Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1872: A Moderate Amount of Hijinks

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley rant and banter (ranter?) about MLB’s approach to promoting the Futures Game, then (17:33) discuss superheroes throwing baseballs, the latest exploits of the semi-superpowered Shohei Ohtani and Sandy Alcantara, and Ohtani’s chances against Aaron Judge (and others) in the AL MVP race, Stat Blast (39:03) about losing teams with two […]

I got a job waiting for my graduation. $50 a year would buy a lot of beer. Things are going great, and they're only getting better. Yeah, I'm doing alright, getting good grades. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades. I gotta wear shades. I gotta wear shades You are fired up. You are aggrieved. So much stronger than I feel. Let's see if I can work my way into bluster. Yeah, I feel moderately aggrieved. It's not a new grievance, but I find my existing grievance inflamed, reignited, stoked. All the more reason to be aggrieved because it's not new. Yeah. So, Ben, can we talk about the Futures game for a second?

Please. Let's talk about the Futures game within the context of getting people excited about baseball and the draft. I'd like to bracket my draft complaint for closer to the draft, which is that the draft being in July remains one of the dumber things I've ever heard. No one likes this. I'd like to just say no one likes this. I know that MLB seems to like it, but like very few people who work for them,

I think like it's certainly very few people who work for their teams. I'd like to say in either a scouting or analysis capacity, I realize those categories can't be completely separated from one another, but I don't know a single person who works for a team who is a fan of the draft being in July. All of the scouts have already moved on to 2023s. All of the analysts are like, hey, we'd like to focus on the deadline. So I don't know anyone who works for a team who's like super stoked on the draft falling in July. But bracket that complaint for a moment to talk about the futures game. So like in April, maybe, maybe it was April, who could say? I was like, let us hope.

Let us hope that the league doesn't do what they did last year, which was to take the Futures game, which is like an all-star game of the minors, and bury it in the same day as day one of the draft, which is what they did last year and like there are like fangraphs specific reasons to not care for that just from a like content production and publication perspective which i realize are not reasons that need to drive policy that's just an inconvenience for for me and the rest of the the fangraph staff but like you do the futures game on the same day as

the draft which you are trying to make into a big marquee event despite some of the structural issues that exist for doing that and and then people don't they don't watch the the futures game ben and so i thought it would sure be nice if they didn't do that and then the monkey's paw curled and they said fine meg we won't do it we will do the futures game on saturday a perfectly good day for baseball we will do day one of the draft on sunday we will do the futures game at 4 p.m pacific time 7 p.m eastern it will still to my knowledge only be seven innings long why ben don't. Don't know why that's dumb. And we will bury it on Peacock,

which like not a lot of people watch, at least in terms of its live broadcast. I am given to understand that it will be rebroadcast on MLB network. And so are you satisfied, Megan? I'm here to say, no, Ben, I'm not satisfied.

I am in fact dismayed. So here's the thing about the futures game relative to the draft which as i mentioned has some structural issues in terms of making it like a big marquee event i think that the draft broadcasts are meaningfully like appreciably better than they used to be i like that mlb wants to get people excited about the next wave of players but the problem is that these guys the ones who make it, aren't going to make it for a couple of years minimum, right? They are ages away from the major leagues

to the extent that they get there at all. It's not like with the NFL where you're like, that quarterback that your team just drafted is probably going to play like come September. Get excited. Like you're going to see that guy. And they're also already famous and prominent people. Right.

Unlike most college baseball players. Right. And, you know, we haven't even thought about how little the average fan knows about the prep players. Right. So you have that structural disadvantage, which doesn't mean that you shouldn't make it like a jewel event. You should because it's exciting. And these guys, the ones that make it are going to be meaningful to some fans someday. And I think anytime you have an opportunity

to hype the game and to start to lay the groundwork for fans knowing who players are, you should take advantage of that. But we should just acknowledge what the ceiling is on the draft broadcast, which is never going to be quite the same as in other leagues where the developmental timeline is shorter.

And as you mentioned, the prospects are sort of more famous to begin with, right? going to be quite the same as in other leagues where the developmental timeline is shorter. And as you mentioned, the prospects are sort of more famous to begin with, right? Like people knew who Kumar Rocker was like they knew who Jack Leiter was. But last year, like most of the guys who went in the draft, the average fan probably pretty far removed from them. So you have that, right? So that's the context of the of the event that they are trying to sandwich into All-Star Week. And then and then, Ben, you have the beautiful Futures game. You have the the the sad, lowly Futures game. Why do we mistreat the Futures game this way? Right. Like, first of all, I think within the context of sort of fandom, I've just said that people are less familiar with the amateur prospects. But in terms of guys who have been an affiliated ball for a while, I think that the appetite for prospect coverage has like never been higher

than it is right now. Right. And so you have a roster of guys who are on average, sort of close to the big leagues and who are quite good. Right. And the quality of that roster varies year to year because the prospect pool is not sort of uniformly deep season to season there's gonna be some variation not every year is gonna have like really rock star guys but like there are always gonna be at least a couple dudes who are going to have not just a place on a big league roster but a a meaningful impact on a big league roster who might be all-stars right they? They might be rookies of the year. They might be, you know, MVPs or Cy Youngs.

You have guys who are going to mean something very real to the fans of their respective teams and probably in short order because a lot of the guys that they pick, in fact, most of the guys they pick are guys who are in the high minors. So you have the stars of tomorrow playing on the field of today. And we're going to bury that on Peacock for seven innings on a day, I will add, where a literal Red Sox-Yankees game is starting 15 minutes after first pitch in the Futures game. What are we doing? It feels like we are not taking advantage of a great opportunity to make fans excited about

the guys who are going to mean something significant to them in the coming years and i get it like there's gonna be as i said variability year to year and sometimes that game maybe it's not very good who cares put them on there but do the bp i challenge you as a casual fan to watch the bp i watched at cores last year and not be like wow some of these guys can really put the ball out of the ballpark and get excited about that i have now been to two futures games just two and i am excited to go to my third and i hope it continues and is like treated better than it is and i worry that they're just gonna like stop doing this all together because it's like what are you why are you anyway this is i am here to to stand up for the futures game and say let let us revel in these guys like last year's futures game it had adley rutschman

it had julio rodriguez it had bobby witch jr. It had just a bushel and a peck of top 100 guys. Why are we not? So anyway, here I am to say we should do better by the future's game. This is a missed opportunity. I think that the league should not monkeys pot. They should just commit whole hog. I'm going to list animals now that they should mimic. And those animals are excited about the future's game.

That is the end of my rant. Hogs don't even have paws, Meg. You're mixing your animal metaphors. I mean, yeah. First, I will say it was fair to say you were fired up. I think that was a solid seven to eight minute rant you uncorked there. Yeah, I worked my way into it. Yeah, I got there.

So what is your dream promotion for the Futures game? What's your list of demands here? Would you like MLB to just offer up this showcase event, this jewel event, and say, hey, whoever has the biggest platform can have the rights to this game. We're not going to hold out for the most money to broadcast this thing. If you have a broadcast network, if you're the biggest streaming service, whatever it is, we will give it to you instead of prioritizing short-term profit so that is definitely part of it i think that they should be less concerned with whatever the upfront economics of it are which i will admit to ignorance of but i imagine that part of why this is on peacock is probably because peacock was like here is a pile of money that is bigger than the other piles of money. Right. And there's already an existing Peacock MLB deal. Yeah,

correct. So I imagine that that was part of it. But I think that there's like the broadcast network issue, which I don't think that the the past sort of setup for was optimized around either. Right. Like, I don't say this is a knock against mlb network but like don't don't dream so small dream big dream uh even if you're on like espn2 like that's in more households and is on the app you know you just navigate over to the app so i think that you should if you're the league you should like prioritize getting it as widely disseminated as possible over recouping the most amount of money. So that's the first thing.

But I think the bigger issue, Ben, is when they do it, right? Like when in the calendar they do it. As I mentioned on this day, and this is not the only game that's going to be in that window, like 15 minutes after first pitch for the Futures game, we will have Yankees Red Sox, which I imagine a lot of baseball people will be watching. And then we have Brewers-Giants. And then later that evening, we got D-backs, Padres, we got Dodgers-Angels. You have an All-Star break.

You have a day of the year during All-Star week where there is very little in terms of sports, which I don't say to knock the WNBA, but in terms of men's sports, there isn't much. So why are you doing it on a Saturday when there are big league games? Why not do it later into the week? And yes, that means you sacrifice like a day of minor league action, maybe, but that's fine. Like I think the trade off there makes sense. Put it after the all-star game when people are like, hey, there's no baseball. And it's like, no, no, no. Yes, there is. There's a futures game.

Yeah, definitely agree with you on that point. We've talked about the value of diversifying the broadcasting streaming portfolio versus that being a short-sighted decision, where it could also be a long-term decision where you're looking toward people cutting the cord. I don't know how much of MLB putting things on various platforms is just trying to maximize profits and how much of it is actually trying to get it in front of more or different eyeballs at least, but I'm definitely with you on the timing aspect of this. I don't know how high I think the ceiling for the futures game as an event is. I think it's certainly higher than the ceiling for the draft,

which I'm pessimistic about for some of the same reasons that you mentioned there. I'm not that into the draft myself. If I'm not that into it, I don't know how easy it would be to convince casual fans to get into it. The futures game, though, is definitely a much easier sell. So I think there's more potential there, especially, as you said,

in this era of everyone paying attention to prospects. Although I will note that this year specifically probably has fewer marquee prospect names involved, just because we're kind of at the point in the cycle where maybe some of the top prospects haven't really been built up yet because so many have been promoted recently. Jarrett Seidler wrote about this for Baseball Perspectives this week, just basically about how there's a dearth of real blue-chip prospects in the minors right now, at least at the high levels. And probably mostly for a good reason, that a lot of them are in the majors now. So the future is now. We're watching these guys in the big leagues. That's exciting.

is now. We're watching these guys in the big leagues. That's exciting. Maybe it's related to some of the incentives in the new CBA that caused people to promote prospects at a historic clip to start the season, and that's kind of continued throughout the year. So that's a positive. The downside, though, is that maybe there aren't as many great guys on the cusp whom you're desperate to see because a lot of them have made that leap already. So that's some solace, consolation, I guess, if you're disappointed about there not being more promotion of this event this season. But I agree with you. I don't see any downside to at least clearing out and giving it some space, give it some room to breathe, try to fan the flame, see how big it can get.

See how big it can get, Ben. We should see how big it can get see how big it can get ben we should see how big it can get because because you're right like this year i mean i think there are still some guys who people are gonna watch like hey that's a cool guy like you know like corbin carroll and gunner henderson who like dan is convinced just broke zips like dan is very nervous that there is something that he is like a special particle that has broken the entire projection system right like you have bobby miller you've got all kinds of dudes you've got names you've got so many and so i just i get that like i said there's going to be some year-to-year variation but like

assume that there's always going to be at least a couple of guys who are are worth watching and worth getting amped about and you know so that's what i have to say about that i think that we're missing an opportunity and it's such an interesting contrast to and i i don't mean to equate these events because i get that there is all kinds of draw to the world's baseball classic right but like the league is has announced the venues for the 2023 world baseball classic which we are all thrilled is back that is so exciting it had taken a two-year hiatus because of the pandemic it's coming back in 2023 we get to see so many different cool players or the guys that we know from the big leagues or guys who play for national teams who we are less familiar with everybody gets amped about this there are so many good wbc memories but it's like when when the schedule

presents you with an opportunity to get excited even if it is relative to some of the other jewel events on a smaller scale a la the futures game i just think that we should take it because like you know it's baseball with guys whose names you will know soon. Not all of them and not all of them to the degree that they have been projected either by prospect prognosticators or by the projection systems, which again, Gunnar Henderson may have just broken, but like some of them are going to be good. Some of them are going to be really good. They're going to be names that you're like, aha, a name I know. i'm so glad i watched that guy in the futures game there was a year where i am pretty sure that like a lot of the guys who have gotten mvp votes in the last couple years were just all on a futures game roster together so it's very exciting and some of

these dudes depending on where you live in the country like you're not gonna necessarily see them this might be your your first opportunity to really see them without an milb tv subscription right like there were guys who i saw for the first time in person by going to the futures game so it's exciting we should i don't know we're always talking about how we should like get excited about stuff so like let's get excited about some stuff this stuff yeah you'll be there at least i will be there that's something this is the first time that I will have had opportunity to go to Dodger Stadium, which I'm very excited about. Oh, nice.

Yeah. I had never. I've never. I had never. What? I've never been there before. How do dances work? Yeah.

What are verbs? So yeah, I will be there, which will be fun. But you know what will be more fun? Watching the Futures game. Yeah. Well, from your lips to rob's ears we'll see if your grievance gets heard here i don't think he listens to well i don't think he listens to this podcast because i think we would have heard about it grievances about baseball in

general yeah and i definitely don't think he listens to me i don't think that it being moved to saturday was my doing I want to be clear. I was one of a chorus of voices saying, hey, why are you doing this? I had to run almost back to my hotel for draft stuff. It's just going to be a lot better to be less stressed.

Although I am a little bit nervous about getting in and out of Dodger Stadium on the heels of a celebrity softball game, which is, I think, the same day as the Futures game in LA, which means they will probably get real celebrities. Yes, probably. Sometimes I get the celebrity softball game and I'm like, are you actually famous enough to be here?

Yeah. This time they don't have to travel, so okay. Yeah, they'll just be right there. That'll be great for them. So that is the conclusion of my rant. It was a good one. Thank you. So I want to change the subject for a second to superheroes.

Okay. Which doesn't sound like a natural transition, but I think I can make a convincing segue here. So the Futures game is the origin story of MLB superstars. Yeah. game is the origin story of MLB superstars. So often a trope in superhero origin stories is baseball. In fact, a young coming of age superhero throwing a baseball, I have noticed, has become a hallmark of recent onscreen superhero fiction. And I noticed this because I was writing something about the end of season three of The Boys. The finale is airing this week. I won't spoil anything, but there is one scene at the

very start of this episode where a young character named Ryan, he is the son of Homelander, who is the superpowered antagonist of the series. And Ryan is superpowered himself. And he's just kind of experimenting, coming into his powers here. And in the first scene of this episode, he throws a baseball. And he throws a baseball very far because he has super strength. And thus, he can throw it farther than Ytrow, farther than Ioannis Cespedes, farther than anyone who has a great arm. Jordan Alvarez apparently has one. It was better than the Jordan Alvarez throw. And so I won't say who shares this scene with Ryan, but the person who sees him throw the ball says, whoa, I knew your fastball would come in sooner

or later. And I think there are a few previous examples of this being repeated. One was actually in an earlier episode of The Boys, season one, episode six, Homelander himself, just lightly tossed a ball, kind of like a sidearm flip sort of, and it went soaring off at super speed. And someone who saw him throw it said, that is going to kill somebody when it lands in Boston, which is always kind of the question, right? I mean, there were people the other night who were hit near Oakland's ballpark because people had been firing guns for the Fourth of July, not in anger or violence in this case, but just in a celebratory way because it's America and we shoot guns for any old reason. And they were hit by the falling bullets and some people were injured. That's always the question when a superhero is just lobbing a baseball somewhere. It's like what goes up must come down at some point.

That's going to kill someone. So this happened in season one. So maybe the season three scene is a callback to that earlier episode. But it's not just the boys. This also happened in the other Amazon Prime. Subverting superhero trope. Superhero show. Invincible.

Where there's a scene in the first season of that show. Where another coming of age superhero. Just growing into his powers. And his dad are playing catch. In midair. Except that they are throwing the ball to each other. Back to back. So that they throw the ball. And each other back to back so that they

throw the ball and it circumnavigates the globe before it gets to their catch partner here. And I know that people have had questions about the physics of that and why does the ball not achieve escape velocity and enter orbit or leave orbit? How does it keep circumnavigating the globe here? And also, why does it make a sound if it's traveling at supersonic speed, etc.? There are always questions about physics when it comes to superheroes, but that is another example. And then in Superman Returns, the 2006 movie,

I think it is, Clark Kent is reminiscing about how he was coming of age and was mastering his powers, about how he was coming of age and was mastering his powers. And he picks up a baseball and his dog goes out to fetch. And then Superman Clark Kent throws the ball, except he throws it so far that the poor dog just trots a few steps and then stands there because it cannot see the ball anymore because it went so far. So this is at least four fairly recent examples of superheroes tossing baseballs and them going very far. And I think there are probably other examples, I'm sure, in the comics or Doctor Strange, where it just seems like

baseball is still overrepresented in film just relative to its status in American culture currently. And we've speculated about the reasons why that might be, whether it is just the remnant of baseball as the national pastime and what it means to the history and culture, or maybe it has something to do with the fact that you can see baseball players' faces and so forth. And there are lots of potential reasons why that could be. It could also be that a lot of the people who have made movies are old white guys who are kind of in the baseball-liking cohort. I think that that has at least something to do with it. Yes, I would think so. So that may change as time goes on.

But you just see so much more baseball, I think, in non-sports related movies than you do in other sports still. And this superhero example is a good case of that, I think, because I don't really recall recent examples of like superheroes tossing footballs around the globe. I mean, there's no reason why they couldn't do that right so maybe it's just that a baseball you can wrap your hand around it you can throw it really far like you can throw a baseball farther than you can throw a football i guess and it is also a type of ball that you are supposed to throw as opposed to i

don't know a soccer ball or a tennis ball or something that is not normally thrown. And you can just whip it and it will go off into the distance. And probably everyone, even if they haven't played baseball, has at least held a baseball and knows what it's like to throw one. It's a very satisfying type of ball to hold and to throw, even if you're not actually playing baseball. So I think that this is just a continued example of baseball's ongoing over-representation on screen, which I'm fine. I'm all for there being more baseball movies and baseball shows by our very limited, specialized, effectively wild definition of those terms. But it's great to see. So I love the trope of superhero origin stories that encompass and incorporate throwing a baseball very far. Yeah, I think you made the segue successfully.

Thanks. I think it is because it's more relatable to be like, a baseball, I have thrown it, than a football, a perfect spiral. It's funny what we can conceptualize a normal person being able to do as they become a superhero. Like I can imagine getting super strength and being able to throw a baseball very, very far. But like throwing a perfect spiral seems out of reach to me or like palming a basketball seems like it would be out of reach because I still assume I would have my normal small hands relative even if I. So unless my superpower was stick them. Yeah. Unless I had stick them powers then it then

it's yeah yeah yeah or mr fantastic stretchy yeah something yeah they still haven't made a good fantastic four movie have they no they're working on it it's like they do keep trying so i have a even more natural segue i think to the next thing I want to talk about show you yeah not just Otani actually there's been this Angels Marlins series going on and so we've gotten to see both Otani at the peak of his powers and his opponent Sandy Alcantara at the peak of his powers which are also pretty prodigious So both of those guys have put on great displays this week. Alcantara as a pitcher, Otani as both a pitcher and a hitter. So Otani's on a real roll right now, really on both sides of the ball,

but particularly as a pitcher. And it has yielded a whole new rash of fun facts, some of which are more fun than others, right? I mean, there was one after his most recent outing where he shut down the Marlins. He gave up one run, unearned over seven innings, struck out 10, also reached base three times, stole a base, drove in a couple runs. And so there is a fun fact going around about how he's the first player since RBI became official in 1920 to have 10 strikeouts as a pitcher,

two RBI as a batter, and a stolen base. Okay, that's a genre of Otani fun fact where you're just like lumping together a bunch of statistical categories in a way that most people don't fill up the stat sheet the way that he does. So, all right, I'm fine with that one. But there have also been some, I think, more impressive ones just about the run he's on on the mound so there are various permutations of this stat like the Angels PR Twitter account was tweeting four pitchers in AL history have had three consecutive starts with 10 plus strikeouts

and no earned runs allowed and in the NL only two pitchers have done it so that's a pretty exclusive group and then pitchers to go 5-0 with 46-plus strikeouts and one or fewer earned runs allowed in a five-game span. All right, that is sort of massaging the minimums there to have a fairly exclusive club. And then it also tweeted that he has joined Johan Santana as the only AL pitchers to go 4-0 with a zero era and 40 plus strikeouts in a four game span in the divisional era only two pitchers did it prior to that so if you're incorporating the win-loss record i'm a little less interested in that although it is surprising that the angels have actually won some games while he was doing his thing which is not always the case but he hasn't given up an earned run in almost 27 innings,

almost three games worth of innings. Maybe the best version of the stat is that he is, I think, the ninth pitcher since earned runs became official in 1913 to have 40 plus strikeouts and no earned runs in a four-start span, although there's an era effect there. The first one was Ray Culp in 1968. Obviously, in earlier eras, you had lower strikeout totals. You had pitchers pitching more innings over the typical four-game span, so it was harder to allow zero-earned runs, even if it was a lower-scoring era. with runners in scoring position in the past 50 years and the lowest slugging percentage allowed with runners in scoring position as a pitcher in the last 50 years minimum 400 plate appearances 200 batters face not bad and he is now leading the american league in baseball reference war

among pitchers or position players that's his combined war fangraphs combined war i believe he is trailing aaron judge by a tenth of a win right now and also trailing paul goldschmidt and manny machado in the nl by a tenth of a win so he's right there he is about to perhaps overtake everyone for the mlb war lead and the al war lead again for the second consecutive season so one thing i'm wondering if he does do that and judge of course he just hit his 30th home run he's still having a fantastic season yep it's pretty good right it was a grand slam too wasn't it it was yes him and aaron hicks yes same day yes they became uh i saw a katie sharp tweet about this but i believe the effectively wild discord group had it first yes i think you're

right they were not credited but i think that uh this was the first time in mlb history that two different players with the same first name hit grand slams in the same game so that's something i guess but yeah aaron judge he's still pretty much tearing the cover off the ball so what i wonder i mean now that we're at roughly the halfway mark of the season if we were to handicap the mvp race which we don't do a lot of early prognostication about award wins but i am kind of curious about this race in particular because i think judge got off to a really hot start and was the prohibitive favorite. Otani's been coming on.

Jose Ramirez is lurking. There are other players in the mix there. But I wonder basically how much Otani would have to surpass Judge by, let's say, in combined war to win this thing again. Because we are in an era where voters pay pretty close attention to war typically, but maybe there's a little bit of angels fatigue. Understandably, the angels have won a lot of MVPs without being a good baseball team. Maybe there is interest and an appetite for someone who is not an angel, especially because the angels are losing again and are probably not going to make the playoffs at this point. They're not out of it, but they are certainly not on pace to make the playoffs currently.

So is there a bit of a, well, Otani just did this last year. And yeah, it's still spectacular, but there's nothing like the first time. And so maybe the field will be opened. Voters' minds will be opened to someone else who is in the same war vicinity. I mean, if he finishes like a win or two ahead of anyone else, like Judge, assuming, of course, that Judge roughly maintains his pace and has something close to a 60 homer season. Like, I just kind of wonder how good would Otani have to be? Would he have to be even better than last year if he just repeats last year or even comes up a little short compared to last year? Will everyone still be as impressed and say, yeah, this is amazing. He's got to win the MVP no matter what. Or will it be another angel again? Eh, maybe someone else this time. So I have conflicting thoughts about this. I think that on the one hand,

it's hard for me to put myself in a position where I care about it being a bunch of angels, right? I have a hard time where I care about it being a bunch of angels, right? Like, I don't, I have a hard time thinking I care about that. I do think that the answer to my question does depend. This is going to be an obvious way of phrasing this. Like, it does depend who the other really good baseball players will like, duh, of course it does. I think that my baseline, My baseline assumption is this. If Otani is within sort of half a win of the combined AL leaderboard in any given year, I just think he's like the guy you have to give the award to. Not only because we know that the error bars on war are such that he is effectively leading the American League in war.

Now, that means that Aaron Judge is too, right? Because they have 0.1 wins worth of separation. And, you know, Jordan is at 3.9 wins and Raphael Devers is at 4.1. So, like, they're all effectively the same guy. and Raphael Devers is at 4.1. So like they're all effectively the same guy. But I think that when you take into, they're not the same guy in terms of the shape of their production being the same,

just to be very clear, or the shape of them being the same. Although we do have a bunch of big strapping guys at the top of that leaderboard, don't we? What I mean to say is that I think that when you take into consideration the acknowledged sort of error bars on war as a concept, and then you take into consideration

what I feel comfortable saying is like war, not being able to, as it is currently constituted, fully capture the value of Otani because of how he is arriving at his, at this moment as we record 4.2 wins, like there might end up being fatigue with it being the same guy, but if he's doing this, like he's just the AL MVP. I think he's just the AL MVP.

Now, now Aaron Judge plays for the Yankees. He is having a superlative season in his own right, and he has the potential home run chase element to his candidacy. So I don't know how voters would separate those things out. I think that the pull of a very good Yankee potentially meeting or exceeding a home run record in a walk year is going to be a super compelling narrative, as it should be. And I think that the idea of a incredible two-way player being completely superlative, again, also very compelling. So I guess that my answer is, I don't know how voters will come down on this, but I think that both of those cases have a lot to recommend them and that the conversation around it might might been actually be fun.

It might actually be fun, unlike most years where it makes me want to never go on the Internet again. to never go on the internet again. So I am very stoked on this because not as excited as I am about the Futures game, but that's not true. That's not true at all. But this is great. It is super exciting when there is legitimate debate to be had about two guys

who are doing something very special, but the shape of that specialness is distinct from each other. Like that is super fun. This gives us an opportunity to appreciate two dudes having just like tremendous seasons. And I don't say two dudes to slight Rafael Devers or Jordan Alvarez, but I think that if things kind of continue a pace, despite the great years that those guys are having, this will end up probably being viewed as sort of a two-man race. And, you know, here I am once again discounting Jose Ramirez,

even though we tell people not to do that all the time. But here I am being like, I don't know, it's just a two-guy race. And Jose Ramirez is like, what? It's okay. I forgot to mention Devers before, and you forgot to mention Ramirez. But between the two of us, we've mentioned all the guys. And can we just talk about how Mike Trout is still like being. Yeah, Mike Trout is still very much in the neighborhood.

Yeah, he's like hanging out. He's like, what do I have to do to get some respect around here? So I don't know that I have an answer. I think that there will be people who sort of settle into their camps on either side of that in terms of which is more worthy. But I don't think that people like saying it should be Aaron Judge or like making a silly argument like he's been spectacular this year. He's just been really, really good at baseball. And people who are like show me yay it's like yeah yeah yeah i do wonder if it will help otani that yes he's the same guy but he's really two in one right and the balance of power between the two has shifted a little yes now by the end of the season who knows his offensive stats may look a lot like they did last year he started slow he's kind of come on at the plate but the pitching has been much improved at least compared to his full season stats last year yeah and so that i mean

he's a cy young candidate outside of the mvp race right i mean i don't think he's been better than shane mcclanahan or kevin gossman to this point but he is third in fraff's pitcher war in the AL right now and top 10 in the majors. I mean, he is in that conversation purely as a pitcher despite the six-man rotation. So McClanahan's pitched more innings. Even Gossman has pitched more innings. It's hard for Otani to make up that gap. But on an inning-per-inning basis, he has been fantastic. So if he's getting Cy Young consideration and certainly would get

Cy Young votes if the season ended today, then maybe that boosts his candidacy a little bit too. Not that it necessarily matters or that it should matter what the distribution of offensive war and pitching war is, but there's a little more novelty there. Whereas if it were just a carbon copy of last season, it would be like, well, that was amazing. That was perhaps the most impressive season ever. But this is the sequel. The sequel is almost never as good as the original and maybe not as shocking and spectacular. So there is a new wrinkle to it. He's showing a different or at least improved side of himself.

So perhaps that helps. Yeah, it very well might. himself so perhaps that helps yeah it very it very well might now as for alcantara he is leading actually the majors in baseball reference war because baseball reference pitching war is very dependent on just pure run prevention and inning totals and he has pitched many more innings than anyone else and he has prevented runs very effectively in those innings he has a sub two era in 123 and a third innings thus far he's still very high in fangraphs war as well he isn't as much of a standout and an outlier in fip just because his strikeout rate is somewhat lower perhaps you can even call his strikeout rate pedestrian frankly frankly, in this day and age.

And so he is getting it done with good control and lots of ground balls and maybe a little luck on batted balls as well. But he's been amazing. He's been fantastic. He is probably your prohibitive NL Cy Young Award favorite right now. There are people who could catch up in theory, but he has a pretty hefty lead to this point in the season. So that's been pretty impressive too. And I have maybe a mid-episode stat blast here

about each of these guys because I was wondering one thing about each of them. And I have fun facts to report. In amazing ways, here's today's stat blast. So the stat blast brought to you as always by Stathead, powered by Baseball Reference. And you can use the Stathead tool at statead.com to look up all sorts of fun and interesting stats about baseball and about other sports and leagues. And we encourage everyone to go to StatHead.com, sign up, use our coupon code WILD20 to get a $20 discount on a $80 one-year subscription. So for this Stat stat blast, one thing I have

heard a frequent refrain about the Angels this year is that they have Trout and Otani having these fantastic seasons, and they're still pretty bad. And they're still pretty bad for obvious reasons, right? The rest of the roster. So actually, Dan

Samborski had a very unfun fact for Angels fans, at least, in his Zips update for the AL this week at FanCrafts where he noted that the Angels roster has 16 players below replacement level over the last 30 days. So most of their roster, by a good margin, has been below replacement level over the past month. by a good margin has been below replacement level over the past month. Contrast that, he writes, with the Yankees, who have only two sub-replacement level players over that same span, with one of them, Miguel Andujar, playing in just two games. So yeah, that will drag you down. If you have a Stars and Scrubs roster and your scrubs are that bad, it's hard to outweigh that. But I have wondered what precedent there is for a team having two teammates that productive and still having a losing record. So we could formulate this in

various ways. Right now, Otani is on pace for, I think, an eight plus war season. Trout has been slumping lately, and so he's down to about a seven.5 win pace, a mere 7.5 war pace. So if we were just to set the minimum at two 7-plus win players on the same team, there have been, according to Kenny Jacklin, who ran this query for me at Baseball Reference, for me at baseball reference 18 teams in the al or nl that had two players post seven plus baseball reference war and still have a losing record i think only four of them were with two position players doing it although maybe that makes sense because there are fewer position players than pitchers at least in this era. And I guess Ohtani is not purely a position player either. Yeah, I was going to say.

But there have been four of those. I'll just put the list online and link on the show page. But just to go down here, starting from the best sub-500 winning percentage to the worst, if we are even going to count this there was the 1889 philadelphia quakers charlie buffington had an 11.1 war and ben sanders had 7.5 yeah buffington they were 63 and 64 that's a 496 winning percentage then at 494 80 and 82 we have the 1964 dodgers who are one of only two teams to have two eight plus war players and still have a losing record which could very well happen for the angels this year so willie davis had 8.3 war that year and don drysdale had 8.3. And they were still 80 and 82. So put a pin in that.

They're one of the two. Then we have 1912 Cleveland, Vian Gregg, and Shoeless Joe Jackson. They had 7.2 and 9.5 respectively, a 490 winning percentage for them. Then you have the 54 Phillies, Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts. They had a 487 winning percentage. 54 Phillies, Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts. They had a 487 winning percentage. Recently, the 2019 Rangers, Lance Lynn and Mike Miner, had seven plus wins apiece, but 481 winning percentage. And, you know, this is a product of baseball reference pitching war, which not everyone loves. And I do prefer Fangraph's pitching war myself.

But 1992 Cubs, you had Greg Maddox and Ryan Sandberg. They ended up with a 481 winning percentage, as did the 1987 Red Sox, also 78 and 84. And they were the other team that had two 8-plus war players and still could not break even. Wade Boggs had 8.3 war that year. Roger Clemens had 9.4 and still a losing team. Then 1936 Red Sox, West Farrell and Lefty Grove, 481. 1890 Giants, the immortal Jack Glasscock, not immortal, unfortunately, but his name will live on forever.

And Amos Roussey, they were 481 winning percentage too. Ben, Ben. Yes. What if he had a glass ass too? I believe I may have made that joke of the glass ass syndrome episode. How could you resist? Yeah. But you know what?

I wanted to make it again. Sorry to interrupt your train of thought, but this is what I had to contribute. Yeah. Black glass cock comes up. Please feel free to remake that joke. Then we have another unique team the 1932 giants are the only team ever to have three seven plus war players and still have a losing record so how about that carl hubbell 7.4 war mel ott 8.3 and bill terry 7.7

and somehow they went 72 and 82. That's a 40-68 winning percentage. So maybe that makes the Angels look good. You can actually do it with three players. Then you have the 1975 White Sox, Goose Gossage and Jim Cott, 466. 1927 White Sox, Ted Lyons and Tommy Thomas, 458. 1977 Angels, there is an Angels precedent. Nolan Ryan and Frank Tanana, 458. 1977, Angels. There is an Angels precedent. Nolan Ryan and Frank Tanana, 457 winning percentage.

2001, Rockies. Todd Helton and Larry Walker, 451. 1987, Dodgers. Oral Hershiser and Bob Welsh, 451. 1965, Cubs. Ron Santo and Billy Williams, 444. Second to last, 1996, Bernard Gilkey and Lance Johnson, 438 winning percentage. Who knew that Bernard Gilkey had an eight-war season in there somewhere?

And finally, top or bottom of the list, it's another Angels team, appropriately. The 1993 California Angels, Chuck Finley, 7.1 war. Mark Langston, 8.5. They went 71 and 91. That is a 438 winning percentage. So it has been done before. Perhaps it has been surpassed in some ways before. Although there is, I suppose, the variability of war and the vagaries of that stat and the

difficulty of quantifying defense and some of the quirks of baseball reference pitching war and all that. So if you want to say like if Trout and Otani end up with seven plus war, we can be pretty confident that they were really that good and that valuable because they're Trout and Otani. Right. We've seen them do that before. So there's not a lot of like a small sample statistical uncertainty. It's Mike Trout and Shohei Otani. So if they do it, it would be yet another embarrassment and poor reflection on the Angels roster composition. and my wife, who mostly watches Angels games when she watches baseball, every time we watch the Angels now, it seems like I am introducing her to new players. It's like, who's that? Let me introduce you to Jonathan VR.

Jonathan VR, come on down. You are a Los Angeles Angel now. Or Monty Harrison, you are an Angel now. Who knew? Suddenly, these people appear, and sometimes sometimes in David McKinnon's case, at least they're batting cleanup. But anyway, for anyone who was wondering about whether that ignominy has been achieved before, it has, which does not make it easier to bear necessarily, but it's not unprecedented. No, but I think it feels different when you're you're thinking about guys who like in trout's case might just he just might be the best baseball player ever right like it it does register a little bit differently even if there are other circumstances where you know like someone has been spectacular or two someones have been spectacular it just it hits you different

when it's literally mike trout and shoryo tani when it's like the guy who might be the best who's ever done it and the guy who is doing it differently than all but a handful of guys throughout the history of the game like that feels like you should most especially try to be good. Yep. You'd think. You'd think. So here's my Alcantara stat blast. So one thing that's interesting about his season is that the distribution of his pitch types is extremely even. You never know what he's going to throw because he doesn't really favor anything overall.

I mean, certainly if he's ahead or behind, he will throw certain types of pitches more often than others, but you just look at the overall distribution on his fan graphs page right now. According to pitch info, he's thrown his four seamer 25.1% of the time, his sinker 23.9% of the time, his change up 26.9% of the time, and his slider 23.9% of the time, his changeup 26.9% of the time, and his slider 23.9% of the time. So the range here is very small. His least used pitches have been thrown about 24% of the time, and his most used pitch has

been thrown about 27% of the time. And so I got curious, is this rare? Is this unusual? I should note also that he is credited at least with throwing curveballs 0.1% of the time. He has thrown curveballs more frequently in past seasons, and he's basically just put that pitch in his pocket this season, and it seems to have benefited him. If anything, he didn't get the greatest results on the curveball in the past. So maybe he has thrown the odd curveball

here and there rarely sometime this season, if that's not a classification issue. But basically, he has four pitches and he throws them almost equally. So one way that I looked at this first with the help of Lucas Apostolaris of Baseball Prospectus, who ran these queries for me, Apostolaris of Baseball Prospectus who ran these queries for me. First way was just to see, okay, what is the lowest percentage on record for a most frequently thrown pitch? So this is going back to 2008. And the least used most frequently thrown pitch, if that makes any sense, is Jesse Chavez in 2017. He threw his four-seam fastball 22.4% of the time. This is as a starter. Lucas just looked as a starter exclusively and set the minimum at 100 innings. So Chavez, he threw his four-seamer 22.4% of the time when he was working as a starter, and that was his most common pitch.

Now, he had some even less frequently used pitches than Alcantara does. He was throwing some in the single digits, let's say. And so that didn't quite get at the distribution that I was looking for here, because it's not just that Alcantara doesn't favor any one pitch really disproportionately, but also like his least used pitch, he doesn't use rarely. He uses it about as often as his most used pitch. And so the second way we looked at it was to use the standard deviation of pitch type rate. So for this, we just tossed out any sub 1% usage rates like Alcantara has with his curveball because that's just such a rarity and it could be classification issues. So we tossed those out and we just looked at standard deviation of your other pitch type rates. here he really does stand out so this is what i was getting at he's actually second all time thus far this season out of oh more than 1700 pitcher seasons qualifying going back to 2008 so the

standard deviation of his pitch type usage is just like 1.4 percentage points. And the only pitcher who has surpassed that in 100 innings in a season as a starter is Edinson Volquez in 2012, who had also a 1.4 percentage point standard deviation, if you round it up, but just slightly less than Alcantara's. So Volquez had the same sort of deal. Now he was not having a Cy Young season at that point, so it was not as notable. But if you look at his pitch type distribution that year, you see the same sort of pattern. He threw his four-seamer 26.3% of the time, his sinker 22.8% of the time, his changeup 24.8% of the time, sinker 22.8% of the time his change up 24.8% of the time and his curveball 24.2% of the time so extremely democratic distribution there I guess you could say that sinkers and

four seamers are both fastballs but they are very distinct types of fastballs so I think it's okay to count them separately here so no one else is really even close to Volquez and Alcantara. The next closest is 2016 Cole Hamels, and his standard deviation was almost two and a half times as large as Alcantara's. The difference between the second ranked Alcantara and the third ranked Hamels is as great as the difference between the third ranked Hamels and the 35th-ranked guy. That is impressive. I think it makes Alcantara perhaps more fun to watch just because he's so unpredictable and you are so regularly seeing him work in these four different types of pitches. Maybe it makes him more effective just because it's hard to anticipate what he will throw.

You can't really ever just sit on something and say, I'm going to look for this because there's a really great chance that you're going to be wrong and that he's going to throw one of those other three pitches. So it seems like it would be a competitive advantage, but also a challenge because he has to have four pitches that are good enough that it even makes sense to throw them all that regularly and not to privilege one over the others so there's that and you have to retain your feel for them and your grips and keep practice and everything and then you also just like have decisions to make on every pitch and i guess that's partly on his catcher too so maybe it helps to have someone

like gold lover jacob stallings back there but they have a lot of things to weigh on every pitch because he could throw so many things there isn't an obvious like you know some flame throwing reliever comes in and it's like oh well he's ahead in the count he's gonna throw a slider like he almost always throws a slider and you don't want to be too predictable ever but they have established patterns if you only have a couple pitches but alcantara not really so i imagine that that makes him hard to read but probably also a high degree of difficulty to do what he's doing at the level that he's doing it yeah i think that that's right i think that it garners a special appreciation yeah so everyone appreciate shohei otani we know you do already but also

appreciate sandy alcantara who he's a marlin so maybe he's not as obvious an object of appreciation but he should be he's really good and special too and i would just say like i know that there has been some discourse which is my very favorite thing about him starting for the nl versus tony gonsolin and like i think that what we should all just remember about the All-Star game, even though I went on a very impassioned rant on behalf of the Futurist game, which is essentially the same thing,

but for the minor leagues, is that it doesn't really matter who starts the game. And it's at Dodger Stadium. So if they make it Tony Gonsolin because he gets to start in front of the home crowd, it doesn't, it's fine. It doesn't make Sandy any worse. It doesn't make Tony Gonsolin any better.

They're both very good. It's going to be fine. They're going to throw some meetings. Everyone's going to be like, all the stars, yay. They're going to wear the weird hats, half of which looks like, it looked like they have an asterisk on them.

Have you seen these all-star hats, Ben? No. Ben, I want you to Google them. We're going to do it live. We're doing it live right now. I'm going to Google MLB All-Star 2022 hat, and you'll probably not get it because everything goes through fanatics now. And so it doesn't work.

But now I see it. Yeah. And so here's the thing about these hats is that they like they decided to put the stars like in a place that was meant to be sort of more aesthetically pleasing. But it just ends up looking like half of them have an asterisk. Yeah, it definitely does. It definitely does. It makes it look like, oh, are you an all-star or an injury replacement who could say so anyway

especially the ones where the asterisk is up high yeah right like after the logo like i'm looking at bujay's one and it's like under the bill of the bird right like on the left side yeah so that doesn't really look like an asterisk that looks to me like a star right and then i guess if you have like the atlanta a and the star is on the left of the a that still looks a little like an asterisk to me but but less yeah but then you see like the yankees or the cardinals yeah and it's just there we'll go with a little asterisk yeah angels for that matter so yeah that very much looks like an asterisk to me. Yeah, it seems like it was maybe, you know, like, look, we're not here to criticize.

I mean, I am actively criticizing. It took like weeks for us to be like, oh, that trip might look like it is a fart. So, you know, we get that it's hard, but somebody wasn't like, is he actually an all-star? Or is that to say, you know, I don't know. What's a bad team? The A's.

Actually, the A's one looks cool because they've replaced the comma, the apostrophe rather, with a star. Yeah, that's okay. But that one's fine. But like, you know, it's going to say like, Jose Ramirez, are you an all-star? I don't know. And it's like, yeah, he sure is. Or the Rockies, you know, whoever the Rockies end up sending yeah hey the guardians are pretty good don't diss the guardians yeah

that one is probably more apt because you know if any if any team is going to be like well we get to send someone that's what the rules say or like the reds some of these are or the cubs some of these you feel like you're saying something you know yeah you feel like you're you feel like you're really saying something with that hat i know it's it's almost a relief that the astros asterisk is to the left of the right not to the right because otherwise and it makes me wonder if that one in particular somebody was like look we gotta yeah we really gotta be careful here because yeah there must have been a conversation about that one. But then extend the convo to the poor Reds. They're having a hard enough time.

They don't need to be made to feel worse. Also, I meant to mention, you noted that Aaron Hicks had hit a grand slam. That one was off a position player. That was off of Josh Van Meter, whom we talked about when he was an emergency catcher earlier this year. He has also sometimes been an emergency pitcher. Can't even call it an emergency pitcher anymore because position players pitch in non-emergencies constantly, which is kind of what I wanted to ask about. If that had been the other Aaron who had been hitting that Grand Slam, it wasn't. But if it had been, and I believe John Carlos

Stanton also homered off of van meter in that game but position player pitchers are pitching more often than ever and they're pitching very badly very badly this year oh it's so bad which makes sense because the more you use them like the average velocity of position players pitch has gone down over the years maybe just because they're trying less hard because it's just such an accepted part of the game now but also probably because the pool of potential position player pitchers has expanded so much that like in the past you might have actually had to have an arm to get put out there and not embarrass the team now it's like nope you can

embarrass the team it's fine you can just go out there and lob a pitch at 30-something or 40-something miles per hour, and everyone's fine with this apparently. But what I wondered is if that had been Judge or if it happens that Judge hits one off a position player pitcher later this year. For all I wonder whether we get to the point where there is some sort of statistical adjustment that you might make for quality of competition or even just like excluding stats. I mean, it's not fair to exclude the stats against position players pitchers. But if you were to build that into a war model in some way, which currently I believe neither baseball reference nor fan graphs accounts for the quality of opposing pitchers, let's say, when assessing a hitter's performance. So if you hit a home run off an ace, it counts just as much toward those wars as it does if you hit a home run off of Josh Van Meter. And there are various reasons for that. And I should say that I think baseball

prospectus and open war, they may actually make some adjustments for quality of competition that the more often cited wars do not. And it's just a philosophical thing. It's a ease of calculation thing. It's a where do you draw the line in abstracting these stats? I mean, we are already making adjustments for ballpark, let's say. And so you could say, well, why not make adjustments for ballpark let's say and so you could say well why not make adjustments for quality of competition too some players are on harder divisions they face better pitchers they face better hitters so why not do that but it's hard to know where to stop then you know do you start to use expected stats instead of actual

stats i mean the way you use fit for pitchers do you start using X WOBA for hitters instead of the actual results? I mean, you could just keep slicing finer and finer and make it more abstract. And I'd be all for having that as an option, I suppose. But I think it would be a harder sell for some fans. And it's already not always the easiest sell. Anyway, just saying that as position player pitchers make up a greater portion of the innings pitched in baseball, and it's still just a tiny sliver, but like Rob Maines has been doing these monthly breakdowns at Baseball Perspectives where he looks at the league

run environment and then adjusts for both the zombie runner and position player pitchers because both of those things really do significantly skew the stats because the rate of scoring and extra innings is just so inflated by the zombie runner that it really does pump up the league overall run numbers and position players do to an extent so when he tried to adjust for that in his most recent monthly update for june it took off like a tenth of a run scored per game. It's just, you know, you're looking at what happens in the actual like first nine innings when real pitchers are pitching as opposed to wacky baseball. So I do wonder, like maybe it's just still not a prominent enough part of the game to go to these lengths and actually make some sort of adjustment.

But who knows, like if maybe if some MVP candidate happened to be feasting on position player pitchers one year and it just like run up his stats and hit a few homers that helped make a little bit more separation between him and the next highest guy, it'd probably be a point of conversation and discussion. And maybe it's not something that every voter would weigh or would even be aware of if the stats did not take that into account. So I'm not against the idea of having some sort of quality of competition adjustment. I think baseball reference, you know, already adjusts for like the quality of defense behind a pitcher, maybe kind of in a blunt way that I don't totally love at times,

but it makes that kind of adjustment. I think there is already some sort of adjustment. Kenny Jacklin told me they take teams into account for calculating how many runs they expect a pitcher to have allowed, but it's based on teams and not individual matchup quality. And it's just for pitchers, not for hitters. So I'm just saying so i would not object to maybe adding that in or at least making it an option with some of these wars yeah or like you know what what you should do ben is on september 1st you should remind me about this and then what i will do is i will say hey ben clemens you know and i'll think aboutmens and then Ben will write it so remind me okay this is me

laying claim to that idea on behalf of a writer who I haven't talked to about it months in advance it's like licking a cupcake that one's mine that topic yeah well good always think about creating content so maybe the fact that it's not in the war means that you can make more posts about it. Exactly. I think that now we're cooking with gas.

Now we're really... But I do think that you're right that at the very least, it's something that absent a rule that sort of alleviates this problem for us, which I do imagine we're just going to get sooner rather than later. I think that people are at the league office, you know, this has come across the transom

enough times that they're like, we probably should do something about that, you know, that it's definitely something to, at the very least, be aware of and encourage people who have the sort of mathematical acumen to write about so that we have a sense of how much it really does matter, because maybe it really does matter. Yep.'m not suggesting that aaron judge doesn't hit titanic homers off of real pictures all the time i'm not trying to slight aaron judge here just uh trying to look ahead there have been some cases in the past where you know someone who's in a central division that perhaps is weaker i mean i don't want to say that it's going to make someone who looks like he's not having a good year into an MVP year or vice versa, but on the margins, these things can make slight differences,

and I think it is sort of fair to adjust for that in theory. So anyway, I'm fascinated by Judge's season and his contract situation, which is something that our pal Craig Goldstein just wrote about for Baseball Perspectives too. The idea of how much money has Judge made himself just because the Yankees reported offer was pretty robust just for a player of his age. And Craig was looking for comps and not really coming up with a lot of players who have reached free agency at the age that Judge will be reaching free agency, especially in this analytics era of paying attention to aging curves and not giving out as many long-term contracts to over 30 position players, etc. Like, he would be kind of breaking the mold if he does actually get some team to tack on an extra year or two

to what the Yankees offered him, although maybe he's at least raising the average annual value with what he is doing this year he certainly has not cost himself a cent that is for sure right yeah I think that this is the thing it's like I don't know how much more he is likely to get and I think that even with this incredible season you know front offices are clear-eyed about both the the stuff we know with some amount of reliability about age and age-related decline and are aware of the unknowns that you introduce when it's a person who is literally built like judge where there's just not a lot of precedent for that guy never mind like aging into his 30s there's just there aren't

a lot of guys like that like he is you know from a baseball planet far far away so it's just not a lot of comps there but he hasn't he sure hasn't cost himself any money he has certainly seemed to have guaranteed a very robust floor and if you're the yankees like i i know that like we have made this point a couple of times in a couple of different pieces at Fanagraphs. Like there is special value to the Yankees in retaining Judge, right? Because of being able to say like his homegrown player is going to spend like his whole career with you. And you get to, you know, like it will probably mean more in merch and ancillary stuff to them to retain him. And that might sweeten it for him a little bit. So I don't know. Good on you, Aaron Judge. Like, wow.

Yeah. A couple other quick assorted observations. We sang the praises of Louisa Rise earlier this year. And we also sang the praises of Fangraph's Plus Stats leaderboard that adjust various stats for the league average in that season so that you can compare easily across seasons in not just WRC plus but almost anything any kind of component strikeouts etc so Luisa Rise he is batting 354 these days I don't know if you've noticed but that's a very high batting average in almost any era. That is a high batting average in this era. That is an extremely historically high batting average. And so I was curious.

I looked at the plus stats leaderboard for average, so average plus at Fangraphs, and I set a minimum of 300 plate appearances and went back to the beginning of the live ball era, 1920. Luisa Reyes, right now, he has a 147 average plus. So he's almost 50% higher than the league average in batting average this year. That would be tied with 1941 Ted Williams. Is that a historically significant batting average season? That seems to ring a bell to me. Blowsers! So Ted Williams, in the year that he hit.406, he also had a.147 average plus that year. It was just that the league average for batting average was way higher back then. in a sense, like everyone's always like, will there ever be a 400 hitter again? There can't be a 400 hitter again. There probably can. It would be extremely difficult to do at this point for various reasons. But in a sense, what Luis Arise is doing to this point, hitting 354 in

half a season is Williams-esque, at least relative to the league. The only season that leads those two is also Ted Williams, a much older Ted Williams. 1957 Ted Williams had a 148 average plus. So this is my new thing that I will be watching for the rest of the season. Can Luisa Rice match or surpass Ted Williams in average plus, which would be extremely, extremely impressive. I kind of doubt that he will do it. He currently has a 378 BABIP, and he is probably a high BABIP guy, but I don't know if it's quite that high. But if he could do it, that would be a really special accomplishment that maybe would be more muted by the fact that we don't pay that close

attention to batting titles and batting average anymore and the league offensive environment is just so low batting average now that that won't leap off the page the way that something that starts with a four will but something that starts with a three five now that is essentially the same in terms of how impressive it is so don't sleep on Luisa Rise or on the Fangraphs plus stats. Yeah, I mean, don't. First, it seems uncomfortable. Yes. And second, it would be to your analytical detriment.

My other assorted observation is also related to the Twins. The White Sox beat the Twins 9-8 on Wednesday, and it was a weird, wild game where the White Sox trailed five times and they kept coming back to tie it, most notably on an eighth-inning Andrew Vaughn home run. But in that game earlier, Andrew Vaughn tried the hidden ball trick. So we have various spies out there, various scouts who were watching and letting us

know about this and it's happened so frequently these failed hidden ball trick attempts since we started lamenting the lack of hidden ball tricks that i am now pretty confident that this is actually attempted all the time and it just doesn't work and we just don't notice so i went and watched this because uh patreon supporter chris hannell told me that this had happened he's a twins fan and he just happened to be watching the game none of the broadcasts that i listened to even mentioned that this happened because it was just such a quick thing the twins had a pinch runner on hilberto soestino and he had just gotten to first base which i don't know if that seems like a an opportune time to try this or an unwise time

to try this because if you have a pinch runner who just entered the game you might say well he's not like acclimated to his surroundings yet and maybe this is the opportunity is ripe to try to catch him here on the other hand if you're a pinch runner like you have one job which is like to run and to not get picked off and make it out on the bases so maybe you'd be hyper aware of your surroundings at that time i don't know anyway he tried for the todd helton style hidden ball trick and the runner just dove back to first and von made a fake throw back to the mound and looked down just to see if he had caught Celestino and Celestino didn't even seem to be looking and he was still reaching and touching the bag. So Vaughn just threw back, but it seemed like routine. It wouldn't be notable

except for the fact that we haven't seen a successful hidden ball trick in so long. But I think it's just been bubbling under the surface this whole time, just going largely unremarked upon because it hasn't actually paid off. So I take back anything I said about players being remiss in not trying this. I think they are trying it. And I think it's just not working because players are calling time or players or base coaches are vigilant or whatever it is. It's not paying off, but I think that the desire is still alive. But that also complicates our understanding of the whole thing. It takes away one of our pillars of explanation around this

because one of our theories about why this doesn't get attempted more often is that guys are worried that they will fail and then feel embarrassed and this suggests to me that that's not true because they're just doing it all the time so they don't feel embarrassed maybe they should feel more embarrassed because they're failing so no i'm not inviting you to feel embarrassed i think it's fine that you try stuff and it doesn't work it's fine it's fine guys don't worry about it don't michael lorenzen we don't want any emails and they wouldn't come from you probably but like you know don't it's okay we're not knocking it we're just saying this clarifies our understanding in a in a confusing sort of way yes and another follow-up we talked

recently about the fact that justin turner has had the same walk-up song for a really long time. And we talked about why walk-up songs don't tend to have the same longevity as entrance songs for closers, and there isn't as much pageantry associated with them either. We talked about this when Jake Mintz was on an episode. Well, we got an email from Morgan, Patreon supporter, and she wrote in to point out that there is another example of a late 30s NL West player who has stuck with maybe an outmoded walk-up song for quite some time Charlie Blackman of the Rockies she says always walks up to your love by the outfield another amusing choice it's so consistent that the crowd at the game sings along with the song, and the stadium sound guy cuts off the at the end of the first verse so you can hear the crowd singing.

Again, can be heard on the MLB audio broadcast. I used toasty in baseball, just like Enter Sandman and Hell's Bells make me think a closer is coming on. So Charlie Blackmon, not just Justin Turner. He's doing it, too. I wonder. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. on so charlie blackmon not just justin turner he's doing it too i wonder yeah interesting okay i um what would your walk-up song be then oh that is just it's such a high pressure question i'm just you're putting me on the spot and i don't know i i like a lot of songs and just to narrow down one you don't have to you just think about

it you know just yeah just uh have some have some rumination on that concept i will mine would probably be pretty mellow i think just because i'm a pretty mellow person and you are you're mellow you're a mellow guy yeah i don't know that a walk-up song would pump me up really i don't know if it has the capacity to pump me up, which is probably one reason why I'm not a Major League Baseball player, one among many. But I would want to stick with it. I like this idea of keeping the same one and being associated with a walk-up song. But that really puts the pressure on because you have to hear that thing so many times

per game. And if you're sticking with it for years, you better get a good choice. many times per game and if you're sticking with it for years you better get a good choice and also i guess it better be a good sing-along song for the fan participation element that blackman has here so i'm gonna have to ponder and mull and stew on this one for a while yeah i i go back and forth amongst a variety of options and so i don't have an answer either but yeah mellow is good you know like i think that there's there's room to do mellow counter programming. Yes. Yeah. Play against type with the walk up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can just indicate we both enjoyed there was a weird ending to a dodgers rockies game on wednesday where the dodgers and mookie bets walked off although

not technically a walk-off there was running involved here it was a game ending play oh that pedantic email has just ruined walk-off for me forever i can never say or think about walk-offs anymore without thinking was it a walk-off or was forever. I can never say or think about walk-offs anymore without thinking, was it a walk-off or was it actually just a game-ending play? Anyway, this was a game-ending play that most people would call a walk-off where the bases were loaded at this point, but even before it got to that point, it was the bottom of the ninth of a 1-1 game in LA, and Cody Bellinger led off with a single single and then the Rockies put the shift on for Gavin Lux. Okay, Lux is a lefty. Fine. Makes sense. But he mishit a ball and just sort of dribbled it

by where the shortstop would have been had the shift not been on. So that was funny. I mean, it's not lol Rockies. This happens. Sometimes you beat the shift by accident, but it did come back to bite them. So then it was first and third, no outs. Then Will Smith came up, pinch hitting Frost and Barnes, and Bud Black brought in an outfielder, brought in, I think, Garrett Hampson. He replaced Randall Gritchuk, and he was kind of the infield rover. And then there was a two-man outfield, if we are counting Charlie Blackman. Poor Charlie Blackman, but not the outfielder he once was, perhaps. Anyway, that's a joke that Patrick Dubuque made in his write-up at Baseball Perspectives.

So this was a five-player infield, not unheard of, not unusual in a walk-off situation, really, not unheard of not unusual in a walk-off situation really although somewhat surprising maybe just because Smith hits a lot of balls in the air so maybe was not the best candidate but you know you had a fast guy in Bellinger at third and he's gonna score on most balls hit to the outfield so sure why not the Rockies don't shift a lot, perhaps unsurprisingly, but this is not something that never happens. But in this case, it kind of backfired again, even though it wasn't necessarily a bad decision for the Rockies to do this. But as it turned out, Mookie Betts, there was a walk, so Smith walked, and who knows, maybe that's because he was out of sorts with this shift behind him or the pressure of the situation or whatever. But then Mookie comes up, and Mookie kind of plays right into the shift, sort of.

This was, like, why you do the five-person infield. Except it didn't work because he, like, bounced a little ball just to the left of the mound. And there were like four different fielders there because everyone was in. And so the player who fielded it just like couldn't get the throw off really because there was like another player in his way. I don't know that he would have been able to get the out anyway necessarily. But Jose Iglesias like kind of cut off Rodgers who fielded the ball, so he just sort of dropped it instead of being able to make a throw. Yeah, didn't have a clean. It would have taken a lot to do it.

It probably wouldn't have happened, but not in a position to even make an attempt because of how this went. Right. Yeah. And the third baseman was just sort of standing there not being able to do anything and also kind of oddly i guess they were holding the runner on first which seemed sort of strange i don't know why they were doing that unless it was like to cut off a ball down the line or something but anyway it was just kind of comedic and also the sort of thing that i would miss if we do get a shift ban next year. And I don't know what form that would take,

but it would presumably prevent the initial shift that helps set up this rally and then maybe would also do away with the five-person infield. I don't know, depending on how the rule is drawn up. And so I would miss the occasional comedic situations where even when the shift is properly or wisely deployed, sometimes the ball just bounces the wrong way or there are too many fielders in one place and something silly happens. And I'm all for something silly happening on baseball fields.

So I am in favor of silliness. I endorse silliness unless it gets to the point of position player pitching when it goes from silly to tiresome. And maybe the shift has for some people. But I would be sorry if we could not see these kind of hijinks happening as soon as next season. Yeah, we need hijinks potential. And I get it. If hijinks potential goes unchecked, you get position players pitching as much as they are. Right. Like there needs to be some bumpers on the hijinks.

That's a weird sentence. But you want there to be the possibility of some amount of hijinks. Yeah. Moderate amount. Yeah. And they need to be balanced against other things. Right. Because I know somewhere someone is saying, well, this is why you should still have to throw four pitches for an intentional walk. And it's like there, the return on hijinks investment is too low to justify. But this is good hijinks, good potential for hijinks. I mean, I'm sure that the Rockies are like, these hijinks suck.

These are bad hijinks. We don't care for these hijinks. The holding luck zone first was one of the things in real time where i'm like why are you doing that i don't really quite i don't quite get and there's something about like making a point of like a substitution in order to do this and then having it go like this where it's like yeah oh these are like chef's kiss hijinks again not for the rockies they hate these hijinks but i will say plan better hijinks. Again, not for the Rockies. They hate these hijinks. But I will say, plan better hijinks then, you guys. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. And lastly, we are speaking on July 7th. So this is the three-month anniversary of opening day. And on each one-month anniversary of opening day, I have given you a list of the biggest playoff odds changes over that preceding month. the biggest playoff odds changes over that preceding month. So according to the fan graphs, playoff odds, these are the changes, the biggest changes in odds of making the playoffs over the previous 30 days. So we've got the Braves, they are up about 23 percentage points. Things are really looking up for Atlanta, started slow, but they are at about a 97% chance to make the playoffs. And now they are up to more than a 40% chance to win the division.

So Mets fans perhaps stressing these days, even though Max Scherzer is back and Jacob deGrom is making rehab starts, the Braves have been winning an awful lot and they're nipping on the Mets heels. So they've put themselves in a much better position than they were when we lasted this a month ago. It's like, you know, here's the problem, Ben, is that those guys, they don't hit. That's what they need. They need some offense.

They need some runs. Preventing the runs? Valuable. Scoring them? Also good. Yeah, because right now they're two and a half. Atlanta, just two and a half back.

Just two and a half. Too close for comfort. You don't want to be in a position where someone can reasonably say they're only a couple of games back and someone can't really pedantically object to the use of a couple. I know the half game makes it a little sketchy,

but let's like look out look out yep and the red socks are up about 22 percentage points over that span that is almost all wild card odds because yankees are still really running away they're still the yankees yeah yes and And then you have the Twins at plus 12 percentage points. So things are looking up for them. And they have actually crossed the 50-50 point when it comes to division odds. So that's something that's encouraging. Although the Guardians are giving them a run for their money and the White Sox still exist and might win some games at some point. And also the Phillies.

Things have looked up for the Phillies. They are up more than 11 percentage points and are now at about a 40% chance to make the playoffs, to win a wild card. So things have turned around for them, whether coincidentally or not, in the post-Joe Girardi era. And actually, I guess since we had Fernando Perez on to talk about the Giants, the Giants have not had the greatest time of it.

And actually, have the Phillies moved ahead of the Giants now? They're right there, right? They're right there. I think they're right there. They are, in fact, one game ahead of the giants as we speak so i guess on the plus side my pre-season prediction which i was immediately ready to recant that the phillies would win the third nl wild card over the cardinals and the giants that's actually looking a lot better right now and would be looking much better if not for

bryce harper's injury. Although these are all teams. I mean, Phillies, the Giants, the Braves. I mean, the Braves have been known to add some bats at the deadline in recent memory. These teams will be upgrading. And I think the ingredients are there for a pretty active trade deadline, but that's a topic for a future episode. Anyway, it is neck and neck and neck, neck i guess between those teams with the marlins not too far behind do we have to talk about necks the way we talked about backs and bellies i don't know imagine like getting all your necks on each other it's like uh that would be i mean your shoulder this is another problem with shoulders this is another shoulder related problem

like what do we make of the anyway the remaining significant gainer you're sort of your seattle mariners yeah up more than eight percentage points and have about a one in five chance of making the playoffs now after their slow start looking up for them too they're about to break even they're 41 and 42 as we speak about to you're so maybe coming with the confidence of yeah they have to deal with the these blue jays you know that's that's their new that's their latest challenge although i think that maybe gausman is not gonna pitch for them in that run maybe kukic for the blue jays that is not for the mariners if he pitched for the mariners we'd probably have different conversations about the se Mariners. Yes. You know, one of the things we talk about

is that they'd be a better team. I am here to submit that I think that maybe Seattle should just try to make their entire roster out of Julio. They should just, why don't they build the whole plane out of Julios? You know, that Julio, Ben. Yeah, Julios and Logan Gilberts

and that young core kind of coming together. I know Kelnick's slugging at AAA. Maybe we'll see him again at some point. And Matt Brash is striking out tons of dudes there too. I don't know what to make of Matt Brash. He's a confusing cat, that Matt Brash. I don't know what to make of either of those guys. But, you know, Ben, take a peek at this Julio Rodriguez.

And he's pretty fun. I don't know what will happen with that Seattle team. I don't know. I'm fascinated by how they think about the deadline. Like, they are one of the teams where I'm like, what are you guys going to? What are you up to? What are you up to in there? What is rolling around in the old noggin?

what are you guys going to, what are you up to? What are you up to in there? What is rolling around in the old noggin? But I am so happy for Seattle fans that at least, at least they get this resplendent young person who just seems to be having a great time, you know, really focused,

keen to lift his guys up, playing some really good ball. Just a lot of fun there's so much fun in the profile too right because julio it's like oh he doesn't just steal bases although steals steals a bunch of bags you know after all the consternation about his speed and then you know he doesn't just hit home runs although he hits you know he hits some home runs, not as many as Aaron Judge, but still a good number of them. He's playing better defense and center than I expected him to do. What a good, fun time.

You need those players to hold on to when the rest of it isn't quite coming together the way you hoped it would. And he's definitely one of those dudes for them. So that's so exciting. Right. And I guess Ty France is back. And then maybe you get Kyle Lewis back and you perhaps get Mitch Hanegar back. Yeah. And then you're cooking with some gas, maybe. Have you seen the video that Seattle put together for Ty France's All-Star candidacy? Yes. Can I say the best part of that video? It is very funny.

We will link to it. It is delightful, the fun that they are having with this. I think it is also a good reminder for folks that, you know, I don't think his season of baseball is coming together the way that he hoped it would and certainly the way that Jared DiPoto hoped it would. So sorry about that. But this is just a nice reminder about Abraham Toro being a talented person

because as you all might have guessed, if you have not seen the video, they are having some fun with the fact that Ty France's last name is France. some fun with the fact that Thai France his last name is France and so this video is in French and is put together in such a way as to draw on some of those trips but Abraham

Toro is from Montreal and so he speaks many languages he is fluent in English and Spanish and French and he is the one narrating this video and it is delightful. Sorry to spoil the end. Sorry.

It's been on Twitter for a couple of days, so I feel justified. But anyway, go check that out. I guess he lost some playing time to Carl Santana potentially, but he has picked up some voiceover work. So that's something. He also runs like he has been riding a horse

for several days. That is one of my favorite things about Abraham Toro. That sounds like I'm criticizing him, but it's not. It is weird and it is fun to watch. So yeah, those are the Mariners. Kind of what we expected, that they would be a better team with a worse record than they were last year. But maybe they will still make a little late season run at it.

We'll see. Could be true. Anyway, just to finish this up, the biggest losers in terms of playoff odds over the last 30 days, they are, as you would expect, the teams that have lost ground to some of the teams we just talked about. So you have the Giants who have lost about 18 percentage points. You have the Cardinals who have lost about 15. The White Sox have lost about 16. And then why not? We can throw in the Angels who've lost about 15 the white socks have lost about 16 and then why not we can throw in the angels who have lost about 16 points of playoff percentage too because uh why not so them and the blue jays are down about seven percentage points and the padres down about six as well

yep yep that's your monthly check-in and to end end, as always, we have the Past Blast. This comes to us from Richard Hirschberger, historian, saber researcher, author of Strike 4, The Evolution of Baseball. This is episode 1872. This is a loaded. McBride is the runner at third. Force is the Troy's shortstop. How appropriate. Force play. Every play involving force is a force play. Wes Fissler comes to bat. Here's the Philadelphia evening city item, May 14th, 1872. After waiting for some time, Fissler popped one up that dropped directly into Force's hands, and then out again, being purposely missed by that individual in order to make a double play. McBride, of course being under the impression that he was forced off third base, attempted to run home, and amidst a scene of indescribable confusion, the umpire decided that Fissler was also out, caught on the fly by Force. This really confuses things in an Abbott and Costello kind of way.

But on what rule he based that decision, we confess that we are at a loss to know, as the ball just momentarily touched force's hands and was not held long enough to constitute a catch. So, Richard writes, this play, little noted at the time and even less since, is the genesis of the infield fly rule. So if you will recall, I believe, I think it was 1864 maybe when we did a pass blast, there was an infield fly, but no infield fly rule yet. So here we are in 1872, and there is a rule. So Richard writes, the question is, did force muff the catch or did he catch the ball and then drop it?

The umpire took an expansive view of what constituted a catch, ruling the batter out on the fly. The writer here disagrees because the ball was only momentarily in force's hands. The umpire's view of the matter went beyond this one play, as this was Nicholas Young, the secretary of the National Association, whose founding we discussed on our last Past Blast. He would go on to be the secretary of the National League and eventually its president until 1902. Young's views carried weight. The language of momentarily held was added to the rules in 1874, so still a couple years

in the future here. The infield fly rule took its modern form 20 years later, but was not new. It had been there all along, hidden by obscure rules language. So if you hate the infield fly rule, now you know whom to blame. But consider the alternative, endless super slow motion replays from multiple angles until New York issues a ruling whether the ball was muffed or caught, then later dropped, bringing to baseball the worst part of NFL games. So Richard also noted that if he were to make any tweak to the infield fly rule, which I think he is generally fine with, but he says, if I could change the rule, I would make it apply only if the fielder touches the ball. The umpire would still have to call it as soon as possible, but this call would be contingent on the ball being touched, just as it already is contingent on the ball being fair. If the ball

falls untouched, there is no question of whether it was muffed or caught, then subsequently dropped. If the fielder can turn this into a double play, more power to him. But we had to have a rule for this sort of situation. Right. It's amazing what you have to have rules for, you know? Mm-hmm. Yep. All right. Well, we will end there. Another reminder, the 10th anniversary of Effectively Wild is coming up later this month,

and we want to include listeners' voices on some of our anniversary-themed episodes. So please do send us some tributes or testimonials or whatever you want to call them. Just 30-second clips. Audio recordings on phones are fine. Explaining why you like the podcast or what you get out of it or what role it has played in your life, whatever comes to mind. Just introduce yourself, say your piece, keep it snappy. We've gotten some good ones already, and we hope to hear from more of you by July 15th.

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at EWPod and look up the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks as always to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you soon. With the hot jinks Hot jinks tonight The hot, hot, hot jinks

Yeah, yeah, yeah