Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1848: Shantz Encounter

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about which is more impressive, Reid Detmers throwing a two-strikeout no-hitter or right-handed hitter Anthony Rendon homering from the left side against a position-player pitcher, recount (11:50) the surprisingly long, largely forgotten history of the 20-seconds-between-pitches rule and the pitch clock in pro ball and the big leagues, and […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1848 of the Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought Digesting every word the experts say is which is the more impressive accomplishment, a 22-year-old rookie throwing a two-strikeout no-hitter or a veteran right-handed hitter turning around and hitting a left-handed home run in his first left-handed plate appearance in the majors off of a position player pitcher? There's just so many layers, so many wrinkles to consider here. The position player pitcher part is like, well, important might be too strong. many layers so many wrinkles to consider here the position player pitcher part is like well

important might be too strong he still hit a home run hitting left-handed yeah but it is a caveat right it is an asterisk to add even if it is not the decisive one yeah that sure was the thing that happened in baseball huh yeah that happened about two seconds after we posted our preceding episode and i was like oh no we got to get back on the mic to discuss this important occurrence. That game was wild. So the Angels beat the Rays 12 to nothing on Tuesday night. Reid Detmers, the 22-year-old, threw a no-hitter for the Angels. Not only did he throw a no-hitter, but he threw a no-hitter with two strikeouts, which was very strange the first time that anyone had done that since Francisco Liriano in 2011.

That was like the no-hitter of it all was almost extraneous. Like it's so unusual for a pitcher to throw a complete game period this year. And then for anyone to get through a complete game with two strikeouts, that so rarely happens these days. I mean, that is rarer than no-hitters are. You know, there are fewer complete game two-strikeout outings than there are no-hitters. So that was weird. And offense is so low right now. Batting average is so low right now that the no-hitter was like,

hey, all right, good job, Bree Detmers. Congrats to you. But you got upstaged in your own game by Anthony Rendon hitting this home run. If you ask me which one I will remember longer, I'm pretty sure it is going to be the Rendon Digger, not the Detmers no-hitter. I guess maybe I'll remember them both in my mind because they go together. But what a wild game because on one half of that game, in one half of the innings you had blowout silliness yeah with Brett Phillips pitching for the Rays and Anthony Rendon turning around and

hitting left-handed in the other half of the innings in the top half you had actual suspense and stakes and anxiety about whether Detmers could finish off the snow hitter was just like watching two completely different games going on at the same time. Well, and I think that part of the strangeness for me was that I was like begging for players I like to stop hitting home runs so that poor Reed Detmers wouldn't have to sit in the dugout for longer. Yeah, I wonder if that was Rendon's motivation. Like, hey, I'll just get this over with sooner so we can get Reid back out there. Yeah, because that half inning, Andrew Velasquez singled to lead things off. And then Brandon Marsh grounded into a force out. And then Mike Trout homered.

Mike Trout homered. We haven't said anything about that yet. That was the second one of the game. Multiple times in that game. Yeah, second one of the game. Didn't say anything. And then Otani almost homered himself. Like he just needed a little a little bit more out to right to get it over that little wall and then rendon homered hitting left-handed and then jared walsh doubled and then there were there was a line out and a fly out to end the half inning and and send things back to to detmers but i was i was sitting there

watching it and i was like you guys stop it. You're not helping. I mean, you are, but you aren't. I think you have this one pretty well in hand. You don't need four more runs. So it was a very odd bit of business. And yeah, I can't remember the last complete game or complete game shutout I watched before this one, and I certainly can't remember the last big league game I watched

that had the starter only record two strikeouts so yeah and Detmer's not exactly known for going deep into games no great pitch efficiency not that he even did in this game because he threw 108 pitches which is you know when you what did he have one walk or something and and two strikeouts like you'd think that that would be a pretty tidy little pitch count, but he was still running up his pitch count somehow. It was just so strange. Like, I guess on some level, the two strikeout no hitter, it's more improbable. It's maybe more impressive on a team level, not necessarily on a Reed Detmer's individual level, because it was not an impressive game score for a no hitter, just because, you know, strikeouts generally impressive,

generally lead to good results. But if you're allowing that many balls in play, then it is. And a no-hitter is always really a team accomplishment to some extent. And in this case, he was depending on his defense. Not that there were that many hard-hit balls or really close calls. There was the one play that was ruled an error at first, I think fairly, but there weren't a ton of just like, oh, what an incredible catch

the way that there usually are. There's always at least one of those during a no-hitter. And here it was like almost routine. It was like almost a routine to strike out an error, which is very weird. It was a very strange sort of thing. And I would imagine that if you were an Angels fan who was there that night,

you would have just been struck with the delightful strangeness because i'm given to understand that otani accepted his mvp award in front of the crowd before this game started and then you got to watch you know two mike trout dingers and you got to see the rendon of it all and you got to see you know tani almost hit a home run you got to see a no hitter but i think you would have walked out of that ballpark at the end of the night and been forgiven if you had said what did i just watch yeah what did i just experience and it's not as if you know the rays are a bad baseball team i mean good baseball teams get no hit that's the thing that happens but um it is kind of it just wouldn't have been,

it wouldn't have been what I predicted. Buoyed in part by that performance that night, I have exciting news for you, Ben. What's that? Mike Trout, he doesn't lead baseball in war yet, but he does now officially lead the American League in war. 2.4 to Jose Ramirez's two wins, which, you know, we will put our usual provisos and caveats

and legal disclaimers on them. That means they're essentially the same player. But we will say it all counts now. None of it counted before, but it all counts now. Man, Jeremy Pena, look at that. I enjoy looking at the leaderboard. Yeah. Rendon doesn't get any extra war for that home run. He should, though. I mean, he shouldn't. That would be madness. But, but you know like he gets extra war in our hearts you know that really is impressive like look i'm sure that he has practiced his left-handed swing and batting practice this is not like the first time he tried to do it on a lark although he didn't even switch his chin protector to the right leg it was like on the same old leg so it must have been kind of off the cuff at the spur

of the moment. But I'm sure that he has practiced that. I enjoyed he had this big old leg kick from the left side. Like just hitting a home run with your non-dominant side, if you're not someone who's ambidextrous or practices this all the time, that's really impressive. It's very impressive. I mean, you have to have a certain level of strength and coordination just to hit a ball out of a big league ballpark. We know that Anthony Rendon has that, but to do it left-handed with no practice in a major league game whatsoever, even though it was off of a position player pitcher, obviously that tarnishes it slightly. I know that people, when trying to come up with comps for this accomplishment, slightly. I know that people, when trying to come up with comps for this accomplishment,

they've mentioned Ji-Man Choi, right, who did the same thing. He hit a home run off a real pitcher in his second plate appearance from his opposite side, right? So he was warmed up. Yeah. He had the one PA under his belt, so that was all he needed. But this was, I mean, you have to be like a certain level of elite athlete to step into the box and do something like that, even when Brett Phillips is pitching just to supply the force, which of course, the usual amount of force is not being supplied by Brett Phillips in this case. So you really have to power it out of there with the deader ball. And he did it. And I'm sure that has uh practiced this in the mirror in the batting cage

or whatever it is but still that was a jaw-dropping moment to see something so silly like this is a moment when unwritten rules are out the window or at least they should be because you have a position player pitching and Tony Russo was not managing so he was not there to object but this was just silly on both sides and it was fun to see Rendon having some fun with it if the Rays were just gonna throw in the towel by having Fred Phillips pitch as he does these days and he at least makes that entertaining but really like usually nothing that you could do against a position player pitcher would really impress me but Rendon doing that that actually did remind me oh yeah these guys are really good well and it

I will say we should say I did not see a single solitary soul not even one human who was offended by any of these proceedings so we'll say that there we're not making up a guy to fight with we're just saying like you know if there had been one we would have said oh aren't you silly now I love that when you look at the like this wasn't even a cheap home run either he put it a couple rows back in center like you know he went up over the book wall and i do love though that you look at the the mlb.com like game day play log and it says in play runs 54.2 mile an hour fastball and i know that there's more than just the velocity that goes into it, but is that even a fastball at that point? Can we really call it that? Yeah, it was quite a little

show that they put on. Those 21 and 11 angels, Ben. They didn't win last night, but boy. No, they made it interesting, but then the zombie runner happened and they lost. But I know I have no credibility on this issue because I've been maintaining that the Angels are fun since well before anyone else thought they were fun. And frankly, they weren't really that fun when I was trying to convince people that they were fun. They are actually legitimately fun now, I think, or at least they have been so far this season. They had aspects of fun, you know yeah so I don't think that it was a completely silly thing for you to argue but I will say to work against your favor the things that were fun when they were sort of in the doldrums just made you realize all the

unfun things about it right like you just you're like but they have why aren't they couldn't they won't you please and then they they didn't you know for just like years and years and years at a time and now they are just a good fun baseball team so i think that's pretty exciting it's pretty great i think so too yeah i'm i'm the boy who cried fun as far as the angels being entertaining. But yes, board the bandwagon, everyone. All right. So unless you have any other current events you want to get to, I think this is going to be a history-heavy episode. And I do have a stat blast to relate a little later in this episode. And I think it's going to be a good one. I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, but I am personally excited about it. But before we get to that, there's one other story I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, but I am personally excited about it. But

before we get to that, there's one other story I wanted to relate to you because I was sent on an incredibly deep dive this past weekend by listener Jody. And Jody, he emailed us on Friday night, and I set all my plans aside for the next few hours. You know, I had huge Friday night plans as usual. I was just going to go out with the boys as I do, you know, but I had to cancel everything, clear my schedule because I had a newspaper.com deep dive in my future. And I'm going to do a swear for the second consecutive episode here. Oh no, you're going to get comments in the Facebook group.

I'm working blue these days. Oh, boy. Taking the heat off me. I appreciate it. When you give me a newspapers.com deep dive subject, I am just like a pig in shit like that. I will happily set aside several hours to just plumb the depths of the newspaper.com archives.

And I did here because Jody emailed us about the hidden history of the pitch clock in professional baseball and in Major League Baseball as well. And I learned a lot. And I want to pass along some of what I learned to you and the listeners because this is fascinating to, because we are on the verge of having the pitch clock in Major League Baseball. There was an article earlier this week in The Times about Rob Manfred, who addressed some issues facing the sport with some sports editors. And the story said that Manfred said that MLB had made progress in various minor league initiatives to improve gameplay with a pitch clock being the one closest to implementation at the major league level. So we really are on the verge of the pitch clock. It seems like we're going to see it as soon as next season at the major league level.

And I wrote recently when I wrote about my advocacy for restricting the number of pitchers on the active roster. I wrote that we were on the verge of seeing some previously inconceivable rule changes happen in the majors, and I included pitch clocks on that list. And what I have to say now is that I can no longer call the pitch clock inconceivable because, in fact, it has been conceived and even used for several decades. So I thought that the pitch clock, aside from just a couple of isolated events, was really kind of a new innovation. And it turns out that it's actually been around for quite a while. So Jody emailed us and said,

I just stumbled upon something I think is pretty interesting. When going through some old Orioles game programs, I found a full-page description in the 1969 game program of a new experimental 20-second pitch clock. And he sent us a scan of this that I will link to on the show page. He says, I had heard previously that there was a very rarely enforced rule on the books about pitchers having to deliver within 20 seconds, but I had never heard that there was an actual experiment conducted with a clock on the field at MLB ballparks much less 53 years ago. So with the pitch clock likely to become part of MLB life in 2023, I wondered if you had ever heard about previous experiments such as this one from decades ago.

I wondered what the backstory was for why the clock didn't move past the experimental stage back then. And I wondered these things too. And I did not know the answers to some of these questions. I had no idea that there was a pitch clock in Memorial Stadium where the Orioles were playing in 1969. So I naturally had to look up how this happened. And I learned quite a few things. One thing I did know was that this had been tried briefly in the big leagues by Charlie Finley, the eccentric owner of the Athletics. And in 1965, he actually installed a pitch clock briefly when the A's were still in Kansas City. quoting here from a July 1965 Sports Illustrated piece.

Then Finley installed a 20-second electric clock beside the one-half pennant porch to check on the time it takes pitchers to deliver the ball with no one on base. The rule says that the pitcher has 20 seconds, but the rule is seldom, if ever, enforced. The clock was a glowing reminder of that neglect. Before a game in Kansas City, the rule was read over the loudspeaker, and the clock explained. Finley took down the clock after a few weeks, but while it was up, he was about as popular with umpires as a foul tip. I'm not trying to be popular, Finley said. I'm trying to make it a fair game. So that was one episode where it was actually used.

And in that same genre of a hustler-style owner who is a showman and thinking outside the box and trying to bring people to the ballpark, Bill Veck, a podcast favorite. He had this idea too. And reading here from his book, The Hustler's Handbook, that is his second book, the sequel to his classic Vecchia's in Wreck. So this came out in 1967. And here he's talking about his first ownership of the White Sox, which ended in the early 60s. So he wrote, the great portion of any ball game consists of the pitcher holding the ball or throwing it to the catcher. Anything that can somehow turn that frozen tableau into a scene fraught with drama and excitement has solved about 75% of your problems. According to the rules, the pitcher is supposed to deliver the ball

within 20 seconds when nobody is on base. Anybody who can tell me when he lasts on umpire call that one wins a free trip to Leo de Rocher. We had a timer built into the scoreboard, which I called, with characteristic corniness, the pitchometer. I think it's the pitchometer. Pitch-o-meter?

Pitchometer? We definitely should bring this back. I think the new pitch clock should be called the pitchometer. Brought to you by Camping World. Yes, exactly. It is well to keep nomenclature simple and to the point, save the cute and the clever for the gag itself. I think the pitchometer is cute and clever. set up to tick off the seconds for us. When the hand hit the 20-second mark, it activated a siren that was guaranteed to knock the pitcher's hat off and startle lovers in the downtown hotels. With luck, it might even call the umpire's attention to the violation of the rule. In any good promotion, or for that matter, any good publicity idea, timing is everything. It is essential to pick the spot that will merit the widest possible coverage and bring on the

most delighted or inflamed comment, I wanted to find the right pitcher to unveil the pitchometer against a pitcher who is known for his sensitivity, for instance, or a pitcher like Camilo Pascual, who is particularly good and also particularly slow. You want to annoy, upset, et cetera, et cetera, the pitcher. However, he says, I was so intent upon getting the maximum value out of my pitchometer that I got no value out of it at all. Before, he says, I was so intent upon getting the maximum value out of my pitchometer that I got no value out of it at all. Before it was unveiled, I was unhorsed. The pitchometer still sits there like a coiled tiger, unheard, unseen, unleashed. I think Vec had to sell his share of the team in 1961. So he debuted his exploding scoreboard in the White

Sox Park in 1960, and the pitchometer was kind of supposed to go along with that. But he never got to use it because he was just waiting for his moment. So the pitchometer was just an idea that, as far as I know, was never actually used. Later on that page of that book from 1967, by the way, he predicts perfectly that scoreboards would be capable of showing the speed and type and trajectory of the pitch. He was really a visionary. So that, as far as I knew, was the history of pitch clocks, pitch timers, pitchometers in Major League Baseball or in professional baseball, for that matter. But there's more.

There is, in fact, much more, as I was to discover. So the first thing to point out, I think, is that this 20-second rule goes back a very, very long way. I was corresponding with a couple of historians about this, Richard Hershberger and also John Thorne, the official historian of Major League Baseball. And they told me that the rule about 20 seconds between pitches, that went into effect in 1901. Yeah. Yeah, so the text of the rule said, The umpire shall call a ball on the pitcher each time he delays the game by failing to deliver the ball to the batsman when in position for a longer period than 20 seconds. Then the following year, 1902, they added some detail to this. The umpire shall call a ball on the pitcher each time he delays the game by failing to deliver the ball to the batsman when in position for a longer period than 20 seconds,

accepting that in the case of the first batsman in each inning, the pitcher may occupy not more than one minute in delivering warm-up pitches, not to exceed five balls to a baseman. So this goes back a long, long way, probably long before stopwatches were widely available. Yeah, I was going to say, there's like a technical component to this that is adventurous, right? Ambitious, one might say. Yes, and so we will learn shortly when it comes to the actual pitch clock. But they did have stopwatches in the 19th century, but I'm guessing that they were not dependable and portable and inexpensive, and I don't know how common they were in 1901.

Perhaps they had them by then. But anyway, that's how far back this goes. So just like having rules to prevent players from dawdling, there is a very long history of that. And there is also a very long history of everyone ignoring those rules completely. So that's why we still have this 20-second rule on the books. This is 20 seconds with the bases empty, of course, and no one really observes it. And that's why we're talking about the pitch clock in the first place. So what I was able to determine is that periodically, every now and then, they would say, hey, remember that 20-second rule? We should start observing that and enforcing that and actually penalizing players. So I found a 1955 article.

In 1955, the average game time the year before had finally hit the two and a half hour mark for the first time. The game times had increased. I mean, you know, you can go back to any year in baseball history and someone is complaining about how long the games are taking. So whether it's because they're now two hours instead of less than two hours, or they're two and a half hours instead of two hours, or they're three hours instead of two and a half hours, someone is always complaining about that. So in 1955, they said, okay, we're going to get serious

about this. We are going to start to actually enforce these things. And so I was looking at some articles and I'm going to cite and quote many articles here. I will just put them all on a Google doc or something and link to them on the show page. But this 1955 piece says, the old rule to which no one paid hardly any attention required him to deliver a pitch within 20 seconds after assuming pitching position. And then the new rule, which they were thinking of at the time having a new rule, was that you would have to throw the ball 20 seconds after it has been returned to the pitcher. So just taking out the part about him having to be in position, and it

would just say, well, you've got 20 seconds once you get the ball back. So it says, that timid move toward keeping games from dragging out over two hours has possibilities. For one thing, it will prevent the stalling pitchers from walking around the mound, rubbing the ball, adjusting caps, tying shoestrings, tightening belts and loosening collars between the time they get the ball and assuming pitching position. with the duty of timing pitchers. And it will be legal, of course, for any of them to drop the flag, blow the whistle, or do whatever an empire is supposed to do when he catches a loafer beyond the 20 second limit. So that was 1955. It didn't do anything. The games continued to gradually get longer. And then a couple of years later, they realized, okay, we actually have to amend the rule here. We're not going to just pay lip service to enforcing the rule on the book, but we're going to change the rule or add a note to the rule so that now, as I said, it will not just be that you have 20 seconds by the time you're in position.

You are just going to have 20 seconds from the time you get the ball back. You are just going to have 20 seconds from the time you get the ball back. And that is actually going to make a difference here. And they put some rules in place or started enforcing some rules about batters not being able to step out of the box. I mean, you know, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. Nothing is new under the sun. Cal Hubbard, the umpire supervisor in 1957, he says a batter shall not leave his position in the batter's box after the pitcher comes to a set position or starts his windup. If the pitcher pitches, the umpire shall call ball or strike as the case may be. This means just what it says,

no more of this fiddling around to wipe an imaginary bug out of the eye or hitch up the belt while the pitcher waits. It won't take long. The first time one of those jitterbugs steps out, the pitcher will fire one down the middle and it will be a strike. Of course, he might miss and it would be a ball. So this was the idea. Okay, we're going to get serious about this. We've got this new, more specific rule. Another interesting note in this 57 piece is that Hank Greenberg, the great Hall of Fame player who at the time was the GM of Cleveland, I think. It says Hank Greenberg wanted to put up a big 22nd clock in all the parks. But the umpire supervisor says, we won't need that.

Oh, boy. Yeah. So, famous last words. Yep. The new rules may save time on the pitches, but wait until the rhubarbs start. We've got lots of articles about how there are going to be a bunch of rhubarbs because the players are going to be upset about being called on how long they're taking here. There are also some articles that were critical of, well, wait, how are they actually going to enforce this without the clocks being on there? So Edwin Rommel, who was an umpire and a former pitcher, he says it is a practical matter of umpiring judgment.

The article author says it takes a pretty remarkable mortal to judge the passage of 20 seconds, let alone count off 20 seconds under your breath, which umpires undoubtedly will not do. Want to see how wrong you can be? Try counting off 10 seconds while a friend holds a stopwatch on you. Chances are you'll be too fast. I guess you can all play along at home and try that exercise for yourself. But it says that the umpires were not actually required to have stopwatches. So again, this was at that point a pretty toothless rule because no pitch clocks on the scoreboard, no stopwatches required, nothing like that.

The umpire Rommel says i see no reason why the 22nd rule should bother pitchers and it notes here that one pitcher it won't bother bob feller because he's now retired they obviously didn't call him rapid robert for the briskness in which he operated between pitches when feller was due to pitch guys in the press box groaned well a two and a half hour game today which uh people in the press box would probably be thrilled to be able to groan about now so this was a difference but also no difference because it was kind of clear that nothing was going to happen and they tested this rule for the first time in spring training and the only pitcher to run afoul of this limit, the 20-second limit, was podcast legend and former guest, the late Ned Garver. He was the only pitcher who was

clocked over 20 seconds and penalized that day. So that was what happened in 1957. But really, nothing happened with the pace of play or the length of games. This didn't have any major difference. So the next major innovation, I think, that happened with the pitch clock was in 1962. And in 1962, the Pacific Coast League, the AAA League, they made a big fuss about the 22nd rule. Here's an article. Another gimmick hovers over the sports world, a proposed time clock in the left field fence to make sure that the pitcher delivers the ball within the 20-second limit. This is the brainchild of Bill Sales, general manager of Portland of the Pacific Coast League. He says that it would add showmanship to the sport and speed up

the game. And there are various major leaguers who say here, no, we don't need this. This is an outrage. Carl Hubble, the old Hall of Famer, he said, the idea is absolutely silly. It's the worst thing that could happen to baseball. One of the advantages of this game is that there is no time element. The better team can win without being thwarted by the clock, as happens in football and basketball. So the age-old argument about how there's no clock in baseball, and that is a feature, not a bug. But in the Pacific Coast League, they armed the umpires with watches that year. They had stopwatches. And there was one team, the Spokane Indians, that year. They were, I believe, a Dodgers affiliate, and they actually did put up a big

pitch clock. And they did the actual pitch clock, which as far as I know, this is the 60th anniversary of that season. I believe that Spokane team, at least the first example I've encountered of a pitch clock like that in the modern sense in professional baseball or in affiliated ball. So that was a milestone 60 years ago, but it maybe didn't work all that well. And this is kind of a common theme in the early annals of the pitch clock. They pitched it as something that would be entertaining for fans and that fans would get really into the countdown and that there would be this big 20-second clock on the outfield fence and then when a pitcher receives the ball, it will be only natural for the fans to take over,

giving the countdown in unison as the giant hands of the clock tick off the seconds. The pitch clock was going to cost $1,500 to manufacture. I have not inflation adjusted, but fairly pricey. But it was sold to a sponsor for $2,500. So they made a profit on this and they instructed the PCL umpires to enforce the 22nd rule. So did it work? Well, it seems like it probably didn't work all that well. For one thing, you had the public address announcer in the press box was the one who would operate this in Spokane. So that was kind of weird. And the umpires weren't actually obligated to abide by this clock.

So sometimes the clock would count down and then there would be no penalty because it wasn't actually the umpire doing the countdown. It was the PA person. So that was a problem. The other problem, first of all, they didn't have the clock installedire doing the countdown. It was the PA person. So that was a problem. The other problem, first of all, they didn't have the clock installed for the first game. Then the second night, the clock blew a fuse. There was a lot of fuse blowing with the pitch clock in those early seasons.

And if the umpires were not enforcing it anyway, then what was the point? The other issue was that often they didn't even call a ball on anyone. So here's a story from May 1962. Pitching clock finds no culprits. The 22nd pitching clock at the fairgrounds, which is supposed to enforce the new Pacific Coast League rule on speed at the mound, hasn't caused a called ball yet. It might bother George Bamberger, said Seattle skipper Pesky, but I never saw the thing unwind past nine seconds. And, you know, I think that is instructive because 20 seconds, like if you go to fan graphs right now, I think the average pace, the time between pitches this year, it's like 23 seconds.

And that includes when there are men on base, when there are runners on, which would not even be governed by the pitch clock. And I think for the most part, pitchers don't actually violate this if you sort of start it when the batter is ready and the pitcher is ready, which is how it has generally been understood. Most pitchers don't actually take 20 seconds or longer, which is why I think you have to have a more aggressive pitch clock, which is what they're doing in the minors this year with 14 seconds with the bases empty or 18 seconds with runners on. So that was kind of a consistent theme in the early years of the pitch clock. Now, Dewey Soriano, who was the head of the Pacific Coast League, he claimed that it has

actually worked. It's a threat hanging over the pitcher Coast League. He claimed that it has actually worked. It's a threat hanging over the pitcher's heads. The real slowpokes know they'll have to get that ball in there or they'll be called for a ball. And he claimed that games were finishing 15 minutes earlier because of the pitch clock. And that same year, 1962, the National Baseball Congress also adopted the pitch clock. And the National Baseball Congress at its tournament in August or September of that year, they tried it. And the president of the National Baseball Congress predicted that the majority of professional baseball leagues would adopt the clock the following season.

That did not happen. I think as we all know, that did not happen. He predicted that not only would most leagues adopt the pitch clock, but that it would increase attendance by 20%. I think that was optimistic as well. He said that everyone loved this rule in the National Baseball Congress, although there was another issue with when it rained, the clock shorted out. So that was a bit of a problem. I hope that they will have straightened out the rain issue when the pitch clock comes to the majors next year, I suppose. But there was supposed to be a horn that blew. Do you think we need any sort of sound effect? There isn't one, as far as know in the minors currently, but would you like to have a horn of some sort or some other sound that indicates a pitch clock violation? I think that having like a funny sound like a maybe it doesn't have to be funny, but I do think that it is useful for the quality of the vibes in a ballpark to differentiate between rules enforcement

that is at the discretion of the umpire and rules enforcement that is not. Because this has been part of my objection to the robo zone, at least in its testing environment or in the early going, where when I first saw the robo zone being tested in the fall league,

it wasn't announced to the crowd. They didn't know the people I knew because I'm me, but most of the people there didn't know because why would they know that? That's a thing you don't need to know to go to a Fall League game. And so when a call would go against whomever they were rooting for, they would boo the umpire. And I was just like, it's not this gentleman's fault that you are mad he is not the one inciting you to to feeling like that's not his problem and so

i do think that having like a procedure so that it is made clear like well it it isn't the ump it's the clock that clock that at times shorts out so It's, you know, it's that clock's fault. It's not the umpire's fault. I think that that's useful because otherwise people get really feisty and then, you know, it can be kind of a bad vibe. So in 62, the National Baseball Congress guy, he estimated that it would cut an average of 20 to 30 minutes from games, which seemed quite optimistic. Heard that before. Yes. Well, the following year, there was one league that actually did adopt the pitch clock, the

Texas League, a double-A league. They had pitch clocks throughout that whole circuit, I believe. And I will just read you a postmortem of how that went. This is from the El Paso Herald Post in 1964. It was a gimmick and gave the Texas league some publicity. It may have resulted in helping increase attendance of fans who thought there'd be better chances of them going home earlier, and the clocks may have made some of the teams and players more speed conscious,

but it's doubtful if there has been much time saving and they have ceased to be any kind of attraction to the fans if they ever were one. The umpires have not been for them and have reluctantly gone along because they've been under orders to. They cost each club $1,500 to install. Their delicate mechanism is always getting out of kilter. There are spare parts to buy, and these parts aren't as inexpensive as going to your watch repairer and getting your Ingersoll cleaned and overhauled.

There was a $50 bill for parts every time we turned around, said John Fulon, general manager of the Sun Kings. So not impressed with how this went. Can I just say that it is deeply funny to me that it was thought that, and I get it, the whole reason that we are fixated on pace of play is to make it more entertaining. And part of why we care about that is the hope that it will inspire more people to be invested in baseball because they'll have a better time. So I know that the argument isn't really actually different at all, but it is funny to me when it is stated explicitly in the following terms, you are more likely to show up if you can leave early. That is, that's a funny thing to say out loud. It's like an inducement to engage with an entertainment product. So who knew? I didn't know. Someone probably knew.

But I was not aware that the history was so extensive. So 1969, this is a time of a lot of change, right? The strike zone is changing again. The mound is being lowered. We're coming off the year of the pitcher. Everyone is fretting about offense being low and baseball being boring and too much dead time. Sound familiar? So there are a lot of articles from that time that sound exactly like articles from now. And I think we are heading for a period of similar change prompted by the bottoming out

of offense. So I guess kind of slipping in another change in the midst of these changes that were happening, the American League decided that it was going to order the pitch clock to be installed in 1969 across the league. However, teams balked at this. Teams were not happy about this at all. So I will read a bit of a story here from 1969. Joe Cronin, the San Franciscan who was named to the presidency of the American League after a long and distinguished career as a shortstop manager and general manager, again is proving what aggressive, inspirational, intelligent leadership is. The big fellow recently sent out a bulletin asking all his member teams to install clocks or timers to assist in the enforcement of the long-ignored 22nd rule. In some organizations, a bulletin by the head would be regarded as an order. Not so in the American League. Judging from Cronin's scared reaction to the indignation the various teams expressed to

his bulletin, one wonders how many presidents the circuit has. One would guess 11, Cronin and the 10 teams that protested his bulletin. Cronin said, what I have decided to do is place the use of timers entirely on a voluntary experimental basis. The article continues, that's courage for you. His decision to make use of timers optional is tentative to a police department's announcement that it will provide violators of a certain law the right to decide whether they should be prosecuted for same. The rule is in the official playing code and the penalty is prescribed, a ball for each failure. But the league president, squeamish because enforcement looks to be a bit sticky, is running away from his duty.

Cronin also explained, after I sent out a bulletin asking all clubs to install clocks or timers, the response I received from the various clubs was sharply divided, so sharply divided that I decided to go along with them." Which I love, he's like, yep, I caved. The Angels, for instance, ran into contractual trouble concerning their scoreboard, and Baltimore wanted to experiment in spring training first. Where we have run into some difficulty in a general way is the perfection of a control system for the timer. It has to be something like a remote control, just as is used with television sets. However, so far, the control device made by the New York company we're dealing with is cumbersome. The third base umpire will handle the clock, but the device now designed for the switch control is so unwieldy that it would go all out of kilter with the movement of the umpire as he bounces around to call plays around third

base and down the line. And now it notes that the White Sox, they already had Bill Veck's old pitchometer still installed, and that Cleveland and their general manager, Gabe Paul, was interested in getting a pitch clock in Cleveland, too. So that was the plan. They sent out this bold bulletin, we're going to have pitch clocks in the AL in 1969. Most of the team said, nope. And then the AL president said, fine. And meanwhile, the National League didn't even send out that bulletin. They said they would urge umpires to bear down on the 22nd rule with no electronic aids. So status quo, basically. So at the time, you had the White Sox

as a candidate, you had Cleveland as a candidate, and Baltimore, bringing us back to Jody's initial email, was interested. And, you know, there were articles from that spring about how, oh, this is just another farce and toothless and meaningless and the umpires aren't using stopwatches and so this isn't going to do anything. However, the Orioles decided they were going to use the pitchometer. The Orioles alone, as far as I can tell. The story from March says a 20-second timing clock will be on the scoreboard tonight at Miami used at the remaining spring training games at Miami and will also be installed at Memorial Stadium for use during the Orioles regular games. And it was going to display an illuminated numeral 20. And then as each second passed, the timer would show the remaining second in descending order. We do understand the concept of the countdown. And then if it counted down to zero, in theory, the pitcher would be charged with an automatic ball.

That's quite similar to what we have now, right? Like to time between innings and, you know, that would be very recognizable to a modern baseball fan. Yes, very much so. So the person spearheading this for the Orioles was Jack Dunn, who was their vice president. Jack Dunn said, like they say in the cigarette commercial, it's not how long you make it, but how you make it long. It's not really the length of the game that worries me, but I would like to see us be able to remove some of the dead spots, the periods of inactivity. I don't think people worry about how long the game is as long as there is action. So that sounds familiar, too.

It's amazing. I was reading all these articles and thinking, yep, that could have been published yesterday. Today. Basically. Ted Williams, amusingly have been published yesterday. Today, yeah. Basically. Ted Williams, amusingly, was a big fan of this one. He said, Hell yes. I think it's great. Roared Williams before last night's game. He was the manager of the Senators at the time. It'll make those guys hustle a little. A good pitcher doesn't need 20 seconds to pitch, and it will make my hitters get in there and stay in there. They won't be able to get back out of the box playing around. They'll have to dig in and stay in. Some people did support this at least. So how did this go? How did the Orioles pitch clock experiment go? Well,

very, very mixed returns. So in spring training, they had problems with defective parts again. Like again, this is 1969. So literally, they could put a man on the moon. Right. We were like, let's go to the moon. It'll work. Apollo program in full swing at that point, but pitch clock still very much presenting a problem.

So they had defective parts. And then amusingly, in spring training, when a plane would pass overhead, the clock would leap up to 50 seconds for some reason because there was interference from passing planes. Like from radar or something? I don't know, but also from police car radios, there would be interference and it would screw up the pitch clock. That's great. I hope that they have ironed out these kicks in the subsequent six or so decades. But that was a big problem. And so here's a review of how things have gone.

This is from April in Baltimore. Baltimore has installed one of those timing devices on the scoreboard that is supposed to clock the pitcher so he delivers the ball within 20 seconds. The trouble is they don't turn the thing on until the pitcher is picking up his signs instead of when he receives the ball from the catcher. The timer never got below 10 seconds all night. Oh, boy. So that defeated the purpose as well. And then here's an article from late April. This is the Evening Sun in Baltimore that says,

The second base umpire keeps the official time with a stopwatch at Oriole Home Games business vice president Jack Dunn on a hand The second base umpire keeps the official time with a stopwatch at Oriole Home Games business vice president Jack Dunn on a hand signal from the umpire keeps the unofficial time with a remote control device which activates a 20 second time piece on the scoreboard. Dunn has been operating the clock for eight games. And you know how many miscreants he has exposed? One. The senators Frank Bertana and the umpire didn't call it so it took them a while it took

them until mid-april like the 11th or 12th i think was the the first time that they were actually able to get this thing installed and use it in games and then it didn't count down far enough because they didn't start the countdown early enough and the parts always needed to be replaced and it wasn't working. And even if it did count down to zero, the umpire still didn't call it, it seems like anyway. So it was just like comedy of errors, complete failure, basically. I found an article from before that opening day that said the Orioles planned to use the

pitchometer all season. Spoiler, that didn't happen. I don't know exactly how long they used it, but I do know that there's an article from the 25th of July, and it talks about the many errors and malfunctions of the Memorial Stadium scoreboard, and it notes here at the end of the story, incidentally, the already discontinued 22nd clock, so this was July, already out of commission which was supposed to be used to hurry the pitchers along was retained when the additional space

was provided must be hard to toss a twenty thousand dollar timepiece into the trash can now the earlier figures i had seen were 1500 so this was maybe bigger and fancier. If it was actually $20,000, that's like $162,000 in current money. Do I just have a really bad sense of how expensive clocks are? I mean, I guess in 1960-something, it was more advanced technology. You had to have a remote control and everything. So as far as I can tell, the Orioles were the only team that actually went ahead with this experiment. The White Sox never did, as far as I can tell, even though they had Vexel pitchometer out there. Cleveland did purchase a pitchometer, but I can't find any evidence that they actually used it because I found an article from Juna that year that said some corrections are still being made on it and it wasn't ready for use. So again,

like the technical hurdles here. Yeah. Apparently, I mean, a big obstacle. Yeah. A working pitch clock in 1962 or 63 or 69 for that matter. So I guess it's instructive in a sense that it was more complicated than you think it would be. Sure. Even when they were able to have it working, it didn't do anything really because most pitchers were not actually taking 20 seconds between pitches, at least depending on when you started the timer. And that would probably still be true today. But it really is amazing that like for, you know, 120 years or so, we've had the 22nd rule. And for, I don't know, 119 years, probably, they've been complaining about it never being enforced or observed.

And every effort to enforce or observe it prior to now, at least, has seemingly backfired and been abandoned in pretty short order. seemingly backfired and been abandoned in pretty short order. I went one step farther here, and Jody, he sent us this image from the program, which is pretty interesting, and I'll put it online, and it says, you know, it's like a Q&A format. When does it operate? Only when the bases are empty. When does the clock begin timing? When the pitcher has the ball and the batter has both feet in position in the batter's box.

Is this completely in keeping with the wording of the rule? No. The rule must be interpreted. It reads, when the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 20 seconds after he receives the ball. This does not take into account the fact that the batter might not be in the box, might be talking to the third base coach, or might, as a pinch hitter, be on his way in from the bullpen.

Thus, it is interpreted that the pitcher should not be penalized if the batter is not ready. I believe now with the pitch clock in the minors, they just start the clock when the pitcher gets the thing and the batter has to be ready with like nine seconds left on the clock. I think that's right. And then it continues. Is the scoreboard timer official at the present time? No.

The official time is kept by the second base umpire who uses a stopwatch. However, it is hoped that the umpire will eventually operate the scoreboard timer by means of a remote control similar to those used to tune television sets from across the room. How is it presently operated? It is operated by remote control, either from the press box or from the box seat section behind home plate. Two methods have been employed to synchronize the timer with the official stopwatch. One, the home plate umpire gives a signal for the second base umpire and the timer operator to activate their watch and timer simultaneously. Or two, the second base umpire signals the timer operator when he starts his stopwatch. Different teams of umpires prefer different methods.

Why isn't the clock in operation at every Oriole game? The timer is in the developmental stage and is not as yet 100% reliable. As bugs are detected, the timer is dismantled and repaired. As soon as the bugs are eliminated, it will be in use at every game. So maybe it just, you know, it took 53 years to work the bugs out, I guess. So that's the 1969 Orioles experiment. The last thing I wanted to try, Jody suggested, hey, Jim Palmer was on that 1969 Orioles team, and he still covers the Orioles these days. He is a media member for the Orioles. I wonder whether he would have any memories of the pitch clock. And if he did, I assumed they would probably be pretty fond memories because he pitched quite well in April of 1969 in Baltimore home games.

He must have pitched in one of the very first games when the pitchometer was in operation. On April 13th, he threw a complete game shutout. And then April 21st at home again, he threw another complete game shutout. So he didn't seem to be bothered by this. But I was actually able to get in touch with Jim Palmer. I asked him via email whether he remembered this Orioles pitch clock, and I sent him the program and everything. And he said, I really don't recall the O's having a pitch clock in 1969. No!

He says, I was just glad to be healthy and pitching for a team that would go on to win 109 games we were taught to pitch quickly in the minors as it is easier to play defensively well behind a pitcher that works quickly that's a tough thing to study i have tried to study that in the past i am not aware of the reason the orioles put it in or if it had any effect on us pitching any more quickly or effectively can't remember if there was even a league rule pertaining to pitch clocks. I'm sorry, I can't be more helpful. That's okay, Hall of Famer Jim Palmer. Sorry for bothering you about this pitch clock from 1969. But that made me feel better about not being aware that this happened because Jim Palmer was pitching in that ballpark. He was directly affected by the pitch clock or could have been in theory. And I then followed up. I sent him an article about it just in case he was curious. And I guess he was because he read it. Although he noted that

the author of the article I sent, he still carries a grudge against that guy for not giving Mike Cuellar even a third place vote in the Cy Young voting in 1970. This is a season more than 50 years ago, and the author and voter in question died 25 years ago, I think. But Jim Palmer has not let that go. He's not letting it go. No. Apparently, he says Cuellar was not interested in being a great interview, and so he thinks that this writer may have inflicted some revenge on him when it came to the voting. But he said, what I find interesting, this is Jim Palmer again, is the same issue remains here in 2023. Some pitchers dawdle for sure, but notice how many hitters step out, adjust their batting

gloves after every pitch. Even if the pitch was taken, better fitting batting gloves or enforcing the can't step out of box rules would also speed up the game. Hitters don't adjust and readjust their gloves in batting practice, which is true. Yep. Yep. So Jim Palmer had sort of the same takeaway from this whole saga that I did, which is just that we are constantly repeating everything. So just to tie a bow on this, games didn't really get shorter in 1969, although they also didn't get longer, even though scoring was up. In the American League, where they had placed more of an emphasis on enforcing the 22nd rule and trying to implement the pitch clock, games were actually four minutes longer than

they were in the National League. And to bring this full circle, we talked about the National Baseball Congress pitch clock from 1962. Well, here's an article from March of 1970. It took a while and a change of personnel, but Major League Baseball is beginning to show interest in Ray Dumont's 20-second timer, which he has used successfully in his Kansas and National Baseball Congress tournaments. Dumont announced a few weeks ago he was reducing the 20 seconds to 18 seconds between pitches,

which we have seen happen in the minors recently. An article appeared in the February 21st issue of Sporting News about the speed-up, and Dumont received a call the other day from baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn's office. Making the call was Jim Gallagher of Kuhn's staff, who said the commissioner was interested in seeing the NBC timer in action. The commissioner feels we have to do something to speed up baseball, Gallagher told the NBC president. It has long been contended by Dumont that the 22nd timer, which had a loud buzzer in the NBC, has made teams hustle more during the innings. This, he claims, has produced better baseball. So there was some tentative interest in March 1970.

However, fast forward to December 1970, and this kind of closes the book on the pitch clock. There was a meeting of baseball's rules committee, lots of interesting rules under discussion, colored bases and colored foul lines and something akin to the DH and widened foul lines and more. But one of the rules under consideration was a pitch clock. So the article says that Charlie Finley's request for multicolored bases was denied and, quote, suggestions for colored foul lines and a 20-second clock on pitchers to speed up the game also were rejected. And this, I guess, was the final blow that sort of ended the 1960s era of

experimentation when it came to the pitch clock in ProBall. So for a little while there, from when Hank Greenberg suggested that they should have pitch clocks in all parks in 1957 to 1969, when the Orioles actually had one for a while, it was possible to envision a future where pitch clocks could have been with us all this time, just like the lowered mound and the DH. And then that window closed for 50 years. If this actually is implemented and is here to stay and has some effect in 2023, it will break with decades, if not more than a century of history of just completely ineffectual approaches to trying to speed up the game and trying to

implement pitch clocks but that was all fascinating to me the the secret hidden history of the pitch clock which i just did not know existed are we to take away from this on the one hand i find it incredibly discouraging that there has been this persistent you know observation about the way that the game could be made more enjoyable for those watching it that we have just failed to actualize over decades and decades and decades of observation right but you know that wasn't a rule that was implemented with the sort of full force and heft of the league it seems like people were quick to back away from it when it proved to be unpopular or weren't you know especially um strident in their enforcement to begin with and so is it really fair to look at that as a failure of enforcement or just like that they weren't

particularly serious about it so like on the one hand i worry about it in that respect but on the other hand i find it incredibly encouraging as i often do when we realize that it's just the same you know it's just a bunch of history repeating itself that we have been so worried about this for years and years and years and decades and decades and like there's still baseball now granted granted one must admit that like two and a half hours people are freaking out about two and a half hours and some of the stuff you're reading and we would be be over the moon for a two and a half hour long game. Yeah. It's the same complaint, but there is actually a difference in time.

It's not that people are complaining about the same length that they were complaining about then. Yeah. The magnitude of the issue seems to expand ever so slightly as time goes on. It is just an interesting commentary on where we are and where we have been before. Pitch clocks. Baseball has not are and where we have been before. So, you know, pitch clocks. Baseball has not died because the games have gotten longer. I guess you could say that it has gotten less popular in a relative sense.

And maybe you could blame part of that on the length of the games. But yes, all of the fears of baseball's going to completely collapse if we don't speed up these players. Well, it hasn't really happened yet. And so I guess that is kind of encouraging. And maybe the important thing to take away from this is not just that every previous effort has failed and thus the next effort is also doomed to fail, but that maybe they are finally learning from the mistakes of all of the other previous ineffective attempts, which all failed because they really were not mandatory and they were not implemented in any kind of automated and rigorous way. And so this is yet another attempt, but it seems to be an attempt that has more planning behind it and more force behind it. And less

finicky clocks. Yeah, that too. That's also very important. There's a mid-April story about the one in Memorial Stadium that says the clock was, quote, just sitting out there because they still didn't have the parts and there were defective parts and they just couldn't use it. It was also, it was supposed to have a loud trumpet-like noise and flashing lights. Fantastic. Maybe it's for the best that it never worked because that could have gotten on people's nerves too. Probably Jim Palmer would have remembered that. Anyway, thank you to Jody for making me a happy man in the many hours that I spent reading all of these old articles. And if you want to follow my footsteps, I will put all of those in a document where you can find

all of the links to them. But I said that this would be a history-heavy episode, and we will continue in that theme here with a stat blast. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's today's stat blast. All right, so this Stat Blast is brought to you, as always, by our friends at StatHead, powered by Baseball Reference, a very powerful tool for looking up all sorts of information about baseball and other sports. And if you sign up at StatHead.com, you get $20 off of the $80 one-year subscription if you use the coupon code WILD20. And I used StatHead many times during the making of the rest of this episode. So what I wanted to know is which hitters and pitchers have done the best or the worst against Hall of Fame opponents.

So who has done the best when facing future Hall of Famers? So who has done the best when facing future Hall of Famers? And I enlisted the aid of frequent stat blast consultant Ryan Nelson with this one. And to do this analysis, we did some filtering. So if we were looking at how hitters did against Hall of Fame pitchers, we filtered out players who may have pitched but were not in the Hall of Fame as pitchers. Maybe they were managers or that sort of thing. If we were looking at how pitchers did against future Hall of Fame hitters, then we removed Hall of Fame pitchers as hitters from the sample as well. So we tried to be as accurate and rigorous as we could here. And I have the numbers, I have

the stats that have been blasted, and I will put them, as always, on the show page for you all to peruse. But I think this is one of my favorite stat blasts ever, probably, because it's my favorite kind of stat blast. One, it yields some interesting trivia. If you just wanted to know, hey, who was good against Hall of Famers, I'll give you that answer. Two, I think it ends up illustrating an underappreciated and fundamental truth about baseball. Always fun when that can happen. And three, it sets up a perfect cold call candidate. So here is one interesting takeaway. At least this was interesting to me. So we did it a couple of ways. We looked at

just everyone, and then we also limited to certain samples. So for instance, for pitchers who had at least a thousand batters faced who would one day end up in the Hall of Fame, and that is to this point about 227 pitchers. And I should note that we don't have perfect play-by-play data for earlier years. And we also, this will focus on retired players because current players, they are facing Hall of Famers, but we don't know who those Hall of Famers are yet because they're not in the Hall of Fame yet. So this will be players from earlier eras. But one interesting thing is that when you set minimums, playing time minimums, it basically doesn't matter at all. So for all pitchers, just anyone, no plate appearance minimum, the TOPS plus, you know, how much worse do you do relative to your overall OPS allowed when you are facing Hall of Fame hitters?

It is basically the same whether you had a long career and faced a lot of Hall of Fame hitters or you were just a flash in the pan. It's like all pitchers with no plate appearance minimum, the average TOPS plus is 136. So they were like 36% worse when they were facing future Hall of Fame hitters. Not every Hall of Fame position player is a good hitter, of course. Some of them were great defenders. Some of them just had buddies on the veterans committee. for the most part they could swing it if you limit that to that sample of 200 something pitchers who faced hall of famers a thousand or more times the

tops plus is 137 so basically the same like it doesn't matter yeah if you were good and you lasted a really long time or you just had a short career, pretty much everyone is going to get the same degree worse when they are facing Hall of Fame hitters. And the same is actually true the other way. So for hitters facing Hall of Fame pitchers, for everyone, the TOPS plus is 84. So you're like 84% as productive as you usually are when you're facing Hall of Fame pitchers. For hitters with at least 500 plate appearances against Hall of Fame pitchers,

the TOPS plus is 86. I mean, it's basically the same. So that's one interesting takeaway is that everyone across the board is kind of affected the same way. It's not like long tenured players, better players are necessarily better against Hall of Famers. They declined by the same way. It's not like long tenured players, better players are necessarily better against Hall of Famers. They declined by the same degree. The other interesting thing, which you may have picked up on there, is that these numbers are very different for pitchers facing Hall of Fame hitters than they are for hitters facing Hall of Fame pitchers. Yeah. So pitchers when facing Hall of Fame hitters are much worse. So again, the TOPS plus is around 136. Whereas for hitters facing Hall of Fame pitchers,

the TOPS plus is only about 85. So the decline is like twice as big as maybe more than twice as big for the hitters who are facing Hall of Fame pitchers. And I was trying to think, well, why would that be? And I think I have an answer here, and I will hopefully spare us a deluge of emails from people suggesting why that answer is. I think this gets at an interesting fundamental thing about baseball, which is that hitters have more control over the outcome of any given plate appearance. If you do a study, and there have been a bunch of studies that have shown this, like Rob Arthur did a study for 538 several years ago where he found that exit speed on bad as balls is controlled five parts by hitters and one part by pitchers. Hitters just have way

more impact on how hard the ball is hit than pitchers do. And you can do that for all sorts of stats. And I will link to some studies that did that. But given roughly equivalent playing time, there is a much broader variation in hitter stats generally than pitcher stats. Like if you just look at the leaders and the laggards among hitters and the leaders and the laggards among pitchers, like there will just be a wider range in everything when it comes to home run rate or strikeout rate or whatever it is. And I think another part of this is BABIP plays a big part in this too, because hitters exert a lot of control over their BABIP, maybe because they exert so much control over how hard the ball is hit. So for a hitter, 300 BABIP is the average, but you have hitters who really do have a demonstrable and repeatable skill to have a 330 BABIP or a 340 BABIP or a 270 BABIP or whatever.

Whereas there are very, very few pitchers who have that kind of wide range. You know, everyone is kind of clustered around the middle for the most part with a few outliers here and there. So I think that's a big part of it. Like the outcome of a ball in play, that's a big part, obviously, of the outcome of the plate appearance. And hitters have a lot of control over that, and pitchers tend to have very little control over that. So I think that explains that. And that's interesting because you will hear knowledgeable that pitching is 75% of baseball, which just like on its face doesn't really make any sense to me. Does that include fielding or no?

And if not, then we're lumping fielding and hitting into the last 25%. That's too much for pitching. But if anything, it's the reverse. If anything, it's more like hitting is 75% of at least the outcome of any individual plate appearance or maybe more like two thirds, but certainly more than half. So that is an interesting thing to know that generally hitters exert more control over the outcome of any given plate appearance than pitchers. Like pitchers, they have control over whether you'll strike out or walk, but hitters have a lot of control over that too. And then they also have a lot of control over what happens when the ball is put in play. So it makes sense to me that people get that backward though, because we talk about hitting as a reactionary exercise, right?

Like you're not able to determine what you're going to throw and you're not going to be able to determine where the pitcher throws it. And sometimes the pitcher can't determine that either but they're they're trying right they are they are aiming quite literally to put the ball in a particular place so i i get why that intuition can kind of get flipped on its head a little bit where you'd think like oh well you know he can decide he's gonna throw a four seamer up and so he gets you know he has more say on what happens here and it's not that they don't have any say but uh yeah i think you're right that we tend to get the ratio backward yeah so i'll give you the actual results here who was good against hall of famers and who was not i'll give you the ones who were worse first because i'm less interested in that you'd expect players to be worse

when facing hall of famers but the worst amongers, the ones who were worn out by Hall of Fame hitters, Tony Kloninger with a 172 TOPS plus allowed, higher is bad for pitchers, followed by a Hall of Famer, Hal Neuhauser, Howard Emke, Clint Brown, Lindy McDaniel, and in the data that we have, Walter Johnson. Among hitters, the hitters who were worst against Hall of Fame pitchers in a relative sense. Sal Bando at a 54 TOPS+. Freddie Patek, Rico Petrucelli, Harvey Keene, Billy Rogel, Norm Cash, and Roy Seavers. Stay tuned. You're going to be hearing that name again. But now let's talk about the players who raised their games or at least didn't really lower

their games against Hall of Famers. And I'll give you the hitters against Hall of Fame pitchers first. So the best hitter against Hall of Fame pitchers, and I'm limiting this to at least 500 plate appearances against Hall of Famers, is Gary Carter. Gary Carter, a Hall of Famer himself. And he had 690 plate appearances against Hall of Famers, roughly according to the spreadsheet. And he had a TOPS plus against them of 121. So he was about 21% better when facing Hall of Fame pitchers than he was overall. So he had a 362 on base against Hall of Famers compared

to a 334 on base overall, and he had a 492 slugging against Hall of Famers compared to 439 overall. So Hall of Famers just did not face him at all. He was happy to face Hall of Famers, but the names at the top of the list are not all Hall of Famers or even great players. Some of them are, but it goes Kurt Walker, Bill Verdon, who is also going to come up in a second, Greg Nettles, Tim Wallach, Vic Wurtz,

Tim Foley, Ralph Garr, Yogi Berra, Dave Kingman, and Phil Garner. I will link to the spreadsheet if you want to check it out. I don't know if this is predictive of anything or whether it just happened to be, but it's interesting to know that Gary Carter was great against Hall of Famers. Now, here's what really made this stat-blast sing for me, the pitcher results. So because of what we talked about with hitters having a disproportionate impact on the outcome of plate appearances, you don't really get a Gary Carter equivalent for pitchers who was way better when facing

Hall of Famers in a significant amount of playing time. Really, with pitchers who faced a lot of Hall of Famers, it's more about how much less bad were you against them than most pitchers are. So with that caveat and a minimum of a thousand plate appearances against Hall of Famers, here is the best pitcher ever, Bobby Shantz. Bobby Shantz is a player who is very special to me, but I'll give you the numbers here. Bobby Shantz had more than 1100 plate appearances against Hall of Famers, and he had a 107 TOPS plus against them. So he was like 7% worse when facing Hall of Famers. And this is, again, a pitcher, so the hitters have a lot of control here. You would expect him to be much worse. The average is like 136, 137. He was only 7% worse against Hall of Famers. He limited them to a 699 OPS overall, or maybe 700. The stats are

a little unclear. We're missing some plate appearances from his first couple of years in the majors. But this is really impressive because he has the best TOPS+. He also has the best OPS+, allowed versus Hall of Famers. He was just a Hall of Famer killer. And again, if you look at the leaderboard, there are some good pitchers and some unremarkable pitchers and some Hall of Famers and some non-Hall of Famers. After Bobby Shantz, it goes Chuck Finley, Dave Koslow, Jesse Haynes, Mike Moore, Dennis Eckersley, Mickey Lawlich, Bill Walker, Burt Bleileven, Frank Leary, Hal Schumacher, Jim Perry. Again, I will link to the list.

Dave Stieb is 15th. Carl Hubble, who came up earlier, is 16th. So Bobby Shantz is special. He allowed a.326 on base against Hall of Famers and a.373 slug against Hall of Famers. Pretty incredible. And here's the good news. Bobby Shantz still with us at a ripe old age of 96 years old. I have found a phone number for Bobby Shantz, and I have wanted to talk to Bobby Shantz for actually quite a long time because if you don't know Bobby Shantz, well, you're about to know quite a bit about Bobby Shantz.

Left-handed pitcher, part-time knuckleballer. He pitched in the majors from 1949 to 1964 into the professional pitch clock era. And he was quite an accomplished pitcher, 119 ERA plus, retired with about 32 wins above replacement, according to Baseball Reference. He was the 1952 American League MVP. So it is the 70th anniversary of Bobby Shantz's MVP season. And he is actually close to the top of the leaderboard, the leaderboard of pitchers who relieved pitch out of the bullpen in at least two-thirds of their games. He is fifth in war on that list after Mariano Rivera, Hoyt Wilhelm, Goose Gossage, and Tom Gordon, and just ahead of another former Effectively Wild guest, John Hiller. He did start more games than most of those guys,

but still pretty impressive. He's a three-time All-Star, pitched in two World Series, won a ring with the Yankees in 1958. He is also known for being one of the best fielding pitchers ever. And he actually won eight gold gloves. Eight gold gloves. Half as many as the pitcher who idolized him, Jim Cott, would go on to win, despite Shantz often being a reliever and being more than halfway into his career before they started giving out cold gloves in 1957. I was aware of the name Bobby Shantz just growing up as a Yankees fan because he pitched for the Yankees. He also pitched

for the Kansas City Athletics, the Cardinals, the Pirates, the Phillies, the Cubs, the Colt 45s, future Astros. So I knew his name and knew a little bit about him. But there was an episode a few years ago, maybe in 2018, when Jeff and I were talking about David Robertson, who had just signed a contract that had a clause in it where if he won a gold glove, there was some bonus or incentive associated with it. And we thought that was silly because in what world could David Robertson, a reliever, win a gold glove? And after that episode went up, my friend and colleague at The Ringer, Zach Cram, messaged me and said, hey, Bobby Shantz was a reliever and he won eight gold gloves. And that sent us into a newspapers.com deep dive at the time. We spent like an hour or two just looking up fun facts about Bobby Shantz because I feel like he's like maybe the most interesting man in the majors. I mean,

there are a lot of players who could claim to that title, but so much happened to him. He is the last living player to be managed by Connie Mack. Connie Mack, Meg. Connie Mack. Bobby Shantz was managed by Connie Mack. Connie Mack was born in 1862 during the Civil War. Connie Mack was born before they had any clocks that worked. Not one single clock worked anywhere. Before professional baseball for that matter. Yeah. So you don't have to play the like six degrees of Kevin Bacon game to like go back to the beginning of baseball. It's just Bobby Shantz and Connie Mack will get you all the way. So I kind of get goosebumps thinking of talking to him. And just to show you how fleeting time and life is, when Zach and I were talking about this a few years ago,

there were a handful of players still surviving who had been managed by Connie Mack. And now they're not. Now there is only one. And it is Bobby Shantz. So time is of the essence when it comes to talking to these players from earlier eras. And I mentioned Bill Verdon, who was at the top of the hitter results for the stat blast. He was third on that list. Bill Verdon is closely associated with Bobby Shantz because Bill Verdon hit the famous potential double play ball off of Shantz in the 1960 World Series Game 7, the famous Bill Mazeroski game that bounced up and hit Tony Kuback's throat and then everything unraveled for the Yankees and the Pirates won. Bill Verdon hit that ball. Well, we can't call and talk to Bill Verdon because sadly

he died in November. So again, you can't count on anyone hanging around. And Bobby Shantz, he has been through some tough health troubles of his own of late. So we are not going to waste any further time. We are going to talk to Bobby Shantz. And as it just so happens, it was Bobby Shantz Day this week in his hometown of Pottstown, PA, where he has lived forever. And there is an annual Bobby Shantz Day where he goes to Pottstown High School, where the field is named after him and he meets with various people.

So he's gotten a lot of attention and publicity this week, but we're going to give him a little more here. So last week we talked to 95-year-old Charlie Maxwell, and I was like, I can't get enough nonagenarians. I must talk to more nonagenarians. I can't get enough nonagenarians. I must talk to more nonagenarians. Well, Charlie Maxwell is the 13th oldest living former American or National Leaguer. Well, you can't find many older players than that, but I have found one, Bobby Shentz. Bobby Shentz is the sixth oldest. He is the oldest living MVP and the oldest living member of many franchises.

and the oldest living member of many franchises. And I believe he and Clayton Kershaw and Bob Gibson are the only pitchers to have won both an MVP award and a gold glove. And as you will hear in this interview that we are about to do, because spoiler, I have already called called Bobby Shantz and I got him and talked to him. And it was so unexpected.

I was not really prepared for the number to be right and for him to be ready to talk right then. So it'll just be me talking to Bobby Shantz. Yeah, you keep saying we, and I was like, I did not enjoy this pleasure, sir. Yes, but you, along with everyone else, gets to enjoy what I hope will be a pleasure now. And then we will reconvene briefly after that to discuss what we heard. One of the more notable things about Bobby Shantz is that he was not a big guy at all. He was listed at 5'6", 139. That's pretty tiny by big league standards.

It was tiny even then, even in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Like pitchers then were about an inch and a half two inches shorter than they are now but as I noted the other day the average height is like six two and a half now so they were still like six one or close to it in Bobby Shantz's era and here he was at five six and I'm not sure whether the five six of it or the 139 of it is more eye-popping and impressive. I don't know whether either one of those stood out to you more, but I used StatHead here just to look up, like, how many successful pitchers have there been ever who were that small?

So when I sorted for most wins above replacement by a pitcher 5'6 or shorter, there are only eight guys with double digits in war. Two of them played since the 19th century ended, and Bobby Shantz is the most recent. However, I think the 139 pounds or lighter list is even more exclusive and impressive because there are only four pitchers in Major League history who had double-digit career war totals and weighed under 140 pounds. And all of them except Bobby Shantz were in the 1870s or 1880s or 1890s. So you got your Bob Carruthers and your Candy Cummings and then Bobby Shantz and Larry Corcoran and then a huge drop off. Just I mean, I don't care if you don't throw that hard like to be 5'6", 139 in any era.

Yeah. To be as good and as durable as Bobby Shantz was. That's pretty amazing, I think. I think that it's a 5'6", right? Yep. I think 5'6 strikes me as the more unbelievable thing because that's like an inch taller than i am you know like muscle weighs more so like you could be you know you could be like really strong and burly or you could you know you could be you know just burly like there's a

lot of ways to be and i could see that you know sort of fluctuating around and who knows. But I can't imagine being a big leaguer and only being an inch taller than I am because I am not a tall person. I'm not like, you know, I'm like an average-heighted, I'm an average-heighted American woman. But like I'm an average-heighted American woman. I'm not a big leaguer. So, you know, that's striking. Wow. And I'm an average-heighted American man. And when I walk into an MLB clubhouse, everyone is a literal giant.

Yeah, you feel wee. But I would tower over Bobby Shantz. Yeah. I mean, in a way, though, I think the weight is almost more impressive because, like, Jose Altuve is listed at 5'6 as well, but he's listed at 5'6, 166. Right, because he's ripped. Yeah, right. as well, but he's listed at 5'6", 166. Right, because he's ripped. Yeah, right. I mean, I guess maybe that matters less for a pitcher, but it's one thing to be

small and yet still like a spark plug, still like powerful, right? But to be both short and also quite slight, you know, like Tony Kemp, 5'6", 160. Again, these are position players, but still to be the combination of things, I guess it's not so much one or the other. It's the combination of both, probably. Yeah, I think the combo is pretty remarkable and so cool. You know, it's just neat that there are people who, of all different shapes and sizes and ways, who can end up being really good. Pretty great. Yeah, there was the pitcher Danny Herrera, who pitched within recent memory, and he was listed at 5'6", but he was listed at 165.

So again, it's the combo. Just a little notice, you will hear interspersed throughout this interview some clips from old radio and TV broadcasts from during Chance's career, as well as a clip from a recent interview with Jim Cott on Sabercast with Rob Nyer, another former guest of ours. And just so you can cover your kids' ears if you're so inclined, he's going to do a few swears. Just a couple. Yeah. You don't bleep Bobby Shantz. No, you sure don't. So here he is, Bobby Shantz. Hello. Hi, Bobby. My name is Ben Lindberg. I'm a baseball writer in New York. I co-host a program called Effectively Wild, where we sometimes do interviews with former

players, and I was hoping you might have a few minutes to talk. What's it all about? Well, I was listening to Jim Cott talk the other day, and he was mentioning how he was hoping that you would be able to attend his induction ceremony this summer. And so that made me wonder how you were doing these days. I've always been very interested in your career and on a personal level, I didn't get a growth spurt till I was 16 or 17. So as someone who grew up as not a very big guy myself at the time. You were something of an inspiration to me.

So I was doing some research into your career and discovered a couple interesting things that I was hoping you might be able to answer. Yeah, I'll try to, but I have to. If you talk to Jim and tell him, I don't think I can make it to you. Oh, yeah. I'm just not able to move.

I'm getting so goddamn old. I can't hardly get up in the morning. I'm not in too good of shape. Uh-huh. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. I really appreciate him. He's talking so nice about me, and I really appreciate it. He's such a nice guy, and I really would like to get up there, but I just can't make it.

Yeah, yeah. I'm 96 years old. I'm getting pretty goddamn old. Well, it's impressive to get up in the morning at all, I guess, at 96. Yeah, I know. I'm just lucky to be getting up in the morning, let alone trying to go to Cooperstown. Right. Well, I know you were a big influence on him, and he's grateful for that, but I'm sure he'll understand.

I don't know. I don't know how he figures I really helped him make such a good field. I know he tells me he used to watch me field, and he'd go out into the game and throw his ball up against the wall and try to do some of the stuff that I did. I don't think I did anything to make him a better fielder. He was just a good fielder, that's all. My boyhood hero, Bobby Shantz, who was known as the best fielding pitcher in baseball,

and that's kind of who I patterned my motion after, really, from listening to Bob Elson, the announcer for the White Sox, describe Bobby's motion over the radio. And that's how I learned to develop that motion. As I said to Bobby, if you hadn't gone to the National League, I wouldn't have won those early awards. He won the award starting in 57. They didn't give him out before that. And then he got traded to the Cardinals in the early 60s. And then that's when I started winning the award.

So I owe Bobby a lot for kind of inspiring me to feel my position properly. You know, at 5'6", you know, he was so athletic. He was almost an Olympic-class diver. He was quite an athlete. And I'm so fortunate to have, through my dad's love of the Philadelphia athletics, to end up, he followed Lefty Grove and I followed Bobby Shantz. What a great influence he had on my career. I think he used to listen to you on the radio and he would hear the description of how you would land on your feet and be in great fielding position. And he would mimic that as a kid. And then when he showed up at spring training, they said, you look like Bobby Shantz. I know. He really made me feel like a million bucks.

I know I was in 1960 when I was with the Yankees. I was sitting in the clubhouse and I was pitching that night and I was sitting over on the side and going over the hairs with Yogi and in walked Jim Cotton. And I said, holy mackerel, that's Jim Cotton. And Yogi said, yeah, that's Jim Cotton. He came right over to me. I was really surprised. It made me feel like a million bucks.

But after he came over to me, he said that I was his idol. Man, that really made me feel good. That was really nice of him. I said, Jim, I really appreciate you thinking that much of me, but I think you're a better fielder probably than I ever was. And I said, what are you doing in here? He said, well, I just come over to see you because I just wanted to tell you I really watched you close as a pitcher.

And then he said, when are you going to quit? I said, I don't know. That was 1960. I had four more years to go. I didn't know how long I was going to make it. But then he said, when are you going to quit? I said, I don't know. Maybe a couple more years. I don't know. He said, do you want me to quit? He says, yeah. I don't care if you quit, but if you do, I'm going to get that glove, that gold glove every year. That's right. I thought he was kidding.

He was such a big guy. I didn't really think he would be that great a fielder. He must have been one heck of an athlete. Yeah, yeah. That's funny. That made me feel like a million bucks, too. Yes, he's about a foot taller than you, I think. So it's an unlikely person to be influenced by you, I guess.

Really a nice guy, too. Chance is one of those quick-fielding pitchers that managers dream of and so seldom find. He goes with the Burkeens, the Burdettes, and the Paddocksons. Did you imitate anyone? Did your fielding position and prowess come from anyone, or was that something you just always had? No, I never thought I was going to be a pitcher, to tell you the truth.

I was always a small one. I used to be out in the field in batting practice, and I'd be a short stopper. I'd be in the outfield. I always became a pretty decent fielder, but I didn't really think I was going to be a good fielder, you know, to get H.J. Cole gloves. Right. I guess they thought I was, but I thought there was a lot of guys that could feel as good as me.

Yeah, and as a relief pitcher in some of the years that you won, which is very impressive, that doesn't happen much these days. Yeah, yeah. I was saying, for four years in the American League and then four years in the national league. When I got ahead of Bob Gibson and Harvey Haddix and the teams that I was on, I said, man, I can't believe it, but I'll take it. Yeah. Well, maybe this will make you feel good, too. I was doing some research and I discovered something about you that I thought was interesting and I hadn't heard before. I was looking at all of the great hitters that you faced as a pitcher in your career and I noticed that you did really well against a lot of them.

You know, Larry Doby and Nellie Fox and Rizzito and Barrett. You did great against them. I know. There were some really good hitters. Ted Williams and one guy I had a heck of a time getting. Roy Seavers. Do you remember Roy Seavers? I had a hell of a time.

I couldn't get him out, and he knew it. I tried everything to get him out, but even after I got him out, he was a line drive somewhere. He was such a good hitter. I didn't think he was that great a hitter, but, boy, he must have been a pretty good hitter. And then later in the years, I ended up on the same team with him, with the Phillies, and I quit in 1964.

He said, I feel like I could always hit you. I said, you did. You sure did. Well, you know, they have numbers for everything now and you can look up anything these days. And I was able to research that, you know, you faced hitters who went on to get into the Hall of Fame more than a thousand times in your career. A thousand. I didn't know that, but I knew, that. But I knew there was a lot of good hitters. I knew there was quite a few good hitters. Yeah. There's still quite a few good hitters. But you did really well against them.

In fact, of all of the pitchers who ever faced future Hall of Famers that many times, so a couple hundred pitchers did, you did the best against them. So you were the best against future Hall of Famers. Future Hall of Famers barely hit any better against you than everyone else did. It was like you handled them as well as you handled just the average hitter, which is really unusual.

Well, probably because I didn't throw so hard. I changed speeds a lot, and changing speeds makes a lot of good hitters slow down a little bit. Yeah, maybe that's why. How hard did you throw, roughly? Because I was wondering. I don't have any idea. I was just guessing. Looking at these guys throw today makes my arm hurt.

I'm just watching them. Boy, oh, boy. I don't know. I figure I might have thrown 83 or 84 miles an hour. I'm not really sure. We didn't have any guns then when I was playing. Of course, yeah. But to a heck of a hitter. One time I got a chance to meet him, and he told me I had one of the best curveballs in the American League, which made me feel pretty good. I don't know if I had that good a curveball, but that's what he told me anyway. It made me feel pretty good.

Yeah, I'm sure. And I know you were really athletic growing up, not just in baseball, but football and diving and gymnastics and bowling and whatever you did. So were you often underestimated because people looked at you and thought, oh, he's not a big guy? I don't know. I don't think I was that good at any of them. I tried all of them. I was on the diving team in high school, and I didn't make the football team team but I was able to kick a football pretty good other than that I just I didn't do any other sports that much that much and did people underestimate you as an athlete just

because you weren't a big guy I don't know and I don't know if they underestimated me but all the guys all the people that talked to me and they they thought I thought I was pretty good. That's all I could tell. That's the only way I could tell. But what they're saying right now, and I talked to athletes that I played years ago with, and they always thought I was a pretty good athlete, I guess. Yeah. And growing up during the Depression,

how did you and your brother and your parents make ends meet? Well, my dad was a half-decent ball player, too. He played for the Best Home Steel Company in Pottstown, where we were born. And he never made a lot of money. And we were always looking for box tops to get any balls or anything in the paper where we could pick up an extra ball or except no we and then we we do the hill school in past town we used to go up there and wait wait sitting outside of the park when they were playing so we

could get their foul ball then we'd run away and take them home with us so I actually way we got any balls but we didn't we didn't have too much money we we were kind of kind of short on balls, I guess. We were short on everything. Yeah. And in 1944, I know you had grown just enough to pass your physical for the Army, right? Yeah. I didn't pass the first time.

They sent me back. I had to grow another wrench. So I waited another year, and then they took me, and I went into the Army for two years. And is it true that you were trained to drive tanks at first, but then you were transferred because your feet barely reached the pedals? Yeah, well, they sent me after spring training. Basic training, I guess. The basic training, they sent me to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and they ended up putting me in a tank, and I couldn't even reach the pedals.

So that was the end of my tank training. I ended up in the Philippines for most of my career in the service. In fact, I even got a chance to pitch against, in Manila, we had a baseball team, the service team that I was on, and I ended up pitching against some of the big league ballplayers at that time. They always thought I could pitch pretty good when I was in the service, too, so I ended up doing that for a couple games. But that's about all the and I did at that time. Yeah. And then after the war,

I know you were starring in a Sandlot League in Pennsylvania. And then I read that in October 1947, you were scheduled to start an exhibition game against Kurt Simmons, right? Kurt Simmons, yeah. He just made his debut with the Phillies at that time. And I know that the problem was you had hurt your wrist. And can you tell me what your manager did?

I don't know what I did to my wrist. I can't remember anymore. But my coach was Larry Glick, and I was supposed to pitch against Kirk this day, and I told him my wrists were really bothering me. And he took me over and he said, put your wrist on a table. He took

a book and he smacked down on my wrist. Man, it really hurt. After that, I started warming up and it didn't hardly hurt at all. I ended up pitching against Kurt. I think we beat him 4-1 or something like that. I still see Kurt.

He's in terrible shape. He's in bad shape. He's not well at all. I go over to see him once in a while. Him and Robin Roberts used to have a golf course, and they used to let me play for nothing over there. They really treated me nice. I really appreciated that.

It was really nice of them. So I still go over to see him, but he's in terrible shape. And I feel so sorry for him when I go appreciated that. It was really nice of him. So I still go over to see him, but he's in terrible shape. And I feel so sorry for him when I go over. I feel like crying. I just can't take it, I guess. I don't know. But I feel really bad when I see him. Yeah, that's too bad.

And I guess that was not a recommended treatment to slam someone's wrist with a book. No, I know. I didn't even know what he was going to do with that book, and he just went down, and he really smacked it, too. And it hurt like hell when he did it, but after I started moving around a little bit, I ended up where I could throw the pretty good curveball. So it actually didn't hurt, but I was really...

I don't know how you heard about that. I almost forgot about that. That was really some. I don't know how you heard about that. I almost forgot about that. That was really nice. Well, later in your career, I know you had a more serious shoulder injury and that cost you some time and you had to get a lot of treatment and then you pitched out of the bullpen, but they didn't have the options for surgery and treatment that they have now. I saw it just a few years ago. At the end of the 52 season, I was going for my 25th win, and I got hit with a pitch ball and broke my left wrist. So that took care of my pitching that year.

Can't slam a book on that, I guess. Then the following, I don't know how I hurt my shoulder. I pulled something in my shoulder, and I didn't pitch hardly at all. It was 53 and 54. So I ended up going, I was just floundering around going from one team to another. And then I ended up with the Yankees. And my arms started feeling pretty good. And I had three or four pretty good years with the Yankees. Yeah, well, nowadays you probably would have gotten some surgery that wasn't available back then. Or I saw just a few years ago, you got stem cell treatments on your shoulder,

I saw. And that seems to have helped you, right? Yeah, I did. I thought about that Tommy John surgery, but I never went through with it because I wasn't too sure if it was any good. So a lot of pitchers took it and they did pretty good with it. Yeah, I mean, that hadn't been done yet, obviously, during your career. Well, you got signed the month after that game against Simmons. And were the Athletics the only team that really gave you a great chance at that time? There was a St. Louis Browns. They had a couple guys looking at me when I was throwing on the sandlots in Philadelphia. But they always said I was too small.

And then the scout for the athletics came to me that winter and asked me if I'd be interested. I had a job in the soil mill working a pretty lousy job. I wasn't too good of a job. And they asked me if I would like to go away and play baseball. And I said, well, I don't know. And then my dad just happened to be sitting there. of a job so and they asked me if i would like to go away and play baseball and i said well i don't know and then my dad just happened to be sitting there he says go ahead go go go away so that's what i that's when i said well let me have better give it a shot because

the job i had wasn't worth a damn it was terrible i had to wear a mask and goggles all the time because it was such a lousy job but but it wasn't making a hell of a lot of money. So I ended up going out to Lincoln, Nebraska, and they sent me to the Class A Western League. They said that's about the class I was pitching around the same lot, so I said, okay, I'll take a shot at it. So I went out there, and I ended up winning 18 games out there in the Class A Western League, and then next year I'm in the big leagues.

Can you believe that? Yeah, didn't take long. I can't believe that yet, but I was pretty lucky. I think I've been pretty lucky all my life. I've been really lucky, very lucky. And your manager your first couple years in the big leagues was Connie Mack, and I think you're the last person I can still ask this question. What was it like to be managed by Connie Mack?

Yeah, well, he was very quiet. He never said much. His son did most of the matching. Earl Mack was his son, and he did most of the coaching. Connie would sit in the dugout and then wave the scorecard. He was 86, 87 by then. Yeah, he never said too much. He was a very nice person, a very nice man.

But he was a little bit too old to be mad at. When I came to the big leagues, I think he was about 82 years old. Yeah, older even. He never said much, but he was really nice. And he didn't want you to throw the knuckleball, right? No, he didn't. No, I had started throwing a knuckleball even when I was around the sand lots when I was screwing around. I used to think about the guy that had that good knuckleball down with that ball.

What the hell was his name? I forget. I can't remember. I used to see how good he was doing. I ended up throwing a pretty good knuckleball, but like everybody else, I didn't have too good of a control of it, but I learned it. When I finally learned to get around the play, that pitch really helped me out. And then Jimmy Dykes took over our managing job, and in spring training, he'd come over to me and he says, Shancy, if you could get that goddamn knuckleball over to play, you could throw that thing. He didn't want to tell Mr. Mack that, but

after Mack had retired, so he'd come over to me and he said, and I ended up winning nine or ten ballgames in a row. I already threw it when I had two strikes on somebody. Even if I wasn't around to play, if I had two strikes, I'd get a lot of guys out with it.

Was that what led to your MVP year, being able to throw the knuckleball more? I think so, yeah. I think it was because I won quite a few ballgames getting guys out with that pitch. Was it intimidating to come up as a rookie and have your manager be someone who's been in the game since almost the beginning? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know. Jimmy Dykes was the manager, and Bing Miller was one of our coaches,

and our pitching coach. Gosh, I can't even think of his name. Bender. Charles Bender. Chief Bender, yeah. Was that Chief Bender? Bender, yeah. Yeah, I had a stroke not too long ago, so I'm losing my –

I've been through the hell. This past year, I broke both of my hips. Oh, no. Mowing the goddamn lawn, can you believe that? Wow, you should get someone to do that for you. Oh, God, yeah, both times, I broke one hip the first time in my elbow, and then the next time, about a year later, I fell and broke the other hip and my shoulder. Oh, no.

And then I finally got over that that and I ended up having a goddamn stroke so now I'm just trying to get out of bed so that's one of the reasons I can't go see Jim Carter I love that guy but I wish I could really wish my kids even want to take me up there but I can't do that that's a beautiful place I've been up there to sign autographs quite a few times, and it's really nice. And I really would like to go, but I just can't take it. I don't think I can do it. Yeah.

Well, you're older now than Connie Mack lived to be or was when you came up. Christ, it seems like I'm older than everybody. I was out throwing the first ball, but they have a field name after me up where I used to go to high school, and they invited me there yesterday. I was up there most of the day trying to throw a ball 10 feet. I couldn't even throw a damn ball 10 feet because my left shoulder is so bad. I threw it right in, and I didn't even reach the plate, and I only had to throw it 10 feet. But I couldn't do it.

They just wanted me to come up here, and I guess they were glad I was there anyway. Well, I know you used to drop down and throw sidearm against lefties sometimes. Did you have a knuckler sidearm too? No, I didn't throw the knuckle sidearm, no. I stayed overhand with that because I kept it on a better line when I was breaking. I could just get it around the plate. A lot of times I didn't even get it over the plate, but they'd swing at it because I had two strikes on it.

That's the only time I ever threw it. Yeah, and in 1955 you got to pitch to your brother Billy, who was a catcher for the A's. So what was it like to throw to him in a game? He was a good catcher, very good catcher. Good arm, and he did a good job. He stayed in the big leagues about four or five, almost five years, I think, almost long enough to get a pension.

And he was really a good catcher. I remember I was having a little trouble with my arm in Kansas City, and Lou Boudreaux was our manager, and he'd come over to me and he says, well, we're playing the Yankees tomorrow, you think you can start the game? I said, yeah, okay. I'm starting to feel pretty good. You know what? We ended up beating them 6-0.

And my brother was catching. Oh, wow. That's great. Yeah. That was really something. I really enjoyed that. And when you got to the Yankees, I know that they put you back in the starting rotation, too, a lot of the time.

Yeah, I did start a few balls. I really enjoyed it. Boy, those years for the Yankees, that was really something. I can't believe I had such a good ball club. They were all really good ball players, really good. Today, little Bobby Shands will try and prove that he also is an App student. Today, little Bobby Shands will try and prove that he also is an apt student, and the Braves will be out to give him a course in more than a few of the mere knocks of life. Bobby Shands is not the biggest man in the world, and undoubtedly, that's a fact known

to a great many of you also. Bobby stands, well, a rousing 5'6 1⁄2, and he weighs 150 pounds. He was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and this year with the New York Yankees, he compiled the best earned run average in baseball. Both the American and the National League, his earned run average 2.44, Chan's 1.11, lost 5, and he's had a rather interesting career in baseball. Well, I asked you about Connie Mack. What was it like to be managed by Casey Stengel?

Well, he was just the opposite of Mr. Mack. Mr. Mack never said too much, and Casey never shut up. He's always talking. He was talking in his sleep, I think. I don't know why he kept talking all the time. Evidently, I didn't really think Casey was – I shouldn't say that. I guess I never thought he was really that good a manager. But he had some really good coaches, you know, Frank Presetti.

Frank Presetti and Ralph Houck and guys like – the pitching coach Jim Turner, those guys really helped him out. They've done a good job for him. Of course, Casey got most of the credit. I think most of the credit should have really gone to the players and the coaches. The coaches were really good. Well, I don't know if you remember this,

but on the last day of the 1958 regular season with the Yankees, you came in to pitch in the seventh inning. You pitched a couple perfect innings, and then Casey moved you to center field, and you played an inning in center field. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I almost forgot about that. You were the first pitcher to play center for almost a century from 1925 to 2019 when Michael Renson did it for the Reds. You were the only one.

How did that happen? Well, I don't know. I think I pitched the game before that, so I didn't have to go to the bullpen. I was in the dugout, and I think Mickey had to go to some place on television or something, and we were ahead in the game anyway. So he looked down at Doug and he said,

Chance, go out and play center field to finish up the game. I said, holy shit, I didn't even have my glove out there. I had to run in and get my glove. I didn't expect to get in the game. I knew I wasn't going to pitch because I hadn't pitched in the game before that. I ended up running out there, and I said, Christ, I hope nobody hits a ball out here because I haven't played center field since high school. And would you believe the first hitter ball, first guy up to come to bat hit one right to me.

I was scared to death because I knew I was going to catch it, but I wasn't too sure because I hadn't played the outfield for years. Yeah, well, you were a great fielder, but it's a little different fielding as a pitcher than as a center fielder, I guess. Yeah, you're right. You got that right. It's a little different in the big leagues, I had like a dairy bar for 23 years. I was running that, and then I retired, and I said, should I have enough? I'm going to retire. I ended up starting my pension. I was getting $600 a month.

Now guess how much I'm making. Oh, is it more, I hope? A hell of a lot more, $5,500 a month. Wow, not bad. Can you believe that's why I say I'm just trying to stay alive so I can collect that pension? I never made a hell of a lot of money in baseball. When I won 24 games that one year, I was only making $12,000. I thought I was overpaid.

Wow. That's what I say. I've been a lucky person, I'll tell you. That's what I say. I've been a lucky person. I really appreciate my life. I really had a nice life. Well, you had an incredible life. You've done so many things. And we talked about your fielding.

You were a pretty good hitter, too. And I know that you— I got up to hit one home run. Yeah, off of Allie Reynolds, right, at 1950. Yeah, I'll never forget that. After Allie and I had both retired, we were both invited back to an old-timers game in Yankee Stadium, and I'm sitting in my locker trying to put my shoes on,

and somebody tapped me on the shoulder, and I looked up, and it was Allie Reynolds. He said, you little shit, how you hit a home run off me? The only one I hit off that hit. I said, I was a pretty good hitter. And Ali said, yeah, you were a pretty good hitter. Yeah, a small strike zone, I guess, so that probably helped. But I know that the Yankees won the World Series in 1958.

You didn't get to pitch in that series, but I know you pitched in the memorable. Yeah, I had a couple of broken. I got hit with a line drive and busted a couple of fingers. They didn't put me on the roster, so I didn't get a chance to pitch at all. And, of course, you got to pitch in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. I'm guessing that's not your favorite game, but maybe one of the more memorable games you were in. Oh, yeah, boy. I'll never forget that.

Bobby Shands came on in the third inning and has pitched magnificently in relief, Curley and Stafford being the first two Yankee pitchers. Here's Bill Burden, fly to left, single to right to drive in two runs, and grounded to second. It's in there. Strike one. There's the ground ball. Hit the short. Knocked, and it hits.

Go back in the face, and all hands are safe. The ball took a hard hop. A double play ball bounced up and hit him in the face, all hands safe. Bobby Shantz got him to come up with what appeared to be the double play ball. It took the hop and hit Kubek in the face. That ground ball to Kubek, oh, man. It was a double play ball. Gordon hit a ground ball, double play ball, and it took a terrible hop and bounced up and hit him in the throat.

Oh, God. Yeah. It was hit pretty good. I know Tony would have caught that ball if he hadn't hit something. I don't know what the hell it hit, but it bounced up. Boy, he went down there. I think Gus Muck had to stick his finger down his throat to keep him from swallowing his tongue. Man, that scared the hell out of me.

We were all standing around trying to help him get it out of there. I know Tony was a damn good fielder. It just took one really terrible hop. That killed us, too. We ended up losing a goddamn series. I thought I was going to win that game. I think I could have won that game if that wouldn't have happened.

You pitched okay. You weren't the one who gave up the Mazeroski homer or the Hal Smith homer. I don't know. Ralph Terry pitched the guy to Mazeroski, I think. Yeah. Yeah, and he hit that home run.

And you know what? Mazeroski lives about four miles from me right now. Uh-huh, yeah. In Lansdale. He lives in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, about four miles from me. I was to a card show not too long ago, and who was there?

Bill Mazeroski. Wow. Nice guy, Really good guy. Yeah. And then you were selected in back-to-back expansion drafts so that the Senators took you, although you never ended up playing for them. And then the Colt 45s the year after that. I ended up at Pittsburgh. I ended up at Pittsburgh, yeah. And then Houston, the Colt 45s took you when they were starting, too. So you were moving around a lot. I pitched the first game in Houston, too, yeah. I guess it was nice to be wanted by these franchises.

Yeah, I was glad somebody wanted me at that time. Right. And then later on, you ended up pitching for the Phillies, that famous 1964 late season collapse, right? That was the end of your career. I thought we were going to win and get in that World Series too, but we didn't quite make it. A new pitcher in the ballgame.

New cover to the Philadelphia Phillies, Bobby Shand. Bobby was picked up from the Chicago Cubs. He also was with St. Louis this year. He had a 1-3 record with St. Louis in 16 games. With the Cubs, he was 0-1. Bobby Shand taking his warm-up pitches. Preparatory to making his initial appearance for the Philadelphia Phillies.

Bob got his start back in 1949 with the Philadelphia Athletics. Then in 1952, Bobby was the most valuable player in the American League with a 24-7 year for the Philadelphia Athletics. That's when I thought I better give up. That's the year I quit. Yeah, right. I was wondering whether you considered coming back so you didn't end on that note.

No, Gene Mock sent me a contract. They wanted me to come back, but I said, no, Gene, I've had it. I ended up getting in that dairy bar in the bowling alley with Joe Astroff, our catcher for the athletics. We opened up that business and I had already started doing that. So I said, I'm done. I quit. So I appreciated him asking me, though. It was pretty nice of him. Right. And I guess the one thing we didn't talk about was your memorable All-Star Game moment where you struck out the side, right?

Struck out Stan Musial, struck out Jackie Robinson. Yeah, and what the heck was the other guy's name for the Giants? Isn't that something? I can't even think of who the hell I pitched. Since I had that goddamn stroke, sometimes I start talking and my mind starts wandering. It was Whitey Lockman. Whitey Lockman, yeah. How the hell could I forget that?

I don't know. I'm just getting old, I guess. You wanted to come back out for another inning, right? But then it started raining, I think. Yeah, we got rained out. I never did get a chance to. I don't know. I don't think I would ever have caught Carl.

He had struck out five, I think. But that was nice. It was a nice career. I really had a great time. Yeah. Oh, no, it's incredible. You played for so many great managers and with so many great teammates and faced so many great teammates and just really an amazing career.

You did so much. That's what I say. That's what I say. That's what I say. I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I really do. Well, I'm so glad that I caught you here. I didn't even mention you were part of the Lou Brock trade, too, right? Yeah.

You were that famous lopsided trade. Yeah. You went there. Yeah. And then when I pitched for Houston against the Cubs, Lou Brock was the first guy I pitched to. Right. I think I got him out, but we beat the Cubs 11-2 that game. Wow.

Oh, God. What was the heaviest you ever were, you think, during your career? Because I read 139 pounds. Was that your actual weight? Yeah, yeah. I still weigh 138. Wow, okay. You can weigh 138. Wow. Okay.

You can fit into your uniform. That's great. I think the most, maybe I don't know if the most important thing, but the luckiest thing I ever did was being picked as most viable player in the American League. I thought that was the most very nicest thing I ever had happen to me. Yeah. And, you know, to win all those gold gloves, I thought it was funny there a few years ago, a reliever named David Robertson in his contract, he had an incentive, you know, if he wins a gold glove, then he gets a bonus. Who was that? David Robertson? David Robertson. Yeah. Who was on the Yankees for a while. Oh, he was on the Yankees. I didn't know that. Yeah. And I thought

it was funny because, you know, relief pitchers never win gold gloves anymore, but you did so many times. So I guess you were just so good that they had no choice but to give it to you. That's why I say, that's why I think I'm so goddamn lucky. I've been lucky all my life, I guess. I really had a great life, I'll tell you. I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world. Not Lou Gehrig, huh? It's you?

No, no. They might have been a little luckier, maybe. I don't know. I kind of doubt it, though. I might have been the luckiest, I guess. I did read about a game where you said you were starting for the Philadelphia Athletics, and I think you had a complete game victory against the Yankees. And I think you said you might have thrown 350 pitches that day.

Yeah, I started against the Yankees in, I guess that was in 52, I believe. I'm not sure. It's 14 innings, and we beat them 2-1. But man, I tell you, Dykes wanted to take me out of that game four or five times because I hadn't been on them four or five of that inning. And we kept getting out of double play balls. They hit line drives right at somebody. But I knew our bullpen wasn't quite so good.

So I didn't tell him that, but I said, I'm staying in this game if I can, if I can possibly make it. And we ended up, we got a run in the 14th inning, and I got him out in the end of the 14th inning, and we beat him 2-1. I must have thrown 300 pitches, I guess. I don't know. Things are a little different today. Pitchers don't work that way anymore. But did you like starting better than relieving, or did you like doing both? Yeah, I really did like starting pitching. I like to start. I love to start.

I thought I was going to start a few I like to start. I love to start, yeah. I thought I was going to start a few more games with the Yankees, too, but Casey kept me in the bullpen most of the time. I guess we started. I can't remember how many games I started with the Yankees, but I think it was about seven or eight or nine. I'm not sure. They had some good starting pitchers, and they had good pitching in the bullpen too

They didn't even need me I don't think They had Louie Arroyo And Bob Grimm And good pitchers in the bullpen Yeah your first year in New York 57 you actually started 21 games Oh did I? With the Yankees?

Yeah you pitched 30 games 21 as a starter Oh I didn't know that I didn't know that I started that many games. Holy Christ. Man, that's news to me. I didn't really realize that I started that many games. I think Whitey was having a little trouble. Whitey Ford was having a little trouble with his arm at one time.

I think that's why he gave me a chance to start, I believe. I don't know. But I can't remember starting that many games. Were you someone who enjoyed the nightlife with Mantle and Martin and all those guys? No. No. After the game, I'd never seen Whitey or Yogi

or Pank Bauer or Mantle or any of those guys. I didn't see them until the next day. Well, maybe that's why you're still here at 96. I don't have any idea where in the hell they went. They were at some nightclub, I guess. That's what I read in the paper. I don't know. Yeah, well.

They were all a good bunch of guys, really good guys. Well, thank you so much for your time. I'm so happy I caught you here, and I wish you better health, whether you make it to the induction ceremony or not. I hope you stop mowing the lawn. My kids want to drive me up there, but I just can't go. I get dizzy and sometimes I don't even know what the hell I'm saying. So I don't want to make an

ass out of myself. I better stay right here where I'm still living pretty good. Well, I hope that you continue to for a long time. But thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to talk to you, Bobby. Okay. Thank you for calling. I appreciate it. Thank you. Bye. All right.

Bye-bye. Bobby Shantz in relief of Stafford, who in turn relieved Bob Turley. The proof being that this game of baseball, there's room for all sizes and shapes. This fella's heart's every bit as big as his body well that was bobby shintz and he was wonderful as seemingly every former player that i've managed to get on the phone has been love bobby shintz do you think that there's a selection bias here where the ones who would be real stinkers are just like no i don't wouldn't talk to you get away from me yes except that that has never really happened that I can recall when I've done these cold calls.

Good luck. I think it's good luck. Bobby said he was very lucky. Maybe we've been lucky with the cold calls too. But I think it's also that we have done them judiciously. I mean, look, if we were to call Willie Mays, which, hey, we'd love to have Willie Mays on the show if he wants to come on. He is always welcome. But we would not cold call Willie Mays. I would not cold call Willie Mays. I would be petrified and would not dare. But I would also not dare because like Willie Mays

probably has people calling him and wanting to talk to him constantly. Right. Whereas your Charlie Maxwell's and your Bobby Shances and your Ned Garvers and your Eddie Robinsons, I mean, these were all good players who had long careers in the majors, but they're not Willie Mays. They're not household names to today's youth. So I don't think they have people cold calling them so often. And so if you get to be 90 something, I mean, look, if I make it to that age, which would be wonderful, even if I've broken both of my hips and whatever else, like I'll take it. I'd sign up for that right now. But if I make it to that age, like I'm giving blanket permission right now to anyone who wants to cold call me to like ask me questions.

Because I'd feel pretty happy if I were A, alive, and B, if anyone wanted to talk to me and still thought I was really interesting, which invariably these guys tend to be. And I guess like one of the big takeaways is that it was two separate mowing the lawn accidents that resulted in the hips getting broken. And so it just it perhaps speaks to an indomitable spirit, right? That you do it the first time and you're like, I'll just get back out there and see how it goes. And if that's your attitude, you probably are happy to share your stories with a plucky young baseball type

who wants to tell you how you just like really dominated a bunch of Hall of Famers. Yeah, right. We never call and say you were really terrible at something. Yeah, that's the other thing.. We never call and say, you were really terrible at something. Yeah, that's the other thing. We're never like, hey, you were the worst at this. Like, that would be a terrible way to treat someone. Yeah, there are some exceptions to that.

On episode 964, Sam and I cold called Bill Hands, who has since passed away, sadly. But we wanted to talk to him about the fact that he allowed five home runs to pitchers in 1968. And then along the same lines, in episode 1081, Jeff and I called Glenn Borgman because we wanted to talk to him about a game when he was catching and he allowed 12 stolen bases. So those were not those guys' finest hours. But again, no one knows these things about Bill Hands or Glenn Borgman. But yeah, if someone calls you up and say, hey, did you know that Hall of Famers couldn't hit you? What are you going to say?

Leave me alone. How dare you? You know, I wasn't insulting him. So I feel like that was probably welcome news. So just a few notes about Bobby Shantz, just in response to things he said on this call. And I could have talked to him for twice as long because as soon as I hung up, there were things that I thought, oh, I should have asked him about that. Because in his very second game in 1949, when he came up for Connie Mack's A's, apparently Mack was not super impressed by his first outing for the A's. And he was actually on the verge of being sent back down to the minors. But then some other pitchers caught cold or were unavailable. And so Bobby Shantz came in and in his second major league game on May 6th, 1949, he came out of the bullpen and threw nine no-hit innings and was the first pitcher to do that since the Ernie Shore in relief of Babe Ruth perfect outing in 1917. So that was pretty cool.

And he ended up losing the no-hitter because he pitched into a 10th inning, but he did win the game. So that was a pretty special outing, I would say. Not bad for your second major league appearance. And that earned him a longer leash. And he took advantage of that. And he actually said in an article once that his signing bonus was a great big handshake. So he was not like a highly touted prospect, which makes sense given his frame and his size. And the Jimmy Dykes connection. So I don't know if you remember this, but Jimmy Dykes played an important part in Charlie Maxwell's career as well.

And so he came up on that episode last week because Jimmy Dykes was the manager who came in and said, hey, Charlie Maxwell, you should not be on the bench. You should be starting in 1959. And then he put him in the lineup and then Maxwell hit his four homers in the doubleheader. So that was Jimmy Dykes doing that for Maxwell. And he also did something for Bobby Shantz. He led to that breakthrough for both of them in that he said, yeah, throw that knuckleball. So that was kind of cool. And Jimmy Dykes once said about Shantz, I'll carry him from the hotel to the ballpark if he weighs over 145. He can walk under my armpits and he wouldn't have to stoop much to walk under some of those strikes he throws either. Jimmy Dykes was

5'9". Oh my gosh. Yeah. Now, Ted Williams, as you heard, he told Chance that he had the best curveball and Chance has previously said, most of the time I got him out. That's what he said about Ted Williams. Technically, that is true. Ted Williams batted 308, 455, 500 against Bobby Chance. So 455 on base. Yep. Technically, he did get out most of the time. However, in keeping with Bobby Chance being good against Hall of Famers, that was actually bad for Ted Williams.

308, 455, 500, that's nothing. His career line was 344, 482, 634. So holding Ted Williams to 500 slug, that was pretty impressive. And against Charlie Maxwell, Shantz and Maxwell as contemporaries, they went head to head quite often. They faced each other 36 times and the resulting line was 286-361-375, which, you know, it's kind of even. I guess they battled more or less to a draw there. As he said, Shantz was a pretty good hitter for a pitcher. He had a 38 career OPS+, which among the 191 pitchers with at least 600 career plate appearances,

ranks 34th, stat head and i guess the the corollary of chance being so great against great hitters was that maybe he was victimized more often by not so great hitters so if you look at his uh top opponents like the guys who hit him hard he mentioned roy sievers who did hit him22, 359, 576 in 64 plate appearances, but he was not the worst defender. They were players like Chico Carrasquel, Johnny Groth, Sherm Lollar, Clyde Vollmer, and Bob Neiman. They were his main nemeses. I'm glad I didn't have those names at my command when I was talking to him or I might have given him flashbacks. Reason to hang up on you. Yeah.

But if his theory is right, that like he just didn't throw hard enough for the Hall of Famers to hit, like maybe they were all geared up for velocity or something and they made their bones on hitting fastballs and that was not his bread and butter, then I guess it would follow that, well, maybe he was more hittable by guys with like slider speed bats. So maybe, maybe there's something to that. Could just be chance or random or something. Chance, chance. But that checks out.

It kind of tracks. It's a more plausible chance-based reason than a lot of chance-based reasons. Put it that way. Right? Yeah, right. I guess all else being equal, you'd rather be better in a relative sense against good hitters who would be coming up more often and probably coming up more often with runners on base. And that famous game that we talked about briefly there where he ended up pitching 14 innings in one game in his MVP year in 1952.

He said he thought he threw 300 pitches in the past. He has estimated 350. Well, there is a formula for estimating pitch counts just from how many batters you face and how many strikeouts and walks you get. It's something Tom Tango developed. According to that formula, his estimated pitch count was 220.

So that's still a lot of pitches, even if that was it. If you threw 220 pitches, I guess I will give you some creative license and say that you can just claim 300. Why not? The headline on the story about that game in his hometown paper was, Bobby Shantz Shows Ability. An understated headline, not exactly effusive. Then the story starts by calling him Little Bobby Shantz. It's amazing how every newspaper story, every broadcaster

just called him Little Bobby Shantz, which, hey, he was. We stan a short king. Last thing to mention, Called him Little Bobby Shantz, which, hey, he was. We stan a short king. Last thing to mention, I think, about him. I talked at the very end there about the fact that he was going in the other direction in the famous Lou Brock trade. Just another case where Bobby Shantz was like baseball zealot and was like there at the important time when something was happening. when something was happening. Well, in December 1960, after the Senators took him in the expansion draft,

as we discussed, the Cardinals, who wanted him even then, they almost traded Bob Gibson for Bobby Shantz. According to the Cardinals GM, the Senators said it would take a lot more than Gibson to get Shantz. And, you know, Gibson was young and not established at that point. He was a prospect.

So they threw in a couple other players, like another minor leaguer and another major leaguer, and they thought that they were going to get Bobby Shantz for this package fronted by Bob Gibson, and they didn't get him. The Pirates outbid the Cardinals or just had a package that was more to the Senators' liking. And And so the pirates got Bobby Shantz instead of the cardinals getting him in exchange for Bob Gibson. So instead of trading Gibson for Shantz, the cardinals kept Gibson, as we all know, and then they got Bobby Shantz later and they traded him and others for Lubrock. So that worked out really well. Instead of just giving away Bob Gibson, you got to keep

him, also get Bobby Shantz, and then use Bobby Shantz later to get Lou Brock in a famous franchise altering deal. So it's like, you know, anything you read about baseball history in those years, Bobby Shantz was there or somewhere nearby. And fortunately, he's still with us. Yeah. He's, you know, he's the friend you're looking at just off camera in every one of your candidates. Exactly. Right. Well, that was just joy. And I say bring on the nonagenarians, although there are only a handful that are older than Bobby Shedd.

So I might have to set my sights a little lower next time potentially. But glad that we could have him on and that we could talk to him because uh just what an incredible career he had well and you have to call me before you call them next time yes i got so excited like i have another great cold call and i was like cool and you were like i already did it i was like okay i i you know this is your joy, your unique special joy. So I won't begrudge you it, but you should just call me first next time. Yeah. No, it was such a cold call that I was cold too.

I was not prepared. You can't tell from the call, Ben. No, it was edited judiciously. Someone else picked up initially and I was like, is this Bobby Shantz's number? Can I talk to Bobby Shantz? Is this a good time to talk to Bobby Shantz? I'll call back. I don't know. And then they just handed the phone to Bobby Shantz and he seemed game. So I just talked because no time like the present. No, definitely not.

All right. That will do it for today. You know, sometimes I wonder when I spend hours on newspapers.com digging up articles from decades or centuries ago whether the things that we write today will be equally accessible 60 or 80 years hence you'd think they would be more easy to access than newspapers that you had to print out and keep and that could physically disintegrate and at the time were often only available in one locality and yet all those things have been digitized and scanned and ocr'd and I can just search the text in a second. Whereas the things I write right now, who knows whether you'll be able to find them in the future, what with link rot and digital decay. Sometimes it's tough to access a story published just a few years ago on a website that was taken down.

I hope that the history-oriented podcasters of 2080 will be able to dig up the interesting and smart and sometimes dumb stuff that we are saying today with just as much ease. I don't know that Google and the Wayback Machine are cutting it. Maybe we should just print out all of our articles and scan them and just add them to newspapers.com. That would work. In the meantime, 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, help us stay ad-free, and get access to some perks. Michael Barrett O'Quinn, Frank Myers, Mark Bologna, Ricky Budd, and Michelle Barone. Thanks to all of you. Our Patreon supporters get access to our 24-7 well-populated Discord group solely for Patreon

members. They also get access to monthly bonus podcasts with me and Meg and play off live streams We'll see you next time. Thank you. Maybe you thought I was going to go with Abba's Take a Chance on Me for the outro song today. No, too obvious. I'll go with another lesser-known Abba song that's also pertinent to today's guest. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you soon. to that place where I've got all my memories, those were my happiest days. Where I've got all my memories, those were my happiest days.