Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2045: The Designated Hugger

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Patreon supporter Samuel Giddins banter about Samuel’s baseball background and history with Effectively Wild, before (9:52) discussing a Juan Soto quote and the type of disappointing team that’s most frustrating. Then (21:35) they answer listener emails about randomizing on-field decisions, the legibility of player autographs, whether teams should employ designated […]

Well, it's moments like these that make you ask, how can you not be pedantic about baseball? If baseball were different, how different would it be? On the case with light ripping, all analytically. Cross-check and compile, find a new understanding. Not effectively, why can you not be pedantic? Yes, when it comes to baseball, how can you not be pedantic? Yes, when it comes to baseball, how can you not be pedantic? Hello and welcome to episode 2045 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing okay. And Meg, we are not alone. We are not. We are joined on this episode by one of our top-tier Patreon supporters, Samuel Giddens. Hello, Samuel. Welcome. Hello.

Happy to have you. And if you've listened to any of the previous Patreon supporters who've been on the show to answer emails with us, then you probably know the first thing I'm going to ask you, which is what possessed you to become a top tier Mike Trout level Patreon supporter of Effectively Wild? Well, the whole pandemic thing happened. And just before I started getting back into honestly reading fan graphs after a decade long hiatus, I suddenly had a lot of time where I was walking outside or biking and needed entertainment. And it turned out there was this disturbingly large back catalog of Effectively Wild episodes. And there's some list of like, oh, here's the top 300 episodes you should listen to. Yeah, just narrowing it down considerably.

And I went through all of them. I figured I got a lot of entertainment out of podcast. As the kids would say, this is terrific content. So it's nice to be able to put my money where my tastes are. Well, it is nice to receive your money and also to entertain you. So glad we could keep you company. And yeah, we've got you covered. If you are someone who takes long walks or long rides or has long days at the office, whatever it is, we've got many years of content backed up for you just waiting to be explored.

So I want to ask you also about your background as a baseball fan. What led to your Fangraphs hiatus? Was that also a baseball hiatus? How did you come to the sport initially? I grew up in the New York suburbs in the late 90s. Do I have to say anymore? Yeah, same. My dad grew up in Brooklyn in the 50s and just was a huge baseball fan. He just remembers a disturbing amount. It's a victory for me when he's trying to remember a player's stat line from a season

and he's off by a point or two on their batting average. Oh, wow. I get to celebrate at that. And I was taken to my first ballgame and it was a Yankees game. And my older sister has never forgiven our father for that, because I am not a Mets fan. I've always, I guess, been more into baseball statistics than anything else about the sport. It's probably the reason that, you know, I like know how to code and stuff. Because when I was in, I guess, fifth grade, it was like, oh, there's databases of baseball statistics. I

have to learn how to query these. The two best stories that I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, one was at a ballgame with my family and my sister asked you know Sam why aren't you watching what's going on in the field I said well they have everything I need up on the scoreboard what a stat head stereotype yeah and the other was I was playing, I think it was high heat major league baseball on my computer. You know, this is over 20 years ago at this point. And I print out a box score from a game I'd played and I come downstairs to show it to my dad. I'd played, and I come downstairs to show it to my dad. And it says, you know, okay, the New York Yankees win, you know, 127 to three. He looks at the Yankees lineup, and it's basically an all-star team, because I, you know, I took all the all-stars and traded them to the

Yankees. And no, I did not score 127 runs. I just didn't like losing. So I figured I just play as the opposing team and do as terribly as I could. And I really haven't changed much since then. Well, if you have kids, then someday they will probably be impressed that you remember Wobas within a point or two, whereas your dad remembers batting averages. So that'll be the change. But otherwise, sounds like father like son. Pretty much. And are you still in the New York area and a Yankees fan? In the San Francisco Bay Area. I guess I'm still a Yankees fan, although the past couple of years have just had me questioning why. Not so much because of the, like, you know, it's championship ring or bust.

There's other things about the sport that just seem more fun now. Other than watching Aaron Judge last season, I haven't had a lot of fun being a Yankees fan since I sort of started watching baseball again four or five years ago. Yeah, there are a lot of worse teams out there, and I'm sure there are people saying, I would love if my team were as bad as the Yankees, right? And poor Samuel, who grew up during the dynasty and was spoiled by that and now thinks only slightly better than 500 team is not worth rooting for. But it's not just the results. It's also the way you get to those results. And I think that has been a consistent refrain that it's just not a very entertaining team. And let me just say to like six or seven

year old Sam, there was nothing more heartbreaking than game seven of the 2001 World Series. That was my introduction to heartbreak as a kid. Yeah, yeah. Right there with you. I'm a little older than you, but I felt the same feelings. And again, world's smallest violin, I'm sure. No one is crying for us that the Yankees did not win yet another World Series that year. But when you're a kid and your team wins every year, and suddenly they don't in heartbreaking fashion in that game, that is a form of heartbreak. Again, most people would sign up for that form of heartbreak as opposed to just the routine, mundane heartbreak of being bad in the first place or never even getting to that point. But when you become accustomed to winning and then suddenly everything unravels after you have come to think of your team as the team that always gets it done, that's quite a shock to the system, right? Especially if you're six or seven years old.

So, yeah, I feel you. Has another team or group of players sort of supplanted the Yankees for you? Or is there a squad you make a point of watching now? Roots for arson judge now. Not particularly, especially now that games are shorter. I don't watch very much because I'm a night person. And so the fact that, you know, there are no games on a Sunday afternoon or, you know, after 9.30 at night means I just don't end up watching very much. I just like following whatever is interesting. Yeah, just look at the scoreboard. That's all you want to see.

Well, it's the stories behind it and the way that the stats manage to make a story feel unique to me. That gives me something to follow. Other than the fact that you grew up in the suburbs and I grew up in the herbs, I'm detecting a lot of commonalities here. So no wonder you've gravitated toward Effectively Wild. And what do you do? Did your fifth grade baseball querying and coding lead you to a life of that sort of work? I've been doing software engineering work since before I finished high school.

Currently on the, not the DL or the IL, but the UL, the unemployed list, doing like contracting type work. But yeah, for some reason, people pay me to sit in front of a computer screen and blast pixels into my face for many hours a day. Same. Yeah. We're doing different things at those screens, possibly. But still, screens, definitely something we have in common, including right now. And I am looking at a screen with many listener emails, which we will get to in just a moment. One thing I wanted to ask you to, so, Meg, last time we talked about the emotional effect of your trajectory in a season. So, if a team starts off fast and then slows down or vice versa, how does that change the perception of the season and how you feel at the end of it, given the same record and results at the end? So here's a question about the Padres, who,

as we have discussed, just extraordinarily unlucky this year in a number of ways. One-run games, extra inning games, clutchness, all the underlying metrics suggest that they should be better than they've been, that they should have a superior record. Their war is solid. They are deep when it comes to individual players with solid wars. Their base runs record, their run differential, all of it suggests, hey, this is actually a good team, except for the record and their place in the standings. So frustrations are starting to boil over for some of them. And there was one quote in particular that has gotten a lot of attention on Thursday after the Padres' latest loss. We've got to go out there, grind every day, grind every at-bat. It's been really inconsistent.

Some days we do, some days we don't. We got to do it every day. Days like this series, we just give up. Like literally, we just give up. Instead of keep grinding, keep pushing, we've got to forget about yesterday and keep moving. Padres fans not pleased, I don't think, by the admission of one of the stars that the team gave up. Now, what Soto's saying here, I'm sure is not incredibly uncommon, right? I mean, your focus, your capacity to grind every at-bat, to never have a wasted at-bat, that varies by day and by team, and players have other things on their mind, and it's hot, and who knows what else is going on. And there are some plate appearances, you know, you take an at-bat off, as they say. But it's not great if you say that you're going to give up,

even if that is what's happening. But it must weigh on you at a certain point when you lose as many close games as they have, despite being such a talented team. Maybe that does at some point affect your motivation and your morale because you just figure, here we go again. We're in this situation. We never win in this situation. Whatever we do, we're going to lose again. So it's kind of incumbent on the leaders of that clubhouse and Bob Melvin, the manager, and everyone else to try to keep players away from that mindset. Perhaps they're not doing as good a job of that as they should. I don't know. Like the Padres is.

But they're expected or deserved record based on their actual performance in the season would not be. So I guess to return to the White Sox, I guess the White Sox, right? Like people thought, oh, the White Sox, they should be good one of these years. And they're not, right? So which would you rather be? Or I guess, which would you rather not be? So your options are a team whose underlying metrics suggest that they should be quite a bit better than they are. And in fact, are a good bit better than their record would suggest, or just like a team that's really in the suck from top to bottom. But same expectations going into the season.

Gosh, they'd be frustrating in such different ways, but I do think they would both manage to rankle and perhaps a good amount, I guess that you're able to maybe hold on to the idea of turning things around longer if you're in the Padres situation. Although, you know, you get to a point in the season where you're either in a playoff position or within range of a playoff position or you're not. And when you're the White Sox, like just to pick a team, you probably, for the first little bit of being not good, expect that to turn around, right? You probably are like, well, this isn't who we are. Like, we're supposed to be good. You know, we are good. We're going to figure it out. It probably takes what, like a month maybe before you're like, oh, this seems

like it's not changing you know you could tell yourself that if you just were playing poorly too i suppose like at some point we're better than this right like we've we've got to get going even if you're not hitting then you might just think well we've got to hit at some point we're good hitters we've hit in the past so either way i guess you could feel like it's gonna happen happen for us at some point. It has to happen. But yeah, I think you're right that you would hold on to that hope at least. And it's reasonable to hold on to the hope longer if you're in the Padres situation. They had a stretch of playing better before the deadline and their underlying stats suggested that their record wasn't really reflective of their talent. And so the other sort of thing that that situation does, serves to do is like inspire your front office not to trade Blake Snell, right? To hold on to Josh Hader and to keep Juan Soto around. So, I think you're able to hold on to the idea that you might see October baseball, like postseason baseball. Next year, I'm not going to have to make this distinction. It's so exciting for a lot longer. And I bet that that helps. But, as you're rounding into what will soon be the middle part of August, like you're, you're probably getting to the point where that

hope might be a bit exhausted because, you know, like they just, they just keep losing. And last night, you know, I was watching that, the back half of that Mariners game. I watched Hancock's debut and then was, uh, turn it on again later. And, you know, they were tied 1-1 going into the eighth inning. And I was like, okay, like, this is going to be fine, maybe. And then the bottom of the eighth rolls around. And I was like, no, they're going to lose again. My stupid Mariners keep winning. Yeah. You gave up just like Juan Soto. So, Sam, if you're looking at the wars and the individual lines and they are not adding up to the results that we're seeing, is that extra frustrating for you because the story that makes you want to watch it is better than not. I guess I'd rather have a team where it's like, okay, you know, you've got players on the roster who are liable to do cool things any game. Right. Right. Yes. whatever, seems much higher than if it's just lackluster across the board. Right. Yes. And I would think also it feels a little less hopeless for the future, too,

because if you're the White Sox now, it's just organizationally, where are we? Sometimes I feel like we're absolutely nowhere, as they say on the West Wing, right? It's just like, where do we go from here? How do we get better? Whereas even if this Padres' terrible luck persists all season, still, it can't keep happening, right? This is a new low when it comes to that. So as long as you have those talented players, you keep telling yourself it really is going to fix itself at some point. And maybe you just need a new season for your luck to turn. Maybe you need a fresh start or something. But it would if you still have that talent base. We know from baseball history that these things don't tend to persist across seasons. So if your luck is terrible one year, then you can certainly bank on it not being terrible the next year. So there's that. I think that is probably encouraging. And also, it probably helps the

morale of the individual players that they're not sucking specifically, right? Like, even if the team spirit takes a hit, if the players are performing well, at least they're not costing their own financial futures as much, right? Because teams don't pay for clutchness, probably, really. And so it's probably not going to hurt juan soto in his contract extension slash free agency negotiations that the padre's record is not good because juan soto has turned his season around and he's still having a solid soto-esque season so there's that you could take some consolation and at least my stats look good now of course if you're coming up empty in every clutch situation you're not going to feel great about that either but at least it's not compounded by

feeling like you're also hurting your own financial outlook for the rest of your career right right which i guess might sound selfish fans might say no you should only care about how the team is doing but come on let's be honest if we were that situation, we would want to do well and make money, right? So if your company is not performing well by whatever metric you use to judge that in your industry, that might be a blow to your ego to some extent and to your spirit. But if you are performing very well and you're getting a raise and your job is safe, you feel a little bit better than you would if your company is tanking. And also, you're a big part of the problem and you're going to pay some penalty for that in the future. So selfish as that may be, we are all selfish in our own way and to some extent. I think it's a reasonable thing to care about. You probably don't want it to be the only thing, but I don't think that for most of these guys,

it is the only thing. So it works out. I think it probably feels good for them to have the occasional good thing to point to. Even if the team loses one day, if you hit home or make a nice grab in the outfield or something that's that's still something to to focus on instead of the well you know i was oh for three with two strikeouts and grounded into a double play and let's just you know come come back and fail again tomorrow mentality that hopefully the players you know are better adjusted and don't feel that way. But I know as fans, we sometimes will interpret a bad stretch that way. Yeah. All right. Let's get to some emails here. One from Dan, who says,

like Meg, I'm a political scientist. And like baseball, political science has become a lot more quantitative in the past two decades or so. But in political science, the increase in stats or stat usage was pretty quickly followed by an increase in randomized experiments because people got tired of saying correlation is not causation. Baseball front offices seem very sophisticated nowadays. So I'm curious, is there any evidence or reporting that they are randomizing on-field decisions to see which work out better? Fans might get angry

if they see a manager flipping a coin in the dugout. But on the other hand, there are lots of decisions, fastball or not, steal or not, bunt or not, use the hamburger phone or not,

that could be legitimately randomized. Maybe the Padres are some sort of randomized controlled experiment here. They're just flipping the coin. It's calling heads and keeps coming up tails over and over again. Oh, man. I think that if we're moving away from real social science, some teams are probably more akin to a PSYOP than to a randomized control trial. I don't know that it's being thought of quite that way. And here I'm going to betray myself as a political theorist and not an empirical political scientist in the way that some of my former colleagues in the University

of Wisconsin at Madison, Bowleside department were and are. But I think the way that they, teams will definitely try stuff. They try stuff all the time. They try stuff in spring training. They try stuff in the minors. They try stuff with players, often in a developmental setting, to say, you know, why don't you throw your, you know, your fastball this way? Why don't you, you know, adjust your grip in this particular way? Why don't we position some guys in this spot versus that spot and kind of see how it goes? But I don't think that that improvisation gets done as purposefully in the majors just to see like how it goes in part because you're so often reacting to other people's play but in a developmental setting i i think that they

they try stuff but when the stakes are low although maybe some of these teams that are well out of it you know maybe they look at it as like, let's do some, let's do a little lab leaguing at the big league level. Why not? We're, you know, 20,000 games out of first place. You know, if ever there was a team to do it, it would be like the A's. But that doesn't seem to be a present strong suit of theirs. So who knows? Right.

Yeah. Who knows? Right. Yeah. The stakes are high at the major league level. And also you have actual people involved with their careers on the line, their emotions and everything. So a lab league would be a better setting to do this sort of thing. But also there's so much good data. There's just I mean, there's more data in baseball than there is in almost any field of human endeavor, right? So there aren't as many situations where you would need to randomize it. I'm sure there are some, but also there's. We can look at all the outcomes that have happened when teams have stolen or not stolen

or bunted or not bunted, right? So we get a lot of good information that way. And I don't know that it would be helpful to experiment in many of those realms. Although pitch selection, I guess, is one where this has come up. And Sam and i talked about doing this with the stompers right what if we just randomized pitch calling and pitch selection because maybe pitchers are too predictable and if they just chose pitches at random then hitters would not be able to anticipate what they were going to throw, or at least like you could kind of calibrate it so that it wasn't completely random, but you could weight it by how effective

those pitches are and then randomize it somewhat by count from there. Again, though, there is just a whole lot of data on actual results and outcomes there. And we have such good information on what makes pitches effective and are they actually effective when you throw them and do they have the characteristics of a successful pitch. And so we get a lot of feedback as it is. So I'm sort of struggling to think of situations where it would be as helpful. It's like baseball is already running an experiment with innumerable trials every day. So am I missing an obvious application of this, Sam? Are you intrigued by this question?

I think the real randomized trials that are being performed are the players with their superstitions. They will randomly choose a pair of socks. And then if they play well, they will keep using those pair of socks or, you know, all the weird superstitions we hear about athletes having. You know, go to Fogo de Chão and hit a homer afterwards. That is clearly causation, not correlation. I wonder if he soured on Fogo de Chao because things aren't going great for Eduardo. No, it's true. You're right.

And we wouldn't have data on that. Right. So, yes, I guess players are possibly running their own not very scientific experiments when it comes to that sort of thing. But, yeah, I don't know if we're missing any obvious ways in which it would be helpful. There are certain things where you don't get to try it in games, and so it would be helpful to test that. That's why we're always talking about Lab League, whether it's moving the mountain back or some other rules change. Then, yes, it would be helpful to test those things. But when it comes to actual tactical decisions and common situations and games, gosh, we have decades and decades of very granular data to go over with a fine-tooth comb.

I mean, even then, I think going backwards, we can see some things that in a different world would have been the start of like a random control trial. What happens if you have a hitter who's never, you know, switch hit at the big league level and you're just like, well, let's like, let's try it out and gather some data. I remember when that happened a couple of years ago, obviously it wasn't for the purpose of like, we're going to tell you right before you step up to the plate which side to bat from and you won't know. And there's no way to make that a double blind trial because going up there swinging blind and not knowing which side of the plate you're on seems like a bad idea. But yeah, like the one-off random things have happened so frequently just because there are so many, you know, events in

baseball history, which I think just gets back to the idea of there are so many events that have happened. If you have any sort of reasonable hypothesis, there's going to be data to test it against. Probably. Or it will be something so wacky that baseball would really be different and you could send an effectively wild hypothetical about it. But for clubhouse reasons and human resource reasons, you might not actually be able to test it in real life, at least in the majors. So, all right. Question from Michael, Patreon supporter. I was recently reading the Cody Stavenhagen piece at The Athletic about player signatures. In it, he

delves into players who care a lot about doing as many as possible and or neatly, as well as others who just try to get it over with. I'd love to hear from you all about any anecdotes you might have about players being notoriously good or bad with their time, neatness, etc. Another topic could be

the dregs of baseball fandom known as binder boys. You know, the adults who never grew up and throw elbows at seven-year-olds just so they can cash in years from now on that high-A player who will eventually be selling us insurance. I've also been pondering how some players now just try to sign with initials and then scribbles due to the lack of cursive being taught in most schools. I know my son began to learn about a decade ago, but his school stopped and he now needs lack of cursive being taught in most schools. I know my son began to learn about a decade ago, but his school stopped and he now needs to Google cursive letters to physically sign something when required. Could it reach a point where players are part of a world so digitized that fewer and fewer can even sign an autograph, thus making them more valuable?

Could this bring back the nonsensical trend that was NFTs and how might that work? As I stare at my signed Andre Dawson picture above my desk, I worry for the future. Are either of you autograph people, collectors? No, although the complex level autographed folk are a potential area of writing interest for me. So I'm going to keep that in my back pocket but no i'm not really an autograph seeker it's it's awkward i mean like in a credentialed setting you're not allowed to ask for autographs right it says it right on your credit and it's understood as part of your like bbwa membership you're not gonna do do that. For good reason. It was tacky. So, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Even when I was a kid, I didn't really like doing it. I mean, part of it was just shyness, but also feeling like I was imposing. It's not really imposing because it's part of the deal. You're a professional athlete. Kids are going to ask you for autographs. That just goes with the territory.

But I don't know. Just shoving a baseball or a program or something in someone's face, even if they're used to it and they don't mind it. I just I didn't love doing it. And then you have it. And then what? I guess. So I have some signed balls and signed stuff lying around just from years and years and years ago because, yeah, now it would be uncouth or against the rules. I just I would be I would feel very self-conscious about doing that and just wouldn't really even have the desire to do it. But but even when I was a kid, I still have some stuff like

lying around at my mom's house. And if there's like a story that comes with it, that could be cool. Like if you had a nice interaction with the player, or if it was some memorable piece of memorabilia, if it was, you know, you got a bat or a ball, you caught something, you had some personal interaction. I think the interaction is more meaningful than if you're just buying an autograph or sending away for an autograph. I'm not knocking that. If people like collecting autographs, that's fine. That's a valid and popular way to experience sports. So just it's not really my thing so much. So I don't have a whole lot of personal autograph signing experience. Although, yes, when I was a kid

and would sometimes just summon the courage to ask for an autograph at spring training, especially when I went a few times. Definitely, there were binder boys, I guess, if that's what they're called, pressed up against the fence, jostling, competing with me, which is kind of unbecoming. On the story subject, I think that is what, to me, makes it special. You know, more so than like, okay, I spent some money and got a, you know, assigned ball ship to me. Like, I remember going up to Cooperstown one summer with my dad, and I think it was maybe the week before induction weekend, and we were camping, and this is an

audio medium, so describing photos goes great, we know. But on the wall behind me, I have photos of me with a bunch of Hall of Famers. And I went through this last summer. I don't think any of them are still around, which is kind of wild how time comes for us all. But, like, I have the photos and I have some signed balls. And like, I remember talking to these guys who had retired before I was even born. And my dad had to tell me like, okay, well, this is so-and-so. So, there's that. And I also, I do think there's an opportunity to have asking for a signature be an in to start talking to a player. I think it would be very weird to go up to a AAA player or something that you're following and be like, So, Mike, what did you have for breakfast today?

But, you know, you hand them a ball. It gives you time to chat. You have an opening, right? It's got a captive audience for a few seconds while they're signing the thing. There was a while where my family was, like, intently following the career of Mike Jacobs. Interesting. Did not turn out as we thought. But it was one of those like, you know,

player you saw coming up through the minors and you saw them a couple of times and having that memory of like, oh, this is a guy that I interacted with. And I did actually know him before, you Cody, but Clay, because I got an autographed ball from Clay Bellinger, a ball that he tossed me in spring training. And we had a little interaction, and then I followed his career. And in a way, it didn't turn out great. In some ways, it turned out really well in that he was on a pennant winner or a World Series winning team every one of his four big league seasons, including those 2001 Yankees who broke our hearts, Sam.

And then I was almost more attached to Cody Bellinger when Cody came along, because it was like, oh, son of Clay Bellinger, which no one thinks now. People might think, oh, Clay Bellinger, father of Cody, probably more so than the other way around. But, you know, Clay Bellinger, he's been on Effectively Wild because of that interaction decades ago. So that was kind of cool because what is special about an autograph anyway? It's the echo of the interaction that that player had with that piece of memorabilia, right? Because we know that players can sign things. It's not like some skillful thing that they're putting on display that they're able to sign a thing.

So why is it even valuable that they signed a thing? What's the correlation between them excelling in their field and therefore that means that this thing they signed would be valuable? And therefore, that means that this thing they signed would be valuable. There doesn't seem to be a direct connection except for the fact that they touched it. You know that a few seconds of the Hall of Famer's life were spent signing this thing, assuming it's not a forgery, right? It's not like they're as good at signing autographs as they were at playing baseball. No, they're definitely not. In most cases, no. So what is special about having the autograph?

It's just, oh, this thing was in the presence of that player. And if you weren't in their presence when that thing was being signed, then it's sort of a second degree connection. It's like an echo. It's like the object is imbued by their essence because they briefly interacted with it, right? But if you had the direct interaction, then I think from one perspective, though, that you can't sell it on eBay, you know, you can't say, I talked to that guy once. How much is that worth on eBay? Nothing.

collect. But to you, it could or should be more valuable than something where you weren't even present when the thing was being signed, unless it's like a particularly cool item from a game or something that was special because it was involved in that game. So as for the actual quality of the signatures, this is not something I have a lot of personal experience with as a non-autograph collector. I've heard Rob Neier lament this many times, the decline of the ballplayer signature and the fact that we've gone from clearly legible signatures to just scrawls and scribbles. just, well, you got to sign a lot of autographs and the faster you sign, the faster it's over. And if you're taking a long time and really putting care into it, then you're going to be standing there even longer and it's going to hurt your hand even more. But it probably also is related to the lack of cursive and physical writing. I mean, I grew up and learned cursive and print and everything and always was writing in blue books and on paper. But even now, having had that history, when I have to write something on paper, which is very rare, and because it's very rare, the rare times when I actually have to sign a physical check or send a letter or something. It is so infrequent now that I do sometimes have to remind myself, how do I make a cursive? Whatever it is, like I haven't done this

in years. So if I didn't grow up getting drilled to do that, then yeah, why would you even need to acquire that skill? So I guess you could just get print signatures anyway, like block letters, which maybe looks a little less fancy and sophisticated, but at least you could read them. Yeah, I'd argue then you would at least know, you know, who it's from rather than having to post a picture on Reddit. And I have this signature. There's some other writing and some numbers. Who the heck did this? Yeah. Which we have to do now.

Right. People post that in our Facebook group all the time. They're like, I found this ball in my uncle's attic and here it is. And can anyone identify it? And to me, it just looks like morb. But somehow people at our Facebook group are like, oh, yeah, that's whoever. Just autographed experts so so i think it's cool if a player takes the the time and the care to perfect their signature and actually have it be recognizable as theirs so that years later you don't pick up

that ball and go who was that again i cannot decipher this right so then it was morb yeah it was morb clearly but yeah i can't imagine that that we're gonna get a return to more legible signatures as we get further and further away from physical writing so yeah then you know you get those mass-produced like digital signature type things again, like the further removed it is from the player holding the thing and doing the thing themselves, then it's far less special because there's no personal connection to it. So I do appreciate when players put time into that, even though it's not something I'm personally invested in. All right. I'm personally invested in. All right.

We've got a question from O, who says, I was contemplating a middle ground between punching in the dugout and crying in the dugout, something players might accept. I was thinking teams could hire a former beloved player of the franchise who understands player frustrations and is eminently huggable. Someone like a David Ortiz who could help talk a player down or give an acceptable manly hug when needed. Football players are always getting hugs on the sideline if they're hot. It's time baseball players do too. I like this idea. David Ortiz specifically, the DH, the designated hugger. This is a great idea. I wonder how this would read to people. I think, I mean, aren't there times when even if your instinct isn't to punch something, that you just want to be left alone with your feelings? Where like you're not ready.

You're not ready for someone to try to make it better yet. better yet you need to you need to be able to stew for a second and and wallow before you can move on and then accept the the generosity of the hug yeah you don't have to hug it's not right it's like the kissing only if they want to right only if they want to but i guess that you're right. So maybe we need to add another skill to this beloved, huggable, gregarious former players skill set, which is that he would need to have very good social feel, right? So that he could tell, like, that guy needs to, he just needs a minute to himself. Versus like, come here, I'm going to give you a big, you know, bear hug. So you need someone with good feel. Puts his arms out and then kind of cocks his head to the side, you know, raises an eyebrow like, I'm here.

I'm here if you need a hug. Yeah. The Padres could use a designated hugger right now, it sounds like. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. I like this. Although this kind of just sounds to me, isn't this the job of a bench coach?

Like, former MLB player. Right, right. I'm sorry to any bench coaches who are listening to the pod. But really, what else are you doing there? You're like waiting for, unless you're Aaron Boone's bench coach, in which case we know you're going to be managing sometime this week. Right. Or you're running a randomized controlled experiment of some sort. Right. Like you're there. Your job is to sit on the bench. It's there in the title. Can't you pull a double duty and also sort of be the adult to offer hugs when needed.

Yeah, sometimes coaches are there to offer a figurative or physical hug. But also sometimes they're the ones laying down discipline. And they're kind of your superiors in a sense. They're not paid as much as you are, but they could get you in trouble. You know, like they're kind of your boss in a sense. And some coaches are not cuddly like that, right? They're like taskmasters or they're just there to make you better at baseball, but maybe not to make you feel better about being bad at baseball, right? So some kind of cuddly coaches probably do serve this purpose.

But but you almost need someone who's removed from the chain of command, I feel like. And then maybe also macho men being the way that they are. You might need the designated hugger to stand outside of the view of the cameras potentially. Right. Like if you if you don't want to have it broadcast to everyone that you need a hug right now, but you really do need a hug right now, maybe they would have to stand just out of view, just down the tunnel in the clubhouse so that you could go get a quick hug away from the prying eyes. Yeah, kind of a designated hug station. Right. Yeah, because look, they always say don't suppress your feelings and bury your feelings

and then that'll be bad, right? And, you know, teams have psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, you know, people you can talk to who hopefully will not like report what you said to anyone if you trust that that all works as it should. But again, this is just someone who's there to hug you, not necessarily to counsel you or psychoanalyze you beyond that, just there for a hug if you need it. And there could be designated hugger player confidentiality,

so they will not be telling anyone whether you hugged them or not. But just not bottling up those feelings could potentially be helpful. I don't know if either of you have seen the show Shrinking. Yes, I'm watching it now, actually. Okay. All I can say is if you're watching it, keep the phrase a hugger player confidentiality in mind. Yeah, right. Yeah.

It's fine. Yeah, right. Yeah. But yeah, like a Jason Segel kind of character, more so than a Harrison Ford kind of character would probably be better for a designated hugger. Well, and importantly, you don't, you know, famously important for the psychologist to not be the designated hugger, right? Like you don't want hugging. That's a good boundary. That also comes up on shrinking. Is this going to be another thing I have to watch now? Probably not, but it's good. Question from Thomas. Question for the mailbox,

which involves a sport outside professional baseball. Hey, we talked about a different sport last time. This is what we do now. The U.S. Women's national team substituted two veterans into their round of 16 World Cup match against Sweden for the purpose of taking penalty kicks. Unfortunately, both storied veterans, Megan Rapinoe and Kelly O'Hara, missed their shots. Prior to their shots, the commentators discussed how those two would provide a veteran presence in a high leverage moment. This is another psychological question. Is there evidence of a benefit from age accrued professional time or accrued postseason experience in high leverage situations? and relief from the bullpen in a high leverage spot, but open to other interpretations you might think up.

This could be observed in different ways. For instance, do veterans play more true to their regular season stats than younger players? Do veterans play better in general than younger players? Or do they have a reduced standard deviation for their average performance? So there have been some studies on this that came to my mind. Russell Carlton did a couple because he's done a study on everything under the sun. And I'll link to a couple he did where he looked at whether there was any benefit to playoff experience in the playoffs or pennant race experience in pennant

races. And he basically just looked to see whether players who had been in previous postseasons or pennant races did any better than expected relative to players who had not accounting for whom they were facing and everything. And he found bupkis, zip, zero, zilch, nada, right? So I haven't been aware of any study that has shown an effect here. I'm open to the idea that there might be, though I suspect it would be small enough that it would be tough to distinguish from randomness. And as we always say when clutch comes up, by the time you get to the big leagues, you had to survive a lot of pressure situations and excel in a lot of pressure situations to get to that point. Because if you couldn't hack it in clutch situations, then you would have never made it off your high school team

or your college team or your minor league team, right? So you can't completely fall apart in those situations or you're just not going to get to the big leagues. And by the time you get to the big leagues, also you're facing pressure all the time, really, even if it's a low leverage situation it's still a high leverage situation compared to anything we do you know like the lowest leverage situation in a major league baseball game would be extraordinary pressure for

us if we were to step into that right so because we aren't accustomed to it and because thousands and thousands of people are watching you do that and will react to what you did, right? So the baseline is really a pressure cooker and then it ramps up from there. But again, I think most players are pretty prepared for that. Except for the ones who, you know, punch or kick the dugout. punch or kick that dug out that. Yeah. Although I guess that could be a coping mechanism that helps them blow off steam and manage in those situations unless they break a bone and then they're not going to be in those situations for a while. But yeah, I just haven't really seen anything that has shown this,

although intuitively it seems like there should be something, Right. And I guess there could be some sort of survivorship bias here. If you were just looking at veterans versus rookies, it's like someone who's stuck around enough to have a long career is maybe more likely to have done decently in those situations. just be yeah playing to your regular talent instead of doing better than usual it could just be doing your usual not doing worse than usual in a high leverage situation where you're facing more pressure and perhaps a better opponent so yeah just never really seen a smoking gun here but if anyone's aware of any research that has suggested that this is a thing. Please make me aware. Yeah. All right. Question from Tom, a different Tom. Tom, not Thomas. I really enjoy the pedantic about baseball series. So in that spirit, one of the terms that always gets me thinking is heating up.

A recent example I heard was MJ Melendez is heating up with four homers and a 500 average in his last four games. This always has me thinking, isn't he hot now? Heating up implies there is some next level of performance, hot, that he has to attain when most likely the next couple of games we'll see him return to a base level of performance. So I guess putting aside the question of whether a hot streak is predictive or not, it is true that when someone has been cold, has been slumping, and then has some games in which they were very hot, we say they were heating up, right? Even though in those games, they may have been scalding. So really, it's like we're late.

You know, it's like when we say they're heating up, they have already heated up. They are already hot at that point. So what do we mean by heating up? I guess that implies that we think it is going to continue. And maybe what we're referring to is that their seasonal stat line is heating up because it's being warmed by the recent performance, right? So it's not like their next game is going to be hotter than the last game, but overall... It's like their season line is in a Jafen dish that's slowly warming back up. Right. Something like that. Yeah. I was thinking, of course, to be pedantic about it, they were hot and they were heating up the box score.

Their heat was transferring to the game around them. Technically, it should be like if you're really cold, like you've been slumping, like you just have a bunch of 0-4s, and then you have a couple 1-4-4s in there. You're still not hot, but you're heating up, potentially. You're not not cold anymore, whereas we probably usually use it to refer to players who already have heated up. They have been hot for some period of time. So it should be like an intermediate state. And I think we actually need to wait until – like the phrase heating up implies that, you know, the derivative is still positive. We have to wait and see if they actually get better than they are when we're saying that they're heating up. Otherwise, they will be plateauing rather than continuing to heat up.

will be plateauing rather than continuing to heat up. Yes. We can't know until retrospectively we can say that he was heating up. But in the moment, that presumes that we know that they will continue to heat up, which I guess is what most people think when someone starts suddenly hitting well for a few games. It's like, oh, this will continue, right? Which is not necessarily the case. I love how this email is getting at the heart of how one possibly covers baseball from like April to the early part of June. Like, I don't know, maybe it'll last,

maybe it won't. Getting hotter? Question mark? Shrug emoji? Don't know. We shouldn't write about baseball until the postseason, but, you know, we got bills to pay in the meantime. Yeah, that'd be bad for Fayette Grasse. Yeah. Alright, Alex, Patreon supporter, says, if Shohei Otani bills to pay in the meantime. That'd be bad for Fayettegrass. Yeah. All right.

Alex, Patreon supporter, says, if Shohei Otani wanted to play for a contending team the rest of this year, and I'm sure he does. He probably hoped that he already was playing for one that would contend. Could he ask the Angels to waive him, maybe saying that's the only way he'd consider re-signing there. So it's like, if you want me back, you got to let me go. Then make it known that he'd report only to a team that's in contention so the bad teams don't bother entering a claim. Or could he even go a step further and say he wants to play for one of these five teams and will simply sit out and rest his body if he doesn't get his way? Top NBA players have tried a version of this to a reasonable, if not perfect, degree of success. And Otani could be the one baseball player with the leverage to make it work.

I can imagine reasons he wouldn't want to. The backlash, it would generate the risk that the Royals or someone would say, screw it and claim him anyway. But is there anything in the rules that would stop him from trying? So there's something in the rules in the sense that he has a contract and he is obligated to play as long as he's being played and under contract to play but this is like a player empowerment era sort of thing and and obviously there's a history a precedent of players sitting sitting out or not reporting or doing a Derrick Bell style operation shutdown, right? Just like trying to use whatever leverage that they have. And Otani does have a ton of leverage. because he's a team player and as much as he would like to be on a contending team,

I just cannot imagine him ever putting himself above his teammates and saying, no, I'm not going to show up for work unless you let me go. But if he were the type of player who might be predisposed to do that, could it possibly work? Well, you have to get on it

because you have to be on the other team's 40-man by, what, August 31st to be postseason eligible. Right, yeah. So you have to get moving. I mean, no one would ever, like, you'd never do this. I know that the question presupposes that Artie Moreno would be like, yeah, sure, no problem. But, like, he wouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it.

He's going to make some starts between now and the end of the season. And I bet those are the only ones that people are confident, you know, fans will show up for. I guess, like, if you're the Royals, who I assume would not be on his list, right? And he has said, I just won't report. I'm not going. just won't report i'm not going if you you know if one of these teams that isn't one of the um ones i prefer uh claims me then i guess like their incentive goes away but i think someone would still probably try i don't know that i think it wouldn't i think it wouldn't work i think that i think the commissioner would be like, okay, relax.

We don't want to set a precedent for this, even though I'm sure that the commissioner's office would prefer to see Otani in the postseason just as many times as he possibly can be over the course of his MLB career. I'm sure they don't want to set precedent this way, but I don't rightly know if there's anything in the rules that would preclude the Angels from doing it. And I don't know that there's anything, it's not like the teams ahead of the contending teams in the waiver order are required to submit a claim, they're not, you know. But it would be some hanky-panky. And the commissioner

doesn't tend to like that. It's dodgy in that way. So, this is where my mind went. What happens, like, let's suppose, you know, he is placed on the waiver wire and one of the teams he doesn't want to play for claims him. And then he says, well, I'm just going to not report. Does he actually have enough service time if he doesn't play out the end of the season? Would there be some shenanigans by

which it would actually be in his best interest to report even to a team that doesn't want to play him because otherwise he would be like, are eligible for the Royals or something. Everyone loves Otani and everyone laments that he's in this situation. And I think it feels kind of bad for him and also feels bad for themselves that they don't get to see him in the playoffs. So I think some people would be sympathetic. It's just like you had Otani and you didn't make the playoffs. That's your fault.

Like, sorry, Angels, like you deserve this. Right. You deserve to be ditched by him. But there's always this player's selfish. They are supposed to play for this team. They agreed to play for this team. And it's reasonable to expect someone who signed a contract to play for a team to continue put a playoff team around you, although that was the hope. But I wonder whether there'd be a backlash and people would say, oh, Otani, he's not who we thought he was. Or whether people would say, yeah, like, would the public pressure be on Otani to suit up again? Or would it be on the Angels to capitulate just so that we could keep seeing shoya otani i don't know i feel like there might be a lot of weight of public opinion just weighing on the angels to just let him go i i feel fairly confident that no matter what the the loser in the court of public opinion here would be perry manasian oh like could you Could you imagine having your obit be, this was the guy who traded Shohei Otani? How much worse would it be to be the guy who just put him on waivers and got nothing? Well, if you love him, set him free. Maybe it'd be a noble gesture, but I don't know. I think it might also

hamper his earning power in the long run, even if he didn't fail to qualify for free agency. I guess teams might have some reservations about signing him to another long-term contract after he pulled this stunt. If he were released and went through waivers and then was claimed, oh, yeah, I guess he would. You know, I've put this question to John Becker, and he says, if he were straight up released, I think he'd get to pick his team, though. I guess he'd go through release waivers. Yeah, I'm relaying this in real time. Type faster, John. You don't know that you're on Effectively Wild, but you're going to find out later. John listens to the show. Type faster, John. You don't know that you're around effectively wild, but you're going to find out later.

John listens to the show occasionally. Hi, John. Got to get the transaction experts involved here. Nothing precluding him from refusing to report, but he'd surely be restricted and not accrue service.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. That'd be a bit of a problem. Yeah. Yeah, he's the one guy who might have the standing to pull this off if he really decided to. But yeah, this would change my opinion of him because I think this is completely out of character for him. So I would have to revise my understanding of his character. I would be happy to see him play in the playoffs. I would be sad if he sat out for some period and didn't accrue war during that time.

So that would be disappointing, too. It's not the only Otani question that we got. We always get Otani questions. For instance, here's one from Andrew, who says, given that Artie Moreno had already been considering selling the team as recently as last offseason, is it not at least within the realm of possibility that instead of offering Otani a contract worth $500 million or more, he would simply offer him a controlling stake in the Angels' ownership group? Per recent evaluations from Forbes and elsewhere, the Angels are worth between $2.7 and $3 billion. So it would theoretically be a payday of well over $1.35 billion, especially factoring in any increased valuation over time. But it's also all pretend money at that point anyway, right?

Even if Moreno just wanted to sell the team to Otani outright, how unreasonable of an offer would that be? What if it's set up as an escalating ownership percentage that accrues over the duration of Otani's next contract, resulting in ownership upon his retirement? And what would the MLBPA have to say about it? Is that even something that Manfred and the other owners would realistically approve? No, probably not. And what, if anything, would it mean for the luxury tax system?

There's some precedent for this, not in baseball. When David Beckham signed with the LA Galaxy, he was given an undisclosed percentage of all club revenue and also was awarded the right to purchase an MLS expansion team for a fixed rate of $25 million upon retirement, which turned out to be a huge discount. So there are rules governing this and it can't really actually happen, or at least it's very difficult for this to happen in MLB because this situation has come up in the past. I think we talked about it on our Eddie Stanky draft episode because there was a rule supposedly prompted by an incident in the late 1920s because Rogers Hornsby, who was a player manager with the Cardinals, he was given some shares in the organization. And then later in his contract, the Cardinals wanted to get rid of him and he was traded to the Giants. And then Commissioner the NL teams had to contribute in buying him out.

And so they have a rule, rule 20E, I guess it is or was, that says no manager or player on a club shall directly or indirectly own stock or any other proprietary interest or have any financial interest in the club by which the manager or player is employed except under an agreement approved by the commissioner, which the manager or player is employed, except under an agreement approved by the commissioner, which agreement shall provide for the immediate sale and the terms thereof of such stock or other proprietary interests or financial interests in the event of the manager or player's transfer, if a player or playing manager to or joining another club, a manager or player having any such interest in the club by which the manager or player is employed

shall be ineligible to play for or manage any other club in that league. While in the opinion of the commissioner, such interest is retained by or for the manager or player directly or indirectly. And there were some less than ideal situations early in baseball history where you had owners who owned multiple teams or had stakes in multiple teams, right? And would sometimes transfer them from one roster to another, which is how we got that notorious Spiders team. So it basically can't happen except for that little bit of daylight there, which is that there can be an agreement approved by the commissioner, right? So if Rob Manfred said, okay, then it could happen. It just probably won't. So I know this came up, it was like tossed around at least, maybe even discussed by the Cardinals kind of informally with Albert Pujols

when he was going to become a free agent. But again, it's just, there's no recent precedent, there's this rule against it, and it's just a sticky sort of situation. So I don't see it happening any more than I see Ohtani getting released and working his way to another team. But again, say the Kansas City Royals and refused to report and not accrue service, his understanding is that the claiming team would hold his rights beyond the, you know, the date of the claim. So because he would not have accrued enough service to become a free agent, they could wait until the offseason and trade what would now be a full season of Otani for quite a package. be a full season of Otani for quite a package. But that assumes him being claimed by a team that knows he won't report and him not reporting and then not accruing service, which I guess is an incentive if what you want to do is trade Otani for a lot of prospects now that you have a whole year of him. So we had failed to anticipate a piece of incentive, but that's what we have John for. Thank you, John. Yeah. I'm reading here from a February 2011 Derek Gould article. Before Wednesday's deadline that suspended negotiations with Pujols, Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. said the club explored different avenues to modify its offer to the first baseman.

Some were described as creative routes to a deal, and sources confirmed that one possibility explored was offering Pujols a stake in the team to increase a contract's potential value. So, yeah, it's an extreme long shot there. But you could just have the Los Angeles Otanis, right? The Los Angeles Otanis, right? Yeah. So what you're saying is really the team that should be exploring this is the Red Sox because they have stakes in non-MLB franchises that they could be handing out. Yeah, right. Yeah. Here, you want a piece of Liverpool or whatever?

Did they sell Liverpool yet? They were exploring a sale, right? But yeah, I guess that's a possibility, right? So this article, the Gould article said, a baseball official who spoke on the condition of anonymity reiterated that the commissioner's office is willing to explore such creative options with a team, quote, if there's an opportunity for a club to sign or keep a player of this magnitude. So Otani, certainly of that magnitude. So I guess it's not completely out of the question, but Pujols ended up getting his long personal services contract with the Angels instead there are precedents in the NBA. Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan had ownership shares they had to divest.

Or Mario Lemieux with the Penguins had ownership, right? And they had to work something out when he returned as a player slash owner, right? So, yeah, I guess it's not completely impossible. Maybe the angels can get creative because they will probably have to, to keep Otani. Trey says, my wife is finishing up med school and is in the process of applying to residencies, which is a pretty silly way to get a job. For those unfamiliar, the gist of the residency match process is med students apply to a ton of residency programs in their preferred specialty. Residency programs extend interview offers to X number of applicants.

The students rank the programs they interviewed with and the programs rank the students they interviewed. And finally, an algorithm matches students to programs based on student and program preference lists and the number of spots each program has available. As silly and somewhat unpredictable as this way of getting a job is, it made me think about the MLB draft. If MLB used an algorithmic match process instead of a draft, would it be more weird, less weird, or just different? A few of the major changes off the top of my head are losing teams would no longer get first dibs on top talent. There would no longer be tactical overdraft or underdraft changes as players are taken. Everyone would be assigned to a team at the same time. Players would have some say in where they go, although the less

valued you are as a prospect, the less likely you are to get your top choice. If baseball assigned amateur players to teams algorithmically, how different would baseball be? This is a question right up my alley. I actually, I have a book written by a professor that I took a class with that I just got. This is actually an economics question. This sort of matching for schools or whatever is something that economists study. And so depending on the way that the draft slash match slash we're going to have to come up with a better name for this, depending on the way that it's designed, there's potentially room for shenanigans, because some of these matching algorithms are not what economists call strategy-proof. Basically, some of them have incentive for you to misrepresent your preferences.

As an economist by training, I would absolutely love this. Could you imagine someone on MLB Network trying to explain how, like, the nitty gritty about how all of this worked? why someone ended up with one team. Or I guess we still don't know, you know, were there pre-draft conversations and did the player come to some agreement informally or did they say their demands were such and such and so a team passed on them. So there's still stuff we don't know about how teams end up with players as it is.

But yeah, I wonder whether we would get to see those preferences or whether that would all be kept confidential. But that would be really interesting. It would be nice. I mean, it would be nice if players got to play where they wanted to play or at least had a better chance of doing so from the start. And I guess it would also be kind of nice to know that the players on your team really wanted to be there if you're a fan, right? Like, oh, they chose us. That's kind of nice to know that the players on your team really wanted to be there if you're a fan, right? Like, oh, they chose us. That's kind of nice.

It's not just random. It was luck of the draw, luck of the draft. They actually wanted to be here. You know, if you have a hometown team or something, then you could have a better chance of arranging to play there if you wanted to be and be a hometown hero, which would be good probably for sports, for baseball in general, right? To have local players that fans have some reason to be attached to and to root for. So that would be one positive, one perk. Yeah, I guess it wouldn't really serve the same purpose that the draft does, which is ostensibly to promote competitive balance, but really to suppress salaries largely. I guess it would still do that to a great extent.

I'd just be sad midsummer not to be able to hear Eric Longenhagen say the phrase cut a deal or underslot about 10,000 times, I think that would be the real big loss under this scenario. Well, and the Rockies would never be able to draft a pitcher ever again, right? I mean, it would reveal something about the perceived strength of player dev across the league, right? Not perfectly, because it's not like every team that's good at player dev gets to get all the guys. But I imagine that if we were to be granted access to preference data over time, that there would be certain clubs that would be up there. Now, granted, they tend to be clubs that are also clubs that win a lot. And so who knows if you'd be able to discern what of it is a preference for good player

development and what is just a preference to be a Dodger or whatever. But I think you would start to see some clubs that players are like, I can go here and get better and be good. And other clubs were, again, you'd be like, I'm a pitcher and I shall not play for the Rockies today or any day. Or you could say, hey, I'm like, I'm 18 just out of high school. I'm going to put the Atlanta Baseball Club number one and just hope that they sign me to an extension before I report to my first spring training. that they sign me to an extension before I report to my first spring training. Question from Robbie, Potomac, Maryland. While listening to the Orioles radio broadcast of their game against the Blue Jays on August 1st, the broadcast team mentioned that Hyunjin Ryu's fastball averaged 89 miles per hour and noted that this was, of course, slower than most these days. I tried to think about how this would look to Orioles hitters compared to a 95 mile per

hour fastball, but I had a hard time conceptualizing this difference mainly because of the units used. Would it not make more sense to use feet per second to measure pitch speeds? 89 miles per hour is 130 feet per second and 95 miles per hour is 139 feet per second. Considering that the distance from pitcher to hitter is best thought of in feet and the time for a pitch to travel is best thought of in seconds, wouldn't this be a better way to report and compare pitch speeds? Why do we use miles per hour historically? My guess is that it's either because we have the convenient benchmark of 100 miles per

hour or because people generally think of velocity as miles per hour because of cars. But for cars, this makes sense. I want to know how many hours it will take me to travel hundreds of miles in a car. But this makes no sense for pitches. Shouldn't we use feet per second instead? I mean, probably. But, I mean, apart from Ben, like, you know, a lot of people drive cars. I think that's part of it.

No frame of reference. What is the how fast the cars go? But you've driven in cars. Yes. You don't walk everywhere. I see a lot of cars as a New Yorker. I've seen cars. I know what they look like.

They go fast. They do go fast. They arguably go too fast in places just milliseconds to, you know, from release to a particular point. Because we, you know, at this point, we know that, you know, the perceived velocity depends on a pitcher's extension, and so on. And so, the common way to compare different pitches would be, you know, from how long to release until they reach whatever we determine a, like, decision point is. Yeah, right. I've seen people suggest this. And we have sprint speed, which is reported in feet per second now, right? which is reported in feet per second now, right?

And I guess it just is a good frame of reference because we kind of know that just from convention, but also from seeing other objects move at high speeds, just how fast that is. But it's true when you sometimes see a StatCast graphic that shows the trajectory of the pitch from the side and it'll show either like a breaking ball versus a fastball or something. And you can see just how much farther the fastball moves, you know, how much quicker it gets on you. That is revealing. So it would also be revealing to have this in

feet per second if we were used to that, right? If it wouldn't immediately flummox everyone. We're used to that, right? If it wouldn't immediately flummox everyone. I've also heard people suggest this with RPM, right? With revolutions per minute for spin rate on pitches. Why not use revolutions per second? Because, I mean, you know, it's hard to conceptualize like a minute. We're talking about thousands of revolutions, but we're only talking about a pitch that's traveling much less time than

that on the way to the plate. Wouldn't it be better to know how many times the pitch actually spun on its way to the plate or some mound-to-plate-like distance? Wouldn't that be better than having to do some abstract calculation or like, okay, I know intellectually that that's a high number, but it's hard for me to visualize that. And that's maybe less ingrained in our consciousness. And there's less of a baseball tradition with RPM so that you could use RPS instead. And I think that that might be better. But yeah, we're not changing miles per hour, I don't think, unless we move to the metric system.

Oh, I was going to suggest that we should do the opposite. Embrace our rejection of the metric system and come up with even more bonkers and useless units. Like, I don't know, we could say that he threw that fastball at like 1.5 grankies or something. We already use Altuve's, right? Yeah. Just something completely ludicrous, just to reinforce the idea of these Americans, they will do anything but use the metric system. Like, let's lean into that and have some fun.

Yeah. I will assert the following. I think that, I know it's not quite the metric system, but I think Fahrenheit makes more sense than Celsius does like intuitively. Yeah. Yeah. Take that.

Put your land down there. Yeah. Other places. All right. Here's a question from Samuel, but a different Samuel. Boy, that would be something if we answered a,

an old email from a Patreon supporter on the episode they were on. Just universes colliding. Yeah. But this is a different Samuel who says, I'm listening to a very old episode, parentheses, sorry. Don't apologize. I love it when people dive into the backlog. In which you discuss batters customizing their zones.

Love it. Once robo-umps arrive, obviously this will not happen. But what will actually happen is the zone will change every plate appearance based on the batter height. I've long hypothesized that umps are not that good at adjusting to batter and tend to call a more consistent zone based on the absolute elevation of the pitch. Firstly, is this true? Secondly, my question is, once the zone height adjusts to the batter's height with no wiggle room, will there be an advantage in alternating batters of different heights in the lineup like we currently alternate left and right-handed batters?

Can a pitcher throw strikes to Jose Altuve and Aaron Judge back to back, or am I overestimating how much the zone really differs between them? So yeah, that happens, right? The zone does not conform to the dimensions of Altuve's. And so in that sense, it's a wonder, I guess, that he's as good as he is because he has all that real estate to cover, though he is also able to cover it because he is a giant. But there is an effect that we see with umpires. I have seen studies on this with Altuve and Judge. Like that same account last September tweeted most called strikes this year on pitches that were over the plate but below the knees.

And Aaron Judge at the time had 30. And another big guy, Josh Bell, was second with 20. So, yeah, he is a patient hitter and takes a lot of pitches. But also, there are a lot of pitches that would be strikes on someone else that should not be strikes for Aaron Judge, but it's hard for an umpire to adjust to the outliers when they develop their frame of reference based on the average batter. So I think that hurts Judge because there are a lot of low pitches, more low pitches than high pitches in general, I guess. And so he gets screwed there sometimes. And maybe Altuve does too. Maybe Altuve gets helped sometimes, right? It giveth and taketh away. Obviously, it doesn't matter that much because both of those guys have been really good players.

And Erejec has sometimes been the best player. So you could imagine how much better would he be if he got the same strike zone dimensions proportionally as everyone else maybe he's just used to it by now but maybe he's compensating for it or maybe he would be even better but yeah would there be some advantage to obviously not everyone has a altuve and a Judge in their lineup anywhere, and you probably wouldn't want to put them next to each other if it wouldn't make sense if you're optimizing the batting order anyway. Would this be enough to overcome giving more plate appearances to your worst hitter or something? Probably not, maybe not. It's sort of small beans anyway. I suspect this would also still be small beans. If you're just confounding the umpire, would that even help you? Would it help you or hurt you? It would confuse the umpire. But I don't know if this would be an advantage overall. I think the question presupposes that the umpire is no longer in the quest.

Like, wasn't it, you know, player, like, customizing zones? Yeah. To which I'll say, I'm pretty sure Pilvet tried this. That's usually a safe bet. Yeah. Whatever.

I'm fairly certain that he either tried or did you know put put a player of exceptionally short stature in the lineup oh well he definitely did the the eddie goodell yeah yeah right but yeah and and he walked but um but i yeah i is, is this in a RoboUmps scenario with a challenge system? Because if there's no challenge, if it's just the zone is automated, then I guess it doesn't matter, right? Or is the suggestion that relative to their previous zones, some guys are going to get an advantage from this? I don't know. I just, I don't know whether alternating or stacking them would matter that much. I don't think it matters that much in general.

But if the zone is adjusting to the batter height with no wiggle room, then would there be an advantage in alternating them? You're not going to confuse the robot, right? You might confuse a human. i think it's about the pitcher like are they going to be able to adjust to throwing two wildly different targets it's like it's it's i guess the the pitcher version of like giving a guy multiple looks. Yes. Okay. I'm glad you're here to help save me from misinterpreting this question, Sam. So, okay. Yeah.

I could see that. Maybe. You don't sound convinced. I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced either. Does it matter so much if you alternate that? Like, if you have giants and relatively tiny people in your lineup

would it be more confusing if they're i guess it would be maybe more confusing if they're like alternating than if you had all the tall people next to each other and all the small people next to each other so that the picture could be like okay i'm in the tall people portion of the lineup here so now i understand where the zone is and like, okay, I'm in the tall people portion of the lineup here, so now I understand where the zone is, and now I'm going to be in the small people portion of the lineup. But yeah, you have no true north. You have no stability if it's just

wildly alternating from batter to batter. So yeah, I could see that potentially throwing a pitcher off a little bit. I think it would have the most impact on the four-seamer at the top of the zone. Because where is the top of the zone?

Who knows? And I think, relatively speaking, that's going to... Sorry, not relatively speaking. Absolutely speaking, the top of the zone is going to change more than the bottom of the zone, based on the height of the player.

Worth trying. Worth a shot. Unless it's not because it means that you would have a suboptimal batting order in other ways. Time for a randomized controlled trial. Yeah, this could be the case. Okay.

One last Otani question from Adam, Patreon supporter. Your Otani trade episode made me think about over-the-phone GM impersonation. Let's say you found a GM's phone, which is unlocked for some reason. Do you think you could come close to completing a trade or some other transaction without anyone else catching on? If you had to close out your prank trade on a voice call, is there any GM you think you could get away with impersonating for a minute? Oh, boy. Yeah, I don't know. i don't know what most gms sound like offhand yeah i don't think that many of them have like wacky voices but but i i guess i could perhaps impersonate a gm for a minute

especially lots of gms are constantly texting now so they might not recognize your voice as well as they would have previously. I mean, just send AJ or Jerry a bunch of texts and chances are one of the transactions will go through. They'll probably bite. Or if you get a hold of one of their phones, anything you send will probably be believable. Right. Like, who's going to question, you know, a random, like, Trader Jerry trade? Right. But they, I mean, they do all, like, see each other at the GM meetings every year. Yes, that is true.

Like, and, you know, for a trade to actually, quote unquote, go through, it has to get sent to the commissioner's office and then verified. There's the e-biz system where you have to officially. There's a whole system in place to make sure that exactly this doesn't happen. Oh, but I don't think so. But I don't think so. If you have the GM's phone, you text whoever it is in your front office who's entering the trade and you tell them. I definitely think you could make deals with some players to be named later and no one would bat an eye until it went through. I wonder. no one would bat an eye until it went through i wonder yeah i think there are enough layers of bureaucracy that particularly like at the time of year when a lot of trades get made like you tend to be in the office now there are definitely times a year where guys are gone and maybe you

manage that at the right spot like perhaps that's how you encountered a gm's phone in the first place right he's on vacation and you scoop it but i struggle to think that there wouldn't come a time where one of the many people who has enjoyed title creep wouldn't be like we're doing what like we're trading who? What? But what if it weren't wildly unrealistic? What if it were either an inconsequential trade or it wasn't like you're giving away the farm or something? This is like a realistic trade that could happen and it's not your franchise cornerstone or something, right? It's a trade that would not really raise any eyebrows if it were to happen. Then maybe. I wonder what percentage of trades are sealed with a call at some point in the process. Like, I know that

a lot of the conversation goes on via text. It's digital, right? But I wonder, unless it's a very small scale deal, at some point, is there a call to confirm, right? Or to haggle over some last small details? I would guess that that is still fairly common, even if it's not the GMs, even if it's GM lieutenants connecting, right? There's maybe a voice involved. And you're right that like,

if it was players to be names later, cash considerations, there might be one side of it that allows for, you know, the charade to go on for longer. But then it's like, let's say you're getting a guy, you know, somebody has to let the doctor know, like he has to come in for his physical. And it's like, when did we trade for him? When did we get that guy?

Like there are just so many. And then, you know, I, I have to think that if a GM lost their phone and, or had it stolen or whatever, like one of the things they would do would be to pick up someone else's phone and be like, I lost my phone. And then try to, you know, I, I think it, I think it would be really hard. Yes. Even if you're very good at voices, which some people are, you know, I'm not good at voices as anyone. Right.

Or like some sort of social engineering person who's good at like calling up and wheeling passwords out of people, that kind of thing. Yeah. To be clear, I'm not saying I think this would happen undetected, but I do think you could get like a trade. Get it long in the process. Oh, no,

I think you could get it like consummated and then. Agreed to in principle, but not officially done or. I'm just guessing that there's like, if you've got someone's phone and you can text your entire front office, I think you can get something entered on your side. You'd have to luck out with them not being physically together. It would have to be like the GM is on the road. You'd have to get the deal done fast enough that the GM doesn't realize that their phone is missing. And I think that most of them would, right? Because it's predicated then you're like, wow, I've somehow know that this is Jerry DePoto's phone. Jerry DePoto of all people is going to be like, where the hell is my phone?

See, I can't do voices. That was terrible, Jerry. That was awful, Jerry. I'm just now regretting, I think there was a time when I ran into Omar Minaya in, like, LaGuardia Airport. And, like, childhood me should have gotten up to more shenanigans with that. Yeah, he could have just picked his pocket and made some deals. And if it was Omar Minaya, then they might have been believable, potentially. All right. Last one. This is from Graham, Patreon supporter. I have a hypothetical in which I must turn to the experts at Effectively Wild.

What if teams using the zombie runner in extra innings were optional? Well, that would be progress, right? Better than mandatory. Obviously, all teams would choose to use it, but now there's a catch. If they opt to use the zombie runner, they must use one of their mascots as the player on base. Which teams would have the greatest advantages or disadvantages? How would the mascot costumes and skill sets evolve, given they still have to perform their mascot duties outside of extra innings? Would the freeze be made an official mascot just for this purpose? Clearly lots of questions that need to be answered. So, yeah, the question, can you deputize someone as a mascot?

Because then we just end up with the Freeze or some other sprinter out there, right? But if you stipulate that it has to be an existing mascot in the costume and everything. We just end up with the mid-inning sausage race being a part of the game. It would count. Yeah, this time it counts. being a part of the game. It would count. Yeah, this time it counts. Yeah.

I think maybe Baxter, the Diamondbacks mascot, would be the winner. Because you need a, you know, you got to get your dingers and your orbits and your fanatics. You got to get those guys out of here. Because they got too much, you know, they have too much material in the middle that is going to make them less aerodynamic. And I think that while the presidents and the D-backs players and the sausage runners, maybe the sausage runners would be a good one. You want a compact, close to the body kind of costume that doesn't have an overly large head to create resistance up top. So no Mr. Met. No Mr. Met.

You gotta, you know, you probably don't want the Marlin. I don't know how that would work. Yes, I was going to say Billy the Marlin. Or like Paws. Aerodynamic profile, right? It's a big head, but it's like a wind tunnel designed mascot head. It might look like Billy the Marlin.

But, yeah, I mean, Bernie Brewer is like a guy. Yeah. With a head. Yeah, still a big head. Big head. This is the time to bring back the team dogs. Right. Because you get a really fast racing dog and put it on.

Yeah. If you had greyhounds out there or whippets or something. Yeah. Like even I, as the staunchest anti-zombie, if you demanded that the zombie runner had to be a dog then even I would have a hard time being against it because I'm pro dogs and a trained dog

doing a trick like running the paces would be very entertaining so yeah it would be fun if there was a dog that wasn't very well trained and he would sometimes be like hi I'm a good boy. I want pets. You'd have a lot of toot plans with the Sashay Runner dog.

Yeah, you're supposed to run and the dog would be like, I don't care. I just want my pets. Your third base coach would have to go out in extras with like treats in a spot. Yeah. Yeah. And everyone in the, you know, standing in the on deck circle would also have to have them in case the dog was, you know, going home. Well, and then, like, what, you know, there could be other shenanigans, right? Because the, you know, fielders could have treats and try to, you know, tempt the dog out of the base path to get tagged out, you know?

Oh, yeah. And be like, I think you're a good boy. And then he'd be like, I think you're a good boy. And then he'd be like, he thinks I'm a good boy. This is how we get the ball trick back. Yes. I was just going to say, like a hidden treat trick or something. Yeah. Yes.

Yes. This is a great idea. No notes. I'm in on the zombie runner now. This is great. All right. Okay. And I said that was the last, but I lied.

There's just one more question here from Tom. Yet another Tom. This is not the Tom from earlier. That Tom had an H in there. Not that anyone listening to this could tell, but take it from me. There was an H and also there was a Thomas, but this is just Tom. No H's anywhere. Who says in following the Yankees, I see that no players in their starting lineup tonight.

This was a few days ago against the White Sox has a batting average over 300. Aaron Judge is closest at 282. I think he's up to 284 now. With the expanded wildcard, this may turn out to be more prevalent now and in the future, teams may make the playoffs. But I would think previously that playoff teams from the pre-expanded playoffs usually had at least one player who was batting over 300. How often has it happened for division or wildcard teams? I know on base percentage may be a better statistic, but MLB TV keeps showing me Yankees lineups with batting averages below 300. So that inspired my question.

They're catering to Sam's dad, I guess, with the Yankees batting averages there. But this is not unprecedented and actually not even all that uncommon for a team not to have at least a qualified for the batting title player who batted 300. So there have actually been, according to Ryan Nelson, frequent stop-loss consultant, 118 such teams that have made the playoffs and have not had a single qualified 300 hitter, beginning with the 1905 Philadelphia Athletics. So it didn't take long. And in recent years, of course, this is quite common. In fact, most of last year's playoff teams did not have a 300 hitters, right? Atlanta, Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle, Tampa Bay, Toronto, none of those teams last year had a 300 hitter. So yeah, I mean, batting averages are low these days, league-wide, and playoffs are big. So there is a graph that

Ryan made that I can link to. It's in this sheet, and it does show that the percentages are climbing of the playoff teams that do not have a 300 guy, both for playoff teams and obviously all teams, total teams, many more teams without 300 hitters. So not all that uncommon. That alone does not mean that the Yankees are bad and can't hit, although that may still be true. But this alone does not disqualify them from being a playoff team. So maybe that's some consolation to Yankees fans. Yeah, but I think Josh Donaldson's bad.

Oh my gosh, yeah. I was at a game at the Coliseum, gosh, maybe a month and a half ago. The night after was Herman's perfect game. But I just remember looking at the scoreboard, of course I was, and trying to do the math of like, okay, well, he has nine hits and he has seven home runs. Nine hits, and he has seven home runs, and this is not how baseball is supposed to work. And then, of course, he proceeded to strike out three times or something like that. The lowest BABIP ever, right, for a player with a minimum 100 play appearances, which Yankees fans are probably pleased that he did not get many more than that. And boy, could you tell it by watching. That was the incredible part.

Yeah, 076. Wow. All right. Well, Sam, thank you for doing this. Thanks for being such a generous Patreon supporter. Is there anything you would like to plug? Do you want us to link to your LinkedIn page? Hire Sam?

Oh, God, no. That sounds more like punishment than reward. I will just take a note from a previous Patreon guest and say, do what you can to help folks who are disadvantaged and in need. So, if you're in the U.S. and listening, you know, your trans friends could use some support. You know, money is just as good support as anything else. And yeah. Here, here. Let's try and make the world better or something like that. That'd be nice. Yeah. Good plug. Yeah. Selfless, our Patreon supporters, just coming on and promoting good causes with the bully pulpit of Effectively

Wild. I love it. Alright, well, I will leave you then with the future blast, which comes to us from the year 2045, and also from Rick Wilber, an award-winning writer, editor, and college professor who has been described as the dean of science fiction45, and also from Rick Wilber, an award-winning writer, editor, and college professor who has been described as the dean of science fiction baseball.

And the world situation here is heating up, or I guess I should say it has heated up already since we straightened that out earlier. The 2045 baseball season in North America was remarkably normal, given the threats to world peace. In the Taiwan Strait, the short-lived peace talks started by Chin Huy Wang ended as China sent its largest aircraft carrier, Shandong, to within 12 nautical miles of Taiwan. In response, Taiwan expanded its existing state of emergency to full preparations for war, calling up all of its 2.5 million reservists and putting its Air Force and Navy on high alert. In Europe, on Vladimir Putin Day, May 1st, Russia declared a national emergency and began moving several battalion tactical groups to its

borders with Poland and Finland. NATO responded by moving its northeastern battlegroups toward the two borders. War never quite broke out in a relief, but the threat was there for months. Meanwhile, in North America, the games went on. With the McLeod brothers, slugger Jalen and pitching ace Kenton leading the Yankees and the Guardians to the expected ALCS confrontation, where Kenton struck out Jalen twice to send the Guardians to the World Series, where they met the Seattle Mariners, the best team in baseball that year with 110 wins in the regular season and a calm path through the postseason. The Mariners were led by a solid pitching staff and a remarkable.338 team batting average and a record 318 team home runs in the regular season, with 18 more in postseason play. Colt Molesky, 42 years old,

hit 45 homers for the Mariners after coming over from the White Sox in the offseason, and right fielder Dominic Roskam earned Rookie of the Year by contributing 44 homers with a blistering.380 batting average. So, the game goes on as World War III threatens to break out, but fortunately has not, at least of 2045. These are getting kind of grim. I know. Has not, at least of 2045. These are getting kind of grim. I know. But, I mean, on the bright side, this is terrible.

On the bright side, think of all the statistical oddities that we have from the prior war years. I guess that's true. I don't actually obviously want it to happen, but my brain immediately went to, so like, okay, who's this, you know, apostrophe 45 year, like, snuffy stern wise or something? The guy who only made the majors during the war years or won an MVP during the war years and then everyone came back and they faded away. Right. Spoken like a true stat head again. So I guess that is a good place to end it. Okay. Two closing notes for you.

First, other Ben, Ben Clemens of Fangraphs, shares my amazement, befuddlement, stupefaction about the Rays' Zach Littell starting pitcher experiment, so he blogged about that at Fangraphs. Couldn't find an obvious reason why Littell is better suited to starting than it would seem from his history as a reliever. He did discover that the Rays have helped him add a sweeper, and he's also throwing a splitter more often, so that has given him more of a starting pitcher repertoire. Anyway, it worked. On Thursday, Littell started again, and he had a quality start. Six innings, three earned runs, no walks, five strikeouts. However, the Rays lost 5-2 because they were shut out for eight innings by Matthew Liberatore of the Cardinals, whom the Rays traded to St. Louis in 2020.

So not so smart now, are you, Rays? Randy Rosarena, whom the Rays acquired for Liberatore, went one for three with a walk and two stolen bases. That was not enough. So I still think they're mostly starting Littell out of desperation. They just ran out of other arms. But I guess there's some reasons why it might work better than it would with a random reliever. We will see. Also, I would like to retract my full-throated endorsement on our last episode of the fun fact or unfun fact about the White Sox being winless in the 11 games this season when their pitchers have struck out 14 or more opposing batters. As I noted, that is improbable and unprecedented. However, when I was talking about that,

I did think for a second, I wonder why 14 plus strikeouts? Why set the minimum there? Did they do so well with 13 strikeouts? Then I forgot to check. Well, I checked. And the answer is yes, they've gone six and two in games when their pitchers have struck out 13 opposing batters this season. Now that still means that they're six and 13 in games with 13 or more strikeouts, which is not good. That would still be the second worst winning percentage ever among teams with double digit such games. The 2013 Mariners went three and11 in 14 of those games, but again, White Sox, 19 of those games, 6-13, still very bad, but that does sort of screw up the fun fact. You can't say they're 0-11, 6-13, even though that's also bad, doesn't sound so impressive or unimpressive depending on

your perspective. Then I dug deeper in games where their pitchers have struck out 12 opposing batters. They've gone 9-1 this season. So on the whole, yes, they are 0-11 in games where their pitchers have struck out 14 or more batters, but they are 15-3 in games where their pitchers have struck out 12 or 13 opposing batters, which on the whole makes them 15-14 in 12-plus strikeout games, which is also not good, but it's definitely not terrible, not historically awful, not really fun fact worthy. They've had 29 of those games. There have been 23 teams with worse winning percentages in those games that have had at least, say, 19 of them. So yeah, the Sam truism about how all fun facts lie,

I think that does sort of apply here. The White Sox are still bad. There's no framing of this stat that makes them look good. But setting the cutoff at 14 does somewhat exaggerate things unless you think there's something special about those extremely high strikeout games. And they certainly have failed at them. And that is improbable. And it's probably because they're not a very good team in all the other ways that we talked about on that episode. But still, if that were super meaningful that they were 0-11 in the 14-plus strikeout games, then you'd think that they probably wouldn't be 15-3 in the 12-13 strikeout games. I'm on to you, fun fact generators.

Now, here's something else I have in common with today's guest, Samuel Giddens. I will not be on Effectively Wild next week. I will be in Sweden on a Ringer-slash-Spotify trip. And so, yes, will wonders never cease, I am taking a week off from Effectively Wild. It can happen. And so, yes, will wonders never cease? I am taking a week off from Effectively Wild. It can happen.

Meg mentioned to me that she had already lined up co-hosts and topics, which is much more proactive than the way we normally operate from week to week. And I said, don't tell me. I don't want to know. I want to be surprised like everyone else. I want to get the authentic Effectively Wild listener experience when the podcast drops in my podcatcher. And I will be as surprised as you all are. Just another listener among many.

So please behave while I'm gone. And I will talk to you the following week. Given the time difference, it may be challenging for me to watch Shohei Otani pitch against the Rangers next Wednesday, but be assured, I will be following from afar. And now that I'll just be a regular Effectively Wild listener, perhaps I will support the podcast on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Be like Samuel Giddens. You don't have to pledge as much as Samuel Giddens did, though that's always appreciated too, but you can sign up to pledge any amount, monthly or yearly, at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners not named Samuel Giddens have already done so and have pledged

to help us continue making the podcast and help keep it ad-free and also get themselves access to some perks. David Michalis, Daniel Powell, Davin Laurel, Carlos Steinman, and Alex Kobayashi. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only. Access to monthly bonus episodes and playoff live streams. Discounts on merch and ad-free fan crafts memberships and so much more. Appearances on the podcast potentially. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild if you are a supporter you can message us through the patreon

site but anyone and everyone can contact us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com you can send us your questions and comments and you could send us a theme song if you're musically inclined and want to join our intro and outro rotation you can 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 effectivelywild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWpod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at

r slash effectivelywild. If you miss me while I'm gone, you're in Ben Lindbergh podcast withdrawal, you can find me on some other feeds. I do video game podcasts on the Ringerverse feed, as well as other podcasts. Just did one on Star Trek Strange New Worlds. Also doing podcasts about the Star Show Heels on the Ringer Wrestling Show. So I'll pop up all over the place.

Thank you to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. Hope you have a wonderful weekend and a wonderful next week. Meg and a Mystery to Me co-host will be back to talk to you early next week. Effectively wild, effectively styled. Distilled over chilled be effectively mild follow the plot sam's in his garage bed with the reverb at 20 in his and after 2 000 episodes we got more inside jokes than carrot tops prop box before we got yoked lab leak banging scheme planting trees and trampolines minor league free agent drafts answer a couple of emails