Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1949: The Stories We Missed in 2022 (AL Edition)

Episode Date: December 31, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley close the book on 2022 by bantering about the year in Effectively Wild, the Marlins signing Jean Segura, the heretofore-unsuspected existence of Charles Leblanc, and the pitch-calling accuracy of 10 retiring umpires, plus followups on how the zombie runner affects plate appearance totals, Lars Nootbaar’s pepper grinder, the year-to-year consistency […]

It's the end of the year It's the end of the year But it's not too late It's the end of the year It's the end of the year But it's not too late. of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Well, I've been a bit of a nomad this week with week after Christmas travel. So I've recorded from a few different places. Jesse's family's place, my family's place. So I am currently coming to you from literally my mom's basement.

I apologize for any background noises that may be picked up here. I hear dog fingernails clicking and clacking above me and people chatting and perhaps babies making baby sounds at some point. So that will just be an occupational hazard here, but appropriate that I'm ending the year from my mom's basement probably. Yeah, I will reassure you that in the time that you were talking, I heard only your voice

and no delightful atmosphere of family whatsoever. So you're doing okay so far. It's funny that you are leading this with potential auditory difficulties when it took me 20 minutes to be able to log into this cast session for reasons I'm still not clear about, Ben. Still don't know. It's working now. So hopefully you won't hear the background noise, but I assure you that I'm having the time of my life and everyone is just out of frame laughing too as I record from the basement here. So Dylan will do his best. Anyway, this is our 157th and final episode of 2022.

Wow. So it works out. of 2022. So it works out. We record three days a week, which is 43% of the days in the week. And 157 is 43% of 365, which is the number of days in the year. So we have stayed on schedule. You can set your clocks and your calendars by Effectively Wild. And I think it's been a pretty decent year. I think we've had some very good, memorable episodes. Yeah. Thanks to everyone who's been along with us for the ride. I feel like there have been some high highs. I wonder, Ben, do you have a good feel in the moment for like, oh, yeah, people are going to really like this episode, this bit of this episode?

Like, what's your spidey sense? How finely tuned is it? Because I find myself, sometimes we'll go on a tangent and people will be like, it is a classic. And then sometimes we're like, why is this woman talking about her teeth for 20 minutes? I struggle to know sometimes. I guess that it's hard to predict just because we have a fairly broad listener base for which we are quite grateful.

And I'm sure different things hit different people in different ways. But do you come away from episodes being like, we crushed it? Or do you have that? No, not necessarily. I don't really either. There are certain times where I feel like, oh, that was a good one. I think people like that one. But sometimes I'm surprised, as I am by my articles and the responses to those.

So you never know. You make things. Hopefully you have fun. And then you put them out in the world and people either love them or are apathetic toward them. Hopefully nothing worse than apathy and indifference. But generally we get good response and good feedback. Yeah. So it's fun to do.

That's why it's still happening on such a regular schedule after so long. So this was the 10th anniversary year, so that was special. Lots of 10th anniversary episodes and we had the baseball Twitter draft and we had the in-venue interview.

Yeah. Just, you know, a lot of episodes this year that you would probably put in the pantheon or so i would say myself that i think i think maybe that episode is the exception right we got off we got off the blower after doing the in venue one and i was like i think people are going to talk about this interview i think people might have something to say about this one you know because um rarely rarely are are we in the moment so

i don't know that rattled is the right word because i think we held it together pretty okay but just like incensed uh on unsure about what is going on how we got here you know like uh yeah it was yeah that was quite a ride it's's not often that Effectively Wild goes viral or like gets aggregated. Like, oh boy, we just said something. Like the bloggers, they're going to have a field day with this. I mean, we are bloggers, first of all, but also nothing we say is super newsworthy usually. I mean, hopefully we're bringing you news and it's informative and fun, but in terms of like making news in the wider baseball ecosystem. So that was sort of an exception.

Anyway, it's been a good year. Been a good year. All right. So to end the year, we have to continue our exercise from earlier in the week where we ran down a story that we missed in 2022 about every National League team. Today, we will circle back to the American League teams. Just a bit of banter before we get there. There haven't been a whole lot of notable transactions since we last spoke or last bantered. The only exception really being the Marlins signing Gene Segura, which was nice to see the Marlins signing someone. This was, I believe, the first

major league contract that the Marlins had given someone this was, I believe, the first major league contract that the Marlins had given someone this offseason. So nice for them to break the seal, get on the board here. I don't know how many more moves are coming, but we've talked not too long ago about just being disillusioned by the Marlins, or maybe we shouldn't have been illusioned in the first place, but they've disappointed me, at least, just in their inactivity this offseason. So Gene Segura, he's a nice player. He's an average guy. He's going to give you some good work. I guess they're going to be playing him at third base,

at least unless they make some subsequent move, but he kind of was overshadowed by the cream of the shortstop crop this winter, and for good reason, but he's a good player, you know? He's going to be, when you look at his WRC pluses over the past three seasons, 106, 109, 105,

plus a 109 in 2018, so that's just sort of who he is, and he is probably going to be getting a little bit worse i suppose in that he will turn 33 in march but he's solid he's a credible major league player and position player which is something that the marlins could use so two years 17 million with some sort of third year option it sounds like but there's just there's not enough more that they could do really to change the trajectory of their winter at this point probably just like looking at the depth charts fangraphs projections now yeah they're pitching war projection is okay like

they're in the realm of teams that hope and expect to contend, though toward the lower end of that realm. But position players, they're way down there. So if you just look at the position player war, I think they're seventh lowest and the only teams with worse projections than the Marlins are the Reds, the Rockies, the Nationals, the Tigers, the Royals, and the A's. So that's not where they want to be or where they should be at this point. And so they've been sitting on their hands all off season and they really needed to and need to do more. So we'll see whether they have a trade of some sort in them. Yeah.

We've talked about their capacity to maybe consolidate some of their pitching and see what, what's what, but I don't know. I think it would, it would take something quite surprising in order for them to salvage it. They would have to do a trade where we looked at the other side of the trade and are like, what is that GM thinking? And I don't think that we had particularly high expectations of them coming into 2023. It wasn't like I thought,

oh, this team is just two signings away from being in a position to like really do something if only because their offense was so putrid last year it was just so bad ben it was it was bad it was so bad you know and so even if they had you know they would have had to do they would have had to do quite a bit they would have had to sign quite a few of the top guys and i i don't want to like knock gene segura because i think gene segura is like still quite good player and um he will do stuff but they needed more than than that in order to really have us look around and say particularly in that division like oh they're you know they're a they're a force but it feels like a missed opportunity in an offseason with so many guys who are not only going to be good or who we expect will be good in 2023, but who we expect

to be good for many years after that, that they didn't start to do some of that work to put themselves in position to compete in the division because they are going to have to be willing to sign some guys. They're going to have to be really good at player dev. They're going to have to be really good at player dev. They're going to have to be really good drafters. They're going to have to be really savvy in the trade market because they are in a division with teams that are either willing to spend big or who have a ludicrously cost-controlled core for a long time.

So there's work to be done. And punting that work to later off-seasons doesn't seem like a particularly winning strategy, at least to me. Yeah, they did not narrow the gap between themselves and the other teams in that division. Yeah, they didn't. And again, we weren't expecting that they would close it, but do some of the narrowing work. I'm trying to come up with a, you know,

why don't wanted you a big boat getting stuck metaphor but i don't i don't think i have it so just um remember when that big boat got stuck that was last year wasn't it it wasn't even this year although it seemed like there was a dicey stretch where we're like oh no the big boat uh a big boat might be stuck in the same spot again but i think we dodged that bullet anyway so yeah it's it's bad that the gap has widened i think and the wild card picture isn't looking so hot either anyway i guess the the time to to dump on the marlins is not when they finally sign someone but in fairness we dumped on them before they signed someone also so well and i do think that like we had gene segura on our top 25 like he he remains productive

in a way that is like he'll surprise you you know you're like he because he's he's only ever like a little above average at the plate right like he had the one really great year from a hitting perspective at least for him in 2016 when he was with the Diamondbacks. But he's not like a guy where you're like, wow, you can build a whole offense around him. But he's like a useful veteran. And he had a 105 WRC plus last year. Ben, how many hitters? I know that very few of them were qualified as we covered in our last episode.

But if you were to guess, if you were like to do a little guess, I love that we are looking for the marlins offense and because of their acro i am searching for mia offense on our leaderboards that's funny let's see i mean like jazz had a 139 wrc plus but that was only 241 play appearances garrett cooper managed to 115. Charles LeBlanc. Who even are you?

Charles LeBlanc. I don't even know who that is. Definitely a hitter who exists. Charles LeBlanc, we all know. Or a character in Glass Onion. It is one or the other. Who are you? Charles LeBlanc, see, he's a rookie. We should have done a meet a major

we should have I'm meeting him right now I don't even know who this is it's you know Ben it's and maybe this is a dereliction of duty on my part I'm willing to accept that I am a dummy perhaps but it's

rare for me to be like who to really not know right to really not know and then like brian de la cruz who is someone i have heard of like i know who that is he had a 104 so like you know gene's gonna be be in there doing stuff you know but um charles leblanc he said i know all the leblancs too because i just I just love the, who are you? Oh, he's from Canada. He's from Quebec.

That makes sense. Oh, well, yeah, sure. Georges Vanier Secondary School in Laval. Rangers fourth round pick. Yeah, I apologize to all of our French speakers. Like, you know, he went to Pitt. Okay. University of Pittsburgh.

He played college baseball for those Panthers. Yeah. Plays a few positions. And he made his pro debut in 2016 in Spokane. Selected off waivers in December of 2021 from the Rangers. And then he was selected by the Marlins in the minor league phase of the Rule 5. Okay. I'm feeling less bad about not knowing about this guy.

Yeah. But Charles, nice to meet you. Yeah, nice rookie season. Yeah, how about that? He came up, he was called up on July 29th, 2022. That was the thing that happened.

Doesn't he sound like a Glass Onion character? That's just because of Benoit Blanc. But yes. I liked Glass Onion. I acknowledge that it has its limitations, but I quite enjoyed it, Ben. How did you feel about Glass Onion? It's not among my favorites of Rian Johnson's work. And honestly, neither is Knives Out. I don't know what it is.

I really like Rian Johnson. Other movies, but these movies, I'm just not as high on them that's okay people are you might be the genre i don't know yeah you're not obligated but that is a useful adjustment for me to make mentally about glass onion because it wasn't like you were like all in on knives out and then glass onion you were like you're less into it that's fine yeah you know ben you watch so much stuff you don't have to be into everything you watch. You couldn't like that many things. That feels physically impossible. More of a looper Last Jedi man myself.

I really liked Last Jedi. Anyway, we're not doing that discourse, but we are dipping our toe. Knives Out was the last thing I saw in theaters before the pandemic hit. And so I really like it on its own, but I do think that I am also, it's getting a little nostalgic boost for being the last in-theater experience I had before theaters were for a while terrifying.

Right. Well, the Marlins signed a free agent and in the process, they helped us discover Charles LeBlanc. Yeah. So that's nice. All right. I really have never, even one time, thought about that combination of names in the context of Major League Baseball. So shame on me, you know? In other news, ESPN's Jesse Rogers reported that 10 umpires are retiring.

Wow. Yeah, it's the most who have retired, I guess, in any season since 1999, which is a lot of these umpires, they came in together around the same time after that big labor dispute where 22 former umpires resigned and then some were subsequently rehired. But this is the biggest mass exodus of umps since then. And seven of them were crew chiefs and over 200 combined umpired MLB seasons among them and 16 World Series umpired. So it's a distinguished group. And I want to wish them all happy trails and congratulate them on their careers and everything. But also I want to sort of insult them for a second here, but not in a mean-spirited way.

Just in the sense that— So you're like doing the Rickles roast. Right. You know how we have talked about the fact that the more experienced, the longer tenured umpires tend to have less rulebook-conforming strike zones, which is not necessarily an ageism thing. It may have nothing to do with age. It seems to be largely because umpires who came in prior to PitchFX, prior to Trackman, prior to StatCast, even prior to QuestTech in some cases, when they were not getting that feedback on their zones from technology and they were not being graded based on technology, then they developed their own idiosyncratic zones. And they've

conformed to some extent as they have had to as the technology has come in, but they still hail from an earlier era where there was less of a priority on getting the calls according to the rulebook zone. And so you see that typically the best umpires, the John Lipkas and the Pat Hobergs of the world, they tend to be the younger, less experienced umpires who have come up in this era and grew up with this technology as umpires and they're used to getting that feedback. And maybe they just kind of had those zones from the get-go or at least they didn't have pre-established zones that they then had to change away from. And so if we look at the 10 umpires here, I looked up their accuracy percentiles according to umpire scorecards, and not all of these 10 were active umpires in 2022. Most of them were, but I just pulled the accuracy percentiles from their most recent and final seasons in MLB. And I'm just going to read you their names and their percentiles. Ted Barrett, 14th percentile. Greg Gibson, 6th percentile. Tom Hallion, he of the demonstrative strike three call,

which I will miss, 15th percentile. Sam Holbrook, 26th percentile. Jerry Meals, 17th percentile. Jim Reynolds, 35th percentile. Bill Welke, 19th percentile. Marty Foster, third percentile. Paul Nauert, eighth percentile. Tim Timmons, 27th percentile. A lot of low numbers there, as you may have noticed. So all 10 of these umpires were well below average, according to umpire scorecards metric measuring their rulebook accuracy. And really, no one was even close to being average. I looked at their consistency scores as well as their accuracy scores, and most of them were well below average in that as well. So there's more that goes into umpiring than just making balls and strike calls. But if you care about how closely an umpire's calls mirror the rulebook zone and the zone that they are graded on, this would suggest that this outgoing group of umpires, and I'm not saying it has anything to do with these accuracy metrics. They may have all just decided to retire of their own accord.

But if you are someone who likes the calls to mirror the rulebook strike zone and doesn't like to see disagreement between K zones and more accurate versions of K zones and umpire calls, more accurate versions of K-zones and umpire calls, then this changing of the guard here is probably good news for you because we're not getting automatic ball strike calls this season, and we don't even know if we'll get them in 2024. But we have seen just umpire accuracy and consistency improve across the board over the course of the pitch tracking era. And I would imagine that this many umpires leaving at once and being replaced by fresh recruits. That might have an actual demonstrable difference in like league-wide accuracy rates. So just saying they come from an earlier era. And I will miss some things about that era like Tom Hallion's demonstrative strike three call.

I kind of like that. I get why it's sort of like ump show-esque. Demonstrative Strike 3 call. I kind of like that. I get why it's sort of like umpshow-esque and why some people might think better to be seen and not heard or not even seen really or not noticed, but it's kind of fun when he does that. But who knows? Does the Demonstrative Strike call affect his accuracy because he's really got to make the call quickly so that he can do the full windup? I don't know. Anyway, umpires are getting more homogenous as a group and probably most people would be pleased about that. Yeah, I think that if we are able to marry

a better trained or trained in a more modern way group of umpires with the challenge system, which I hope that you, Ben, get a chance to see in person because this is such a perfect i feel so vindicated i'm so rarely not that i'm rarely right that sounds self-aggrandizing like but i like i don't i don't try to like you know have takes like call it you know and i feel like i called it right here and i feel vindicated by my experience of the challenge system and other people importantly experience of the challenge system being so positive so i feel like i got it so i think that if we combine those things it will in a really meaningful way improve

the viewing experience for people like i i think that this is an underrated fan viewing improvement innovation that we might have. And all it took was, you know, like better training and technology that's existed in tennis for a really long time. So I think it's good, Ben.

I think we might, we might get a win here in terms of our experience of watching the game, you know, it's going to be, and we're going to have so much fun. You know, when, if the challenge system comes to the big leagues you

and i we're gonna have a great time because we're gonna have oh boy we're gonna be able to like you know there'll be this whole new thing that players and managers can do to impart value to their team and we're gonna have we're gonna have so much fun when they get it right we're gonna be have so much fun when they get it wrong it's're going to have so much fun when they get it wrong. It's going to tell us so much about human ego and perception. I can't wait. It's going to be... And you'll just never have a playoff game end on a bad call again, really.

We're just going to be able to eliminate that problem. So now, if we can get the replay standard to change to just getting the call right rather than this overwhelming evidence, then I think we're really going to have that little bit of that pocket of problems all sewn up. Yeah, one of the things that I would lament if we went to full robot umps is just there'd be a lot less to analyze and discuss and i get that for many people that's okay yeah they just want the calls to be accurate yes based on a certain definition of accuracy and they don't want any dispute or room for analysis right but you lose a lot there when it comes to umpire zones and catcher influence and all sorts of just little idiosyncrasies of players and officials and strategy about where you pitch when this umpire is behind the plate.

All those sorts of things just go out the window. And if we keep this, then yeah, maybe it's the happy medium where we get to still analyze and just like roll around like a pig in mud and just spray ourselves, cover ourselves with data. A pig in mud. And other people will not have to endure occasional terrible and costly calls. Seems great. Best of both worlds. Yeah. It seems like old Meg.

She had it figured. No. Other people came up with it. but I was right about it. Let it be said. And a couple follow-ups from last time. So last time we talked about this was prompted by the Marlins and their one qualified hitter this past season, Miguel Rojas, who barely qualified and was also barely qualified just like on a performance basis.

Marlins fans are going to be like, go back to not talking about us. qualified hitters qualified for the batting title and also 700 plus plate appearance hitters and just the reducing number of plate appearances by the average qualified hitter. And we talked about various reasons for that. One reason we did not mention was proposed by listener JG White in our Patreon Discord group who wrote, with regard to the Marlins section in episode 1947, a factor that may have been overlooked is the zombie runner. When racking up plate appearance totals, the occasional nine plate appearance extra innings marathon can be the difference between barely qualifying or not. The overall plate appearance totals league-wide are certainly going to be lower now than pre-zombie. A quick stat-less comparison of plate appearances and extras per game now and before multiplied by the average number of extra games per team

divided by nine would give you a rough idea of the cumulative impact. So I did that because I was kind of curious and I expected that this would be a fairly minor factor, but I'm always happy to recognize ways in which the zombie runner has changed the game, usually for the worse. Although in this case, I guess it's debatable. But in 2019 and really after the zombie runner, basically 9% or so of games go to extra innings. And the difference in length just on average is only about an inning. So in 2019, the games that went to extras lasted about 11 and a third innings on average. In 2021, roughly the same percentage of games went to extras, but they averaged about 10 and a third innings instead of 11 and a third innings. instead of 11 in the third innings. So you only have so many extra inning games per team per season.

And if you're only lopping off one inning on average, it's not going to be a huge amount. But I looked at the numbers. So in 2019, of the 2,429 Major League games played that year, 208 went to extras. And there were 3,861 total extra innings plate appearances. And so there were 18.6 plate appearances per extra inning game in extras. And so you have to divide that by two because there are two teams playing. So that's 9.3 plate appearances per team in extra innings games. per team in extra innings games. And then in 2021, or I'll do 2022, but it's almost exactly the same.

There were exactly the same number of extra inning games in 2021 and 2022. But in 2022 of the 2,430 total games, 216 went to extras. There were 2,395 plate appearances in extras. So again, the difference there league-wide is 2,395 to 3,861. So you're lopping off almost 1,500 plate appearances across the league. But the difference now, so in 2022, there were 11.1 plate appearances per extra inning game in extras so lop that in half you have 5.5 plate appearances per team per extra inning game and that is 3.7 fewer plate appearances per extra inning game than we had in 2019 which tracks tracks, I think, because we just said that there's like an inning shorter. And so 3.7 plate appearances seems about right. So 3.7 plate appearances fewer per extra inning game now per team. And on average, each team has about 14 extra inning games over the course of the season, 14.4 to be precise. So if we multiply 14.4 by 3.7, that is 52 fewer plate appearances over the course of the season per team because of the zombie runner.

by nine for the players in the lineup then we get 5.8 fewer plate appearances per player per team because of the zombie runner and you could fudge that a bit i guess based on maybe certain lineup spots uh having a disproportionate number of extra innings plate appearances or whatever but basically it's going to be like five to six played appearances per regular player per year per team. Okay. So, you know, not a lot. Not a lot. Here was a thought that occurred to me on this subject after we got off. And I don't know.

I feel like this is also a not a lot. But do you think that the fact that guys, I don't even know, you know, for hitters, this is probably really not a lot. But do you think the fact that guys are limited in the number of times they can be optioned will allow a little cream to rise to the top? Probably not, right? It's a bigger deal for pitchers than it is for hitters. It is a bigger deal. I guess that would inflate plate appearances.

Right. It might be a countervailing force was my point. Like it might, you know, buoy a couple of guys by a couple of, but probably only by a couple. Because if you're a up and down roster guy, you're probably not close to qualifying anyway, right? Right. Yeah. I guess. Yeah.

If you're a regular who's going to have a chance to qualify, you're probably not getting optioned anyway. But maybe. Maybe. Probably not. I talked myself out of it live on air but you know it's good to go through the process yes right anyway it's a it's a factor so thank you for for pointing it out i think it's smaller than other factors we mentioned sure but it's in there yeah it's part of the soup it's one of it's one of the ingredients in the big baby salad exactly people who haven't

listened to the patreon pod have no idea what I'm talking about. We also got a response to the Cardinals entry. We talked, among other things, we talked about Lars Neupahr and his pepper grinder and his pepper grinding motion, which was about grinding out plate appearances. And we got a response on Twitter from at Carpendingers, who wrote, Fandom is great. I think you're slightly underselling the prop comedy effect of Newt Barr's pepper grinder. It wasn't just that he had a standard pepper grinder like you'd buy at a store. It started with just a grinding hand gesture.

And then one day he had a normal grinder in the dugout. The celebration caught on. He got a slightly larger one. Every couple of weeks he would upgrade it until it got to turd Ferguson hat levels. He had a whole row of grinders in the dugout with one that was nearly the size of a bat. Okay. Okay. That's funny.

Yeah. I'm into it. I'm not normally like a prop comedy person, but I do admire commitment to a bit. So I'm into that more i'll take the note you know right yeah it's like uh it's like you know the the giant hat the brian robinson of the commanders had his comically big cap right and that became a meme and uh so i guess newt bar he just kind of gradually kept upsizing the pepper grinder and i wonder if it was like how did he get the different models?

Did he have like a bat rack where he had just different sizes of pepper grinder? Did he just like upgrade the size so slowly and gradually that he fooled everyone into thinking that the pepper grinder was not getting bigger? And then suddenly they were like, wow, this pepper grinder is huge. Did it used to be that big? Anyway, that is amusing. So thank you for giving us that context at Carpent Diggers. I wonder if he was like, oh, you know what might have happened, Ben? What? You know a gift that gets given that a lot of people don't end up using very much? Our wine racks.

You know, you put like a little wine rack on it. And I bet, you know, maybe, I'm speculating, maybe like at one point Lars Neupahr was given a wine rack and he's like, I don't know what to do with this. Like, you know, it's a speculating, maybe like at one point Lars Neupahr was given a wine rack. And he's like, I don't know what to do with this. Like, I was like, you know, it's a nice idea, but do I really need it? And now he's like, I got to use for that wine rack and put those pepper grinders in there. And he has like a collection, you know, but you got to be careful with stuff like that, Lars, because sometimes you indicate to your friends and family, I like a thing.

And then they get a version of that thing for you for like 10 years you know like for christmas you're like oh look i went to bernmar and now i have more owl stuff but it's like i haven't been an undergrad for a while now so like we can move on from the owl stuff you got to give people new you got to give people new grist for the mill anyway well done all right thank you i didn't even know that that was where i was that was the destination but that was where the road took me and another follow-up i got curious about the consistency of replay challenge success rates from season to season because we were talking about the mets and how they had a league leading success rate and in fact the highest success rate on record with as many challenges they had 78 they were 26 out of 33 in getting the calls overturned.

So that was good. But I wondered, does this actually stay the same from year to year? If you're good at that one year, are you still good at that the next year? Yes, it's sticky. Yeah, because the Mets were not good at this in 2021. So they actually had, they were, I guess, one of the lower percentages in 2021. But that was with a different manager and I think also a different replay review person. But in 2021, they were 35% successful, which was not good.

That was below average, I think. So I looked just year to year since 2014, excluding 2020. And it really varies by year. Like from 2021 to 2022, there was essentially no correlation whatsoever. So it was just whether you were good in 2021 really had no bearing or didn't indicate whether you were going to be good in 2022. Some years there was a much stronger correlation. In total, the correlation was 0.37, where zero is no correlation and one is a perfect correlation. So this is weak to moderate, and I didn't make any effort to account for consistency of the replay people. So if I isolated, if I were to go above and beyond and look up who was the replay review person for every team the replay people. So if I isolated,

if I were to go above and beyond and look up who was the replay review person for every team and every year. Which might be hard to do even. It might be hard to, yeah. So if I did that, or even managers staying the same since they're ultimately making the call usually, like that might give you a higher correlation,

I would think. But if you know nothing else except what a team's replay review success rate was last year and you don't know whether they'll have different people or the same people or whatever, then 0.37 is the correlation. And it's not very strong. Just to give you an idea,

most pitching and batting stats are more correlated from year to year than that. It would be about equivalent to hitter BABIP is roughly that level of correlation. It how fast you are, all of those things influence your BABIP and that does have some level of consistency, but there's still a lot of fluctuation from year to year. And so if someone has a super high BABIP one year, you might think he's more likely than not to be a high BABIP guy, but you wouldn't really take that BABIP to the bank. So that's the level of confidence that you should have about a team's replay review success rate. And I guess that makes sense because A, it's just a small sample inherently. And B, these are all borderline calls for the most part. So they could go one way one year and the other way the other

year. But there seems to be some skill to it. It's not completely random. Yeah, that seems like it tracks with my expectation. All right. And my final follow-up from that episode, we didn't have a listener submission for the Rockies, so I ended up supplying one myself about how their farm system had improved more than any other team according to MLB Pipeline over the course of 2022.

But we did get some belated suggestions in the Discord group from listener Andrew, who was making up for his fellow Rockies fans in not having suggested something. So he went above and beyond and suggested several, and I won't share them all here, but there are some good ones. Riley Pint, the Rockies' former first rounder who threw super hard in high school, but never really put things together. He unretired after having retired the previous summer and he came back and still had control issues, which was why he retired, I guess ultimately he had fewer control issues, but also fewer strikeouts. Anyway, I guess he was the same sort of guy, but he was back and he was only 24. And then also CJ Krohn became the first Rockies first baseman since Todd Helton to be an all-star. And their third ever, Andres Galraga, was the other to be selected. And also the Rockies scoreboard operator is clever and goes viral sometimes for funny

messages and also the Rockies have five pitchers in the WBC and only one batter but the one that really caught my eye more than the others was a reaction by Kyle Freeland former Effectively Wild guest oh I should also mention and brendan rogers quietly having a pretty decent year and winning a gold glove so that was nice but the one that i really liked kyle freeland former effectively wild guest in august he had a home run saved for him by sam hilliard which was hit by brandon drury and it was going to be a home run, but it was pulled back by Hilliard from over the fence. And hide your kids, cover your kids' ears, listeners here who are sensitive to language

because Kyle Freeland, his reaction, it's caught on video and there's a Reddit thread about it, which I will link to. And I'm not a skilled lip reader myself, but it doesn't take a lot of skill to see what he was saying here after having this home run saved for him he said holy shit balls motherfucker very just very clearly enunciates or

ellipsiates emoutsiates holy shit balls motherfucker after having a home run removed from his record thanks to sam hilliard yeah so i enjoyed that all right well thank you andrew all right so let's pick up with the american league teams and the stories that we didn't discuss or under discussed in 2022 these were submitted by effectively wild listeners so going in alphabetical order, the Angels, whom we talked about quite a bit this year. Yeah, I was going to say, did we under-discuss the Angels?

No, definitely not. And so we didn't get many submissions for the Angels. I think we kind of covered the Angels. But one thing that listener Wayne pointed out is that Angels starting pitchers ended with the eighth best ERA in baseball. ended with the eighth best ERA in baseball. And I will go one better and say the sixth best fan graphs were in baseball, which I knew that the Angels starters were better this year. And certainly Shohei Otani was great, but I didn't realize that they were quite that good.

So sixth best wore from their starting pitchers behind only the Astros, the Phillies, the Giants, the Dodgers, and the Mets. And I looked back just to see when the last time that they had had any kind of decent performance from their rotation was. And you really have to go back a bit because 2019, as recently as then, they were dead last. And the last time that they were higher than 15th, so basically above average, was 2011, which was also Mike Trout's partial debut year. So they had not finished higher than 15th in Mike Trout's career using his full seasons until 2022. And of course, that was still not enough to get him to the playoffs again. But it was progress. I guess the problem was that as they had the sixth best rotation war, they had the 25th best bullpen war. So that'll get you in addition to their other problems. But it was

progress. And we talked about how their rotation with some of the changes that they've made this winter, it really projects to be pretty solid going into next year. So we'll see. But it wasn't just Otani, obviously. It was Patrick Sandoval, who we've talked about, and it was Reid Detmers and Jose Suarez and also Sindergaard and Laurentin, who are no longer there. But it wasn't solely Otani, although he was obviously leading the way. So better starting pitching than the Angels have had for more than a decade. So just got to round the rest of that roster into shape, and they'll be back in October in no time. One of these years. Is this the year? The fact that the regular season extends like almost a week into October now, it always makes me think twice about when I say, like, can they get back to October or something?

I know. Like the pedantic part of me is like, well, they will because they have games scheduled for October. But you know what I mean. But will it extend into October again? Wasn't, I guess it did last year too. I think it still will. Yeah. Yeah, it still will.

Anyway, no one else is bothered by that, I'm sure. All right. The Astros are up next and this is a suggestion from Kevin. So Dusty Baker bought the team breakfast food after Yom Kippur for Alex Bregman, but not just for Alex Bregman, like basically for everyone. So I did not know about this. I'm reading a story here from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. This was published October 7th. Headline, Astros manager Dusty Baker hopes matzo ball soup will give his team a playoffs boost. Maybe it did.

Anyway, Jewish Herald Voice is the byline from Houston here, and it leads with, If the Astros make it to the World Series later this month, which we know they did, fans can thank team manager Dusty Baker, along with a fresh-baked challah and several quarts of matzo ball soup. Baker stopped by Kenny and Ziggy's New York Delicatessen here just before Yom Kippur ended to load up on food to help Jewish star Alex Bregman break the fast. He said he wanted to do something really nice for Alex and he bought a substantial amount of food. Ziggy Gruber told the JHV, I thought that was quite noble of him, Dusty eats here all the time and said it is one of his favorite places.

So Dusty likes the Kenyan Ziggy's New York delicatessen. And again, according to Gruber, the Astros manager walked out with enough to feed the entire team. He got a round challah, three pounds of pastrami, some corned beef, rye bread, potato salad, coleslaw, smoked fish, nova, bagels, and of course, a bunch of matzo ball soup. Oh, and he also loaded up on dessert with all kinds of rugelach and cookies. And Baker said he also gave some soup to Luis Garcia, who was ailing. And Dusty said, I got him some matzo ball soup, so he will probably be well tomorrow. And we know he was quite good and the Astros were quite good. So the owner of the delicatessen said, we know they are going all the way.

There is no doubt. And if we end up playing one of the New York teams or Los Angeles know they are going all the way. There is no doubt. And if we end up playing one of the New York teams or Los Angeles, it will be good for business. I've operated delis in New York and Los Angeles, but I've been here 23 years and we'll be wearing Astros colors for sure. So how much do we attribute the Astros postseason success to Dusty Baker loading up on food at this New York delicatessen and giving matzo ball soup to everyone? I don't know, but it can't have hurt, I guess. Nice gesture, at least. This is why people love Dusty, why he's a player manager. He'll just bring you food after you break your fast. And also,

if you weren't fasting, he'll still bring you food. Yeah. I mean, I think that food can feel a lot like medicine and it certainly is rejuvenating particularly after you've not had it for a while so this is wise yep it's wise the athletics just not a ton of positive stories to talk about with the old

A's this year so we got suggestions about like relievers who were kind of good. It's like, you didn't talk about Sam Mole. No, we didn't talk about Sam Mole. I guess he had a pretty good year and he started really well. But if that's the best you could do.

Yeah. AJ Puck was mentioned just for having a decent year and also just staying healthy, I guess. Pitching at all. Yeah. So that was nice. I mean, he was just a bullpen guy and not like an amazing bullpen guy, just like a pretty good bullpen guy, but he was around, he pitched, so that's good. And the only other one, which I think we touched on, but maybe we didn't do it justice, is Steven Vogt homering in his final at bat.

Oh yeah, that's pretty great. Yeah. We may have mentioned that in passing, but that was a really nice moment. And Vogt, it was his final year with the A's. And of course, he came up with the A's and was with the A's for some good season. He's just really, really popular with A's fans. And his nickname is I Believe. And he's very popular and he's funny.

He does great impressions of nba or basketball referees which you can watch online and they're very amusing so everyone likes steven vote and this was a homecoming went back to oakland for his final season and it was a tough season i mean it was a tough season for the a's it was also also a tough season for Steven Vogt, who just did not hit at all and had some injury issues and had knee problems and couldn't really catch after the knee problems. But he went out with a bang because he had a home run in his final plate appearance. And it was really emotional and everyone celebrated. emotional and everyone celebrated and he almost didn't get to hit because he was supposed to be pulled from the game with the starter I think according to Brandon who suggested this but there was a clutch double play in the top of the inning which earned him one more at bat one more

plate appearance and it was a home run and it was almost identical to his first career home run with the A's 10 years earlier which was also hit in the Coliseum in the same direction. So it was just a really nice little way to end his career in the season. And that's about the best that I have here because the A's, they traded all of their other good players for the most part. I mean, I'm sure we talked about Sean Murphy's telegenic hit-by-pitch plenty. Oh, yeah. Telegenic hit-by-pitch is such an unhorny way of describing that.

I know. But yes. Well, I made up for it because The Ringer does an annual compendium of just like the best sports moments where everyone on the staff just writes about some moment that they remembered. And I wrote about the Sean Murphy hit-by-p pitch combined with the big dumper mariners homers i just i wrote about the west catchers with yeah that's basically yeah the year of the butt right you know so anyway that's uh i guess as good as it got like we talked about the a's a fair amount i mean we talked about

the wildlife in the ballpark we talked about the attendance and the ticket prices and the threats to move the team and just them getting rid of all their good players before the season or during the season. But this was the rare heartwarming moment. And his kids were there to announce him on the PA system, his three children. So they said, like, now batting our dad number 21 steven vote so just really sweet and also he was starting at catcher in that game his first start at catcher in like 47 games because it had been hard for him to to do that yeah so it was just a really nice sent off that he gave himself and also the team gave him yeah i have never heard anything but really great things about Vogt, including from people who have worked on the team side when he has been on their roster.

I think we talked about this at the time, just seems like we're not done seeing Steven Vogt in a big league dugout. I imagine that guy's going to end up coaching and progressing pretty quickly just based on what people say about him. But I also would submit this, Ben, that Steven Vogt may have had a rough year at the plate and he might have been injured. But I would submit that a guy like that on a team like the 2022 A's, if ever there is a case that someone is bringing value

that war can't capture, I imagine it's a Steven Vogt on a team like the 2022 A's because he's this calming veteran presence, sounds like he's a good teammate and mentor. He's probably, he's a glue guy. And when your team's that bad and it's trading good players and it's maybe moving and- Trade everyone who wasn't glued down so yeah yeah like you need a you need a glue guy and i think that he is he's a consummate glue guy you know and so um uh yeah what a nice send-off to steven vote i look forward to seeing what he does next in his baseball career assuming he wants to have one you know he does have three i think pretty young kids so maybe he'll just like hang out with his young kids who knows sure why not all right blue jays so we also must have mentioned this at some point

but maybe we didn't give it its due kevin gossman not only did he have an extremely high babbitt but he had the highest yeah babbitt ever yeah really like i mean at least for a pitcher with as many innings as he threw he threw 174 and two-thirds innings if we set the minimum innings cut off at 170 i just looked the live ball era 1920 so we're talking more than a century here and no one has ever had a babbit that high his was 363 after that you got to go down to kevin brown at 355 and that was in 94 so shortened year so in a full season 353 aaron sealy in 1999 so that's like extraordinary i mean it's uh it's unprecedented for someone who pitched that many innings to have that high a BABIP. And so obviously that led to more than a full run or almost a full run gap between his ERA and FIP. And that is probably why he finished only ninth in AL Cy Young award voting, even though he led the league in FIP and also in strike out to walk ratio. Among AL pitchers, he was second only to Verlander in Fangraff's war. And so really, it was an interesting test

case because obviously voters are paying more attention to FIP these days, but his gap was so extreme, I guess, that when you have a 3.35 ERA and you have a lot of other guys with very low, you know, sub three or sub two numbers, then that's just too much to overcome even for statistically savvy, enlightened modern voters. So that's just, I mean, he had to feel snake bit and the Pujays, like they did a lot of adventurous shifting, especially early in the year more outfield shifting than i think any other team did and also early in the season a lot of shifting against right-handed batters but they really dialed that down over the course of the

season and it seems like it it may have been because of kevin gossman at least in part because he was getting killed by the shift or at least getting killed when the shift was on. He was not having better results on balls in play when the shift was on, which was the point of putting it on. And he was not thrilled about it. There's a quote from him in mid-July where he was referring back to a late June start against the White Sox, June 21st, when he pitched pretty well, but he gave up seven hits and six innings and he took the loss. And he said, you usually only notice the negative things and you don't notice the line drives that are right at somebody. You kind of forget those things. You only notice and remember the times when a single turned into a double and they scored

a run. Before my game in Chicago, I was like, these guys are doing a really good job of beating the shift in the first game of that series. I was kind of like, let's just go play baseball straight up and see what happens. There was also maybe a couple of times where I could have had an out where I gave up a base hit. It's just a tough situation. There's no right or wrong answer. It's just dependent on if it's working or it's not. And that was diplomatic. He didn't throw anyone under the bus too much. He said, you know, you notice the negative things. You don't remember the times when the shift bailed you out. But there were a lot of times when the shift seemed to cost him a hit.

And so that comment and there was some rumor mongering or reporting that maybe he had objected privately to. And as a veteran, like maybe he had some input and a big addition. So if we use that late June start as a cutoff, the start before that, the shift had been on for 73.6% of his pitches. The start after that, the shift was on for only 21.4% of his pitches. So it seems like that might have been a time when things changed. Overall on the season, he was shifted for on 39.2% of the pitches he threw, but through June 21st, 61.9%. After June 21st, 20.4%. And even more extreme, if we look at shifts against right-handed hitters, it was 58.1% when Gossman was pitching against

righties through June 21st, only 7.7% after that. So that's a pretty steep fall off. And if we look at the Jays as a whole, it is definitely the same sort of trend, but not quite as extreme. So Jays on the season, they shifted the second most frequently of any team, 50.9% of pitches, which was second only to the Dodgers at 53.1. The Astros were the only other team that shifted on at least half of the pitches that they threw. Against righties, the Jays were also second

to the Dodgers. Full season, 44.6% was their rate. The Dodgers were 46.4. And the league as a whole was only at 20.4% against righties, which was down from its high in 2020, but a bit higher than 2021. We've talked about how shifting against righties may be a dubious decision on the whole if you do it too often. Now, if we break down the Jays through June and after June, you see the same sort of trend. So against all hitters, 61.8% through June. After June, 41.2%, which was only the sixth most, whereas they had been by far the most frequent shifters through June. Against righties, again, 61.1% through June, so they were shifting against righties almost as often as they were shifting against lefties.

After June, only 26.5% against righties. And you see sort of the same thing with their four-man outfields, because they did that much more than any other team too. They had a four-man outfield on 4.3% of all their pitches this season, but again, through June, 5.9%, after June, 2.8%. Even so, full season, they had 981 four-man outfields. The Rays were second, a distant second at 487. The Yankees at 223, the Tigers at 117, and no one else near 100. 21 teams never had a four-man outfield. So essentially, the Jays shifted less often after June, even when Gossman wasn't pitching.

But when he was pitching, they shifted a lot less often. Yeah. Did that actually make a difference for Gossman? Well, not that clearly. Through that start on June 21st, he had a.372 BABIP. After June 21st, and you'd obviously expect some regression even if you didn't do anything differently, but after June 21st, a lot less shifting going on, he still allowed a.357 BABIP. Not much lower at all.

And in fact, if you look on the full season, Gossman allowed a.350 BABIP with the shift on and a.354 BABIP just with a standard defensive alignment. So it's weird that it's not much lower. You'd expect it to be significantly lower. But still, he allowed a higher BABIP with a standard defensive alignment and a very high one in both situations and a 477 BABIP on a partial shift, a strategic shift. So he was sort of damned if he did and damned if he didn't. According to StatCast, he was third worst defensive support behind him. So just in terms of outs above average behind a pitcher, Patrick Corbin was dead last at negative 20 outs above average, the Nationals defense when

Corbin was on the mound. Yeah. Second was George Kirby of the Mariners at negative 12 and then Gossman at negative 11. So his defense let him down or he got very unlucky or some combination of the two. And so he ended up with this just historically strange BABIP year and a barely top 10 finish in Cy Young voting when if you went by defensive dependent stats, he was one of the very best pitchers in the league. Yeah, I think that I'm okay with the idea that, I don't know. I think it's fine to look at that big of a gap and say, yes, clearly there was some defensive problem here, maybe a profound defensive problem, but that also maybe there was something weird that he was doing too.

Yeah, that's possible too. He is very good. I'm not knocking him, to be clear. The grace under pressure exhibited by not being like, these guys, get it together. Stop buttering your gloves before you go out there during one of my starts you know like i i'm sympathetic to and sort of admiring of the grace he exhibited in light of a thing that he he probably would have been within his rights to

complain about like a little bit more and a little bit louder in public than he did so i like you know but also like that's a big... Yeah. I can understand a Cy Young voter looking at that being like, a lot of that is defense, but maybe there's something in there that we're just not understanding about what he's doing. I have sympathy for that, too. I don't think that that is exhibiting an anti-stat approach. Right. No. Yeah. And he had a 307 career BABIP coming into the year, which is slightly elevated, but obviously nowhere near 363. So maybe he had some tendency to, obviously he's hard to hit just in general or at this stage of his career he is but sometimes you have guys who uh they're hard to get the bat on the

ball but when you do get the bat on the ball then it tends to be hit hard sort of a josh hater situation so so he may have been a bit prone to that but not to that extent yeah he did have better than average hard hit rates and exit velocities and barrel rates so he just had a hard luck year one way or another yeah which he acknowledged and vented a bit about on August 25th after a loss to the Red Sox. He said, I try to focus on the contact I'm getting, but obviously you want the results and the soft contact. You just feel like you're not getting beat. They're not necessarily earning it. And they are, it's still a hit, but there's been a lot of ground balls that seem to be finding their way into the outfield. All I can really focus on is

making better pitches before that happens. You know, strike a guy out. That's kind of where I'm at. A lot of the bad stuff that happened tonight, I could have done things earlier in the at-bat to maybe keep that from happening. And speaking of putting balls in play and making things happen, let's transition to the Cleveland Guardians. Talked a lot about Stephen Kwan this year, but one thing that I did not know, and probably every Guardians fan knows this, and maybe you know this. I'm sure it was mentioned on broadcast and everything.

But his parents, Stephen Kwan's parents, Jane and Ray, they met in the 80s while playing pinball. Oh. And so they got young Stephen Kwan hooked on pinball when he was very young. And it seems to have helped. He gives credit to pinball for his hand-eye coordination, which is so important to his hitting profile and knowing when to swing and being able to make contact. Really?

He's apparently a pinball wizard. I did not know this about him. I didn't know that about... Like, move over, Mookie Betts. There's a new guy in the clubhouse for weird alternate sport acumen. That's so cool. Yeah. I like the idea that we should be training our young baseball players on playing pinball.

Yeah. Wow. That's delightful. Yeah. And also interesting, this is something I noticed. A few people suggested, Scott and others or Corey, that we talk about Oscar Gonzalez. And people brought up the fact that, yeah, he had the SpongeBob theme music as his walk-up. And SpongeBob kind of became the official or unofficial team postseason mascot.

And that's nice. But one thing that I thought was interesting about those two rookies, the Guardians had tons of rookies and young guys on this team. But those two, Oscar Gonzalez and Stephen Kwan, who were big for them all year and particularly in the postseason, they were polar opposites when it came to swing rates. So I guess, I don't know if Oscar Gonzalez played much pinball when he was young, because he sort of swung at everything. Yeah, as is his want. Right. And Stephen Kwan swung at nothing. So among rookies with at least 350 plate appearances, Kwan had the lowest swing rate. Gonzalez had the highest swing rate. And even if we go just among all players with 350 plate appearances, so that's 246 players, Kwon had the third lowest swing rate. He swung more often than only Daniel Vogelbach and Juan Soto. And Oscar Gonzalez

had the third highest swing rate of anyone. He swung at 59.2% of pitches behind only Luis Robert and Nick Gordon of the Twins. So you had two rookie outfielders who played a big part in the Guardians surprise season and postseason run, and they could not have been more different when it came to their swing profiles. Now, Gonzalez, despite swinging at everything, he still makes pretty good contact, not like Stephen Kwan, but Gonzalez's strikeout rate was only 19.6%. So significantly below average strikeout rate or better than average strikeout rate, even though he swung at everything and didn't really walk. So I guess the common theme there is that they both had high contact

rates, but just a completely different swing profile, which is pretty interesting because you might think like, oh, they're, you know, young rookies coming up with the same team and the same player development system and they would prize different things. But it does seem like plate discipline and contact rate, those are things that aren't necessarily like set in stone, but are maybe more inherent or resistant to change and development than some other qualities that can be more easily adjusted in this day and age so those guys were

just uh completely opposites but it worked for each of them in their own way yeah wow that's cool that's a cool thing all right next up is the marin. We also talked a lot about the Mariners this year. And so this submission from listener Matt is somewhat obscure and not even about the Major League Mariners. But this was about the Mariners top prospect, who is Harry Ford. And he was their first round pick in 2021. Yep. And he is a catcher and he's young and he is still quite a ways away from the majors. I think he's like looking at maybe a 2025 ETA or something, but he's only 19 years old, but he was the 12th overall pick last year. overall pick last year and although he is a long way from the majors he was in a ball he did and has gotten to star in wbc qualifiers because he was on the great britain qualifier team and i guess uh the great britain wbc team because they qualified for the wbc for the first

time ever largely or in part due to har Ford and his heroics. So both of his parents are British, born and raised there, and he is not, but he gets to play on the Great Britain team. And Great Britain played three games in the qualifiers, and they beat France and Germany and also Spain. And the Spanish team that they beat to get into the tournament included shortstop Noel V. Marte, who was the former Mariners top prospect, who was sent to the Reds in Luis Castillo trade. And he homered in that game. But so did Harry Ford. And Harry Ford, he caught and hit leadoff in all three of Great Britain's qualifiers

and led them to victory in all of those games. And I think he hit three homers, three games, three homers, and three for six in the first two games with two homers and a double and three walks. And then in that final game, he hit his third homer. He went two for five,

drove in three runs, and clinched the first ever WBC berth for Great Britain. So even though he spent the season with the Modesto Nuts, the Mariners' single-A affiliate, he still got to star on that stage. And I guess we will get to see him playing in competitive WBC games with Great Britain. playing in competitive WBC games with Great Britain. So that's a nice little introduction to maybe more of a playoff type atmosphere than you get in A-ball. I don't know what the crowd was like at the Spain Great Britain qualifier, but there he is starring for his country or at least his parents' country that he plays for. Wow. That's pretty cool. Pretty cool. All right, Orioles. So a couple submissions here. Matt noted that after Grayson Rodriguez got hurt, the next big starter prospect that the Orioles had was D.L. Hall. And he did make his major league debut, unlike Rodriguez. He got one

MLB start, and it did not go well. And he was sent back down. And from then on, all of his appearances in the minors and the majors were in the bullpen. And it's not totally clear whether he'll be starting again. So I'm sure it wasn't entirely because of one start that didn't go well in the big leagues. But I guess he pitched in many games. He pitched in 11 games for the Orioles, but he made only one start. And then it was just the bullpen for him, both on the major league staff and once he went back to the minors. So I don't know whether you look at that as a turning point or not. It wasn't the worst start ever he came up and he faced the Rays on August 13th

and took the loss he went three and two-thirds innings he gave up five runs on four walks six strikeouts five hits I mean it's not good but it's not so bad but after that he was just back in the bullpen and for the rest of the season so I he's still a, and it's not like one game changes your whole outlook or where you're going to land. But that's notable, I guess. And the other submission was from Kevin, who pointed out that Anthony Santander led the team with a career-high 33 homers. And he also had five two-homer games, including the last four games in which he went deep in 2022. But oddest of all, the Orioles were 1-4 when he homered twice, and they are now 1-9 all-time when he has two home runs in a game. The only win was a 14-8 mess in Fenway on September 26th. So he has 10 career two-homer games, and the Orioles are 1-9 in those games. That is weird. It's very strange. Ryan Nelson, frequent StatBlast consultant, rsnelson23 on Twitter, he did a little mini StatBlast here.

I guess we have a few of those in this episode. But overall, when a team has a player hit two homers, it wins 72.4% of the time, or it has historically. historically so if that's all you know that someone has hit two homers then you're you're almost three quarters likely to win the game which is not so surprising because uh getting a two homer game out of someone before anyone else does anything else or or exclusive of everything else that's that's pretty good this is actually i think not just two i think think this is two plus. Okay. So it could be more than two sometimes. But Santander's one in nine lifetime is by far the worst winning percentage by anyone in games where he's homered two or more times. So he's one in nine. It's a 10% win rate.

The other worst one. So Lee Thomas was one in six. Ken Griffey, I assume senior, not junior, was 1-5. Charlie Neal, also 1-5. Then Mike Davis was 1-4. So Santander is like a total outlier here in terms of worst win rates. And he still has time for teams to improve that. I guess it hasn't helped that he has played mostly for really, really terrible Orioles teams. So that'll do it, I guess. But even in light of that, you would think that he would have had better luck. But the outlier on the other end, so laroche his teams when he homered two or more times went 23 and one so 96 win rate and right behind him is mookie bets at 22 and one

and he's uh he's also at 96 although mookie he's had a bunch of three homer games which uh i think we have mentioned before that he had an unusual cluster of multi homer games which uh i think we have mentioned before that he had an unusual cluster of multi homer games i think that may have been the subject of a stat blast or mini stat blast but i will put the spreadsheet online but santander just weird weird outlier where him hitting two or more homers has not been a good omen for the orioles thus far But maybe that'll change now that the Orioles are a bit better. I would continue to hit two or more homers whenever I could, if I were Anthony Santanda. Yeah, like I think that if one is given the option to do that or not do that,

one should do that, not only for the sake of your team, but just for yourself, because if you keep doing that, you know, like people are going to be like, well, that guy, he hits home runs. Right. All right. The Rangers, this was also submitted by matt so the rangers suffered three immaculate innings against them that is so uh nine pitches and nine strikes three outs and two of them were in the same game which i think was mentioned on the show against the Astros on June 15th. And in all three of them, I think the third one was a Reed Detmers game. So in all three, Ezekiel Duran struck out. So he was the first player, I think, ever to strike out in three immaculate innings. So not something you want to be known for i guess ezekiel duran yeah it's also sort of a tungsten arm angel story as matt points out because reed detmers through that third immaculate inning

while the angels were losing five to two so the rangers uh they've been on on the bad end of some no hitters but also three immaculate in. And they are the second team ever to suffer that indignity in a single season after the 1979 San Francisco Giants. Ezekiel Duran was part of all three of them. And on a more positive note, I guess, listener Mulder Batflip in the Patreon Discord group. Terrific. Yeah. He suggested that we mention the second half that Nathaniel Lowe had. And I don't know whether we ever did mention this, and I was not really aware of this. But wow, he had himself a second half. Among qualified hitters in the second half, only Aaron Judge was better than Nathaniel Lowe.

Did you know that? I didn't know that. I did not know that. Yeah. So I did know that i didn't know that i did not know that yeah so uh i did know that aaron judge had a good second half i was aware of that but nathaniel low i was not so aware of so in the second half if i'm sorting by wrc plus here it goes aaron judge 252 then a very very big drop off to nathaniel low at 176 but but he just surpassed Jose Altuve and Jordan Alvarez, and I really just did not know. That was 301 second-half plate appearances, and because of that,

he ended up with a very robust 143 WRC plus on the season. He hit 302, 3588 492 in 645 plate appearances 27 dingers so i mean he had been the the less notable low slash lau in the majors yeah until this year but i guess there was a kind of a changing of the hierarchy when it came to the lows and and lau is in 2022 because Nathaniel Lowe was really spectacular especially in the second half and Brandon Lowe was not so much and didn't play a full season and had all sorts of issues so there you go the low that the Rays did not keep he was fantastic in 2022 all. We have the Rays now, Nathaniel Lowe's original team. So we did talk about one trade that the Rays made that worked out really well for them, the trade where they acquired Isak Paredes for Austin Meadows before the season started. And Paredes was really fantastic for the Rays and I think out-homered everyone on the Tigers, just to

add insult to injury. But there was a maybe lesser known trade that the Rays made prior to the season that also worked out quite well for them. And that was for Harold Ramirez. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Harold Ramirez, he was traded by the Cubs to the Rays for Esteban Quiroz on March 25th, 2022. So right before opening day. And he never actually played for the Cubs. He was with the Guardians last year. Right. And then the Cubs purchased him from Cleveland. You've got to change that language. I know. It's always like purchased. But that's what it says in change that language. I know, it's always, like, purchased,

but that's what it says in the transaction log. I know, I know. They paid money to acquire these services. Yeah, it just feels like you're saying the same thing with more words, you know? I'm not blaming you, Ben, to be clear. I'm saying that, like, you know, in the next CBA, maybe we update this language. Yeah.

I don't know how to say it in a more palatable way. But they paid only money for the right to have Harold Ramirez play for them. I don't know. Whatever, at least. So Harold Ramirez, for the Rays, he had a really nice year. It was not an Isaac Paredes-level year. But it was a nice year. year. It was the first year that he had been an above average hitter and he offered positive value and and beyond that he actually like he lost a month

to injury I think and if he had not then he could have made a run at the batting title because he did not qualify he is one of those players who did not qualify for the batting title but I mean I guess he hit 300 like he would have had to have a great month. But he was in the running at least. Yeah. And so I'm reading from a Tampa Bay Times article that says the headline, Call Harold Ramirez a lot of things for Rays, including Mr. Happy. So he's also very happy.

And he smiles a lot. And he's uh just a good clubhouse guy yeah and so he he got hit by a pitch and and he fractured his thumb and was out for a month and so he was not happy about that no but other than that he's uh just very popular and was kind of like you know we talked about steven vote being popular. We talked about Guillermo Heredia being very popular for Atlanta. But those guys were not good when they were playing. But Harold Ramirez was also pretty good when he was playing. And, you know, he's got like dyed blue hair, which is fun. It's, you know, kind of floppy, floppy blue hair yeah and he's like the article one of the ray's most enthusiastic animated and loudest cheerleaders in the dugout he's great manager kevin cash said just a genuinely good person yeah and uh talks about his family and his upbringing and just his style and and he's just a fun player who i don't know if we ever mentioned. So Harold Ramirez, everyone, just another example of the Rays getting a good player and seemingly a good person in a trade. Yeah.

Okay. All right. And the Red Sox. So not that many great stories about the Red Sox this year, but Ryan nominated Dennis Eckersley, who retired as a broadcaster. And he was a broadcaster for 20 years or so, and he was immensely popular in that role. And he has developed his own lingo. He has his own dictionary. There is a Twitter account called The Actionary.

Twitter account called The Actionary that has, it's at Actionary, and it has tracked just all of his little phrases that he has coined, or at least that he uses, because he's famous for having coined walk-off or walk-off peace, as he originally put it. But as a broadcaster, he has continued to employ these unique phrases. And this is something that even as a player he was known for. There's a Peter Gammon's book from the 80s that has like a Dennis Eckersley dictionary in it. And he said like some of these he has coined himself. Some of them he just picks up from other people or he doesn't even know where he got them, but he incorporates them into conversation. them but he incorporates them into conversation so i'll read there's a google doc that the actionary put together with uh all of the ecchisms that we will now no longer be treated to as he is

retired so the the most common phrases by ecch are i gotta have it or i gotta have that that's uh basically like a pitch on the corner that he thinks should be called a strike. And as a former pitcher, he looks at it from the pitcher's perspective. And so he says, this is a strike. I got to have that. Sometimes he might add a pair of shoes. That's a pair of shoes, which is what he calls a looking strikeout. A pair of shoes. So the batter usually thinks the pitch is a ball out of the pitcher's hand, causing him to freeze in his shoes as it crosses the plate for a strike.

So it's a pair of shoes for some reason. So that's a common phrase. It's a beautiful thing is an go-to catchphrase. Put the ranch on it. That means, you know, basically bet the ranch like you're so confident in it that you'll bet everything. You'll put the ranch on it. like you're so confident in it that you'll bet everything, you'll put the wrench on it. And just to stay in shape is an activity done with just enough frequency because the player can.

So you can go to a full count just to stay in shape. Sure. It's just what you do. And he's got a lot of nicknames and some other things that he calls by weird names, but some other echisms. A home run is a baboomba. That's great. Bases loaded is bases drunk. I've heard others say that.

I don't know if he started that or if he's just known for that. A bean is either 100 miles per hour or $1 million. Okay. Someone who's making $19 million is making 19 beans a year. Okay. Or if you throw throw 100 i guess you threw a bean and uh some of these are exactly ecchisms like big league you know saying that you're big league you're like you're legit that's uh that's pretty common yeah i was gonna say i don't think we need to credit him with that one you know yeah branch work So when the results are not reflective of a pitcher's outing due to fluky or unlucky breaks.

Branch work. Yeah, branch work, like a check swing single or like a weekly hit home run or like it goes around the pesky pole or and it bat with a bunch of rockets foul that ends in an out consistently working with runners on base but getting an out. Yeah, branch work. Branch work. Kevin Gossman was having a lot of branch branch work done against him yeah that makes me think of like um landscaping like yeah you know yeah had a tree out front and had to have some branch work done on it earlier this summer because it was looking scraggly yeah same thing just uh happened to me we a branch kind of like fell over the road and scraped across our windshield as we were just driving up here. So we need to do some branch work

after I'm done with this podcast. Are you okay? Are you guys okay? Oh yeah, we're fine. I feel like you, sometimes you drop stuff on me in the middle of an episode that you should really lead with. It didn't fall. It was just like, I guess the branch cracked maybe and was hanging over the road.

And so as we went by it, it scraped across the car. But it was not like, yeah. That's less dramatic than what I was envisioning. I was like, you have people, you got a baby in that car? You're right. Yeah. Oh, my. Well, I'm glad that it was not more dramatic.

Yeah. Didn't stop you in your two shoes. No, it did not. It's a pair of shoes. To hit a home run is to go bridge. Okay. And a bridge master can be someone who hits a lot of home runs. Okay.

Some of these, like Broadway, middle of the strike zone, okay. Yeah, okay. Bronze to tan. I mean, we know this, right? Yeah. And cheese, okay. I mean, some of these, yeah. Some of these feel like you know you just

you just like dennis eckersley and you want to credit him and stuff and that's fine but like let's call it what it is hesitation cheese is a fastball in which the pitcher hesitates in his delivery it's not like a particularly pungent kind of cheese that you know i don't know if i shouldn't do this one this might want this one might be illegal in the u.s a lot of different varieties of cheese ultra cheese is uh when a guy's throwing beans, I guess. Cheese school is what he calls driveline, a place where you can

go to improve your fastball velocity is cheese school. Yeah. Dotage is when you dot the corner of the zone. You get some good dotage. Okay. Again, some of these are dotage. Okay. Yeah.

Again, some of these are just baseball. And Hairy Guy is a middle-of-the-order hitter who hits long, far home runs, like a big hairy guy, I guess. What? Yeah. I like that he is trying to claim being her suit as a positive thing. Because I think sometimes we're anti-body hair as a culture in a way that is very strange. Yeah. Hazel is his word for half or 50. So if you say someone had a five and a half ERA, you might say five and a hazel.

All right. Yeah. He refers to money as iron also. Big settlers of Catan guy over there. Yeah. He's good about things in terms of resources. Now, Johnson, in the words of Eck, everything's a Johnson. It goes with everything. So he will use it in place of a home run, like a three-run Johnson, a backdoor Johnson, which is a backdoor johnson which is a backdoor breaking ball a steel johnson is a stolen base okay a three-finger johnson is a three-finger change up i gotta say some of these sound pretty dirty yeah no slide johnson is a slider a 10-year johnson is a 10-year contract is this like a john

like like a philadelphia person says john for everything and, and is that what John is short for? Like J-A-W-N. Yeah, right. So maybe, I guess he just, he uses it interchangeably to mean many different things. It could be true. Yeah, same sort of idea, apparently. He's from Oakland, not from Philly. Anyway.

Listen, I gotta say, though, using John, like the Philly version, it's very tempting, because it is such a delightful bit of phrasing. Yes. So, you know, if that is what he's doing, I think he can be forgiven. Right. A lamb is the opposite of a hairy guy, I guess, like a player who is mediocre going through a slump. But lambs are hairy. That is true.

They get shorn. Like, that's a whole thing you do with lambs. Right. Yes. I don't know if some of these hold up i you know i don't think we have to change our opinion of him as a broadcaster but i think we could examine some of these and be like you know we have notes a nice set of hair is moss okay fine pretty good deal yeah we covered uh okay party is like when a pitcher needs to attack the hitter you want to

party with the hitter okay a pearl is uh like a good performance a good defensive gem or sometimes you'll hear that for like a nice clean baseball but but a pearl is spectacular pitching performance or defensive play peace is uh similar to johnson i guess that's not that unusual powder river when a pitcher airs out his best fastball and challenges the hitter to hit it. So this comes from before Eckersley, but Powder River is a real good fastball. And Salad is a slow pitch. Yeah. Look at that, Salad.

Snake is a sweeping breaking ball. A Snapdragon is a sharp biting curveball. This one, Speed of Stink, that means very slowly. So if you say it was a four-run game and he was moving at the speed of stink that means very slowly so if you say it was a four run game and he was moving at the speed of stink i mean that means he was like working at a really slow pace speed of stink speed of stink i don't know is that like is that related to like how quickly a smell spreads when there's a i don't know either i don't know that's a's a, I don't know either. I don't know. That's a good band name. Yeah. Squash is a head, so you can have good moss on your squash, I guess. Okay. Stat Masterson is someone who is well-versed in baseball analytics.

Okay. So Alex Spear, for instance, a regular Effectively Wild guest of the Boston Globe, he will be referred to as a Stat Masterson by Eckersley. Okay. And then Statue of Liberty play is when the pitcher freezes in the set position with no intention of throwing the baseball. Here's the problem with that. That is another...

That's another play. That's another action in another sport. Like, that is a football thing. It's a trick play in football. Yeah, I guess he just borrowed it. I'm taking exception with that one. Okay, well, that's everything on the action area. So thanks for your contributions to

the baseball lexicon, or at least popularizing some terms, and we will miss you. We will. Despite my criticism, you know, editors don't criticize because they dislike you. They want to help. So that's where that's coming from for me. Alright, the Royals. Andrew nominated Jose Cuas,

who is a sidewinder reliever for the Royals, who probably never came up on the show, but he's another good meet a major leaguer type because he had a really interesting trajectory. and he really went through a lot like he pitched 47 games for the royals and was pretty good but to get to that point he was uh he was a fedex driver like multiple off seasons but also he first came up as a position player he was drafted by the brewers in the 11th round in 2015 and then they converted him to pitching and then they also released him because he wasn't good enough at pitching and then he went and he pitched for the long island ducks of the atlantic league and apparently francisco rodriguez was also there at the time and quas was was warming up and he just kind of like threw a few pitches sidearm just for fun. And evidently it looked and felt really natural.

And Francisco Rodriguez was like, you should just be a sidearm pitcher now. And so he did. And that was kind of the key for him or a key. And then he was signed by the Diamondbacks pre-pandemic and then released by the Diamondbacks pre-pandemic or during the pandemic. I guess they released him. And then finally he signed as a free agent with the Royals in June of 2021. And he made it up this year and he pitched quite well after pitching very well in the minors. So just kind of your typical rags to riches minor league story, working all kinds of odd jobs and going through all different outposts of baseball.

And then something clicks, and you make it all the way to the big leagues. He has a family. He's got a couple kids, and he was just trying to support them. And he would work as a FedEx driver and then go out and throw to his brother and try to just stay in baseball shape and hope someone would give him a chance. And it's a nice, heartwarming story. It really worked out. And he was not just a cup of coffee guy. He was actually up for most of the year and was good. Cool. That's very cool. Yep. All right. The Tigers, I will mention, I know that we mentioned this, but the fact that

a couple of the Tigers' most notable additions were not with them for much of the year, right? And Eduardo Rodriguez was absent for months and initially just was not even in contact with the team and then was away for a while and never publicly said exactly why. He did tell the team what was up, but it was just some sort of family issue was going on and it was reported maybe marital issues or something but he just said you know it was family stuff that he was dealing with and he was away from the team and then he pitched okay when he came back the other notable absence was austin meadows who i mentioned as the player who came back in the isaac paredes trade although you probably would have called it the Austin Meadows trade at the time. At the time, yeah.

Yeah. And he missed a bunch of time with a lot of issues, but one of the things that was not just physical injury related, and I think we mentioned this, but in September, he tweeted, this season has been an unfortunate struggle with a series of injuries and illness from dealing with vertigo early on, then COVID, to bilateral tendinitis in my Achilles, and then having to go through the rehab process each time. What I have told very few people is that I also have been struggling with my mental health in a way that has extended my time away from the game I love so much. I've been dealing with this privately with a great team of professionals, but I need to continue to

put in the hard work off the field toward feeling mentally healthy. While I've been back in the clubhouse the past few weeks and plan to remain with the club through the end of the season, I am still not ready to return to the field. I'm so grateful for my family, my teammates, and the Tigers organization for supporting me through this. I can't do this alone, and I hope in sharing my experience, I can touch at least one person who might be going through their own struggles and encourage them to reach out to someone for help. So I think we may have briefly applauded that in passing, but just wanted to mention it again, because a lot of stigma around this sort of thing, just societally, but especially in professional sports, right? And that has started to change belatedly in baseball. And some players have been

more open about going through these things. And so for him to put out that statement, I think was great. And I'm sure that did have an impact on some people. Yeah, I think that that's right. And also just want to mention for the Tigers. So so listener Brandon had suggested that we talk about how many different lineups the A's had had because he thought that had been a record. And it would have indeed tied the record for a team with the dh but the record was actually broken and set by the tigers so no yeah so just another little mini stat blast here that ryan looked up for me so we looked up a couple different ways we looked up

just different batting orders just irrespective of defensive position. So it's the same, you know, if you bat seventh one day and then you bat seventh the next day and the first day you're playing third base and the next day you're playing first base, it's the same by that method. And then we also looked another way where that counts as two different lineups. So you're taking into account not only the lineup order in your lineup slot, but also where you were playing in the field. And either way, the Tigers had 161 different lineups. Oh, my gosh. So they had one repeat.

So the duplicates, July 26th and August 9th, they had the same lineup. But other than that, they had a different lineup every day. Oh, man. And Oakland and Toronto were both at 160 this year, which tied the previous record that the 2019 Jays set. And before that, the record was 158 by the 2018 Royals and also the 1985 Angels, who held the record for a long time. And before that, the 1979 A's at 153. And before that, the 1973 Rangers with 146 in the first year of the DH era. So Ryan ran this all the way back and he gave me both leagues, including the NL.

So of course, in the NL and in the AL prior to the DH, there tended to be more lineups just because you had different starting pitchers all the time. And now you do have teams that are using the DH to give people rest days instead of having a dedicated DH every day, but still less variety than when you had a starter in the lineup. So Ryan gave it to me all the way back and for both leagues. And of course, even for AL teams in some years, there were games in NL parks where they had to have a pitcher hit. You can see all the teams and all the years in the spreadsheet that I'll link to on the show page. The overall record holder is the 1965 Mets, who played 164 games with two ties and had

164 unique lineups via both of our methods. But really, we're focusing here on the record for DH teams in DH leagues, though the trends hold across leagues. And we had done a somewhat similar stat blast back in episode 1379 about the number of lineups per team per season, but now we're updating that and we're also looking at it with multiple methods counting the defensive variation and also without that. Regardless, the Tigers set that record and they can't be beaten unless a team has a different lineup every single day of a 162 game season. That is what it would take to set one more record. So they are almost at the maximum. But I think the interesting thing is whichever method you use here, there has been a slow and steady increase over time in the number of lineups used per year. So Ryan went back all the way, and I'll link to his spreadsheet, which has an interesting graph.

But even if we just look for AL teams in the DH era, and we compare that to even just AL teams in the present. even just AL teams in the present. So like in 1973, first year of the DH, AL teams had on average 111.6 lineups not taking into account the defensive position and 114.8 lineups taking into account the defensive position. So 111.6, 114.88 fast forward almost 50 years to 2022 and we can just stay with al teams for consistency 147.8 and 152.9 so like 35 to 40 more lineups used now in the course of a season by an average team or AL team than in the first season of the DH era. And there has been just a steady increase, obviously, like going from no DH to DH that reduced the lineup variety if you take into account the pitcher's slot. But just looking at the past 50 seasons or so, just the DH era, it has been a steady climb by both of these methods. And so I think there are a few different reasons for that.

Probably it could be partly more defensive versatility and an emphasis on players playing more positions because benches are smaller, but it's not even really that much more of an increase if you look at the defense method. It's a huge increase either way. So I think probably the rest days issue that we were talking about with the qualified hitters. So just like more days off and someone's got to play and then just probably being less married to certain lineup slots, being limited to certain archetypes and types of hitter, right? So kind of anyone can bat anything these days. It's not like you have to have this guy as a leadoff hitter

and this guy as a number two hitter. And maybe also like analytics-driven matchups changes and handedness platoons and just like we like you against this guy and maybe if we like you against this guy. And maybe if we like you against this guy, then we'll move you up in the lineup. Whereas in the past, we might've been like, well, he's a number six hitter and he hits number six every day or something. So I think there's just a lot more versatility and flexibility when it comes to this, but we do see just way, way, way more lineups than we used to. I guess it could also have to do with front office input into setting the lineups, which used to be just the domain of the manager for the most part.

So now you have more of a brain trust putting these things together. And I guess that might lead to more changes. But the Tigers are sort of a sign of the times, but they are the most extreme ever. All right. And just a couple more here the twins so paul suggested that we just uh note joan duran's incredible season that he had which probably came up at some point but paul writes he always had great stuff but had thrown just 16 competitive innings in the two seasons leading up to 2022 right at the end of spring training he was

moved to the bullpen and hit the ground running. Not only did he throw the hardest fastball of anyone in the league, he also dazzled with the hybrid splitter slash sinker that he threw as hard as 101 miles per hour. And despite those offerings, his curve was actually his best pitch, allowing a pitiful 166 ex-WOBA against. And so, yeah, he was one of the best relievers in baseball. He had the second highest WPA, win probability added, total of any reliever behind only Daniel Bard of the Rockies. So Duran had the highest in the AL. And, yeah, he actually had the highest average fastball speed as well as of anyone who threw at least 50 innings. He averaged 100.9, which was 0.6 faster than Andres Munoz of the Mariners.

So he did kind of come out of nowhere and was just a dominant bullpen guy that, you know, as a rookie and as someone who people hadn't really forecasted that for and he was not closing for most of the season but he did pick up eight saves with a sub two era and yeah he was just uh totally dominant so a nice surprise and i guess a good example of a guy who's a starter who then gets moved to the bullpen and is just kind of out of nowhere amazing yep that happens paul also mentioned the continued mentoring of luisa rise by nelson cruz even though cruz was no longer with the twins he had taken a rise under his wing as well as other young players and so over the off season heading into 2022 arise went down to cru Cruz's hometown in the Dominican Republic and they would train and hit at his batting cage and lift at his gym and stay with him at his home. So a typical day,

he said, would see them starting in the cages at around 9am and hitting until noon. They would drink protein and then quickly shift to lifting until 3pm. After that, they'd grab some food and rest for a bit before getting back to the cages around 7 p.m. and hitting until 11 or 12. Cruz's mother, Dominga, would often cook for them. So Arise lost about 11 pounds and he developed this new routine. And even after leaving the twins, Cruz would call to check on him and make sure he was following the schedule and sticking to what they had worked on over the offseason. And of course, Arise won the batting title. So Cruz continuing to have an impact even from afar. All right. White Sox didn't really get many nominations for the White Sox.

I guess it was just not a season with that many fun stories. And probably a lot of them we did talk about. Yes, we did talk about that Tony Russo story and also that Tony Russo story. that totally racist story so uh we got a couple nominations from from daniel who noted that we could mention the fact that uh sebi zavala became a competent backup catcher so i guess that's that's something so congrats to to sebi he did put together a 107 ops plus in over 205 plate appearances after not really hitting at all in limited time in 2021. But also, Daniel suggested Reynaldo Lopez becoming a good late inning reliever or Eloy Jimenez's second half. So I guess Eloy's thunder was a little bit stolen by Nathaniel Lowe, who had an even better second half. But Jimenez was right up there. So it was Judge, Nathaniel Lowe, Jose Altuve, Jordan Alvarez, and Eloy Jimenez had the fifth best second half by a qualified hitter with a 169 WRC+.

So he made up for lost time. So if we can just get Eloy Jimenez to have a healthy full season and not hurt himself playing outfield or doing something else, then that would be good for the White Sox. It would be useful. Yeah, he can hit when he's healthy. All right, and lastly, we're up to the Yankees. And we got nominations here from a friend of the show, Lucas Apostolaris. And you wouldn't think that there'd be anything that we had not talked about. They were a frequent topic of conversation.

They were, but there were a couple things that I don't think not talked about. They were a frequent topic of conversation. They were, but there were a couple of things that I don't think we talked about. So the first was that the Yankees hit two ultimate grand slams. So an ultimate grand slam is when you hit a bases loaded walk-off homer when you're trailing by three runs. So sort of very specific,

but this is the scenario that maybe you practice in the backyard when you're hitting wiffle balls or something, right? So bases loaded, walk off homer with the team trailing by three runs. play-by-play data, but we know of 32, and the Yankees hit two just this year, and they became only the second team on record to hit two in a single season after the 1956 Pirates. So Giancarlo Stanton hit one on September 20th against the Pirates, and that was a home run that was kind of overshadowed by Aaron Judge's 60th home run, but it was in the same inning of that home run, I believe. And then Josh Donaldson hit one on August 17th against the Rays. So that was nice for the Yankees. They hit two ultimate grand slams. And as a sign of how rare it is, the Yankees, as a franchise, had only had two ultimate Grand Slams lifetime. So yeah, Babe Ruth hit one September 24th, 1925, and Jason Giambi hit one on May 17th,

2002. So they had two coming into the year and they hit two more. And then I think even more interesting, Lucas pointed out Oswaldo Cabrera's defense. Even more interesting, Lucas pointed out Oswaldo Cabrera's defense. So Oswaldo Cabrera, he came up 23 years old, rookie, and he robbed a home run on his first pitch as a major league outfielder. Wow. Yeah, pretty impressive. Yeah.

So he made his major league debut on August 17th at third base. And then on August 18th, he played outfield. And on the very first pitch, he lourdes guriel jr he went over the the right field fence and brought back a ball and that's uh that's pretty darn impressive yeah a lot about like people who hit homers on their first pitch or their first at bat or whatever but robbing one yeah and you're and even more impressive is the fact that he had not played a pro game in the outfield until like the week before. So in the minors, he made his debut in the outfield on August 10th. That was in left field. He played his first game in right field on August 14th. And then on August 18th, he's playing right field in Yankee Stadium and robbing a home run in the first pitch he sees.

So not a large or steep learning curve for Oswaldo Cabrera. And he finished the season in only 208 innings. He had nine defensive runs saved in right field. And then, yeah, and he was also average or better defensively at five other positions. So a quick study as well. Yeah, that's impressive. All right. So that concludes this exercise, which is fun,

although it requires me to open about 60 tabs. So many tabs. Try to find the right one. So hopefully we have not overlooked another notable story about your team, but this was great. We learned a lot. We learned about Charles LeBlanc even before we started learning about stories that we had overlooked. So this was great.

And I'll end with the Pass Blast. This is episode 1949, and the Pass Blast comes from 1949 and from Jacob Pomeranke, Sabres Director of Editorial Content and Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. This was something I touched on in the MVP machine. So 1949, gadgets galore. Jacob writes, after signing Jackie Robinson and several other black players, the Brooklyn Dodgers quickly became fed up with fighting against segregated facilities, hotels, and ball fields during spring training in Florida. In 1948, the Dodgers took over an old Navy base in Vero Beach, Florida, and brought players from their 28 minor league affiliates for spring training in Florida. In 1948, the Dodgers took over an old Navy base in Vero Beach, Florida, and brought players from their 28 minor league affiliates for spring training at an integrated, all-inclusive camp they called Dodger Town. The Major League Dodgers began training there in 1949, and they brought a few experimental techniques with them. Here's a wire report on life in Dodger

Town on March 27, 1949. Quote, There must be thousands of dollars worth of gadgets in this Dodger training camp, but the most fascinating of all must have cost all of 75 cents, and it looks like something dear Aunt Miriam would use for stretching the chintz curtains from the pink bedroom. It is built on the lines of miniature football goalposts, and it is called simply The Strings. It is set up in front of a home plate and a practice catcher, and every pitcher in this tremendous training camp takes his turn at hitting the strike zone.

The zone is a well-defined rectangle in the dead center of the frame, which roughly approximates the area which umpires would call the pitch a strike if, of course, the batter didn't hit it first. It is a wonderful thing to practice control on, said Raph Branca, who works at the strings by the hour. You keep trying to hit the corners with different pitches and trying to picture different batters up there and see how you would throw to their weakness. I try to get 10 in a row in there, but about the time I get going good, the darned wind blows the strings in and makes me miss a corner somewhere. Next year, the Dodgers, who do everything in the grandiose manner,

not only are going to set up a type of chord which the wind can't blow, but they are going to illuminate the darned thing so the pitcher will see that strike zone sticking out at him. Of course, it would also be a terrific idea if they could develop some sort of an iridescent strike zone to hang in suspended animation during regular ball games, which not only would help the pitcher, but which might be very beneficial to nearsighted umpires, of which ballplayers say there are many. Jacob concludes the strike zone training tool was just one of many gadgets that Branch Rickey's Dodgers tried to make spring training more productive and efficient for their players. They also brought in customized pitching machines that could throw sliders and knuckleballs and high-velocity fielding machines for defensive drills. The Dodgers held spring training at Dodger Town in Vero Beach until 2008 when they moved to Arizona. Former Dodgers president Peter O'Malley now runs the site and hosts amateur and professional teams from around the world.

So yeah, Branch Rickey and his Dodgers were quite ahead of their time, and Branch Rickey himself when it came to helmets and batting cages and all sorts of things. Tricky himself when it came to helmets and batting cages and all sorts of things. So they innovated quite a bit. Lots of handy dandy player development tools that were sort of early predecessors of things that we consider cutting edge today. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that will do it for 2022. That is a year wrap for Effectively Wild. Thanks for listening, everyone.

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Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance this episode and this week and this year that will do it for us for this week and this year. So we will be back next week to talk to you in 2023. And words, they still come out of me But they don't mean much anything I want to make my history I want my place by 2023 By 2023