Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1993: Break(out) the Cycle

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the hot start by Jarred Kelenic and when to believe in a breakout, Jo Adell and the mystery of quadruple-A players, the odds of no Marlin hitting for the cycle until Luis Arraez did it this week, the Rays’ record-tying 13th straight win, new reports about new rules, […]

If baseball were different, how different would it be? And if this thought haunts your dreams, well, stick around and see what Ben and Meg have to say. Philosophically and pedantically, it's Effectively Wild. Effectively Wild. Effectively Wild! Hello and welcome to episode 1993 of Effectively Wild, a Fangrafts baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangrafts, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm all right. How are you? I'm all right.

I truly, truly hesitate to ask this, but do you believe in Jared Kelnick? Oh, Ben, what a controversial topic to start with. This could be the beginning and end of this episode. This could consume the entire podcast. It might. What a time. What a question. Is the Jared Keldick breakout reel the longest thread in the history of forums locked after whatever? Yeah, the longest podcast in the history of podcasts.

So I think a couple of things, but allow me to start with this one, which is to say that I'm not on Twitter as much as I used to be. And I've, as a result of that, I'm sure missed discourse. So I worry, Ben, that I'm going to say things innocently without guile or malice in my heart. And people will hear them and think, she's subtweeting or whatever the heck. And I'm here to tell you, I'm not doing that. Okay.

I don't have any, I have no guile. I have no agenda here other than to sit in awe of a set of facts that could support either conclusion, I think is really what I think. You know, I'm struck by a couple of numbers. Ben, can I give you some numbers? Please. It's what we do here. This is a FanGraphs podcast.

So like one number that you could be excited about if you were a Mariners fan is Jared Kilnick's WRC+. Yeah. He sits at a robust 212 as we are recording on Thursday. That does seem exciting. Yeah. That, you know, robust, Ben. Robust.

Right? And the Mariners are off today, I'm given to understand. So that number is not going to change for at least 24 hours. Yeah. The breakout's real for at least one day. For at least one day more, you know? I think there's a song about that in the musical. So you might be like, wow, cool.

And like, here's another number that you might be excited about. I'm going to give you two, and they're going to sit comfortably in concert with one another, right? One might be that he has a 470 WOBA, right? And you might think, wow. And then you look at his ex-WOBA actually higher than that, 479. You're like, wow, cool. You might, you know, if you're someone who has followed his tumultuous big league career so far, be like, wow, walk in a touch more skosh and striking out slightly less, certainly less than last year, you know, right around 27%. And then you might be like, wow, that iso. Spectacular, incredible, amazing even. You might be excited about the home runs that he has hit,

which I have to say, titanic. Oh, yeah. 482 feet. Just like real big, meat meaty healthy home runs hit to a part of wriggly that i don't think people hit home runs too very often right yeah it's like a big very rarely big old blast right and so those are like exciting those are exciting things it's very exciting that a guy who has at times just looked hopelessly lost at the plate is slashing 351 415 703 you know 41 plate appearances like you might be excited about all those things now you might also look at his literally 435 back and think, you know, there might be some regression baked in there.

But like, again, other numbers. Exciting. So I think that what I would like to say about one young Jared Kelnick is that I don't know yet, Ben. I don't know yet. It feels irresponsible to be confident in one way or the other, one direction or the other, I guess I should say. Am I excited? Yeah.

Am I intrigued? Sure. Am I deeply afraid? Also, yes. But I think that the main thing I would offer to Mariners fans who don't know how to feel about this is, first, feel however you want to. And second, just remember, like like we do not need to see a version of jared kelnick with a an ops that starts with one and not in the bad way right not in the bad way that an ops can start with one but in the good way that an ops can start with one he doesn't

need to he has had batting averages that started with a one in two straight seasons. Sure has. And so I guess what I would offer is that like if what Jared Kelnick ends up settling into over a bigger sample, maybe a full season sample is like a league-ish average bat, that would be a boon to Jared Kelnick and to the Mariners because the production they got in life last year was varying degrees of black hole. And the production that they have gotten from Jared Kelnick at a big league level feels rude to talk about, really. It feels ungenerous to the young man. So I am encouraged that we are seeing these results, if only because while he has had stretches where he has been serviceable, he's never quite looked like this before. One could say that it might end up being fine. It could be. That is an outcome that is available to us

in the distribution of outcomes. The limit of your optimism is that it might end up being fine. I mean, that's not the limit of my optimism, but I'm a semi-public person, and I have a responsibility to be reasonable in the face of what might be boundless optimism otherwise right like it it is objectively good that a dude who just like could not hit say four seamers last year sitting four seamers that a guy who could not ever lay off of uh like breaking stuff is well still struggling with that at times but is compensating with you know production against fastballs in a way that is like, it's pretty good. So I just, I don't want anyone to get overly amped, right? Because we've been disappointed before. And, you know, there are things here that might cause one to be a little nervous right could be a little bit nervous one might say like is he gonna continue to make good swing decision you know ben here's what i would say but i am

encouraged by the fact that like he, say, making better contact. He's making contact at all. At all, for sure. Right? And that there does seem to be some adjustment in approach here. But again, it's, Ben, here's another number that I will just underscore to you again. 41, that's the number of plate appearances. Yes, I was going to cite that number too.

It's 41. Not only 41 plate appearances, but I believe 38 of those plate appearances came against right-handed pitchers. Oh, yeah. I mean, they are deploying him quite strategically. Yeah. Yes. 38 of his PAs have come against righties. Look, you know, if he could be a platoon bat who produced a 1200 OPS against righties. That's a valuable, that's a valuable member of a big league roster.

Sure is. We could probably get an email question about whether you would be an all-star or a hall of famer. I mean, if you produce a 1200 OPS as the long half of a platoon, then you're an immensely valuable player. But, you know, that's just another caveat one could include here if one felt inclined to pump the brakes. If one felt to include caveats, that is a reasonable caveat to include. Right. And I've been on Kellnick breakout watch for a while here. I've hoped it would happen, probably not as much as you have hoped it would happen, but still somewhat hoping. And obviously this came to the fore this week with a tweet that perhaps you were alluding to.

I won't subtweet. I will just say the Jeff Passan tweet. Oh, I didn't even see that. I didn't see it. I mean, I was not again. No guile here. I just like it. I was not, again, a platooning. It's perhaps slightly premature to state that with such confidence. But again, stating things with confidence is how you get attention in the attention economy. And perhaps it will turn out to be true. And perhaps it will turn out to be an old take exposed a few months down the line. We'll see. But I hope that it's true. And there are other reasons to believe that it could be true, such as the fact that he hit very well in spring training. And he also had a mechanical overhaul, right? Like he has changed some things with his swing and his setup and such. So it's not the same Jaron Keldick that we were seeing last season.

So there are reasons to believe. And of course, there's the ongoing reason to believe, which is that he was a very highly touted prospect and a lot of people thought he would be very good. And he's 23 years old. So those are all reasons for optimism. And he certainly struggled very extremely for the first, you know, 500plus plate appearances of his career up and down. But that's not that many plate appearances. So the degree of the struggle, it made you concerned.

The way that he struggled, it made you concerned. But I believe in talent. I like to believe. I want to believe until proven otherwise, especially when it comes to guys with great prospect pedigrees or players who've performed very well in the upper minors. You know, like, am I on the Joe Adele train? I wouldn't say I'm on the Joe Adele train, but. You're like running next to the Joe Adele train?

I mean, maybe, you know, like. You're in like one of those little cars that you have to pump the up and down, up and down, up and down to keep next to the. What's that called? It's definitely not called the up and down cart. That's not a. Those aren't. That's not a thing. Yeah.

I'm in one of those way behind the regular. A hand car, I guess we would call it. Hand car. I'm in the Joe Adele hand car. And it's just like when any player has such a disparity in performance, like when you have Joe Adele over the past three seasons or whatever it is, that his OPS in AAA is like, I don't know, close to a thousand or something. And then in the big leagues, it is far, far lower than that. Far, far lower than that. So, you know, when you have a disparity of three or 400 points of OPS or whatever it is, there's certainly such a thing as a quadruple A player. But I just I tend to hope that someone is not a quadruple A player until proven otherwise. And sometimes you never really get a chance to completely prove it otherwise because the player doesn't actually get enough reps to prove that they can't handle it at a certain point like they just won't keep running you out there but you

never know if they did for a really long time perhaps you could come out of it but they're just i don't know probably i would say maybe more examples of guys who were labeled quadruple a or dismissed or told they couldn't replicate their performance in the majors and then ultimately did, then guys who kept performing at a high level in the high minors and just couldn't translate it. There's certainly plenty of each, but I'd like to think that any given guy could be the former until there's just no way to avoid the fact that they're the latter. So Jared Kelnick is not in that latter category yet. And again, I don't know that I would definitely declare the breakout finally happening because who knows how the next

41 play appearances will go. But there's much more reason for hope than there has been in some time. Yeah, I think, you know, if you want to get a better sense of some of the mechanical adjustments that he's made, Estevan wrote a really good piece about Kelnick for us back in March at Fangraph. So we'll link to that in the show notes, but like we have seen Kelnick try to make adjustments and alterations to his swing before, right? This is not unprecedented. This, I think,

make adjustments and alterations to his swing before, right? This is not unprecedented. I think the hotness of this stretch is perhaps a bit unprecedented for him, at least certainly at the big league level. But we have seen him try to make adjustments before. And the reason we're talking about him as potentially finally breaking out now is that those adjustments haven't worked, right? Or at least they haven't been able to sustain the counter moves of pitchers at the big league level. So we don't know what this is going to be yet. I have a lot of sympathy for the guy just because I think that particularly when you're in that category of guys who we might look back on as being sort of prospect busts, there just seems like there's a lot of of there's so much like feeling and energy to the conversation around the performance of those guys that seems to have very little to

do with the actual player and a lot to do with like the the fall and what you know failing to have identified you know some fatal flaw in a guy's game might mean for like the people who did that evaluating. And again, I'm not subtweeting anyone. I think this is a phenomenon that we just have when we're talking about prospects and like, you know, sometimes they flame out and sometimes we, you know, we all missed something. I think that sometimes, you know, we look back in the last couple of years and we realize like, oh, we've learned something about like how these particular kinds of swings work or, you know, how many,

how many pitching prospects did we all collectively, you know, get wrong because we weren't fully appreciating like the importance of fastball shape in addition to velocity. Right. Like, I think that we go through these moments as an industry where we adjust our understanding and,

and sort of refine our understanding. And then sometimes just guys just don't, they just don't, they just don't work. Ben't, they just don't work. Ben, sometimes they just don't work. It's no one's fault. I mean,

it, it, I guess technically is theirs, but like that it's not a, it's just a thing that happens. It's very hard to play baseball at this level. Right. So I always feel bad for these guys.

Cause I think that I just get so, there can be so much, like you can be, feel very tense, you know, and I'm just inviting everyone to there can be so much, like, it can feel very tense, you know? And I'm just inviting everyone to, like, relax. Like, everyone can just, you know, let's, like, ease into the warm bath and see what, that's a weird thing to say about a person. But you know what I mean? Like, we're going to know. We're going to know a lot more two weeks from now than we know today.

We're going to know a lot more two months from now than we know today. We're going to know a lot more two months from now than we know today. And, you know, what we know right now is that there are issues with the Mariners lineup. There are spots where they are not producing very well. And for once, like, that doesn't have anything to do with Jared Kilnick. And that's nice to be able to say

because we haven't been able to really say that because he's either not been in the lineup for a good reason or he has been and been playing really poorly in the past. So, you know, who knows? I don't know. Ben, I don't know. I gave you a bunch of numbers.

Some of those numbers will end up being signally. And some of them will end up being noisy. And we're going to know more, which is the former and the latter, in a couple weeks. But I hope that this is a nice reprieve for Kelnick, whatever ends up happening, because you're right. The kind of bad he was was just, it was like the hard-to-watch kind of bad. You get the close-up on the batter's face on a broadcast,

and he's swinging through stuff, and he's not making contact. He couldn't catch up to velocity. He was messing the top, the bottom. And then he'd have this look on his face when he's walking back to the dugout and you're just like, oh my God, this poor guy. It just, you know, it's all over his face. How in, you know, and here I am engaging in a bit of speculation, obviously, because I haven't spoken to Kellnick about this stuff,

but it looked like the face of a guy who was just like, what is going on? I have never struggled like this ever in my life. And you never know how that's going to wash over a guy and affect his personhood. You just worry about that stuff. So I hope that whatever happens, this is like a nice reprieve from that. What I imagine was a very disorienting and like not just forget about the struggles. But even if you have the potential to break out, if you've struggled to that extent, then you might be in a mindset where you're not able to allow yourself to break out in the way that you would otherwise. And maybe if you just get that breather where the monkey's off your back for a few games, that could in theory be enough to just get back to whatever natural talent brought you to that point and you stop beating yourself up and you start sort of expecting to succeed instead of

fearing failure. And perhaps that could be the breakthrough. But with someone like Kelnick, I mean, I respect scouts. I respect scouty types. and I especially defer to them before I have much data in terms of seeing stuff with my own eyes, which I don't even trust as much as, say, seeing the stats over a large sample. And so when smart scouty type people tell me that someone's good and they have high expectations for that player and they've seen him in the minors and they think he can make that transition, then I kind of default to, yeah, I guess that's probably the case until we see otherwise. And so with someone like Kelnick, I expected him to be good, not because like I evaluated him personally and I thought that his bat speed and his swing mechanics were going to work at the upper level.

I just thought, well, he's got great numbers and all the scout people like him and have liked him for a while. And it was not even a case of like some toolsy prospect who doesn't have the performance and all the scout type people are telling you it's going to translate at some point, but it hasn't in the minors like he was hitting too. So like in 2021, he was fifth on Eric Long and Hagen's top 100 prospects at Fangraphs. He was also 13th on Dan Simborski's Zips-based top 100. So the sets liked him, the scouts liked him, like everyone liked him. There was nothing really not to like until he got to the big leagues and he didn't hit. So with someone like that, I just would give them a longer leash or I would hold out hope longer.

You know, I've seen enough of Joe Adele like against my will while watching Mike Trout and Joey Otani that, you know, it's disconcerting or it has been. And then you look and he's hitting a homer every day in AAA and you wonder, maybe this is the year. But when you see someone striking out more than a third of eye test, given my limited experience in that area, then I just assumed that the people whose job it is to know those things, know those things. And obviously they're not infallible, but I think they've gotten better over the years and they've learned how to avoid some obvious mistakes maybe, and also have incorporated data scouting and that sort of analysis into their own more subjective evaluations. Very important part of it now.

Right. It's very much a blend. And it's not like the stats are just not factoring any scouting type information because, of course, a lot of the stats we have are basically scouting information. Right. And vice versa. Also, the scouts are looking at the stats and everything. So that's why I believed in Derek Kalnick initially and still would like to believe now. So we'll see. We threw some big numbers at you and some small numbers at you.

And now we will wait for those numbers to change. Now we will wait for them to change. But I got to say, like, you know, it's just I don't know what the meeting is like in that clubhouse right now. But, you know, if they're going through position by position, he's just like he's not he's not on the top of the list of their problems. They do have some problems, Ben. Yep. They do have some problems, Ben. Be nice if Jared Kelnick was not one of them, or at least not one of the best. They do have some problems, Ben.

It'd be nice if Jared Kelnick was not one of them, or at least not one of the best. Yeah, man. But you look at Seattle DHs, and again, they're DHs. They don't have a dedicated DH. They're like cycling guys through there. It's not the best. One could say, not the best. Yeah.

So I did want to mention a cycle, which is not normally a topic of conversation. You're not normally a cycle guy. You're normally a not cycle guy. Yeah. Not a big cycle enthusiast. But there was a notable historic cycle involving a player we enjoy, Luisa Rise, who is on the Marlins now. Yeah. And he cycled. And it was notable because it was the first cycle in Marlins franchise history.

Doesn't this feel impossible to you? Well, this is what I wanted to interrogate because much was made of that. And even though I'm not super interested in cycles, I'm sort of interested in, I guess, the probability of cycles and how weird it was that the Marlins had not had a cycle. And so I tried to dig into that a little bit. And Arise is really fun, and he's off to a great start, and well done, Luis Arise. But how meaningful is it that the Marlins had not had one. So here's what I have discovered. Basically, there have been or there had been 111 cycles from 1993, the first year of the Marlins' existence, through Monday, which was the day before Louisa Rice cycled. So his was the 112th since 1993. So 111 cycles. And in that span, there were 69,766 total MLB games and twice that number of team games.

Two teams play per game, as you may know. What? These rule changes, Ben, they're out of control. What? These rule changes, Ben, they're out of control. That's 139,532 team games and 111 cycles. So that is an average, on average, a cycle every 1,257 games. Okay. So team games. So one would expect one cycle per team every seven and three quarters seasons.

Okay. And the Marlins obviously have existed for many more seasons than that. So given how many games they've played, which was 4,699 prior to the game in which Arise cycled. And again, with our rate of one cycle per 1,257 games, they should have had about 3.7 cycles. So you can't have 0.7 of a cycle. I guess you kind of can. I mean, you can, but then it's not a cycle. Yeah, but it's not a cycle. No one cares. But they should have had 3.7 cycles in theory, and they had zero until Louisa Rice cycled on Tuesday. So I did some probability calculation and discovered that the odds of the Marlins having zero cycles over that span, if we just use that league average cycle frequency, 2.4% was the odds that the Marlins would not have cycled over that span, which obviously it's improbable. It's unlikely.

It's not incalculable. I calculated it, and it's not that small a number. It could happen. not that small a number. It could happen. And in fact, if you think about it, I guess I was talking this over with Zach Cram and he pointed out that a 2.4% chance means that if you have 30 teams, you'd expect to have one without a cycle over that span. And in fact, the Marlins were not the only team that did not cycle over that span. Again, we noticed that the Marlins didn't cycle because that was the beginning of their franchise. So they have never cycled or hadn't until Arise. But over that span of 1993 through Monday, the Reds did not cycle and the Royals did not cycle.

So the Marlins were one of three teams that had not cycled during that span. So in that sense, it seems a little less extraordinary. I will say, though, I will say that it wouldn't have been the Royals. But if you had said, like, who else wouldn't have cycled, I would have picked the Reds. Yeah. Well, I think that is relevant because I was talking this over with Zach, too. relevant because I was talking this over with Zach too. And obviously like there are park effects and there are offense effects like over that span. The Marlins, again, don't know if you noticed this, but historically have not been a great offensive team. So the Marlins since 1993 are 24th in

batting average, 28th in slugging percentage, 28th in strikeout rate, 26th in WRC plus, 27th in batting runs. So they've played in pitchers parks and also even with park adjustments, they have not been a good hitting team. So you have to discount their odds of cycling because they have fewer good hitters than most other teams. And so the true odds of the Marlins not cycling over that span probably higher than a 2.4% chance. But you can also see that on the other end, there have been more teams with zero cycles than one would expect probabilistically, statistically, and fewer than you would expect with one. But all in all, it doesn't look that out of line with the raw odds that you would calculate.

So basically, the odds of, say, having three cycles over that span is like 21%, and the actual rate is 20%, or the odds of four cycles over that span. The odds like 19%, the actual 23% or two cycles, 17%. Actual is also 17%. So it mostly does match up. But at the extremes, you have 10% of teams that had zero cycles prior to arises, whereas the odds again, 2.4%, at least for any one team. And then on the upper end, teams with many cycles, there were more of those. So the Rockies and the

Rangers over that span had nine cycles. And you'd think that probably having nine would be more unlikely than having zero. But if you account for where those teams play, and particularly cores and pre-humidor cores, then it's not so surprising that the Rockies have cycled often. I guess it's maybe a little stranger that the Expos slash Nationals have had eight cycles over that span. Anyway, it mostly matches up. And what I'm saying is maybe we shouldn't have ragged on the Marlins for not having a cycle because there were other teams that over that same spin also didn't have cycles. And we were all picking on the Marlins because they just were not on the board as a franchise. And now they are. So we can stop making fun of the Marlins for that.

We can all shut up. Yeah. There's nothing else negative we could ever say about the Marlins other than their lack of cycles. So they're a model organization now. Yeah, that was the big thing. Really? Now what are we even going to talk about? What is the purpose of this podcast even?

I know. Yeah. Everyone's just knocking the Marlins. Like the one thing that the Marlins can't seem to do is get that cycle other than that you know i mean granted they've won a couple championships which is probably more important than the weirdest thing about that organization yeah because they have not won a division title yet right neither of the rockies but the marlins have uh had just as long and they haven't either. So that's not a great reflection on them.

I have not given this even one second more of thought than I did in the three seconds that I came up with this sentence. But it has to be one of the weirdest facts about baseball, that the Marlins have not won but two World Series titles. Isn't that one of the weirdest facts about baseball that the Marlins have not won but two World Series titles. Isn't that one of the weirdest things about baseball you've ever heard in your entire life? Yeah. I mean, coupled with the lack of success in almost every other season. It's really doing a lot of work when it comes to propping up the Marlins' reputation as a franchise, which is not a great reputation as it is. I don't think it's much propped, you know? No, I guess it's not.

Yeah, because even with the championships, immediately you think of the fact that they won World Series, and then you think, well, that's weird that they won World Series. That's weird! And then you think of fire sales and teardowns, right? A lot of fire sales. Which kind of goes hand in hand with the winning. So yeah, I guess that is true. But imagine if they hadn't even won those World Series, how bleak it would be. At least they've had those moments. Yeah.

I mean, like it would be almost untenable, but they've won two. And so instead of it being untenable, it's just the weirdest thing you've ever heard in your whole life. Well, maybe not the weirdest. Again, I haven't given it a lot of thought. I don't have a conclusive ranking, but I do suspect that if we were to go through and by some more, you know, objective measure, figure out the weirdest stuff, you know, and maybe it's like a matter of the least likely. I don't know. Like you have to have an avenue to just be like, no, no, no. Maybe it was somewhat likely. It still feels very strange.

It has to be at least in the top 20, you know, and I'm going to venture to say maybe the top 15. Yeah. least in the top 20, you know, and I'm going to venture to say maybe the top 15. Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of the other Florida team, I thought before we started recording this podcast, I was all ready to do a bit about how the wheels were coming off the Tampa Bay Rays and they can't buy a win and Jeffrey Springs got hurt and left to start early. Yeah, that seems really bad. He's doing the hand flex.

That's never good, you guys. It's not a good thing. I don't worry about him. So I was all ready to discuss the disastrous loss for the Rays, who would have fallen to 12-1. Then they won. Then they won. The thing about it is, Ben, then they won.

You know? Yeah, they sure did. So, yeah, they can't be beaten, it seems like, or at least they have not been beaten. Right. So, yes, just during the course of this podcast, I guess it's not final yet. We're prematurely rewarding the win to the Rays, but it kind of feels like you can almost reward the win to the Rays before the game begins. Wait, they're up 9-3 now? Yeah, they're up 9-3. They were

losing shortly before we started recording. And in the course of this recording, they had just a weird, weird rally. There was a seven-run inning where there was a double, a ground out, a walk, a single,

a line out, a single, a single, a hit by pitch, a single, a double, and finally a fly out. And next thing you know, and there were maybe questionable pitching decisions there and all sorts of mishaps. And somehow before you knew it, the Rays were up by many runs again, And somehow before you knew it, the Rays were up by many runs again, as seems to be their way. They're up by so many runs. I don't know. One of the things that I spend this part of the season, you know, the early days of the season trying to do is like kind of calibrate my instinct instrument. And, you know, instincts are valuable and why not but you know you start to you develop a sense over the course of a season once you have a good feel for like who is good and who is bad

and how they're good and bad like the sort of character of their success or failure i don't mean that in like a you know moral character way but like you know are they good in a we tend to win tense one run game so you never feel confident or are they good in a dominating way or is it uh you know their pitching is superlative but their hitting is just so so you know you get a sense of teams and and players over the course of the season such that you get to a point where you're like yeah this one's in hand you know they they have this win in hand i don't want to say for sure that they do because, you know, a lot can happen. But I'm here to say this.

I don't think the Red Sox are very good, Ben. And I think that the Rays, I think they're pretty good. And so I'm not saying that it's impossible for Boston to come back down six, top of the eighth. It's not impossible. But it doesn't strike me as likely. You know, it doesn't strike me as likely you know it doesn't seem particularly likely and so while i do not want to in what would be their 13th win a number freighted with superstition and potential magic i don't want to say it couldn't happen but if we have to issue a

correction at the end of the pod because you know sometimes you and I will talk about stuff on the pod and then like stuff happens. Like we talked about people getting hurt and then baseball was like, what if we injured like 10 more important dudes? How about Corey Seeger, too? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and then you will do a little like after. That's not what you sound like at all. after our... That's not what you sound like at all, but you will do a little

bit in the outro, clarifying a thing or adding further context or what have you. If you have to do that, I'm not going to say I'm going to eat something weird because people... This is a tangent. I'm going to do a brief tangent. Why are people always offering to eat shoes

and clothing? Stop it. You guys are so silly to do that because something weird will happen. You should do it. You should Stop it. You guys are so silly to do that because something weird will happen. You should do what Jake did and have to ride a million miles on your bike. People are like, I'll eat a hat if this happens. I'm like, that is a very dangerous bet. What is wrong with you? You're in your 30s. You can't just eat weird shit and be okay afterward anymore. We're past that. We're not in our 20s anymore. My goodness. Anyway. And don't eat a lizard like Miles Michaelis did either.

He ate like a live lizard? He just chomped a live lizard. This was several years ago, but- Now that you're saying that, this story is starting to ring a bell. If I were him, I would not tell people that story. Those people will come after you. Yeah, no. And like, they'd be right in this case. Sometimes they are. They call them the lizard king.

I mean, look, I will eat flesh sometimes, but generally not living flesh. Okay, why on earth would you say it that way? What is wrong with you? You sound like a sci-fi character now. I know that it is flesh, but like, come on. I sound like a PETA person, I think. That's probably how the PETA people put it.

The PETA people. Anyway, so. Anyway, don't eat live lizards. At least, you know, kill them first, I guess.

I don't know if eating lizards is advisable to begin with. Yeah, I don't, see, this is what I have to tell the cats all the time, like,

stop that. Yeah, don't swallow goldfish. Stop with the eating of live lizards. Yeah you know you know would you want to be eaten while you were alive after you're dead it's one thing but yeah i mean like after i'm dead i'm not gonna know so i'm just you know one one way or the other i'm free of that particular bit of discomfort but what was i even gonna say oh i doubt that, if I were to make an ill-advised bet about eating a thing that humans shouldn't eat, like shoes or clothing or, you know,

live animals, stop it. I don't think I would come to regret that ill-advised bet, even though I don't make those anymore. So I think they're good, is what I was going to say. And then I got distracted by, you know, the idea of having to eat a shoe you know who's really good right now as I'm looking at both this uh uh game summary and also his player pages man Brandon Lau's having a nice little oh no I was gonna say Brandon Lau's having a nice little start to his season and see here's a funny thing so every Tampa Bay Ray is having a nice little start to his season yeah Yeah. And like, Lau has had fewer plate appearances than Kelnick has had.

And I, again, do not think that he is going to sustain a 235 W or C plus over the course of a season. But if I had to put, you know, an unfortunate bet on the line, I'd say his odds are probably better than Kelnick's, if only because we've seen him do it before. Not quite to this degree, but to a degree that is, you know,

within striking distance of this, as opposed to Jared Kilnick. Wow, a lot of words, Meg. So many words. I love also just the flex of when they were, what, 11-0, then they just call up Taj Bradley, who's a top prospect, like a top 40 prospect, and then he deals, and then they just option him back to the minors. Yeah, although he might be on his way back, depending on how the spring injury goes. 40 prospect and then he deals and then they just option him back to the minors it's like he might be on his way back depending on how the spring's injury goes perhaps but but just i mean

the flex of that like we already won't lose and by the way we have this other top prospect we'll just call him up for a game he'll just get us another win and then we don't even need to keep him around he could go back to them it's majors. It's just like an endless number of Rays who could beat you. They don't even have room for all of them in the majors. And some of them are hurt. And yet they can just keep calling them up. And they will beat you. So it's sort of scary.

But, you know, on Friday, they run into the buzzsaw that is Jose Barrios. So I'm sure that will be the stopper. Man, Jeff is going to be so pissed at you if they lose to him and you've been snarking. Although I don't think Jeff listens to the podcast anymore. Probably not. But I'm sad that Jose Barrios is someone I snarked about because he certainly did not used to be in that category. And I hope he doesn't stay there. But for him. And that's becoming like art. It's been a while. It's been a while since it's been good for him.

That seems, you know, I don't think it's the best. And I wish that he could fix it because when he was going well, it was like super fun. And, you know, they traded for him and they extended him. They traded for him and they extended him. And you always like it when those work out because it's like a nice little one, two punch of, you know, talent acquisition. And also this is one of our guys and we're going to, but it hasn't been the best. Here's here. We're going to play a little fun game. I haven't even come up with the rules for it, but here's what we're going to do.

So as you noted, tomorrow they play, they start a three-game set against Toronto. And then they have a three-game set against Cincinnati. And then they have an off day. So let's imagine for a moment that they keep this streak going. So they win the three-game set in Toronto, and they emerge from that. They would be what? They'll be 16-0 if that happens? 16-0, yes.

What are the odds that the Reds are the ones that then finally hand them their first loss of the season? I mean, if they are a normal baseball team that is bound by the rules of baseball, then the odds are probably pretty good that the Reds would win 1-3. But do those rules still apply to the Tampa Bay Rays? I don't know. There might be some kind of dark magic at play here. Do you think, Ben, if they continue on this trajectory, are they duty-bound to change their name back to the Devil Rays? And do you think DeSantis kicked them out of the state of florida wait a minute we've veered into dangerous territory

let's veer back yeah but i think if the reds it looks like green and little low are in line to start okay so so i mean lodolo is quite good as michael bauman noted for us at mangroves today yeah so there's green too he has his moments but like lodolo's been on a real heater it wasn't a knock on hunter green it was a praising of nick little everyone toronto's the first good team legitimately good team that the rays will have faced this season so i think they can win one whether or not it's behind Burrios, I think that they will stop the Rays. But the Rays,

assuming they finish off the Red Sox here and can beat Burrios, then that would set the record, right? Because 13-0, that is the record to start the season and they're about to tie it. And they could go ahead if they can beat Burrios and the Bouches even once. Yeah.

That would be notable. It would be notable. And again, like I don't, I don't know that my estimation of the Rays is, is all that significantly altered by the start that they've had because my estimation of them was high. You know,

I had, I thought this was a good baseball team, and I expected them to do well this season, even if I didn't quite expect them to put this little run together in the early going. But it is impressive, even though their competition has not been. And as we noted the last time, like, hey, bank wins when you're in a tough division. You'll thank yourself later. You'll be like, oh, past me. What a solid you did. What did I expect of Tampa?

You see, it's like I make the staff make predictions, and then I immediately forget what I predicted, probably because I do it later than everyone else, as we established. That is my prerogative as the managing editor. I had them as a wildcard team. Oh, I had them as the third wildcard team. Meg, that might have been rude. But see, I don't want to overreact, you know? I don't want to overreact,

Ben. Yeah, well, if you had them as a third wildcard team and then they go 13-0, I think it's reasonable at least to upgrade them to second wildcard team or first wildcard team. Would you at this exact moment rather be Tampa Bay or Seattle? Would you rather be Tampa Bay or the New York Yankees? Those are the two teams that I had ahead of them in the wildcard coming into the season, even though I did not remember that until this exact moment when I pulled it up.

Even before this game goes final, the Rays now have double the division-winning odds of any other team in the AL East. So, yeah. And we will get a final score before we're finished recording here because games move quickly these days. Yeah, they sure do.

It was the top of the eighth when you said I might have to adjust something at the end of the episode. And now it's the bottom of the eighth. So it's flying right along. Wanting to be able to look things up that were not easily looked up, such as clock violations and such as various ways to break down time of game, etc. And wouldn't you know it, the overlords of Fangraphs and Baseball Reference, respectively, have come through on the same day, I assume by coincidence, unless there was some kind of collusion behind the scenes here. coincidence yes collusion behind the scenes here but david appleman has rolled out a pitch timer leaderboard or other rule violation leaderboards now at fancraft so you can look up all sorts of stuff all of the all of the violations yes can now be like it's just every violations sounds don't brand it that way but but yes so you you can look up catcher pitch timer violations and pitcher pitch timer violations

and batter pitch timer violations. You can look up the balls and strikes that were gained or lost, and you can look up the run value of those things, and you can look at it on a league-wide level and a team-wide level and a player level. Just every violation information you could possibly

want is now available at fan crafts violation you know the one thing that i don't like about this fantastic new leader board that we had you know we're taking information from not taking it like in a criminal way but like in a you know we're getting a feed from the league about this stuff and they are insistent on uh pitch timer which is what ours are labeled as as a result of that they didn't insist that we label it that way that's just the way that we've labeled it because that's i assume how the data comes to us and i am i'm a proponent of let it go we all just call it the pitch clock but um whatever you call it we have it i mean yes so that's nice

yeah and baseball reference rolled out this rules changes changes page two with the time of game and various other insights into base running and the pitch clock and defensive shift information. And I just I love how the baseball community and our leading stat sites, they just always come through because I was like, how can I look this stuff up? And other writers were g-chatting me like, do you know anywhere I can look up pitch timer violations and all that sort of thing? And then voila, here we are. A couple of weeks into the season, we've got leaderboards for every possible thing we could ever want. And we're French now.

Voilà. It's great because I've learned that if I don't know how to find some piece of information, all I have to do is wait and someone smarter and more capable will make it easier for me to find that information, historically speaking. In some cases, that's because I might have some connections and I might know someone who's good at database stuff and frequent StatBlast consultants I can call on and research assistants and so forth. But even beyond that, I'm talking public resources. stuff and frequent StatBlast consultants I can call on and research assistants and so forth. But even beyond that, I'm talking public resources. There are things that you can look up on various Fangraphs leaderboards or Baseball Savant leaderboards. I mean, Baseball Savant, like the data didn't even exist as of several years ago, but even if it did exist, you wouldn't have had a way to query it. And then someone will come along and build an interface that will allow

someone who doesn't have a huge number of coding skills to retrieve this information, which is just wonderful. And if I were someone who had more expertise when it came to querying information, I might feel like my expertise isn't setting me apart anymore because all these other normies can just look up this information without actually learning anything. Normies. And to that, I say, yes, we can. And we can just wait and the internet will provide a solution somehow. To that, Ben says, heh.

Anyway, that's wonderful. One interesting little tidbit from the baseball reference leaderboard, they have the average time a game and they have the percentage of games that take longer than three and a half hours or are shorter than two and a half hours. And then they have time between plate appearances. They also have time between balls in play, which is a useful metric too, because we can see that the average time a game is way down. So two hours and 37 minutes as we're recording, which is this page only goes back to 1998, but you have to go back to the mid 80s or whenever it is to find a year when average game times were that length. But the average time between balls in play, it has decreased significantly since last season, but it is the same as it was in, say, 2008, let's say.

So three minutes and 10 seconds on average between balls in play. So if you mouse over that, it gives you a little tool tip that says average time in minutes between a ball in play, including home runs. So three minutes and 10 seconds, that was all the way up to three minutes and 52 seconds in 2021, three minutes and 42 seconds last year. And now it's down to 310, which is great. But the gains there or the savings there, not nearly as great as the savings in game time. We've gone back to the 80s when it comes to average game time. But we've only gone back like 15 years or so when it comes to time between pitches, which is still great. Still progress, but not as much progress because, of course, the strikeout rate is still high.

It's not higher, but even though we've gone back to the 80s when it comes to stolen base rates and time of game, still lots of three true outcomes. So that aspect of the game is different, and that's reflected in the time between balls in play. Reflected in the time between balls in play. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It, you know, we just need to like pedal faster on our bikes that are powering the time machine and then we can keep going back and back. Exactly. All right.

I've got a few emails here while we wait for the race to officially be undefeated for another day. Wow. Here is a question from Mewi Abbey, a Patreon supporter, who writes, I just had a vivid dream where I managed my fictional baseball team, the Brooklyn Blinks, pronounced Blinks, B-L-I-N-K-S. I'm a furry with a Lynx fursona. The team competes in Discord admin myths League X for gender minority fans of baseball. Within the dream, our squad decided to go barnstorming across the streets of NYC, playing in Times Square, on a handball court, in Brighton Beach, on Broadway, etc. The streets were only closed to cars, and it was hectic, as my brain could imagine,

with broken lights and glass and fans getting in the way, etc. A real 1800s-style messy game. in the way, et cetera, a real 1800 style messy game. If you had to choose a non-baseball street location within a city to have baseball be played, where would it be? And it doesn't have to be New York City. We could make this more broad and just say a city. What sort of city setting would you want a game to be played? We could pick a specific landmark or area in New York or some other city, but some non-baseball setting, an urban setting where one could, in theory, play baseball. And I was kind of blanking when I initially thought of

this. And then I looked out the window and the first thing I saw was the aircraft carrier, the Intrepid, which is a museum now and is moored by the Hudson River at 42nd Street. And you can tour it and look at all the pretty planes and everything. And that, I think, would be a fun place to play baseball. So this is not very creative of me. This is something I can see from my window, but playing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, I would watch that. I think that would be fun. It's not quite large enough to have a regulation MLB size field. I mean, I don't know. I guess you could kind of cram it in with weird dimensions. It might violate certain restrictions and minimums, I suppose.

But I think, at least on some aircraft carriers, your state-of-the-art new ones, the biggest ones, I think you could orient a field in such a way that it would just be narrow. It would be just a very narrow field, which'd be like a polo grounds sort of situation where it's just like elongated kind of. And I would watch that because A, you would have fielders plunging into the drink constantly, which would be fun, I think, you know, assuming you had life boats and life preservers at the ready, but it'd basically be like McCovey Cove, except that the players would also get dunked into the water when they were trying to retrieve balls.

So I think that would be good. And visually, I think it'd be interesting. I'm pretty sure there was a minor league home run derby on an aircraft carrier. That sounds familiar to me, yeah. Yeah. on an aircraft carrier that sounds familiar to me yeah yeah so i mean i think just having splash downs be a feature of of many balls would would be fun i'm not saying like every day there'd be some pretty extreme park effects but as a one-off i think that would be a pretty fascinating setting. That's a good one. I'm trying to think of a place like, so this would not, you definitely, definitely could not fit a regulation field here.

You couldn't do it, but could you play? I want to see someone play baseball with like the Palace of the Fine Arts behind them in San Francisco. Have you been to the West Coast, Ben? Yes. So that thought comes to mind. I'm trying to think of, could we play baseball at Red Rocks in Colorado? Again, not a regulation field, not a city uh right necessarily but these would be

yeah these would be picturesque backdrops at the very least yeah i just googled and i found an mlb.com cut for post from 2016 that says the california and carolina leagues held a home run derby on an aircraft carrier and it was the best so there you go it was the best i cannot personally attest to it being the best but michael claire of cut four says it was the best and i believe him yeah i'm trying to think of other places that are like it's like is it cool to play in them or is it cool to play in front of them yeah like this is the calculus I'm trying to do because, yeah, it would just be cool to see baseball with that as like the backdrop. But it's not I don't know if it's real baseball.

You know, it's not conducive to real good baseball, maybe. Yeah, I would say also maybe similar to the aircraft carrier deck, like playing on the roof of a tall building. Yeah. Now, without the part about fielders plummeting off the edges. Yeah, we don't want any of that. No. In this case, you would definitely have to have fences.

Yeah. There would have to be some safety barriers erected. But to play very high up in the air. Yeah. I mean, I guess you'd still be lower than, say, Coors Field, but you'd be higher than everything else around you, which visually would be very striking, I think. And again, I guess you would also have to worry about

just balls plummeting onto people's heads, you know, passersby, and you'd have to clear out the streets surrounding this building so that people could not be struck by fallen baseballs. You wouldn't want any thunking. No. No thunking. That would be bad. But just imagine the visual of St. Paul and Judge just hitting a home run from the top of some tall building with the city just laid out around him and then it just goes sailing off into the air that would be wonderful i think well and it's hard because

like some of the places that i would really love to see baseball played like i wouldn't want to do damage to like any of the natural features around that thing right like i would love to see baseball played with, like, you know, the Desert Botanical Gardens as a backdrop, but I do want to hurt on any of the cactus, Ben. I wouldn't want to hurt any of... And I guess if I want that, I can just go to the Giants facility at Papago. So, never

mind. I take it back. All right. Here is a question from Ted, Patreon supporter. If you were stranded on a desert island, which MLB player other than Shohei Otani would you want to be stranded with? Gosh.

This is a tough one. Intimate. Yeah, I guess we gotta keep it clean here in this one. Potentially uncomfortably intimate. Yeah. On a platonic level, which MLB player would you want to be stranded on a desert island with well it's just such a funny question i mean like yeah it's an email to our podcast so of course it is but it's a funny question because like i don't know them

yeah you know this is the thing yeah this is the thing i don't know i don't know them i don't know them and so i don't know who i'd want to be stranded on a desert island with like you know there are people who you might think are cool um but some of them are unfortunately gonna end up sucking you know some of the and i'm not gonna even name a name because like i don't know if they are actually secretly a stinker or not like i don't know them this is the whole thing is that i don't know if they are actually secretly a stinker or not. I don't know them. This is the whole thing is that I don't know them. And wouldn't it be disappointing? Again, here I am going to name a specific person, and I don't say this thinking that he's anything but cool

because it sounds like he is. But wouldn't it stink if you're like, well, the answer is obviously Joey Votto. And then you get stuck on the island and you're like, turns out Joey Votto sucks. And I don't think that that's true. But you wouldn't know with confidence going in. The best people to answer this question are beat writers, actually.

They could make the most informed decision because they're around these guys so much. But you and I, we're afraid of going outside. That's not true. But we're not around a team's worth of dudes on a regular basis. And so we don't know who's cool and who isn't. And, you know, even if you had a good sense of that and you picked the best guy, let's make up a guy. We'll name him. We'll just say his name is Joe, right? And you're like, Joe, cool guy, best baseball player. You're in like a super stressful situation. And even if the personality is good, joe have the skills you

need to be able to get off the island what are joe's survival skills like was yeah you know joe does he know how to build a fire does he know how to build shelter can he fish right is he adept at identifying a fresh water source will he outim the shark that you need to swim past to get to, you know, some piece of debris that might help you float off the island? These are the questions you need to know about Joe. And even a beat writer can't answer those questions because he's never been stranded with Joe before. So who knows if Joe is good? Seemingly every baseball player can hunt and fish because a large number of them seem to do that. They do seem to do that recreationally.

Yes. Yes. So that's good. But yeah, you would want a woodsman. A woodsman. You're not in the woods. You're not in the woods. You need an islandman.

A fisherman. You need a fisherman. So I don't know. I wasn't even thinking of this from a survival skills perspective, but you're right. That probably should be. I took the question to mean you're just stranded. No hope. There's no escape.

But I'd be smart of you to think of, well, what if you could get off the island? What if you could get off the island? And in that case, look, look, I don't want to. Maybe if that's what you're going for, the purse, the people who have those skills, like maybe they have terrible social skills. We don't know. I'm not saying that everyone who knows how to hunt has bad social skills. This is not the project here, Ben. But what I'm saying is like maybe you would pick someone who, you know, sucks, but they're good at the stuff that would help you be away from them faster, you know?

But they're good at the stuff that would help you be away from them faster. And in that case, you got to suck it up and deal with their personality not driving with yours so that you can get off the island and get back to your – Right. So you can get back to your wife and child, Ben, and your dog. Yeah. They need me. They depend on me. They really don't. They'd be fine without me, I think.

But I would miss them. They'd be sad without you, though. Yeah. Yeah, they'd be sad without you. I'm sure they'd do fine in a survival way, but in an emotional way, they'd be quite sad, Ben. Yeah. Yeah. Don't throw yourself short. I mean, I'm sure the answer is someone we wouldn't even know is the right answer. Sure. Because we just don't know them well. We just don't know. even know is the right answer. Sure. Because we just don't know them well. We just don't know.

And maybe they'd be really pleasant company on a desert island, but they're not as public a personality. Sure. And you could even say that maybe someone who is an extremely public personality might wear on you after a while if you're stuck on a deserted island and you're their only audience and they're just constantly doing bits and cracking jokes. And it's like, give me Mike Trout, you know, maybe he's boring, maybe he's bland, but he's nice and he won't get on my nerves.

That's all I want here on this island. Just leave me alone and don't get on my nerves. But look, I mean, you know, we could name, I guess, all the obvious candidates, players who seem to have nice personalities and are interesting. You know, I think interests outside of baseball would be a nice thing because you want other things to converse about. Presumably you can't really play baseball on this island. You can't watch baseball on this island. So if they're just a baseball rat who's just talking about baseball and thinking about baseball 24-7, that might be fun for a while,

but you'd run out of material pretty quickly. So you'd want someone who has a lot of interests and hobbies and is well-read and could converse on a number of subjects. So I guess the obvious candidates come to mind. You mentioned Votto or like a Sean Doolittle or an Andrew McCutcheon or Rich Hill and his extensive life experience that he could regale us with the stories from his many major league stops. So, you know, I'm sure there's someone, though, who would be the best fit for me. And I would never know. You'd never know because we don't know them.

And then are you really expecting the best either from yourself or someone else in such a stressful situation you know if you're if you're on the island and you're trying to get off the island well at least you'd have something to do together right and so in that respect like you know you have a common purpose and project and that tends to bond people together but then like what if you can't get off the island? And then it's like, is this the person I want with me in the course of my despair? You know, who knows? And you don't know how you're going to act when you realize you can't get off the island because you never had that situation before.

And they don't know how they're going to act if they can't get off the island because presumably they've never had that situation before. So I think it would, you know, you're really rolling the dice. And then it's like, why do you get to pick in advance and then still get stuck on the island? Right. Like what mean force is like, well, you picked someone. So I guess we're going to put this theory to the test. Like really seems like a strange situation. It's like it's an email to effectively wild or something.

Yeah. I guess you might have to worry about the language barrier a bit, but also if you and the player don't speak each other's language, well, that gives you something to work on for a while. Sure. Again, a common project. You can help one another to develop important language skills. Right. Yeah. Teach each other your respective languages and then you don't have to play tic-tac-toe all day. You stimulate your mind. You learn something while you're on the island in case you ever do get off there. You'll be bilingual.

To be clear. Yeah. My thought is this. If you get stuck on an island, I don't think you need to be in skill acquisition mode. You know, if you survive that, you've done pretty well. So, you know, if you get stuck on an island and you're like, oh, my resume building, don't worry about it. It's not about the grind set. It's about getting off the islands. Right. But you also don't want to have to

talk to Wilson the soccer ball either. So, I mean, I guess it would be good if it's someone that you can converse with. He worked for FedEx. Was that the conceit of that movie? Okay. I've seen it i just spent a lot it's been a long time you know it's one of those things that it devolved into being a meme before we had a word for that really right yeah did he work for was it just that uh you think he was just like on fedex planes yeah okay now i have to look it up i think he did he was like yeah he wasn't like a a delivery person he was like he was like a court he like worked for corporate or something yeah he's like

an engineer or something at fedex like big wig i don't know anyway he had a lot of packages with well right because they had to be like was it it wasn't based on a true story was it i don't think so and this is when we in the year 2023, try to remember the plot of, what is that movie even called? Castaway. Castaway. There you go. All right, Castaway. Now here you're going to be trying to, FedEx executive undergoes a physical and emotional transformation after crash landing on a deserted island.

Well, IMDb, that is one way of describing the plot of that movie. I mean, he's like really obsessed with being on time. Here he is in Russia. deserted island well imdb that is one way of describing the plot of that movie i mean yeah he's like really obsessed with being on time here he is in russia they're playing the trailer is playing but i have it on um on silent because that would be i don't know if the trailer is the most efficient way to to glean this information while on a podcast but he is yelling at a guy in moscow you know they could i mean we like i know that politically this is very complicated but the red square would be a cool place to play a baseball game yeah sure yeah i mean the grand canyon i don't know again this was supposed to be a city

not natural splendor anyway yes so he played baseball on a desert island. He was a FedEx executive. He was a FedEx troubleshooter. Troubleshooter. That's not a real job. The FedEx cargo plate he got caught on had packages, including Wilson the soccer ball. Anyway, that's the story of Castaway, which, no, was not inspired by a true story, except in the sense that there have been many people stranded on desert islands. So it was inspired by those in a general sense.

And then like they thought he was dead. And so Helen Hunt married somebody else. Yeah, she moved on. Well, you know, I'm sure that what would you what would want you to do? Of all the of all the digressions, I don't know if this is the one that I. Oh, did she marry his best friend? Is that who she married? Did Helen Hunt move on too quickly in Castaway? This is the one that I... Oh, and did she marry his best friend? Is that who she married?

Did Helen Hunt move on too quickly in Castaway? A discussion on the Baseball Podcast. It's actually wild. Anyway. Someone's going to be like, I can't believe you spoiled that movie for me. Yeah. Apologies. Yeah.

I mean, look, if I'm stranded there for the rest of my life, I guess I would want my wife to move on and meet someone else. But, you know, not overnight. Well, right. Hold move on and meet someone else, but not overnight. Well, right. Hold out hope that I might be back at some point. Yeah, you wanted to take longer than a FedEx donor. Yeah. You know who's moving up my desert island ranking suddenly? I just saw this ESPN story about Matt Strom of the Phillies, who has come out to condemn MLB teams extending the alcohol sales, which is something that we talked about last time, right?

The fact that suddenly with the pitch clock shortening games, some teams have decided that we're actually going to extend or remove or delay the cutoff that traditionally has been after the seventh inning. And no, we will make it after the eighth inning or we will remove it entirely to try to recoup lost concession revenue, which, again, according to testimonials from minor league executives last year and Ron Manfred himself, didn't seem to be a concern that MLB forecasted that they would not lose concession revenue because games were faster just because people would cram their buying into a shorter time or they were already leaving games early as it was. And they were only going to be at the ballpark for a certain amount of time anyway, and they're still there for that amount of time.

Anyway, there have been several teams that have done this already. Including the Arizona Diamondbacks. Yeah, the Diamondbacks, the Rangers, the Twins, I think the Astros. So it's like it broke the seal, I guess, once one team started doing it. Everyone's like, we should do this too. But Matt Strom has wisely pointed out that this seems inconsistent with the purpose of the cutoff, right? He cited common sense and the safety of the fans.

The reason we stopped selling alcohol in the seventh before was to give our fans time to sober up and drive home safe, correct? So now with a faster-paced game and me just being a man of common sense, if the game is going to finish quicker, would we not want to move the beer sales back to the sixth inning to give our fans time to sober up and drive home? Instead, we're going to the eighth, and now you're putting our fans and our family at risk

driving home with people who have just had beer 22 minutes ago. Good point, Matt Strom. Yeah. He also went on to say, I'm not surprised when you mess with billionaires' dollars, they find a way to make their dollars back. My thing is, when you're looking at the safety of your fans, that's probably not the smartest decision to extend it into the eighth. I agree. Matt Strom? Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that like, I think a couple of things about this. Like

I think if a person is really bound and determined to get, you know, tanked at a baseball game, they're going to find a way to do that. Yeah. And also the cutoff would not have been sufficient probably to make you not drunk by the time the game was over if you were really loading up before the seventh. And I think that there are places where you can reasonably take public transit home in a way that I think is not true everywhere. If you're getting loaded at a Rangers game, you're out in the middle of, there's no transit taking you back downtown so like there's i think there are places where the potential impact for this is going to be heightened than it is in other places

and you know i don't i would be curious to see like a real study about um this stuff i suspect that strom is right that if the idea is to have a reasonable barrier for people who are not just in the business of getting totally loaded anyway, that like the seventh is probably too late. Like we probably are, you know, already exceeding what is maybe the most safe barrier, but it doesn't seem, I don't know, it doesn't seem super great to

get people in a position where they might get loaded and then drive home and you have to have a cutoff somewhere. I'm surprised. I wonder what the liability stuff around that is like. And I ask that not knowing, genuinely not knowing. Are they incurring additional risk by extending alcohol sales? Is that calculus really worth it to them? Particularly when the risk is that you might, you know, crash a car and hurt yourself or somebody else. So I don't know. I think that a lot of, you know, and then the counter argument to that is that for a lot of ballparks, like you can leave the ballpark and then keep drinking if you want to, right?

Like a lot of ballparks that are in urban areas have, you know, they have stuff around them specifically for people to enjoy after games are done. But, you know, I always thought it was weird that they lay a tailgate at, what is it called now? What is the Brewers place called now? It's not Miller anymore. American Family Field or whatever. Because you really do have to drive to Brewers games,

or at least in my experience as a grad student, you have to drive there. And it's fun to have the tailgate thing, but then you're like, wow, you're like drink before you even get into the ballpark. That seems bad. So I don't know. On some level, people just have to make decisions

that are going to be safe and reasonable and plan ahead and understand like if you're going to drink at the game you want to make sure that you're not planning to drive home like you know at some on some level there is an element of like i hate to say this because personal responsibility there but i think that we could probably design policies that are geared toward maximizing safety rather than revenue. And I don't know that this is one. And it's nice to have a player go like, hey, I have to drive home too. Yeah. I talked to him about that on our desert island if we were stuck together. Anyway. Does he have good survival skills though? He seems like he has good survival

instincts, but is that the same thing, Ben? Very little else about Matt Straub. I know he has a YouTube channel where he opens baseball cards and such. And if there are bad things I don't know about Matt Straub, no one tell me. Allow me to live in this nice fantasy where we just have enlightened conversations on our desert island. All right. on our desert island. All right.

In keeping with these sort of silly questions that we've been answering, maybe we can do a few nuts and bolts baseball questions next time. But just to stick with the theme here, here's one from Sydney. Commentators often talk about a pitch as being unhittable, which is useful hyperbole.

But imagine if a pitcher had a pitch that truly was unhittable, which for the sake of this hypothetical, I'll take to mean a pitch in the zone that truly was unhittable, which for the sake of this hypothetical, I'll take to mean a pitch in the zone that produces 100% whiff rate. Obviously, such a pitch would be game-breaking if a pitcher could use it all the time. That's the scenario we discussed in our last email show, the pitcher who can throw 150 miles per hour. But what if they could only use it once per game or twice per game? How valuable would such a pitcher be, assuming they otherwise have league average stuff in command?

Or alternatively, how frequently would the pitcher need to be able to throw the unhittable pitch to significantly alter his value? Would the threat of the unhittable pitch increase the effectiveness of their other offerings? Hmm. That's a fun question. Yeah. Unhittable pitch. Only deployed once or twice a game. I think that the threat of it would have a positive impact on their other offerings.

Although it would probably be a limited impact if they really truly can only throw it once. And then once they've thrown it, forget about it. Then you're, well, I mean, they're still league average, right? It's not like they go to suddenly become like terrible. And also, if it's just an unhittable pitch, then I wonder, because you could just put it out of your mind and say, well, look, if he throws the unhittable pitch, it's unhittable. I guess that's true.

So I don't need to worry about that, right? Like there's nothing I can do. And so I should just act as if it's not going to be the unhittable pitch. And if it is, well, I won't be any worse off, right? Be the batting average you want to see in the world. Yeah. You wouldn't want it to be in your head. Now, easier said than done, I guess.

Because you know he's got this unhittable pitch. Right. Yeah. And so you might feel that your confidence is eroded because you know that at any particular time, assuming he hasn't already used up his unhittable pitches for that game, you know that you might be completely helpless. So you'd have to have the right mindset, which is just, look, there's nothing I can do to counter the unhittable pitch. So I'm just going to prepare for a hittable pitch and hope that I get one. So as for how valuable it is, I mean, not that valuable. valuable it is. I mean, not that valuable. Like you can, you can choose when to use it, which makes it more valuable because obviously you can save it for a high leverage spot, but, but it's

only one pitch or two or whatever it is. Like it's not even an automatic out. It's just an automatic unhittable pitch. So you could use it on a strike two, let's say, if you use it with a two strike Right. you know, the run value of changing a ball to a strike or whatever. It's not that huge. It's significant, but it's not enormous unless you can do it repeatedly, like a good receiving catcher who can change many balls to strikes over the course of a game or a season. So just one, you know, like you could calculate the value of it, but if he's average in every other respect, then he's only going to be slightly

above average i think once you factor in the unhittable pitch yeah but it would be really cool though it would be cool yeah i mean we'd all be like waiting and wondering is this going to be the unhittable pitch or like you'd be mad at him if he didn't use the unhittable pitch at a moment when you thought he should use it and he gave up a hit and he's like i was saving the unhittable pitch at a moment when you thought he should use it and he gave up a hit and he's like, I was saving the unhittable pitch for some other moment. And you think, well, you might not never have a more important moment. You got to use your unhittable pitch, but then what if you've used it already? And then some super important moment comes up and you're already rendered hittable because you've used it already. So it would be a fun kind of question, just when to use it, when to be confident enough, like what's the leverage threshold where you should

be confident that you're not going to get another comparable situation or even more important situation that you should save it for? Oh boy, what a tricky i mean could it could it operate like rollover minutes like can you like if you don't use it yeah can you say can you save up your unhittable pitches vacation days yeah can you save up your your unhittable pitches and can you roll them over like let's say let's say ben let's say that you have an unhittable pitch right and there's a rule you can only use it once per outing, but you can roll them over. And they don't have to stay in just the regular season. You can roll them over to the postseason.

Do you save the unhittable pitch through an entire season's worth of outings so that you have a bunch of unhittable pitches and then you deploy them in the postseason? Then you would be, wow, you'd be a really fun Hall of Fame case, right? Because assuming your team makes the postseason then then right you would be wow you'd be a really fun hall of fame case right because assuming your team makes the postseason a lot you'd be like you know you're a league average guy in the regular season but you would truly be like a superlative stand out like yeah you know mo guys down you know lights out dude in the postseason that that ben you know you know, lights out dude in the postseason that, that Ben, you know, you know? Yeah. And, and of course, like the utility would still be somewhat limited because if you only get one per

outing, not like if you got one per inning and you were a starter, then okay. But if you only have one per outing, even if you're, you know, that you wouldn't have an entire game's worth of unhittable pitches it would be an incomplete complement of pitches in that respect but if you had a a couple unhittable pitches like if you you know like let's say you're a starter congratulations and you make how many starts you making in a season ben like how many are you making me personally i've been you're a major scenario i'm already a major league yeah have confidence in yourself making 32 starts you're making 32 starts so okay so you are uh congratulations you're on a playoff team you were a starter for that team the whole year you have 32 unhittable pitches that you can deploy

in the postseason because you have rollover minutes regular season and you know then the question becomes like you know then it's really time for some game theory, I think, is the answer. Because it's like, do you use them all in one go? Do you sprinkle them over the course of the postseason? You can't roll them from the postseason to the next regular season. That would be ridiculous. Right. Anyway. way. Oh, well, we made this an even more interesting hypothetical than it started as, I think. All right. Last silly one here, because officially the Rays have won. Eastman says, I think it's funny to think about a different kind of black box outfield, one where the entire outfield is invisible. So the ball disappears when it enters the outfield grass or the airspace above it and then reappears as if flying out of nowhere as it gets back into the infield.

Isn't that the plot of Annihilation? Sort of, yeah. I love watching diving plays in the outfield, so losing those would be a bummer. On the other hand, some say baseball is a game of tension. And imagine the few seconds of tension while runners are running the bases and the ball and outfielders are invisible. If the ball were invisible to the batter and runners too, fly balls would be a real adventure. If it were invisible to fans in the stands in the outfield, unfortunately, some people would probably start getting clocked by fly balls. So it's invisible not to the people in the outfield, not to the outfielders. It's invisible to everyone outside the outfield.

So the fans don't know if the ball is going to be caught until I guess the ball comes back in or it goes over the fence. And perhaps even the runner and the batter might not know in this scenario. It's just the black box outfield. And we're all just waiting in suspense to find out what happened. I mean, why stop here? Why not just make it a black box ballpark? And we won't even know who won the game until the game is over. And then you'll just give us the score and we'll say, wow, the Rays won again. And we won't even have to watch the game. Who needs then you'll just give us the score and we'll say, wow, the Rays won again and we won't even have to watch the game.

Who needs a pitch clock? We'll just skip the whole thing and you can just tell us what happened and we'll be waiting with bated breath to find out who won. Now I'm just thinking

about that bear in Annihilation that has a scream of other people in it. I regret my analogy because now I'm thinking about that. It's a disturbing movie. I'm going to do a swear that.

F***ed up bear, man. I don't think the bear was in the book. I don't remember the bear from the book, Ben. Was the bear in the book? Was Annihilation based on a true story? I hope not. Did someone work for FedEx in that movie? Is that what the company did in Annihilation?

That was the actual purpose? I've only read the first one. It was very unsettling. The movie was, I tell you what, if you have an option, become a tree. That's all I'm saying. Just become the tree. So the black box outfield could also be unsettling in some ways. Yes, it would be incredibly unsettling.

And what happens if there's an injury in the black box outfield? And then you have like a panicked. How would anyone ever come to the stricken outfielder's help? Yes. Well, the other outfielders would know. Yeah. They'd have to walk out of the annihilation bubble. And then it would make that sound like they did in the trailer. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not sure about this one. I like the suspense, I guess, but there's already some suspense, ideally, right? Like there's suspense about, ooh, is he going to catch it? That's fun suspense. And then there's the suspense of, ooh, is he going to throw the ball in to get the runner in time? That's fun suspense. So we'd basically be losing that sort of suspense or at least losing part of it because we just have no idea. We'd see the initial trajectory, and I guess we'd have the expected batting average if we were looking at that just based on the batted ball characteristics and the positioning and all that. But we wouldn't even know the positioning.

Can StatCast even penetrate the black box outfield? Would we just lose the black box outfield would we just lose the the data on outfield positioning who knows what shifts the royals would be trying in this scenario we'd never see them i think that part of why they had to send the team in ben was because they couldn't discern using their own technology like what was going on behind the so i mean i can't imagine that hawkeye would be able to do better than the folks in Annihilate. See, it's not that I don't engage with pop culture. It's that I don't engage with as much of it as I'd like. And then I have a couple of references and they just have to sit with me for a long time. And I'm really sorry about that. I realize it makes me boring. I realize it makes me boring. I think black box baseball would be boring eventually, too, or at least we would miss actually being able to see what is transpiring on the field.

You know, like that's why they play the games so that we can actually see them, know what's happening in them. Yes, it is. It is. Unlike podcasting is a visual medium famously. Yeah. Or sometimes it's an auditory medium. But even that would be spoiled by the black spot. Right, because you couldn't see anything. Yeah, no one would know.

No one would know. Absolutely no one would be able to convey what is happening inside that outfield. Yeah. Yeah, I don't like it. I don't like it. I'm not into that. All right, so let us conclude with the pass blast,

which comes to us from 1993, and also from David Lewis, an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. And this one is also about some fun experimental ideas here. 1993, new tiebreaker tested in Japan. David writes, in 1993, Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball League experimented with a solution to baseball's eternal search for ways to shorten games and boost fan interest. After a preseason tournament game between the Tokyo Giants and Hiroshi McCarp ended in a 5-5 tie, a new scoring system dubbed attack points was used to break the tie. Teams gained a point for each base advanced on a hit or steal. Accumulating more total bases throughout the game, the carp were declared the winners. According to an April 6, 1993 article from Washington Post writer T.R. Reed, although the system was put in place just for the tournament and not regular season play,

it was met with positive reactions from fans and league officials. Reid wrote, The plan got rave reviews in the daily national sports newspapers and central league officials said they planned to try it again next year. Reid continued by explaining the similarities between professional baseball in the U.S. and Japan before highlighting one of the greater differences. Japan's major leagues have always permitted ties to extra-long games, he explained.

Typically, ties were only called after 15 innings, but time constraints for the preseason tournament meant that they could not go longer than 10 innings. League officials had to come up with a solution. Central League executive Ryoichi Shibusawa said, One thing was we needed some kind of tiebreaker, but also there's too much playing percentages in Japanese ball. The managers are so conservative, you know, a hit and a sacrifice bunt, another hit and another bunt. We wanted to encourage aggressiveness. So I said, let's reward people if they swing for extra bases or go for a steal. As Reid would explain, exactly that happened during the Giants-Carp game.

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the teams were tied in score 5-5 and attack points 15-15. Carp manager Koji Yamamoto called for just the kind of strategic move Shibusawa had been hoping for. Yamamoto inserted his fastest player, Kaoru Nihei, as a pinch runner and called for a steal. Reed set the scene. Since the fans were kept abreast of the attack point situation, everybody in the stadium knew what Nihei had in mind. On the first pitch, he did it, becoming the first player in history to win a game for his team by sliding into second base. Since both teams went hitless in the 10th inning, that last attack point won the game for the carp. In an interesting footnote to the story, the Tokyo Giants tied their next game as well and again lost on attack points. As Reed wrote, they therefore finished the tournament in fourth place

without being outscored in a single game. So David wonders how this would go over if MLB experimented with it and would it be better than the zombie runner? And my automatic answer to that is yes. In almost any scenario, almost anything is better than the zombie runner. Certainly ties would be preferable for me. But attack points, attack points is interesting. So, I mean, we've had various scenarios we've talked about with like run differential governing things winning a series instead of a single game and looking at it that way. But actually wondering about total bases and bases advanced as a supplement, as a tiebreaker.

I don't hate it. I don't hate it. I just don't know why we need to. We can just go back to the thing that worked before. We have the solution right in front of us. Like, I don't hate it. It feels overly complicated for the purpose, which is just to have like a way of concluding stuff that looks like baseball, which is they just play baseball. Just have them do that.

Well, that's one advantage of this, I think, is that they don't change the rules, really. It's still baseball. They just, I mean, it's different in the sense that each base advanced counts. So that is a different rule, right? But you still play the same way and score the same way and you don't magically appear on base without having done anything to get there. So it just rewards advancing, which is something that you want to do anyway, even under regular baseball rules. So,

you know, it might make you play a bit more aggressively, but that could be a good thing from a spectator perspective. And also you're not going to take unnecessary risk because uh i guess it would that's one question i guess like if you gain for advancing a base but you don't lose for for being removed from the base other than the fact that well you no longer have the opportunity to advance or score then i mean i guess that's sort of self-governing. Yeah. Because, you know, if you just run yourself into an out, then you don't get the chance to advance or score.

So there is a penalty there. So that's why I find it more elegant than the zombie runner, at least. You know, you're basically still trying to do what you would normally do, but perhaps in a more entertaining way. And if fans are kept apprised of this, like if it's on the scoreboard, you know, like runs, hits, errors, attack points, and everyone is monitoring the attack points, then you have something else to root for in addition to trying to score. And you could really root guys on to steal and there'd be a lot of extra tension there.

So I agree. Like, just keep playing the way you play for the first nine innings if possible. In this scenario, they had to make sure that the games ended early. So fine. I think if you're in that situation, you have that constraint. This is not a bad solution. Yeah, I agree. I think that like under these parameters, preferable to some other stuff. But also, simply reject the parameters.

Reject them. All right. We will end there. Today's theme song was written and recorded and submitted by Dave Armstrong and Mike Murray of the Austin-based punk band The Awful Lot. This was more of a folk tune in which they dabble as well.

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The rhythm of our place in time In cycles of existential rhyme