Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1838: Walk and Balk

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Angels manager Joe Maddon’s befuddling bases-loaded intentional walk to Corey Seager, NPB phenom Roki Sasaki’s perfect followup to his perfect game, Hunter Greene and velo-induced fear for young starters, injury close calls for Byron Buxton and Mike Trout, the rise of non-fastballs leaguewide and what Andrew Heaney’s sweeper-iffic […]

It'll put that smile back on my face, yeah Have you made up your mind? It's the only way Have you made it up? Have you made it up? I admire the time that you take. Have you made it up? Have you made it up? I still think we should meditate. Hello and welcome to episode 1838 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you?

Well, I have so much to discuss, so many tabs open, that I have taken the drastic step of making a little rundown for this episode. Oh my gosh. Yeah, not normally an outliner, but just trying to keep all my subjects straight here. I guess we could start here, although it's been a few days, but nothing is more up our alley than this. So Friday night, I went to a concert. I went to see Big Thief, great band, great show. And as a result, I was not watching the Angels game. I missed a multi-homer.

Yeah. Well, it was an entertaining one in multiple ways. I missed a multi-homer Otani game, missed him putting on the cowboy hat after hitting the homer a couple times. I was sorry to see that, but the concert was worth it, I think. But we checked the box score as we went into the concert, as the opener was finishing maybe, and saw that Otani had hit one homer. Okay, great. Then the concert lets out. I look at my phone. I see Otani has hit a second homer. Also great. And then I see that his performance and every other Angel's performance was totally overshadowed by Angel's manager, Joe Madden, who issued an intentional walk with the bases loaded, with the Angels losing in the fourth inning.

I'm just going to stack improbabilities here. It took me a little while to parse that this actually happened. I was like, did I get a contact high from this indoor concert in Brooklyn? I don't know. But no, it actually happened. So this is just one of the weirdest managerial moves that we have seen really ever. One of the weirdest managerial moves that we have seen really ever. Yeah. I mean, this is the eighth bases loaded intentional walk that has ever been issued or probably the seventh.

Mel Ott issued one as a manager. Some sources say he also drew one as a player in 1929, but most sources say he did not. Intentional walks weren't even an official statistic then. So this is based on newspaper accounts and reporting. So if you don't count that, this is the seventh ever. And the first since, well, Joe Madden did it to Josh Hamilton back in 2008. But really, every previous instance of this has been not smart, necessarily, not supported by the numbers exactly but late in the game eighth or ninth inning having some super hitter up you know Barry Bonds of course is the famous example in 1998

this was Corey Seager no offense to Corey Seager he is a very good hitter but he was backed up by a pretty good hitter in Mitch Garver as well. To do it this early in the game when your team is trailing, just one of the wildest counterintuitive, counter logic and statistics and probability moves that we have ever seen. The Angels ended up winning the game, but wow, Joe Maddon, what were you thinking? I guess we have some sense of what he was thinking, but still, what were you thinking? So, you know, sometimes you are a writer, let's say, and you write about baseball, and you're casting about for a topic,

and you're trying to look ahead to the next week. Like, what can I write for Monday that will still be relevant then? Like, who is starting this weekend? You know, who has been unexpectedly good? Who can I look at who seems to have changed their fastball shape or is throwing harder? And that's the context of the conversation I was having with one Ben Clemens on Friday during the day, earlier in the day, about what he might write for Monday.

And I think he was like, maybe I'll noodle on Alex Cobb, who, as we have discussed on this podcast, is just like throwing 96 down. And then this happened and I was like, or you could write about this because this is pretty wild stuff. I want to highlight before we talk about, I mean, it's hard to talk about this decision even because it's just so obviously a bad one. Like there's no, there's not really a circumstance under which this is a good choice. When Ben did end up writing about it for us at Fangraphs,

he was like, what if I substitute peak Barry Bonds for Corey Seager? Because as you said, Corey Seager, no slouch, a very good hitter. Him being a very good hitter was quite lucrative for him this offseason, but he's not Barry Bonds. Even with Barry Bonds, this is a bad choice. I want to highlight two things about this decision.

The first is that, did you see Mike Trout's face in reaction to this? There's a moment after the intentional walk has been called for where he's like, his head is moving back and forth slightly. And you can like see him, you can see him doing the math. Like, wait, am I miscounting how many base runners? Yeah. It wasn't even a double take. It was like

a triple take where he was looking at every base. Oh, they're all occupied. Wait, one, two, three. So there's that piece of it. And then, you know, I feel that part of my skill set as a baseball analyst is to speculate wildly about people making mistakes. And so I thought to myself as I was sitting there watching it, like, what are the odds that Joe Madden is doing this by accident, right? That he doesn't fully grasp. But there's zero because there was literally a mound accident, right? That he doesn't fully grasp. But there's zero because there was literally a mound visit, right? What was the decision was made? So it's not like he was like,

oh, there are only two guys. We'll just walk them loaded and then hope for a double play. No, that wasn't. He was fully in possession of his faculties and was like, I'm going to intentionally walk. Yes, this was premeditated. Yeah, it was really a decision that was made.

And then I think one of the best things about this is that, okay, so they intentionally walk Corey Seager right, and now the score is 4-2. And then Mitch Garver hits a sack fly, and it's 5-2. And then poor Austin Warren box. Yep. And Marcus Simeon scores on a box

and then Adoles Garcia popped out and it ended the inning. But it was just this like compounding set of problems because it would have been a bad and strange choice regardless of whether or not the next two batters had gotten out without any further scoring. But it was just the sort of thing where like, you know, have you ever played like sim league baseball?

Like have you ever played like Diamond Mind or anything like that? Yeah, a little bit, yeah. So I have a bad habit in my Diamond Mind managerial career of being like, the guy can face one more. And he very rarely can and almost always i am burned immediately and i have continued to make this mistake so in that respect i have some sympathy for joe madden because like i'm i'm doing low-stakes stuff and

know it's wrong and keep doing it and and you know maybe he just thought this would be clever but it sure was a thing that happened in a game that we all watched that counted it was not an unforeseeable circumstance because he had brought in austin warren just the batter before to face marcus semien and warren walked semien but it was not impossible to anticipate that perhaps semien would reach and that there would be a basis loaded situation with cory seager coming up so you could have anticipated that you knew that there would be a basis loaded situation with Corey Seager coming up. So you could have anticipated that. You knew that you would not be able to pull him because of the three batter minimum. So you got to think one batter ahead. So yes, there was a platoon

disadvantage here, but you could have stuck with the lefty. You could have brought in a lefty. I mean, there are ways around that if you take that so seriously. And there were a couple of explanations that Madden gave. One was that he just didn't think Warren was sharp. He didn't look like his usual self. He walked Simeon quickly. He didn't want to give up a grand slam or a big blow to Seeker. But it sure seemed like most of the reasoning, to the extent that there was reasoning, was, as he said, just to stir the group up. So he talked about his mound visit when he went out there to talk about this with Warren. He said, I walked out there and looked at Warren. I said, how about? And then he kind of

said, putting him on. I said, yeah, how about putting him on? And he kind of smiled. And then the infielders kind of dug it too, which in his telling, everyone was on board with this. Everyone thought it was a good idea or even suggested it themselves. It's like that Nathan Fielder tweet about how you're out on the town having the time of your life with a bunch of friends. They're all just out of frame laughing too. That's what this was in Madden's mind. Because after the game, I don't know that everyone else's story necessarily matched that

I mean for one thing you had the trout reaction Madden called this visit a hallmark kind of moment I don't know whether he meant like hallmark gift cards or whether he just meant it was a hallmark moment

in the day in the season but Warren after the game he said he was surprised but i mean i'm not going to tell joe madden no right which doesn't exactly sound like yeah i was totally on board with this and thought it was a great idea too so it seems like joe madden was kind of in his own little universe here and you know there was some conversation about the idea that this worked, right? Not only did the Angels come back to win the game, but there's a quote from Reed Detners, the rookie pitcher who had started that game and was charged with the run on the intentional walk

because he had put that batter on base. And after the game, he said, you don't really expect an intentional walk with the bases loaded. That's an understatement, especially in the fourth inning. But Joe knows what he's doing. Obviously, it worked out in our favor, and that's all that really matters. So this idea, I mean, look, I co-wrote a book called The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, right? So I'm on board with unorthodox ideas, but they have to have some grounding in sense, in logic, in process. Now, to be fair, I don't think Madden thought that this was like the statistically sensible move. I mean, he is aware of run expectancy tables or the fact that a move exactly like this

just had never been made before. So I'm sure he knows that by the book, it made no sense. And his idea was, hey, let's shake things up. Let's flip the script. Let's do something that no one is expecting, and maybe it will just juice everyone up somehow. Now, Detmers, he's a rookie. I don't expect him to publicly question his manager, obviously. But when he says it worked out in our favor, now, in the sense that the Angels won the game, I guess it did. And if you credit Madden's just doing something completely out of left field here for inspiring the Angels to start hitting and come back in this game.

I mean, that's a big leap, but that's basically what you have to do. Because in the situation, like, put aside process and results, you can just look at the results and it didn't really work in the moment because as other Ben noted in his piece, the run expectancy in this inning coming into this situation was like 1.5. Like the expectation based on generic pitcher, generic batter was that the Rangers would score a run and a half in this situation. batter was that the Rangers would score a run and a half in this situation. And even if you account for the fact that Seager is up and Warren is pitching, it was like one and three quarters runs or something like that. In actuality, the Rangers scored three runs, right? They scored the run that Madden gave them with the intentional walk, and then they scored another run on a sack fly, and then they scored another run on a balk so it's true that there was no big blow there was no grand slam but this worked out worse than the average situation like that works

out largely because madden conceded a run he just handed them a run so even based on that i mean the actual win expectancy hit in terms of how often do teams before that situation typically win? How often do teams in the base out state that resulted after that walk typically win? It was like eight percentage points or so in terms of win probability. And, you know, you can do the math. And as Ben did, like the advantage of going from facing Seager to facing Garver, it's maybe like two percentage points. So basically he concluded that it hurt maybe four times more than it helped to do what Madden did here. But even the immediate results didn't really work. To say that it worked, you have to give Madden full credit for the Angels making a comeback in that game, which I guess we cannot disprove

that there was a connection there. I mean, doesn't Mike Trout's face kind of disprove some of that? I mean, I get, you got to say something is the thing about it, right? Like you have to offer some justification for a wonky decision like this. Not wonky as in, you know, like that what a wonk would do, but wonky as in weird, weird decision. But I don't know. If I were a professional baseball player,

I would prefer to have the other team scoring be a result of something that I did wrong rather than a little gift. You're not in the business of giving little gifts once the play ball has been set. So it's just a very strange choice, and I don't know that if we take Madden at his word and we assume that his motivation was, I think this is going to rile the boys up.

Sometimes you make people kind of agitated, and they lock in, and they perform well and they do stuff and sometimes you make people agitated and it's distracting and they play less well and they do less good stuff and then you lose a baseball game and i don't know i just i struggle to believe that like otani really needed extra motivation to hit a home run. It was very silly. I should be clear. I love that he did this because it was something I had never seen before. I had never seen it with my own eyeballs.

I appreciate having had my range of human experiences expanded. And the nice thing about it is because the Angels players managed to either have a fire lit under their ass or rally from their manager's boneheadedness, whichever you prefer as an interpretation, we can laugh about it in good fun because it didn't end up mattering. But it sure is weird that he did this. It sure is. Sure is weird. Yeah, right.

And our former guest Bailey of Foolish Baseball tweeted, teams are 7-0 when issuing a bases loaded intentional walk since 1900. If I were a manager, I would simply intentionally walk with the bases loaded in every game and go undefeated. Hopefully that is not the conclusion that joe madden draws and obviously most teams win when they pursue the strategy because they are already winning and it's at the end of the game so you have to go back to the immortal abner dalrymple who was walked in august of 1881 to find the last time that a team that was trailing did this so yeah hopefully it's a one-time thing.

Hopefully Madden just thinks I got away with one there, but doesn't draw the conclusion that I have magical motivational powers. And the worse move I make on paper, the better the results, because that could come back to bite you. But yes, if the Angels had lost this game, if they'd lost this game by a run or two, you wonder whether this would have stuck to Madden in a way that it won't because they won the game. And I'm sympathetic to the basic idea that he said,

I thought just by going out there and doing something like that, the team might respond simple as that. I just thought it was the right thing to do in the moment, period. I understand the idea that by shaking things up and doing something unexpected, maybe for some players on some teams that sometimes that could actually help. That could enhance your performance. 72 Tigers where the Tigers weren't hitting and he picked the lineup out of a hat, which is sort of similar, although probably less deleterious just because the effects of lineup order in a single game are not eight points of win expectancy. But, you know, you could go back to previous instances of Joe Maddon doing kind of wacky things like he has a long history of just like bringing zoo animals into the clubhouse you know like in september

2015 down the stretch with the cubs like he brought a bunch of zoo animals into the clubhouse before the game and maybe it loosened everyone up like that idea fine getting away from the routine giving players a chance to relax a little and let their hair down and just have it be fun for a moment, forget their problems, forget the stress of the situation, fine. I buy that that could help or not hurt, at least. But this is a little different because this is not just bringing in zoo animals to the clubhouse before the game. This is affecting the game itself and actually putting your team into a deeper hole when you're already losing like that crosses the line for me between fun little motivational tactic and no this is

actually hurting our chances to win in a significant measurable way so look i don't know that joe madden has been a good in-game tactical manager for quite a while and i don't know that he's even a good people manager i think he's done a good job with otani he did just sort of fumble that mike trout moving out of center field idea this past spring where he didn't run that by trout before he talked to the media this is the sort of thing that like you said it's kind of fun especially in this era of just like button down managing where most of it is push button moves and you kind of know what's going to happen for the most part. And everyone does the like optimal thing.

You know, we see fewer pitch outs than ever, hardly any pitch outs and fewer sacrifice bunts by position players in past years. And all of these suboptimal decisions that managers used to just go rogue or play a gut feeling or whatever it was they don't do that so much they stick to the script for the most part now so this was just throwing out the script setting it on fire tearing it up shredding it so it was fun in that sense it was out of the norm for sure but i don't think this should catch on did the zoo animals really help i mean like probably not but i can't just give people the day off for like

for appicino i could buy the idea that it could theoretically help and it certainly doesn't cost you any wit expectancy at least in a way that we can calculate assuming there's no mauling right exactly you are you are investing a great deal of confidence in in an animal in a confined space with poking being well behaved yes yeah and that seems you know that goes wrong for folks sometimes i think like leave you know animals don't need to be in the clubhouse. They can just, like, go be animals. We don't need to be doing this. Maybe they don't need to be in zoos either. But just saying, you know, that was probably a little less harmful, at least. Because they were, like, real bear cubs, right?

He was like, here's this bear cub. That was one of the times, at least. I think there were other times with more exotic animals even than that. But, yes. I was like, where's this bear cub's mom? Does it know where its kid is? Does it feel? I know it's not a kid in like an animal way.

Relax, everyone. All right. Well, even with peak bonds, the strategy usually didn't make sense. So you basically, as Ben wrote, need like Jeff Mathis batting behind Pete Bonds to justify it in all but a few limited cases. Which is not a fair way to describe Mitch Garver even a little bit. No, not at all. No. We'll remember this.

We will remember that this happened. So that's something. Not something you can say about every Friday night Angels game in April. So in other news, Clayton Kershaw was far from perfect in his follow-up to his perfect seven-inning start, but Roki Sasaki was perfect again. Again. Again.

Eight more perfect innings for Roki Sasaki. He has now faced 52 consecutive batters over three starts without allowing any of them to reach. That is an NPB record. That would be an MLB record, breaking the great Yuzmira Petit's 46 that he set in 2014. So this is incredible at this point. And again, like Kershaw, who was pulled after seven, Sasaki was pulled after eight. In his case, 102 pitches, not 80 pitches. And I don't know that this was all that controversial. They were facing, Sasaki's team, the Chibolote Marines, were facing the fighters managed, of course, by big boss, Siyoshi Shinjo. And Shinjo said that he would have done the same thing. And I saw a big poll on Twitter by the Japanese media outlet Sponichi where 75% of

respondents said that they would have done the same thing and some of the others said that they didn't have an opinion I think so it was massively in favor of pulling him but you had two pitchers pulled from perfect game attempts within a week on two continents. So this is a thing now. This is definitely this era. And of course, Sasaki, he's 20 years old. He throws really hard. He has been handled carefully by the Marines and they're taking no chances with him. And so sort of disappointing to see him not pitch back to back perfectback perfect games take that johnny weissmiller this would have been even better than that so take that johnny vandermeer to have two back-to-back perfect games instead of back-to-back no hitters that really would have been something but it was

also something to see him throw eight more perfect innings it's like what is the ceiling with this guy like how long can he remain perfect i mean this is must watch now like he starts once a week which is typical in japan now it's just like appointment viewing aside from the fact that it might be at a very odd and inconvenient hour where we live but aside from that like gotta tune in for the weekly Sasaki perfect start yeah I mean it was just I think that what we need is for these games to be rebroadcast at a more reasonable time in the U.S. because it's thrilling stuff that can be kind of some of a sleep bend you know like we don't keep your hours and so yeah it's just it's just a very cool and remarkable thing and I I was thinking about it because we talked about it on the pod last time. I know that Eric Longenhagen included him in his sort of prospect roundup.

And I think, you know, you and I talked last time about his age and whether or not he'll want to come stateside and whether he'll want to post. But it's just it's a cool thing on its own. And I think being able to see it allows us to engage with it sort of on its own terms rather than having it be like, what will he do in the majors if he gets here eventually? And that's a relevant question, so I don't think it's not tacky to consider that,

but it is also like it would just be, I wish that we had an easier sort of and more immediate recoil on these things so that we could see them for ourselves because it would be nifty. Yeah. So just absolutely incredible what he is doing now. And I can't wait to see what he does as his next follow up and how long I can keep the streak going. Although there is always an element of yes, please protect this pitcher because i'm always so scared and i was thinking that too watching hunter green the great reds rookie who threw 39 pitches 100 miles per hour or faster in a single start which is a record in the time that we can measure these things and that scares me i mean hunter green has already had tommy john

surgery once so he has suffered the consequences but unlike with young position players where it's you know obviously they get hurt too at times but there isn't always this feeling of possible impending doom i don't want to think that as i'm watching green or watching sasaki but it's hard not to think that i mean mean, I've made the Icarus comp before with someone like Jacob deGrom, or I guess more accurately Icarus. That is the downside of watching a young, hard-throwing pitcher who's doing things that I'd love to just sit back and watch the show and say, yeah, wow, look at this player pumping in those fastballs. How high can the radar gun readings go? But there's always just some element in the back of my mind where it's like, oh, no, I

don't want to look at what happens next. I'm like watching through my fingers because I just don't want to see. And so when one of these players gets pulled, whether it's Kershaw, who is throwing 90 or less, or Sasaki or Green who's throwing 100 or more I mean when they are removed early from the game it's like I'm not mad I'm just disappointed because I do understand why this is happening but it would be nice if we could say that pulling them preemptively or earlier than they would have been pulled in the past kept them safe now the best we can say is it doesn't endanger them further

right and you're just constantly having this balance between well throwing more pitches is gonna hurt them but also throwing fewer pitches really really hard is gonna hurt them and so hopefully we can offset the damage of the latter with the former by just having an earlier hook but you just never know. Anyway, I don't want to be the wet blanket with every young hard-throwing pitcher. It's just the track record health-wise is not the most encouraging. Yeah, and sometimes it's fine, right? Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes it's fine, but because we don't know when we'll stop being fine, you always do have that bit of nervousness.

up being fine you always do have that bit of nervousness it sort of makes things thrilling but you're sitting there being like i'd like to enjoy watching you play baseball for for months and years and you know it's not as if all guys who throw hard sort of raise a similar level of alarm right like if you have a guy who has very clean and repeatable mechanics like you might look at it and feel differently about it than you would with a guy who has like a lot of violence in his delivery and and what have you but thinking that there's like a clear and obvious bright line with those things is probably a fool's errand so it does always operate in the back of your mind it's like well is this is this the one where he feels the pop right and green in his two starts i mean he struck out 13 in 10 and third

innings he's walked only two that's very promising but he's allowed three homers so he hasn't been untouchable or unhittable when it gets to the point where you are that's where de grom was or where sasaki seems to be right now that's kind of where the cost benefit calculus comes up in my mind where it's like well if you're literally, like if no one could hit you, if you're challenging Bob Gibson's record or you have 52 consecutive batters without anyone hitting you, then can you dial it down a little bit and save yourself and still be really effective? And I know that's a hard thing. I mean, it's easy for me to say, and it's harder for someone to do it mechanically and also to make that mindset adjustment where it's like, yeah, I can throw 101, but instead I will throw 98. You're trying to do the best you can at all times, and you're trying to make the most money you can.

So I get it. I get why you're all out. And for all I know, they are taking a little off, and they could throw a little harder than they are even. they are taking a little off and they could throw a little harder than they are even but that's the point where it becomes a question to me where it's like if you've reached this level of untouchability then it's like well long term does it maybe behoove you to be slightly less untouchable but also not go under the knife at some point and who knows they could get hurt even if they did that so it's hardly a foolproof plan. Yeah.

You know, to enjoy a pitcher is simply to be cognizant of the fact that you are enjoying a thing that no one should do. Right. Right. No one should do it. Just like no one should catch. The fact that we play baseball at all is pretty wild. Well, protect Hunter Green. Protect Roku and Sasaki.

I want to see them keep pitching. I want to see the perfection streak continue and speaking of injuries we had a couple close calls with Byron Buxton and Mike Trout who I lumped together in my mind because they're both center fielders and because they have been over some period of several seasons now the most productive players in the game on a rate basis when they are on the field and also I lumped them together because far too often they have not been on the field, even more so in Buxton's case. And so it looked bad.

Buxton hurt his knee and he slid into second and he was like pounding the ground and he knew immediately that something was wrong and he was escorted off the field. That was like, oh no, here we go again. And he was off to a pretty good start. Fortunately, no structural damage in the MRI. Sure sounds like he will be back any day now. Trout was hit by a pitch. Fortunately, I guess it was a breaking ball.

There was no damage detected there long term either, and he-to-day and should be back soon as well. So it looks like crisis averted with both of these guys, but man, we came close again just a couple weeks into the season. Like, high on the list of players that we all just want to stay healthy. We just want to see what they can do all season. Don't put this fear into us, you know know it's one thing for Mike Trout to have intestinal distress I mean that's not great either but you hope that doesn't keep it out for a full season although who knows like he strained a calf and it kept him out for months and months so I don't want to take anything for granted at this point but I am relieved that they both seem

to be okay but it was scary there for a minute, and it's never not scary with those two at this point. Well, and it feels like the sort of scary it feels like is a little bit different because with Buxton, we have this sense, this obvious and well-earned sense that we just want to see the one clean year, right? We want to see the one year where he is able to stay healthy having put all of this stuff together and of course like the unspoken thing with that is that we're never satisfied with just one year we want all of the years but like we got

to start with one before we can get greedy right you need to have the first thing before you can ask for more so you know that's the sort of character that that longing and trepidation takes when he seems dinged up and then with trout i think you know it it's the sort of character that that longing and trepidation takes when he seems dinged up. And then with Trout, I think, you know, it's a really hard, it's really hard to sit there and say, I'm not satisfied with the character of Mike Trout's career, the path that it has taken, right? Like if he retired today, he'd just be a Hall of Fame, he'd just be a Hall of Fame player. He'd just be a Hall of Fame player. But I think that wanting the decline to be smoother and sort of on his own terms and have the opportunity to sort of adjust and adapt and see what the best baseball player

any of us have watched play baseball can do if he is fully healthy and is confronting sort of the natural aging process. Like, I want to see what is, I don't know, what does 36-year-old Mike Trout look like? Because it might just not be very good, but maybe he, you know, figures something out and he adjusts and he unlocks something. And, you know, the version of it we get is, I mean, obviously not going to be a center fielder anymore, but he, throughout the course of his career, has been of it we get is, I mean, obviously not going to be a center fielder anymore, but he throughout the course of his career has been so keen to like identify a

weakness and adjust to it and try to overcome it and sort of remove from the ledger anything that might hold him back from posting, you know, nine and ten war seasons. And so like age comes for all of us, like we are all slowly moving toward death or whatever but but if anyone's gonna like keep that dragon at bay for a while it's probably gonna be mike trout so i want him to stay healthy to see like would you be surprised if like 37 year old mike trout is like in a corner or mostly dhing but still posting like a 150 WRC plus would you be like shacked by that no I wouldn't either so I wouldn't be shocked if like 40 year old Mike Trout is doing yeah so I want to see that so keep all of your bits and bobs intact please yes please do by the way I forgot to

mention Sasaki had a mere 14 strikeouts in the second perfect start as opposed to yeah the 19 that he had in his nine inning perfect game so now through four games this season yeah 31 innings pitched 56 strikeouts two walks is that good that seems that seems good yeah that's not bad yeah okay all right and i was gonna say so i mentioned that trout it's fortunate that he was hit by a breaking ball. Now, there have been more breaking balls than ever this season. For the first time ever, or at least on record, fewer than half of all pitches thrown this season are fastballs now, which, I mean, we've been moving toward that point for quite a while now. We have some form of pitch data for about 20 years at this point, and it's been a fairly steady decline, especially lately in the rate of fastball usage, and that's lumping together everything but cutters. So we've seen more and more sliders and more change-ups, more nasty breaking balls. We've now gotten to the point where fastballs obviously are still a plurality of pitches, but no longer the majority,

which is a real sea change. And it's interesting because fastballs keep getting faster, and yet they are also getting less frequent. So you would think, well, you're throwing faster, just throw those harder. Of course, they're throwing every pitch type harder these days. So it's not as if you need to have that limited to fastballs, but as opposed to in the past where it was a fastball first mentality and establish the fastball and everything works off the fastball and you're expected to throw fastballs in these counts and you can't throw non fastballs in these counts. Now that's all out the window and pitchers are just throwing nasty breaking balls if that is their best pitch. And that brings me to Andrew Heaney of the Dodgers, who we spoke about briefly after his first start. He had another start.

It was against the Reds. He went six innings. He struck out 11. So on the season now, he has pitched 10 and a third innings. He struck out 16. He has walked three. He has not allowed an earned run yet. And obviously too early to say that Andrew Heaney is now an ace and that the

Dodgers have turned him into a monster or anything he's had two good starts back to back before but I think it's notable because he has made so many changes and they were in some sense predictable changes I mean he's been kind of a favorite of stat head teams and stat head writers for a while now just because of certain aspects of his stuff. And it seemed like he was maybe an adjustment or two away. And he's made multiple adjustments with the Dodgers now. He has moved on the rubber. He seems to have changed his mechanics a little and is maybe hiding the ball a bit better and changed his release point a little. maybe hiding the ball a bit better and change his release point a little but the most notable change is that he is now throwing the sweeper as it is called as the dodgers call it at least others the

yankees call it the whirly it is a new slider variant essentially and it is sort of uh well sweeping the league i guess you could say if you wanted to have a very predictable and strange pun. And Heaney has thrown more of them than anyone this season. So Baseball Prospectus on their revamped PitchFX leaderboards, or I guess we could call them StatCast leaderboards now, they are now tracking the sweeper. They are classifying pitchers as sweepers. And Heaney, as we speak here on Tuesday afternoon, has thrown 75 of them, which leads the major leagues. And this is a pitch that has caught on just in the past couple years here. So Enos Harris described the sweeper this way. For most Dodgers sliders, the difference between the spin axis, the batter sees, and the movement he expects from that spin axis, a phenomenon known as seam shifted wake before.

This is new advanced pitching terminology, new aspects of the physics of pitching that have been discovered and quantified at least in recent years. And so the Dodgers, the Yankees, some other teams, they seem to be at the forefront of teaching players this sweeper and pitch info at Baseball Perspectives is now classifying it separately. So this is really interesting, I think, A, the idea that idea that Well there's a new pitch out there Like we've gotten that question before basically Like is there a new pitch that is still undiscovered

Now this is maybe not A new pitch it is a form Of a slider of a breaking ball Like every pitch basically Is on some kind of continuum Except maybe like a knuckler So you know it's like where do you draw the line between this pitch type and that? Maybe the grip is a little different. Maybe the movement is just

a little more extreme. So I don't know that this is a new pitch exactly, and people have called it different things, but it's interesting that even after all this time, and even after years of pitch data being out there, there was a new advance to be made here and that this new pitch can catch on and just be passed around the league so quickly and seemingly be so effective at least for some pitchers who have the right stuff the right repertoire to work well with that but also like people predicted that this is what the Dodgers would do with Heaney, you know, and people have been predicting a Heaney breakout and debating whether he had another gear in him for a while. And when the Dodgers signed him, Michael Ajeto of Baseball Prospectus wrote basically predicted that this would happen. Very good piece.

Yeah. And so it's interesting that even now, like we can anticipate these things and sometimes it's a player goes to a team that has a reputation for making a certain tweak or just for having good individualized player development that is able to extract more out of players and improve their performance even after they've been established for a while. And people in the public can write that And yet these players are out there And Andrew Heaney signed a one-year $8.5 million deal So anyone could have matched that or exceeded that And you never know, like, maybe the fact that the Dodgers have a track record of improving players Helped them land Andrew Heaney It may have been part of their pitch

But still, like, anyone could have come to the conclusion That, hey, if we do this or that differently with Andrew Heaney, he could reach a new level. And, you know, the jury's still out. Maybe the league will catch up. Maybe he won't be able to sustain these changes. But through at least two starts, it looks like, oh, the Dodgers did exactly what some people expected them to do with Andrew Heaney. them to do with Andrew Heaney. And so you sort of just wonder, like, A, how many pitchers are out there who could have this sort of tweak made to them even now, even after we've been talking about data-driven player development and player enhancements for years now? And B, well, if people publicly were predicting this, then why were teams not just signing Andrew Heaney and say, no, we won't let the Dodgers do that that we will outbid the dodgers and we will do that ourselves i guess one answer is that well it's hard to outbid the dodgers sometimes and you know they have the pitch that they can make to people and say here's what we can do and we've done it before so it's a nice setup the dodgers have where they can afford to pay a lot

for players and then they can also be smart about ways to make those players better after they acquire them yeah i think that you know having the prior proof of concept is really helpful to guys i think that some of this probably has to do with and there were other teams that were in on heaney this offseason right i think that it was reported that the reds were interested in him and the cardinals and the nationals and the Red Sox and the Blue Jays. Like there were other teams that wanted to be in the Andrew Heaney business, but I think that some of it might be a matter of being able to articulate to the player, like, this is what we have noticed in you. And here's specifically how we think we can help you unlock

this new pitch that is going to be more useful to you than what's in your existing repertoire some of it is probably you know i wonder how much of it is teams having enough good advanced scouting to know that the player will be receptive to those kinds of changes because like you can suggest all you want and there are plenty of big leaguers who are going to be like i'm throwing my slider like i don't you know either because they're antagonistic to the change or because they have trouble executing on it right like you still have to do it right you still have to throw the pitch and so being able to say to androhini like here's what we're going to be able to do is one thing having him buy into the process of changing it is another and then having you know being able to

actually help him execute on what you've proposed is is another thing entirely and you're right like he's looked very good so far he has surrendered a lot of really hard contact so there's that piece of it too like it isn't a complete transformation there are still things here that need to sort themselves out in the next couple of you know weeks and months but the the early returns are good and yeah i don't know it's just i wonder sometimes if we're like properly defining the continuum of player dev like i think that at the extreme end are the teams that you know perhaps don't they don't know what they don't know like they don't know what they should be striving to do and then there are the teams that perhaps do know but aren't able to do it just yet they either don't have the in-house personnel that can help them or they don't have the buy-in from the rest of the big league staff or what have

you and then i think there are the teams that are are doing it and doing it really well and then there are the teams that are doing it and doing it really well and then are matched by the financial might of the dodgers and when you're all the way at that end of the spectrum i think that you know it's it's just going to be a really compelling argument to someone like andrew heaney where you say like we think we know how to help you like realize your potential and you get to do it on a club that is probably going to be part of a deep postseason run. And if we can help you, you get to be part of that. You get to be a meaningful contributor to a potential World Series team.

I don't know. If you say that to someone and then you give them $8.5 million, I think they're going to want to hang out for seven months. Yeah, you'd think. He's basically throwing two pitches in his starts this week. It's like four- four seamer sweeper yes jay wrote about the sort of early returns on heaney and yeah he has thrown his four seamer 48.7 of the time the sweeper 48.1 and his change up five times yep 3.2 and maybe because of the increased rate of sweepers, the average horizontal movement of sliders is up appreciably league-wide this year.

So it's really interesting to see these things catch on so quickly and spread from team to team. And you just wonder how pervasive it will be. It's almost like, you know, to use a comp that is much more disturbing, it's like looking at some new COVID variant or something. And it's like, how effective will this one be? How transmissible will this be? And how quickly will this become the dominant form? Hey, that's where my mind is going these days. I'm sorry. But some of the variants, they're not as potent as others, and they're not as communicable, and others are. Before you know it, this variant that you heard about like a week ago is now like suddenly the dominant variant in at least some regions.

It looks like maybe we're heading that way with sweepers. And I don't know that this will fit in everyone's arsenal, but for those who need it, it sounds like, you know, if this could benefit you, you're at least going to be introduced to the idea and it's probably not great news for batters on the whole yeah so another bit of news here game lengths in the majors games are still long games have been three hours and 10 minutes so far this season or three hours and eight minutes for nine inning games but in the minors there has been a drastic change just made this past weekend so on saturday new more aggressive pitch clock rules went into play across the minors and it seemed to have an immediate effect so this new ultra aggressive pitch clock 14 seconds between

pitches with the bases empty 18 seconds with runners on coupled with rules that require hitters to remain in the batter's box and these rules began to be enforced just about i guess a week into the minor league season and it seemed to cut game times by about 25 minutes like overnight suddenly the average game time in the first day that this was in effect for 9-inning games was 2 hours and 38 minutes, which is basically flashing back to the 80s, at least in the big leagues.. So that's kind of amazing that that happened. I mean, it's not shocking. We have seen that sort of thing happen before when new rules are put in place. And it's all about the enforcement because often these things will start and then umps will start to let it slide and they'll get lax about enforcement and hitters and pitchers

will find ways around it. lacks about enforcement and hitters and pitchers will find ways around it. But for now, they seem to be committed to this and just kind of eyeballing box scores since then. It seems like a lot of games are still well under three hours. So again, like I guess you get to the point where it's almost too fast, but I don't think we're anywhere near that now. We're way far away from talking about our games too fast so i don't know that i want baseball to be like speed chess or something like that but i think there's a lot of room for improvement here and if it's just cutting out dead air like this definitely works at least initially it is proven to work and games go on and yes there are some strange things that happen

initially as everyone adjusts to this so the red sox pitcher darwin's and hernandez he struck out the side on eight pitches i believe because there were two automatic strikes so the way that this works is that if pitchers take too long there's an automatic ball assessed if hitters take too long there's an automatic strike assessed which uh seems i guess slightly disproportionate? Because you only have three strikes and four balls, but harsh penalties. And for now, at least they're actually upholding them. So this just confirms in my mind that the pitch clock works and that everyone gets used to it initially and that we are heading for this perhaps as soon as next season in MLB. And it probably won't be as drastic as this, at least initially. So I wouldn't expect a 25-minute fall in game times necessarily. But even if you could lop off 10, 15 minutes, get under the three-hour mark, that would be a victory.

And again, I don't think you're losing a whole lot. Yeah, I think that we have talked a lot about all the different things that people fret over when the pitch clock comes into play. I think people, when this finally makes its way to the majors, will be surprised how much they don't notice it, really. So there's that piece of it. I agree with you that the balance seems a little bit wrong, but I am glad that they are finally saying, hey, stop fussing with all your stuff in the box

and just stand in there. Yep. Because you need both things. Like the amount of time that guys spend moving around and fixing, your gloves are on. They're not going to come off. You're fine.

You can leave them be. Yep. So I think that that part of it is positive. But in my experience, seeing this in action, not the most recent change, but in prior iterations in minor league parks, it's just the game does have a nice flow. It does kind of move in a good way.

So we'll have to see what it looks like when it finally comes to the big leagues. I imagine that there will be an adjustment period, and then there will be the adjustment back to the adjustment where guys try to push it a little bit again. We've seen that in the minors too, where enforcement sort of started to flag, and then game times crept back up again. But it's good. Pitch clock is good.

And as I wrote with Rob Arthur last year, almost everyone who's in the majors now has been exposed to the pitch clock already. Either they've come up through the minors where the pitch clock was in place. They've had rehab assignments, whatever it is. They've experienced it in spring training. Everyone has had a taste of the pitch clock and a chance to get acclimated. So I don't think it'll be as big a shock to the system as some people fear. All right.

We also got some initial sense this weekend of what is going to happen when teams travel to toronto and parts of those teams do not travel to toronto yeah so because of the vaccine mandates in place in canada players who are not vaccinated are not making the trip to play the blue jays so the a's were playing the Blue Jays this past weekend and catcher Austin Allen and pitchers A.J. Puck and Kirby Sneed did not make that trip. And then subsequently there has been a COVID breakout of sorts for the A's involving those three players as well as other players.

Not the best. Those three players as well as other players, not the best. So we don't know whether those unvaccinated players perhaps contributed to some sort of outbreak. It's also possible that I think when you cross the border from Canada to the U.S., but maybe not the other way around, you have to get COVID tests, I think. And so we don't know whether the unvaccinated players who didn't make that trip may have contributed to that breakout. Also, when you make the trip to Canada, you have to get a COVID test to enter. So it's possible, I suppose, that some of the A's positives might partially have come from players who didn't have symptoms, but were positive and didn't realize it until they had to take that test to enter. So even some of the vaccinated players, I guess. I think that might actually be a U.S. restriction in that Canada may not require tests for vaccinated individuals to enter, but there are tests involved. And so you might see some teams not only have certain players not make that trip, but then also some positives result from that trip because of

mandatory testing that happens anyway after that we heard that the red socks will be making a trip to toronto as well they are going to have players who will not be making that trip tanner hauck the starting pitcher who was scheduled to make a start there he will not be going because he's not vaccinated he said i'm bummed that i won't be able to make that start i think it's a personal choice for everyone whether they get it or not how many times have we heard that alex cora said there would be other players who would not make that trip and so if you don't make that trip you're placed on the restricted list yeah you don't get paid you don't get service time well they can decide right the team has discretion over whether i see they're paying you i'm pretty sure okay i think

that was what they said after there are real costs even if it's just lost playing time right the service time piece you're not going to get credit right and players are opting not to do that and you know people have talked about uh well is this an advantage for the blue jays others have objected to phrasing it that way because of of course, the Blue Jays are playing under the same rules here. It's just that all of their players now are vaccinated. Makes a lot of sense that Kirby Sneed got dealt away from Toronto, put it that way. That could be why, yes. It's not as if the Blue Jays are getting some special exemption or something here. It's like any team could decide to get universally vaccinated. All of these players could get vaccinated and play in Toronto.

And they've decided not to. And the Blue Jays players, at least the ones who are still there, have decided to. So, you know, we could quibble with whether it's an advantage or whether it's not right to phrase it that way i think we could say that the blue jays might potentially win more games than they would have otherwise because players are choosing not to get vaccinated and not make this trip and you can balance that against the fact that well there may have been players who the blue jays could not acquire or even had to deal away because they did not want to get vaccinated so i don't know which one is more beneficial or less disadvantageous or however you want to put it.

But for now, at least like at the end of the season, I guess we can look back and, you know, it's not as if Austin Allen and AJ Puck and Kirby Sneed not making that trip is necessarily like going to give the Blue Jays an enormous advantage. But over the course of a full season, teams playing shorthanded because some of those players have made those choices, like it could add up in the long run. So we will be able to track this and, you know, hopefully there will be fewer players like this as the season goes on and some players will decide this is not worth it. I have done the research, quote unquote, and my personal choice or whatever is that I'm going to get the vaccine. But yeah it did provide an incentive for some players to

right like trevor story with the red sox right so you know there were there were definitely guys who saw this as a compelling reason to do it you know we'll just be excited that they're that they showed up at the party even though they came late right so there's that piece of it i think it's gonna be hard to disentangle because like part of this is also just the Blue Jays are a really good baseball team. Yeah, sure. Right? So there's that piece of it. But I think that the way to frame it is to think about it not in terms of it being a

Blue Jays advantage, but a Red Sox or a Yankees or an A's or whoever it is, self-imposed disadvantage, right? That is where the decision making is sitting, right? Like that is where the decision-making is sitting, right? That's the direction that the choice is flowing. And that's in some ways just not the Blue Jays' problem. Yeah. You know, there is a very easy remedy to this, right? You know, I don't know that we will be able to point quite so cleanly

to this decision relative to, say, intentionally walking someone with the bases loaded. But, you know, I imagine it'll matter some. And if the concentration of guys who are unvaccinated and not able to play happens to be more tightly clustered in the AL East, it might matter a great deal. might matter a great deal. So, you know, they're right that this is a personal choice, but in a way that is true, whether it's a question of public health or whether you're showing up for your teammates, like it's one that affects other people.

Yep. Is it possible that Joe Maddon was looking at the Apple probabilities on the screen when he made this decision? And maybe the Apple probabilities say- Was that game an Apple TV game? I don't think it was, actually. I don't think that game was an Apple TV game.

No. I don't think so. That would have been good. I could have imagined the Apple probabilities saying, hey, walk Corey Seeger here and the reach-based probability will be 2% or something. Madden checking out the screen, oh boy, maybe I should do this. Yeah. Those probabilities did not make any more sense to me on this past broadcast than they had the week before.

But at least they trimmed a digit off. They are now only going to one decimal place instead of two. So that's progress. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Now I feel much better about giving them tiny bits of money several times a game. Yes. All right. Also,

Ichiro threw a ceremonial first pitch and as opposed to most ceremonial first pitches, he really fired it in there. Oh, yeah. Which is not surprising for Ichiro. This was before a Mariners game. Now, there was some fake news or at least a joke that was misinterpreted because there was one tweet that said he had thrown this 93.6 miles per hour. And then it turned out that that was just picking a number out of a hat the actual number according to the mariners information people and stat cast was 84.5 still not bad for a 48 year old non-pitcher for the most part throwing a ceremonial first pitch 84 and a half

miles per hour that could be a record i don't know but tellingly perhaps the 93.6 miles per hour. That could be a record. I don't know. But tellingly, perhaps the 93.6 mile per hour tweet has like 1500 retweets or something. And the 84.5 clarification follow-up has like 60. That's kind of emblematic of the way that Twitter and information spreads. Although I guess the 93.6 one also had a video of the pitch, which could be why it was shared so much. one also had a video of the pitch which could be why it was shared so much but however you slice it 84 and a half or 93.6 it was a pretty impressive pitch so you can just add that to the fire of itro could be the home run king if you wanted to and itro could be a successful pitcher if you wanted to we all like to think that we have boundless potential as human beings to do all sorts of things. And in a lot of respects, baseball is predicated on the delusion that that is true, right?

Because if you're a guy in low A, you have to think that you can be a big leaguer or an all-star, even if it never ends up happening. Because otherwise, how would you get through the grind, the crushing grind of the minors? And obviously, a lot of people are disappointed but i you know i think that ichiro is probably the exception that proves the rule i have faith in his boundless potential as a human being even now yeah i'd like to and in other al west news the oakland coliseum or whatever they're calling it these days, is infested with feral cats. What? Yeah.

It's always something. You spend one day editing a Cleveland Guardians prospect list and you miss a lot. Feral cats? Yeah. I mean, this is not necessarily a new problem. No, like there are loose cats. Ballpark cats are a rich tradition. But apparently now the rats are no longer a problem, which seems directly related to the explosion in the feral cat population. But now the cats have gotten out of control.

They are, I guess, an invasive species. They have no natural predators here. So they have taken over the Coliseum, and the executive director of the Okinawa-Meda County Coliseum Authority, Henry Gardner, says, we have been invaded by these cats. The population keeps increasing them. He has ideas for the cats. Euthanizing them is not an option, so that's

nice. He said the plan is to relocate them a few at a time to new homes, and they're considering some advertising or promotional opportunities here for people to adopt the cats. And I don't know, I mean, it's been everything short of a plague of locusts at this ballpark over the decades. I mean, with, you know, pipes bursting and the field flooding and what have you. So now it's feral cats and it says that the patrons have not complained about the feral felines. So that's nice.

They are thinking about securing the dumpsters on the property to limit the food source. However, they don't want to starve the cats. So they're trying to find a humane solution to this, it sounds like. So you're a cat owner. Would you want a feral cat from the Oakland Coliseum? I mean, you already have multiple cats, right? So you may not have room in your home for yet another cat but if you were in the market for a cat would you want a baseball cat um i mean like to be clear the cat doesn't know that there's baseball happening

there the cat is just in a warm place like cats cats don't care about your hobbies the coliseum always but yes not always but like a sheltered place, put it that way. Kept from the damp and the rain a little bit. This is like a real if you give a mouse a cookie kind of situation, you know. Yeah, if you give a cat a mouse. Yeah, there you go. I mean, I think that all cats should have the opportunity to make someone wonder whether the cat likes them,

whether the cat has a rich and full inner life, whether the cat is plotting your murder. I think that that's an opportunity that every cat should have. They should be able to bring that level of disquiet into somebody's home. I mean, sure. I guess I would take a baseball cat. What would you name a baseball cat, Ben? You haven't done baseball pet name stuff. Grumpkin's not.

No. That's not a- It's more of a Game of Thrones reference. Right. And I'm a dog guy, not a cat guy. But I don't know. Something Oakland, Alameda County Coliseum themed. What is its actual name now?

Is it like Oco now? Isn't it Ring Central? Oh, it's right. It's Ring Central. So there you go. Ring Central. You could name the cat Ring Central. Yeah, that's terrible.

Ring is, that's not a good cat name. No, I guess not. You don't want to name it Ring. But yeah, I mean, they sell like dirt from ballparks, right? Oh, yeah. You'd think they could give away cats. People like Ring. But yeah, I mean, they sell like dirt from ballparks, right? Oh, yeah. You'd think they could give away cats. People like cats.

So sure, why not? They sell seats and all sorts of, you know, broken bat shards and all kinds of stuff. I do hope that they're able to like help the cats out and find them homes. I want to know how many cats it is. Yeah, I'd like to know too. Like how many cats? It doesn't specify. Like infestation suggests hundreds of cats and that seems like it's probably too high a number yeah yeah invasion that's you know the cat's not there's no intent behind the cat being there there's no strategy

other than being out of again out of the elements and near what I imagine is just like really bountiful food options, right? Like if you're a cat, if you're any kind of animal taking refuge in a stadium, in any kind of sport park, you're just going to, I bet a lot of, are the cats fat? Like, are they going to be fat cats? Fat ballpark cats? Because of all the food around, maybe less so now because they've taken care of the rodent problem. Right.

Yes. And they're securing the dumpsters. So, yeah, I don't know. Maybe you can name them after Sean Murphy's delightful hinders. Yeah. That's one way you could go. You could name a cat, but you have to name it delightful hinder. You can't just name it hinder.

You got to call it delightful hinder. And then you have to shorten it to like Hindy. Like, can I be Hindy? Yeah, that's not so bad. I would name a cat Hinder. Wouldn't put it past the A's to roster some of these cats. They'll play for the league minimum. Just have a cat running out there in the outfield.

Save some cash. Speaking of which, MLB average salary is up this year. So that was a little bit of news too. Now it's not way up, historically speaking, but the average salary in the major leagues as of opening day was $4.4 million. Now that is skewed a bit because you had 28 players on rosters and the extra players were making the league minimum. So that average, though, is up 5.9% from the start of last season.

It is still below the record from 2017, which is when things kind of peak before salaries started to stagnate. So payrolls were up in general just because there are more players on opening day rosters now than there were last year. But they did some adjustments in this AP story I read, and they noted that had the average not been lowered by those couple extra players who were mostly making the league minimum on every roster, then the average would have been a record 4.62 million. So it is an increase, and also that will go up after the fact retroactively because of the $50 million bonus pool for some of the lower-salary players. So if you add that in, then the average they project will actually be $4.68 million. So it's a new record. It's up.

It does reflect some of the changes that the Players Association pushed for in the new CBA, whether it's that bonus pool or its higher minimum salaries. But if you adjust for inflation, which I hear is high these days. Have you heard that? Yeah, gas price is out of control. The number is not dramatically up over where it was several years. And if you adjust for inflation, it's probably not up at all, in fact. So that gives you a sense of why players were pushing for those things and why many players were not quite content with what they ended up extracting in those negotiations. So at least it's not totally flat or down. So there was some meaningful change there. But also, I don't know that the revenue distribution will be all that different from the way it was yeah it's the sort of thing where it's like you don't want it would be bad

if the number weren't moving in that direction but it isn't necessarily good yeah right yeah and the average salary probably inflates things in most people's mind maybe you'd rather see the median salary because so many players are making a whole lot less than the league average. And it sounds, according to the story, as if the payroll disparity among players decreased slightly. So the 50 highest paid players are getting 30.3% of salaries, down from 33.4% at the start of last season, but still above the 28.6% in 2017. still above the 28.6% in 2017. So there's a little bit of a narrowing there, maybe because of the increase in the minimum salaries. But still, you have Max Scherzer making $43 million, and then you have a lot of people making, what, $700,000 is the new minimum. So no one's weeping for them, I'm saying. But just note that it's not as if everyone is making $4 million. Most players are making a lot less than that. Right. I think that they, relative to sort of like the national average salary, are doing quite well. But if we're thinking about it in terms of both what players

who have had the benefit of going through free agency have had, or even the players who have gone through arbitration, and certainly relative to the amount of money that is flowing into the sport, you know, it's very important to keep those proportions sort of in mind because you and I, like, I'd love to make $700,000 a year. That'd be great. But I think that we can appreciate

how the industry adjustment for baseball players is perhaps different than those working in, say, sports media. Right. And the league-wide revenue should increase if only because of an attendance boost. And I just noticed this, but it seems like attendance has bounced all the way back to where it was pre-COVID. And where it was pre-COVID was down from where it had been a few years before that. But for instance, 2018, the per game average attendance was 28,659. 2019, it was 28,203. This year, so far, 28,517. So it's been right in line with where it was in the couple seasons prior to COVID.

Now, those are full season numbers, and this is through mid-April, which, if anything, I think probably makes this look better because usually April attendance is lower relative to later in the year when it warms up and maybe kids are out of school and you have pennant races. And so attendance typically ticks up. Of course, we are only in mid-April here, and I guess opening day skews things a bit because that's typically a sellout in most places. But still, this is encouraging. I think that it has bounced back to this point. And, you know, you no longer have COVID restrictions when it comes to who is allowed to attend parks. And it seems like in many metrics across society, behavior has largely, in a lot of areas at least in respects, returned to pre-covid behavior for better or worse

and that seems to be the case at mlb park so far this season so i don't know if this is evidence of pent-up demand a concept that we talked about whether people would really flood back into ballparks because they've gone a couple years without going at all i was sort of skeptical of that idea and i don't know if this corroborates that that is happening. It's just bounced back to basically where it was before. But even that, I guess, is encouraging. So that's something to know. Well, and so here's a question for you. This is one of those things where I am very nervous that I am not remembering the past clearly and that the rate isn't actually different. Doesn't it seem like we've had a lot of weather postponements? Yeah, I don't know. It's hard for me to calibrate that in my mind.

Like there have been a bunch, but there was one year fairly recently where there was like a historic number. I don't think we're there yet, but yeah, there have been a fair amount and it's been cold in a lot of places. It's been cold. There's been rain. There's been like sleet and other bits of precip that have been bad so i don't i don't actually know if it is just the the recency bias of like i'm literally looking at

a tweet from the cleveland guardians as we're talking about how they have rescheduled tonight's game too and they had a postponement yesterday but i think that those numbers are encouraging because at the very least it doesn't seem like there are fewer weather postponements than there have been in prior years and we're still seeing the spike and i you know we have to adjust for opening day and all that good jazz but it seems good that people want to see baseball you know because we want them to want to see baseball because we like to see baseball and we like to talk about baseball and we find that people enjoy us talking about it more when they have also seen it. Yes. So I think that that part is good.

You know, I do wonder if, and it would be hard to isolate it to this in particular, not all of these teams have opened at home. And so like, you know, take this with a grain of salt. But I do wonder if the presence of top prospects helps to move the needle on some of that stuff at all like our fans more inclined to go check out a team that perhaps isn't thought to be good or isn't expected to be good because you know I get to go see Steven Kwan now yeah yeah that's a factor possibly and the other notable thing to know about this early season and the rates that we've seen thus far is that home run rates are down. Offense is down.

Something seems to be up with the ball, best we can tell. We talked about this maybe a week or so into the season. We noted that it was too early then and it's too early even now to come to any firm conclusions. But the home run rate was down in spring training. And yes, it was a weird compressed spring training. And so who knows, but thus far this year, even when you compare to the same period in previous seasons, which it's very important to do because the weather is colder and the ball does not travel as well now, even if you do that adjustment, it still seems like home runs

are not flying. The ball is not flying offenses down it was noted on sunday by jeremy frank on twitter that there were only 15 home runs hit in a full slate of games which he noted was the fewest in a day with 14 or more games since 2014 and it does seem as if you know it's not that the dead ball is back or anything, but something is happening here. So just looking from April 7th, which was opening day this year, through April 18th, which was Monday, the rate of home runs on contact, so home runs divided by at-bats minus strikeouts, basically balls in play, 3.9% of those balls have been home runs. Last year, for the same dates, it was 4.6%. The year before, peak home run rate of 2019, it was 5.5%. And 2018, 4.2%. 2017, 4.3%. 2016, 3.99 percent so basically we are back to a 2016 ish level of the ball leaving the ballpark on balls in play and if you break it down other ways jim albert at the blog baseball with r he did an analysis based on stack cast data and he looked at just a certain subset of batted balls, batted balls that are hit, I think, between 20 and 40 degrees and 95 and 115 miles per hour.

And in some years, like the peak home run rate years, something like 40 percent or well more than 30 percent of those balls have been home runs. This year, it is well under 30 percent. Even this is comparing the same time periods in each season. So it seems like batters are hitting the ball just as hard that the contact has produced exit velocities and launch angles and so forth that would lend themselves to home runs just as much. But those balls do not seem to be carrying as well, and they are not leaving the park as often. And offense is down. And this is the thing 689 ops league wide through monday's games that is compared to 698 through the same dates or during the same dates of last season

when we were all freaking out about offense then it's even lower now and in every previous season that i looked at even when the home run rate was the same or even lower prior to the ball being juiced back in 2015, 2014, 2013, the OPSs back then were 700, 712, 730, 712 again, 706, 749 in 2019, 698 last year, 689 this year so 233 batting average 313 on base 377 slugging not so different from last year which was also 233 batting average a little lower on base 310 but a little higher slugging 388 so it would appear that the ball is not carrying as well could be because the ball's construction is different maybe there's only one new model of ball in play. Maybe it's the one that MLB said it was going to be introducing last year that would fly a little less far. And then they ended up using two different models, supposedly because of production shortfalls. Maybe now they're only using one model.

Maybe it's the intentionally de-juiced model, or maybe it has something to do with the fact that the balls are stored in humidors in every ballpark now, 30 up from 10 last year, which, again, doesn't always suppress offense. Depends on the park and the environmental conditions can actually increase offense in some places. But because of one of those things or because of both, based on the evidence we have thus far, it seems like batters are hitting the ball hard, but it's not going as far. And just anecdotally, there have been a bunch of times where an announcer called one wrong, you know, launched into their home run call. Granted, some of those were John Sterling, who is notorious for that, or Matt Paskurjan on the Angels broadcast, who is not traveling and is doing play-by-play remotely, which is not great because there's a delay. And also he is getting some calls wrong. But it seems like, you know, players have said, managers have said, broadcasters, fans have said, you know,

there seem to be some very hard hit balls that look like no doubters. And then there is doubt. So early, early yet. But that is something to be aware of as well. Well, and I think that in a perfect world, we would notice these things, right? And we would test them now. We would say early yet,

and then we'd wait until it was a little less early yet. And we'd say, here's what offense looks like now. And then we would go to the league and we'd say, here's what we've noticed. What do you think? And they tell us what it means. And then we would say, cool. Or we wouldn't say cool.

Maybe we'd say, that's terrible. And we would gnash our teeth. But we would have a sort of an open and frank dialogue about this. And we'd get straight answers from Major League Baseball. We might even know, say, in advance of the season starting, what kind of ball, what sort of pal we're hanging out with all season. But that's not the approach that the league has taken. And instead we are left to like observe ops and be like what does this mean what is the thing that is determining whether you know there's gonna be a bunch of home runs or not

is it the humidor is it the ball is it all the things working together the answer to that is yes but to what end we don't know quite yet right we've spent a lot of time over the years talking about this on the podcast we've spent a lot of time over the years talking about this on the podcast we've spent a lot of time over the years talking about all the other like weird little scandals that the game has had and i think every time i've said it's really weird that we talk about anything other than the fact that we don't know what kind of baseball we have year to year and i'm here to say that again because it's you know april 19th and we're a little over a week in and we're noticing that the ball is different. And we're going to have to spend like brain space thinking about that as time goes on.

And I would prefer to think about it less, but we can't. So here we are. Yeah. And the interesting thing is that maybe this is the right ball now. Like I could be convinced that this is actually the properly calibrated ball that we have found the happy medium here because 3.9% of balls in play being homers, that's fine. That's not too high. It's not too low necessarily.

It's higher than it was in 2014 when we were fretting about the lack of offense. It's lower than it was a year ago or two years ago or three years ago when we were fretting about too many homers. Maybe this is the Goldilocks zone for the baseball the problem is that offense is cratering at least so far without the ball being as juiced because of all the other trends that we've been talking about because of the sweeper because velocity is up even though it's april still the league-wide velocity 93.9 is higher than it was for the full season last year. Even with the short spring training and everything, it seems like velocity has ticked up yet again. So you have pitchers who are throwing harder, who are throwing nastier stuff, and strikeout rates keep rising. They're a little off the very, very peak right now. You have a universal DH, for one thing, which is propping the numbers up a bit. But even so, we are in this era where you have a very three true outcomes type ball and you have players who have been conditioned to swing for the fences by the juiced ball and by analytics that say, hey, home runs are good. You should try to hit the ball in the air.

That makes some sense. And so we've got a lot of homers. We just don't have a lot of hits at this point. A lot of walks, but not a lot of singles. And now fewer homers. More of those flies are turning into outs. And so you just wonder whether, well, in the absence of some other change, unless you're going to do something with pitcher usage or where the mound is or whatever to curtail the velocity or just the unhittable stuff that pitchers are throwing these days. Well, if you take away the juiced ball long term, I guess you could say, well, batters will be incentivized to aim for contact more often and they will stop swinging for the fences as much and they'll try to put the ball in play.

And I guess if you, you know, take the shift away, then maybe that could be a bit more advantageous possibly. But right now, if all you've done is deaden the ball a bit, then you are taking away the one weapon that hitters really had. And so we might end up with a pretty stagnant offensive profile this season. Again, we'll see. Inevitably, the numbers will pick up as the weather gets warmer. But even with sticky stuff banned and to some extent being enforced at least, we're still seeing not the offensive profile that you would probably choose. Super low batting averages and now not a lot of slug either and less scoring. And I think on the

whole, fans like scoring and they tend to tune in and go to games more often when scores are higher at least some studies have suggested so worrisome in the short term maybe in the long term there will be an adjustment but I just I don't know if you can adjust to the average fastball being 94 and then sweepers on top of that so you take away the one thing that was counteracting that, it's risky business. And maybe it's a bit disturbing that MLB looked at the way offense was working and said, what we should do is make things harder for the hitters. Right. Well, and I think part of what is frustrating here is that when you look at what they are trying to do with rule changes, like we have remarked that they're testing in

the minor so many things at once in some cases. And so it's like, what is actually going to be meaningful to shifting the balance between hitters and pitchers? And how are these things interacting with one another? And I feel like we don't always have a great sense of that. And then operating in the background of all of that stuff is going to be this just huge unknown variable, which is the baseball. And so it seems like this is a place where if what you're trying to do is test some stuff with the aim of improving pace of play and putting more balls in play and making the game sort of more dynamic and less reliant on the three true outcomes, like you, especially in that instance, seem to be able to say very clearly, like, here is the ball and

here's what it's going to do most often. And we're not in that spot. And it's very strange. Yep. All right. To end, just a few rapid fire follow-ups here. We talked about beef boys on our previous episode on an email show, what one has to do or be like to qualify as a beef boy. We talked a lot about Yandy Diaz in that discussion because he is a beefy boy, but he doesn't hit for a lot of power and he hits a ton of grounders. And we said his name many times. We said beef many times. We talked about his grounders many times.

But as Ashton Moss pointed out on Twitter, we did not make the obvious connection and call him Ground Beef. It's kind of the perfect nickname for him, right? Can we make this a thing? Yandy Diaz, Ground Beef? I mean, it's so much better than nutting. Yeah.

Debatable. I like both, but yeah. Yandy Diaz, we're dubbing him Ground Beef for now. And we got a couple follow-up questions. Can pitchers be beef boys? Would you like to rule on that? Yeah. Oh, yeah, totally. I think they can be beef boys.

Yep. Yeah. Lince Lin, he's a beefy boy. Yeah, no problem with that. We also got a question about whether vegetarians could be beef boys. For instance, Prince Fielder, who was a vegetarian at least for part of his career, can he be a beef boy? And what I pointed out is that cows are herbivores and they are literally beef. So I think absolutely a vegetarian can be a beef boy.

Yeah. I mean, I know that there is a particular mammalian context for beef, but it can be a more generic term to refer to one's flesh. You know, we talk about moist as a bad word but we maybe don't talk about flesh as like kind of a nicky you know feel word you know i don't know here i am complaining about nutting and then i'm introducing that idea so i think so i do not i do not think that it requires it does not indicate the consumption of a particular kind of food in order to achieve one's imposing stature, right? It is not as if the beef boys are inherently consumers of beef. I wouldn't dare speculate.

Don't know whether, you know, any of the so-called beef boys are vegetarian. Maybe some of them are pescatarians. We don't know. But I don't think that it implies anything about one's particular consumption habits, nor is it specific to cows. It is just about the flesh. Yeah. I guess this goes against the you are what you eat principle, but it's not about what you put into your body. It's about your body or it's about the state of mind, as I think you said on that episode.

So yeah, you don't have to eat beet necessarily. But another follow-up, we talked about the over-the-ear headphones gesture coming to represent replay review and whether that would continue to represent replay review now that umps are not really using over-the-ear headphones for that process anymore and whether this would linger and whether people would eventually forget what it originally signified or why that became the signifier well kazuto yamazaki listener informed me that in npb and he sent me a video of this which i will link on the show page but managers there to signal

replay reviews they basically draw a box in the air to symbolize the screen seemingly so yeah they just kind of like draw a square or sort of a rectangle kind of thing sort of sloppy it ends up being kind of circular in practice but but basically they draw a screen in the air with their fingers and that is replay review so if managers and mlb are looking for a new signal to adopt for that now that we're no longer using over the earfed headphones don't know that we need to make for that now that we're no longer using over the earfed headphones. Don't know that we need to make that change, but if you're looking for a substitute managers, there is already one in NPV. So we could just borrow that from them, I think. I guess we could. I mean, again, I think the most important thing is that we understand what it is,

what it is meant to communicate. And so I think that it is not so much that the headphone signal might always be meaningful and sort of interpretable by fans, but that symbol is understood now. That action is understood now. And in the future, maybe they have to do a different thing. Maybe they have to do a square. Maybe they will kind of point to their temples to be you know beam it into my brain with your brain rates you know that might end up being the thing but i i think that as long as there are instances as we said of over ear headphones out in the world the fact that the specific equipment has changed within the context of the game it doesn't lose any meaning. And just changing it

to change it might be more confusing. Right. Yeah. And then I also learned it was suggested that Jackie Robinson might have been a candidate for our Stanky draft, not because he broke the color barrier, but because of another rule that he might have inspired. So this is something I was first exposed to this past week on Jackie Robinson Day. But Jackie, apparently, he would sometimes, or at least on opening day 1955, he did break up a double play by let the ball hit him which of course ruled him out but prevented the double play from being completed under the rules at that time the ball was just dead the play was over and so he broke up the double play by sacrificing himself now of course there is a rule that says that the umpire shall declare both the runner and the batter out in that situation so you can no longer game your way out of a double play.

So I was going to retroactively say that we should have drafted Jackie Robinson. However, I did further research about this rule change, and it seems to have been prompted more imminently by others. I don't know whether Jackie pioneered this or whether he picked it up after other players did it, but there were other players who did it after him. And it seems like if anyone deserves credit for actually spurring that rule change, it was perhaps Don Hoke, the former major leaguer of roughly the same time. So in 1957, he was playing for the Cincinnati Redlegs. And I will read from Wikipedia here, in a game against the Milwaukee Braves on April 21st, Hoke was involved in a controversial play that would lead to a change in the rules.

He was on second base and teammate Gus Bell was on first. When Wally Post hit a ground ball to short, Hoke broke up a potential double play by fielding the ball himself and flipping it to Milwaukee shortstop Johnny Logan. Hoke was called out for interference, but Post was given a single on the play. The day before, Johnny Temple let Bell's ground ball hit him with the same result, Temple being called out for interference and Bell being awarded a single.

The two incidents prompted league presidents Warren Giles and Will Herridge to jointly announce a rule change that declared both the runner and batter out if the runner intentionally interferes with a batted ball with no runners allowed to advance. Without the new rule, it was sometimes advantageous for a runner to touch a batted ball because doing so avoided a double play. So I don't know whether you want to give Jackie credit for doing it before those two did or give them credit for actually prompting this rule change more immediately. But as is often the case with these rule changes,

as we discussed, it's usually more than one player who is directly responsible for changing the rules. But that's something I learned about Jackie Robinson on Jackie Robinson Day. And then I learned about that rule as well. Did you see Chris Bryant's comments about the service time manipulation rules in the new CBA? No, what did he say?

He said he was disappointed that it wasn't named after him because Ohtani got his role, so Chris should get his, and I thought that was very funny. Fair enough, yeah. And then lastly, did a stat blast last week about hitters who had broken up the most no-hitters, and we talked about how, well, where do you set the line? I mean, is breaking up a no-hitter when you break it up in the first inning, or does it require it being the sixth or the seventh or the eighth or the ninth

or whatever so we went through the number of players who had broken up the most no-hitters after certain innings thresholds but some of our listeners got even more curious about this and patreon supporter Chris Hannell proposed to frequent stat blast consultant Ryan Nelson that they come up with this like

full no-hitters subtracted probability model to do this more rigorously and comprehensively and find out just on the whole career wise who has subtracted the most no hitters or expected no hitters. And Ryan just went whole hog with this. And I had nothing to do with this. I did not put him up to this I just sat back and watched but he came up with this whole thing where he went year by year and the probability of a hit and the probability of an out given that run environment

and then calculated the probability of the no-hitter at every stage in the game and he summed it all up and you get negatives if you are in a situation where you could break up a no-hitter and you fail to. And you get credit if you do break up the no-hitter. Anyway, the upshot is that Joe Maurer, who we noted has broken up three no-hitters in the ninth, which is tied for the most ever.

He is on top with 1.408 no-hitters subtracted or expected no-hitters subtracted. So there are only four guys who have cumulatively subtracted more than one or at least one no-hitter or expected no-hitter. Maurer, George Scott, and Horace Clark, who we mentioned in that stop last, and then Wally Joyner. And then there are some others we mentioned as well toward the top of that leaderboard like George Hendrick. But I will put that spreadsheet online

because Ryan did a whole lot of work to do that. And if you're wondering who's on the bottom, it is Johnny Logan, former major leaguer Johnny Logan with negative 0.66 no-hitters or expected no-hitters subtracted. So he actually made no-hitters more likely to happen. And that's because he came into a no hitter in the seventh inning or later five times. So he was up in the seventh with no outs, in the eighth with no outs, in the eighth with one out, in the ninth with one

out, and then the 12th with one out. And in those five at-bats, he had two pop-outs and three ground-outs. So those all tanked his stats. He had 15 plate appearances in the fifth and sixth innings of no-hitters, and he went one for 14 with a walk. So Ripper Collins, the guy who professed that he was the All-American louse for breaking up a lot of no-hitters, he's 1,079th on the list. So no, he does not really qualify as someone who did that. But Joe Maurer deserves to be up there. And if you have a no-hitter going, then you Joe Maurer deserves to be up there. And if you have

a no-hitter going, then you really wanted Johnny Logan to be at the plate because he could help you out. So thanks for doing an enormous amount of math and sabermetrics there to give us this answer. Yeah, an incredible amount, an admirable amount, perhaps an ill-advised amount, but an amount we appreciate nonetheless. All right. Well, we have managed to get through my entire long rundown and outline here. I really needed it to keep everything straight. Yeah, I'm going to need to come with GoFlo next time. I feel nervous.

All right. We will stop there. Although I see that as we were speaking, Ben Clemens published yet another post about bases loaded intentional walks, and he calculated it a different way and found out it was still a bad idea. It's still a bad idea. Yeah. The beginning, still, you're not helping your case, Joe. Right. Yeah.

Okay. We'll link to all of that if you want to see just how bad an idea it was. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast

going and help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks. David Harris, Tim Whitehead, Michael M. Morgan Barnes, Matthew Browder, and Judith Boyce. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group, which is great during the season. It has live game chat channels and channels for every individual team. You also get monthly bonus pods hosted by me and Meg, as well as a couple of playoff live streams and more. Anyone, of course, can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild.

You can all also rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please 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. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. And you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with another episode a little later this week.

Talk to you then. Yeah, let's shake up their minds for a little too. Don't you know we're going to shake up their minds. Thank you. Speaking of... Wait, no, I don't actually have a segue here. All right.