Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2018: Commissioner Correspondence

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Patreon supporter Reggie Deal banter about Reggie’s background as a baseball fan and Effectively Wild listener, his email correspondence with MLB and Rob Manfred, accessibility issues he’s encountered while following baseball as a blind person, and A’s fans’ upcoming “reverse boycott” event, then (22:25) answer listener emails about angry Aaron […]

It's Effectively Wild and it's wildly effective at putting baseball into perfect perspective. Impressively smart and impeccably styled, it's the wildly effective, effectively wild. Spin, rate, along, shingle, bad at man of war. You might hear something you've never heard before Hello and welcome to episode 2018 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. Still with a frocky voice, I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of FanGraphs, who sounds like her usual self. Hello, Meg. Hello.

And we have the pleasure to be joined today by one of our Mike Trout tier Patreon supporters, cashing in the perk to join us on a podcast. And he is a frequent emailer of ours and also someone who's come up on the podcast before for asking questions and prompting stat blasts. Reggie Diehl. Hello, Reggie. Welcome to Effectively Well. Good morning, and thanks for having me. Happy to have you. So we always do a little bit of background with our Patreon guests on the show just to catch up with how you became a fan of the podcast and also how you became a fan of baseball.

I guess we could start with the latter. How did you get the baseball bug? baseball. I guess we could start with the latter. How did you get the baseball bug? So, full disclosure, I actually have a visual disability. I'm totally blind, so I did not grow up playing the game. But I grew up in a football family. And in Texas, of course, it's Cowboys and everything else is secondary. And in the mid-1980 1980s when i was in probably fifth sixth grade i was looking for something different to do when football season wasn't going on and i kind of just stumbled across the other sports so i started checking out basketball and hockey but the baseball bug bit and bit hard in 86 that was the year that the astros came out of nowhere and contended for and won their division the rangers had a surprising contending team in their division in fact they were the most

improved team for the 86 season and so the pennant race bug bit me and i got hooked on it wanted to learn about every single team i would listen to every broadcast I could get a hold of back when teams actually put their games on big AM radio stations. And that, the rest, as they say, is history. And you're in Austin now? Yeah, far south Austin. I work actually at a university right down the road. I work at Texas State University in San Marcos. So we've lived here in the Austin area now for five years in about another month and a half.

Nice. And how did you come across our Humble podcast? So I actually first found your program in 2013 when I had stumbled across a couple of interviews with scouts about international prospects, which then led to the discovery of a Kevin Goldstein interview, which then led to me eventually finding your podcast. I became a regular listener once I had an iPhone, which had some nice accessible podcast apps that you could use. Starting probably late 2014, and the season preview series has always been a big favorite of mine. And so that's kind of where it started.

So I've been with the program for a while. So there's definitely some things that you've done that I remember, like the Eclipse game. And there's actually one of those coming up next year in Texas. I would like to see someone take advantage of it. I don't know if they will, but I've been around for a while. Yeah. Well, thanks for following us throughout our multiple platforms and venues and hosts and everything throughout the years. Appreciate it.

Glad I didn't drive you away, Reggie. No, no, no, no, no, no. You're a good addition to the program. Thanks. And I always ask what possesses our Mike Trout tier supporters to support us at that level. So what made you upgrade all the way to the top? So I kind of became a higher level donor. I was inspired by Alana.

And I thought it would be fun to do that for a couple of months and come on and talk baseball. And also, you know, kind of just be able to, you know, kind of put my voice to, you know, a little bit of my life and my situation and how that ties into baseball and just, you know, in a very small way, maybe bring some awareness around a couple of things that I do intersect with a lot in the world of baseball and internet in particular, and also to answer some of these more random questions that I'm sure we'll get from the audience. Yeah, we will do some emails, stat blast and pass blast. But yes, I did want to ask you about a few things.

First of all, I guess it came to my attention that you have been corresponding with Rob Manfred, sort of. You've just been cold emailing him, and he will occasionally respond. How does that work? Okay, so truth be told, at the beginning of the season i randomly just tried submitting email to two mlb addresses hoping it would stick and one of them did which they resulted in an email from chris marinak and i actually have corresponded with him a couple times and their customer support team i've had an awful lot to say about, in my view, the degradation of the League audio package that Odyssey took over. I'm just going to say it.

When you listen to a streaming game on the Odyssey-operated audio, that feed is a full 60 to 70 seconds behind what you get if you overlay the audio on the MLB TV side. Yeah, yeah. A lot of our listeners have complained about that. Yeah. So I would definitely encourage them to complain to the commissioner's office. The more people who complain about it, the more they'll listen. So nothing's really changed so far, but I'm going to keep talking. So you emailed what you hoped would be Rob Manfred's email address and it didn't bounce back. And then you heard from Chris Maranek, who's MLB's chief operations and strategy

officer. And then you corresponded with him a bit, and then you just continued to occasionally drop Rob Manfred a line. Well, I've only sent one other email to the commissioner, and that was earlier this week. And this had to do with the whole Oakland situation. I mean, my personal feelings on this is that more and more people are not going to be crazy about publicly funding stadiums for various reasons across the ideological spectrum. I mean, I'm the biggest baseball fan you're going to find, but if they try to hit up, you know, Austin, Texas for $500 million for a baseball stadium,

I'm going to be like, dude, you guys are worth billions. You've got access to friends who are worth billions. Talk to your equity partners, take out a loan and use your resources and build it yourself. So I had a lot of things that I wanted to just share as a fan, my personal views on, you know, things I think the league could do differently. I think instead of hitting up the owners for a $2 billion expansion fee, just to even have the right to have a team. And if the league wants to make billions off expansion fees, then instead of going to 32, go to 36. And that way the owners can put more of the money towards stadiums. Because, then instead of going to 32, go to 36. And that way, the owners can put more of the money towards stadiums. Because I think they're going to have

a hard time finding a lot of cities that are going to be willing to penny up, you know, three, four, $500 million of public funds for a ballpark. I think a lot of places, the best they can hope for is that the city and the state will offer funds to help with basic infrastructure updates, power, water, sewer, and nothing else. So we shall see. And he got back to you? Did he say, okay, yeah, you got it, Reggie? We'll get right on that? This is what shocked me. So I was up early. I wrote this email at like 5.15 in the morning, and I had a response within 20 minutes. It was fairly short and to the point.

He basically said, I appreciate your thoughtful letter. There are some things that you have said that I actually agree with. There are others where I strongly disagree. And then he wrote, thank you, and put his name on it. All right. Well, that's customer service for you, I guess.

Just got to email the man directly and you'll hear right back. Maybe I should try that to just spread my zombie runner just screeds, just send it to him directly.

Well, you know, as far as I'm concerned, I have less hope of getting rid of the zombie runner, but I was thinking now that games are so much shorter with the pitch

clock, can we get rid of the three batter pitcher rule and let the loogie come back? But I don thinking now that games are so much shorter with the pitch clock, can we get rid of the three batter pitcher rule and let the loogie come back? But I don't think that's happening either. Probably not. I don't know if I think it's better or worse that they appear to be more responsive to individual

fans than they sometimes are to the journalists who cover the game. I think sometimes there is a degree of window dressing there. I think if we get a response, they hope we'll stop squawking. I think sometimes there is a degree of window dressing there. I think if we get a response, they hope we'll stop squawking. I've been leaning on the customer service pretty hard on this audio issue

to the point that I'm actually, if something happens where they don't come back to a game properly, I'm hopping on email and I'm sending them a note and say, okay know, okay, this date, this time, this is what's happening. What are you going to do about it? Yeah. And you've been involved also, speaking of the A's, with spreading the word about some A's fan initiatives, right? There is a reverse boycott coming up this coming week. Can you tell

us about that? So they are organizing what they're calling a reverse boycott. They are actually, basically the message is, you know, we want people to show up and basically say, you know, we care about baseball. We want to have our team. The reason we're not coming is because we don't believe we should support the owner who is basically intentionally losing and intentionally doing everything he can to drive the fans away from the team. And somebody pointed out to me, and I thought about this, and I think it's a pretty apropos thing. In most cities, when they're cheering for the team, it's let's go Yankees, let's go Red Sox. They don't say let's go A's in Oakland. The chant has always been let's go Oakland. So I think there's a there's kind of a two pronged approach here, which is to say

we don't care for what this owner is doing. We are very angry with the athletics, but we want to have baseball in Oakland in some form or a fashion. And I think if they get a big turnout, what I hope this does, even if they do go to Vegas, I hope this plants the seeds maybe for a replacement expansion franchise or a relocation out there. I mean, when the A's left Kansas City in 68, a Missouri senator jumped up and down and basically threatened baseball with antitrust then, and they got the Royals the very next year as a result. So this is rootedinoakland.org, right, is where you can find info on this? I believe that's right, yeah.

Yeah, at Oakland Rooted on Twitter. So this is Tuesday, June 13th, and they're just, what, asking people to come out and carry signs and wear shirts and do chants and send their message. at games around baseball this coming Tuesday to basically do a little hashtagging. It's basically showing solidarity with the fans out there. And I think there's a lot of fans in a lot of cities who are very sympathetic to what's happened to them because I grew up an Astros fan. And when they tore our team down to the bones in 2011, 2012, a lot of people stayed away. And it took a while for that attendance to come back. And you see that in a lot of these markets where teams tore it down so severely. I mean, even now, Baltimore is barely averaging 20,000 a night. And it's not because they don't care about baseball. It's because it wasn't just that they were losing. It was intentional, horrible rates of losing for so long.

And that becomes an insidious process that is hard to get out of the minds of your fan base. Well, I hope that MLB doesn't censor any highlights from that game. The signs that were removed, perhaps inadvertently, according to MLB from the highlight some time ago, that I think if the whole stadium is packed with people carrying signs and wearing shirts, then it would be tough to wipe that from the footage. Yeah. Radio broadcasts, I assume. I mean, what with the descriptiveness of a radio broadcast, which, I mean, frankly, I enjoy, you know, just the call of that and the audio of that more so than a TV broadcast. But I assume you rely on a TV feed, but radio is definitely my preference. And I kind of get a chuckle out of the people who get so upset about the, you know, hey, our team is on Apple tonight and I don't want to pay for the Apple. I'm like, well, you know, there is the thing known as the radio broadcast. You can always do that. But a lot of fans are very picky about how they consume their baseball, I suppose.

Are there particular broadcasts that you enjoy listening to more than others? Are there any booths that are favorites for you? Let's see. My go-to is when I'm bouncing around the league. Houston and Texas are good. Atlanta's good. I've always liked the Mets radio booth. Cleveland is good. Cincinnati, the new guy in Cincinnati is actually really good. I can't remember his name, but the

Reds radio is very good. Royals and Rockies have always been some go-to crews for me through the years. And do you run into other accessibility issues? I think you've emailed us in the past about some that you've encountered at times. Well, there's a couple of interesting things I'll share this for the benefit of the audience and for those who might design things on websites and platforms. Sometimes there will be things that MLB puts out

and they'll do updates to their apps. And so you'll try to get something to load and the little button that you're tapping on, it won't tell you what the button is. So if it just says button and it doesn't say what the button goes to, I'm like, all right, what am I going after here? The other thing is in the past,

when the league has done some of their survey initiatives, they'll have like a little link to a survey form you fill out. And just for the benefit of the audience, drop and drag questions for blind users who use screen readers, regardless of the platform, the drop and drag method is notoriously not accessible. So if you can come up with another way to get the information you want without having to do a drop and drag kind of a question, that would be very much appreciated.

And you do a lot of statistical research and analysis, and you send us interesting factoids that you come up with. So is that difficult to work with at times? Or has that been implemented fairly accessibly generally? StatHead is great. In fact, any time I've run into a couple of weird glitchy things, I've actually sent a tweet to Sean. And he's very responsive. So that's actually a great site. And in fact, part of what got me into that was actually the old promotions that you guys used to do back when it was the Play Index.

And so I've actually been a subscriber to that since 2014. And then when it became StatHead, of course, I stayed with it. I didn't go Bo Jackson and get all the sports. I just do the baseball. But that's a very good site. I guess that actually does dovetail to one other thing. In the baseball community, and I'm sure it's true

with a lot of other online groups too, there is a huge amount of information that is presented in infographics. And I so wish that sometimes the providers of those things, including our dear friends over at Baseball Perspectives, I wish they would have a way of making an alternative version available that's like just a nice table to read, even if it's a bunch of information. Tables are great for me if they are done right.

Infographs, there's no real nice way to do that. Yeah. So that would be, I guess, if I had one other thing to just kind of plant a seed, that would be the other. But in terms of the StatHead experience and just looking up the random things I like to look up, that's actually quite nice. And I've actually been working on this idea in my head one of these days. I've got to spend some time and just write it up. That's actually quite nice. And I've actually been working on this idea in my head

one of these days. I got to spend some time and just write it up. Billy Joel had a reference in the song Pressure in 1982. There's a line that says, who you are in the ninth, two men out and three men on. I would love to figure out who is the best hitter or the worst pitcher or whatnot in that scenario. Yeah, it sounds like a future step, Les. Okay, we can file that one away. Have things gotten better just generally, not even in the baseball internet, but the internet at large with people making more of an effort to include alt text, let's say, or I guess some perhaps AI solutions to just automatically generating those things? There's a lot more awareness. And I would say there's a lot of areas where there's definitely

been significant improvement. I think what frustrates me and certainly other users who I know who operate in this world is that we still see a lot of the same mistakes that just continue to be made time and time again. And you actually hit on one of them with the alt text. And this is a particular frustration of mine in social media. And frankly, a lot of the baseball teams are bad about this. They'll post things and it'll just say image, but they won't write up the text of what's in the image. So much so that I will not follow the teams on Twitter. It's just, it's too frustrating. There are some who do a good job of it. And if I see something that's been shared by another person who I follow, because I do follow

a lot of the writers, most of my Twitter is baseball and weather. You're like Mike Trout. Yes. So if I see someone who posts something and it's been done right, you know, sometimes I'll quote it to another team and I'll go, you know, here's the way you do a really nice, easy to read alt tag when you're going to put your lineup on Twitter and do it as an image. So it's definitely hit and miss. I know there's a lot of people who try to be very mindful about it, and there's others who, through no neglect of their own, it's just a lack of education, a lack of knowledge. But it definitely is something that is very pervasive in that space. We did an interview, Jeff and I, about a thousand episodes ago with a listener who talked to us about beat baseball. Is that something you have experience

with? I've never played it organized. I had played it at a couple of camps when I was a kid. And in fact, the last time I played with it, there was a guy who was one of our counselors when I was graduating high school, and he knew I was a big baseball fan. So we just went out impromptu one afternoon, and he threw me a couple. And it was over after I swung at the ball, and it stopped beeping. Yeah. Yeah. We've had other people inquire about getting involved in that. I know there are organizations and places you can look up that info. So we will link to some of it. I don't know if it's in your area or not. There is a national, I know there's a national meatball organization and they have like a national tournament every year. I guess the one other thing I would share,

and there's nothing that can be done about this, but in terms of just the in-game experience when I'm at baseball games, something that a friend of mine and I noticed when we went to a Houston game last year, there is definitely a growing reliance on those kiosks for ordering, and they are oftentimes unmanned. Those things do not play nice at all. They're not designed to talk back to us, so we can't do the ordering. So I don't know if there's anybody from the league or teams who listen to this, but I would say, you know, work with your vendors and the people who run your concessions and make sure you have a strategy for watching for fans who might need help with those things. Because, you know, if I go to games by myself, sometimes I will wander up and want to get something. I mean, I did the 30-30 back in 2012 when I hit all the ballparks. And back then it was easy, you know, just to walk up, go to concessions and say, okay, you know, here's what I'm looking for.

That's a much harder thing to do now with the kiosk and no person. Yeah. Well, I guess you've got the direct line to Rob Minifred and Chris Maranac. Send him another email. You don't need us. But yes. And if you go to a game, then do you bring an old-fashioned radio and listen to that because of the digital syncing issue that you mentioned? game, although some stations are notoriously on a delay. And in fact, I was at the Houston Angels game last Saturday, and they were on about a nine-second delay. So my friend that I was with, I basically told her, I said, well, I'm ditching the radio broadcast. I said, I'll flip it on if there's something I need to get context about that we're not sure what happened. But for the most part, because we had such a big crowd, I was kind of able to follow

what was happening just based on the reaction of the crowd. And if I wasn't sure, I'd ask her, I'm like, okay, what was that? Right. Okay. Well, we can answer some emails. I guess I'll start with this one from Jason, who says, I stumbled across a theory in this Reddit baseball subreddit thread about the Yankees' recent highly favorable umpire scorecard for the week, the most favorable in MLB for the week, plus 3.22 runs added, and it piqued my interest. The commenter claimed that some of the credit toward umpires' favored calls toward the Yankees could be a result of Aaron Boone's frequent arguing and yelling from the dugout when umps miss pitches. As a Yankees fan who primarily watches Yankees games, I can anecdotally agree that this happens quite a lot, probably at a rate of at least once

per game and certainly more than any other MLB manager. Boone is even on a potential record setting ejection pace for the amount of arguments he starts, often over balls and strikes. Could Boone's arguing possibly be getting in the umpire's heads and causing them to subconsciously favor the Yankees on close pitches more so than other teams? Could this be an intentional strategy on the part of Boone and the Yankees, a notoriously framing conscious team? Or is this nonsense and simply the result of the Yankees having two above average framing catchers, Trevino and Gashioka? Could Aaron Boone potentially be a pitch framing manager? Would love to hear your thoughts. because we actually answered a hypothetical about this very scenario, whether a bunch of bench jockeys, whether it's the manager, the coaches, or the players just riding the umpire all game could actually get more favorable calls or whether it would backfire and the umpires would just be

upset and annoyed and they would give you fewer calls. And I mentioned, I think on that episode that when I worked for the Yankees as an intern and framing was discovered while I was in the office, basically. And one of the theories that came up was that Bobby Cox had this sort of effect because the interns who were working on that early framing analysis, they noticed that the Braves under Bobby Cox tended to get very favorable calls. they noticed that the Braves under Bobby Cox tended to get very favorable calls. And that could be because they had guys like Maddox and Smoltz and Glavid, great command and control guys who were great at expanding the strike zone, or it could be because the catchers that they had. But there was at least a theory that was bandied about in the office. Hey, maybe it's Bobby Cox.

And I don't know whether there was ever an answer to that or whether it just remained a hypothesis forever. But I guess you could say maybe the Yankees came across that old theory and decided to put it into practice with Aaron Boone. But that's the question. Would this just piss umpires off or would it make them more likely to give you a call? I saw something posted online about a week or two ago and I don't know how legitimate it was, so I'm not sure I should run with it. But I had seen something that some of the umpires privately would derisively refer to Aaron Boone as Karen because of all of his complaining. I will say, you know, it takes a

pretty thick skin to, you know, turn that off. So, you know, there could be some who could be susceptible to that. I know if you were to ask, who was the umpire that you interviewed for the book? Ted Barrett, I think. Oh, yeah. I think he would probably shoot that down pretty quickly. But, you know, could there certainly be someone, maybe a younger umpire who's not as seasoned, who, you know, maybe inadvertently, you know, falls for some of that and gives them a little more leeway? I don't want to say it's a zero. I definitely think it's more than a zero percent chance that that could happen in certain situations. I'd be curious to see if someone

picked up on a trend with certain umpires and Yankees games or other teams who have aggressive managers like that, kind of the way that folks picked up on the issue with Bill Cussey and the issues around the sticky stuff. I wonder, I mean, I know that they're irritating, but boys being an umpire, a hard job. I mean, didn't Boone get suspended for a game or two this season because of how aggressively he was berating an umpiring crew? Yes. If I were an umpire and I had a manager like Boone who was constantly in my ear, I could see overcompensating in their direction because you're up there, you're trying so hard to have, you know, the way that the catcher is framing the pitch and the way that the pitcher is squawking at you and, you know, the batter

derisively asking you, that was a strike? That was a strike? You know, you're trying so hard to filter all of that noise out because what you want to determine ball or strike is the pitch itself. And so I would be tempted to say, you're going to give me the business there? I'm going to give your guy the business, but you don't want to do that. And so then do you, not because you're going to give me the business, Aaron? I'm going to give your guy the business. But you don't want to do that. And so then do you, not because you're trying to, you're susceptible to Boone in and of himself, but because you are trying so hard not to succumb to bias in the opposite direction, it would be a tricky thing. It's a delicate strategy, though, because eventually it's like,

you know, Aaron, we do pay you to be in the dugout. So maybe you want to, you know, be in the dugout. Exactly. Yeah. There was an article that June Lee just wrote for ESPN about Boone's ejections and noted that, you know, he's kind of notorious for it, but that also also like umpires kind of understand what he's doing because it says part of it is that like, he's just, he's been in baseball for so long because he's in this baseball family, right? Like there's this, there's this quote I'll read from the piece here. Umpires frequently cite Boone's background in baseball. He comes from a line of major leaguers that includes his grandfather, Ray, his father, Bob, who managed for six seasons after a long playing career,

and his brother, Brett, as the foundation for a common understanding that what happens on the diamond stays there. If he crosses a line and makes it personal, then he's probably going to get ejected, but he comes from a great baseball family and he knows what his job is, another umpire said. The whole thing is funny.

So I'm guessing some of them don't find it as funny, but maybe just because like he grew up around the game and he's Aaron Boone of the baseball boons that he gets a little more leeway and maybe he kind of knows to keep it, you know, within the bounds of... I mean, obviously he's getting ejected often, so he's saying the magic word. And suspended. And suspended, yeah. But I guess he's not maybe crossing the line over into... People actually hate his guts because of this.

Maybe they understand he's just got a short fuse or he's trying to rile up his team or whatever it is. Well, I'm waiting for an umpire to go Bob Davidson on him because there's a famous clip that's on YouTube. Charlie Manuel, the Philly manager, I guess, took issue with something, and Davidson turns toward the dugout and kind of snapped back at him,

and then the two of them got into quite a heated exchange. Yeah, if we ever interview an umpire again, and Dale Scott was the one we had on the pod, Reggie, maybe you were referring to, yeah, who wrote the book with Rob Nair. He's been on the show a couple of times. And in his book, yeah, he wrote about managers who had that reputation, right, for being really hard on umpires. And I think he distinguished between guys who were just real jerks and unpleasant and unfair and guys who would give you a hard time but were generally more fair about it. Like they had a point or at least they knew what to say. So maybe Boone's sort of on the right side of that, but it really is. It's like historically significant, his ejection rate.

I mean, he's one of the most prolific guys when it comes to getting ejected. He's been ejected 30 times already in 773 career games managed. So that's about 25.8 games per ejection. Now, I'm just looking at the Baseball Reference Leaderboard. There have been 241 managers who have managed at least 500 games, and Aaron Boone's ejection rate is sixth highest. So it's Bill Dolan, Paul Richards, Rick Renteria, David Bell, interesting, another active manager from a long line of baseball people, right? And Frankie Frisch, and then Aaron Boone. Aaron Boone just above Earl Weaver,

above Bobby Cox, above Larry Boa, these notorious hotheads who get into arguments with managers. Boone's rate is higher than those. So in this June Lee piece, Boone is told that he gets ejected more often than Bobby Cox and Earl Weaver. And he's like, okay, I better cut down on this a little bit. Remember, Boone and Bell both got kicked out of the same game when the Yankees were in Cincinnati a couple of weeks back. Yeah, so with their powers combined. Yeah, I guess, I mean, probably Boone is not going to manage as many games as Earl Weaver, certainly as many games as Bobby Cox.

But, so I don't know. And also, I think one thing June mentions here is that there might be a little less friction between umpires and managers these days. He wrote, it's a feat made more impressive because Boone manages in the instant replay era, which has reduced potential friction between skippers and umps. replay era, which has reduced potential friction between skippers and umps. So really, we almost have to era adjust these ejection rate stats and do like a ejection rate plus or something, because I think I have seen a study on this that the ejection rate for managers has declined at least slightly. Like it was at its high, I guess, in the 20s and the 50s. And it was about one per

nine games in the 50s. And then it decreased over time. In the 90s, it was about one ejection per 10 games. And in 2000, it started to become even less frequent. And in 2021, when this piece was written, which I'll link to, it was once every 13 games. So, yeah, if we adjust this, then Boone's pace is even more impressive, I guess. And there's one other thing I'll mention, and it kind of dovetails to your reference to things changing in 2000. Prior to 2000, the umpires were assigned to only one lead. assigned to only one league. Right. You would see the managers more frequently than you do now because you have,

I think, what do you have, 17 crews that rotate across the season. So you're much less likely to see the same crew as much as you would have when we had separate AL and NL umpires when we had no interleague play. Right. So maybe, yeah, it would be harder for friction to build up or for people to hold grudges against other individuals. So really what he's doing in this era, it's pretty impressive. But that brings us back to the original question about is he helping or hurting with the calls? I guess he can't be hurting that much because the Yankees do fare well in these metrics.

It's tough because I guess Higashioka has played his whole career with Aaron Boone as his manager, so we can't really do a with or without Boone. I guess Higashioka's rookie year maybe was with Joe Girardi, but he only played nine games that year, so that doesn't help. Trevino played in Texas, of course, before he came to New York, and he was a good framer then too, right? I mean, it was smaller samples most seasons, but like 2021, 713 innings caught. He had 8.8 framing runs saved according to Fangraphs. Now, then he comes to New York, 2022, catches like 100 more innings and saves 19.1 runs. So maybe is that the Boone effect? Who knows? It could also be a coaching effect, like the Yankees hired away the Twins catching coach

who's had some success with making guys better framers. So tough to untangle all that. If Aaron Boone has as long a career as Bobby Cox, then we'll be able to do a with or without Boone style analysis and we'll be able to look at all or without Boone style analysis. And we'll be able to look at all the catchers who caught for Boone and without Boone and see whether the rates were higher with Boone. And then we could perhaps make some inferences and draw some conclusions. But it's also going to be worth watching to see which umpires are the ones who kick him out the most. Cause I would think the effect would be the least with those umpires are the ones who kick him out the most, because I would think the effect would be the least with those umpires. I don't know if the Yankees have had C.B. Buckner, but he's notorious for kicking guys out. Yeah. I haven't looked at this, but I wonder whether the younger generation

of umpires is less prone to ejecting guys, because the younger generation of umpires also call the rulebook strike zone more accurately, which I guess maybe makes – they call more strikes on the whole. But that might be – there might be some kind of correlation there of the younger umps who are less established. Then again, sometimes they're younger umps who feel like they have to solidify their status by ejecting someone to a display of dominance or power like I belong. I can give you the hook here. So I don't know if that would be telling or not. But yeah, I can imagine certain umpires just hating his guts and saying, I'm not going to give him any borderline calls. But there have been studies that have shown that maybe home field advantage could at

least be partly attributable to umpires just wanting to defer to the home crowd, like subconsciously maybe not wanting to be booed. And so giving the home crowd an extra call here or there. And I guess that could apply to the home team too, or whichever team it is. If they're getting yelled at by one bench in particular, it's just like, leave me alone. Stop yelling at me. Here's a call. You win without even thinking that way, but just get off my back a little bit, please. I would imagine as an umpire, you're conscious of the fact that like, yeah, this guy's got to do his job. And of that is trying to enforce like a truth value to the

strike zone and some of it is uh you as an umpire are an instrument of him riling up and encouraging his dudes and i imagine that you can balance those things most of the time but i also would think that points you'd be like, come on, man. Like, I'm just trying to, we're all just doing our jobs today. My job is to call this zone, you know? Yeah. I bet it might also have to do with how justified your complaints are. Like, if you pick your spots, if there was a call that actually was bad, and then you give the empire a really hard time about that, umpires know that they miss calls sometimes, and sometimes they might know immediately,

oh, I missed that one, right? Or at least they might think that could have gone either way. So if an umpire is really hearing it from a manager on those, then they might be inclined to think, okay, you could lay off a little bit, but he might have a point on this one, right? And then there might be a makeup call or you might be more conscientious about that. Whereas if you're just indiscriminately yelling about every call and it's like the boy who cried wolf, the boon who cried wolf, it's like any call that goes against your team, you're yelling at the umpire and giving him grief and the umpire knows that was like right down the middle or it was way outside, then I feel like they would be more inclined to just disregard your complaints, right? So I think you would have to pick your spots and actually be somewhat judicious about when you yelled. It calls for so much self-awareness on everybody's part, you know?

Yeah. All right. Michael, Patreon supporter, says, I'm currently listening to episode 2015 and enjoying the question regarding the forced seventh inning singing in the seventh inning stretch. Take me up to the ballgame. And I had a similar thought. I forget what episode it was. I think it was 2000. But you discussed the use, if any, of the between inning warmups for position players. the between-inning warm-ups for position players. What if the MLBPA and the owners, mid-CBA, agreed to something players want, like a salary floor, and to offset costs, owners now force players to take up other in-game work, often done by other employees? One specific job could be that instead of taking unnecessary grounders, the position players need to do the crowd entertainment. The singing, dancing, races, fan cams, et cetera, could all be done by the players. Teams love their elaborate homer and walk-off celebrations already.

So what teams or individual players do you think would do the best jobs with their new duties? And what sort of new entertainment do you think could come from this? Mike Trout could do in-game weather forecasts. Mookie Betts could do a beat-the-pro bowling contest or a steak-eating contest with Eduardo Escobar from, I guess, catered by Fogo. Oh, yeah. show and tell, like, here's my non-baseball ability, and I will put that on display for you mid-inning. I will juggle, or I will bowl, or I will give a weather forecast or whatever it is.

I love that. I like the minor leagues between innings stuff, contests or whatever it is. It's Bush League, but it's kind of charming. So if the players themselves, instead of taking those warm-up throws and grounders, just went out there and, I don't know, cut a promo on the mic WWE style or just showed off some other talent that they had, I would enjoy that. I imagine that there would be certainly some reticence on the PA's part for this to be something that happens right because and I don't just mean that in like they're going to be difficult but like they if we look at the thrust of a lot of their action particularly on the minor league side it's like directed with the idea that the calendar year should be open to baseball players doing baseball stuff to the exclusion of other, you know, like make work. So I think the PA would be like, they're not here for singing. They're here for the baseball. They're doing baseball things. And I think that teams

would be reticent because even if we can debate the real impact of any particular, like, you know, throwing the ball around. They want their guys to focus on the baseball, because that's who you win the baseball is to focus on, the baseball. So I bet they would be a little nervy. But maybe this is, like, an expanding skill set that we look at for the 26th man on the roster, right? You have to be the bench guy.

You got to sing a song in the seventh inning and maybe you juggle. And also you're a late inning defensive replacement. Like, I guess I would be surprised if this is really the best way to optimize that. But maybe. Yeah, I mean, the league is making it worth the players while in this scenario, right? I mean, sure, they might be resistant, but hey, they're getting a salary floor out of this. So I don't know why the owners consider this so valuable. Yeah, I guess this is the only trade-off.

They're getting a raw deal and I should just shut up. Yeah, the owners are saving a little coin on in-game entertainment and they're willing to make major concessions that they wouldn't consider otherwise. I don't know why, but hey, all right, if they brought that to the table, sure, let's go with it. If I were a player, because I will confess, I've never been the biggest fan of just kind of forced impromptu skit type things. I could see I probably wouldn't be crazy about it. And I think the other part, I guess, of the question that really, I think,

puts this thing dead on arrival before it makes it to first base is I think the union's going to oppose anything that says salary floor because they're going to automatically assume cap too. Well, yeah, if that's part of the proposal, I don't think it's going to work. But if it's just, hey, floor, as long as you entertain us mid-game, then we'll listen. I don't think they go for it, though. I think there's some other things that players would like to see to make the product more compelling. But I think we're in an era right now given the you know the relationship between the union and certain

leadership you know components of the league that i think right now anything the league proposes the union is going to find a reason to be disinclined to support it uh unless it's mandated by some sort of committee i mean we saw that with the pitch clock. Well, you two are no fun. You're bringing reality to this scenario. I just want to see Mookie Betts bowl mid-inning. Is that so much to ask? Come on.

He would like to show off his bowling skills, I'm sure. Some players would probably embrace this. They probably have some hidden talent that they would want to show off. I mean, maybe not if they're playing in that game, but not everyone on the roster is playing at all times. I mean, all the wacky stuff that relievers get up to in the bullpen, that they could just do it for everyone's entertainment. So they could play pranks on each other. Or, yeah, you could have the last guy on the roster who's basically like a clown prince of baseball, Max Patkin type, and he has a routine and it's like a variety show or, yeah, someone like Brett Phillips, you know, like would you roster Brett Phillips to be your late game defensive replacement

and also to come out and laugh at corny jokes with his hilarious laugh in the middle of the game? Sure. Wouldn't that make things better for everyone? I actually think one thing that they, I mean, if they really wanted to go down that road, maybe you have a thing for PR type stuff. Maybe each team on its own works out an arrangement with its players where they set aside one day that's an off day at home between series, where they do a player talent show thing, and all fans can come out to the ballpark. And for a $10 ticket, sit anywhere in the park.

You can have access to concessions, and the players who want to could do this team talent performance improv kind of thing. I mean, maybe do something like that. Right. Yeah. I guess this isn't so dissimilar from what some teams already do on the video board. They'll have a player out there, you know, like answering trivia, doing quizzes. They have to guess something or someone has to guess the player or they have to identify the song that

was a hit in some year, whatever it was, right? Some sort of pre-taped promo that's aired between innings. So that kind of thing already happens. That's along the lines of what we're talking about here, except it's not live and it's not some sort of talent show demonstration typically. But I mean, some sort of skills competition obviously would be very fun, but probably would never happen. Like, you know, in the old days, you'd have players racing each other around the bases or competing to throw the ball over the fence from home plate or something like that. But these days, you hear people say we should bring back skills competitions for the All-Star game.

And sure, that would be fun, but also the injury risk. And the players probably wouldn't want to do that or teams wouldn't want them to do that. So this is, yeah, not necessarily baseball skills that they'd be showing off. It's just like, I can recite all the state capitals. It's like, what's your skill? What can you do? What's your party trick?

Can you do some sleight of hand or something? Whatever it is. Just come out and vamp. You don't have to kill as much time now because there's a clock between innings. It's not going to get out of hand. You just need to entertain briefly. Some guys would probably be pretty good at the improv. Although with the pitch clock being the way it is now, I think most folks will be scrambling to get, if they want a beer, there'll be a scrambling to get a beer between innings. They won't have time to watch. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and speaking

of another instance of needing like self-awareness, it's like, there's their perception of their talent away from baseball and then there's their actual talent away from baseball. And there might be a gap between those things, you know? Yeah, that is a good point. But that might be entertaining in its own way. Yeah. All right. Mac says, I was playing some Wii Sports baseball the other day, blast from the past, with some buddies. And we started thinking about one of the game mechanics. When playing the CPU, occasionally the CPU pitcher will make a mistake pitch, and as they release the pitch, a red exclamation mark will appear above their head, as if to say, uh-oh, hung that one. Typically, a very slow curveball or slower-than-normal fastball will float in, and you can sit back and smack it. This got us thinking. Obviously, major league pitchers don't ever accidentally float in 75 mile per hour fastballs, but they do hang sliders and change ups up in the zone or badly miss their

spot with a fastball. What if when a pitcher hangs a slider or dumps a 91 mile per hour fastball middle middle, a red exclamation point appeared above their head only as the pitch leaves their hand to notify the batter that the mistake was on the way. Would average or production increase on those pitches? Would the pitch come in so fast that it might only serve as a distraction? Would we start to quantify it to measure a pitcher's control? Huh. So yeah, I guess the issue is that the pitch, even if it's a mistake pitch, if it's still a major league quality mistake pitch, it's not going to come in slowly enough that you would necessarily be able to see the exclamation point and then take advantage of that. Maybe you could. I mean, batters are

so skilled at what they do. I mean, they can pick up the rotation and the seams and all that stuff. So could they see the exclamation point appear over the pitcher's head and then know that it's a mistake pitch? I guess, I mean, they would know it's a mistake pitch because the pitch is bad also. So I wonder how much knowing it's a mistake pitch would help them? Like, wouldn't they just recognize that it's a mistake just based on the characteristics of the pitch? I mean, I guess sometimes a mistake pitch could look like it's going to break at some point or something, and then it never does. It just turns into a cement mixer. So I don't know. I think the combination of major leaguers just being able to pick up

on pitch characteristics as well as they can. And then also the fact that even a mistake pitch by a major leaguer who's not a position player pitcher, it's going to come in fast enough that you're still not going to have a ton of time to adjust what you're doing the way that you can as a Wii sports player. There's also the eye level. I mean, if the signal that tells you this is an error is above his head, most batters, they're not going to have enough time to check above the pitcher's head every time he's releasing the ball to then refocus on the plane of the baseball. So I think that right there probably makes it a null hypothesis. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe so. Because unless the pitcher is like a straight over the top

release point where he's releasing it over his head anyway, then you're trying to focus on where the pitch is coming out of his hand and that's going to be not directly over his head. And then you might lose the pitch on its way in and you'll know it's a mistake, but you'll have made a mistake yourself in taking your eye off the ball. What this questioner made me think of actually is totally unrelated in one sense, but very much related in another. In the old days, the RBI baseball game, I could actually play it by sound. In the old days, the RBI baseball game, I could actually play it by sound. And one of the reasons you could is because the game designers, and I don't know if they did this intentionally or not, but the sound effect for the different pitches coming in at different speeds was different. So as soon as the sound effect for the pitch would play, you knew if it was a fastball or something in between or if it was an off speed. knew if it was a fastball or something in between or if it was an off speed and so then after a while of gameplay you kind of had in your head what the timing was for when to swing so i mean

if if you had a way of incorporating something in real life where the batter knew what was coming because of a certain signal like that i'm sure they would take advantage of it, and they would probably be very successful. But in this case, because the way the question describes the scenario, I don't think the batter would be able to focus in two different visual planes at the same time to take advantage of it. Right. Yeah. It's been a while since I played Wii Sports, so I forget whether there's a sound effect that accompanies the exclamation point or not. But if there is, then you could just focus on that, the audio cue, and that might really help. But yeah, the visual cue might be a bit distracting, if anything, I would think. It's like you do want information, but I think that we tend to overstate the desirability of sort of in-moment, mid-at-bat signals of that stuff

beyond what the hitter is already being given. Because I think that if you have to filter out that stuff and process it fast, you have so little time. It seems like it would maybe be more trouble than it's worth, ultimately. Well, I mean, didn't somebody do do analysis with the trash can binging thing? Yeah, that's what I was just thinking of. Yeah. Right.

There's no discernible advantage based on the batted ball data that they had. Right, which partly was maybe because they didn't always actually forecast the pitch that was coming correctly. And so if you were sitting on one pitch and then you got something else, then you'd be even less prepared than you typically are. But it might also be because

you're trying to listen for the banging and that's distracting you, even if there's no visual components. So yeah. But yeah, I guess this would be helpful maybe if we had a visual indication every time there was a mistake, then we could quantify mistake pitches. There have been various analytical attempts to quantify mistake pitches, but how do you do that? Is it just based on the spin or the movement of the pitch or the location of the pitch? A meatball sometimes might not always be the worst pitch you could throw in that situation. It might not be a mistake necessarily. It depends on a lot of factors. So if we had this exclamation point, then we could quantify how often pitchers make mistakes and how much worse that makes their

pitches, which would be analytically interesting. Well, and there were some pitchers who famously would intentionally sometimes throw an Ephus pitch. Bill Lee and Pasquale Perez came to mind. Mm-hmm. Right. Okay. Christian, Patreon supporter, says, Are there any regulations about the size of batting helmets? If not, could left-handed batters wear ridiculously large helmets, especially with extremely long visors, to get in the way of throwdown attempts? Obviously, they couldn't intentionally use their helmet to block a throw,

but if it gets too big, they'd simply have no way to get out of the way in time. I scanned the rule book and I didn't see any regulations on the size of batting helmets, but... It doesn't come immediately to mind. I know that you're bracing yourself for me to say, actually, Ben. Yeah, I was, but yeah, I didn't see anything. So if there's no size, I mean, we've gotten this question about like the sliding gloves, the oven mitts that some guys wear. Could they just wear one that was long enough to reach second base and then they'd just be there? No, I don't think they could do that. I forget. I think there are rules about that.

But also like if you tried it, this is in the genre of if you tried it, then it would instantly be disallowed. So even if there's technically no rule against it, it would be ruled out immediately by umpire discretion, I think. But if you did this, yeah, I guess you could get in the way of a throw. But you would also, I think, impair your own ability to perform, right? If you're wearing a ridiculously large helmet with an extremely long visor, I mean, it would probably get in the way of... I would be afraid if my helmet wasn't secure and I got hit by a pitch, I'd be more prone to injury. So as a batter, I would not want to do that. Yeah.

I don't understand why you just don't want one that fits, fits good and snug, right? Like some guys do wear obviously loose helmets and they fly all over the place. They just fly out. And like their visor is the normal size, right? They don't have like a brim, but it, wear batting helmets that fit your head. Sometimes they look too small. Like they're too tight. I'm like, I don't have like a brim, but wear batting helmets that fit your head. Sometimes they look too small, like they're too tight. I'm like, I don't know. It feels like your equipment people should be helping you like figure that out better. I don't know. Yeah. Well, your whole head's going to be

unbalanced. How are you going to pick up pitches? Is the visor going to be in your eyeline? But also it just seems like this is a very bad idea. It just doesn't seem like it would be worth it. I mean, I guess if there's already a runner on first, you could come up with the ridiculously large helmet with the extremely long visor just so that that runner could get to second and third. And then you could pinch hit for the guy, right? Or you could go back and change your visor, I guess. So you could just get a couple automatic steals and that runner would advance and then you could go back to hitting like normal. So yes, I suppose that would be worthwhile.

If you don't actually intend to swing, if you're just trying to get in the catcher's way, then I guess you could get away with that. I mean, you couldn't get away with that. But if there were no umpire policing that, then I guess it would work. All right. Here is a question from Riley who says,

Estere Ruiz's 30th steal had me wondering, if a player were average to slightly below average in nearly every aspect of their game, except for one that they were clearly elite at, how elite would that one stat have to be for them to garner award voting support? In Ruiz's case, he currently has 0.8 fangraphs war and a 93 WRC+, but is leading the league in steals. How many steals would he need to win rookie of the year? So I guess it depends on what their one standout tool is, right? Because some would be more valuable than others.

If you have incredible power and you're hitting a home run every time you make contact, but you strike out a lot and you're defensively limited and you don't add a lot of value on the base pass, you wouldn't really need to because you're just hitting a home run and doing your home run trot every time. You could still potentially be valuable. Or I guess this isn't so different from Luisa Rice, right? This is kind of Luisa Rice. He's got an AD hit tool, basically. I mean, contact tool. He can make preternatural amounts of contact and also seemingly direct where he hits the ball. He cannot hit the ball hard, or I guess there's probably some element of choice in there where he has prioritized contact over power. If he sold out for power, could he hit for more power than he currently

does and also strike out some more? Probably, I guess. I don't know if he'd have good power, but it might be a little better than his current power. But if you can make contact so well that you strike out 5% of the time and you have such great bat ability slash luck that you can bat 400, then you're quite valuable and you'll win a batting title and you might even get other award consideration. This is a fascinating question. And I think it depends on the run scoring environment and the kind of baseball that we have like i i think in 2014 the home runs per game i think was like 0.87 and so that would have been more inclined to favor a speed only player like Ruiz as opposed to right now where the Joey Gallo type probably plays up more just given the kind of environment we have and the kind of ball we have this actually makes me think of the Oakland question with the all-star game they're going to get one player but they have

three players who all have very different fascinating cases because you have Ruiz with all the speed. You have Ryan Noda, who's among the top. I think it's Ryan Noda. Yeah, he's leading the AL and OBP. And OBP. And he's got a crazy split between his batting average and his on-base. And then there's Rooker. And so, you know, three very different profiles.

They all seem to excel at one thing. So, you know, I guess it's, you know, have your pick. If you, maybe if you have a, if you have a certain skill that's lacking, maybe that plays one of them up. But as far as the question about rookie of the year, I think he'd have to have a Ricky Hendersonerson i think you'd have to be like 115 120 stolen bases with at least league average you know on base percentage to to be considered well and i think it would depend also on like where so you have this this standout skill and let's say it's not ricky henderson level standout but it's a standout an obvious obvious standout skill. It's a league leading skill. That was harder to say than I anticipated it being, but I think it probably also depends where that skill is relative to other rookie of the year candidates. Like let's for a moment transplant Estuary Ruiz into the national league, just for a second, like he's hanging out. And so it's like,

okay, you have this standout skill. Well, you also have a Corbin Carroll. He doesn't have as many stolen bases. He has 10 fewer stolen bases, I think, than Ruiz does, but he still has 18 and he has a 158 WRC plus. So I think it would also matter, like what is the relative gap between your super cool, impressive thing and the also really good, impressive thing of a guy who can actually hit. So that would matter too, I would imagine. Yeah, because Ruiz, I mean, he's stolen prolifically and also efficiently.

He's stolen 30 bases in 36 attempts. Okay, so a little bit more than 10 more. Yeah, well, he's... 12 more, you know. He's been worth like five base running runs, according to Fangrass. It's just not a ton of value, partly because he doesn't get on base all that often. He doesn't walk. He is a 322 OBP, so he's not able to use his speed as often as he would if he were Ricky Henderson,

and he were getting on base all the time. Even Ricky, I mean, like in Ricky's best base running seasons, let's see, he was worth, you know, 14 runs, I guess was his peak, according to fan graphs, just in pure base running. But of course, you know, he had a 400 plus OBP that same year and, you know, he had power and he hit for a high average. He was a seven-win player that year, but not primarily because of the bases that he stole. And he wasn't quite as efficient as Ruiz has been in this easier base-stealing environment that he's in. So maybe a comp, I guess, could be Vince Coleman, for instance, who stole about as often as Ricky at their respective peaks almost, but was not nearly the same player.

In Vince Coleman's rookie year, he stole 110 bases, and he was not that great a player. He was okay. He got caught 25 times, and then he didn't get on base a whole lot. hey, you know, he got caught 25 times and then he didn't get on base a whole lot. And he was worth the 2.6 Van Graaff's War that year, but he won the Rookie of the Year award because he led the majors in steals and he was super exciting. Like probably the excitement that you generate is part of it, like part of the narrative.

And, you know, is it an era that prizes that skill? And is it really fun to watch a player like Vince Coleman, who I think maybe had the highest stolen base attempt rate that year of any season ever? So it was sort of sensational. And back then, they may not have had the same appreciation for on base percentage and, you know, how much value you were actually deriving from all that running. So it depends on that, too, in this era of war being valued so highly. Maybe it's hard for one standout skill that, as we quantify these things, is not immensely valuable, actually, to power you to an award win, even if it is exciting? I think the Ruiz comp might be Billy Hamilton when he came up about 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, Ruiz has a league average OBP. I think, what's the OBP league-wide this year?

I think 323, 324. Because he keeps getting hit by pitches. Yeah, it's 320 league-wide, yeah. So he's right at the league average in terms of getting on base. And I think Hamilton in 2013 was actually below average at getting on base, even though he had all the stolen bases. And I can't remember where he finished in the Rookie of the Year voting. I'm not sure he was top five, but I don't have it in front of me, so I don't know. Yeah, I guess he was also sort of a semi-disappointment in terms of just how many bases he stole and how good he was at it, right? Because he actually was runner-up in the Rookie of the Year award race that year, but he stole 56 bases in 152 games, and he got caught a major league leading 23 times, right? And he didn't quite live up to the hype,

I guess, in any number of ways. But one of the ways was that he didn't steal quite as much as we wanted him to. I mean, maybe if he had the current rules that Ruiz is taking advantage of, he might have. But it was kind of like, how does anyone ever catch Billy Hamilton? How is it possible? Isn't he just too fast ever to be caught? If he gets a decent jump, just do the math. How does anyone ever catch Billy Hamilton? How is it possible? Like, isn't he just too fast ever to be caught? If he gets a decent jump, like just do the math. How does anyone ever

catch him? But no, he got caught fairly regularly, right? Which is kind of disappointing. I mean, it was disappointing that he couldn't, you know, get on base more often and all that too. That was part of it. But also like, given his speed, his base stealing wasn't quite as elite as you'd think it could have been. Yeah. Right. So, I guess also a version of this is like a pitcher who has just one really unhittable pitch and just, you know, like a Ben Joyce fastball or some slider monster who just throws tons of sliders. I guess that could be, you know, if they have no command, but just like one pitch type that is kind of devastating,

I guess that could be one of these things. But if you could only have one standout skill, I guess you'd probably want a Rises, right? Yes. I love how you're like, you know how he has like this, you know, skill? I'm like, like hitting, you know, his skill is hitting. would ever throw you a strike and you wouldn't actually hit that many home runs even if you had great home run hitting ability? So what Arise has, it's tough to pitch around him. I mean, he's not going to take you deep often, but obviously when he's going well and the balls are falling his way, he's a pretty significant offensive force. I think he's not going to hit 500, but the fact that he is even

making a run at it is super exciting. The way that he does it, he's probably got my favorite baseball savant percentile sliders, the patriotic lollipops, as some people call them, the red and blue circles on the baseball savant page, where he's totally elite at some and bottom of the league in others. It's great. You don't see that all that often. The hard hit rate and the max exit velo and all of that, super, super low, but the expected batting average and the strikeouts and the whiffs and just like total opposites. But even if he doesn't sustain this run for that much longer, which odds are he probably won't, but once he falls below 400, I will then be interested in

the average plus race, which is not quite as storied and exciting maybe as the 400 hitters. But his average plus, which you can look up at fan graphs, and it's just his batting average relative to the league batting average. That's what's so impressive about what he's doing because he's doing it in a low batting average era where he is facing so many more pitchers than the old 400 hitters used to, right? And it's almost miraculous that he's kept it up this long. And he hasn't hit any homers too. So like just so many balls in play, he's like so subject to the vagaries of Babbitt, right?

It's hard when you don't hit any balls over the wall and everything is in play. Then it really, you have to get either lucky or just immensely good, I guess, in order to sustain a batting average this high for as long as he has. Not only that, his home park is not known as a hitter's park either. I guess, in order to sustain a batting average this high for as long as he has. Not only that, his home park is not known as a hitter's park either. Yeah, that's true too. So his average plus, Bailey from Foolish Baseball was tweeting about this the other day, is 160. And the record for an ALNL player who qualified for the batting title in the modern era since 1901 is 154 by Nap Lajue in 1910. Ty Cobb also had a 153 in 1910. Trispeaker 151 in 1916. Lots of Lajue and Cobb and the first couple decades of the 20th century. If you look, say, post-World War II or post-integration,

and you exclude DJ LeMayhew and his 150 in 2020 shortened season, then you get Ted Williams in 1957, actually, when he had a 148 average plus, Rod Carew, 146 in 1977, George Brett, 145 in 1980, Tony Gwynn, 144 in the strike shortened 1994, Wade Boggs, 141 in 1988. So Ariza's blowing those away now. He could finish below 400 and still have the best average plus ever, really, or certainly in recent years. Ted Williams, when he batted 406 in 1941, Major League hitters collectively batted 262 that year, or 266 in the American League. What Arias is doing strikeout rate-wise relative to the league is really impressive too. So Arise has struck out 4.5% of the time so far this season. That gives him a K percentage plus of 20. So I guess it's like one-fifth of the league rate, basically. And it

looks like the all-time record, at least on record, minimum 500 plate appearances going back to 1901, I guess is eight, which was Joe Sewell in 1932. And then also Joe Sewell in 1933 and 1929 and 1925. Joe Sewell was eight or nine or 10 all those years, but no one has really done this recently. So I will be watching for that. I guess Tony Gwynn had a, in 1995, slightly strike short in the year, he had a 16k percentage plus. I'm very

curious about something while you're looking at that. So in 93, we had Sir Langs tweeted this out to the day. In 93, there were two players who were making a run at 400 at this point in the year. And I'm curious how their games translated to the strikeout component, because that would have been John Overwood and Andre Scalaraga. And those guys were not just contact guys.

They were home run hitters. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Arise, he's an outlier when it comes to the strikeout stuff. I mean, in 93, Overwood struck out 9.6% of the time, which, I mean, anything in single digits sounds super impressive today. But back then, 30 years ago, it was not quite as extreme as it would be now. And Galraga, 93, he had a 14.4% strikeout rate. So, all right. Last question here. In 93, he had a 14.4% strikeout rate. All right, last question here.

This is from Ian, and he sent us a question designed to get us to talk about the Giants. He sent us an email noting that we really haven't talked about the Giants this season. I can't dispute that. I made the point that the Giants, they're doing what we thought they would do, kind of. They're like a 500-ish team, and they were expected and projected to be a 500-ish team. They were an exactly 500 team last year, right? So we tend to talk about the extremes or the new and the novel, the different things, right? And they're right smack in the middle where they were last year and where we expected them to be. They're not dramatically underwinning or

overwinning their underlying metrics or anything. And they haven't had a lot of really extraordinary, extreme individual performances either. So I guess we have given short shrift to the Giants, performances either. So I guess we have given short shrift to the Giants, but it's like, you can be 500 and if you're 500-ish or worse than you're the Mets or the Padres, well, then that's really notable because, oh, you were supposed to be better. Or if you're the Pirates this year or the Orioles last year, it's like, oh, you haven't even been that good in quite some time. Let's talk about that. They're turning a quarter. Or if you're the Angels and you're always 500-ish, but you have Shohei Otani, then we'll talk about you, right?

And Ben's in love. Yeah, right. So to get us to talk about the Giants, Ian said, among the teams that are really close to 500, this was a few days ago, Pirates, Angels, Giants, Red Sox, Mariners, and Mets, which of them are you most confident will be contenders in the fall?

So Pirates, Angels, Giants, Red Sox, Mariners, and Mets. So the Mets are just free-falling as we speak. There's panic in the streets here in New York, and Pete Alonso's hurt now and on the IL, and everyone is worried about the Mets. Then you have the surprising pirates, you have the unsurprising angels just kind of, you know, plugging along. And then you have the Red Sox and the Mariners in the mix too. I feel bad because this question is clearly like, talk about the Giants. And I'm like, can we talk about the pirates again?

They're like, talk about the Giants. And I'm like, can we talk about the Pirates again? Just because out of that constellation of teams, their division makes them, and the Reds for that matter too, make them, to my mind, the most likely just because they have the opportunity to be a division winner maybe, if things kind of shake out, right? Whereas I don't think that's going to happen for the Mariners. I think that the Red Sox are in a division that's going to be impossible to win. Although, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of our wildcard teams just come out of the East. So maybe I'm giving them short shrift. And then for the Giants, like, you know, I keep I keep talking about I think the Diamondbacks are just

kind of good. I think they're just a good team that needs bullpen reinforcement. So I don't think the Giants are going to end up winning the NL West and the Mets might I don't know. The Mets are it's really you always want to separate

and I say this as a Mariners fan where it is a fan base prone to feeling, big feeling, that is sometimes a little bit separated from the underlying performance of the team. So when you look at the Mets, you're like, are you feeling the Mets, or are you engaging with the Mets? And I think if you engage with the Mets, it's like, oh, this is bad. It's going in a bad direction. So all of that to say, oh, the Pirates, man, we should talk about them more.

Well, if you look at the Giants historically, I think we would all agree 2021 was an extreme outlier in the positive direction for them. Right. Yeah, I told you. And we certainly talked about them that year. We talked about them over this offseason, too. I mean, last year, 500. 2020 in the short end of the season, they were basically right at 500. 2019, they won 77 games.

I'm looking this up now. 2018, they won 73. So this feels like a team and their signings that they have made, no one has really stepped forward and just taken the mantle and had a great season on this team. I think it's going to be one of these 78 to 82 win kind of teams. The Mets have one of the worst starting rotation ERAs in all of baseball. I'm with Meg. I think given the division and just the ability to have access

to a playoff spot because of the division they're in, I think it's Pittsburgh. So we didn't even mention the Twins who are exactly 500 as we speak, I guess because they're in first place. But then there's the Phillies who are 31 and 32

as we record on Saturday. So they're in that 500-ish mix too. I would say, I'm trying to throw Ian a bone here, but I think you could say that the Giants of those teams he mentioned might have the best playoff shot because the Pirates, look, they're fun. And we have talked about them and they're worth discussing. But there's still some doubt about how good they are, right? Oh, yeah.

If we go by the Fangrass playoff odds, the Giants have a 46.5% chance to make the playoffs. The Pirates are at 22.1%. The Red Sox are at 13.7%. The Phillies are at 38.3%. The Red Sox are at 13.7%. The Phillies are at 38.3%. The Mariners at 16.5%. Even the Mets are at 35.4%. So the Giants have the best playoff odds of any of these teams. I mean, yeah, they're kind of unremarkable.

But because they were 500 last year and they're more or less 500 this year, like I don't have a fear that they're going to fall apart. Like I have less collapse risk fear for the Giants than I do for, let's say the Pirates or the Red Sox. Right. And I mean, they're, they're not super compelling to me in that they're just giants over there. They're just doing their giants thing, right? Nothing is surprising about what has happened with the Giants this year, but I think they're in decent position to be in this race all year. So we'll talk about them eventually, I'm sure.

We're talking about them now. I think the key to what the Giants do, and i don't have their schedule up to see if they're going to have a softer part of their schedule since everybody plays everybody now but i i do think one of the things i would be worried about if i were them is the fact that the diamondbacks do not appear to be slowing down at all the dodgers are doing their thing. The Giants' success hinges completely on, do the Padres figure things out and get back to what we expected them to be, or do they stay in their current state? If the Padres don't fix this situation, then maybe the Giants have a better chance. If San Diego figures things out, then I think San Francisco is on the outside looking in, and that's for us in amazing ways. Here's to Daystoplast. And the Stat Blast, as usual, comes to us presented by, sponsored by, Tops Now,

which is the company that produces quick, made-to-order, I guess not really made-to-order, you don't get to decide what Tops makes baseball cards out of, but you'll be happy with their choices because exciting stuff happens in a baseball game. happy with their choices because exciting stuff happens in a baseball game. And then the very next day, the most exciting of those moments get immortalized, memorialized as baseball cards made by classic company Topps that's been making baseball cards since before most of us were alive long before. And now they just turn them around much more quickly. You used to have to wait a whole year. A new set of baseball cards would come out. Now, a new set comes out every single day, and you can get them while they last. So you can click on the link that is on the show page for this episode, or you can just go to Topps.com, and you can find the link to the Topps Now cards, and you can see what the current

selection is. There's always a new crop of Topps Now cards available to you, and you can see what the current selection is. There's always a new crop of Tops Now cards available to you, and you can get all the ones for your team or your favorite player or whatever fun fact was of interest to you. There will probably be a card of that. And now we can talk about some stat blasts and assess whether those might be Tops Now worthy. stat blasts and assess whether those might be tops now worthy. So I guess I can start with a question that was sent to us recently by listener Patrick, who wrote earlier this week. This was Tuesday. Tonight, Sebi Zavala hit two home runs in Yankee Stadium. The first went 320 feet, and the second went 430 feet. Is this anywhere close to a record difference in dinger distance in a multi-homer game? So a 320-foot homer and a 435-foot homer, that's 115 feet

of difference. So I sent this to our pal Mike Petriello of MLB.com, and he asked Jason Bernard, who is one of the researchers on the StatCast team, and Jason Bernard looked this up and Mike related it to us. So this is excluding inside the Parkers and looking at over-the-wall homers only, and obviously this is StatCast era. So the biggest differentials in a game, they do exceed this 115 foot, although not by that much. So on August 10th, 2019, Aristides Aquino, now he hit three homers. I don't know if we want to limit this to two in a game only. I remember that happening. Yeah. He hit three in that game and the longest was9 feet, and the shortest was 344 feet. So that is a difference of 125 feet. So that is the biggest distance differential on record in a game. 2019, so just a week before that Aquino game, Nelson Cruz hit three homers in a game. His longest was 478, and his shortest was 354, so that's a difference of 124 feet, one less than the Aquino difference. Now, if we limit it to just two homer games, then we get JD Martinez, May 20th, 2018. Then we get JD Martinez, May 20th, 2018. His longest was 443 and his shortest was 324. And that gives us a difference of 119 feet. And lastly, George Springer on May 1st, 2021, he hit two homers. The longer one was 470 and the shorter one was 354. So that is a difference of 116 feet. So Zavala and his 115 feet presumably would come right after the Springer one. So I guess he might be fifth on

the leaderboard, but I just got the top four from Mike and Jason. So that's the answer to that one. Thanks to our StatCast friends for answering that one for us. Now, here's one that I saw tweeted. This was tweeted to us. We prefer email, podcast at fangraphs.com for StatBlast questions. day by Andy, who drew our attention to a tweet by baseball infographics person slash shit poster Jay Kuda, whom you've almost certainly seen his many, many tweets at Jay Kuda. And one of his recent ones was he had like a circle around all the teams with a left-handed hitter who have homered against a left-handed pitcher in the last two years. And then outside the circle was just the White Sox.

So they're the only team without a left-on-left homer on offense in the last two years. So listener Andy said, I would love to see an Effectively Wild stat blast about the longest periods of time in MLB history without a same-side home run. I guess they just haven't really had a whole lot of lefty power hitters over that time. But Andy wanted to know if this was historically notable or not. Everyone was piling on the White Sox. But Ryan Nelson, who is on Twitter himself at rsnelson23, our frequent StatBlas consultant, he looked this up and he found that this White Sox streak is not close to the record. In fact, it pales in comparison to the record. The Reds went from August 19th, 1940 to May 9th, 1946 without a home run by a lefty against a lefty. That is 2089 days. He did this by days. So that is the record. The White Sox went or have gone 674 days without a lefty-lefty homer.

That's only the 67th longest streak on record, with the caveat that the farther back in time you go, the spottier the data is. And so there could be missing games in there. But not even close to the record. So there could be missing games in there, but not even close to the record. It is the 24th longest since 1970, and there shouldn't be any data issues there. That should be pretty complete. It's the seventh longest streak this century, but two of the other long streaks in front of this one are also White Sox teams. But the Angels, they went 1,039 days. I guess the end date was July 6, 2013. But the

White Sox had very long streaks of 700 plus days ending in 2001 and also ending in 2016. So yeah, this sounds like a very long time, but it's not that long in the grand scheme of things. That red streak that was 2,000 plus days, that was broken by Grady Hatton versus Joe Hatton. But Hattons are spelled differently in that case. But the right on right data, a lot of the longest droughts just for days were 2020, just because teams had gone a long time without playing. So that's one drawback of the days method versus the games method. But it looks like there have been right on right streaks of at least 300 plus days.

And then there are some that are longer, but are like a century ago and are sort of suspect. But it looks like 330 or so days is the longest anyone's gone in even more recent years, right on right. But yeah, lay off the White Sox, I guess. It's not that extreme or noteworthy that they have not had a home run over that span. It's not great, but it's not necessarily historic. Now, the last stat blast for today and this week, this was prompted by one that caught my eye. Jeff Fletcher of the OC Register wrote this pretty wild article about the Angels and Anthony Rendon and how the Angels have hit better with runners in scoring position when Anthony Rendon is playing. And evidently, Angels manager Phil Nevin believes that Rendon's presence in the lineup makes the other Angels hitters have better at-bats with runners in scoring position. So Rendon recently returning, Nevin thought this was great because everyone else would get better with runners in scoring

position because Rendon, with his great sense of the strike zone and his patience, he works the pitchers and he works the at-bats in such a way that Nevin believes it lifts the other players around him. So here's the quote from Nevin. When you see that at-bat and you watch it every day, I think that bleeds into the team. And we have not had that at-bat from Anthony in a few weeks. Now you put more pressure on yourself to do that and fill in for him. If you just watch his at-bats, he takes a winning at-bat every time. We've missed that at-bat. And Fletcher writes, the numbers support Nevin's assertion that Rendon impacts his teammates,

with the caveat that correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation. This season, Rendon's teammates have hit 295 with runners in scoring position in the 30 games that Rendon has started, a number that goes up to 302 when you add Rendon's production. In the 31 games Rendon has missed, the Angels have hit 187 with runners in scoring position. Fletcher continues, the same thing happened over a much larger sample in 2021 and 2022. Over those two seasons, the non-Rendon Angels hit 278 with runners in scoring position

in the 105 games when he was in the lineup and 235 in the 219 games when he wasn't. So simply getting Rendon back in the lineup might not solve the Angels' problems hitting in the clutch, but they need to do something if they are going to have any chance of contending. The obvious question here, did Rendon have this kind of effect on the Nationals? Yeah. Well, I have an answer for you, I think, Sarah, on that question. But yeah, there were quotes from Taylor Ward and Brandon Drury. Now, Brandon Drury amusingly says, I think everybody goes through times when you're driving the runner in, whether it's hitting the ball well or getting lucky. And then you have times when you just can't get anything to follow with runners in scoring position. It's a long season. It'll all getting lucky. And then you have times when you just can't get anything to fall with runners in scoring position.

It's a long season. It'll all even out. And then Fletcher says, Nevin, who played 12 years in the majors, doesn't buy it. There's a lot of people in our game that don't think the RBI is a skill. And it absolutely is.

Nevin said, it's a mentality. It's a way you go about your at bats. It's wanting those situations. We've got to want to hit in those situations. We've got to want to come up there with a wanting those situations. We've got to want to hit in those situations. We've got to want to come up there with a runner at second. We've got to want to come up there with a runner at third. So he is attributing this largely to Anthony Reddone,

just the talisman of clutch hitting, inspiring everyone else. And Taylor Ward says, I think the worst thing you can do is have a different approach or thought process in those situations. When you realize there's runners in scoring position, I think that puts added pressure on you and that thought isn't good there's been something to this during Rendon's Angels career, right? So that much does check out, but it doesn't really check out so much over the full course of the career. course of the career. So with the Angels only, and Ryan included the player in question, included Rendon's at bats with runners in scoring position in the sample, I guess it might be ideal to exclude that player, but it shouldn't make a big difference. So with the Angels only, with Rendon,

it's 260 batting average with runners in scoring position. And then in games that Rendon hasn't played, it's 239. And that is not statistically significant, but it's close-ish, I guess, to statistical significance. But over the course of his career, with Rendon, 260 batting average with runners in scoring position, 251 without Rendon. So if it's 260 and 239 with the Angels and it's 260 and 251 overall, then that would suggest that with the Nationals, he did not quite have these miraculous powers of clutchness. But Ryan found that that is not quite statistically significant either, even though that's a lot of plate appearances, but the 260 versus 251 and the 260 versus 239 in a smaller sample,

it's basically he found a 13% chance that it was just random noise with the full career numbers. So it's, you know, I guess it might be a little bit suggestive. The thing is, though, that there are a lot of players and there are a lot of opportunities to have someone who just flukily seems to have this effect,

this with or without you effect. And so there might be some players who might appear to be statistically significant, but really it's just that there are many, many, many players, right? And lots of teams and lots of trials and opportunities for someone to really stand out in this respect. So if you look at everyone who has had at least, I guess, a thousand played appearances,

I think is what Ryan did here, a thousand plus played appearances in the play-by-play era. Anthony Rendon, he's 1,550th for his career. So he's really not that noteworthy. If you pretend his Angels career was his whole career, he'd be like in the 300 range.

Now Shohei Otani, among players whose team hit better with runners in scoring position when they play, Shohei Otani, among players whose team hit better with runners in scoring position when they play, Shohei Otani, to this point, is 13th highest. So really, if Nevin is going to identify anyone as having these magical abilities to make his teammates hit better in the clutch, it would be Shohei Otani more so than Rendon.

But yeah. So this is really just an opportunity for you to talk about Otani again. It did ultimately turn out to be that, yes. It didn't set out to be that. Where's Byron Buxton on this list? Because we've always talked about the Buxton effect on the Twins in terms of win-loss when he plays and when he doesn't play. Yeah, that's a good question. Let's see if I can quickly search him here.

But it looks like the biggest difference, okay, Byron Buxton, it looks like the Twins have actually hit better with runners in scoring position when Buxton is not playing, surprisingly. So team batting average in runners in scoring position with Buxton in the lineup, 252 without 274. So a 23 point difference. And obviously this is all batting average. So if we want it to be really rigorous, we might do OPS or something, but that's what Phil Nevin is using to pump up Anthony Rendon here. So if you look at

the biggest differences ever, oddly, the Carl Mays, a well-known pitcher in the 1910s and 1920s, primarily for the Red Sox, Yankees, and Reds. He had 1,202 plate appearances in his career, 1,056 of which we have play-by-play data for. In games he did not play in, his teams had a.282 batting average with runners in scoring position. In games he played in, his teams had a.327 batting average

with runners in scoring position. That has a p-value of 1,000. I mean, that's statistically significant, you would think, except that it's just that there are so many opportunities for apparent significance. But he was a very good hitter for a pitcher, but he has the highest team batting average with runners in scoring position with any player with 1,000-plus PAs in the play-by-play record and the eighth highest difference between team batting average with runners in the position when he played and when he didn't. So it looks like the highest result for with, for doing better with and without, yeah, Carl Mays and then Nick Senzel.

That is odd. Yeah. Ryan Mountcastle is fourth on the list. David Hulse. Andrew Vaughn is up here. Jose Abreu as well is close to the top. And yeah, Shohei Otani, as I mentioned. And then the better without guys, I guess it looks like the number one is Bert Schotten,

whose teams did 66 points better without him, 66 points clutcher. Bert Schotten may be better known for being a manager. He was Jackie Robinson's first manager and along with Connie Mack, the last manager to wear a suit in the dugout. And speaking of our Boone conversation earlier, Connie Mack, lowest ejection rate for a manager and Bert Schotten also among the lowest. So I guess, you know, they were very formal suit wearers and didn't want to get their suits dirty by kicking dirt on umpires or anything like that. But Bert Schotten played at the same time as Mays primarily for the Cardinals and Browns. And he has the biggest difference, 256 versus 322. So I am going to say that this is most likely

meaningless. Just Rendon's ability here. I mean, look, he does take good at bats. He doesn't give away at bats, I guess. He's got a good sense of the strike zone. Maybe that rubs off on players. Maybe they want to emulate him and have good selective at bats too. But yeah, I think between the limitations of batting average as a stat and the fact that Rendon's differential isn't actually all that extreme in the grand scheme of things, I don't think his return is necessarily going to make the Angels much more clutch, regardless of what Phil Nevin thinks. foul balls into the Angel dugout. There's a clip of this online. I think it was in 92. And he hit like four straight foul balls into their dugout, and the Angel players basically were disappearing. Right.

For fear. Yep. So maybe he had that ability. I don't know. Anyway, this is something to add to Carl Mays' Wikipedia page, so it's not just that he fatally beamed Ray Chapman. He also apparently made his teams better when there were runners in scoring position, although probably that was just a fluke, too. So I would say probably don't read too much into this. whether Phil Nevitt actually really believes that there's something real here, or whether he's just trying to hearten his team,

make them think that, okay, we've got Anthony back, now we can be extra clutch, although that could backfire because Rendon will probably get hurt again. And then if you believe that your clutch hitting ability is dependent on Anthony Rendon, then you're going to be demoralized when he's not in the lineup. I think the runner in scoring position statistic batting average is about as meaningless as RBI is, personally. Well, Phil Nevin would disagree with you.

But yes, I don't know. It doesn't give me a ton of confidence in the Angels' clutchness with Rendon back. But can't hurt, I guess, to have him back. All right. Let's wrap up with the Pass Blast, which comes to us from 2018 and from David Lewis, who is an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. And he writes, games too long, get rid of them. In 2018, a guest column written by Mitchell Nathanson, a law professor and author of several books on baseball, appeared in

the New York Daily News under the headline, A Modest Proposal to Save Baseball. In the column, Nathanson offers a tongue-in-cheek solution to baseball's pace of play battle. Instead of shortening games, we can do away with them altogether and simply simulate the season using analytics. Nathanson wrote, simply by applying what we know about the game,

thanks to the sabermetricians who have worked tirelessly to transform our national pastime from a pastoral endeavor into something that more closely resembles an IRS audit. We can trim the length of the average baseball game down, down to zero. You want a quick game? How about one that lasts zero minutes and zero seconds. He continued, we have so much accumulated data with regard to batters and pitchers' tendencies, along with park factors and other niceties, that we can safely predict the outcome of most at-bats anyway. Nathanson addressed the concern that the data would no longer be applicable by suggesting a smattering of real games that could be played every few seasons. He concluded, contrary to the bleats and moans of the so-called purists,

analytics hasn't ruined baseball. It has provided a tired game with its salvation. All right. Well, fine. We get it. Anyway, David says, while I definitely won't agree to cancel any games, I do think a full game-by-game simulation of the season could be interesting to see, at least for comparison's sake, once the real games have been played. The season could be interesting to see, at least for comparison's sake, once the real games have been played. Could also be cool from a historical perspective if using historical stats, one could simulate seasons gone by and compare those results to what actually happened.

This might already exist. Yeah, that does happen. We get simulation leagues. And during the pandemic when there was no MLB being played, they various simulations, like Baseball Reference was doing simulations of the season. That was not as fun. I didn't follow those that closely, I've got to say, even as a card-carrying sabermetrician here. I did not find that particularly compelling. I will tell you, it's interesting you bring that up. Following those simulations in 2020, it was interesting to watch their simulations, how different they were in some cases

in terms of how the teams were doing. So I would say no. Yes. I don't despite what the author says here, I don't think most sabermetricians would be into this idea. We like simulating stuff. We like projecting stuff.

But then we actually want the games to be played, too. And it's fun to simulate past seasons. I actually will put together sim leagues of players from the past and see how they do. That's fun. But you've got to play the real game on the field. Yes, that's why they play the games, as the saying goes. And we like it when the reality is different from the simulation. We wouldn't want it to be too predictable. All right. Well,

Reggie, thank you for your support. Thank you for joining us. This was fun. Anything you want to plug or let people know where they can find you? Well, I will, I guess, say that I briefly was in the Facebook group. I got out only because I keep getting these weird issues of Facebook saying that your account's been compromised. You had to change your password. I don't know if it's when I started doing groups or what. So I'm kind of laying low. I am on Twitter. I will freely admit that I'm not one that likes to get into a lot of arguments.

So if someone posts something crazy, I may not respond. lot of arguments so if someone posts something crazy i may not respond but uh baseball yoda wx which ties into the weather part of my interest is that uh if you want to follow me on there and the baseball yoda is uh inspired by a friend i am not a star wars person that would be my wife people can get me up on there if they want to talk i do you know find random baseball things that are interesting to me such such as the John Gray stat from this week with the fact that he had been one of two pitchers, I think it was, that gave up

one run in nine innings with four or fewer hits, no walks, and a dozen strikeouts or whatever the number was. All right. Well, thank you. Say hello to Rob Manfred for us. I don't know if he'll respond again, but thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed every minute of it. All right. After we recorded, Louisa Rise went two for four, raised its average to 402. The chase lives on for another day. And also, we got an email from Reggie, who looked up the Billy Joel pressure situation. But here you are in the ninth, two men out and three men on, nowhere to look but inside where we all respond to pressure. Reggie says, according to Stathead,

there are 6,982 known plate appearances with two outs in the ninth and the bases loaded, classified as high leverage with the batter's team either tied or behind by one to four runs. He found that Steve Finley has the most played appearances in that situation at 16. No other player has more than 13. Brooks Robinson and Albert Pujols had 13. Then Jeff Kenn and Richie Ashburn with 11 and a whole bunch of players with 10. On the pitching side, modern closers lead the list in most batters faced. Trevor Hoffman, 35. John Franco, 34. In terms of defensive position of the hitters in this situation, pinch hitters had the most appearances with 1,163, followed by first baseman at 719.

The most ever such plate appearances in one game is five. Four hitters hit two homers in these situations, Ted Williams, Mark McGuire, Kevin McReynolds, and Ryan Zimmerman. Six pitchers allowed a pair of homers in this situation, Don Elston, Goose Gossage, Lee Smith, Ryan Madsen, Miguel Castro, and Chad Cordero. Albert Pujols has the most hits in the pressure situation, six of them, although Kevin McReynolds might be the most clutch despite not having double-digit plate appearances in those scenarios. He had five hits and two homers. Bruce Suter and Franco gave up nine hits. Trevor Hoffman allowed only three in his leading 35 plate appearances.

So thanks to Reggie and correcting a pronunciation of mine from our last episode, I referred to Guardian starter Tanner Bibby. It's Tanner Bibby. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free aside from our statBlast sponsorship and get themselves access to some perks. Derek Dixon, E. May, Zachary Bartley, Randall Woodford, and Andrew Thompson, thanks to all of you. Patreon supporters get access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only. They also get access to monthly bonus episodes and playoff live streams, plus a whole bunch of other perks,

to monthly bonus episodes and playoff live streams, plus a whole bunch of other perks, including ad-free Fangraphs memberships and merch and expedited email answers and so much more, potentially even a podcast appearance, patreon.com slash effectivelywild. If you are a patron, you can contact us through the Patreon site,

but anyone can email us at podcastatfangraphs.com. If you'd like to submit a theme song that we will add to our intro and outro rotation, you can do that at podcastatfangraphs.com. If you'd like to submit a theme song that we will add to our intro and outro rotation, you can do that at podcast at fangraphs.com. You can also rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. Thanks to you all for putting up with

my voice this week and with our late recording schedule. I suppose it's still Saturday somewhere as I'm posting this. We will be back with a new episode in the new week. Talk to you then. I won't banter with nuance From two hosts who are the guile I'm just a fan who wants Nothing less than effectively wild Oh wild Oh wild Nothing less than Effectively wild