Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1888: Paper Tigers

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners’ soaring playoff odds, a wild Mariners-Yankees game, the other greatest team gainers and losers in playoff probability over the past month, the difference between Baseball-Reference’s playoff odds and other sites’ versions, Keith Hernandez’s thoughts on the Phillies, how their own preseason predictions have held up, Steven […]

I screwed up when I was young, but must I keep on paying for it? Yes you must, yes you must, until you let yourself go Lions and Tigers Make the same fight as each other Hello and welcome to episode 1888 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing all right. How are you?

Ben, did you know that the Seattle Mariners have like a 90% chance of making the playoffs? I don't know how I am about that. I feel shocked. I feel scandalized potentially. Anyway, that's not all we're going to talk about in this episode, but I thought I'd lead off with that because, hey, Seattle Mariners, what's up with you? How are you doing? You're doing great. This is so fun. Are you allowing yourself to believe as still a vestigial or maybe more than vestigial Mariners fan?

You know, well, so here's the thing. I've been hurt before, Ben. Yeah. So here's the thing. I've been hurt before, Ben. Yeah. But as we have talked about, and as I imagine we will talk about again, I think that this is not a bad baseball team, you know?

I think there are some components to this baseball team that are actually quite good. And it sounds like Julio Rodriguez will be returning soon. And I sure have enjoyed watching Luisuis castillo pitch you know yeah that has sure been that has sure been fun yeah it's nice when you trade for a top of the rotation pitcher and then immediately he performs like a top of the rotation pitcher and it's like yep that's what we traded for that's what we were hoping he would do yeah you sit there and you go, huh, sometimes things are as advertised. And that ends up being pretty good. So I don't know, man. Like the bullpen is also quite strong.

Diego Castillo is back from the injured list. Chris Flexen has been flexed into bullpen duty. I should go to prison. Anyway, yeah, it's fun can i tell you a thing that i've i had brought to my attention by the old twitter.com yes please so castillo's first start as a mariner was against garrett cole and then his second start as a mariner was also against garrett cole and right now the way that the rotations are lining up his next start will be against shoya otani so welcome to the american league west i guess did you end up watching any of the marathon castillo cole extravaganza yeah i sort of missed the castillo cole part because of course i was watching two

way otani right yeah a pretty good game of his own that day but he did that game went on for hours after that the man was yankees so i did get to tune in and see the extremely odd end of it yeah there have you know i think there's a lot to be said about baseball games that basically give you two games and two totally different games right if you stuck it out to the end of that one you had amazing pitchers duel a lot of fun zeros exchanged and then some of the zanier extra innings baseball that i have seen in a while where i was left to wonder if the yankees had ever successfully stolen a base or even run the bases at all which is not generous because I know there's a lot of hand-wringing and trepidation in the Yankees fandom.

That is my sense. This is another thing that Twitter has informed me of. I tend to think, Ben, and this is a controversial take, that the Yankees are just a good baseball team and it'll be fine. I get that there are some concerns. There are concerns, but I think it's going to be fine because I think they're a pretty good baseball team. Perhaps not the best team in the American League anymore, but still a quite good baseball team as it turns out.

But also a lot of hand-wringing and I don't think that he did anything to assuage those fears on, was it Tuesday night into Wednesday morning that that game happened? It was, yeah. For the benefit of people who are listening to this episode years after we recorded it, perhaps. Generations.

Hello in the future. How are things? Yeah. Are we still alive? Is there still society? I hope so. Are you listening to us huddled around a fire as the water wars unfold? Yes, exactly.

Well, if so, thanks for tuning in. Sorry about the circumstances. But we're talking about the game on Tuesday, August 9th that the Mariners won one to nothing in 13 innings. 13 innings. on the Yankees part. And that was fun. The only upside, I can't even bring myself to call it an upside of the zombie runner, but when the purpose of the zombie runner is thwarted, that is satisfying to me. It's almost as if the players are just sticking it to the zombie runner, even though most of the players are probably fine with the zombie runner. That's how I choose to view it. And that's- That seems consistent with what they have said right i mean i'm sure there are detractors but it sounds like it is not an unpopular right rule change even as we curse its name daily sure they want to go

home early if they can or go out or whatever they're doing but the whole purpose is to get the game over earlier and when that fails at least for a while, eventually the zombie runner always wins and games don't go on as long as they used to go on at the extremes. But when you do have a few innings where the zombie runner fails to score, just because the worst case scenario, I think, is that when you get to extra innings and it's scoreless and you have this great pitcher's duel and then suddenly we're playing wacky baseball and the run environment is completely different in extra innings. And it skews things completely. And so when you get there with this white knuckle pitcher's duel and then suddenly it's like, oh, you get a runner on second base and you get a runner on second base and you get a runner on second base. It just spoils the whole thing for me. But when somehow the design is thwarted and the scoreless tie is preserved, that is extra special because just every extra, extra inning you get feels like a gift that you weren't supposed to be given, that you're getting away with something. And again, only 13 innings,

so we wouldn't have batted an eye at a 13-inning game prior to Zombie Runner. But just the longer that tenuous equilibrium gets preserved under these conditions that really just don't lean toward scoreless games, I find that special. And especially if it happens in sort of uh like benny hill type way where you're just running into outs all over the place yeah like maybe the way that we should think about the yankees performance that night is not that they toot bland multiple times but that they were staging a protest yeah you know they were engaged in performance art. The Yankees fans who listen to our podcast are like, shut up, Meg. It's very serious.

It's very serious. But I'm inviting you to think about it from a different perspective that allows you to laugh at your pain. Listen to my wisdom after years of being a Mariners fan. I'm here to help you. You're going to be fine. But also, yeah, you got to laugh along the way because otherwise it's just too sad.

Yankees fans famous for just counting their blessings. You know, just being happy with what you have. I like to think that like Rob Manfred was like asleep somewhere in the, you know, the greater tri-state area. And he just, he woke suddenly and he's like, I can feel the disturbance. This game is going too long what is happening i decided not to try to do a rob manfred voice because that seemed like a really bad idea it seemed like i would not have stuck the landing and it might have been a

thing that caused me to get in trouble so i just did my own just did my own interpretation well i'm glad you mentioned the mariners because we have not done our monthly playoff odds change update. I guess it would have been early this week, but we had a full episode last time. And we've been doing that ever since opening day on April 7th, just every month or so, just checking in on who was climbing, who was sinking since we last did an update. sinking since we last did an update. So since it has now been just a tad over a month since our last update, maybe we can just point out who have been the big risers and big fallers since then. And the biggest riser, that's your Seattle Mariners. Yeah, my Seattle Mariners. Yeah. Well, compared to July 7th, at least, they are up, as we record here on Thursday afternoon, 63 percentage points in terms of their playoff odds. And as you said, they're now up to 90, at least, if you round.

Yeah, basically. It's huge. I mean, a month ago, they were looking like a possible playoff team, but odds were against them. And now the odds are ever in their favor, it seems like. So we will see if that continues, but looking good. So they're the big winners. And if we go, so you did it respecting the sort of conceit of our check-in, but I did not do that. I decided to do it. Yeah, cherry pick away. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm going to paint an even more dramatic picture, but I think it's one that has some narrative continuity.

I don't think I'm reaching too much here. So I decided to do, and we'll just remind everyone that really, you should all poke around our Playoff Odds page because there's all kinds of fun stuff in there that I think people don't realize is there. I really should do like a post a week that's like hey we have this thing at fangraphs you should use it you know i could probably get a post a week out of that so you know you we are both using our uh changes display option which allows you to pick some and you know start and end dates and do a thing so i i picked instead of the seventh i picked july 1st

which was the the day before the mariners kicked off their 14 game win streak which helped to you know really account for their change in fortunes spoiler alert good to win 14 in a row so from From July 1st, the Mariners' playoff odds have gone up 78.5%. Wow. That's a lot, Ben. It's a big change. Their World Series odds are up plus 2.8. They're only at 3.1 now, so they've done a lot of work there. That seems good.

I find it interesting i'm gonna have to ask i'm doing i'm doing a critique my own site on on air i guess it's because the expression is in the red but like the negative changes are in red and the positive changes are in blue and maybe people think of those as reverse so anyway i'm gonna right because of heat maps and hot zones and such you're gonna wonder aloud about that. But anyway, so yeah, the Mariners far and away are our favorites here, at least in terms of how they have improved their odds since our arbitrary endpoints. But there are other teams that have picked up meaningful playoff odds, like the Philadelphia

Phillies, Ben. You know, we didn't- I'm not changing this because then we'd have dead time on air, but yeah, plus 45.2. They now have an 80% chance of making the postseason, Ben. Yeah. How about that? Yeah. How about that?

They're up 36 percentage points since our last update. And yeah, I mean, I guess I'm feeling a little bit better about my preseason playoff team pick for the Phillies, which I was feeling quite bad about for a while. I did enjoy this week that Keith Hernandez mentioned on the Mets broadcast that he has asked SNY not to make him call games against the Phillies because he doesn't like watching the Phillies play. He said as far as fundamentally and defensively, the Phillies have always been just not up to it. And Keith, he loves the fundies, loves fundamentals, loves the inside game, and he's not getting what he wants from the Phillies. But that is part of their appeal to us, I believe.

That is why you said you had no notes at one point about the Phillies. I'm back to not having notes. They have gained 57.9% since firing Joe Girardi, which some of that is purely coincidental, but that is the relevant narrative there. So there you go. Yeah. I do like the idea that broadcasters could just beg off certain assignments because they just

don't care for that team. It's like, eh, don't really like that team. I'm just going to take the series off if that's okay with you. They're going to make me too upset to see them flubbing the ball. So you don't really want me on air. There's no telling what I will say. So the other biggest winners over this period, got the Mariners on top. You got the Phillies second. Then you have, it looks like, the Guardians. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the Guardians in a stat blast later on, but the Guardians are up almost 32 percentage points and currently find themselves in first place in the AL Central. And then you have the Cardinals up 27 percentage points. So they are the big winners over this time.

And then the Blue Jays are up a bit. And, well, I guess the Baltimore Orioles are up a bit. Each of them is up six or seven percentage points. And, of course, the Orioles starting from a pretty low baseline there. Did want to note, because we've gotten some emails about this and there have been some Facebook threads about this, the difference between the baseball reference playoff odds and the fan graph playoff odds are really every other model of playoff odd. And some Orioles fans, I think, have been looking at the playoff odds on the baseball reference page and getting excited. Because if you go there right now, as we're recording, baseball reference says that the Orioles are more likely than not to make the playoffs, 51.2%. Now, here's the thing.

I don't want to be a wet blanket and cast a damper over Orioles fandom. Orioles fans deservedly having a lot of fun these days. But this is a difference in models, really, that explains the relative lack of optimism on part of the fan graphs playoff odds. So baseball references playoff odds, not to disparage them, but just to explain what they are. They're pretty simplistic. They don't project player performance the way that fan graphs do and the way that baseball prospectuses do and some others do where they look at, well, who's going to get playing time and what are the projections for each of those individual players and how does that all add up? Baseball reference is just looking at, I'll read from the page here, the team's estimated quality is determined by their performance over their last 100 regular season games, even if it spans seasons and includes a regression to the mean factor.

So it's basically how have they done this year or not even this entire year, but their last 100 games. If we assume that that is real, that's who they are essentially, then what are their odds given their position in the standings? Whereas Fangraphs is more forward-looking and saying, well, what do we actually expect them to do? And you're not going to just take the last 100 games as gospel and say that is exactly what they are. So that's the difference. And if you want that model, Fangraphs gives you that too.

You can go to the Fangraphs playoff odds and click on the tab that says season to date stats under projection mode. And that'll just say, okay, use this season stats as the basis for what they will be going forward. And that will give you a different answer. And at least in some teams cases, in some cases, it won't be that different in the orioles case it is quite different and the orioles season to date stats mode number at fangraphs is very similar to the baseball reference number it's it's close to 50 but that's a very different way of doing things and you could always split the difference if you want maybe you think that the fangraphs playoff odds which still have the orioles at a very low number, even though they remain above 500 and just outside of a playoff position here, they still have single digit chances of making the playoffs, right, even after their increase over the past month. So maybe that's too pessimistic for your taste. And if you want to just buy into Orioles fever and have some fun, then you can bump that up accordingly if you'd like. But that accounts for the difference at

least. It's not that both sites, both models are doing exactly the same thing. And baseball reference is just a lot higher on the Orioles than everyone else's. Right. Yeah. I think that it's a meaningful difference and one that is useful to bear in mind as you're trying to sort through, like, what's what? What's what here? Yeah. Now, the biggest losers of the last month. Sorry, baseball, zero-sum game. If they're winners, there have to be losers.

So the losers over the last month are the Red Sox. The Red Sox are the big decreasers in terms of playoff odds since July 7th. They're down 57 percentage points. Not so great. It's been bad. It's been rough. They've lost a lot of games. They have lost a lot of players to injury. Chris Sale has had like multiple broken bones just during that time, I think, and is now definitively out for the season. He, of course, had broken a pinky with a comebacker shortly after he returned from the IL, but now he has wrecked his bike and also his wrist and underwent season-ending surgery. So it's been a tough couple of years for Chris Sale,

what with the Tommy John surgery and all of the other ailments that he has endured. So between that and some other injuries that they've suffered and just poor performance, things have not been great for the Red Sox. And we talked a little bit about how they had kind of a confounding deadline and tried to straddle the line between buyer and seller. And there is an Alex Spear article in The Globe about how even some people in the Red Sox organization are kind of confused about what they did or what they didn't do and what their stance was. Always a good sign. Yeah. I feel for Heimblum in a sense because he's trying to get away from only Sith deal

in absolutes. You don't have to only be a buyer or a seller. Maybe you can find ways to add here and subtract there. And we have seen some contending teams that have done that. They'll make a move where they trade a veteran maybe for other veterans or trade a veteran in one move and then add a veteran in another move. And so you don't have to be locked to one course necessarily, but it seems like maybe other teams and certainly Red Sox fans and media members, and even maybe some within the organization are not completely on the same page or following exactly what the plan was. They're trying to thread the needle and sell if a move made sense and buy if another move made sense. So I don't know that they significantly upgraded or downgraded at the deadline for this year,

if you factor in their various moves. But they were in a tough spot because they hit that huge slump not long before the deadline and still had a chance but weren't looking like a playoff team and were making tons of mistakes. So they didn't want to completely sell but also didn't want to just go all in when the odds were against them. And so they did what they did. And things have probably only gotten worse for them since then. Yeah, I think that it's just it's an odd spot to be in. And, you know, if the moves had sort of shaken out differently, if injuries were a little bit different, maybe we'd be like, oh, well, they charted a sensible course.

But I don't know that we're going to feel that way a couple months from now or even right now. Yeah. The other teams that have headed downhill, the Giants are down about 31 percentage points. They've hit hard times. They were kind of along with the Red Sox. They were sort of in the same boat when we got to the deadline. And it was like, are they going to do things? Are they going to get rid of this guy or that guy? And ultimately, mostly didn't. Didn't do a ton and just sort of waited

and saw what happened. And they do have a light schedule ahead of them for the most part. So that could help. But they are a losing team at this point. So after way overperforming the projections last year, they have not managed to do that this year. If anything, they are slightly underperforming in projections. So the 2021 Giants magic has not completely carried over. And of course, Buster Posey didn't carry over either, which hurt. And it's just like, it turns out that when you have an old team that is way better than everyone expected it to be, that doesn't necessarily mean that they weren't good, that they were some sort of mirage, but it is also difficult to sustain that. So they've continued to have some successes with imports and players

that they have helped improve, but they haven't had a healthy and productive Brandon Belt and Crawford the way that they did. The Brandons have not been nearly as great as they were in essentially a career year for Crawford last year, just great years for both of them. And then you take away that production in Posey, that's a lot of ground to make up and they just haven't. So I guess, you know, maybe last year was so good that if you're a Giants fan, you feel better about that than you would otherwise. I guess some sense of sanity has been restored to projections vis-a-vis the Giants, at least in that, you know, they haven't had a second in a row historic overperformance.

So that's something. Yeah, I guess that does this satisfy the paranoid faction that was convinced that there was scandal afoot? Yeah, which always seems sort of silly to me. But yes, I guess if you thought the Giants were doing something nefarious last year that was such a big boost to them, then it's either not working anymore or they stopped doing it. But I guess, you know, I ended up not picking the Giants as a playoff team in my preseason picks that I am made to make. And I just sort of stuck to my guns. And in general,

I tend to trust the numbers over my own personal opinion or the eye test, which is not to say that I just stick to the numbers in every case or the projections. But it's just it's hard for a human to beat the projections in the long run, I think. And the Giants certainly beat them last year, convincingly. But I just kind of bet on the plexiglass principle and regression to the mean and all the rest. And I guess that has turned out to be true. Not that I'm feeling great or vindicated about that. I certainly wasn't rooting against the Giants or anything. Hey, stop making the stats look bad. No, it was a ton of fun when they defied the stats last year. But it is,

I guess, nice to know that uh there's some some reason behind the projections that if you take the long view often tend to work out do you remember your pre-season projections without help i don't i have no memory of who i picked i have no memory i i want to say like or i didn't pick them either and i'm like i am not confident that that is accurate yeah i mean they mean very little to me and And even though I've brought them up a couple times here, and I guess I'm taking some semblance of a victory lap, like I don't put any stock in my ability to project things or beat the projection systems. And maybe I remember them because it's like traumatic for me to have to make so many predictions and projections like people at the

Ringer when it's preseason staff predictions time they're like oh ben's gonna be thrilled about this because i've been trying to just like weasel my way out of doing this for years and years and never quite succeed so yeah i do remember just because i don't make a lot of projections and predictions and so when i actually have to make them i suppose they stick in my mind for the most part but rarely do i like go way off the board with anything. Right. I mean, there are the make you look prescient, which I just cannot bring myself to do. It just feels philosophically inconsistent. And so rarely do I go for a huge long shot unless I actually believe in it. So my picks are famously pretty boring.

And so probably no one else does remember them. It's like my little protest. It's like, oh, you're going to make me make predictions? Okay. I'm just going to pick the best players to win the awards and the best teams to make the playoffs there. Hope you're happy. Let's see. So I picked the Dodgers to win the West, Milwaukee to win the Central, Atlanta to win the East. That was spicy of me. And then Mets, Giants, and Padres in wildcard spots. A lot of that is true. Some of that is true. Did I pick the Mariners?

I'm just reengaging with my past optimism. Yeah, look at me. So spicy. Houston, White Sox, and Blue Jays to win their respective divisions, and then Tampa, Yankees, and Seattle. So, you know, some of that has proven to be right. Not all of it, but, you know, parts of that are true. Parts of that are true.

Yeah. I was mostly on target here, I guess, in the NL. I picked the Braves, the Brewers, the Dodgers, Padres, Mets, Phillies as your wildcard teams. I guess maybe I was a little low on the Mets, perhaps. We'll see. I had picked them to win the division a bunch of times before that. And finally, I was like, OK, I'm giving up on this horse. I think they'll still be OK, but I'm not going to pick against Atlanta. Perhaps I should have stuck with the Mets one more year. We will see. And then in the AL, I also had the Blue Jays winning the East. I think everyone at the Ringer did.

We were very high on the Blue Jays, and then I had the White Sox and Astros with the Rays and the Yankees and the Red Sox sneaking in there. So I did not believe in the Mariners, it looks like, and was too high on the Blue Jays, it turns out, although the Blue Jays of late have been playing more like the team that I think we thought they were. They're in a playoff spot. They're the top wildcard in the L right now. They're still 10 games back, so it would take a pretty historic collapse by the Yankees in order to flip the order there. But lately, at least, they have looked like the best team in that division,

not to sound any panic alarms about the Yankees. But we didn't mention the Yankees in our biggest playoff odds risers and followers little readout there because they're not on it. Their odds have not appreciably changed because they built up such an enormous lead. Such a lead. Yeah, that even though they have not had a great last month,

have not been playing at nearly the pace that they were, have been a losing team, depending on where you set the arbitrary endpoints there, they basically have not gained or lost any playoff odds because they've been at 100 both times. They've lost a tiny bit of division odds, but they're still at 95% likely. So, you know, I know that there are a lot of people just wanting to bail out the rising water in the

Yankees boat, but it's probably going to be okay. Now, I will say, like, I didn't see the Yankees preseason as some sort of historically great team that was going to challenge single season wins records. So in that sense, it feels, I guess, more like what I was expecting. If you actually look at their record today, that would have been much closer to what I thought they would be preseason or even still probably above what I would have expected. So in that sense, maybe we could have seen that correction coming. So in that sense, maybe we could have seen that correction coming. But not only are they no longer on some sort of historic wins pace, but they have been surpassed by some teams, not in the AL East, crucially for them. But, you know, they have a 634 winning percentage. The Astros also have a 634 winning percentage. So there, that's a tie. And then the Mets are up to 652. So best record in New York, no longer the Yankees. It's the Mets. Still a lot of juice to that Subway Series rivalry. I'm actually taking a friend whose wedding I am in and who's getting married later this year. We're going to one of the next Subway Series games later this month. And the atmosphere

is going to be pretty spicy at that one, I think. So I'm looking forward to that. And then the team that is above them all, as always, your Los Angeles Dodgers. Not your, literally, but 77 and 33. Yeah. 700 winning percentage. So they're on a 113 win pace. It's like, yep, another year, another dominant Dodgers team that is leading

a good Padres team by 16 games at this point. And they're about to get Dustin May back too. So I know Clayton Kershaw is hurt for now, but you just fill that spot with Dustin May, who's looked great in his rehab assignment so far. And if he is the Dustin May we were seeing early last year before his tommy john surgery when it seems like maybe he had figured out how to translate the nasty stuff into strikeouts then that's a pretty huge addition late in the season yeah and like you know i know that it's only what august 11th i don't even know how many games it is but like max muncie has like a 276 wrc plus in august so it's like sure

because what they really need is for max muncie to recover his form it's like oh his elbow's all better actually for real now maybe he's a good max muncie again because you know they just didn't have enough hitters they were like we don't have enough of those we just need him to be himself again and uh joey gallo 120 WRC plus as a Dodger. It's because he gets to live by the beach now, Ben. He doesn't feel confined in his New York environs. The beard is back. People get so fussy when people talk about leaving New York.

And I'm here to tell you, you know, some of the takes are bad and some of them are fine. And, you know, if you just didn't react to any of them, they maybe would stop. Chill. It's fine. No one has been happier to leave New York than Joey Gallo. So if this very small sample resurgence continues, I don't know that we even need to credit great Dodgers hitter development, which certainly is a skill that they possess. But also, Joey Gallo was really good for a long time. This is who you would expect Joey Gallo to be. And we talked like when the Benintendi trade happened, it's like, you know, I noted that Gallo had better projections than

Benintendi did. Now, if he had remained in New York, would he have played to those projections? Well, based on his mindset and the quotes that we went over, I doubt it. Whether he can just immediately leave that behind him and go back to who he was in los angeles i don't know but nice little start for him so yeah i'm happy for him that he is hopefully in a better place psychologically speaking i just look forward to the plucky seattle mariners making their first world series against this dominant dodgers team and getting absolutely slaughtered yep it's not funny but funny, but it would be a story. We'd have some stories. Yeah.

And just to close the loop on that playoff odds segment, the teams other than the Red Sox and Giants that lost a lot over the past month and a little bit, the Brewers down about 22 percentage points, the Rays 17, the Twins 17, and a couple other teams with single digit losses, the Angels, the Marlins, and the White Sox, who have hemorrhaged playoff probability all year. The White Sox, you know, there have been a few notable injuries this week, right, of late, not just the Chris Sale one, also Matt Carpenter, the best hitter in baseball, Matt Carpenter. He fractured a ball off his foot and he's going to be out for a while. Also, Matt Carpenter, the best hitter in baseball, Matt Carpenter, he fractured a ball off his foot and he's going to be out for hang in there yep they're close enough that you know i think they were most people's pre-season picks and we were all thinking oh the twins just

don't have the pitching to hang in that race and and lately they haven't looked like they have the pitching the pitching is broken down a bit even though they reinforced it at the deadline and so it's not like the white socks are out this thing, but they just cannot get anything going, really. They're just a game over 500 still, and their playoff odds were down about five percentage points since July 7th. So they're now at about 40% to make the playoffs and maybe a one in four shot to win that division, according to the odds here so really one of the most underperforming disappointing teams relative to preseason projections and expectations yeah it's just in some respects it is a testament to the talent that they do have on that roster that they have kind of remained in it even if more on the periphery than we were anticipating coming into the season. But it just has not gone great in ways that have often been outside their control. And then the stuff that has been inside their control, they've seemed like they're content to just be like, well, this is our team.

You know, we're just kind of like, here we go. Here's our team. And, you know, I think that the Twins and, to a lesser extent, the Guardians have been like, hey, thanks. You know, Minnesota was actually busy at the deadline. Cleveland was not. But now, you know, Stephen Kwan hit a home run. So who cares? You know, Kwan, Kwan. Yeah, I'm happy with how Kwan has performed since that first weekend, just going totally wild and everyone getting super excited about Stephen Kwan. Obviously, he has not hit nearly as well since then, but he's been okay. He's been fine. Okay, no one really believed that he was going to be a superstar just because of

that tiny little hot streak that he had at the beginning of the season, but he has continued to perform the way we thought he would in the sense that he doesn't strike out and just does not miss the ball and has that extremely level swing and contact-oriented approach. And he has a 121 WRC plus on the season with more walks than strikeouts

and more than 400 plate appearances. And I suppose actually 125 after the home run today as we're recording. So, you know, I mean, if you subtracted his flurry of hits from those first few games, I guess it wouldn't look quite as impressive. But like, he's been good, you know? If you subtracted his putrid May, you know, two and a half wins according to Fangraphs War. And again, this was a guy who was not ranked on top press spec lists except for Fangraphs, right? So I would say that that's a win, you know, not a superstar, but productive player. He's held his own. Yeah.

That's a win, you know, not a superstar, but productive player. He's he's held his own. Yeah. You know, it's such a funny thing. Like, I think that getting on the one hand, like you want credit, but you don't want to be, you know, getting overly fussed about this stuff can can lead you to madness. Right. Because on the one hand, you're right. Like we we were the only outlet that had him ranked on the top 100.

Like we had him ranked as a 50. It wasn't like he was like a 70 for us you know he was a 50 we're like this guy's belongs in the top 100 he's going to be a productive big leaguer he has been that it's good it's fine like you know it's just such a funny it's such a funny thing because you i think that there is a satisfaction and a validation of process to be like yeah like we got this guy right but like there were other guys we didn't so i don't know it's just like it's hard to be you don't want to be overly sassy because i don't you know think that that's especially productive but you also want to say like yeah we got that one right from so if we look at his this is i think you know what i think

this is like a good indication of who kwan can be so his early part of the season hot hot his may putrid if we go from june 1st to yesterday he's got a 130 wrc plus 329 385 410 hitter that seems right you know that's like, welcome to Stephen Kwan. You know, it's fine. Yeah. And speaking of other guardians who have been doing well, Tristan McKenzie is someone I've liked for a while and have been pulling for because he was my breakout pick this year. And that's looking good lately.

He's been really good. I have a pretty good record with the breakout picks in that I picked Shane Bieber in 2019 and Corbin Burns in 2020. And you could say this is cheating, but I picked Otani last year. And, you know, I picked Otani to be like great. And, you know, not everyone was buying that he could be a great two-way player at that point. And I still believed. You don't have to give me huge credit for that. But I picked McKenzie this year and he was, you know, up and down last year. He had some dominant stretches. He had some stretches where he couldn't throw strikes. And lately he has just been unhittable for the Guardians. And, you know, I can't crow too much about making a good breakout pick because really, like, I should nail that one every year because you're giving me every single player in the majors to choose from. It's not even like pick a breakout guy on this team or something. It's like you can choose anyone in the majors. You get your pick of any player. And I try

to be semi-strict at least. You know, I try not to take players who have been breakout guys before Otani was kind of pushing it. But, you know, often breakout picks are like, this guy was good last year, but maybe not everyone noticed or something. So he's my breakout guy. And I'm always like, well, but he broke out. He was already good. Like maybe people didn't know.

But I try to pick players who have not really been great, at least consistently, and hope that they will take a leap forward. And so if you give me as a potential pool of breakout picks everyone, then it would almost be embarrassing if I did not nail that because I get to choose the one person I feel most strongly about and most confident about. And yeah, you're going to go wrong sometimes regardless. But still, your hit rate should be pretty high on those but feeling good about tristan mckenzie and how he has performed for the guardians lately i just enjoy watching him pitch just because of his build yeah and just

because of his stuff and and his repertoire so it's been fun to see him put things together yeah it's great like i think that the game you when you can have a bunch of different aesthetics, and sometimes when we see the contradiction between what we assume about what a person's build means for their athleticism, those are the most satisfying. And I think the place where we often see this is with the guy who people might describe as husky or roly-poly, and then he's like super athletic. And it's like, oh, this is challenging the assumptions that we have about what athleticism can look like. And I think when you have like kind of a spindly dude who is able to do what Mackenzie can, like that also, you know, both underscores sometimes the rarity of it, but also confronts the assumption that we have about like what that can look like.

And that's cool. So while we're on the subject of the AL Central, I guess we should talk about the team that is not making good news, but is making news this week. And that's the Detroit Tigers, who pulled the plug on at least this part of the rebuild and fired their GM Al Avila. And Chris Illich came out and did a press conference where he basically just disclaimed all responsibility for anything and was like, you know, I didn't make those trades. That was Al, which, you know, true, probably true, but also maybe not exactly what you want the owner to say. Yeah. If you're like, I'm involved, but it's not my fault. It's like, well, what are we meant to draw from that, sir? But really, I guess this was not a shocker, maybe.

I mean, maybe it would have been even less surprising if it had happened at the end of the season. But things have not gone well for the Tigers. And we talked about this prior to the deadline when there were some rumors about Tarek Skubal potentially being traded. And our take essentially was, well, are you going to let the guy who has thus far failed to make the rebuild work embark on what almost seems to be a second rebuild? Maybe not. Maybe you want someone else handling that. And ultimately, they held on to Skubal, but they did not hold on to Alavila. So he's gone and hard to quibble with the decision, right? Because if you're talking about

disappointing teams in 2022 relative to preseason expectations, there really was a strong sense that the Tigers were turning the corner, as the saying goes, right? I mean, they were not necessarily playoff favorites, but I think they were a dark horse pick, right? And it seemed like they thought they were ready to make a step forward because they spent to their credit and the spending has not worked out very well. And Javier Baez has been the worst version of Javier Baez. And Eduardo Rodriguez has just not been with the team for undisclosed reasons for most of this season. So it's hard to know whether that's something that could have come up in due diligence or whether that's just a totally unpredictable thing. We don't know what the reason is, and I wouldn't want to speculate. But the list goes on. Tucker Barnhart hasn't hit even by Tucker Barnhart standards. Maybe the most embarrassing thing of all is that Isak Paredes, whom the Tigers traded to the Rays two days before opening day for Austin Meadows,

Isak Paredes would be the best hitter on the Tigers this season. Paredes would be the best hitter on the Tigers this season. He would be leading the Tigers in OPS+, in home runs, even by baseball reference war for that matter. And he's 23. Maybe he could have been someone to build around. So things have just not worked out well for the Tigers in so many ways. And instead of taking a step forward, as we noted, they were a winning team after April last year, and it seemed like, OK, things are coming together. You have this young pitching. You have Spencer Torkelson. You have Riley Green. And, man, aside from Scooble, just about everything has gone wrong.

Yeah, I mean, it's just such a shame. it's just such a shame some of the things that have gone wrong are like they're not they're not necessarily ones where i'm like oh we all saw that coming you know it's like coming into the year there were teams where we're like you didn't address this like obvious deficiency in your roster and now that obvious deficiency is holding you back like that's that's one kind of thing but like torkelson's performance you know there's a there's needing to adjust to the majors and then there's this and i don't know that like he'll it's not like he'll never figure it out like i don't think that we're coming away thinking that but it's like it's been real bad you know torkelson's been real bad and then guys have been hurt and then they've underperformed and then you know and it does feel a bit like they are

realizing like the bottom quartile of their potential like distribution of outcomes right but also some of those were maybe more sort of easy to anticipate like this version of bias has always existed right this was one of the potential downside outcomes, and that's been pretty bad. You're relying on a lot of young guys to be not just serviceable big leaguers, but real contributors. Again, some of those underperformances, I think we're all a little surprised by the depth of them, but you have the injury thing. Now, it's like, what do they do now, Ben? Yeah, they're in a tough spot. Because their farm is not good. It's 24th, according to Fangraphs.

Yeah, their farm system is not very good. They've already spent a good chunk of change, which if we're going to really pick nits about Eelj's statement, it's like he didn't get to just spend all that money without ownership buy-in, right? That budget got set. pick nits about eels just statement it's like he didn't get to just spend all that money without ownership buy-in right like that budget got set so right and even some of those trades like i mean you can say that those trades were were wise and and necessary because the tigers were rebuilding and they had their run and they were successful and unfortunately it didn't end up with a ring

but you know it ran its course. And then you have to sort of start over unless you're going to really double down and extend players. And I guess the player that they decided to extend was Miguel Cabrera, which they did really earlier than they really had a pressing reason to. And perhaps that was unwise. It seemed somewhat risky at the time. And, you know, if you're going to trade Justin Verlander and J.D. Martinez and Nick Castellanos and Ian Kinsler and just everyone else they have traded, you know, it turns out that, like, I guess Justin Verlander was the one that they should have signed to an extension and kept around, right? Because he's still awesome and looks like a Cy Young favorite, but who knew that he could maintain his performance so long? And of course, he did have the Tommy John surgery. But if you're going to kickstart your rebuild by trading a lot of your big players, you got to get something back. And they just have not really gotten much

or anything back in a lot of those major trades that you have to use to seed your system. It just has not paid dividends. Now, they use some of their early round draft picks on promising prospects. Casey Mize and Matt Manning and Green and Scooble and Torkelson. And a lot of those guys either have gotten hurt in the pitcher's cases or just have failed to launch thus far. Even Green, he didn't flame out as spectacularly as Torkelson did in his first taste of the majors, but he hasn't been great. So that's a problem. That's your core. That's what you have to build around. And if that core turns out to be a shaky foundation, is that bad luck is that a process problem with player development is there a scouting issue with not finding a lot of gems in later rounds of the

draft is it just a holistic problem but you know they've been post rebuild or mid rebuild for quite a while now right and they find themselves in a position that I guess maybe is most analogous to the Phillies in recent years where they look like the team that's not coming out the other side with a strong playoff contender and the Phillies have just spent and spent to try to get themselves up to even sneaking in with a wild card and the Tigers are not even at that point yet. So it's tough, but you can't say Avila didn't have his shot, right? I mean, he's been in the organization for 20 years or whatever, and he's been the top guy since, well, almost exactly seven years ago. So he's had his chance. It's not working out. You can't say that they gave up too early on him i don't think

no and you know i know that some have sort of reacted to the timing around the deadline and like i initially thought that was curious that they would like have him go through the deadline and then fire him they weren't super active as you noted i do wonder if like scooble isn't dinged up did they move him but you know it doesn't matter like that's a counterfactual we don't have to realize i guess this way they get a head start on their search for for their next gm but yeah it's too bad i mean we i think directionally we tend to be excited about teams that as they are coming out of what they understand and we understand to be their rebuilder like okay now is the time to like supplement this homegrown group with, with investment, right.

With looking at the roster and saying, what are we able to, who are we able to sign and spend money on? Who's going to really help to solidify this into the next great insert name of team here, team. Right. And I think that like, we are a fan of that directionally, but you got to spend on the right guys and you need other stuff to go well. And then you need the ability to course correct

when things start to go wrong. And it gets harder to do that when you're in sort of the spot that the Tigers are in. And so I don't know. I wonder how long it will take for us to see a good Tigers team. But we also said a couple months ago, like the Phillies, man, and now they're in playoff spots. So sometimes you just need breaks to go your way

instead of be on your players. That sounds terrible. That was like an injury joke. I don't like to joke about that. What was that about, Ben? Why did I do that? But you know what I'm trying to say. Sometimes you get a good break, and sometimes you go, them's the breaks.

And then it's a lot of saying the word break right in a row. Yes, right. And I don't know whether Cabrera will even be back next year. He has a new contract for one more year. But yeah, he's made some noises about maybe just physically being unable to. So we will see. Yeah, he's said that they're gonna have to you know look at stuff him in the front office and his agent because i think the

it's the knee right the knee is really seeming to bother him a lot yeah so i could imagine just everything that went wrong goes right you know some of these young players they establish themselves and they figure it out right and i don't know if chris illich is the equivalent of mike illich when it comes to spending and just he seems to not be no i mean you know it's hard to assess i guess because they have been in rebuilding mode for much of his ownership period and they did get some big guys this past offseason so it's not as if he's done nothing. We still don't know what more he will be willing to do. And I don't know how desirable a GM post this is. I guess there's some question about him maybe meddling from time to time, even though he is saying that

he had nothing to do with anything that went wrong, really. But I'm sure that they'll go through the whole search. It sounds like for now, Sam Menzen is not the official interim GM, I suppose, but is sort of the point person. He's a VP in AGM and is more analytic leaning. Actually, Sam went to scout school with me. I mean, not with me, but we were in the same scout school class and we got to know each other a bit there and have stayed in touch from time to time ever since. He has struck me as an impressive person. Not that I know how to evaluate a potential GM candidate just from having breakfast a few times many years ago, but he seems like a good guy from my limited

interactions with him, but I'm sure that they will do a full search and talk to all of the obvious candidates and we'll decide what's best for that organization. But it seems like there's maybe some modernizing that has to happen there. People have even mentioned manager A.J. Hinch as a potential GM candidate because because of course he does have some front office experience in his past too. So who knows? We'll see. But it's tough, I feel, for Tigers fans. I hope for their sake that things turn around. I also think that this is, at least for me, something that is perhaps a little humbling in terms of how good we are on the outside at gauging the player dev acumen of an organization and it's still hard to tell a little bit right because like scooball before he was hurt like school was good and the

other guys have been hurt and like you know sometimes hurt pretty badly right like there are tjs to be had among that young group but my impression of them from looking at their young pitchers was wow they seem to have figured something out about pitch design and maybe they have but i feel less confident now and maybe i should just always feel less confident about that you know yeah or about anything well yeah i mean like i can engage in in fits of no confidence so that's not productive either you know we're just like therapizing but yeah i think it is a good reminder to recognize that there can be noise in that perception and that you know even if that perception is right it can be undermined by just like you know a guy needing tommy john

or a guy being heard or a guy being whatever you know know, like stuff happens. So there's always more to learn and assess as it were. Yeah. All right. Well, I did want to mention, speaking of things that have not gone as planned, there was some news about Jason Hayward this week, basically that the Cubs will be releasing him after this season. He is not playing. He is hurt, probably not playing the rest of the season, but he's with the team. He's going to stay with the team just to provide veteran mentorship and clubhouse presence and such. But they will be going their separate ways next season, and they announced that. And so there have been some retrospectives, postmortems on the Jason Hayward contract. And some people have said, well, that didn't work out for the Cubs. That wasn't a great deal.

And certainly that's true in a sense. But I did want to note, you know, he was signed to, what, an eight-year, $184 million deal in December 2015. And that was one that was war-wise it made sense, right? Makes sense, right? Because he's always a player whose wars, at least when he was a productive player, sort of outstripped his surface stats, his back of the baseball card stats and maybe his general reputation. And he has not hit even as well as he had prior to that. And so he has not been able to be the player he was before he was with the Cubs. Now, I think even if you went purely by on-field performance, I don't know that you would rate this as one of the worst returns on investment from a team perspective. I mean, he has been worth, according to Fangraph's free agent valuation, so what he would have in theory commanded if he had just gone year to year, let's say, or the typical price per win for a free agent. He's been worth about $71 million over his span with the Cubs. Not what they were hoping for, of course, but has not been completely unproductive or unavailable. He has had his moments. But the big thing that everyone remembers with Jason Hayward's tenure with the Cubs

is the 2016 World Series and the rain delay and the famous story about how he pumped up the team and made an inspiring speech and they went out there and won their first World Series in forever. And look, there's no way to know whether they would have won anyway if Hayward had not made that inspirational speech or if someone else had made an inspirational speech instead of Hayward. And in general, I'm not always someone who is attributing everything to clubhouse chemistry and pep talks and such. I certainly believe that they can have their impacts at times, but I think talent probably matters the most. So who knows? We can never say whether that really did have a decisive impact.

But if you're a Cubs fan, are you going to take that chance? First of all, there's no real reason for you to be up in arms about this contract if you're a Cubs fan because it's not your money and it's the Ricketts' money. And frankly, they haven't spent enough of it on that team. So unless you're someone who is like accepting the Ricketts' self-imposed payroll constraints and are saying, well, if we didn't have Jason Hayward, we could have spent on this guy and that guy instead. And I guess that is true in a sense, but also true that they just could have spent more regardless and actually invested in that team and that core instead of breaking it up. I know they didn't perform quite as well as everyone hoped and expected that they would after that World Series. But anyway, if you're saying, well, Jason Hayward wasn't worth that contract, even so, like if you had the opportunity to just wipe that one off the board and say, oh, we'll put that money toward this player or that player who is more productive over that span. And you can just have 20-20 hindsight.

Would you do it? I wonder how many Cubs fans would actually do it. Like if you could say, you can undo the Hayward deal, put that money towards other players who we know were more productive over that span. But you have the possible butterfly effect of taking away Jason Hayward's inspirational speech in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. Are you going to risk that as a Cubs fan? Of course you're not, right? You can't possibly risk that. So in that sense, you kind of have to consider the contract of success. I mean, you know, like, I don't know what Hayward's value over replacement inspirational speaker is or like how we would assess the chances that that actually affected the outcome of that game.

But there's no way you're going to go back and change that if you're a Cubs fan, because you couldn't win one before that. You haven't won one since then. That was everything to you, to that organization. And you're not going to mess with anything that led to that or that preceded that, I don't think, because you change one thing, who knows what happens, what happens differently about the outcome. I guess you could say that about many things that happened that season, but one was a proximate event if not a proximate cause and so I feel like as a Cubs fan you just have to say you know what I'm happy that Jason Hayward was a Cub just because of that one moment yeah I mean now the contingent of us who are convinced that the Cubs finally breaking the curse, getting that off their back, being World Series champions

was an event in the timeline that maybe altered the fortunes of the origin. Look, I'm just saying that there is a part of me that is convinced that the baseball gods were like, you don't know what you're asking for and then boom. Someone might say, Meg, what will happen when the Mariners make a World Series and then win one? I am here to tell you, I don't know. I'm terrified about what ripple effects that might cause. No, you want a World Series.

If you're a Cubs fan, you especially want a World Series because you're tired of hearing about how you don't have one. You're like, hey, it's been a long time we'd like to win one and you know i think that you can hold two personalities in you simultaneously you can have within you the potentially superstitious understanding that if you remove hayward from the equation that you don't win the world series and then you can have the rational part of you that knows that his contract wasn't really an impediment to them doing more stuff. They could have done more stuff if they had wanted to. They simply lacked the will as an ownership group

to make that happen. And you can be a superstitious rationalist in that respect and enjoy your World Series. Just like I am convinced that we need someone else to throw a perfect game our playoff odds do not factor in my superstition

that Felix Hernandez being the last pitcher in Major League Baseball to have thrown a perfect game is the reason the Mariners have not gone back to the postseason like we don't know how to factor that in. Plus, they don't let me monkey around with it on the back end because that way lies madness.

All right. And also, shout out to the Pirates' Rodolfo Castro for losing his phone on the field, sliding into third base and having his phone just plop out of his back pocket. A number of people have pointed out that this was sort of a glass ass syndrome situation. Now, he was not aware of the phone being in his back pocket. At least he says he was not. And so he was not intentionally. No, I mean, not until it was lost. He didn't realize it was back there. He was not sliding that way

to protect the phone because you're not supposed to have a phone on your person on the field during the game or even in the dugout, right? No electronic devices. So he says that he left it there accidentally. It was just like muscle memory. Yeah. Now the perplexing part is that it was, I think, the fourth inning at that point. Haven't you tried to sit down in the dugout even one time?

Exactly. at that point yeah so like haven't you tried to sit down in the dugout even one time exactly no i i think he said that he he had one of those oven mitt style sliding gloves in his pocket and so there was some cushioning there and so he didn't realize that the phone was there and you know there was an ap article about this where a number of players uh poked fun or or sort of identified with or sympathized with castro because they said that they have almost done that themselves. You know, they're using their phone right before they get dressed or go out to the field. And maybe they catch themselves right before they're about to go out there with the phone. In a sense, it's almost surprising that this hasn't happened before. Maybe it has and we just didn't know because the phone didn't plop out right in

front of everyone's face which was amusing i don't think plop is a good word ben no i think that's a bad word okay not like a bad not like a it's not a swear dylan doesn't need to bleep it but i'm just saying that like i don't i don't like it i don't like that word. It's like a moist. Yeah. Plop. Yeah. Don't care for that. That's okay. I just thought I'd let you know. I'm sorry. Plop. But it did just sort of just fly right out there. And Adam Hamari, the umpire, was like, oh, you know, you noticed you got a phone there.

Looks like he just pointed down very matter-of-factly. So there's been some news that like the league is looking into potential discipline here because, you know, I don't know. They're worried about cheating. They're worried about shenanigans. There are rules against these things for good reason. And, you know, he's he's a young player and people, I think, are mostly giving him the benefit of the doubt. But I guess they at least have to launch a little investigation just to make sure that there's no chicanery going on here. Still some sensitivity about sign stealing and such, but this was not quite a glass-ass situation because he was not sliding headfirst to protect the phone, or so he said. It just happened to be

that way. And then the evidence was right out there for everyone. It was almost like, you know, you cork a bat and a bunch of cork pieces come out or something. It's like, oh, there it is, although it's not the same. But it's sort of the same in that the evidence is right there in front of you. So that was amusing. Had not seen that before. And it was relatable because if I were a big league ballplayer, I'm always on my phone. I imagined that this would probably happen to me at some point. mean probably i mean maybe it wouldn't though because i am a

rule follower in general so well right and also wouldn't you be excited about like i you know this is like when i fly i'm like this is great no wi-fi for me like i get a break it's an enforced it's an enforced break right and i think you would you'd be like what's gonna happen in three hours that i i have to you know it's fine yeah i don't need it out there probably some fans will tweet angry tweets about the mistake i just made so yeah it's a bad idea to have that on you you need to just be present and engage with your teammates and the act of sporting you know that's what it's about i will always say that the wi-fi on the plane is broken and that might be true but i don't actually know because i never try to use it because you know what this is this is meg time it's time for me to get to read without people talking to me

about stuff you know i like people and I like talking about stuff, but sometimes you want an enforced three-hour break while you're flying home to see your family. Sure. All right. Let's end with the pass blast and some stat blasts. Maybe I'll go pass blast first this time. Yeah, switching things up.

Mix it up. Episode 1888, pass blast from 1888 and from Richard Hershberger, historian, saber researcher, author of Strike Four, The Evolution of Baseball. He said there was a plethora of possibilities for 1888, so he indulged himself by selecting two, although one is very short. He said he couldn't pass on this first one because it is also a scene in Bull Durham. So the Giants are on a winter tour to California, and as related in the Cleveland Plain Dealer of February 9th, 1888, Buck Ewing and a few of the Giants while in Frisco did not care one day about playing two weeks ago and took a hose and watered the grounds.

The hose would not reach second base, and then the trick was discovered. Richard says it worked better in the movie version, but that goes back a long way. This is the second time that Bull Durham has come up in the pass blast because we had Bull Durham style cliches being bandied about in the 19th century. So this tactic of watering down the infield and hosing down the grounds, that was age old too. But the main pass blast here, another foreshadowing of the future is the earliest known suggestion for pitchers not batting.

This is from a column by our old friend Henry Chadwick in The Sporting Life of August 8th, 1888. Quote, a well-known and noted player residing in Pittsburgh recently sent me a letter in which he makes the following suggestion. He says, I should like to see a rule embodied in the national code, which would admit of the captain of a team having the privilege of allowing his pitcher to go to the bat or not when his turn came. He very pointedly says in advocating this new rule that pitchers as a rule are rather weak batters. And besides this, when they come out of the box on a hot day at the close of a lively inning, they are likely to be pretty well fatigued and are then in no condition to go to the bat or to run bases. Then too, in case he does go to the bat after a long inning and happens to get his base on balls or to make a hit and in consequence has to run bases,

he comes in from the double fatigue in no trim to do justice to himself in the box in the next inning. Variants of the idea will pop up several times over the years. In this version, the team can simply skip the pitcher, having a lineup of just eight hitters. The designated pinch hitter will be a later refinement when finally adopted. when finally adopted. And we've talked about that proposal. Don't have a DH, just have eight hitters instead. Obviously, that is not the way that we've gone, but all these things go back a long time. Yeah. So it seems like the main reason or one of the reasons why they were advocating this at this time was just that it was hard on pitchers to have to bat and run and then pitch and not have a lot of recovery time. And I remember reading a little research on that, and it seemed like there was maybe a tiny bit of evidence that pitchers pitched worse a little bit after having hit or run the bases or both in the previous half inning, but it was not a huge effect.

I will link to that study on the show page. But the primary reason is that they can't hit. So that was not as apparent in 1888 as it became later. There were still a lot of two-way players at that point and caliber of play was not as high. And so pitchers could hold their own a little bit more, but they were still bad, just not as completely inept as they later became. Just not as god-awful as what they ended up being. Yeah. So, you know, it only took almost a century for this idea to be put into practice and

then another half a century for it to become mandatory across both leagues. So sometimes change takes time. Better late than never. Mm-hmm. All right. So, stat blasts. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways.

Here's today's StatBlast. Okay, so StatBlast, as always, is presented by our friends at StatHead, which is powered by Baseball Reference and is a very valuable research tool that we use all the time. I use it constantly answering questions from listeners or in my own research and things that I'm writing or podcasting about. But, you know, we just got a question from listener Chris, who noted that on August 9th, Miles Michaelis had a bad game. Two and two thirds innings pitched, 14 hits, 10 earned runs, two strikeouts, no walks, not so good.

And he said, in terms of a starting pitcher, is this one of the worst individual starts? And I was able to very quickly stat head that and just search by the lowest game scores in the pitching game finder. And it was indeed the worst start by game score this season. That's a negative eight game score for Miles Michaelis using the Bill James version of game score. That's not so good. The only other negative this season was Dallas Keuchel

for the White Sox on April 20th. He had a negative two. Negative eight, that's quite bad. So that was the worst this season, but not nearly the worst all time. So I also sent Chris the results just since the integration era. And there are, it looks like, about 27 starts that have been worse than negative eight. So that's some consolation to Miles Michaelis. The worst of all time by game score, a negative 21 by Mike Oquist on August 3rd, 1998. This was Oakland against the Yankees.

It was a 14 to one game. You can guess which side of it he was on, but he actually went five innings in that game. They just left him in to give up 16 hits, 14 runs all earned on four homers, three walks, three strikeouts. He just wore one that day, 115 pitches. So, yeah, they just sort of left him out there to get knocked around. Not a banner day for Mike Oquist, but at least he made some history. He has a record to his name. Wow. But that's not even the stat blast.

That's just a little side stat head search that I did, the likes of which I do constantly. Side quest, side stat. Yeah, exactly. I don't know how to say it. One of those things. Yep, side quest. So you too can embark on those StatHead side quests if you go to StatHead.com and use our coupon code WILD20 to get a $20 discount on the $80 one-year subscription. That's for one sport, but they also offer other sports and you can get a package deal if you like. So I believe we didn't do a stat blast last week.

I have a few built up here. They'll be pretty quick. last week. I have a few built up here. They'll be pretty quick. So we got one question from Alana, who noted that it looks like Atlanta is going to be the third team this year to cut Robinson Cano. And that did happen, right? So is he the first player to be released outright by three different teams in a single season? He's also still receiving checks from the Mariners, meaning he'll appear on four different teams' MLB payrolls at the end of the year. Even if none of these are records, we could still have a war-based fun fact if he's the only player with a Jaws score over his position's Hall of Fame average to have done it. So I guess there's that. I asked Kenny Jacklin at Baseball Reference

to look this up for me, and he grouped together releases, which he classified as a mix of released and granted free agency mid-season in their database. So it had to happen after opening day and before the last game of the regular season. And not unprecedented, at least for a player to be released this many times in a season. I will put the full list online. And actually, Kenny went above and beyond and included the war career and Jaws scores for me here too. So by that metric, yes, it looks like Canoe is indeed the best player to have been released this many times in a single season. Others were Darren Oliver, Stan Williams, they had 22-something war, and Jamie Moyer, actually, 2012. He was released three times at the very end there, and he had almost 50 war at that point. So he was the closest. But yes, I guess Canoe is the most

accomplished player who has suffered this indignity. but there are a bunch of players, 75, who have been released three times in a single season. However, there are only six who have been released more, and they were all released four times. So that's Carlos Torres in 2019, Randy Wolfe in 2014, Coy Hill 2012, John Moses 1991, Ted Gray 1955, and Willis Hudlin 1940. And he actually had 30 career war at that point, and he was released four times. So, yeah, it's not great for Canoe. I guess it's unprecedented in one sense, but also surpassed in some other senses. Okay. Also a question from Dennis, who said,

Jake Fishman made his major league debut with the Marlins on July 31st. We mentioned that, right? Yeah. Fishman. Fishman. It was appropriate, although they only kept him up for one game. Yeah. He was optioned again.

But Dennis noted he became the first Union College baseball player to play in the bigs since Billy Cunningham suited up for the Senators 110 years ago. Is this the longest gap between major leaguers from the same college program? Oh. I know this pod isn't huge on college ball, but you have to have a soft spot for a cold weather Division III school. Union College is in Schenectady, New York. So Kenny Jacklin, a baseball reference, answered this one for me too. And yes, it is.

Wow. The answer is yes. So Bill Cunningham debuted September 12th, 1910. Jake Fishman debuted July 31st, 2022. That is 40,865 days between Union College alumni there making the majors. And that is indeed the longest. The closest after that, Haverford College had Bill Lindsay debut June 1911. And then Stephen Ridings, who I believe was a meet a major leaguer subject last year. He debuted for the Yankees last August. So that was 40,221 days. So those are the two longest gaps. Kenny notes that incredibly two schools have gaps within this top 100 list, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania and University of Rhode Island. So they appear twice. They have two very long gaps. So, for example, East Stroudsburg, they had a gap of 18,000 plus days between Jack O'Neill in 1902 and Harry Schaeffer in 1952.

And then they had another gap of close to 17,000 days between Harry Schaeffer and Joel Bennett in 1998. And then the other one was University of Rhode Island. They had a gap of more than 17,000 days between Norm Geigen, April 67, and Nick Greenwood in 2014. And they had had a previous gap of 17,000 something days between Tom Catterson, 1908, and Angelo Dagris in 1955. So it's Union College, it's Haverford College, some other one gaps. Adrian College went almost 39,000 days between Clint Rogg in 1915 and Ryan Dorough last August. Canisius College went 36,000 days between George Daly in 1909 and John Axford in 2009. baker university 36 000 days between zip zabel in 1913 and vidal nunio in 2013 oh yeah and then last one i guess last one over 35 000 is slippery rock university of pennsylvania

36 000 pennsylvania representation on this list right yeah so so Bob Shockey, 1913, and Matt Adams, 2012. So it's a fun list. Again, I will put the data for that one online as well. Now we have Patreon supporter Matt who noted that on July 6th in a Pirates-Yankees game, Aaron Judge and Aaron Hicks each hit Grand Slams. The folks in the Discord group figured out that this was the first time two players with the same first name hit grand slams, not only in the same game, but on the same day. I think we mentioned that. But Matt said, that got me thinking.

There had to have been some day when players named Mike or Willie or Jack combined for seven homers, right? What's the record for total home runs in a game by players with the same first name? runs in a game by players with the same first name. So for this one, went to frequent StatBlast consultant Ryan Nelson, and he found that the record for most players with the same name hitting homers in one day is six, which has happened twice. So July 21st, 1940, Joe Cronin, Joe Gallagher, Joe Gordon, Joe Grace, Joe Marty, and Joe Medwick all hit homers in the same game. And then September 21st, 1965, the Jims hit six homers. Jim Davenport, Jim French, Jim Hickman, Jim King, Jim Lefevre, and Jim Pagliaroni.

Jims and Joes. The record for most homers hit by players with the same name in one day, so not most players, but most homers with the same name, is 8, and that was the previously mentioned Joes, because Joe Gordon and Joe Grace both hit 2 that

day, although on May 30, 2012, there was 7, with only 4 players, 4 Carloses, because Carlos Gonzalez hit three, Carlos Pena hit one, Carlos Quentin hit two, and Carlos Ruiz hit one. Now those were all the most in a single day. If you want to know the most homers in a single game by players with the same name, it's five. That has happened twice. Giants at Phillies, July 7th Mike Ivy hit two and Mike Schmidt hit three and Reds at Giants August 2nd 1994 Barry Larkin hit two and Barry Bonds hit three I am not quite done although we're getting there this is a question from Evan that just came in this week he says I noticed in last night's 16 to 5 drubbing by the Rockies that the Cardinals used three pitchers and each recorded exactly eight outs, or two and two-thirds innings pitched. It seems like every pitcher recording the

same number of outs would be pretty rare if you exclude complete games. For number of pitchers greater than one, it seems like three is the most likely number for this to happen because it's mathematically possible in any game that doesn't end with a partial inning. How often has this happened with three pitchers and has it ever happened with a different number of pitchers? So Ryan Nelson responds, it's not common, but it's not that rare either. By his count, it has happened 1,375 times since 1901. The far and away most common method is two pitchers pitching four innings or 12 outs a piece. And that has happened 933 of those times.

The next most common is three pitchers going three innings each and then four pitchers going two innings each. And there have been a couple or a few that have happened just once each. So two pitchers, eight outs a piece. I few that have happened just once each. So two pitchers, eight outs apiece. I assume that was a shortened game. And then two pitchers, 22 outs apiece. That happened once as well. And nine pitchers with three outs apiece. That happened once.

And that was the famous Ned Garver game that prompted the first effectively wild cold call to Ned Garver. And as I recall, that was the last day of the season. And they just had nine guys throw an inning apiece. So this is the 12th occurrence of the specific combination that Evan wrote in about. And the first time since the Tigers did it against the Rangers on May 16th, 2013, when Verlander allowed eight runs in two and a third innings pitched and the Tigers lost 10 to four. So all the data is online there, both for the combinations and for the individual games, if you are interested in that too.

Okay. This one came in a while ago. This is from Richard Hershberger of Pass Blast fame. This is a crossover. Yeah. So he asked a statplasty question, and this was during the Orioles' long winning streak in July, which started when they were under 500 and then propelled them over that mark. So he asked, in honor of the Orioles, what is the longest winning streak by a team that is under 500? And Ryan Nelson says the record is 13, which has happened three times.

So the 1991 Phillies, after starting the year 40 and 58, the Phillies rattled off 13 straight wins from July 30th through August 11th, getting to 53 and 58. They would then go 26 and 26 the rest of the way to end the season at 78 and 84. 26 the rest of the way to end the season at 78 and 84. The 1999 Padres started the season 25 and 39, then won 14 straight from June 18th to July 2nd, but the 14th got them to 500. So only 13 of that streak was below 500. They went 45 and 51 the rest of the way to end the season 74 and 88. And then the 1999 Orioles.

They started the season 74-88. And then the 1999 Orioles. They started the season 61-76. They won 13 straight, the last streak of 10-plus for the Orioles until the one this summer, to reach 74-76. But then they lost 8 of their last 12 to end the season, like the 91 Phillies at 78-84. The 1980 Twins almost ended the season with a 12-game streak to get to 77 and 82. They lost only two games after the streak. The 65 Pirates had a 12-gamer after starting 9 and 24, and then they went 81 and 48 the rest of the way. Pretty good, although that only got them to third place in the NL and no playoffs in 1965. And finally, the 2004 Rays won 12 straight in June to get to within one win of 500,

and then they peaked at 42-41, nine and a half games back, before absolutely tanking the rest of the way, going 28-50 to end with 91 losses. All right, last one here. I mentioned that I was going to talk about the Guardians again, and this is what I was alluding to. So the Guardians, as we said, they are in first place as we speak now. And I noticed that they are a very young team, notably young for a team that is so successful. And I saw that they were just making another call-up because James Karanchak not making the trip to Toronto.

And so they are calling up, I believe, a 25-year-old Peyton Battenfield, great name, Peyton Battenfield, to replace James Karanchak. So maybe he will make his debut and bring down the average age even more. Although I did also read that the Guardians had optioned their mascot Mustard to high A after he failed to secure a victory in any of the first 50 Sugardale hot dog races at Progressive Field in 2022. Mustard, the mascot or condiment, is 17, according to the story.

So his, her, their, its demotion may raise the average age a tad. I guess Mustard uses he, his pronouns according to this MLB.com story. According to Baseball References method, they actually have the youngest average batting age, 26.0, and the Pirates are second at 26.6. And they also have the youngest pitching age in the same season. So youngest batting team and youngest pitching team. And really, if you look at the teams that are close to them, so their average pitching age this year, 26.5. The next closest is the Royals at 27.4.

And not only are they outliers in terms of age, but also in terms of success. Because if you look at the other young teams, you've got the Guardians, the youngest batting age, but then you have the Pirates and then the Diamondbacks. And then you get to the Blue Jays and the Twins and some more successful teams. On the pitching side, the second youngest team is the Royals, the Tigers, the Angels, the Reds, the Marlins, the Pirates. Then you get to the Orioles and the Mariners. So being young, not always a good thing. So I asked Ryan Nelson about this, too, and I wanted to know just like how many teams have been both the youngest batting team and youngest pitching team in the same season?

And how has that gone for them in general? It has not gone well. So the Guardians are sort of an exception here, though not the lone exception. So in general, you think of youth as being a positive for a baseball team, right? Like a youth movement. Like, OK, you're bringing up good young players. And I guess that's true in a sense, but not true in that initial season when you are super young. It is not a good thing to be extremely young because that probably means that

maybe you just embarked on a rebuild or, you know, you just traded away all your veterans or you have just promoted a bunch of prospects and they're not peaking yet. Things are not going great. You're not competitive in most cases. So Ryan used a method where he just waited by playing time, either plate appearances or batters faced. And so if you do it that way and you look at the youngest hitting team in each season going back to 1916, so the cumulative winning percentage by the youngest hitting team in each season going back to 1916.

So the cumulative winning percentage by the youngest hitting team in each year is 460. And the cumulative winning percentage for the youngest pitching team in each season is also 460 as it turns out. So not great in general. Yeah. If you look at the oldest teams, now again, like that seems like, oh boy, they're advanced age, right? You know, everyone's going to be injured and decrepit, but not really. In general, it is a good thing, at least in that year, to be very old. So cumulative winning percentage of the oldest hitting teams, 519, and cumulative winning percentage of the oldest pitching teams, 533.

So it's a good thing to be very old, at least for that year. Now, I'm sure the fortunes diverge in the following years. So maybe the very youngest teams had a better next few years than the very oldest teams did. But at least for that year, you'd rather be old and have a bunch of established veterans than to be going with all rookies and scrubs and unestablished players. And that you can kind of see if you look at the very youngest team on record by this method, it's the 1967 Kansas City A's who were not good.

They had a 62 and 99 record, not so good. Whereas the oldest team ever by a lot is the 2005 Yankees, who went 95 and 67 and won their division. So the question, though, about being both the youngest hitting team and youngest pitching team in the same season. So this generally does not bode well. So the Guardians really are an exception here. So that has happened 18 times prior to this season. So the Guardians are the 19th and those teams combined have gone 1180 and 1591. winning percentage for the youngest hitting team that was also the youngest pitching team. So the notable exception here would be the 1970 Reds, who won the World Series and went 102-60. And they were the youngest hitting team and youngest pitching team that year. And that was, I guess, the beginning of the big red machine. So that was a good sign for them that they were super young. Yeah. The only other team at that level, the great vaunted 1994 Expos,

one of the great what-if teams. They were 74 and 40. That's a 649 winning percentage when that season was cut short, sadly. So they were an exciting one. There just aren't a lot of other examples. I guess the 1948 Dodgers had a 545 winning percentage, but that is it. Well, 68 A's were 506 winning percentage, and the 88 Pirates were 531. So really, it's just, I guess, five of those 18 teams that have managed even to have winning records. So what the Guardians are doing this year is quite rare to be so young and also successful.

And it's also impressive that they have one of the best farm systems, too, in addition to one of the youngest big league rosters. So they've done a nice job job that front office has of of developing players and making do with a very low payroll and they've managed to remain competitive and maybe that only adds to the frustration of some cleveland fans that they did so little at the deadline when they have all these prospects and all these young players and it's like can we go get a veteran or two maybe to round out this roster but but they did not. However, they have managed to be pretty good even so, and they're defying history here. And I don't know if they have- They have Stephen Kwan.

Yeah, they have Stephen Kwan and Tristan McKenzie. So I don't know if they have a big red machine future ahead of them, but it's encouraging to be both good and young and very rare too. Yeah. Okay. So we will end here with sort of a very brief snippet of a cold call, I guess you could call it. So we talked to a nonagenarian, Ron Teasley, earlier this week that did not quench my appetite for talking to 90-somethings. Your appetite is insatiable. It is. And you got to go older. It's tough to go older than Ron Teasley, but we managed it here. So the third oldest living major leaguer is a man named Larry

Milligan, and he's 96 years old. His 97th birthday is coming up next week. And Larry Milligan's name you may have seen in the last week or so because he was a childhood friend of Vin Scully's. And one of Vin Scully's favorite lifelong stories was the Larry Milligan story because he made a video and put it on Twitter earlier this year of him recounting this story for probably the umpteenth time. But that was the one that he went out with. And really, it was perhaps his favorite story. So Larry Milligan's had a very interesting career. I will just read a quick little excerpt here from Craig Wright's great baseball newsletter, Pages from Baseball's Past, which I encourage everyone to check out at baseballspast.com. And he did a newsletter on Larry Miggins, which made me think of this. And he wrote, a few baseball fans remember Larry

Irish Miggins, his nickname is Irish, whose big league career consisted of just 100 plate appearances during which he hit 227 in his time at Fordham Prep in the Bronx. Miggins was the school's best athlete and the valedictorian of his class. His best sport was football, but his real love was baseball and his favorite team was the nearby New York Giants, whose manager, Frankie Frisch, was the most famous alumnus of Fordham Prep. Larry got a tryout with the Giants in 1943 at age 17, hit five homers and six swings, and the Giants gave Miggins $3,000 to give up his football scholarship

to the University of Pittsburgh and sign with them. After graduating, Miggins was deemed good enough at age 18 to get into eight games in the International League, but then was off to serve in the Merchant Marines for two years. After the war, he was back in the International League, but then was off to serve in the Merchant Marines for two years. After the war, he was back in the International League, and on April 18, 1946, he was the opposing third baseman in the historic game when Jackie Robinson integrated the league. Then he was drafted away from the Giants by the Cardinals.

He had a big year with the Omaha Cardinals at age 22 and then was promoted to Houston, played for the Buffaloes, led the team in homers and RBI, but he was an outfielder. By that point, the Cardinals had Stan Musial and Eno Slaughter in left and right field. Tough to crack that outfield. Finally, however, in spring 1952 at age 26, Miggins made the Cardinals team out of spring training. On May 13th, St. Louis was playing in Brooklyn and manager Eddie Stanky decided to give the right-handed hitting rookie a shot against the Dodgers' lefty ace Preacher Rowe. Larry started in left field and struck out swinging in the second inning, but his next time up in the fourth inning with red Shane Deanstown's second base, Larry Miggins hit the first homer of his

big league career. It wasn't, as Larry hoped, the first of many. He would hit only one more off another star lefty Hall of Famer Warren Spahn, and then Larry would never play again in the majors after that 52 season. But that first homer of Miggins' brief career is a story of one of the most amazing convergences of chance or baseball magic in the history of the game. So I will let Vin Scully tell that story, I think. So the story is set in 1943. We just had a brief call with Larry. It was a cold call and the connection wasn't great, but we just wanted to get his brief remembrance of this moment as Vin told it. So I will play the clip of Vin,

and then we will play a snippet of our talk with Larry Miggins. The most emotional home run I ever called. Well, go back to my days in high school. I'm sitting in the back of an auditorium with the best athlete on the campus by the name of Larry Miggins. We talked about what we hope to do. He hoped to become a big league ball player. I hoped to be a broadcaster, and we wondered what are the odds of us making those goals. Well, would you believe, 1952, the St. Louis Cardinals came to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Who's in the lineup? My friend,

Larry Meggins. I'm on the air, and I'm going to broadcast an inning in which he is coming to bat. Sure enough, he came up and would you believe he had a home run which I described off left-hander Preacher Rowe. As Larry ran around the bases, I could not believe a billion-to-one shot has occurred directly in my lap. That's the one I will never forget. Hi, Larry. Hello. How are you doing? I'm doing fine, thank God, except my right leg.

I was playing ball in Omaha at 48, hitting over 300 and leading the league in home runs and RBIs. The Class A league. And I was on the way to the big leagues when that season was over. I hit a double one night, late in the season. And I was second base and I never hit the singles. on second base and I never had to single. And I came around

on third base expecting to see him telling me to stay up or get down. So he wasn't there. So I come sitting and standing up

and just as I put my foot on home plate, here's a big guy. He's an over 200 pounds. He dove on me and hit that knee. I thought he was definitely broke to the in half. It was that bad.

They took two gallons of fluid off my knee that night in the hospital. I went to St. Louis and they had some famous doctors up there. They said they were going to help me, but they couldn't. I got one at bat with the Cardinals.

The last time at bat in the last game of the season. And I slid into first base. I was safe and I scored the last run for St. Louis that year. That's the whole base. I was safe. I scored the last run. The same it was that year. That's the whole story. Well, that's a good story. You must have many good stories. We're calling because we've been reading a lot about you since Vin Scully passed away last week. And of course, your name often comes up in connection with his. And so we hope that you might have a few minutes to talk to us. And I know that you're aware of the story that Vin always used to tell about you and the home run that you hit when he was calling it. And I wonder what it has meant to

you to be maybe the subject of the favorite story by such a master storyteller? He was always so eager to tell people about that home run. Well, almost every time he came to Houston with the Dodgers in the old days, not more recently, he didn't travel to all the teams in recent years. I talked to him one time. He said, I can't make the travel. I go to certain games. I think he went to Denver.

And, of course, he goes to the National League. But he goes to ones close by. But he couldn't make the travel. So I didn't say much this last couple of years but I have it in the past in the past he'd been into

the place where he worked at I'd be right there on the field doing it was beautiful and he I'll never forget if if you want to get something, well of course he's dead now, but I remember the day the last time I was there, he was asking one of the other writers or sports writers who was there, would you pick me up a pen or a pencil that can cut out pieces

of newspaper? I need that thing to cut out the stuff that I use during the course of my game. And it's all modern stuff. It's good stuff. The different parts of the paper, it wouldn't be just the baseball. It would be sports generally. And he always wanted that

if he could tie it into baseball, he'd tie it in. And that's where he got a lot of his imagination. Yeah. These pieces of excerpts from other things besides baseball. He was a genius

at that. Yes, he was. He was just a great storyteller. Do you remember the day that he remembered so well when you and he talked back in high school? Because you were the big man on campus

at that point probably. I know you were the successful athlete and and he was do you remember talking to him then we had 89 kids in my class and I don't know why they didn't choose me but there may be the boundaries of the class yeah so you must have been a good student too. I was trying to survive that. I don't know how I did. At 89 people was in the class. And I was the baddest boy. I didn't do anything,

see, because I wasn't the best, the smartest guy in the class. I was up there, 44 or 45. That was it. I thought, there was a or 45. That was it. There was a friend, Owen Black, who was a junior. He was in my class. So anyway.

Do you remember the day that Vin is talking about in those stories, when he talked to you about what you both wanted to do? Yeah, we were in the assembly. We were in the assembly, and we were talking. Who's talking? The assembly hadn't started yet. And he said,

I get an idea. It might work for both of us. I know you want to be a big league ball player, and I hope you're satisfied. Yeah. That shot I took at Omaha destroyed my career. I can't walk today. I have to use wheels around my house. We had to put an elevator in the house. And all of a sudden, we were in a mess. So that's how hard it was going to be. There was a fellow, he had a Polish name.

A guy about 220. He was a heavy-duty guy. And I made him a stick of my foot over to touch the base. I was safe. And I played with him one in the base. I was safe. I played one in a year. I couldn't walk. And that was it. But I played after that

where I could, you know, I'm fairly good. I played in the 50s. I played in Columbus, Ohio. That's AAA, American Association. And then he had healed long enough that I could run fairly good and get by.

So that's the way it was. So my last day was a hand-and-goose. I had 300 at Columbus. And I had a good year. I had 300 at Columbus and I had a lot of home runs at Aubrey High. And we won the playoffs. In those days, a couple of late teams played in playoffs. City was the top team in the league and they played the top team in the international league. So we played Baltimore that year and we beat them I think in five games. I hit two homers in that series. I never got to the big league where I could play every day. I got up there and played a little bit here and there. I couldn't run.

Yeah. Like a big lady. So that's just the way it was. And you played against Jackie Robinson in his first game, is that right? Yeah, I played against Jackie. What was that game like? Oh, well, it was a bad house.

I could only hold 25,000 stands and we had to play small in Jersey City, Jersey City Giants and play that game against Robinson. And I didn't pay much attention because I was playing with the Bushwicks. The Bushwicks were a secular team that played semi-pro throughout the country. They played the Black Yankees, teams like that, all over the country. The Mace was in Kansas City or someplace, on the Midwest.

They traveled quite a bit. I had two singles in that game. The picture, have you seen the picture of the show of that game with the third base and number four is the captain's name, Gahar Balamuddin, so from right field. He tagged up for a second and killed with a third. And I'm the guy that I'm number four. But he made it. He beat me.

I didn't get to the ball. He beat me and he got in there. And he was a great ball player. It didn't bother me. Because I played against the Black Jackies. I played against all the black teams. I played in New York.

That's a great team. And Jackie hit a home run that day, but he also hit a couple balls toward you, right? And ended up getting on base a couple times. Yeah. And you were playing third. So I guess you found out pretty fast that he was speedy. I was up on the side of the ground ball. And I played the outfield. pretty fast that he was speedy. I stuck my finger in a ball, tossed around the ball, I said, I don't know, I stuck my finger on it.

And I just made my index finger, and I knocked an L off it, on my finger. I couldn't throw a ball. Well, these are mine. So I was out of the commission down there for a while or so. But it's interesting. I've had an interesting career. Before we let you go, I did want to ask. I know that you barnstormed with and then played for Eddie Stanky,

who we talk about pretty often. Do you remember Eddie pretty well? Oh, Eddie Stanky was my manager. Yeah. Eddie pretty well? Oh, Eddie Sang was my manager. Yeah. He was the manager back in 52 I think.

Yeah, I liked Eddie. I'll tell you why he liked me. When the game, when the World Series was over in the 1950s, 152 I forget what it was, they beat the Yankees and the Hewitts in the 1950s. 1952, I forget what it was. They beat the Yankees. He was one of the guys. And he and Ice, he was the best.

He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best.

He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best.

He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best.

He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best.

He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best.

He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best.

He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the best. He was the park. Next to the park was out in Long Island.

And a couple of big leagues took me up. And took me out there every Sunday when I was available. And I hit seven for eight. I mean, shots all over the place. And he was taking my... He said, yeah, that's the end. He must have said, I want to do something with this kid. He never told me that.

But he did write to me later. I still have the letter. I wrote me a letter. I saw I got a claim on the stack. I made the hitter. What had just happened, I was playing the Black Yankees now. Playing the Black Yankees. Yeah. We were playing the Black Yankees. It was easy for everybody.

So, he remembers that and never told me a lot of it. But I know that's what it was. I'm sorry to move on with the voice. I can't talk much longer because it's been raining down here for two days.

Uh-huh. And it's terrible. I see. Anyway, nice to talk to you. God bless you and keep you. And maybe some more movies. Okay. Thank you, Larry.

Thank you. God bless the lady. We love you. Goodbye. All right, that will do it for today. There's a lot more I would have liked to ask Larry if he'd had more time with him and a better connection. I read that he had a football scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. But one day when he was in school, he saw the Pirates working out at Forbes Field and decided to try baseball.

So he worked out with Hannes Wagner, who told him stories about his on-field battles with Ty Cobb. And then Larry went on to sign with the Giants. Then, of course, he had a 21-month stint in the U.S. Maritime Service in World War II. He was in the Merchant Marines, played with Stan Musial. He also wrote a book called The Secret of Power Hitting. So I wish we'd been able to ask him the secret, although I guess it's in the book. It's probably not a secret anymore. Miggins hit a lot of homers in the minors, didn't get much time in the majors, but it's been

said that maybe he's someone who would have benefited from the designated hitter because defense was not his strong suit. And it sounds like there's a reason for that. You heard him talking about the leg injury he suffered that still bothers him today and seems to have affected his running during his career. Perhaps he could have had a different career if he had come along later. But in a sense, he did have a different career after he stopped playing baseball. He worked in the justice system for decades. Now I always wonder with someone like that, his baseball career is obviously pretty fresh in his mind,

but he's had a whole lifetime since then. It must seem like a different life in a way. And he had a subsequent career. Probably people are not cold calling him to ask about his time in the justice system quite as often. since then. It must seem like a different life in a way. And he had a subsequent career. Probably people are not cold calling him to ask about his time in the justice system quite as often. Maybe it's not quite as much fun to reminisce about. But most baseball players still young men when they stop playing and then they go on to do other things. And if you live to almost 97 now, then you have had a life post-baseball. Maybe you still look back on baseball as the glory days,

or maybe not. Maybe you find the same satisfaction baseball as the glory days, or maybe not. Maybe you find the same satisfaction doing something else. But it really reinforces my impression that there's something interesting about every baseball player, and I suppose every person. But Larry Miggins played 43 games. One in 1948, 42 in 1952, 100 total plate appearances, 67 OPS+. But look at the things he saw. It's like Vin Scully's tweet with the video started out, you've probably never heard of Larry Miggins. Well, probably not,

but there are reasons why you should have heard of him. Every ball player's got good stories. By the way, that Jackie Robinson game, the day that Robinson integrated affiliated ball, he did have a three-run homer, three singles, two stolen bases, four runs batted in. The Montreal Royals beat Miggins' Jersey City Giants 14-1. Not a bad debut. And reading here from the Akron Beacon Journal, April 19th, 1946, somebody asked Robinson if there had been any riding from the other bench during the game or if there had been any suggestion of roughness on the field. None at all, Jackie said. If there had been any riding, it wouldn't have bothered me, not with the kind of fellows I have behind me on this ball club. They're a great gang, and as long as they're back of me, that's all I care. That's what is important to me.

Robinson said he wasn't a bit excited, but he had to tie and retie his necktie three or four times in between slaps on the back and more handshakes. The general impression was that Jackie's third inning homer and his subsequent feats would take the heat off him in his first swing around the International League. He hadn't been awed by the hop from the Kansas City Monarchs with whom he played last year. Two of those three singles, by the way, were bunts down the third baseline to Larry Miggins, who is playing him back, understandably after the dinger. One more note from Craig Wright's newsletter about Miggins' home run. On that day of the home run, May 13, 1952, Vinn was the junior member of the Dodgers radio broadcast team behind Red Barber and Connie Desmond. So Scully only got to call a couple of innings a game at that point, and he was not on the mic for Miggins' first at bat when he struck

out. So it was fortuitous that he was doing the call in the fourth inning when his friend came up to bat. On another occasion, Vinn recalled, It was probably the toughest home run call that I ever had to call because I was part of it. I had to fight back tears. I called home run and then I just sat there with this big lump in my throat watching him run around the bases. I mean, how could that possibly happen? So take that, Kirk Gibson. Maybe the impossible actually happened in 1952.

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Talk to you soon. He is holding it in The fig and cast and brunch just makes him think of them. Hose and Grants is all he had laid back a team. Trophy for the last one.