Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1866: That Sinking Feeling

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about two spectacular games by Shohei Ohtani and Ohtani’s extraordinary playing-time pace and relay a sinker-iffic response from Michael Lorenzen to a previous discussion about baseball grip, then (24:22) answer listener emails about using different-colored balls to denote different levels of liveliness, how much time to train players have […]

Oh, I go for it every time Just like a heavy drinker I go for it every time A clan and sinker. Hello and welcome to episode 1866 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Eugrelia Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing well, how are you? Oh, you know, I'm doing alright.

It's been a while since we started an episode with a good old-fashioned rave about Shohei Otani. And by a while, I mean, I don't know, a week or two probably. It's a while for me. I mean, I've backed off my pace of discussing Shohei Otani probably to no one's dismay, but we still talk about him a fair amount. And there are certain times when you just have to talk about him because he demands your attention and everyone's attention. And this is one of those weeks because he had a couple signature games back-to-back, really, the way that only he can, where anyone can have a good offensive game or a good pitching game, but no one else can have them, the same player, or back-to-back games the way that he did. have them the same player or back-to-back games the way that he did. So he had the game where he drove in eight runs on two home runs,

including a game-tying three-run shot just in the ninth. And then he followed that up by pitching an eight-inning gem, two hits, 13 strikeouts, a career high, one walk. Caveat, Kansas City Royals were his opponent in each of these games. But even so, there's no way to take away from the luster, really. And you got the classic Tungsten Armo Doyle kind of game with the first one because the Angels somehow lost that game when he drove in eight runs. So I think it was the fifth time maybe that someone had driven in five runs and had their team lose the game. But it was the first time ever, I believe, that someone drove in eight runs without his team being in the lead at any point in the game. So just a true angels fact there. But really, that was worth almost a win, almost a war, I think, over those two games.

If you look at the fan cross leaderboards, it gives him 0.3 war on the offensive side, 0.6 war on the pitching side. And I don't know, maybe if you could account for rounding and such, perhaps you would get up to one win above replacement in two days. So it's pretty good. I remember in 2018, I wrote a piece just at the very beginning of the season about Shohei Otani's one war week, because he had hit a couple homers, I think, and he'd had a good outing as a starter. And that was when he wasn't playing as regularly as he does now. And I just pointed out how quickly he could accrue value relative to one-way players. And he showed that again this week.

Yeah, it turns out that when you're able to play at an elite level on both sides of the ball, you can just really rack up those wins. It's a sort of valuable position to be in. I had occasion now to look at our combined war leaderboard at Fangraphs. Yes, I have been frequenting that myself. Yeah, and I do not want to take away from your Otani shine. We will return to it ever so, you know, in just a moment, but I want to ever so briefly say, like, wow, Manny Machado.

Yep, still on top. Yeah, what a season that guy is having. Unfortunately not seriously injured, seemingly. Yes, yes. It seems like he will be back in the folder is back in the folds now if we could keep track of these things anyhow yeah otani is doing he's doing some special stuff i i understand the instinct to like take to to apply an asterisk to games that are superlative but against inferior competition and you know like it's useful to keep in mind

that you're striking out 13 guys against the Royals, who, you know, it's not a very good baseball team. And, you know, you're notching eight RBI against the Royals, which again, famously, just like not a very good baseball team right now. But I wonder about it because at the end of the season, you don't remember any of that stuff. And you want to do really, really well

and sort of assert your will against inferior competition. That's what you're supposed to do. So I know why we need to take note, to be like, cool your jets. And perhaps to you, Ben, we especially need to be like, hey, Ben, cool those jets, though, because you have big flaming jets. But I think it's just like a really special, amazing thing that he's doing. And we can, you know, whatever asterisks we need to apply to his performance against inferior teams, like then we need like another symbol to note, like, but he did both things like in back to back games. And like, that is so hard it's

like my it's like every research paper i wrote in grad school where you had like all these different caveats applied to stuff you know yeah and obviously he shows off skills that would play against any opponent and when he's hitting 100 although he didn't even have to use his fastball all that much because he has like three slider variants. And that was nasty. And then he's got the splitter and cutter and he just throws all these different pitch types at you to the point where once in a while he'll just throw 100 or 101 or something. You'll be like, oh, yeah, you can do that, too. He doesn't even necessarily need to do that always.

And I know that his fastball has elite velocity, but maybe not elite other characteristics. But still, it's pretty impressive that he can throw that hard and then you get the change of speed effect and then obviously he will show off other tools too like just hitting the ball extremely hard or running very hard so it yielded a fresh crop of fun facts i mean some of them were fun, I guess, but almost obvious, like that no one else would have done what he did there. Sarah Langs tweeted that Otani is the first player since RBI became official in 1920 with eight plus RBI and 10 plus strikeouts in consecutive games in either order. Only one other player has even tallied each of those totals in a game in a career or a season, Tony Cloninger in 1966. So I guess that's impressive. I mean, when I was watching that and seeing eight or more runs driven in and then 10 or more strikeouts in back-to-back games, I guess I was not surprised that no one had achieved that previously.

I mean, that is so superlative that you're not watching that thinking, huh, I bet this happens all the time. So I almost didn't even need the confirmation, although I appreciated it anyway. To me, it's almost like I appreciate the everyday, the mundane Shohei, the run of the mill days when he just does both things without doing them at that level or in such close proximity that everyone has to sit up and take notice. Because right now on that aforementioned combined war leaderboard, he is 12th now. Which is pretty impressive because, again, I guess there's a perception that his season has been not disappointing, I would say. He's been well above average as both a batter and a pitcher, but a little below his MVP pace from last season. But a little below his MVP pace from last season. And yet, because he is good at both of those things and because he constantly plays, he is just almost inevitably going to be one of the most valuable players in baseball, even if he is not necessarily producing at the absolute peak of his powers that we saw last year. And maybe he gets back there over the course of the rest of the season. But even if he doesn't, if it's just, oh, yeah, well, he's not performing quite at that level. And yet he is still on a very short list of the most valuable players in baseball. And even before that two-game run, when I was looking at that leaderboard, he was still like in the top 20 or so. It's not like he just vaulted onto that. He was kind of there even when we weren't talking about him that much yeah and you know i think that even though we are into the end of june now you know we can note things like the fact that the you know the three players who are immediately ahead of him on that

combined or leaderboard are you know 0.1 wins at him right you know tommy edmund is 0.2. Paul Goldschmidt is 0.3. Mike Trout is 0.4. Like, you know, you start to get into more than a win's worth of Delta when you get up to Machado and, you know, close with Devers and Dredge. But, you know, to say he is 12th is also to say that, like, he is functionally as valuable as a couple of the guys ahead of him. It's just such a tiny margin. You know, it's well within the sort of error bars of war but yeah i mean like this is one of the incredible things about this guy where if he is able to play regularly and remember when we were like so

worried about otani's durability for a while there and now it's like he's been he's been really consistent in terms of his ability to be on the field like the floor is just going to be really high because he is able to do both of these things like you said at the beginning of this segment like well anyone can hit well it's like no they can't it's actually really really hard to do that and a lot of guys are bad at it so to be able to produce at the level that he is on both sides it's just always going to build in a baseline value to the Angels that is going to be pretty impressive. And sometimes we get to see it on display to an extreme degree where everyone kind of perks up and it's like, I guess I'm tuning into the Angels and the Royals, a thing I did not anticipate happening on my Wednesday. But even when he's not quite that on or spectacular, like he is just incredibly valuable to them as a team. And what he's able to do for them is pretty special.

Yeah. I guess in the interest of fairness, if we're pointing out that he is barely behind some other players who are just ahead of him on the way to boards. Yeah. He's barely ahead of Dansby Swanson, who we're going to have to have a conversation about Dansby Swanson because, sir, Dansby Swanson. Yeah. Big year for walkier players it's yeah not that I've been doing that generally but with him and Judge yeah I think the most of that I think he hit you know we were recording this on Thursday afternoon I think he hit two more home runs today

like Swanson's just having a heck of a time and like he's he's only a a skosh ahead of Nolan Arenado and Bryce Harper and Sandy Alcantara and Freddie Freeman. But he is in a select tier of player at this moment. And he certainly has fellows in that tier, including Taylor Ward. Maybe the way that you can remember is to first navigate to the combined war leader board. And whichever of them you see here is Taylor Ward, because it's certainly not Tyler Wade.

No, it's not. Yeah, it's tough for him, I guess, to be overshadowed in that way by someone who is also on his team. But yeah, I feel bad asking you to praise Otani yet again, because it's like when on the Angels postgame, right after the game, the sideline reporter on the Angels broadcast almost inevitably will ask whichever player is being interviewed about Otani because of course Otani doesn't really do many interviews and so every

other Angel is in the position of having to speak for him or speak about him, at least. People are always asking him about Otani. And so whoever it is who had the big game and gets pulled over to talk to TV right afterward, inevitably there will be like a couple of questions about what they did in that game or what the team did. And then it'll be like, what can you say about Shohei Otani? And then I feel like the players,

there's like a bingo card almost of what they will always say. It's like, you just sit back and watch and you just can't believe what he's doing out there. And there's no one like him and he's one of a kind and you just have to pinch yourself watching him day in and day out. I mean, they all have exactly the same rote response because they've all been asked about him so, so many times. And there are only so many things you can say, although hopefully we have come up with some original things. And you kind of teed me up because one thing I wanted to mention, the playing time, that to me, I think continues to be the most impressive single stat. Yeah. Obviously, you can point to how hard he throws and how hard he hits and how fast he runs and all of that, the physical tools.

But the durability, the availability, that to me dwarfs every other player. This is an era where we're getting increasing specialization. We're getting more attention to rest or load management, right? Even position players are taking more days off. And then you have pitchers who are pitching fewer and fewer innings individually. And meanwhile, Otani's out there being basically a full-time hitter and almost a full-time pitcher within the constraints of the six-pitcher rotation, and he is racking up just ungodly amounts of playing time. So one of my favorite stats about his MVP year was that he had 1,172 combined plate appearances and batters faced last year. And that was the most that any player had had in a single season since Randy Johnson in 1999, which was obviously mostly batters faced as

a pitcher. No one else this century, this millennium, had accrued that much playing time. And I know that Otani doesn't really play the field. He DHs most of the time when he's not pitching. So maybe that removes some of the stress. But still, when you watch Angels games, if you watch Angels games, he's kind of always there because he is either pitching or hitting just all the time.

And he very rarely takes a day off. And this year, because you have the Otani rule, so he can keep DH-ing when he leaves the game as a pitcher, and because you have the universal DH, so if there's an interleague game, he doesn't have to sit. He can still start. He's getting even more playing time. He's on pace for a new high.

So, so far, entering Thursday, he has 298 plate appearances as a hitter, 273 batters faced as a pitcher. If you combine those and project it out, giving him the same percentage of playing time over the rest of the season that he has had thus far, he's on pace for 1,284.75 combined plate appearances plus batters faced. You can round up to 1,285 if you want or keep it at 1,284. Either way, that would be the highest combined total since Steve Carlton in 1983, who had 1,288 combined and he he pitched 280-plus innings that year. So he had 1,183 batters faced and then 105 plate appearances as a batter to boot. So he is just racking up more combined plate appearances and batters faced than anyone has for almost 40 years at this point. It's pretty impressive, and yet he has stayed healthy and seemingly not too fatigued.

So that is almost the most miraculous part of it just aside from the obvious physical skills yeah i think that that is uh a thing that like i said we kind of worried about for a while like after the tommy john and we weren't sure how this was all gonna work and was the degree yeah we still worry well i know you worry but you always worry right we we often do about our favorites but you know i think there was a genuine concern that the degree of load management that would be required to sort of keep him fresh never mind healthy enough to do both of these things to you know an elite level was was going to be such that it wasn't really feasible for them to attempt

it and that has not proven to be true. I like how you're like, how will the Angels players ever learn to talk about a superlative star in their midst as if they haven't all been dealing with that with Mike Trout for his entire career? I mean, I know when they talked to David McKinnon yesterday, he doesn't exactly have the experience, but I imagine that they have some practice in finding new things to say about, you know, a superstar in their midst. And speaking of Angels and Angels pitchers, I heard from one because we talked yesterday about Michael Lorenzen and the comments that he had made over the weekend about the balls being slippery and not getting a good grip.

And a ball got away from him and hit Justin Upton in the head. Fortunately, he was OK. But Lorenzen came out and had some some words for MLB and for the consistency of its baseballs. And that preceded the memo that was then sent out about how to prepare the baseballs. So we talked about that and we wondered, I think, well, is this a pitcher specific problem? Is it something that pitchers complain about because they are deprived of whatever grip agent they were previously able to avail themselves of? And now they're just adjusting to that new normal because we noted that the hit byby-pitch rate league-wide is high still, but not higher than it was before foreign substances were banned, and that even in the game that Lorenzen had pitched, Robbie Ray, his counterpart with the Mariners and the relievers who followed him,

seemingly hadn't had any trouble gripping anything and were quite effective. Well, I heard from Michael Rensin. It was very much like the Annie Hall scene where Marshall McLuhan comes out and says, you know nothing of my work. That's not exactly what Michael Rensin said in this case. But he did want to clarify and add some additional context, which I appreciate. And he noted, I throw a ton of sinkers. Generally, sinkers are pitches where fingers aren't touching seams for grip. So during that game, he said, I threw a total of 18 sinkers to right-handed hitters. The three Mariners pitchers threw a total of six. So I threw three times as many sinkers where my fingers weren't touching the seams for grip. So hopefully you can see why a slick ball might matter. Good point, Michael Ronson. Had not considered that. How did he find out that we had talked about that? Does he listen to the podcast? I don't know if he regularly does. I think someone might have told him that we did,

but if you're out there, hello, Michael. Thanks for reaching out. Yeah, thanks for the clarification. That is very useful to know. We appreciate it. Yeah, that's a legitimately valid point, I think. And I looked on Baseball Savant, and it does seem that while the league-wide hit-by-pitch rate isn't up this season relative to very recent seasons, the hit-by-pitch rate on sinkers specifically is at the highest rate on record in the pitch tracking era. So yeah. How about that? Fact check true. I don't know if I want this to become a consistent thing

where the things that we say just immediately get responded to by the players we're talking about who point out, you didn't think of this. I was saying last week how it can be humbling when we fail to bring something up and listeners point out something that we had overlooked. Well, now apparently players are just reaching out and being like, hey, you talked about me, but you didn't mention this. So I welcome the feedback. This could also be humbling if this becomes a habit, but I appreciate that. So yeah, that's a good point, I think. And that might explain why this was particularly galling to him or the Mets pitcher Chris Bassett, who came out earlier this year and also talked about the lack of consistency in the balls and the lack of grip and the safety issue. That was when lots of Mets were getting plunked and he was maybe speaking up for his

teammates but Chris Bassett is a sinker baller as well so maybe that is a consistent theme cracked this nut wide open Ben yeah or Michael Lorenzen cracked it open for us yes yes yeah that's nice I had Michael Lorenzen on a podcast, The Ringer MLB Show, back in 2017 when we were talking about his two-way play and his history as a hitter. I don't know if he remembers that, but here he is featured on another podcast in a way. And it's interesting because sinkers are making a comeback, right? They are. Which is something that Justin Choi wrote about recently for Fangraphs. People were thinking that the sinker was on its way out,

and it was seemingly for a while, but now it's on its way back in. So I guess that is interesting, given the fact that it may be tough to grip sinkers all of a sudden. Yeah, it seems like unstoppable force is going to meet an immovable object, which is a really weird way to talk about pitching in hindsight. Michael, if you have notes on that as a metaphor for your craft, I would be open to those.

I'd be like, yeah, I don't know if I got that one quite right. But yes, they are. See, there's nothing really truly new under the sun. Even Ben, even the sweepers. It's really just a slider. It's fine. I mean, it's a variation, but it's fine. Yeah.

So what did Justin say? I guess that pitchers who don't have good sinkers are not really throwing them anymore maybe, but there is more of a focus on the individual as opposed to sinkers are bad. So let's throw out all sinkers. I think that like it is another manifestation of a thing that we see sort of increasingly as the default in like player dev and pitch selection, which is what if we thought about what you do well, and then we make adjustments based on that.

And so it's not that there aren't still pitchers who are deciding, I shouldn't throw my sinker. That's not a great pitch for me. It's that the ones who look at it and say like, no, this is an effective offering and I'm able to do something with it are either continuing to emphasize or emphasizing a new that pitch while guys who are like, ah, this sinker stinks are leaning on other stuff.

I think that that's a thing that he said. Yeah. Maybe with less color than I just gave it. I think sinkers are being thrown harder. The concept of the turbo sinker. Turbo sinker. And also are moving more maybe. So sinkers have just gotten better.

Right. Even at the same time when maybe they've gotten harder to grip. Yeah. Which is kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah. All right. so i have some emails we could answer unless there's any other news or banter you want to get to i will save

maybe some pedantic questions for next time we could do a whole episode we could i don't know that anyone would want that but really like you know sometimes like uh you know when people do television shows for instance they do all this like focus grouping about what people like and what they don't and like we don't do that because we're not fancy i think that we like and sometimes i have wondered like why do people listen to this show not like it's not a good show you're excellent but like you know what what about us is bringing them back three episodes a week because like that's a lot of episodes and you know sometimes we talk about rubbing balls and um i think that we've discovered bringing them back yeah i think we've discovered the the through line which is that there is in addition to being like really fiercely committed to um sabermetrics

and finding that interesting just like a lot of pedantic sorts who are like finally the baseball podcast for me yeah yeah and it's always been for them we just never explicitly said so i think yeah it was it was sort of a a theme but it was like a quiet theme and now we've we've turned up the dial on it a little bit. by pedantic questions, which I enjoy, but we will try to answer them in moderation, I think, for those of you who perhaps are not as pedantic as others. But I have some regular old baseball questions here that we could get to. So let's start with a question, well, on the theme of the baseball and variations in the baseball. This is a question from T, who says, how would baseball be different

if when a new ball was given to the pitcher, it was colored so as to reflect if it was a dead ball, a normal ball, or a juiced ball? Let's say a dead ball was white, a normal ball is gray, a juiced ball is black. Given that the pitcher could not choose to reject the ball upon discovering its color and given an even distribution of ball type what would the pitcher do how would this change if the batter also knew the ball color how would baseball be different and i was thinking that maybe we would even want to restrict this to the same color standardize the colors because i don't know how the color would affect the offense i was just about to say like famously they're they're white for a reason right it's so you can see them it's so that they're easier to see and so

it's like if a ball was lively but the hitter couldn't see it because it was black that seems like a safety issue so maybe maybe we need like a talking ball or like announce itself like i'm alive or like i have a wee and the other one can be like i am a ghost right yeah it's dead ben because it's dead so it's a ghost because it's otherwise it would be like early dead ball era where they were not replacing the ball and maybe it got soggy and misshapen, but it also got muddy and not in the way that you want it to and you couldn't see and that would be dangerous, but also hard to hit. And so, yes, I don't know.

You'd have to juice the black ball probably a lot to get the effect of it because you might not be able to see it as well. Although I guess if it were against a backdrop of white t-shirts or something maybe it depends a little bit on the batter's high but you need like a an entire like team like a stage crew to swap out backgrounds well and like you know you wouldn't want to throw a dark colored lively fastball because like what what if the guy can't see it and the pitcher misses his spot and then he gets hit in the head?

This was the concern. So you'd have to make the lively balls also restricted to particular kinds of pitches where if they hit the guy, it's not going to cause any problems. So then you're giving too much information to the hitter. So again, I think we need talking baseballs. that won't make it seem terrifying at all when they're hit over the fence and you think about them dying yeah so there's something maybe it's a qr code you

scan i guess you can't have phones on the field so that might be an issue but but there's something that says this is a normal ball this is a dead ball this is a juice ball but it's the same color and the same outward appearance and i guess as far as we know it's the same spin profile and movement and all that like it's it's maybe just a coefficient of restitution issue where it's some are bouncier than others maybe or or carry more than others but don't really affect like you know i'm thinking like if it's juiced because like you can throw it less effectively, if it's like you're suddenly in Coors Field and your ball is moving less or something like that, well, that might affect your pitch selection or location or something. So

the way I'm thinking about this is that it's basically it behaves the same way until it's hit. And then some are very lively and bouncy and some are not, although I guess it doesn't have to be that way. But we've gotten some similar questions and maybe even answered them at some point about like what if this could be a tactical consideration? What if you got a certain number of times when you could use a juiced ball or a dead ball in a given game and like the hitter could call for a juiced ball on a particular pitch or something? And how would you decide when you want to do that or how would you alter your approach but in this case at least this scenario doesn't sound like you get any choice in the matter it is just assigned maybe they have a big like lotto wheel or something and the juice ball comes out and you say to the pitcher oh you got a juice ball'm sorry. So what does the juice ball make the pitcher do differently

or the hitter do differently, if anything? How long do we think they let one? What is the average number of pitches that a ball is in use for? Do you know? I don't know. It's very low at this point, I think. Right because if the answer is at this point right if the answer is like two one thing that you could do depending on the circumstances is a terrible idea are you ready for a really bad idea ben you're ready for the worst idea i've ever i've ever had

you could just walk the guy you could just put up four and say like get get the heck out of here with your very juicy balls. Very juicy balls. We didn't even mind the full humor potential of that segment yesterday because it turned out that MLB was filming clubhouse attendants rubbing their balls. No. Yeah. Ben. Yeah, they were.

We could have made it sound so much more portographic than it actually was this is like are you a clubhouse attendant or are you on only fans who could tell the difference i don't know but so it would have to be pretty darn juicy i think to justify the intentional never do it you wouldn't do it you would never you wouldn't i mean, Joe Madden might, but only if your faces were already loaded. Yeah. And, oh, you'd have to adjust every player's stats, right? Assuming this was in the data feed, right? You'd have to adjust for juiciness of balls.

Maybe some players would be randomly distributed a higher proportion of juice balls unless this is like rigorously standardized somehow. Otherwise, then some players, luck of the draw, you might get a bunch of bad balls. You might. Yeah. I mean, some people just have bad balls. They're burdened. They do. might consider doing if you are a pitcher who say has a pitch in your repertoire that leads to a lot of ground balls and you have a particularly juicy ball you might prioritize trying to generate

ground ball contact so that if uh if they do put it in play uh it doesn't go over the fence that might be one thing that you could do can i ask you a question that's unrelated no actually you answer and then i have a question that is not an email but is a thing that I've been thinking about. So what would you do if you were a pitcher and you had a particularly spicy meatball? I'm Italian. I can make that voice. Well, you could adjust the sliding scale of pitch to contact

versus stay away from contact, sort of what you were saying there, right? Yeah. If you know that you have a very juicy ball, then you could try to avoid contact. You could throw outside the zone, try to get hitters to chase. The thing is that it then becomes kind of a game theory issue, right? Because if the hitter knows, that's the thing. Do both parties know? If the hitter knows, that's the thing.

Do both parties know? If the hitter knows what the pitcher knows, that the ball is juicy or less juicy, then the hitter could anticipate that the pitcher might try to do that, right? And so maybe ultimately you'd end up being better off pitching against what the obvious predictable pattern would be or just randomizing it or just like pitching the way you normally would. And the hitter will assume, oh, he's going to do something different. Because like if we're talking about juiced versus non-juiced now, like there is a fairly wide range, but it's not as if you have pitchers who are just unplayable with one kind of ball or with another. It definitely affects some hitters and pitchers more so than others. But I don't know that it's so dramatic that you would want to just like

toss out your typical approach because then if you're like getting away from your mindset and your game plan and you don't have conviction in what you're doing and you're kind of off your game because you're just trying to adjust your approach from pitch to pitch and ball to ball, maybe it's better to just ignore it and forget about it. I don't know. So there are a lot of considerations there. But I'd say probably just a little bit of how careful are you going to be, how much of the plate are you going to try to catch, and how intent on getting chases and misses will you be. Although again, if the

hitter knows, oh, he's going to go outside the zone because it's a lively ball, then probably you're less likely to induce a chase because they're going to be primed for that. And who knows, maybe you can catch them by surprise if you just throw one right over the middle. So who knows, maybe you'd be better off not even thinking about it. Yeah, you probably would be. I think it would be incredibly difficult to do that if the ball was say talking to you or was a different color you know it would be like i kind of wish that this would happen for a little bit just so that we could do some analysis on you know how does the how does trying to optimize your pitch selection in that moment to mitigate

loud and potentially very harmful contact get counterbalanced by the hitter potentially knowing that you're keen to do that and so you know trying to sit on whatever that pitch is like that would be interesting are you ready for my question almost i was thinking about just the spectator perspective oh it'd be fantastic it would be fantastic. You'd be so nervous, though. You'd be so nervous. I think if there was an element of choice, especially if you could have some gamesmanship and some strategy and hold it in reserve, and then everyone would know,

oh, it's a juiced ball on this pitch, ultimately it might be kind of disappointing because even a juiced ball, it's not that dramatic. It's not even like you could totally tell necessarily unless maybe you do hit a deep fly ball and it carries farther than you would expect it to. Like most of the time with the juiced ball, you're just going to like hit a grounder to second or something. rounder to second or something. Like it's not going to be pyrotechnics and fireworks and explosions, probably, if it's like within the realm of actual current baseball. So maybe it would be a bit of a letdown, especially if it were just randomly assigned or assigned in some standard way so that there wasn't an element of like, oh, here it comes. He's elected to

use the juiced ball here. And everyone could break that down and analyze it. So that would be kind of cool. Anyway, I am now ready for your unrelated question. balls that they were engaged with right in any given season so i wish that we knew that but you know what i've been wanting to know lately you know what i wish that was in like the stat cast feed what i want to know for every single pitch whether pitchcom is in use and oh yeah and what the decibel level in the ballpark is i I want to know those things because I suspect that the effect is probably teensy-tinesy. Like, teeny, tiny, little, teensy-tinesy. But we're always trying to figure out, like, home field advantage and what goes into it. And we have a pretty good understanding of that. But I do wonder if, like, you know, when guys are using Pitchcom, if the ballpark is loud, they do have a hard time hearing.

And they can go to signs if they need to. If the ballpark is loud, they do have a hard time hearing, and they can go to signs if they need to. But do you think that there's a teeny tiny, even teeny tiny bit of home field advantage being eked out in ballparks where the fans are rowdy and the opposing team is using pitch comp? Potentially, yeah, because if you're not prepared, probably just teeny tiny. And I imagine there aren't that many situations where you can't hear it. I know there were some cases where some pitchers said like there was some super loud scoreboard noise or music or something and maybe they had some trouble. I don't know. Maybe they've adjusted the fingers to call signs forever, so you could just go back to that. So what's the big deal? But if you have adjusted to PitchCom and maybe you're not even on the same page with the signs and everything, then it wouldn't necessarily be so easy to flip back to that. It's like we talk about with robo-umps and the automated ball strike system. It's like if you get accustomed to that and then suddenly the system malfunctions for some reason, well, you could say, just go back to calling the pitches then.

You were back there the whole time. But if you weren't mentally prepared to do that and you weren't really psyched up to do it and you weren't paying as close attention and you were used to just delegating that to the computer, then you might not be prepared. You might not be able to do it at as high a level as you would have previously. So, yes, I'd be curious about that. I'm also just generally curious about whether it's made a difference in pace of play. I actually did email MLB about this earlier this month because I was wondering about that. I was thinking maybe I could do some sort of study on that. I hoped that they might have some record of when PitchCom was in use. Maybe the teams had reported it to the league or something.

And their spokesperson told me, I will check, but I'm not sure if we do. And he never followed up, so I assume that they don't. But he did say, I do know that we attribute improved pace of game to Pitchcom at a clip of a reduction of two minutes per game specifically because of this initiative. I don't know whether he means two minutes per game when it's in use or two minutes per game overall, even though it's not always in use. And I have no idea how they are getting the two minutes per game estimate either, whether maybe they timed some pitchers with and without as they were testing it or something, and

they've extrapolated from that. But I would be interested in seeing those numbers if the data existed, which evidently it doesn't. Yeah, so that would be another thing that we would be curious about. I was just going to ask you, like, what are the little bits of data you wish were in the StatCast sheet? But that's a pretty big question, so maybe we can put a pin in that idea and we can save it for a later episode or something.

Okay. Owen says, not sure if there's a league-wide correct answer to this, but realistically, how much time do players have to train in season? I know they take batting practice, some fielding drills, bullpen sessions, etc. But where they're playing every day, they can never spend too long training, in my mind. Or am I missing something? And we better get this right or I will hear from Michael Lorenzen. His arm suggests that there are no off days for him. Yes, he is definitely doing some type of training there.

Yeah, every day is arm day for Michael Lorenzen. So there's some time. So there's a lot of recovery that you have to do and you have to make sure that you're working out, but also not overstressing yourself and fatiguing yourself and losing weight and strength. And then you have to just kind of keep yourself at a certain level. And so if you're constantly tinkering and there are players who just by default, they are constantly tinkering with things, then I think that can be tough, which is why I'm always impressed when someone is able to identify some flaw and fix it.

Why I was kind of charmed by the Nick Pavetta anecdote where he just like fixed his mechanics in the middle of a start and has been largely lights out since then, that's pretty cool. But that was not a dramatic overhaul necessarily. So I think there are certain ways that you can train. And there are certain ways in which I think the old types of training were maybe not the most effective or efficient types of practice. And so you've seen some players go away from just taking your standard low velocity BP before games. And if they're doing anything, maybe they're taking high speed, game speed BP in the cage

before a game, or they're training with some very advanced, realistic recreation of a pitcher with one of the new types of hitting machines or pitching machines. I guess we could have a pedantic conversation about whether it should be called a hitting machine or a pitching machine, but the ones that can replicate- It should be called a- Wait, sorry. It should be called a pitching machine. I guess so, but you hit off it. I know, but the function it is performing is pitching. That is true. The machine itself is pitching.

Yeah, the machine is pitching. That is the function of the machine. And then you are hitting. You're not confused. You've won me over. You've forestalled several emails probably. Thank you. Well, I don't know about that.

I say this with supreme faith in our listenership. Have I? Have I? Maybe you have inspired more emails. Who knows? We will find out soon. Yeah, we will. But there are new advanced models that I've written about that can really recreate like seam shifted wake and all of these new advanced understandings of physics.

with that picture on that day and there's some video recreation or you can train in VR and face a digital representation of the picture you're about to face as you go out to prepare to face him. So I think there is not a ton of time and some types of training have been discarded as perhaps not the best use of your time. But I think there are more tools and technology and maybe more awareness of certain types of deliberate practice that have actually made practice more efficient so that you can cram in more useful training sessions in a shorter amount of time. a shift toward efficiency, both in terms of selecting training methodologies that seem to actually be correlated with meaningful progress or maintenance of skill, right? So you're trying to like do stuff that actually works. And so your time is being more efficiently deployed in that way. And that is, you know, it's doing it to like actually show you like, hey, your issue is that you can't hit curveballs and this pitching machine will give

you a good one and it actually works the way it's supposed to so that you can drill in on specific problems but yeah i mean like you also you're going to work and you're running around out there and like you don't want to overtax yourself i don't know i'm sure that there's a balance to be struck there and like everything else it's like how some people can only sleep four hours a night and i would be a ghost right so it's like i think that the when you're talking about both maintaining and then advancing physical skill the needs of every individual athlete are probably going to be kind of at least a little different from one another. Yeah, I think these days players are usually, or at least teams usually want them to be training for something specific as opposed to just going out there and just taking some

swings off a tee or off a old school BP pitcher or just throwing a bullpen and just kind of going out there to do it and not really having any kind of goal or target in mind. If everything's going great for you and you don't want to change anything, okay. But if not, then you're always getting some form of feedback, whether it's from some kind of hit tracks machine in the batting cage that's telling you the characteristics of all your batted balls in there, or you have a Rapsodo device set up in your bullpen session or whatever. Like teams use that stuff as just a monitoring tool, really, that they have available to them during the season

so that if one of your pitches gets slightly out of whack, you can figure out why that is. Why is it not moving quite as much? Well, let's look at the high-speed video. Let's look at the data from the Rapsodo device. Let's see if I'm releasing it in a slightly different way. And so you can maybe quite quickly figure out what went wrong and try to go back to what was working. Whereas in the past, maybe you might have known that something wasn't working, but it would have been hard to pinpoint what it was. And so you could have practiced for hours without necessarily ever hitting on the solution

because you wouldn't actually be able to see like, how did that pitch come out of my hand in this incredibly high resolution and frame rate and everything. So I think there are certain types of training that are actually easier now, but there are still large scale projects where it's like, I might not want to undertake this in the middle of the season because potentially you can screw yourself up even more. If you try to do some dramatic mechanical overhaul midstream and it takes a while to iron out the kinks and to cement those memories, then you might scuffle for quite a while and it might end up being worse than if you had just waited for the season to be over and undertaken that project then. Right. Yeah. Question from Aaron. In the Astros-Rangers game on June 15th, Oledmus Diaz missed a ground ball on a play that resulted in a run scored.

He was credited with an error and the Texas announcers were perplexed at the scoring because he made a decent play just to get to the ball. They reviewed the play in slow motion and revealed that the ball went through Diaz's glove. They had noticed the night before that his glove's webbing was particularly wide and were shocked he had worn the glove again that day. My question for you both, should a fielder be credited with an error if the ball pops through a hole in his webbing? My first thought was no, as he had made the play correctly otherwise, but isn't his responsibility to have a glove that doesn't have a baseball-sized hole in it? I would be more sympathetic if they hadn't shown the clip of a ball nearly squeaking free the night before.

You'd think, does my glove have a baseball-sized hole in it, would be something you'd worry about as a ball player, but I guess they're less anxious than me. There was a recent instance of this just this month with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. too, who had a ball just go through his glove and he had to switch gloves after what would have been a routine catch. So this does happen sometimes. So who's the culprit? Is it the player? Is it the player's tools? I think it depends on if it is the glove performing as expected. Like in the instance of wide webbing, right? Surely you know that a risk of that is that the ball might go whoot and might go whoot

right through the webbing. I think that my reaction to it is different if like sometimes you know guys stuff will break like the the webbing will snap the strings will snap i don't know if i'm describing the right snap but you know like it's different when there is an equipment malfunction versus i have picked equipment that doesn't seem to be completely well-suited to the task that I'm about to engage in, right? Right. I mean, you can't rule an error on Wilson or Rawlings or Mizuno. Right. You can't do that in the box score, I suppose. Well, why not? Just write their names down there. Yeah, maybe you should. You can write it in the margins if you want to. But for scoring purposes, I don't know what you would do otherwise. It does seem like, well, it's the player's responsibility to have a glove that works. And I wonder, even if it is a case where there wasn't wide webbing or some gap that should have been attended to, that maybe there was some sort of structural weakness that was less evident but could have been detected had there been more maintenance.

It's tough because some players will switch gloves every year. Some players will just wear those things out, right, because they value either they have some sentiment for the glove or they just like it loose and floppy. So they just want to be able to i'm sorry i'm sorry for using those particular words to discuss gloves whatever we do balls gloves we get ourselves in trouble our minds are actually in the gutter we yes we i mean sometimes it is me i guess that's fair but in the last couple of instances it has been more you than me i'm just saying.

And I feel the need to point it out because it very often is me. But this time it wasn't. It was you, Ben. It was you. I will take the blame. Yeah. So some players have a preference for gloves that just don't have a lot of stiffness to them. Yeah.

Just don't have a lot of resistance. Any webbing that is girthier. Just don't have a lot of resistance. And we'll not. The webbing that is girthier. Yeah, they need to be kneading and rubbing those gloves more often. So it's kind of player preference. But if it gets to the point where your preference for having a floppy glove leads to that glove breaking, then that is kind of your fault. I guess it's fair to hold you responsible for that. So I don't know. If we use the framework of like, right? It's like not the player's fault. Then he would have had to make an extraordinary effort to complete that play because how could you? He was prepared for the glove to do its job and catch the ball. And then it didn't. The glove had ennui.

And how can you blame the player for that? He would have really had to make an extraordinary effort. He would have had to had a backup glove behind the first glove. I don't know. So I don't think you're allowed to do that. No, I don't think that is allowed. Yeah, probably that would be a bit of a loophole that maybe would have been exploited by now. So I think in that case, it might be fair to say it's not really the player's responsibility. It just happened. But then would it be the official scorer's responsibility to perform an inquest and to examine the glove and to ask witnesses about the glove maintenance? That seems like a lot of a burden to place on the official scorer as well. So maybe this is just the easiest and simplest way to handle it for everyone.

Yeah. But don't we like a challenge? Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, now a player might say, I do like a challenge. That's why I got this floppy, floppy glove. Well, sometimes you get bad bounces and sometimes you get bad breaks. And this is a literal break that can happen at times. And and anyway who cares about errors anymore so we're we're not big uh fielding percentage fiends these days although i guess you still get debited in some of the advanced defensive systems even if uh if you're just standing there and you

get to the ball and then your glove breaks i don't think stat cast can currently account for that so that's the stat that i want to be in StatCast, glove integrity. I want to know whether it was the player's fault or not. Tensile strength of the glove. Yeah. What is the string pressure? How supple is the leather? Give me all of the StatCast breakdowns of the glove. So here's a very related question from Matt, who says, I was watching the College World series and it occurred to me that one of the reasons it is fun is the bad fielding. Oh, yeah. Don't get me wrong.

I love me some great fielding plays. That said, there is something to the feeling that the batter can get on base anytime the ball gets put in play, even on a routine ground ball to the shortstop. To add this suspense to the pro game, I am wondering if MLB should mandate players wear worse gloves to encourage higher BABIPs. So how different would baseball be if MLB outlawed webbed gloves for infielders or all non-catchers instead of banning the shift? So they just have like oven mitts on their hands?

Yeah. So we're rewinding to 19th century gloves or something here. We're doing away with all the webbing. That's one way to make sure your webbing doesn't break. So this is relevant, I think, because BABIP is low. Rob Arthur just wrote about this for Baseball Perspectives this week. There are a lot of potential culprits there, but it does seem that one is possibly just that positioning has gotten better, perhaps more in the outfield even than the infield. So if we are opposed to mandating that fielders have to stand somewhere or can't stand somewhere else, which I think philosophically we are, but Babbitt is low.

Now, again, I care more about balls being put into play than I do about what happens after they are put into play. But even so, we want hits, we want base runners, and Babbitt obviously has some bearing on that. So if it got to the point where Babbitt was so low, but we didn't want to restrict where fielders could stand, could we and should we just make them worse at fielding by not taking away their positioning advantage, but taking away their glove advantage or just like doing worse grooming on the field. Just have a bunch of pebbles out there. That becomes a safety issue. Yeah, that becomes sort of a safety question. I think yes, and we

should make them more ankle weights, right? Because like you don't want to just do ankle weights because it doesn't solve the positioning problem because ideally if your positioning is actually doing what it's supposed to the ball's going right to that guy he he might not even need to move at all or he might not need to move very much so like having just ankle weights isn't going to solve the problem you need you need more guys biffing it out there you know but i think that we should also have ankle weights so that running is a little bit harder because then we don't have to monkey with outfield stuff either it's just like oh you just make them that might make it a less fun game though because like

speed is fun to watch it's part of why we want more balls in play right is so that we have the opportunity for speed to play potentially but i think we should try messed up gloves and ankle weights i guess the question is how much of the appeal of watching at the mlb level is that you're seeing the absolute best in the world unencumbered doing their thing like is it a bug or a feature that they are this good. Are they too good? Because I have experienced that at lower levels as a spectator or with the Sonoma Stompers in 2015 in the Indie Ball, where every ball in play was an adventure, which was nerve wracking if my team was pitching and sort of exciting if the other team was pitching. But there did come a point where it was like, I kind of miss just seeing the absolute

best in the world just do their thing where a routine play would actually almost always be a routine play. So anything you could do to kind of artificially make the players worse by tinkering with their equipment, I mean, it's not like you are physically hobbling them in some way. You are just saying you can have a smaller glove, right? I mean, we have limits on how big gloves can be right now. So it would just be lowering that limit a little. I guess I don't regard that as intrusive as the shift, as mandating where people can and can't stand just because equipment has evolved over the years and you've always had some rules and restrictions on what you can and can't use so i guess there's something to be said for that it's not like you know with your ankle

weights you would actually have players who were slower right but they're like little little tiny ankle weights not like 20 pound ankle weights that not like 20-pound ankle weights. That would be silly. So you couldn't even notice. It wouldn't be like they're dragging around a ball and chain sort of situation. Well, and you know, you don't want anything too intense because you don't want someone to get hurt. No. Yeah. I don't know.

I kind of like the idea of they're as fast as ever, but if they get to the ball, they might not be as automatic once they got there. So you could still see spectacular catches and maybe it could even make you appreciate catches even more if you're able to hold on to the ball with a smaller, less well-equipped glove. So I don't hate the idea. hate the idea. Like, I'm not there yet where I think we need to do this, but I would be more receptive to this than I would be to saying you can and can't stand here or there. Would you be more receptive to it than you would be watching college baseball? Yeah, you know, I don't watch college baseball, so I can't say that this has made me tune in necessarily, that this is enough of a draw, the bad defense, the worst defense to get me to watch. I do enjoy just the variation at lower levels of the game where you have certain skill sets that just wouldn't work

at the major league level and you have certain strategies that aren't employed there. So I do appreciate that about the college level. But the lower level of play, just the idea that players might make more mistakes, I think that dissuades me from watching more so than it persuades me to watch. Although I'm sure it is helpful to kind of calibrate your appreciation of how great at baseball big leaguers are because you're going from, let's say, high-level college players who are already really good at baseball, and then you're watching the absolute best in the world. And that probably gives you a greater renewed appreciation for

just how great they are. So that's the thing. It's like players have just gotten better and better and better kind of constantly over the years at the highest level. And some of that is the equipment and some of that is field conditions. And some of it is that they are just better practiced or physically more skilled or there is a deeper pool of players you're drawing from. So I'm hesitant to say, let's rewind and make the players less good at baseball. But I don't hate this because if they do get too good, then you do have to do something. It's just like the question is,

is the difference between, I don't know, a 280-something BABIP and a 290-something BABIP, is that noticeable enough that you would think you have to do something? For me, probably not quite. I think the strikeout rate increase would be kind of my first move before I started tinkering

with clubs and doing away with their webbings and adding ankle weights don't forget the ankle weights Thomas, Patreon supporter says a while back you asked for questions about records were surprised haven't been broken here's one that's baffled me throughout the juiced ball era

the record for most home runs by one team in one game is 10, set on September 14th, 1987 by the Blue Jays. How on earth that record stood through the steroid era and the rabbit ball years of 2017 and 2019 is beyond me. A common refrain throughout the juiced ball era is that it's not that individual players are hitting more home runs, but that a broader group of the player pool are legitimate home run hitters. It seems then that it should have been relatively easy for a team to hit more than the 87 Blue Jays did on that day. Rob Doocy hit his only home run of the 1987 season in that game. The 87 Jays were a good home run team. They hit 215, second most in MLB. In 2017, that number would have tied them with the Nationals in 14th place.

In 2019, they would have tied with the Phillies in 22nd place. How did no team in those years manage to bunch more than 10 in a single game? Furthermore, according to this, and he sends me a link to Baseball Almanac and team records for most home runs in a game. me a link to Baseball Almanac and team records for most home runs in a game. Only the Nationals twins, Dodgers, Diamondbacks, and Padres have set or tied their franchise records since 2017. Even going back to 2015 only adds the White Sox, Orioles, Rockies, and Mets to that list. Plenty of team records were set in the 70s or earlier. The Pirates record was first set in 1894. What the heck is going on here? I know the answer is probably just math, but still, am I out to lunch or is this legitimately weird? And that does seem semi

surprising, especially because, again, relying on Baseball Almanac, it looks like 20 of the franchise records for most homers hit in a season have been set since 2017. So two-thirds of the teams have had their high season total for home runs just since 2017. I guess the single game records, my best explanation would be that single game records are probably more random. Yes. Just you might happen to cluster a bunch in one game. Maybe they were using super juiced balls that game. Or maybe you would have gotten mismatches in talent in earlier eras that would have

been more notable than today when you have a higher caliber of competition in the league. And so there's less difference between the best players and the worst players. So that could be part of it, too. So what you're saying is we need expansion so that we can get. Well, and I would imagine that part of it is just that it's hard to score 10 runs in a game no matter how you score them. Right. Like some of it is just it's hard to score. I don't know. Right. I mean, you had team records for homers being broken

left and right i remember doing an episode or maybe even writing an article about that where it was like who cares about these records anymore they're just falling like flies so it is sort of weird that the single game team homer records have not fallen at that same rate. I don't know whether pitcher usage is a factor, like if teams are, you know, giving starters shorter leashes when they're getting bombed and you're having hitters face pitchers less often for a bunch of times in the same game. in a single game, but over the course of the whole season. And then teams also are more likely to use position player pitchers these days in blowouts, which would make homers more likely. Right. So I don't know if we're overlooking an obvious factor.

And if so, we're going to get emails. I was thinking like you had maybe more extreme parks back in those days. Maybe. And so that could have been part of it. But then that would have affected the season totals for home runs for those teams too not just the single game totals right i mean i think you know we are perhaps just underrating how hard it is to score 10 runs at all but yeah it seems sort of at least 10 right i don't know that all of their home runs that day were solo shots but like it does seem if you wanted to construct a rationale

we could say that yes you do have more home runs sort of across the board but the increase you know i would imagine that home run production was still kind of concentrated among the guys who you would expect there were outliers right where they had like the weird season where they hit 40 and then they never hit more than 15 again but like i think in general like the guys who were hitting a bunch of home runs were still hitting a bunch of home runs and then you had guys who were hitting like some right like how many went from how many went from having like two home runs to having 20? I bet that number was low, even though there were a ton of guys hitting 20 or 30 compared to historical standards. So I guess you would have less variation just in the batting order in the lineup on any given day typically. Even your number nine guy, assuming it wasn't a pitcher, is still probably going to have some home run power in 2017 or 2019.

is still probably going to have some home run power in 2017 or 2019. But if anything, that might make me think that you would be more likely to hit a bunch of home runs on that day. So I don't know. It's tough. The Blue Jays scored 18 runs that day, although not only on home runs probably. They had 21 hits. They trounced the Orioles 18 to 3. It's always the poor Orioles. I've got to think it's kind of a clustering thing. Yeah, I think it's probably just fluky.

Yeah, but if you have other alternate suggestions, please let us know. Plus you might like, you know, maybe you get up big and then, you know, in much, like yes, you are likely then to face less good pitching because you're blowing them out, but maybe managers also use that as an opportunity to rest their starters and put in bench guys. And so the big boppers that started the game

might not be finishing. Yeah. Maybe? Could be. Question mark? Could be part of it. I bet clustering is the main thing, Hmm. Yeah. Maybe? Could be. Question mark? Could be part of it. Yeah. That makes some sense.

I bet clustering is like the main thing, but it's probably a couple of different things. These days, I mean, you do have fewer position player bench players than you used to. That's true. So you had the ability to swap out your starters more easily back in the day. Yeah, that's true. Although maybe you wouldn't have done it for rest-related reasons as readily. Yeah, you don't care if their arms fall off. Right. Interesting. Interesting question and observation, Thomas. All right. And then

Keith asks, is a pitch clock needed at the MLB level if there is already a pitch clock at the minor league level? Broadcasts will often talk about how young rookie call-up pitchers tend to work quickly since they are used to the tempo set by the pitch clock. If, after a long enough period of time, virtually all MLB pitchers came up in a system that used a pitch clock, would that have the downstream effect of speeding up MLB pitching across the board? Basically, what I am wondering is if somebody used to the speedier tempo of minor league pitching would tend to slow down without the external pressure of a pitch clock at the MLB level, has there been any study or attempt to quantify how the interval between a pitcher's delivery changes over the span of their career?

So I guess there is a tendency for pitchers to slow down without a pitch clock or we wouldn't be in this situation where we have more time between pitches. But it is an interesting idea that if you could instill respect for the pitch clock as you're coming up through the minors and pitchers get accustomed to that tempo, then maybe you wouldn't actually need the pitch clock. It's like, I don't know, if you have a dog has one of those electric collars or something that stops them from leaving the yard and going out into the street. Just to pick an example that doesn't sound weird when you transpose it onto a human person. To be clear, I don't have a yard or a collar with electric shocks for my dog or anything.

But if you do, then, you know, your dog could become conditioned to that and not wander out into the street, even if you took the collar off. So don't know why my wife went there. Not saying we should shock pitchers if they take too long between pitches. Just put ankle weights on them. Yeah, sure. But if you got used to it, then maybe you would just do it naturally without being forced to. What do you think? I think that people adapt to the environment that they exist in. And so if there isn't a consequence

for taking too long, you're going to take as long as you think you need to. And you might not, you know, I don't know that guys are necessarily doing it like super consciously, right? I don't think that they're necessarily thinking I'm going to slow down a little bit so that I can then throw max effort on my next pitch. Like I don't know that it's even that thought through on the part of the pitcher. But I think that if what you want is to ensure compliance with a pitch clock,

you need both a pitch clock and then consequences for taking longer than the clock allows because- Electric shock colors. Or, you know know you could like award a ball to the hitter i guess you could just do that instead you could shock the hitter and really confuse everybody but i think that we tend to you know you like sink into the bath that you have and then all of a sudden you look around and you're like, wow, it sure took me a minute to throw that inning, didn't it? batters do too. Rob Arthur has written about how seemingly pitchers get maybe a little bit of a

velocity boost from taking longer between pitches. And also batters seemingly get more benefit from taking more time between pitches if they are older, it looks like, according to his research, which I think could be because maybe they need a little more time to recover or maybe- Because you're tired. You just get tired. Yeah, right. Or maybe they are more adept at thinking through the pitcher's game plan and anticipating what is going to come. And so they're able to use that time more effectively. So I think if you take the difference between the average pace, like there isn't that big a difference right now. If you look at starting pitchers through age 27 this season, according to FanCrafts, the

average time between pitches for them is 22.4 seconds. Starting pitchers 28 and up, it's 22.6 seconds. So just two tenths of a second longer. If you go back to 2012, the difference was only one tenth of a second. Like just kind of browsing around the leaderboards and looking across years, it seems to me like there is a slightly bigger difference in pace between young players and old players now than there used to be, which could be part of this. It could be the I'm used to the pitch clock and so I will just naturally employ a faster tempo or it could be something else. But even so, the difference is only like a couple tenths of a second or a few tenths of a second. So it's not as if you divide your sample and you have your young pitchers or your young batters versus your old pitchers or your old batters that one group is super speedy and the other is super slow.

Although admittedly, this is only the first season of the more aggressive pitch clock in the minors. So give it a few years for players to come up after having been exposed to that, and maybe there would be a bigger gap. I think there is probably a performance-enhancing effect of taking longer, whether you are conscious of that or not. And if you're given that time, then yeah, I think you're probably going to take it. Yeah, I think you're going to take it. All right. And maybe last one. This is from Ethan, Patreon supporter. He says, your recent discussion about the difference between Byron Buxton and Louisa Rise raises an interesting thought in me. You observed how they are creating similar value offensively,

but doing it in very different ways. And I started to think, imagine that you had to watch baseball with access to only a single statistic for each player, just one. Whenever any player comes up to bat or is pitching, the broadcast and the internet, if you searched, only showed one number. What statistic would you want to know, which would give you the best sense of what kind of player you were watching. Not necessarily how good they are, but what to expect from a qualitative perspective. Like most, I'm a fan of war, but one of its downsides is that it's not very useful as a guide when watching a game. War will tell you just generally if a player is good or not, but

it doesn't tell you how. Are they fast? Are they patient? Do they have power, etc. Even something like batting average, weaker as it is in terms of predicting value, actually gives you a meaningful sense of what kind of hitter you're seeing in a given at bat. I think for pitchers, this is a little bit easier than hitters. Something like FIP or perhaps some ratio of strikeout percentage to walk percentage would be explanatory. For hitters, it seems a little harder. Would you also want the hitters ratio of strikeouts to walk? perhaps something like slug minus on base percentage i'm having a hard time thinking about what statistic real or invented would give you the most information about player type understanding that any one statistic will always be somewhat lacking oh boy that's such a

really good question yeah yeah because you know like war on purpose isn't trying to describe the shape of the production. Right. They want you to just know the value. I like the idea for pictures of... Well, I think the idea of fit for pictures is good because it's also kind of sneaky. I guess it's only sneaky if you know era also so no it's not sneaky but like that's good i think that having a sense of strike out to walk ratio is also yeah informative there and probably tells you that is kind of sneaky

because you're getting information about both things probably yeah that's two stats in one really if you're doing strike out the walk or strike out minus walk whatever yeah so that's like that's fun and sneaky and also descriptive in an interesting way gosh it's like type of it does give you a sense of the type of hitter in a sense like it gives you good versus bad but my go-to for like you know offensive stuff is generally wrc plus but i don't know if that's the best option here right because like it doesn't it's not going to necessarily help you distinguish like what kind of hitter the hitter is yeah and strike out to walk ratio is not bad for hitters, but it also would not necessarily distinguish between, say, Stephen Kwan and Louisa Rice or Juan Soto or, you know, like there are players who have very good strikeout to walk ratios with no power and players who have a ton of power with that. So that would not tell you everything. I think if you can use StatCast stats, if they count, then I think that just something about their repertoire would be most helpful. Like if you just gave me their fastball velocity, that tells you a lot. Or maybe even their fastball

usage rate would tell you a lot because, I don't know, maybe that would give you some sense of how good their fastball is. And then you would know, like, are they a pitcher who pitches, quote, unquote, backwards? Like, are they someone who's going to be trying to strike you out with a bunch of breaking balls? Or are they going to be just pumping that fastball by you? And you never know with any one hitter. Like we talked about Shohei Otani and how he can throw super hard, but sometimes he doesn't throw his fastball that much. And so you would not necessarily know from his fastball usage rate that he's got a great one or from his fastball velocity that he has a whole bunch of fun secondary pitches. So it wouldn't be a perfect measure, but that would tell you a lot, I think.

So maybe with a hitter, then hard hit rate or, gosh, max exit velocity. I mean, that's going to tell you like is this guy strong probably like you might get a Yandy Diaz situation where you have a beef boy but it's ground beef so you never know but if you hit the ball really hard I mean

that doesn't tell you anything about does the guy have plate discipline or anything so you're still getting an incomplete picture so maybe I mean hard hit rate, that would probably be the best thing I can think of. Like if we had bat speed, which we don't, I guess there's like inferred bat speed or teams have bat speed from StatCast. And I think there are some plans potentially for that to start showing up on broadcast sometime, which would be fun. They had that like on ESPN, like way back in the 90s, they had a different kind of technology that would measure that. But that might tell you something, but not everything. So I guess hard hit rate would

be my answer for hitters and for pitchers, either fastball velocity or fastball percentage probably. Either fastball velocity or fastball percentage, probably. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to only have one. Who's doing this to us? I know. Why? Why are you deprived?

There are so many stats. Why do we only have one? Yeah, why do we only have one? And how are you throttling our internet searches somehow so that we can only find one stat when we search? That seems intrusive. Yeah. Like, let me, mean like yeah i mean at least let us know two right if we could just know two we can it's funny that i'm about to use the word triangulate given this but you can you can like really kind of work your way to a better

understanding so give us two seems fair to give us two. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we did the best we could with this one. Maybe like a swing rate or chase rate for hitters and pitchers? Something so that you know, like, is this guy getting a lot of chases and then probably a lot of strikeouts? Or

is this a free swinger or not? Of course, you don't know if he's hitting it when he swings. You would hope that if you're swinging a lot, you don't know if he's hitting it when he swings. You would hope that if you're swinging a lot, you're hitting it a lot, but it's not always the case. But that would tell you something descriptive in a single stat as well. All right. So I said that was the last one. I lied. This is a follow-up that I need you to answer because you have already solved all of our problems by advocating for the challenge system, the appeal system with the robot strike zone.

Yeah, it's because it's the best approach and we should do it tomorrow. But Jackson wants to know a specific question. He says, I loved your discussion of the potential challenge rule for balls and strikes. I'm an advocate of the challenge rule, but I think it would be best used in moderation. I believe the Experimental League is allowed three per game per inning. Is it per inning? I think it might be per game, but you get to keep them if you do a correct challenge. Right. Yeah. And Jackson says, and they don't lose a challenge if they are correct. That is correct, I think. My initial

thought has always been to give each team five ball strike challenges per game or maybe seven, but anything more than that, I feel we might as well use the RoboBump the whole game. I feel like a limited number of these challenges still holds framing as a high priority, won't slow the game down, and will be fun to see how teams deploy their challenges. Curious to know what number

you think the Goldilocks number of challenges would be. Oh, boy. My answer is so fraught because I was so right before, and now I have to be right again to weigh in. I'm furious. I think that if you're allowed to keep the challenges, assuming that prior challenges have been successful,

that you probably don't want to do more than five five i think that you're you're probably wanting to stay at five because then realistically well i mean a team might have a great great many but i would imagine that they would average more than five a game provided that they have competent replay people which i think teams generally do i think they generally have a good sense of that stuff so i would say probably five is the right number i would be fascinated by like their distribution and you know if you know that you have an acumen for deploying them successfully right and having a good understanding of when the call is right or wrong you might be less nervous about using them early but i would really want to see like how do

they get clustered in different parts of the game i think that that would be really fascinating i think as of a couple years ago at least there were on average 156 called pitches per game, 78 per team. And if you have, say, I don't know what the average jump is, like a 92% success rate, let's say, then you're talking about maybe 12 or 13 misses per game. And that is really between both teams. per game and that is really between both teams so if you have 12 13 misses per game and you have a challenge system that's five per team and you get to keep your challenges if you challenge correctly in theory like there should not be a lot of uncorrected calls, I would think, because also like most of those misses are not going to be egregious. They're going to be fairly borderline pitches. And what you really want to do is do away with the obvious mistakes, the ones that are going to infuriate everyone. And it's obvious to everyone in the moment that this is wrong. It's obvious to everyone in the moment that this is wrong. So I wonder, because if you had five and you keep the correct ones and you're looking at only like six or seven misses on average for each team per game, something like that, then you are kind of doing away with all the misses, which I guess is the point.

You do want to do away with the misses, but maybe that also does away with framing to some extent. Because at that point, if you know that you have that many and you can appeal pretty liberally, then any borderline pitch you're going to do. And if you get half of them right, let's say, then effectively if you have five challenges to start with, then maybe you've got like seven or something in practice or more than that, depending on the sequencing of your correct appeals or incorrect appeals. So I think three is not bad, actually. I kind of don't hate three as- Yeah, I wouldn't be furious about it.

You definitely don't want more than five, I think. No. Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. Some people are just not going to be happy with any mistakes at that point because it's like, we have the technology. We might as well fix it. We can rebuild him.

We can fix the strike zone. So if you are out of challenges and then you have some egregious call, then that team's fan base is going to be so mad. It's like, we could fix this. This is silly. Why do we have to let this stand just because of some arbitrary number of challenges? So it'll probably annoy people. So if we want to preserve the tradition of people being annoyed by subjects related to the strike zone and on power calls, then I guess that would achieve that goal. But yeah, I'm going to say three is fine for me, but maybe I'm more in the non-interventionist

stance and camp when it comes to this than most people would be. All right. Let's end with the past blast. As always, this is from Richard Hershberger, the historian, saber researcher, author of the book Strike Four, The Evolution of Baseball. This is episode 1866. So this Past Blast comes from 1866. So he says this year's item is timely, pushing back against a change in the rules. In this case, it is the base on balls. against a change in the rules. In this case, it is the base on balls. This rule was introduced with the 1864 season, but largely unenforced. It is in 1866 that umpires start to call balls.

It was a strange innovation, and many people resisted it as not baseball. One of these was Charlie Pabor. It is perhaps natural that he did not like the rule as he was a pitcher, but here he is the batter. He refuses to take first base and a teammate runs for him. Boyish among the strongest condemnations available. Boyish. They were big on boyishness and manliness, right? Our past blast on the last episode about people who were mad that you could slide now. It was unmanly. And this also unmanly to take the base on Paul's boyish. This is in the New York, whereas, boy-like, he refuses to take his base on three balls, which is not discreditable to the batsman. The rule in this case says that the player shall take his base on balls. Smith acted very properly in running his base for him. Another such act should lead to his being put off the nine for disobedience of orders. So there was a small localized revolt here from a player who so hated the idea of walks

and bases on balls that he refused to take his base on balls and had to have someone run for him instead. Aww. But it's, just lean into your OPP friend, it's fine. Yeah, well, no one was calculating that then, least of all Henry Chadwick. So that's probably part of the problem. If they had told him that one day there'd

be a book that was all about the wonders of OPP and players would be paid based on that, then maybe he would have taken his base, but not in 1866. So what we have learned from this series, I think, and what we will continue to learn and what I hoped we would learn is that everything has generated controversy at some point. Every rule seemingly that we take for granted, that we think of as dating from the very beginning of baseball, made someone mad at some point about it not being real baseball anymore, which suggests that

whatever we legislate now, whether it is robot umps or whether it's telling fielders that they can or can't stand somewhere, or whether it's ankle weights or whether it's shock collars, can't stand somewhere, or whether it's ankle weights, or whether it's shock collars, possibly not shock collars, but anything short of that, that there would be a hue and cry. And then ultimately, everyone would get used to it. And someone podcasting in 2300 and doing a past blast about what we were saying about that rule would make fun of our quaint notions of baseball not including that in the first place. But see, then, Ben, you would have to be okay with the zombie runner. And do you want to, I mean, maybe the thing to the way to think about it is that our insistence on what is right now informs the future such that they do not have to fight that particular fight.

So we should stay angry about it. Should I be critiquing the zombie runner on the grounds that it is boyish and unmanly? No. I think that we have enough of that discourse in the conversation around baseball. We don't need to contribute anything further to it. I think you're right. Although in this case, it actually is kind of, and I don't mean that in like a toxic masculinity sense. I mean it in like a this is kind of how you might play on the playground kind of way, which it's not an actual ghost runner that you would use in a playground situation, as we have discussed.

But there is still something just seemingly unprofessional about it. But I guess I will not use boyish in my arsenal of arguments against the zombie runner. I have plenty of better arguments. And for anyone who was wondering, I asked Richard about just why this was instituted at that time. I had the notion in my mind that this was a response to Jim Creighton, who is a pitcher who is given a lot of credit for finding a way to kind of, you know, find some leeway in the rules about what you were and were not allowed to do as a pitcher back in those days. Like you couldn't throw overhand and you weren't supposed to have your hand at a certain angle and you weren't supposed to break your wrist and all these things. And then like bit by bit, a pitcher would get away with this and a little more and I'll raise my arm a little higher and I'll bend it a little more. And then they'd say, OK, we'll let that slide, but we'll draw a line here.

And then people would test that. And then eventually we ended up with overhand and you can do almost whatever you want. But the called strike rule, Richard writes, was instituted in 1858 in response to batters not swinging when a runner was on base. in response to batters not swinging when a runner was on base. Catchers had absolutely no protective gear, and a passed ball was bound to come eventually, allowing the runner to advance. So this early called strike rule was completely unenforced. The wait game strategy, as it was called, was mostly kept in check through social pressure.

So it's like, you know, if you throw over to first base as a pitcher a bunch of times and you get booed, I guess back then if you just waited too long and let too many pitches go by because you were waiting for a wild pitch or a pass ball that would allow the runner to advance, then you would be peer pressured into swinging. However, he says the base on balls did derive indirectly from Creighton. Pitchers were emphasizing velocity over control. The rules had always specified that the ball be pitched for the bat, but that there had been no enforcement mechanism. So originally baseball was really about running and fielding. It was like you're going to put it in play. We'll put the ball right where you want it, and then you're off to the races.

Whereas now it's all about the batter-pitcher confrontation, and there are a lot fewer balls in play. So the whole nature of the sport has changed for better or worse. Anyway, because of Creighton and others like him, the base-on-balls rule of 1864, it was hoped that by restoring balance to the force with both called strikes and balls, umpires would be willing to enforce both. This proved a gradual process not really complete until the mid-1870s. 1866 was the first year when enforcement was at all common, and this idea was not anything like the modern strike zone and the duel between the pitcher and the batter. Rather, it was a mechanism for the umpire to recall the player to his duty. The batter wasn't swinging at good pitches.

Call a strike, regretfully, more in sadness than in anger. Pitcher persisted in throwing wild. Same thing, but calling a ball so umpires just up there like i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm trying to delete it yeah right yeah it was like a pace of play concert it's like you can't just stand up there forever you gotta swing or if you can't throw a strike then there has to be some consequence to that so that's how we got balls and strikes but not everyone was happy about it. And the lesson is that not everyone is happy about anything. We're never happy about anything, I think, is the broader lesson.

We can end on that note. All right. Maybe this was clear from context, but we got a conveniently timed email from listener Kyla, who wrote in to explain more about the 19th century distinction between manliness and boyishness. Kyla writes, this is in reference to Meg laughing at an old article about the origin of sliding, condemning it for not being manly. I also thought it was funny at the time, but just a couple days ago I started listening to the audiobook of Playing for Keeps, a history of earlyball by Warren Goldstein, and have learned something pertinent and interesting. In the 1850s to 60s, manliness was incredibly important to baseball players and club members to separate it from boyishness. It partially derives from Victorian ideas of gender, but is also because at the time, playing baseball was often seen as a

child's game and a childish pursuit. It was really important for supporters of the game to change that public view, and they were generally obsessed with everything being manly or boyish. Things that were manly, cricket, having ladies attend the game, not arguing with the umpire, being polite to opponents, catching the ball on the fly, practicing skills regularly. Things that were boyish, rounders, arguing with the ump, being rowdy at the game, catching the ball on the bounce. Chapter 5 of the book is basically entirely about manliness in early baseball. I've not done yet, but so far would recommend. I have not read it myself,

but I have heard an interview with the author. Thank you to Kyla. Reminds me a bit of video games. In a way, I suppose when I started playing video games, they were about as old as organized baseball was in the 1860s, maybe? And there was an urge, and maybe still is, an urge to justify the maturity of the medium. It's not just for kids. People of all ages play games. There's artistic merit to them, which is, of course, true. But for a while, it was kind of a campaign.

And then it becomes accepted, and you don't have to push that narrative anymore. So baseball was still a fledgling sport, at least as an organized endeavor, something for adults to compete with each other in. And so they were eager to differentiate it from a boyish pursuit or a childish pursuit. Although really, childish pursuits are pretty fun. Kids enjoy themselves. And you still sometimes hear people refer to baseball players playing a kid's game. Wouldn't have gone over well in 1866. Also, if you've been a longtime listener and the name Charlie Pabor rang a bell, the player who refused to take his base when he walked,

well, I had forgotten this, but he actually came up during the Jeff Sullivan era of the podcast in the 1160s. And I remembered this because I just went to his baseball reference page and I saw that he was nicknamed the old woman in the red cap, one of the weirdest, quaintest, most mysterious nicknames you will ever see for a baseball player. And when I Googled it, it took me to a Reddit page on the baseball subreddit that says, today I learned that left fielder Charlie Pabor was nicknamed the old woman in the red cap. And the first comment says, shout out to Effectively Wild, the greatest podcast of all time, which reminded me that we had just talked about that nickname, and that's where the poster heard it. And then I think there was maybe a three-episode sequence where we tried

to figure out the origin of that nickname, and it still seems like no one knows for sure, but we did eventually get to the bottom of it in episode 1167, or at least as close to the bottom as we could come. It would seem that the nickname came from his longtime catcher, David Birdsaw, who caught him in the 1860s. And Birdsaw was known as the old man, so Pabor became the old woman. But at least one time, by the Cincinnati Daily Times, May 12, 1871, he was referred to as the old woman in the red cap. Official MLB historian John Thorne has speculated that it comes from the fact that the red cap was common headgear in the French Revolution for women who carried knitting bags under these caps. The unions wore puffy red caps. Pabor, baseball's first left-handed pitcher of note, may have been viewed as a revolutionary. etching called Old Woman in Red Cap by Paul Gavarni, the nom de plume of a French illustrator

who actually died in 1866. And he did this drawing sometime right around then. So now you know, and you can go create a duplicate thread on Reddit to remind everyone of these fun facts. And if that origin story for the nickname is not right, maybe the ghost of Charlie Papoor will follow in Michael Lorenzen's footsteps and send me a message to correct the record. 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 a monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, get themselves access to some perks, and help us stay ad-free. Jordan Boisine, Dominic Lewis, Matt Harrison, Benjamin Haywood, and Adam Cowess, thanks to Thank you. of playoff live streams later in the year, discounts on t-shirts, and more. You can contact me and Meg via email at podcast.fangrafts.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance.

We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week, which means that we will talk to you soon. I can't get you off in general So here we are, we're just two Two I want you and you want something more beautiful