Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1873: Puke and Rally Cap

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s unfortunate Brussels sprouts incident, then answer listener emails about the ballparks with the most and least locations where a ball would be a home run only in that park, the Rays’ MLB-leading outs on the bases, the Orioles’ possibly improved pitcher development, a loaner-type trade where a […]

Oh my, oh my, oh my End of the week We get started Working so hard to play So hard to play End of the week It's time to party End of the week

End of the week End of the week Feels good now Feels good now End of the week End of the week It's feels good now, end of the week, end of the week. It's real good now, feel good now, end of the week, end of the week, end of the week. Hello and welcome to episode 1873 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented

by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. How are you? I'm doing all right. How are you? How am I? Well, it's been a long week. I've been traveling from place to place. I've been working a lot. I ate too many Brussels sprouts this morning and vomited repeatedly. Did you really?

I sure did. Ben! Yeah, gotta be careful. I binged on Brussels sprouts. Wait a minute. Why are we recording right now? Ben! I mean, I'm okay now. I'm not ill. I just ate too many Brussels sprouts

in too short a time. I have largely recovered from that, but I've learned some valuable lessons. Wait a minute. I have. Wait. Why are we recording? I'm okay.

I'm fine. Have you rehydrated? Have you had something with electrolytes? I don't know if the electrolyte thing is real, but have you had water? I have had water. Okay. How many Brussels sprouts did you eat? It was a lot of Brussels sprouts. In retrospect, too many Brussels sprouts. There's a volume question that I guess I have to

ask about this, but also how fast were you eating the Brussels sprouts? Did you, were you trying to do like a Nathan's hot dog Brussels sprout eating contest except for Brussels sprouts instead of Nathan's hot dogs? I was not. If such a thing exists, I will not be entering it knowing what I know now. But I just roasted some Brussels sprouts. I got some Brussels sprouts from Trader Joe's. They were like pre-seasoned but uncooked. And I just put them on a sheet and put them in the oven and they got all nice and

roasted and brownish and they were quite good and so I was consuming them quite quickly and I have observed this before with brussel sprouts which I quite enjoy but there is a price that can be paid at times after the consumption of said Brussels sprouts if you go too quickly. Not that I'm like just constantly binging Brussels sprouts. I don't want to give anyone that impression. This is a new thing for me. This is not a regular occurrence. I have been fortunate not to be ill in quite some time and not to vomit for any reason and have never in my life vomited for Brussels sprout related reasons as far as I can recall.

So this is uncharted territory and territory that I will not be revisiting if I can at all help it. I hope this has not ruined Brussels sprouts for me forever and that whenever I try to eat Brussels sprouts again, it will summon this painful memory for me. I hope I can get beyond this.

So, okay. Also, what time? So, again it will summon this painful memory for me i hope i can get beyond this so okay also what so look i'm not here to judge man because like i have been known to eat like breakfast pasta you know like i think we should have much more flexible understandings of like what food belongs in what part of the day like i think that we are overly rigid as a culture about this stuff and mostly like you know you should just eat the food you you like when you want it because that seems like a better way to live than being like overly prescriptive about these things but i am still inspired to ask you like when were you what time of day because like we're we're recording at about 2 p.m my time so it's evening where you are almost almost but like when were you eating brussels sprouts friend i guess breakfast brussels sprouts does sound somewhat strange it's just it's just

not i don't say it's strange in a way that carries a value judgment right um it's atypical it's strange in a way that carries a value judgment. Right. It's atypical. It's atypical. That is a better way of putting it. It is not the typical timing of Brussels sprout consumption. I don't know. Maybe there's something to be said for shifting your roughage a little later into the day. There might, maybe you should have- I shifted it very quickly.

Time shifted roughage. Maybe you should have time-shifted refuge. Anyway, I just want our listeners to know, I did not know about Ben's intestinal distress before we started recording. No one knew except a few family members. It's like you say you're fine, and I do believe you, but I want you to know, Ben, that if you're experiencing vomiting,

we don't have to record the podcast that day like i will i will do a saturday pod with you buddy so that you can recover from i appreciate that early brussels sprout induced vomiting was there something wrong with the brussels sprouts like are they maybe yeah other people eat the brussels sprouts no because i ate them all okay so we don't know whether there was an issue with the brussel sprouts? No, because I ate them all. So we don't know whether there was an issue with the brussel sprouts or whether the issue was with me. Or it was the volume or the rate of consumption. It was pretty early in the day to be gulping down brussel sprouts. So as I said, I've learned a lot.

I do appreciate your willingness to postpone, but I've made a quick and fairly full recovery. It's been several hours at this point i don't think there's any underlying issue it it was i think pretty identifiably the brussels sprouts so that that is behind me but yeah i guess i could have kept this little anecdote to myself but i'm practicing radical honesty here on the podcast today you know i think that like people have come to expect that the Friday show is a little bit looser. Yeah, I was going to say. I'm drinking my, I don't do this every time we record, and I don't even do it every Friday,

but I am drinking my Friday podcast beer. I have no sense of time right now because, you know, you ended up needing to record a little bit later than you were originally anticipating. I thought because of travel, but it's apparently because you were vomiting. It was not actually for Brussels sprout-related reasons. It was for travel. Okay.

So I ended up doing my Friday errands early instead of late, and so it feels like it's like 7 p.m. to me, but it is, in fact, not even yet 2. So anyway, how long have we been talking about? So it feels like it's like 7 p.m. to me. But it is, in fact, not even yet 2. So anyway, how long have we been talking about? Six minutes. Okay. Probably long enough.

Yeah. Long enough. I mean, look, pitchers puke on the mound and then they go back out there all the time. And so here I am. Yeah. A considerable amount of time later and I'm prepared to podcast. And I guess I should have expected that just mentioning that casually in the intro would have elicited some follow-ups, but I was going to say I've been through a lot this week. So it's nice. I always appreciate the Friday afternoon, evening

podcast. Of course, a lot of our listeners will not be listening to this at that time. They will be listening who knows when. I don't know when or where it is when you, listener, are listening to this at that time. They will be listening who knows when. I don't know when or where it is when you, listener, are listening to us or what point in the week it is. But hopefully you can just immerse yourself in the end of the week vibes here. Brussels sprouts aside. I'm just

envisioning that someone is listening to this podcast as they are making dinner and they are making Brussels sprouts. And now they feel very nervous. Yeah, just practice portion control. It'll be fine. It's okay.

And pace yourself. Yes, pace is important as well. Pace yourself. You don't want to- Don't make them too tasty. You can't go too big too fast. You got to- Yeah.

Anyway. What are we talking about on this podcast today i guess we'll see about baseball yeah so just to put yourself in the vibe of this is the last thing you have to do in your work week before the weekend begins yeah because that is the headspace that we are in currently so i think we're going to answer some emails and end with a past blast as always. So I guess we can begin with the emails. Maybe we can just take one here from Reggie, Patreon supporter, who says, On the Royals radio broadcast, they indicated that a homer hit by Jordan Alvarez would have gone out only in Houston and at Wrigley Field.

Question, how many ballparks have a special area based on distance and wall height anywhere in the outfield in which a homer would only have been a homer in that one ballpark? I assume there are certain ballparks that will have no area of their outfield that would qualify for this list. So this is an interesting question that I felt incapable of answering authoritatively. So I emailed Mike Petriello, our pal at MLB who works with StatCast data all the time, and he thought it was a fun question, too. and he thought it was a fun question too. So he said, I don't have it directly in the sense of being able to look at every inch of every park and say here is a place that it's impossible for it to go out anywhere but here because that gets into how wide are you defining areas, etc.

But you can get a good idea of it indirectly if you just look at which parks have seen homers that showed up as one out of 30. So it would have only been out there and which parks have not seen any of those. So Mike said, I arbitrarily picked since 2019 through yesterday. This was a couple of days ago. You won't be surprised to learn that these five parks are the ones that have seen at least 10 of the one out of 30 shots. Yankee Stadium, 46. Wrigley Field, 37.

Minute Maid, 35. Fenway, 16. And Citizens Bank, 11. And he also notes that the home parks of Cleveland, Cincinnati, San Francisco, the Angels, and the Dodgers all have between 5 and nine such one out of 30 homers. Some others pop up with one or two such homers, but with such a small number there, I'd probably want to go verify each one to make sure that's not some one-off data error. Though I do remember offhand the Trop had that ridiculous Harold Ramirez one against the Yankees.

We mentioned that briefly. That ridiculous Harold Ramirez one against the Yankees, we mentioned that briefly. It was what, like at 85 mile per hour, the slowest exit speed for a homer in the StatGast era. Amazing. So Mike sums up. Here is, I think, the answer you want. Which parks have no such only here spots or at the very least have not witnessed any such home runs in those spots since 2019? We have Atlanta. We have Colorado. We have Colorado.

We have Texas, both parks. We have Kansas City. We have Arizona. We have Minnesota. We have Pittsburgh. And we have St. Louis. So that's your list. And I guess people might be surprised to hear the Rockies on that list because they think, wait, aren't there more home runs hit there? Well, yes, I guess with the altitude, but also that is just a giant outfield, which is why the Babbitt tends to be so high there. So there isn't a shallow portion there. It's just that you get an assist from the thin air. So I think that is a pretty good list. Braves, Rockies, Rangers, both of their parks, Royals, Diamondbacks, Twins, Pirates, and Cardinals. Those are kind of the normcore parks, I guess, the ones with the less weird dimensions. Normcore parks. That seems to track with my understanding of what parks are gonna play weird versus not which isn't to say that other parks don't have their own bits of personality if you will right like the trop might play pretty neutral but like you got the you got all the weird ground rules with the catwalks and stuff so it's like there are a lot of different ways for a ballpark to play kind of funky,

but sometimes the wall isn't one of them. Exactly. All right. Well, sticking with the Rays, we've got a couple of questions about the Rays base running. Here's one from Peter. What is up with the Rays base running? There's more to the question than that. The TV and radio broadcasts keep mentioning that the Rays are by. There's more to the question than that. The TV and radio broadcasts

keep mentioning that the Rays are by far the worst in the majors at outs on the bases. A quick look at baseball reference has them with 40 outs on the bases with the next highest team at 32. But the top five teams in that stat also include the Astros and the Dodgers. My question is, is there any bright side to this over-aggressive base running? Like, is there a hidden competitive advantage of taking the extra base at every possible moment, even if the lower probability of getting to the next base means that there will be more outs? Are the Rays trying to make up for their lackluster power numbers by turning singles into doubles

that really should have been singles all along? How do we quantify this is this just another example of joe madden-esque 4d baseball chess so this is great the rays are running into tons of outs and we assume that because it's the rays it must be a competitive advantage so it's interesting because they are like in terms of their sort of base running, 14th but like they have the same base running number as like the cubs they're slightly better than like toronto and then there's a bit more of a gap that starts to emerge like the the rangers are just like really leading the way here goodness i haven't looked at this number in a while because like it's it's not a thing I think about very often. So it's not as if they are being penalized so much by their running into outs, although I think that it is the thing that people notice the most. So like base running takes into account weighted stolen base runs,

grounded to double play runs, and UBR, which is ultimate base running. And those are all available on our player pages and leaderboards so you can look at the individual components and like what they break down into and there's a lovely calculation on our glossary page if you're like really curious about this stuff but like zero and i will admit this table is from 2014 so these numbers might have moved a little bit but like zero is average and then like eight is really good and negative six is really bad and so some of this stuff has probably moved around a little bit in the years since this piece was written but they're not like terrible at it

they just are not they're just doing the part that you remember the most you know yes right i think that the outs on the bases number probably makes them look worse than they are, but I don't think they're good. I think looking at baseball reference, which breaks it down, they have made more outs than anyone at second base, which maybe is related to the fact that I don't think they have a great stolen base success rate so far this season. But if you were to say that they were getting some kind of competitive advantage by, yes, they're running into a lot of outs, but they're also getting a ton of extra bases, then you would expect to see them at the top of some of these other columns on the baseball reference team base running leaderboard, which they are not. So Baseball Reference has a stat called Bases Taken, which they define as bases advanced on fly balls, pass balls, wild pitches, box, defensive indifference, and the Rays are below league average in that stat. And then they also have a stat called Extra Bases Taken Percentage, which is the percentage of times the runner advanced more

than one base on a single or more than two bases on a double when possible they are also below league average or really right around league average in that stat so it doesn't seem to me that this is just like a high risk high reward strategy it seems like they're probably just running into some ads that they probably shouldn't be running it too yeah i don't know that there's any 4D chess raised forward thinking competitive advantage going on here. And also, unlike some of the other teams that Peter mentioned, they don't have a high team on base percentage. So they haven't had a ton of base runners, I don't think. And so they can afford to lose a lot of them to outs on the bases so no i don't think that this is an example of a competitive advantage it could be right you could have a team that was

like yeah we know that we're gonna get thrown out at times but it'll be worth it in the long run i just don't really think that's what's happening in this particular case and i think also generally teams have moved in the other direction where it's like, we're not going to go for the extra base because we realize that outs on the bases are costly. And so that's why in recent years we have seen that the rates of players trying to take the extra base and just stolen base attempt rates, the success rates have gone up because the attempt rates have gone down right like teams are being more conservative on the whole and that has to do with the run

environment as well but yeah i don't think the rays are a great base running team i don't think there's a really positive way to spin this well they don't have like a they don't have a ton of like vroom vroom guys right no like well maybe they have more than they should but actual fast guys actual fast guys right like if you look at the sprint speed leader board for tampa you know like no not all of these guys are getting equal amounts of playing time and some of them are hurt and so you know but like kevin kiermeier is their fastest guy that is unsurprising but like g-man is slow and mikeanino, who has been hurt for a while now, is slow. And Isak Paredes is slow.

And Francisco Mejia is slow. And Yandy Diaz is slow. You know, like they got some slow boys out there. Not vroom vroom guys, slow boys. Yeah, combination of slow and vroom vroom mentality. Right. That's not ideal. Right.

And so I, yeah, like i don't mean to suggest that they're like amazing at it i think that like they are probably not as bad as the like memory of being out all the time right not all the time but making outs on the bases makes them feel but they're not good at it either and like you know some of those outs might be really inopportune. They may come at really bad moments, Ben. They could. Yeah. All right. Jacob writes, the Orioles have in recent memory been notorious for their pitchers doing well

when they leave. Jake Arrieta, Kevin Gossman, of course, are top of mind, but has some kind of corner been turned here? Keegan Aiken, Jorge Lopez, Dylan Tate, and Dean Kramer have all seemed to have found something this year. Is this small sample size noise or is there something here? Are the newly semi-respectable Orioles good at pitcher development? I don't know. Yeah, a little too soon to say. I think it's too soon to say. It would not surprise me if they were or if it were no longer a weakness at least, given that there are a lot of ex-Astros people who are running the Orioles. And that has been a strength of the Astros organization and still is.

paperback edition of the MVP machine. I did a afterward, a new chapter at the end just about the Orioles because I had written a bit about the Astros in that book. There was one chapter on them and how they changed player development. And so I went and talked to some Orioles people because they were at the time truly terrible and it seemed like they were trying to follow in the Astros' footsteps. And so I tried to look forward and peer to the crystal ball and see, well, will they actually be able to follow in their footsteps? Or is that tough to replicate? Or has just the player development landscape changed so quickly that it's tough to do what the Astros did? I don't know. It is, I think, too soon to say, but it would make some sense to me that they would be a lot better at that than they had how their bullpen has pitched this season with a bunch of anonymous no-name players for the most part. So I think they're encouraging signs there, but I wouldn't lump them in with the leaders in pitcher development yet. But if you start to see some prospects promoted and come along and reach their ceilings or exceed their ceilings in the coming years, then maybe you would say that the Astros' special sauce with pitching actually was

transferable. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, I think that it's been interesting. Like for Houston's case, I think the stuff that they have proven good at, right, their ability to sort of ID guys who they can either make better or shift around such that they are more productive. That information has sort of disseminated across the league to places like Baltimore, right, when that Houston DNA gets kind of transplanted into other orgs. And it has made things, at least from a draft perspective, harder for Houston. Because now it's like, oh, we're going to target that guy. Oh, everybody wants that guy.

That guy isn't on offer exclusively to us anymore. So I think that it is likely that other orgs are going to be good at that stuff. It makes sense that one literally helmed by someone who used to be in Houston would be at the forefront of it. But I think it takes time for us to be able to say with any kind of confidence. And, you know, these things ebb and flow based on the players themselves. It isn't entirely the orgs doing right. Like I was like really high on Detroit's pitching development. I don't know how I feel about that anymore. Yeah, I think that maybe

maybe that ball got called a little soon. So it can kind of it can kind of ebb and flow. And I think that being able to identify guys who have traits that will play at the big league level is a slightly different project than identifying existing guys in affiliated ball who are not being deployed optimally right and being able to do both is i think where you really look at an org and say they're good at pitching dev because they are able to see guys who are good and will be good at the big league level they are able to take guys who just needed an adjustment and you know then they are themselves good so it's i think there are a couple of components that go into being like a good pitching dev organization and i don't think we know that about baltimore yet yeah in addition to the guys at the top of that front office and not just the guys many people at the top of that front office you have chris holt who is their pitching coach and director of pitching he's a former Astros person as well.

So yeah, it's something to keep an eye on. But the Magic 8-Ball is still being shaken here. And the answer hasn't materialized quite yet. All right. Question from Josh, Patreon supporter. With the trade deadline a mere three and change weeks away, could the player to be named later trade mechanism be exploited to allow teams that are out of the race to rent or loan their talented players to buyers? I've seen examples of players

traded for a player-to-be-named-later one-to-one and having themselves named as the player-to-be- named-later, making the trade nothing more than a bit of salary relief, but it seems like this could be used more broadly with young stars on bad teams to get their team some prospects. For an example scenario, Shohei Otani isn't considered a trade piece this year since the Angels have control of him next year as well. He is cheap and they hope to compete next year. They may also think that they are in it this year, but that's another story.

Could the Angels trade Otani to the Blue Jays for some prospects and a player to be named later with only one name on the player to be named later list, Shohei Otani? After the Jays win the 2022 World Series, the Angels name the player to be named later and reclaim Otani for the 2023 season. Is this within the rules? If so, why haven't we seen this more often? Would it sour the relationship between club and player? I would think so? If so, why haven't we seen this more often? Would it sour the relationship between club and player? I would think so. If not, could making this legal be a way to get particularly young stars on bad teams a chance to shine in the postseason? So I have not seen any actual

language that would expressly permit or prohibited this. I know that there are examples of players having been traded for a player to be named later and then subsequently being traded back to the original team as the player to be named later. Now, I don't know if in all those cases they were actually specified as the player to be named later prior to the trade being made. It just worked out that way. So if you go to the Wikipedia page for player to be named later, it lists for Harry Chidi, Brad Golden, Dickie Knowles, and most recently, John McDonald, who was traded in July of 2005 from the Blue Jays to the Tigers for a player to be named later. from the Blue Jays to the Tigers for a play to be named later. McDonald was subsequently reacquired by Toronto on November 10, 2005 in a cash transaction, completing the trade.

And then there's also a weird one with Dave Winfield, where near the end of his career, he was included in a player to be named later trade that then ran into the 1994 strike. So he was on the Twins. He was traded August 31st, 1994 to Cleveland for a player to be named later. Under the terms and conditions of the trade, I'm reading here, if Winfield appeared in 16 or more games with Cleveland, the Twins would receive a class AA level player to be named later. But if he played between one and 15 games, the player to be named later would be class A level.

However, the strike led to the season eventually being canceled with no further games played. So to settle the trade, Cleveland paid Minnesota a token sum of $100, and Cleveland's GM took the Twins' GM out to dinner and picked up the dinner tab. Isn't that nice? So I guess there's some precedent, but i don't know if there's precedent for agreeing on this beforehand and making it official that this is what's gonna happen so not sure that that is allowed or would be allowed in practice if someone were to try it so i think that there are other issues here right so? So like, let's say you're the angels

and you have reconciled yourself to the idea that you are going to trade Otani. You're going to want like a haul for that, I would imagine, Ben. Like you're Ben Lindbergh and you're running the angels and you've decided that you're going to trade Otani and after your mental breakdown is complete, you have come around to like needing to put a

package together because you're very sad about this because you're ben limberg and he's showing otani and you're trading him and that seems antithetical to your entire being so you're gonna want prospects of pretty significant impact i would imagine or you know uh potentially big leaguers right why would the team you are trading otani to do that if the understanding is that they will get otani taken back from them at the end of the year right so i don't think you're gonna get prospects of the caliber that you would presumably want to trade such an important player and so now having understood that they're going to be like, just okay, guys, assuming that all of this is legal. Now you have to balance like you are

presumably or potentially putting Otani in a position where he is going to, you know, he's going to pitch deeper into the year. He might pitch all of October. He's going to hit then too. He could get injured. He's going gonna just add innings to his arm even if he doesn't get hurt and so is that potential risk of another org reaping the benefits while your guy maybe gets hurt worth like some prospects

I don't know probably not though like why would you do that and why would the other team why would the other team entertain this you know like yeah they're gonna get Otani maybe but like they still have to give up some guys, even if they're, you know, just okay guys instead of like really amazing guys. So I think that the incentives are not well aligned here

for this to happen, but it would be nice if we could do loner systems. Like I know that we have talked about that on the pod before as a mechanism. Like I wouldn't hate it being part of a guy's 10 and 2 rights that he gets to be available as a loner for a month. Not as a guy who feels alone, but as a guy who is lent out to another contending team

so that we can see Mike Trout in October or we could have seen Felix or whatever. Pick a guy. 10 and 2 is what you or, you know, we could have seen Felix or whatever, you know, like pick a guy. So, yeah. Ten and two is what you do when you drive, isn't it? Oh, maybe. What is it? Ten and five.

Yeah. I don't drive. So, but ten and two. Oh, man. And like, yeah, you're right. That sounded familiar to me. You do drive. So, that's probably what you were thinking of.

Yeah, that is what I was thinking of. Oh, man. Imagine if you had had to drive today, Ben. After your Brussels sprout experience i can't believe we're recording right now you say you're fine i don't believe you when i bomb i'm like done for the day so i remembered that sam and i had answered a question about this many a year ago way back on episode 232 it was more about just loaning more so than the player to be named later quirk, just because I know that soccer has loaning systems. These things do go on in other sports.

And I don't really remember what we said, but just quoting from the Effectively Wild wiki summary here, Ben and Sam agree that loaning players make sense from a business and competitive standpoint, but do not think it would be good for the game and that fans would struggle to accept it. And I do think there is something to that also. Just first of all, like assuming the player is okay with this. I mean, in Otani's case, maybe he would like to go play for a playoff team for a few months.

I don't know. But some players would not want to, right? They wouldn't want to right they wouldn't want to relocate i mean that's a hazard of just being a major league baseball player anyway sometimes you just get traded and weirdly you have to just change cities you just have to go live wherever they tell you yeah that's something that happens yeah so everyone just kind of takes in stride. So there's that. But also, I guess there's like the mercenary aspect to it. Like, you know that this player is just a rental, but like not even a rental where they might stay, you know, like where it's they're going to be a free agent. But OK, you might resign them.

They might decide to stay around like this guy's gone. You know, you know know it's just a attempt yeah he's gonna go back to his old team there could be concerns about like double agents here you know trade your uh your player to like a division rival or something i don't know why the player would go along with that and intentionally tank their stats but i'm sure people would have conspiracy theories about that but I just think as a fan like knowing that that player is not really affiliated with your team in a lasting way or doesn't even really have the potential to be that might be a bit off-putting

and it might feel like I don't know like if he wasn't around for the whole year obviously Atlanta last year, they won the World Series in large part because of players that they had acquired at midseason. And I think that Braves fans were pretty happy about how that all played out. Yeah, I don't think they were mad. that cheapen it somehow if you know that you have to just send them right back and they know that too like you can't put down roots how do you like develop an identity with that team like how does it affect you in the clubhouse knowing that this is just a temporary situation right we have like freddie friedman discourse on steroids yeah so i don't know i think for various reasons there are certainly times i think where loaning might make sense and maybe would even be advantageous for players' development or exposure or earning potential or we would get to see them on a bigger stage. There could be some cool aspects to that. But also, I think it would be just sort of destabilizing in a way. We already have a lot of player movement by historical standards and even compared to some

other sports. And this would probably ramp that up even more in a way that just might make it feel a little less earned somehow at times. Yeah. And to your point, like if you really think that that guy is sort of one and done with you,. Your incentives around usage are going to be weird. Why would you protect that guy the way you maybe should? I think that it would just be, it would go over poorly. I think fans would probably be the population of people who would get over this the fastest, though. If the Dodgers had won the World Series when they traded for Manny Machado,

they wouldn't have been like, I don't know about Manny though. They would have been like, Manny! You know how Dodgers fans sound? Yep. I don't know. Doing voices. So I think that fans, to your point about the Braves, like they want to win. And I think that it does probably mean more to them when the guy who helps them win is one where they feel like they have

some kind of connection where it's like their guy but i think that there's room for like multiple narratives i think that you know coming in last minute might test that but it's uh i think they'd get over it pretty quick because like at the end of the day they gotta go to a parade who doesn't like parades yeah all right here are maybe a couple pedantic questions, not a full how can you not be pedantic about baseball segment, but just a smattering. This is from Sebastian or Sebastian. I don't know how to pronounce the name, but bonjour les amis.

He says, I am Sebastian, one of the few French people fanatic about both baseball and stats, who loves your podcast and listens to it at work to the utter bewilderment of his co-workers. As a longtime Yankees fan, hearing on a podcast or reading on Twitter stats about their comeback wins always fills me with joy. Although, since I don't mind being pidon about baseball, I'm probably mingling that, but that is pedantic, I have to admit something's always bothering me about that stat. Shouldn't we have a minimum innings limit before we may call it comeback? If the away team scores in the first and nothing later and ends up losing anyway, yes, it's technically a comeback win, but the home team has the whole nine innings to just score one more run. Trailing by two after the third inning is not that big a

hole since on average teams score half a run by inning. Couldn't we put limits like trailing by at least three runs after the fifth or by eight after the second inning, mercy rule style? Keep up the great work and merci beaucoup for all of the mathematical pedantic and nonsense topics you entertain us with so definition of comebacks what counts or doesn't count as a comeback i think that this is um this is a fair thing to if not be pedantic at least pick a knit right one is picking a knit over this i think that that would be justified because yeah if the other team like pulls ahead in the first and then the team you're rooting for you know scores a couple runs like an inning or two after that like it does not carry the emotional heft of

a comeback where you felt with some amount of certainty that your favorite team was going to lose and then they they disproved that theory and ended up winning i think that there is like a very different emotional reality to opposing team scores in the first your team scores in the fourth and then the other team never really threatens after that versus you are behind you know you're behind for a while it's it's late and close and you rally right maybe the maybe the way to think about it and i don't want to conflate terms because that invites um another form of being pedantic but like if you as a fan would not contemplate a rally cap then perhaps it's not a comeback and i know that rally rally caps are tend to be reserved

for like i don't know when do people do rally caps like the eighth inning after seventh seventh when do people do rally cap spend do you know when they do them is there like a rule is it like i don't think there's a rule necessarily but people tend to do it late right they tend to do it when like time is winding down when the number of chances are limited when the announcers in the booth might say they're down to their last couple of whatever's right and so i think if you're not in that territory you probably don't really want to call it a comeback because you're just like still playing baseball you know right i would not call it a comeback if you are trailing after the top of the first and you're the home team and you have not yet batted do you think that's a come i

mean no like if you're down one nothing and it's the middle of the first you're fine you're not come back to win it's not even the stress it's more like you haven't even had a chance to bat yet like you haven't been up yet you haven't had the same opportunity to score right you are still trailing obviously and if you don't score you will lose the game so right it is technically correct that it is a comeback i suppose it just depends like if if someone said to me that they have this number of comeback wins, I guess I probably would assume that it was just the most liberal, expansive definition. And then it's, hey, were they ever trailing in this game? And did they come back to win? It's a comeback.

But I think it would be useful to specify or to maybe just be a little more selective. Yes. You could do it by win probability, right? Sure. You could set a cutoff there. You could do it by, I don't know, it's like Sebastian was saying, that you could score half a run an inning. That's just like your average game basically.

So maybe if you're trailing by so few runs that you would be expected to come back and win if you just had an average offensive performance in that game. Yeah. Maybe that could be one way to weed out the comebacks that don't really feel like comebacks. Right. Or you could just set a cutoff of down by this many runs or after this inning, etc. But yeah, obviously, it feels like a comeback depending on how deep the hole is. So you could have a team that had a ton of comeback wins, but they were all just kind of gimme comeback wins or they weren't all that impressive. And then you could have another team with the same number of comeback wins, but they had to come back from further behind. So it tells you something, but it doesn't tell you everything

and you need to get more specific. But I can't say that it's incorrect to say that it's a comeback as long as you were at some point, you had scored fewer runs in that game than your opponent. Yeah, I guess that's fair. But it just doesn't feel like that really comports with our emotional experience of the comeback is all. Yeah. I'm just looking at the win expectancy finder at gregstoll.com, and according to that,

when the home team starts batting no outs, no one on in the bottom of the first and is trailing by a run, so the visiting team scored one run in the bottom of the first and is trailing by a run so the visiting team scored one run in the top of the first the visiting team's win expectancy is only 51.7 percent because when the game begins the home team has like a 54 percent something chance because of home field advantage so scoring one run in the top of the first for the visiting team undoes the home field advantage and just a little bit more but it's like basically still a coin toss yeah at that point just because you haven't even gotten your your first licks let

alone your last licks like you haven't had a chance to even the score so that to me it's that's like i suppose it's still sort of a comeback but it's barely a comeback it doesn't feel like a comeback doesn't feel like a comeback i'd be fine with excluding that from the comeback category otherwise you just have to decide do you want to set your win expectancy at 40 or 30 or 25 or or what or just go with the was i trailing at any point in that game right yeah all right well thank you for the question sebastian and i'm glad that uh pedant questions are appealing to our international french listeners all the the many of them that we have i'm sure and we got a question from Brian, who says,

I have a pedantic thing that occurred to me last night. They are not all hitters. Saying something like the 3-4-5 hole hitters are up next this inning or something to this effect is wrong, hitters assumes an outcome. I am willing to grant that anyone who hits one foul is a hitter, but if you do not make contact in any way, you are merely a batter. They all do carry bats to the plate, after all. I had no idea I felt so strongly about this until last night. I don't know what happened to prompt this epiphany for Brian, but all of a sudden something clicked and he realized that this bothered him greatly. Something clicked.

And he realized that this bothered him greatly. I agree, actually, that I prefer the term batter to hitter, I think. And I also prefer, like, if we're talking about, like, I mean, we say who's batting, right? We don't typically say who's hitting right now. You might say that. It wouldn't be weird if you said that, but you would usually say batter, probably. So I agree. This obviously, like a lot of these questions, falls into the, well, we know what you mean. And it's a minor niggling issue here. batters should be the preferred term because uh they do all bat they have bats they carry them they don't always use them and you do have to use them to have hit something to be a hitter yeah but two things you're a writer and an editor and you know that having another word is useful because sometimes copy gets monotonous if If you restrict the number of words you have,

you just have less to work with, and then you're going to read copy that starts to bother you. You get annoyed. You just keep noticing all the batters. You can't help but notice it. There's that piece of it, which I understand is not necessarily an issue that extends to everyone. I also think the following.

Once you're in the big leagues, you might not yet be a big league hitter. Even a guy making his debut, that is perhaps the place where you could raise the greatest quibble because he has not yet done the thing at the big league level. But he's done it before, right?

That's why he's there. If he weren't able to hit at all he presumably wouldn't be there at least not as a position player so i think that like perhaps not in any given game or even any given plate appearance are we to assume that a guy will get a hit but we can safely assume that he has gotten a hit he he has the essence of a hitter you know he has the like esprit de corps or whatever just to keep saying french stuff so i think it's i think it's fine i i prefer batter also i think that it is more descriptive of like the action rather than the result and so i think that it is closer to the person than the thing

that person does. And in that respect is better. But I think it's fine. And to all of you writers out there, I would just say like, you should use all of your words that you can, you know? Yes. All right. So we kind of agree with Brian, but we feel less strongly about it than he does. Yeah. So Jscape2000, Patreon supporter, this is the last pedantic question today. Is it fair to say the Yankees won two games in their series against the Astros without ever holding a lead? So he is referring to a recent series in late June where the Astros and Yankees split a four-game series, and I believe at no point during any of the games were the Astros trailing,

so they lost on walk-offs. The two losses were via walk-offs. So is it fair to say that the Yankees won those games without ever holding a lead? Can you win a game without ever holding a lead? I think that the way that, like, I know that this fact was mentioned in Jake's power rankings. I don't remember what week that was because who remembers time?

Who has a sense of these things? And I think that the way that he put it, which I thought skirted this issue quite nicely, was that the Yankees actually didn't lead at any point during any of the four games until the final batters on Thursday and Sunday. I thought that split the uprights, to mix my sports metaphors, very nicely because it tells you the fact about them not having led, but it acknowledges that they had to have at some point or they wouldn't have won. Yeah, right.

This is sort of a philosophical question. We get some emails from philosophy professors sometimes in response to our pedantic discussions here. Sometimes we get answers from philosophy professors, which we also super appreciate. Yeah, so can you win a game without ever leading? It would seem to. I mean, victory would presuppose that you were leading at some point.

You have to lead at some point. But the instant you take the lead, if it's a walk-off game-ending situation, the game is over. So when that player crosses the plate and scores that winning run, does the game end instantly? Well, it sort of depends now doesn't it it depends how much they win by well that's true yeah yeah because like you know sometimes you hit like a you're down you're down by one run and then you're aaron judging you hit a three run home run

and you've won you've pulled ahead but he's still getting around the bases all the way because he doesn't want a very long single he's trying to break a home run record. This actually happened in that series where they were like, hey, you got to keep going because otherwise it's just going to be not counted as a home run. You still have to cross that plate. So I will quibble patently about that, I got to say. But also, I think that it's fine. Yeah, I think it's okay. I think it's fine yeah i think it's okay but i think it's fine i think that you do need to differentiate

like it is useful to it does tell you something about the sort of shape of the game to say that you didn't that they didn't hold the lead but for the final batter like you you learn a lot about the game that way yes games that Games that way. Yeah. But yeah. There's probably some other way you could phrase it perhaps even more precisely, but it would require more words and more sentences and probably wouldn't be worth the extra verbiage. It would absolutely not be worth the extra verbiage. Yeah. There's no probably about that.

Your editor would be like, this is more words. Why did you add more words? There are two other questions that are directly related to what we just discussed. So Marcus said, will we ever see another home run single? So he's referring to what you just talked about. When Aaron Judge hit the walk-off home run against the Astros, he didn't see the ball go over the fence initially and almost stopped running the bases, similar to Robin Ventura's Grand Slam single in the 1999 NLCS when Todd Pratt didn't see the ball go over the wall and interrupted Ventura's trip around the bases.

Do you think we'll ever see a walk-off homer turn into a single in the future or is that something that won't repeat itself in the future? I never say never. Never say never. in the future i never say never never say never i mean i think that assuming perfect vigilance is probably faulty right because people do goof up this stuff right and it's a moment where you're having big feelings where you are overcome i think that the odds of it happening i think that the odds of it happening and like mattering to the outcome of the game are pretty low because i think the base coaches would be like no you got to keep going but i could see a guy peeling off sooner than he should you know yeah one thing you don't get these days is fans

rushing the field and getting in the way of the players or having them have to exit the field quickly that's something that security tends to do a better job about these days. So that's one less potential way to have this happen. And maybe players are more cognizant of this too, because sometimes you might have players mob the player as he's rounding first base and just interrupt his run. Whereas in Jed's case, as you said, they were sort of signaling to him, keep going, keep going.

Yeah, make sure that you keep going. And they were probably, speaking of vigilance, particularly vigilant in Judge's case because there is this home run thing going on with him. Right. And so I imagine that they are cognizant of the necessity of that stuff. They're like, oh, you really gotta.

But I think that players care too much about their stats i don't mean like again i don't mean that in a value judgment way like i think that they are conscious of their stats and their value in a way that would sort of preclude this from happening when was the last time fans rushed the field ben that's a good question i don't know i don't know the answer to that i mean i i feel like it is of a bygone era yeah it's a good question. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I feel like it is of a bygone era. Yeah, it's a very like 70s sort of, you know, Henry Aaron, Chris Chambliss kind of highlight thing that happened. It's probably like, you know, one of the last times that a team did like a really dumb giveaway

where they were like, oh, we've miscalculated and now there's a bunch of crap on the field. They gave away where they were like, oh, we've miscalculated and now there's a bunch of crap on the field. Yeah. There's a 2020 Slate article by Mitchell Nathanson entitled Why Baseball Fans Stopped Rushing the Field. And the subhead is on October 21st, 1980, a beloved tradition was put to a stop. The piece starts, 40 years ago last Wednesday, baseball changed. Most obviously for Philadelphia Phillies fans, baseball changed because at last, after 97 long ugly seasons, the Phillies were finally World Series champions. But on a grander scale, the game itself changed the moment Tug McGraw struck out Kansas City's Willie Wilson at 1129 Eastern.

We Philly fans are not ones to skimp on the details when it comes to our scant moments of glory to clinch both game 6 and the series. At that point, or to be more precise, immediately following that moment, something momentous in baseball history occurred. More than 65,000 delirious fans jumped up and down, hugged complete strangers, and sprayed beer into the ether, all while remaining in the stands. Not wholly by choice, though. Until that point, baseball had what was a decades-old tradition, inglorious as it may have been, of fans charging the field

whenever the home club clinched either a pennant or a World Series championship. Just four years earlier, Yankee Stadium instantaneously became rush hour at Penn Station when first baseman Chris Chambliss hit the pennant clincher. I mentioned that one. The following season, yes, you had Reggie Jackson in Game 6 of the Yankees World Series, and then the Pirates clinching their 1979 World Series championship in Baltimore even, and fans still spilled over into Memorial Stadium. But October 21st, 1980, channeling their inner Frank Rizzo, whose strong-arm mayoral reign of intimidation ended only months earlier, Philadelphia City Hall's Pubaz decided there would not be a repeat of the bedlam that occurred in New York and elsewhere

should the Phils prevail over the Royals in Game 6, so they positioned a platoon of mounted policemen along with their K-9 Corps in the bowels of Veterans Stadium that evening. During the seventh inning with the Phillies winning 4-0, the K-9 unleashed onto the field to a chorus of boos. At one point, umpire Bill Kunkel instructed the players that there would soon be policemen on the playing field during the game, and if the ball hit any of them, it would be in play. Suddenly, the World Series became surreal. Who wants to run into a horse? Royals second baseman Frank White asked. It just doesn't seem like a baseball game. But the strong arm tactics worked. After the final out, save for a few strays,

the fans in attendance concluded that it wasn't worth confronting the phalanx of German shepherds ringing the field. They remained in the stands, and baseball hasn't been the same since. So, yeah. Somehow the story of how we stopped having fans on the field is way worse than I anticipated it being. It is far more of a bummer than I thought it would be. That sucks. Yeah, it's been a while.

I think maybe it happened in the 90s. Let's see, in the early 90s, I guess there were cases where it happened. Maybe 1999, Cleveland beat the Yankees on Jake Taylor's walk-off bunt. I am browsing Reddit here, and people are suggesting times that it might have happened. But yeah, it really hasn't happened a lot lately. So I guess that's good although also it requires uh strong arm tactics but pluses and minuses i guess trade-offs either way it's a land of contrasts yes you also had disco demolition night in 1979 so that was something

although on reddit i'm seeing fans were on the field when the Brewers won the AL Pennant in 1982. The 1986 Mets had some fans on the field when they won the NL East. 1995 AL West Tiebreaker also saw some fans on the field. So I guess there were some sporadic incidents ever since, just maybe not with the frequency and not with the volume that it used to be done with. It's just maybe not with the frequency and not with the volume that it used to be done with. There's a really, really good You're Wrong About episode about Disco Demolition Night that I encourage people to listen to. It was fascinating. All right.

So there is one more, as I said, question related to that incident. So Jaden just emailed us this week and noted, In Thursday's Padres-Giants game, Jorge Alfaro hit a game-winning hit with the bases loaded and nobody out that bounced over the left center field wall. Here's the thing, though. The game ended 2-1, and he was not awarded a double. Why is this the case? Batters are awarded four bases for hitting it over the fence on the fly and two bases for bouncing it over. I see no reason why he shouldn't be awarded two bases for the double and two RBI to make it a 3-1 win. It's not like this is a gapper where the run scores and the batter doesn't have a chance to get to second because the game is over. This ball is out of play and supposed to net you a double. Not sure if this has been discussed on the show before,

but I thought I'd see if you have insight into this. And he followed up when he learned that there is a rule rule 9.06 f i believe and i actually have this open look at me with the rule book here so rule 9.06 f says that subject to the provisions of rule 9.06 g when a batter ends a game with a safe hit that drives in as many runs as are necessary to put his team in the lead, the official scorer shall credit such batter with only as many bases on his hit as are advanced by the runner who scores the winning run, and then only if the batter runs out his hit for as many bases as are advanced by the runner who scores the winning run. Which makes it super insulting because you get less, but you still have to work hard. Yeah.

Super insulting because you get less, but you still have to work hard. Yeah. And then there's a comment to that rule that says the official score shall apply this rule even when the batter is theoretically entitled to more bases because of being awarded an automatic extra base hit under various provisions of rules, blah, blah, blah. The official score shall credit the batter with a base touched in the natural course of play, even if the winning run has scored moments before on the same play. For example, the score is tied in the bottom of the ninth inning with a runner on second base,

and the batter hits a ball to the outfield that falls for a base hit. The runner scores after the batter has touched first base and continued on to second base, but shortly before the batter-runner reaches second base. If the batter-runner reaches second base, the official score shall credit the batter with a two-base hit. Now, that provision for Rule 9.06g is when the batter ends a game with

a home run hit out of the playing field, the batter and any runners on base are entitled to score. Yeah. I have a memory of talking about this on the podcast before. I don't know when and I couldn't find out when it was, but I am also sort of up in arms about this. It seems almost vindictive. It's like, I agree. If you hit a home run, then it counts. But we are going to specially comment in here that if you hit an automatic double, a gradual double, it doesn't count. Why? Why are we so anti-automatic double? Why can we not give that to them? I agree. Yeah, it's very odd. I asked our past blast source, Richard Hershberger, if he has any insight into why the rule reads this way. And he responded, path dependency, poor statutory draftsmanship, and this not being on anyone's list of priorities now. He says that the question of how to score a walk-off hit was first codified in the 1920 rules. The practice before then had been to give the batter the smallest number of

bases that would force in the winning run. This was made the rule in 1920, but at the same time, the exception was made giving a fair ball hit out of the field of play. We occasionally see the statement that Babe Ruth actually had 715 career homers. This is based on one of these walk-offs early in his career. It seems unfair to give the batter a single on a line drive into the corner, so in 1931 the rule was changed to the official score giving the batter the number of bases, quote, as in the judgment of the official score he would have made under normal conditions, that number, however, not to

exceed the number of bases advanced by the runner while keeping the ball over the fence exception in place. 1931 was also the year that the fair ball bounding out of the field of play became an automatic double. It previously had been a double by ground rule on some part of some parks. Fenway with its short right field had a vertical line painted on the fence. A ball that bounded out on the left side was a home run while on the right was a double. Babe Ruth Day was held on September 20th, 1919, his last home game with the Red Sox. He hit a ground rule double this way. The crowd was not happy with Billy Evans the umpire. Finally, we jump forward to 1950. The 1950 rules were completely rewritten. Mostly it was reformatting, but they

also were updated to better reflect actual practice. A modern equivalent would be if MLB ever changed the rulebook strike zone to reflect the zone actually enforced. With 1950, we get the modern rule on scoring walk-off hits, keeping the exception for balls hit over the fence, but no longer empowering the scorer to judge what the hit would have been were it not the bottom of the ninth. I have not seen any discussion around this change, but I can make an educated guess that the 1931 version opened the official scores to a lot of grief from players who disagreed with their judgment. Sure. That makes sense. They might have requested that this judgment call be removed, or they might have refused to exercise it in the first place, scoring according to the older rule

all along. In other words, I don't know if the 1950 change was an actual change of practice or a reflection of existing practice, but coming back to ground rule doubles, it seems likely that between 1931 and 1950, a scorer would have given the batter a double on a walk-off ground rule double as there was no judgment involved to bring grief down upon their head. Exactly.

But when the 1950 rule was written, this scenario was on no one's mind. After all, it can only happen with the score tied and bases loaded. How often has this happened? Heck if I know, but not often. So it simply wasn't considered. It was clarified later on with the note that remains in the current rules, presumably because this question arose in practice. This happened pretty quickly as this note is in the 1955 rules.

I don't know why the decision went this way. Maybe the league president flipped a coin. Were I a cynic, I would suspect that the pitcher who gave up the hit was more famous than the batter who made the hit. But not being a cynic, this thought has not even crossed my mind. So I don't care for this. thought has not even crossed my mind so i don't care for this and i think that we should give them credit for that double and the runs that they're entitled to for a double yes how many guys like i mean we don't really think about rbi all that much right but like how many guys aren't hitting

this is probably a small number but like how many guys are not hitting rbi milestones because of this yeah there's probably at least one like you're like how many guys it's like it's gonna be a big number maybe one maybe one guy it's probably only like one guy but still i understand i completely understand not wanting to have some of the vagaries of scoring and stuff like subject to judgment and that it might be irritating. But like it's a ground rule double. There's no that's not. Just give them. Just give them.

Yeah. Just give it to them. We revise the rule book every year. That thing gets worked over every single year. We can be the change. I mean, not us us we're not on the committee but like is jerry depoto still uh chairing the rules committee by the way i think he is jerry call us we have some suggestions yeah this should vault to the top of the list okay

and the other weird rules related question was from richard who, if a tag with a glove, which is a form of clothing, debatably, containing a ball results in an out, then by the same logic, would a player who held a ball with some other form of clothing result in an out if tagged with that clothing? So let's say a player somehow catches a ball in his armpit, bad hop, then stumbles into a base runner, a ball in his armpit, bad hop, then stumbles into a base runner, effectively tagging him with his jersey, which also, quote unquote, contains the ball. Is the runner out? Or ball in pocket and tag with leg? Then would the runner be out?

So if we're defining the glove as an article of clothing, then what is the distinction between the glove and any other article of clothing? distinction between the glove and any other article of clothing. So I asked Richard about this one too. And he said that tagging with your butt while the ball is in your back pocket, if we are going to go down this road, let us go all the way. Historically, the rule was that the fielder had to touch the runner with the ball. When fielder started wearing gloves, there was a legal fiction that touching the runner with the glove holding the ball was when Fielder started wearing gloves, there was a legal fiction that touching the runner with the glove holding the ball was the same as touching him with the ball. The modern rules speak of tagging the runner with tag having a painfully convoluted etymology to

work its way into this usage, with tagging defined as touching a runner with the ball or with his hand or glove holding the ball while holding the ball securely and firmly in his hand or glove. It is not the most euphonious piece of prose, but it clearly eliminates butt tagging. So, yeah, I think we've got a rule against this one. I don't think this would count. Right, because, like, you're... against this one. I don't think this would count.

Right, because you're... I love the image of intentional butt tagging. It seems really inefficient. It seems so inefficient because you've got to put the ball in there on purpose. It's not going to fall into your back pocket

on accident. So you got to put it in there and then you got to put it on. It could. It would have to be some freak occurrence. Yeah, but this is about to get to why I think it's fine. So the purpose of a pocket is to hold things. Yes. Stipulated. pocket is to hold things yes but stipulated but the purpose of a glove is to feel the ball to catch it yes you know and like the purpose of your back pocket is to like hold your snacks

really is what it's there for on a baseball field. Are they both a form of holding objects? Yes, but the object it's meant to hold is your snacks, not the ball. It used to be for holding chew, or it could be for holding a little defensive alignment card, but you will notice that none of those things are the ball. Or it could be for your batting gloves, or your little scooch glove, the little oven mitt glove

so that you don't hurt your fingies when you're on the face bath, which always makes it look like batters have a mic pack in their back pocket. Yes. It's for those things. It's for snacky stuff and not hurting your fingers stuff

and for defensive alignment cards. it is not for the ball i mean i know that sometimes or you know sometimes they put those like little mini bottles of gatorade back there so they're like i will acknowledge that baseball players like to strain both literally and physically the pocket you know they like to to to test test that sucker out and see how well it holds but they're not generally at least during a game putting balls back there i mean sometimes i think they probably do you know when they're just goofing around or doing other stuff because they're baseball players and their understanding of humor is like you know it's different than yours and mine but it is not for the ball while you're playing the game.

It's for other things. Whereas your glove, that's for the ball. And so I think we can draw a use distinction between those things based on what they are meant to catch. One is meant to catch the ball and one is meant to catch your snacks. Because one of the weird things about baseball is that they snack. They take their snacks out there with them on the field, Ben.

It's like, I have to have this snack right now. I can't even wait until I'm back in the dugout. Fill your pockets with Brussels sprouts. Can't wait. What time did you start did you look at the clock and go were you like trying to speed run it i think i was up writing i think it was like five in the morning or something, you were not eating! Benjamin! You were eating Puzzle Spots at 5am? Can't you have roughage that early in the morning?

I know that now. I mean, I know that, like, bran is a thing, but, like, you're having, like, a bowl of bran. You're not having a sheet of Puzzle Spots. I have great regrets. Alright. Sorry to wet you down, Richard, about the butt tagging. I have great regrets alright sorry to wet you down Richard about the butt tagging

I have one more here one more unless you have Brussels sprouts why me and Ben oh no okay you're a parent now you can't be doing that stuff I will not pass that habit on to my daughter all right hit

me hit me with your next question this one was really roiling the discord group for our patreon supporters very much like that so patrick says can the shohei otani rule allow a two-way player to take back-to-back plate appearances? Oh, boy. Here's the situation. Shohei Otani is pitching a game and is also playing DH. Okay. He has a plate appearance which ends in a way that does not end the inning. Okay.

The shortstop is next in the batting order following Otani. Immediately before that shortstop comes to the plate, the Angels, number one, replace Shohei Otani the DH with a substitute DH. Due to the Shohei Otani rule, Otani remains in the game as the pitcher when the DH is replaced. Number two, defensively replace the shortstop with the new DH. This causes the Angels to lose the DH. Yeah, which means that Shohei Otani, the pitcher, enters the batting order in the place the shortstop had before. Oh, boy. Number three, Shohei Otani is up to bat again. So there you go.

You just found a loophole. You get to have Shohei Otani up again. So Patrick writes, there are two common objections I have heard when I present this to people. I don't know if all those people were in the Discord group or whether he's just, you know, going up to people at the parties and laying out the scenario. But the common objections, the first is you can't make defensive substitutions while batting, to which I say there's no rule I can find against it. All right. The second common objection is that a section of the Otani rule reads, if the designated

hitter is replaced, he can continue as the pitcher, but he can no longer hit for himself, which some people interpret as meaning that the pitcher wouldn't be allowed to hit for But that doesn't make any sense. himself while a separate DH is batting in the order as well, because it provides no solution for what would happen if the DH was lost and the pitcher would normally bat, which you'd expect if it was intended to close this loophole. But is this loophole actually legal? And if it is, how useful would it be? The caveat is that the full text of the Otani rule is not available online. So I don't know if there's another part of the rule that expressly forbids this loophole. Is it or it's not?

How long would the replay review, the rules review last? I'm not asking that question to buy time, but I am kind of asking that question to buy time. I don't know. I don't know either. There are like multiple things here that never happen, but maybe are not expressly prohibited from happening

precisely because they never happen. I think that you should be able to like automatically fire the manager. If he tries this. Yeah, I think that the umpire should be able to say, you're rejected for being a nincompoop. Like get out of here. That doesn't, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? It doesn't an income poop like get out of here that doesn't what are you doing why are you doing this it doesn't make any sense get out of here i would sympathize if it's phil nevin the angels manager i mean sometimes uh the angels order can be a bit thin so do whatever

you can to get otani up again right but it fundamentally doesn't make sense for you to be allowed to have the same person occupy two spots in the lineup that doesn't make any sense i mean the two-way otani rule doesn't necessarily make the most sense either but no but but the thing that doesn't make sense more fundamentally is a scenario where, because here's why, and I don't just mean it from a competitive advantage perspective. So like Shohei Otani as the pitcher or the DH or the shortstop, I don't know what position he's playing at this point. Shohei Otani, shortstop.

Okay, now I want to see that. Now I want to see it. Why isn't, make him the American League starter at shortstop and O'Neal Cruz the National League starter at shortstop and o'neill proves the american the national league starter shortstop and then make them stand next to each other he's still the pitcher at that point i think i think he's just in the order in the place that the shortstop had been so i don't know if he's ever actually the shortstop i think he only gets to bat twice if you play shortstop. I'd be fine with that.

Okay, so here's why it fundamentally doesn't make sense and why I think that the umpires would be able to, even just invoking their umpire discretion, which they have broad discretion, would say no, because here's what happens. Shoei Otani, a guy playing baseball, whatever his position is, gets up to bat, and he is meant to bat back to back.

Oh, no. But that's a real back to back. And he hits a double. And now he's on second base. Then what? Do you have to pinch him for him? Yeah. Yeah.

So, no. This is ridiculous. I love. It's definitely ridiculous. The outcome of most of these. I regret telling people that I opened a beer because I've been very giggly and I have had like four sips of this thing. So it's not that.

I have managed to eat most of a piece of heirloom tomato galette, but nobody knows that because I've been good at muting. But I've had very little of this despite how googly i am i just think that they would say get out of here i think so too get out of here and i don't think that phil nevin you know phil nevin would not go up there and credulously believe like you're gonna let me uh have him have two goes at it right and he wouldn't do that he has self-respect i mean fake it till you make it just act confident just have the courage of your convictions it's just uh yep otani's up again yeah but the last time phil nevin had the courage of his conviction somebody got a ball thrown at

their head so maybe he should have the courage of someone else's convictions yeah seems like uh madden might have been more likely to do this than Phil Nevin. But if there were a way to keep chaining this tactic so that only Otani batted, that would be great. But I'd be into that. No, no, because you would want Mike Trout to bat. And you would want, oh no, which of them is it? Taylor Ward. Although, Tyler Wade's still in the Angels organization. Yeah, he's in AAA now.

So there's still a risk. He's just a hammy away. Yep, yep. Oh, no. I guess that was predictable. You would have to have a real ghost runner situation. Not a zombie runner, but a ghost runner in that case if Otani got on base and then had to hit again. But you'd only do this if he did not get on base, I think.

There are limited times when you would want to do it, even if you could do it. And if you tried to do it, you would probably just have the Empire say, nope. No, they'd just say no. Or maybe they would call New York, and New York would say, nope. Yeah.

So this wouldn't work. Like a lot of the things that we've talked about, like protesting that the zombie runner never touched first base on the way to second. Like, I'm in favor of trying it. Why not? Just like, you know, embody channel the spirit of Eddie Stanky and make them write it into the rules. Right. But it doesn't make sense.

I agree that the rulebook is poorly written in a lot of places and that from a legislative drafting perspective, it leaves much to be desired. For all the lawyers that are involved in baseball, the rulebook is riddled with drafting issues. They're not errors. They're just issues. Drive whole runs through them. But I think it is understood that the spirit of the rule is that you have to bat in an order and that your guy only gets to go the one time through the order. And then you have to start over. That is like none of the other rules around batting order make sense if you're able to do this. Like it would undermine everything else. Right.

It would undermine it all. And so they would say, no. And you would never ask to do it. And so we'll never have to. It would take so long then. They would take 20 minutes. They'd be on the blower for 20 minutes and you could stand in there. I would get to write an entire piece about it,

looking at people's faces as I watch the song. Anyway, it would go on for ages ages and so and so it wouldn't be to our benefit because we would be like all right surely it is obvious that you were not allowed to do this why are we still talking about it generally i'm on board with looking for loopholes and make them tell you no, make them write it into the rules. But I think I agree that much as I like to see Shohei Ohtani bat as often as possible, I'm in favor of challenging the zombie runner thing. Not that that would work, just because I think that the zombie runner rule itself is just kind of, you know, it goes against the spirit of

the game and the rules, right? Much like this this would it's just the idea of the batting order even if it's sort of a singular situation because it's a two-way player and otani and maybe it's not so much of a slippery slope but it does kind of go against the spirit of the batting order which is that you know you only get to go once each time you only get to go once each time around now yep i will say once again that i am fine with an exception to that if otani has to play short step yes that'd be fine i want to see it all right and i will take us out with the past blast which comes from richard whom we've heard from a couple times already in this episode but he is a historian saber researcher author, author of Strike 4, The Evolution of Baseball.

This is episode 1873. This is a Pass Blast from 1873, the Philadelphia all-day city item, June 30th, 1873. Wes Fissler of the Athletics, who I believe was mentioned in our preceding Pass Blast, is interviewed about the upcoming game with the Philadelphia Baseball Club. Quote, he declines to say anything definite regarding the game, making his usual remark that he will do the best he can, semicolon, that he hopes his side will win, that the Philadelphia's should not be underrated, that Zetline pitches a straight fair ball, that clean, safe batting wins at all times, that the Philadelphias

play with marvelous unity and enthusiasm, that too much reckless throwing is indulged in when safe hits are made with men on the bases, and that the umpire is the most important man on the field if he does his duty, end quote. Richard writes, here we have irrefutable proof that baseball in 1873 was fundamentally the same as it is today, with players going into interviews armed with an Richard writes, to be here hope i can help the ball club i just want to give it my best shot and good lord will and things will work out not too different right that he will do the best he can that he hopes his side will win that they should not be underrated etc etc i guess he didn't necessarily say that he was taking it one day at a time or that he was trying to stay within himself or that he was just looking for a good pitch to hit maybe back in those days, they were all good pitches to hit. I don't know. But I guess there were some innovations in baseball cliches yet to be made. But the template was already there at that point, even prior to the founding of the National League. So how about that? Yeah, but how many modern players would make a point to mention the umpire?

Yeah, butter up the umpire while you're at it. Probably not that many. All right, we can end there, and I can go back to chowing down on something other than Brussels sprouts. 5 a.m., Ben. Oh, my God. Just being awake then was my first mistake. Yeah, there you go. Before I leave you, I have another Taylor Ward broadcaster name screw up reported to us by listener Jay Keith. No, Tyler Wade was not called back up already.

And no, the Angels facing pitcher Tyler Wells on Friday was not the source of the issue as I expected it to be. Rather, we have the rare confusion of Jared Walsh for Tyler Ward. That's right. Jared Walsh was not mistaken for Brandon Marsh, which is what you would expect. Instead, Angels broadcaster Matt Baskergen mistook Walsh for Ward. And the pitch to Ward, a little cue shot. That could find a place to put him aboard, and it does. An infield single for Taylor Ward.

Ward, and it does. An infield single for Taylor Ward. Sorry for Jared Walsh after the Ward strikeout. In Vaskirjan's defense, Ward had been up just before Walsh. So this was less a name confusion maybe than just losing track of who was hitting. Still, that's a weird one. Interesting entry in the annals of broadcasters screwing up Angels players' names. Also, we've been talking about examples of enduring walk-up songs that become institutions for certain hitters, just like entrance songs become institutions for closers and encourage

fan participation. We talked about Justin Turner in Turn Down for What. We talked about Charlie Blackmon and Your Love by The Outfield, a British band that knew nothing about baseball but named themselves the Baseball Boys and then changed that to The Outfield despite not knowing what an outfield was. Well, here we have perhaps an even better example provided by listener Sam. Perhaps this one didn't come up because he isn't an active player, but I wanted to throw an entry into the iconic walk-up song conversation, Chipper Jones and Crazy Train, of course.

Among Atlanta fans and probably most of the NL East, it is an iconic pairing. Growing up in the South, I knew it as Chipper's song long before I knew the song on its own. As far as I can tell, Atlanta started using walk-up songs when Turner Field opened in 1997 and Chipper used Crazy Train for the rest of his career, although I vaguely remember a brief period where he used a rap song that sampled the intro to Crazy Train instead. Atlanta even gave away Chipper bobbleheads a few years ago that play the song, and they play it on occasions when he is honored at the ballpark. As an Atlanta fan, or likely a Mets fan for different reasons, there is nothing like the feeling of hearing that opening riff with the game on the line in the ninth inning.

Excellent nomination, Sam. All right, that will do it for today, and mercifully for this week. I don't know where this episode fell on the effectiveness slash wildness spectrum. Sometimes we go in weird directions, including culinary and or gastrointestinal misadventures. Just got to give the people what they want. I don't make the rules. I will remind you all that if you do enjoy this podcast, and if you have enjoyed it for some time, even before it became about Brussels sprouts, you can send us a voice memo. Just send a little tribute or testimonial if you have enjoyed it for some time, even before it became about Brussels sprouts, you can send us a voice memo.

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a wonderful weekend. Keep your Brussels sprouts down, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. My old man's always saying you can't steal second base with your foot on first. Sometimes you gotta gamble, Rose. You can bet on me. Born in Buffalo to humble Christian folks. My old man raised me right, real polite. No telling dirty jokes.

A Wally Cleaver type. Ate every brussel sprout. My mama's pride and joy, golden boy. Your average Eagle Scout.