Aiden and want to add to his

workload, there is an email address on the site where you can contact him. So thanks Aiden for doing this service for the baseball community. And I hope someone hires you based on this and gives you a great coding job. All right. Thanks a lot. All right. That will do it for today. And for this week, thanks as always for listening.

You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks like monthly bonus episodes and access to the EW Discord that I mentioned earlier. Michael Wilner, Tim Charks, Linus Marco, James Edmiston, and Scott Kramer. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups 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 at fangraphs.com.

You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWpod. You can follow the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. In the trees, those useless trees Produce the air that I am freezing In the trees, the useless trees, they never said that you were leaving.