Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2055: No Throw

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a Statcast-standout throw by Brenton Doyle, a Statcast-standout homer by Ronald Acuña Jr., and how closely Statcast data matches the eye test in various aspects of performance, the surges or resurgences of Cole Ragans, Blake Snell, and Trea Turner, a Julio Rodríguez fun fact, Royce Lewis’s grand slam […]

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 rippin', all analytically Cross-check and compile, find a new understanding Non-effectively, why the 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 2055 of Effectively Wild, the Fangraphs Baseball Podcast brought to

you by our Patreon supporters, the Fangraphs Baseball Podcast. It's one of the Fangraphs Baseball Podcasts, although it is the only one brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Riley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Did you enjoy the little zippity-doo that my brain did around a cold sack of our podcast intro just now? You took a roundabout route to get there. I got there, though. You made it. Yeah, I made it. Here we are. How are you, Ben? Doing a little bit better than last week. Still not 100%, but getting there. The percentage is higher than it was.

And we had a couple StatCast standouts over the weekend that I wanted to bring up to you. One was a hit and one was a throw. And this reinforced my sense that throwing StatCast heroics just don't do it for me. I wish they would. But over the weekend, we had Brenton Doyle of the Rockies uncorked a record throw for an outfielder, 105.7 miles per hour. And that got a lot of hype, a lot of acclaim. Ron Lacuna Jr. of Atlanta, Got a lot of hype, a lot of acclaim. Ronald Acuna Jr. of Atlanta, he hit a home run 121.2 miles per hour. He sure did. The highest exit speed of any ball hit this season.

Third hardest hit homer in stat cast history. Sixth hardest hit ball period in stat cast history. And one of those looked like it was as impressive as the numbers said to be. And the other, not so much. Acuna's homer, that was clearly crushed. He hit that really, really hard. I don't know that I would have guessed the exit speed on the dot, but not at all surprised that it was near record setting because it was an absolute bomb. I think most or all of the harder hit balls had been pulled and this one was hit almost straight away a little bit to right field of

center and it was just a missile over the wall, just a line drive that got out quickly. Doyle's throw just looks almost indistinguishable to me from many other outfield throws. If there were an outfield throw version of Homer Hindsight, the browser game that we talked about last time where we had to guess was that a hard throw or not, I think I would do really badly because I just I can't really tell. He was in fairly shallow center and he held the runner. The runner respected his arm. There are some good arms in that Rockies outfield between Doyle and Nolan Jones, which is good because it's a gigantic outfield. But this one looked like any other throw to me more or less. I don't know if it's the camera angle or what, like the ball is coming toward the camera and maybe that makes it harder to assess how hard it's thrown, but it's just not

thrilling me, these stat cast record setting throws. I have two things to offer on this score because I've been thinking about this a lot lot like what makes the impact kind of register right and i wonder here's my first thought i wonder if part of the difference is that there isn't an audio component to the throw so like when acuna hits that ball when when like big tanks get hit right And they go really far and you can tell off the bat, you know, the ones that sort of register that like it feels different

kind of a vibe that Sam would talk about in your chest. Part of what you're reacting to is the sound of the barrel on the ball. Yeah. And with the throw, you're not getting that. They might go to a replay of it Yeah. be part of it which i will say is part of what contributes to what can sometimes be a false sense of how hard a ball is hit because it can be loud and not be like as big as what acuna did so there's

there's that piece of it and i we can explore that and then i really do think that being able to be there in person and watch the entire trajectory, see the physicality of the fielder as he is like getting set and throwing or sometimes like really kind of thrown on his back foot, not always planted makes a big difference too. Like the Rangers came through and played the Diamondbacks a couple of weeks ago. And I don't think that it will surprise you or our listeners to know that like a guy who rates well in terms of his arm is Adoles Garcia, right? You like have seen him play and you're like, that guy has an arm. He uncorked a throw to get a runner at third. It has to be one of the best throws from the outfield I have ever seen, Ben. It made me go, whoa.

Yeah. In real time, in person, I was like, that's an 80 arm. Like, oh my God, that throw, right? Yeah. And part of why that registered the way that it did, and I actually haven't gone back and looked at the stat cast around that throw, so I don't know how impressive it actually was but it seemed crazy in the moment and part of it was being able to just watch the entire process uninterrupted I didn't have a camera cutting from him to the I just could follow the whole trajectory of the ball right right? And I was like, wow, wow. You know, it was one of those where the throw happens

and I looked around at other people to be like, did you just see that? Did we all just get to watch that? And so I think part of the problem is that, you know, so often when we're watching these throws on the broadcast, Problem is that, you know, so often when we're watching these throws on the broadcast, we aren't getting that same uninterrupted, like, look at it. And, like, I was sitting in a seat pretty, not immediately behind home, but, like, in the section behind home. And so I was perfectly positioned to just see the whole thing unfold. the whole thing unfold. So I wonder if those two things contribute to the one kind of highlight sort of playing either to what it really is or playing up in some instances and the other like

not registering in quite the same way, especially when we're watching from home. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you also get a better reaction from the players involved when there's a home run because you see the pitcher whirl around to stare or sometimes not even bother because it's so obviously gone. And you see the batter's reaction and you see the catcher and the umpire staring at it. Whereas with a throw, you don't really get any feedback other than the runner who was

thinking of tagging from third deciding not to. runner who was thinking of tagging from third deciding not to. And also, I find it more impressive, although probably it shouldn't be when there's a throw that makes it all the way on the fly. Whereas this Doyle one, it bounced and one hopped the catcher. And that's not necessarily bad, but there's something I think more impressive about it being just on a line, right? And sometimes if it doesn't bounce, it's because you kind of air-mailed it and it's sort of, you know, it takes a high arc to get there. And that's not good. You might actually be better throwing to a cutoff man or having it bounce. But there's something about when you throw it just really, really, really far on the fly.

That's just, it's more impressive. It's probably an oversimplistic way to look at it. But yeah, maybe if you saw it from a different angle or you're right, I think we've talked earlier this season and Sam has since written about how broadcasts rob us of certain perspectives that they're constantly cutting and showing us snippets of a play instead of showing us the entire play. And there was that one great one where there was just a zoomed out view of everything that was going on and you got to see it all without any cuts. And it was wonderful. And we thought, why don't they do that more often?

We really should have a baseball broadcast producer on the show sometime to tell us about that. But the first replay I saw, or not even the replay, just the original broadcast vantage of the Doyle throw, you had him make the catch. And then as he was making the throw, they cut to the runner on third. So you didn't even see the throw. You saw him gathering to make the throw, then it cut to the runner on third, then it cut to the throw kind of halfway to the catcher. And that wasn't great. You couldn't see the throw released. You couldn't get a sense of the pace. And I did see a replay where they showed the whole play. And you wonder, why is this not just the default view from the first place? Because can see everything at once sam speculated that this is probably just an artifact

of how people didn't used to have high definition 4k gigantic screens right and so if you were watching on some old crt some small thing with broadcast quality footage, then you might not have been able to see anything if they didn't cut and zoom on a fielder and a runner, right? If it was just one eye in the sky sort of view of the field, the resolution might have been too low to actually make out the details. So maybe this is just, it's outmoded. It's like we're tied to past traditions that we could now transcend because of the technology and maybe we need to move past that now. But yeah, I think those are all the reasons. And I guess maybe it's just that like a pitch going fast, it's going fast over a shorter distance, whereas this thing is going hundreds of feet.

And by the time it gets to the plate, it's not moving as fast. It's lost some speed. So maybe that's why it doesn't seem so fast out of the hand. Like if you were there on the field, if you were standing right next to Doyle or behind him, I'm sure it would have been pretty impressive or from the side, but it just doesn't get me going. I see, oh, this is a record. And I think, huh, okay, I'll take your word for it. I guess so. Yeah. And I, I wonder, like, I guess you, you want to tell people like, this is a record, but maybe we could be a little more discerning about like, is it impressive? Like maybe we could say this was a record, you know, and move on.

It's like the it's your birthday sign in the office with the period instead of the exclamation point. You know, like maybe that's what we maybe that's what we're looking for. I don't know. Yeah. It's the level of hype doesn't match the eye test. I guess it doesn't. The StatCasts don't always... You'd think that the stat cast is generally good for passing the eye test

as opposed to other advanced stats. If you look at some advanced stats, then they measure value and you might be surprised sometimes. You'd think, oh, I didn't know that guy was that good. But with stat casts, because it's tracking actual movement and speed, generally it does accord pretty closely to the eye test,

but just not always, not on these throws. So I've got a few updates on players or since certain date performances that I wanted to shout out here, because there have been some players who have done some things here that I think we have to reevaluate their seasons. And number one, just the subject of a Fangraphs post I saw just before we started recording, but Cole Reagans. Yeah, how about it, man? Cole Reagans of the Royals, who was the centerpiece of the return for Roldis Chapman back when the Royals traded Chapman to the Rangers in June. And at the time, I recall thinking and saying that that didn't seem like a great return, that I was not intimately familiar with Cole Riggins.

In fact, I remember there being some confusion about how to pronounce his name when we talked about that. Riggins? about how to pronounce his name when we talked about that. Dragons? Yeah, but people, I think, were saying at the time, oh, this is like a back of the rotation arm, maybe. Right. And that didn't seem like such a great return for a reliever, even a reliever in his walk year.

Yeah, those guys don't tend to bring back a ton, but this was maybe the best reliever available on the trade market, and it was super early, so the Rangers were getting extra innings of Roldis Chapman, and he's largely delivered. He's pitched pretty well for them. He's pretty much the only person in that bullpen who's pitched well late. That's been a problem.

But the Royals get back Cole Reagans, who at the time he had been pitching out of the Rangers' bullpen to start the season. He had pitched out of their rotation last season as a rookie, and he had not done particularly well in that role. And he wasn't doing particularly well in his relief role for the Rangers either. And so I didn't think much of, well, Cole Reagan's all right, I guess. He's a controllable arm, but not super exciting. And turns out, should have been super exciting, I guess. He had almost a six ERA in relief for the Rangers.

And now with the Royals, for whom he has pitched exclusively as a starter. So July 15th was his first start and his first outing for the Royals, and then he didn't pitch again until August 2nd, and he's been regularly in the rotation since then. And he has been the best pitcher in baseball over that span. And he has been the best pitcher in baseball over that span. So since July 15th, he has the highest fan graphs war of any pitcher. He has been amazing.

I guess it's too late for him probably to get serious rookie of the year consideration because late start. But man, he's been really good. I guess it's eight starts, right, which is not that many. But he's been so impressive in those starts that I've had to reevaluate. Oh, okay. Maybe that was a pretty decent return for Roldis Chapman. I certainly didn't see this coming. Maybe he was just tired of people mispronouncing his name.

He's like, I got a pitchfork so that people learn how to say my name. I definitely know how to pronounce it now, yeah. Yeah, you sure do. And the way that he's done it, too, he has way better stuff than he had last season, at least. So he's one of these guys. He went to Tread Athletics, which is a driveline-esque place in North Carolina. It's the facility where White Sox rookie and effectively wild guest Declan Cronin works part-time when he's not being a major league pitcher. And he

did a bunch of stuff over the offseason. You know, Saris just wrote about this for The Athletic, but it was weighted ball work and plyometrics and mobility and flexibility. And it wasn't even that his goal was to add velocity necessarily, but man, did he ever. So last year, his four-seamer averaged 92.1. This year, 96.6. And I'm just comparing his starting pitcher outings to his starting pitcher outings. So it's not just that he pitched in relief somewhat. 92.1 to 96.6. And his max for Seamer has gone from 94.8 last year to 101.0. He's like, he's throwing triple digits out of the rotation for the Royals.

Where did this come from? Where did it come from? I don't know. And it's not even just that he's added velocity. He's also added a slider since he joined the Royals, which from the sound of it is more like he's continuing to work with his partners at TREAD with the Royals kind of involved, but it wasn't necessarily the Royals leading the charge on adding this pitch.

But now he's added this slider that seems to be pretty nasty. So suddenly he's just like a flamethrowing fastball slider monster and has been one of the best pitchers in baseball. So I just, I don't know. Who knows anything? Who knows anything? I mean, like, it's, I think we can choose, we can choose one of two paths, Ben. We can be flummoxed. We can be discouraged.

We can be just fundamentally anxious and unsure of ourselves. Or we can be all of those things and find it delightful, right? Because I do enjoy, like, I like knowing things. Maybe I enjoy, like, knowing how to know things even better, right? Like, I enjoy being able to look at a set of information and draw a conclusion that makes sense from that information, to look at a guy and be like, I have a general sense of what this kind of picture is based on these underlying data points about him. And I take a lot of comfort in that because the world is so chaotic and unknowable, Ben. And there are so many things I don't know, you know, and like, I don't know that

I will ever be able to really understand them, even when they've been explained to me, like I am a tiny child, right? And so like, when I look at something like this, and I'm like, Cole Reagans, how do you do this? But I also could opt to feel delighted that one can do these things and be surprised. I think it does make for a better game, even if I find it psychologically destabilizing. Yeah, it makes sense, at least in the sense that suddenly he has the stuff to match the results.

So sometimes it's mystifying when someone gets great results without the underlying performance. This is a case of the underlying performance itself, the improvement there being very surprising, but at least the results sort of match the stuff. So with the Royals, 1.51 ERA with a 1.65 FIP. So that's a 2.2 fangraphs war since July 15th, which leads the majors. And he struck out almost 12 per nine, walked two per nine, not even a BABIP thing. He has a 315 BABIP over that span. I guess maybe he's gotten a little lucky with the home run prevention. But not like weirdly lucky, right? Not like, oh my God, the luckiest boy in school.

No, no. You know how you describe professional baseball players as the luckiest boys in school? His XFIP that adjusts for the home run rate is 2.49, which is also superlative. So that's exciting. That's great for the Royals if suddenly you have someone like that because they really haven't had someone like that. Oh boy, it's been rough over there.

Yeah, right. And they imported all these people from the Rays and Cleveland and all these organizations that have been more progressive and have had better luck with player development and player improvement and didn't really seem to be paying off early this season. And Brady Singer aside, I guess there just haven't been a whole lot of high points on the staff. But man, Cole Reagans. Wow.

Been mostly low points. And then there is Cole Reagans. Yeah. It wasn't even actually that impressive of a throw. That's incredible. Sorry, I was looking up Adoles Garcia while you were talking about Cole Reagans. I mean, it was impressive, but it wasn't the hardest throw. It wasn't even his hardest throw from the outfield. It was like 92 and a half miles an hour. I

misremembered and thought that he had nabbed the runner. He didn't, but I tell you, Ben, that was still a great, it was a great throw. It was a great throw. I don't know. I'm, I'm, maybe I'm out on stack. You're going to turn into

one of the old school, well, we never needed to know exactly how hard it was. I'm a truther now. I'm a truther. Yeah. No, but the correlation, if we had to break down all tools or aspects of the game, like the correlation between what StatCast says and what our eyes say. what our eyes say. Let's say for throws, for pitches, for hits, and for sprints or runs. I think sprints generally match up quite well when I see someone who's fast,

Stackus says they're fast and vice versa, right? And hits can be misleading or deceptive at times, but for the most part, I would say, not that every hard hit ball is a home run or a hit. It depends on the trajectory. Like there's some 120 mile per hour grounders that you might not think are that impressive, but they're blistered, right? They're like, they're not hits, but if you saw them, you'd be like, I would not want to get in front of that ground ball, right? But if you saw them, you'd be like, I would not want to get in front of that grump off, right? Right. And pitches, you'd think that that wouldn't be that telling because what's the difference visually between 95 and 99? I mean, it's over a shorter distance, so maybe it's easier to tell than it would be with a throw. But you can kind of tell, right? Right.

But a hard fastball is a hard fastball and some are harder than others. Like if Cole Reagans is throwing 101 instead of 95, can you tell that visually? Maybe. I think a lot of it comes down to the effort level of the pitcher, which doesn't always correspond perfectly to the actual results. So I guess if I had to go with, if I had to rank how closely the StatCast matches my intuition, it would probably be like runs, hits, pitches, then throws. I think that's probably how I would rank them. Yeah, I think that that's right. I think that's right. You just become so anti-StackCast in this one single arena. Again, I don't disbelieve it. I'm not questioning the accuracy here.

No. I'm sure it's true. It's just, it doesn't wow me. It doesn't knock me over. Yeah. All right. So another since date X, can't believe what this guy is doing. Got to talk about Blake Snell for a second, who's the probable NL Cy Young favorite

at this point, I suppose. He did not start the season in impressive fashion. He threw May 19th. He, through May 19th, that was through his ninth start, I think, he had a 5.4 ERA. And as we've discussed, Blake Snell, when he's not pitching well, is just a slog to watch. He's a slog even when he's pitching well, Ben. Even when he's pitching well, but especially when he's not pitching well. We can say it. We can say that about him. And it's fine. He does other stuff well. Do we find him as impressive as some other metrics? No, we maybe don't. incredible run, he's still snelling it up in some ways. He's had great results, and yet he's been pretty darn wild. I don't know exactly how he's doing this. So Blake Snell, so let's say starting on May 25th, and this is obviously arbitrary. I'm trying to make this as impressive as it can be. But this is 19 starts now, 110 innings.

He's got a 1.31 ERA over that span. Now, granted, like 255 BABIP and 2.93 FIP, but still, he's been on an unbelievable run. But it's almost more unbelievable to me that over that span, so he struck out 34.5% of hitters, which is very good. Only Spencer Strider and Freddy Peralta have been higher among pitchers with 80 innings pitched. That's 78 guys.

However, he has walked 14% of batters. That is the highest of anyone minimum innings pitched. So he has not gotten his control problems under control whatsoever. It's just that they haven't really been problems, Ranger Suarez with the Phillies, 83.9. So like the difference between Snell and Suarez, it's got to be as big as the difference between Suarez and gosh, just eyeballing this, like I'd have to go on to the next page on the leaderboard. Like he's been a total outlier when it comes to strand rate, like 92.7 over 110 innings. It's tough to search that, but like the highest going back to, let's say post-World War II, the highest full season left on base rate is 90.1. That was Robbie Ray in 2021, and then 88.8 John Kendall area in 1977. Like, it's really tough to get 90 or even close to 90 over, gosh, any, I mean, in 2020,

Shane Bieber had a 91.1, but that was 77 innings, right? So 110 to sustain that sort of strand rate. That is wild. He's been wild. I guess this is effective wildness. This is the epitome of that because he has turned going for chases and still someone who's going to go into deep counts. But, boy, he's been making it work for a really long time now. say that it hasn't worked you know like we can acknowledge the efficacy while also taking issue with the aesthetic right it it's one of those where it doesn't it doesn't feel fun and it doesn't look fun it looks like a slog i wonder gosh i know so young hmm yeah i mean I wonder, gosh, NL Cy Young. Hmm. Yeah. I mean. It's an unremarkable field. It's not great. Yeah, it's sort of, it used to feel, even earlier this season, more, more remarkable.

But now it feels less remarkable. I think in part because some of the guys who were so i mean like i don't know though i say that and it's like i really like i do really love watching spencer strider pitch what a fun good story justin steel has been right but like gallon has kind of fallen off of late you know he's had more kind of clunky outings logan webb is sort of you know i guess one could argue if one were inclined to that logan webb can also feel like a bit of a slog but that's more about him his like strikeout rate instead of his walker he doesn't walk very many guys he certainly doesn't't walk as many guys. No one does. Yeah. Blake Snow. Yeah. So many guys he walks. Man, there are a lot of Mariners on this. This is obviously, I'm just looking at the leaderboard generally. I didn't separate it

by league. Boy. Mariners is stacked. Yeah. Yeah. Stacked. When Zach Kram broke down the award races with one month to go in the regular season last week, he found that Snell was leading NL pitchers with 4.2 baseball reference, where he's up to 4.6 now. And that could be the lowest league leading total for any AL or NL pitcher since the start of the 20th century, he found. It's really like, I guess, 1937 in the NL, Jim Turner led with 5.5 baseball reference war. And then 1938 in the AL, Thornton Lee, or early win in 1951, a few years. But five and a half is basically the lowest league leading total.

And he's, I guess, about on pace for that. So there just haven't been many standout seasons. And I guess combined with the fact that starters don't throw as many innings these days. So unless you're really effective in the innings you do throw, then you're not going to rack up as high wars. But I guess Snell has sort of done this before. Like when he won the AL Cy Young Award in 2018, he had a high strand rate that season as well. He was at 88.0 with the raise in 2018. So it's possible that he might have some skill for that. Like the league wide strand rate, I think is about 72%. So he's just way, way above. And his career is 78%. So he's had some standout

seasons in that regard. And I think if you break it down, like he does throw more off speed stuff and gets more strikeouts when he has runners on. So maybe he's doing things a little bit differently, but he hasn't done this consistently. It's not something that's very stable from season to season. And even if he's better than the average pitcher, true talent-wise, when it comes to stranding runners, probably not this much better long-term. But man, he's made it work for at least a couple of years and might get more hardware out of it. So and the other player I want to shout out who's been pretty unbelievable is Trey Turner,

right, who had a similarly disappointing start to the season. And you could put the start point anywhere. And you could put the start point anywhere, but if we, for sentimental reasons, put it at when the Phillies fans gave him a standing ovation, which they were very proud of themselves for being so supportive and not booing. And they were, I think, consciously trying to undo their reputation for piling on players. And they said, what if we tried something different here? What if we applauded a player who was struggling? And since then, I think that was August 4th. So that does coincide with when he heated up,

which could be coincidental, or maybe he just felt the brotherly love so much that it buoyed him. or maybe he just felt the brotherly love so much that it buoyed him. But since August 5th, he has hit.366,.400,.786 with 12 dingers. That's a.212 WRC+. 2.2 fangraphs were. Only Mookie and Julio have been better than Trey Turner over that span. So he has gone back over the past month to being one of the best players in baseball

as he has been before, as he was expected to be, as the Phillies thought he would be when they signed him. And the season as a whole, still disappointing. He's just barely above league average offensively. He's at three war. Again, that's not so bad if that's your down year, your disaster year. But unless he finishes this hot over the final month, it'll still be a bit of a disappointing season.

But it has gone from catastrophic to merely disappointing. And because of the trajectory, he's ending on a high note here. disappointing. And because of the trajectory, he's ending on a high note here. So if he helps propel the Phillies into the playoffs, then I think all anyone will remember about Trey Turner's season is how it started with his WPC heroics and how it's finishing with his late regular season and perhaps playoff heroics. I think that you're right about all of that i think that philly fans i don't know that they get a bad rap they get a rap for sure i think that philly fans in my experience like if you try really hard and if you are willing to pander and boy have have some of the more um beloved athletes of late figured this out. They love you.

They'll fight other people for you. Like they will, they'll go to war for you. You know, they'll, they are feral at times. And I say that with affection mostly. And a little bit of fear, which I think they would appreciate, right? Like I think they'd be like, that's the right balance, Meg. You got it. You dialed that in.

The gritty aesthetic. It's like a little bit of affection and a little bit of fear. Fear. And, you know, as long as you try really hard and you pander, then they're going to be like, yeah, we love you. And so do I know Phillies fans who take personal credit for Trey Turner's turnaround? Yeah, I do. But he sure has played really great lately and at a time when it has worked out well, it's like, you know, in some respects, I think that there's a parallel to be drawn with like Julio season where it's like you looked at this sophomore campaign and you're like, it was, you know, like, it's not bad, but it's not, you know, sort of incandescent like his rookie of the year campaign was. And then at the time that it mattered the most, like he turned on the Jets.

And the same is true for Turner, where it's just like that team was floundering. It felt like they were kind of going nowhere. And then he's played really great. And now they are, I think, in pretty solid wildcard shape, which given the rest of the division was probably what we expected of them. I think we thought that they would be, you know, kind of duking it out with both the Braves and the Mets. And clearly one of those things proved to be true and the other really did not. But, you know, I think wildcard was sort of the anticipated ceiling for them, given how strong atlanta looked coming into

the year and so yeah if like he ends up having this incredible heater and then they you know go into the postseason kind of riding high and feeling good like i don't know what the statistical value of vibes are but if any team has like, you know, a vibes based adjustment to make to their win total, you know, it's like we have Pythagorean wins and win expectation and we have base runs and maybe we need vibe runs, you know, and I think that Philly would be like a real vibes team. Yeah. Oh, it has been for a long time. Seattle too. Oh boy. Ben, can you imagine, look, I'm way ahead of myself. This isn't likely for any number of reasons on either side, candidly, but can you just imagine what the internet would be like if we ended up with a Philly Seattle World Series?

That'd be fun. Yeah. It would be fun. I think that it might end the internet. So it would also be service. You know, it might be a service. By the way, Kyle Schwarber, among the Vibes leaders with the Phillies, he's now up to 40 homers, but he's hit so well lately that he has now gotten above water, according to baseball reference war, no longer a sub-replacement level player, 0.3 baseball reference war to go with his 40 homers. So that's nice. I think he's up to a win by our estimation of things.

One source of concern about Trey Turner during his slump was that he was not hitting fastballs. And people were thinking, oh gosh, did he just get old all of a sudden? Can he not catch up to fastballs? It looks like during his heater here, it has not really come against heaters that much. He's done okay. He's done fairly well against fastballs, but he's still really making hay against off-speed stuff. It looks like change-ups and sliders and curves he's been crushing more so. But I guess he's corrected the fastball performance a little bit,

but that has not been the driver of his hot streak here. Well, that's okay because nobody throws fastballs anymore anyway. I don't really like fastballs. What are fastballs? What are, you know, the pitch of Philistines and Rubes? Let's see. He has been worth 2.1 warp by BK's estimation. They're high on him.

They are high on him. Craig and I talked about this a little bit. They do not, I mean, they also do not love Kyle Schwarber's defense because, you know, they're good at what they do. Who could love Kyle Schwarber's defense? Maybe his parents. Kyle Schwarber's defense's parents probably love it very much. defense maybe his parents kyle schwarber's defense his parents probably love it very much but but like this is part of the vibes based adjustment to this team right because war is cruelly indifferent to acts of service you know and kyle schwarber is only playing the field because of what the roster and injuries hath wrought and he's not good it, but he's going out there and he's doing it. And that is a vibe. That is an in-service-of-one's-fellows vibe.

And would we expect a stat to capture that? I mean, no. Stay in your lane, stats. But we can acknowledge it as part of the context of his season it is funny to me that some of the like screenshots i saw around schwarber and the stuff they were like of his fan graphs war and i was like i think that we're like sitting in the middle of this like between warp and and b ref war like leave me alone you know i do this face i'm like leave me alone you can't see the face but you imagine it. You know, the emoji that's doing like the grimace, you know,

Waldrop's face as we referenced last time. That's the face I'm making. I'm like, leave me out of it. Anyway, here I am. You know, I'm technically on vacation, Ben, and I feel like I'm bringing that vibe to the pod, you know? Yeah, you're like, you are. you. I was surprised by that stat that he was the first player ever to go 25-25, 25 homers and 25 steals in his first two seasons. Although, upon further reflection, I guess that is partly a fun

fact lying a little bit because first two seasons, right? It's not saying first two full seasons, right? I mean, Mike Trout went 25-25 in his first two full seasons, but in his first season, he played 40 games in the majors, so he really could not have gone 25. So I don't know what percentage of all-time first seasons are not full complete seasons, but probably a pretty high percentage, right? And because Julio was up on opening day, credit to the Mariners and credit to him, last season, he got the full crack at getting to 25-25 that a lot of players in their first season don't. So when you think about it, I guess it does reduce the pool of potential first two season 25-25 guys dramatically. yet it's still pretty impressive it's a fun pretty impressive you know it's the thing that it's a thing he has done and uh who's gonna take that away from him not this podcast you know look we can acknowledge the flaw in the stat and still go that julio what a guy can i shout shouts a. Because any time a player overcomes multiple potentially catastrophic injuries, when they come back and play well, it feels so nice.

You feel happy for the guy being able to enjoy a strong performance after having gone through so much and worked back through multiple rehabs. And so we should take a moment. Including Cole Reagans, by the way. I forgot to mention, he's a two-time Tommy John guy. Two-time Tommy John guy. Two-time Tommy John guy. You know who else has suffered injuries twice and they were both really bad? Royce Lewis. And you know who's playing really good baseball? Royce Lewis. So, you know, hitting grand slams, hitting all kinds of hits. The guy has a 317, 363, 545 line. He's got a 150 WRC+. He's got, you know, he has any stolen bases, which given the fact that I'm surprised his legs are attached to his body is pretty impressive as far as I'm concerned.

But yeah, he has been. Would we call it a Grand Slam heater? Is that fair? Do we need more Grand Slams before we can say something like that? I don't think so. I think they're scarce enough that what he's doing, that qualifies, if anything does. Sarah Lang's had all the fun facts about his Grand Slam tear here. So I shouldn't say tear in the context of Royce Lewis, probably.

Yeah, you take that back. She tweeted, he's the second player with four Grand Slams within his first 13 career homers. Joining Chris Taylor, Taylor hit his fourth slam in his 11th home run. So Lewis has the second fewest home runs to reach for career Grand Slams. Also, fourth player and first rookie to hit three Grand Slams in a span of eight games or fewer, joining Jim Northrup in 1968, who did it in a four-game span. Lou Gehrig, who was quite a Grand Slammer in 1931,

he did it in five games. Larry Parrish in 1982 did it in eight games. And then the final fun fact about this, his three Grand Slams tied with 1998 Shane Spencer, a season I remember fondly, for second most by a rookie in a season behind only Alexei Ramirez in 2008, who had four. So, yeah, it's been pretty special. Obviously, it's a product of chance in that he has to come up with the bases loaded. But, boy, he has capitalized on those opportunities. So yeah, I mean, he was doing well and then he got hurt again.

And then now he's come back when he's been on the field this season, which sadly has been fairly infrequent, but he sure has been great. Yeah. And Minnesota beat Cleveland 20-6 yesterday, Ben. Yeah. So that happened. Cincy beat Seattle 6-3. So the aftermath of the great waiver wire extravaganza of 2023 is a land of contrast. Yes.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that is not gone so well when it comes to teams that have decided to acquire, let's say, specifically Lucas Giolito this season. The Angels were like, let's go get Giolito. That'll be great for us. Not so much. And then not such a great Guardians debut either. Although, that game, that ended up becoming a blowout. But kind of interesting that the Guardians utility man, David Fry, he came into this game as a position player pitcher. He pitched four innings. Four innings. That made me do a double take. Because even in this era of seeing position player pitchers constantly, usually they're going an inning or two.

So he threw 64 pitches. They were down 13 to 1 with four innings to go. And Francona puts in Fry, who I think had had one previous pitching appearance this season and pitched a scoreless inning. They just let him out there and just said, go suck it up. I mean, this is not good, I guess, in that you're inflicting position player pitching on fans for more innings. And the thrill, if there is any thrill or novelty or charm left,

wears off probably by the third or fourth inning. But kudos to him, I guess, for wearing that one. He gave up seven runs on 10 hits in his four innings, including three homers, although not one of the Royce Lewis ones, right? I don't think Royce Lewis had a home run off of him. But some guys did. Joey Gallo hit a bomb off him on a 59-mile-per-hour pitch.

But he wasn't even—he's very much in the genre of, I'm just going to lob it in there. Yeah. So I saw Codify Baseball had this tweet, no pitcher in the entire pitch-tracking era had ever thrown 30 pitches under 60 miles per hour in one MLB game. David Fry threw 64, so all 64 of his pitches were under 60 miles per hour. He just kept going out there and lobbing pitches, which, you know, seven runs in four innings, if you're just lobbing sub-60 miles per hour pitches out there, that's actually not that bad, really.

Yeah, yeah. But, like, boy, what a... I wonder how Guardians fans feel right now. Like, did you experience a boost when these waiver claims get made? Did it feel desperate to you? Do you just feel despondent now? Because they really had to like, I mean, not totally win out, but they kind of had to win out. And it's not going to happen now. It's a confusing season because it seemed at the deadline they were like, okay, we're done.

Probably we're going to make these long-term oriented moves. And then they made these waiver claims, which I guess you could say, well, this will set us up for the future. So we'll make these moves now. And then, hey, these waiver claims just fell into our lap. So we can make a run at it also. But it is a little bit of whiplash. Like, are we in this? Are we not in this? Anyway, I think they had an extra inning game on Saturday and they had a

shorthanded bullpen because we don't have gigantic September expanded roster bullpens these days. And there'd been a bunch of other relievers who'd pitched multiple times or long outings. So they're just like, David Fry, here's the ball. And I believe he was the first real position player pitcher to go four innings in a game since Jose Aquendo did it in 1988. And he threw 65 pitches. That was not a blowout. That was, he came in in the 16th inning in a tie game and stayed into the 19th when he took the loss. No one had even gone three, I don't think, since that Okendo game. So, yeah, this was an outlier. I was pleased to see, Mike Axisa wrote this at CPS Sports, it looks like we're on pace to have fewer position player pitcher outings this season than last season.

There were 160 last year. There have been 124 this year. So we're on pace for 148 or so. So I don't know whether that is the slightly stricter rules that MLB put in place about when you're allowed to use these guys or something else. But we seem to have arrested the increase, at least, if not really caused a great decline here. But I don't know that I would want more in the David Fry mold of, yeah, let's just have like almost half of this game pitched by a position player pitcher, because I don't think that would be fun for anyone except the opposing hitters. Yeah, I think that that is an accurate assessment. We want this to diminish because at

a certain point, it might diminish to the point that it's fun again. We could get to a place where we're like, you know what? I haven't seen it in a little while. It's a position player pitch and how does that go? And then they'd come in and probably be pretty bad. And then we'd go, well, okay, I don't need to see it again for a little while. But if the rate is lower, then we probably wouldn't. Wouldn't that be nice, Ben? Yeah. Yeah. It was fun at first, like everything in moderation. The twins had a position player pitcher in that same game, Willie Castro, but he pitched only the ninth, I think, which is more par for the course. One other player I wanted to shout out who we haven't talked about much since the start of the season, I don't think. Kodai Senga. Yeah. Senga, I believe, is leading all rookie

pitchers in Fangraphs War now. That's right. That's saying something because this has been a really strong year for rookies, as Chris Gilligan detailed in another post for Fangraphs this week, particularly rookie hitters, but rookie pitchers too, as he Gilligan detailed in another post for FanGraphs this week. Particularly rookie hitters, but rookie pitchers too, as he noted when all is said and done. This might end up being the second strongest year for rookies after 2015, a legendary season. And granted, Senka isn't really a rookie like Masataka Yoshida. He's a 30-year-old veteran, but he is an MLB rookie and he's been fantastic. It's gone a little bit under the radar because he's a Mets. The Mets are terrible.

Yeah, that Mets rotation that was vaunted and projected so well, much of that rotation no longer pitches for the Mets and parts of the rotation haven't pitched that well. But Senga, man, he's delivered. He's been worth every penny they've paid him. He's been really quite impressive and fun to watch and the ghost fork and all that. Like there was a lot of hype and I guess he didn't start so great. So maybe it's that and then his success coinciding with the Mets being completely out of it. But, you know, he's another guy who's leading the majors in wild pitches. He's walked four per nine, but he's struck out a ton of guys. And he's limited the homers.

And now he's got a 3.08 ERA and 143 and a third innings with a mid-three FIP. Like, this has worked out. He was an all-star. Like, he has delivered. Yeah. I think that there is a lot that you can say about the Mets season, and much of it is not complimentary. But we have to—we should take a moment to, like, acknowledge the parts that have been good. And he's definitely one of them like he's been he is a success story and one that

you're right is probably not getting the attention it deserves because god is the rest of that team just like it's not been but this you know sanga has been so good job you know thumbs up yeah and and i'm i'm always sort of happy to see npb players succeed because i feel like there's still some unwarranted skepticism when it comes to NPB stars coming up and everyone acting like, oh, we have no idea how they'll do. Like, there's enough of a recent track record now. Yeah, we kind of have a good sense now. The stars generally are still pretty good. Yeah.

Obviously, there's like some tax that comes with changing leagues and not everyone works out great. And there's a language barrier and a culture barrier and a schedule barrier and all sorts of conditions change and everything. But especially if you've got the stuff the way that Senka did. And that just makes me think that Yamamoto this winter is going to get paid. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, he's having yet another amazing, you know, Samuura Award winning, probably the NPP equivalent of the Cy Young winning season.

He is going to make bank. Like, I don't know if there's enough hype about what he has been doing over there for Oryx because he's having just another unbelievable season. He has thrown 134 innings.

He's got a 1.34 ERA. And that's like what Snell has been doing during this stretch. That's what Yamamoto has done this whole season and last season and the season before that. Last season, his ERA was 1.68. The season before that, 1.39. He just turned 25. He's got great control.

He doesn't have the highest strikeout rates, but like, you know, fairly high strikeout rates and good stuff. And just so dependably amazing that, I mean, Rookie Sasaki's gotten maybe more attention just because he had the perfect games and his stuff is even more off the charts. But he's been hurt lately and has been handled carefully. Yamamoto, like the track record of success, he's been doing this basically since he was a teenager. this basically since he was a teenager and just year after year after year he's yeah he's gonna be maybe the top free agent available this winter like we've talked about it's a weak free agent market yes especially on the position player side but but you stack up Yamamoto against any of the pitchers who are available like this guy is he's gonna fortune. Yeah, I think that he is going to. And like we have kind of joked about this before.

At least I have that like one of the least important things about, you know, Otani's injury is that it does sort of put a damper on an already kind of meh free agent class but i feel like yamamoto is really in a position to inject some some excitement and energy particularly because there are going to be a lot of u.s baseball fans who aren't aware of how like incredible he's been and aren't familiar with him and are going to get to learn about his game and sort of get to know him for the first time and so i look forward to that i think that's going to be a really fun bit of whoop. Yeah, and because he's now turned 25, he's not subject to the international bonus rules that would limit the contract that he could sign,

like Otani was when he came over. So I think the record for a posted Japanese player is Masahiro Tanaka's seven-year, $155 million deal. I don't see how Yamamoto doesn't blow that out of the water. So that's going to be fun to follow. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does and also what kind of contracts he commands because, yeah, it's going to be a big one. That should be a fun bidding war. I think you're right. All right. So this is less fun to talk about. But another impending free agent we should discuss is Julio Rios of the Dodgers, who for the second time has been arrested on a domestic abuse charge. On a domestic abuse charge. And we will see what the penalty turns out to be. And we don't know all the details, of course. The first time this happened, it was in 2019. He up being prosecuted this time or how severe the incident is, one would think he's in line for a longer suspension this time. Right. So obviously there are baseball implications to all of this.

So what with the Dodgers shorthanded staff all season and the free agent market being thin as it was. But the main consideration in this case, as in any of these cases, is about the alleged victims. And what does this mean for the possibility, I guess, of rehabilitation, right? And for turning over a new leaf, particularly in this case, because I think he would be the first player suspended under this policy multiple times, I believe, if that happens. Yeah, I think that's right. The thing with him is that the initial incident, which was like a push in a parking lot, right? And there were some suggestions that maybe this wasn't as severe as some of these other incidents.

It's hard to delineate between, oh, this is worse than that. But they're all bad. I guess some of them are even more severe than others. And people had suggested, oh, he was in this upscale area. Maybe someone reported something that was not as severe as, as they said, or even if it was that he seemed more contrite or, or,

you know, he, he went into this like what 52 week training or awareness program and then came out the other side of that. And there were some suggestions at least that like he had learned his lesson, right. That he was, Yeah. sort of event here? You know, I think back to the conversation, the conversations that we've had around these questions in the past. And, you know, I saw a lot of the reaction on sort of Twitter to this, which I think is a very understandable one of like really profound disappointment and concern for his alleged victim here. And, you know, a lot of people saying, you know, something to the effect of like, you should, when people tell you

who they are, you should believe them. And I, I understand that sentiment. And I think that we've talked before about like this very uncomfortable space that we come to occupy when we are confronted with athletes who perpetrate violence against their intimate partners you like you want to approach those moments with the sensitivity and seriousness that they obviously demand and it can make you feel kind of caught in between because i don't want to be, I don't want to foreclose the possibility that people who, you know, do bad things and perpetrate violence can't reform because I think there's something sort of inherently nihilistic to that perspective. And maybe that's Pollyannish on my part, but like, I want to believe that when people do bad things, if they recognize the harm that they have done and commit themselves to learning how to treat people well, how to engage in healthier and nonviolent forms of conflict resolution, that they can do that.

I think that that's an important thing to believe. that they can do that. I think that that's an important thing to believe. And what we have heard from experts in intimate partner violence is that zero tolerance policies can have a, you know, admittedly kind of counterintuitive, but a negative effect for victims and survivors because it can have a chilling effect on people reporting incidents of violence, right? If they think that, wow, he's never going to pitch again, he's never going to throw a football, whatever, they're less likely to report. And so it can put them in a position where they stay in abusive relationships longer. And so I want to be cognizant of that. And if you do this again, like there just have to be really harsh consequences, I think. Like, you know, I am hesitant to say that this says anything about treatment or rehabilitation. I think that we probably are better served to deal with each of these incidents in isolation and say that, you know, the particulars of the person, their, you know, their own family

history, whatever, sometimes like substance abuse, I don't say that, like, I know that that's a factor in this case. I just know that it can be a factor in abuse dynamics that like, sometimes the way that their abuse dynamic plays off of substance abuse issues can have its own particular impact on this stuff. So, like, I think we need to treat each of these individually. And in this individual instance, like, I just can't imagine that he's not done pitching for the Dodgers and potentially pitching in Major League Baseball. When you do something and it elicits a felony charge, and I don't look at our criminal justice system and view it as infallible or necessarily even on the side

of abuse victims and survivors, but I think that it does speak to the severity of what this incident might be. And so I would suspect that like he will probably be on the restricted list fairly quickly would be my guess. I don't know that for sure. I don't have any inside insight here, but you know, while the investigation plays out, but it seems like, you know, the odds of him pitching for the Dodgers again are, are quite low. And I think that that would be appropriate. Like you, I think we want to let people reform if they can.

And that isn't to say that he can't reform in his life, but I suspect that that is going to be a life away from baseball now. And I think that that's probably appropriate. So it sucks, man. It just really sucks. And I hope that his partner is getting the kind of care and support that impact this is going to have on the Dodgers rotation. And like, I'm going to do a swear, but like who gives a shit, you know, it's just

not important here. So yeah, it really sucks. It really sucks. Yeah. The thing about him, both of these incidents have happened in public. Yeah. Yeah. That makes me feel like, gosh, if he's comfortable doing that, like in a crowd, what does that mean about what he's doing in private, right? I don't know that that's necessarily fair, but so many times with these things, it's behind closed doors and often it's like, oh, we had no idea, right? And they managed to hide these things in public. And the fact that he can't or isn't even bothering to hide these things or change his behavior in public makes me think, like, what is happening in private?

Like, that's even more concerning, maybe. So, yeah, it's pretty disturbing. He went through a 52-week counseling program, domestic violence counseling program. So it's not like he – 52 weeks, that's a lot of weeks. It's not like he hasn't heard the message and been told about this is not acceptable and here's what the consequences will be, right? So he had his chance to straighten up and fly right here. And yeah, I like you. I hope that that doesn't suggest that no one could ever learn and change. Right. And why even bother trying to rehabilitate someone? Why not just skip straight to being incredibly punitive? I'm sure that the rehab and the learning and reform does and can work in many cases. But yeah, you're right. If it doesn't, if they got that chance and they still failed again in the same

way, then you got to come down on them harshly. Yeah. I think that you got to, on them harshly. Yeah. I think that you got to, you know, you want to meet the moment. And I think that there are going to be times when the appropriate course, and like, to be clear, I'm not the, I don't have the expertise to say when this is the appropriate course versus not, you know, I think that when the moment suggests like we should try to rehabilitate this person and then that's what the moment demands. And when the moment suggests that like they are not in a position where that kind of intervention is going to stick, like we have to understand and meet that moment too. So it sucks. Yeah. It just sucks. It sucks.

So a couple last things here I wanted to mention. One is actually Dodgers related on a lighter, happier note. I mentioned when the Dodgers signed Colton Wong that that should be the test of like, are the Dodgers actually magic when it comes to making hitters good again or for the first time? And I thought that would be like when we played our little game with the Rays and Jake Diekman. They signed Jake Diekman, who had struggled so much with the White Sox that they cast him loose.

And we thought, OK, if the Rays can fix Jake Diekman, then that'll be the ultimate test. Well, they did, I guess, or he fixed himself. So Jake Diekman now update the Diekman update 36 and a third innings pitch for the Rays 40 games, 2.72 ERA, 3.59 FIP. So he has surpassed the projections and even our expectations. We underrated either his ability to correct course or the Rays' ability to fix it. I know that they signed him as like a desperation move. They've done it with a number of pitchers this year.

Like we just don't have any arms. Okay, Jake Diekman's available. I don't know that they expected him to be this good, but man, even Jake Diekman they can fix apparently. So anyway, the equivalent of that I thought might be Colton Wong, who had struggled so much with Seattle and then caught on with the Dodgers. And we didn't play our little game because I didn't know if he'd be even up in the majors

or whether he's skeptical he'd even see the majors this year or get enough playing time to tell whether he was actually better. But early returns suggest that that maybe right so he said right when i signed i went down to arizona and started working with the hitting coaches working in the hitting labs just kind of cleaning some stuff up that i had creep in with seattle which led to my demise so that doesn't reflect very well on the mariners i guess he said i put in a lot of work in arizona i didn't go there to hang out i went there to try and make it, I put in a lot of work in Arizona. I didn't go there to hang out. I went there to try and make it back here.

It was a lot of hard work and sweaty days, but it all worked to be here now. And apparently he corrected some mechanical issues, cleaned up his swing in that Dodgers way that Dodgers do. He said, as a lefty, I tend to cross a lot. When I'm crossing over a lot, I tend to roll over a lot of ground balls'm crossing over a lot, I tend to roll over a lot of ground balls. It was a thing I was trying to combat, but with not much playing time and all

that, I was never able to kind of get over that hump. So anyway, supposedly he corrected this down at the Dodgers hitting lab, and he played just three games in AAA, and I guess those three games were enough to convince him or the Dodgers that he had something to offer here, because in those three games, he had seven hits. I think he went seven for 13 with a home run, and they said, okay, rosters have expanded. Let's call you up. He hit a three-run homer in his first plate appearance as a dodger yeah he sure did so here we go i mean he he has he was pinch hitting in that game and he has only pinch hit he has pinch hit one time each in three games thus far so again he doesn't really have a regular role here as of now but

they think or seem to think that that they have cleaned him up mechanically, and then he announced himself with a three-run homer. So here we that's how I feel about it now. I mean, I don't, I have no, I bear Colton Wong no ill will. I'm sure he wishes his Seattle tenure had gone differently than it did, too. And if he can right the ship, like, that's great. Good for him. But it was deeply, it was deeply funny. I mean, it can be, it can be exciting and deeply funny at the same time. Those are not mutually exclusive. So that's where I'm, that's where I'm at on it, you know.

Also, follow up from Will C., Patreon supporter. In episode 2051, you discussed the feat that Gunnar Henderson accomplished on August 20th when he passed up the opportunity to hit for the cycle by going for a double instead of the necessary single. I had an idea for what to call this achievement, the motorcycle. Gunnar could have cycled if he had stopped at first base, but instead he kept on motoring for a double, thus motorcycle. Pretty good, right? I like that. I like that a lot.

Yeah. Okay. I'm into it. I don't have any notes on that. Me neither. I don't know if it's in use for anything else, but if not, then yeah, let's go with motorcycle. then yeah, let's go with motorcycle. And also, I think the Cespedes family barbecue boys shouted this out,

but sort of sad to see that Terrence Gore was not signed by anyone before this postseason eligibility deadline. So we're not going to get Gore in the playoffs this year. And I had not actually realized he has not been playing all season. So he was with the Mets last year and he's not been with anyone. I usually don't really pay attention to Terrence Gore until September. I just assume he's in the minors somewhere and someone will call him up to be the October designated runner type. Like the Rays just signed Billy Hamilton to a minor league deal, at least right before the end of August. So you thought like, oh, maybe Gore will get one more chance.

But no, I guess he's been out of it too long. He's 32 now. And probably, I don't know whether he's interested in playing or what he's been up to. But yeah, potentially end of an era here. I'm sad to see. You know, he never ended up stealing a base in a World Series or Championship Series game, but he got

five playoff seasons, I think, nine playoff series. He won a couple rings with just two postseason play appearances with the 2018 Cubs. Incredible. A singular career former Effectively Wild guest Terrence Gore. If it's over, then I

will be sad to see that streak end. But it was fun while it lasted. I don't want to reduce guys' careers to oddities. I don't imagine that that feels good for them, right? And I think that maybe a way to counterbalance

that not feeling great for them is to celebrate the odd ones. And boy, that's a weird career, but it is like a very, you were told that you were really valuable at the most important part of a team season like multiple times. That has to feel good. So, you know, if any of them have doubt about their place in history, like I hope that they can sort of view it through that lens. It's like, what an affirming thing. Like you have a very particular skill and it isn't even saving the same person from kidnapping across multiple movies. Right. At a certain point, aren't you like, can you stop getting kidnapped though? And lastly, just wanted to shout out a study here that I thought was revealing or at least important in confirming something we thought we knew. So Bill James Online is closing up shop this month. Bill James himself is not closing up shop, but his website is.

He's just decided to refocus on other things and work on books and hopefully produce a new version of the new historical abstract, an even newer historical abstract. But this is maybe his last study or one of his last studies. He investigated the idea that pictures aren't lasting as long these days, that injuries for pictures really are more severe than they used to be, which I think a lot of us assumed and kind of took for granted because it just seems to be the case that pitchers are getting hurt left and right. But, you know, with any sort of science, including the science of baseball sabermetrics, you want to check things out and make sure that your gut sense of those things is true.

But it's really difficult to approach that problem because, A, you can't really study IL rates or like pitchers having declared injuries because, A, we may not have great data on that for past seasons. But, B, the whole pattern of placing pitchers on the injured list has changed, right? I mean, you put pitchers on there as like just roster rejiggering and machinations all the time. Now, you used to not even necessarily put a pitcher or player on the injured or disabled list as it was then known, right? So the patterns of using those lists have completely changed in a way that makes it really difficult to compare across eras. And then also pitcher usage patterns have completely changed too.

So it's not like you can look at games pitched or innings pitched, right? Just everything has changed with pitchers. So it's really, it's tough to tell across era. And he says, you know, the theory that injury rates by pitchers. So it's really, it's tough to tell across era. And he says, you know, the theory that injury rates by pitchers have increased substantially is not a ridiculous theory or a silly thing to say. It is just that I need proof. And so he went looking for proof here. And the way that he did it was basically by looking at whether pitchers retain their value over time. And if they don't retain their value,

a lot of the time it would be because of injury. Not always. It could be just because they got bad for other reasons all of a sudden. It could be because they got suspended, like Julio Urias. You never really know. But in most cases, if a pitcher holds up, it means that he stayed healthy. cases, if a pitcher holds up, it means that he stayed healthy. And if he just completely falls off a cliff performance wise, then probably there's an injury in there. So he looked just by decade, just across eras, going back to the beginning of the 20th century, and tried to compare like he divided pitchers into various levels, like one to 10, based on how effective they were. And then he compared how much of their value did they retain over the next 10 years? Like if you were a level 10 pitcher one year, how much did you produce over the next 10 years? If you were a level nine pitcher and on

and on, right. And, and looked like by decade. And he concludes the belief that the number of pitcher injuries is increasing seems to be clearly true. The rates of pitcher value retention have decreased steadily in recent decades and have declined sharply in the last few years. This is fully consistent with the widespread belief that pitcher injuries are increasing. And he cites like for level 10 pitchers in the 2000s, for instance, just to give you some sense of the range here. Like so from 1900 to 1909, level 10 pitchers retained on average 63 percent of their base year value over the next five years, 42 percent over 10 years. And then it went up for much of the 20th century. And then in the 2000s, it goes down a little bit. So you have 63 percent and 45 percent, which is the same as the long-term

historical averages, but a little lower than the norms from the last decades of the 20th century. But in the 2010 to 2019 era, the averages dropped to 58 percent value retention over five years and 42 percent over 10 years. And they appear to have dropped more than that in the last few years. It would appear that when complete data for that decade can be figured, the lost value from pitcher injuries will be at a historic high watermark. And he found looking at pitchers at lower performance levels, the conclusion is the same, except more so. So they've dropped off even more. And he concluded the percentages are dropping because not as many pitchers are having

full careers. I don't really think there is any other explanation for it. So this backs up what we've all sensed, that guys are getting hurt more often. And he chalks it up largely to, I think what we have chalked it up to is just more max effort pitching, just guys going all out on all pitches. It's not pacing themselves. It's not great. And he had some suggestions for this,

one of which was if you're drafting amateur pitchers, maybe give more weight to their amateur workload as opposed to if they throw super hard, right? But if they've been worked hard, you know, I do think teams pay some attention to that already. He says maybe encourage your minor league pitchers not to go to those camps where they teach you how to turn your 88-mile-per-hour slider into a 92-mile-per-hour slider, which is going to be kind of controversial because you see Cole Reagans, right? Suddenly he adds a bunch of miles per hour and he adds a slider and he's dominant all of a sudden. So are you going to tell Cole Reagans, who has already

had a couple Tommy John surgeries? I mean, he knows that time is precious and he's going to want to make good while he can. Right. But Bill James says maybe tell them that's not what you want them to do because there's an injury speed bump in the middle of that road. Maybe don't draft that kid who looks great, but who had Tommy John surgery when he was 18. Maybe focus on the kids who haven't needed to do that.

When you have a young pitcher in the minors, maybe you make him pitch seven innings in a game or nine innings a game. Maybe you let him throw 120 or 130 pitches a game, because maybe if you do that, he will have to back off the max effort delivery and mix in some 80-miles-per-hour junk along with his fantastic slider just to learn how to stay on the mound and throw 120 pitches. Maybe the things he will have to learn by doing that are the same things that will keep him healthy when he's in the majors and has a major league workload. Maybe you don't absolutely

need to build a bullpen around five pitchers who all throw 98 to 100, right? So I wonder, right? And any questions, you know, maybe you don't need pitchers to use the exact same delivery on every pitch. Maybe repeatability is overrated. Maybe it helps to vary your arm angle because maybe it would put stress on different spots on your arm. He doesn't know that. He's just speculating. Or, you know, maybe you don't take pitchers out the third time through the order because, again, you want them to pace themselves. Maybe the union, he suggests, could even step in somehow. It's part of the traditional role of a union to try to protect their workers from injury. Maybe there are rules that could help us do that.

You know, we've floated the idea of just restrictions on pitchers on the active roster to force pitchers to pace themselves. But I do wonder whether we will see any team go in the other direction ever and say, we're going to try to build a staff around guys who throw 88 or 89, you know, like, could that work? You see Kyle Hendricks, who's back to not quite his old self, but something approximating his old self. He's been effective throwing 87

and Kyle Hendricks still got hurt, right? So you can still got hurt. And also if you don't have the incredible command that Kyle Hendricks has, then you're just going to get lit up. So that's always going to be the issue. It's like throwing harder makes you better on a per pitch basis. Right. So how are you going to tell pitchers don't do that? And yet, like long term thinking, you know, a young competitive athlete who's like, I got to make my money here. But, you know, you might not even make it to free agency and in tact if you're just going to blow out your arm trying to be good for a few years and then you'll be useless after that. So I don't know what the answer is. But but this only confirms my belief that it's a problem. Yeah. I think that it's like, how do we think about margin for error, right? Because I think that we think of, and this isn't, I think, incorrect, but we think of velocity giving a pitcher sort of margin for error, right? You don't have to have the pinpoint command. You know, you can, if things aren't working, if that pitch isn't

working for you, you can just be like, eh, screw it and blow 100 miles an hour past somebody. But there are multiple ways to think about having margin for error. And does a more restrained reproach from a velocity standpoint give you injury margin for error that you otherwise wouldn't have you know i and i think the the frustrating thing i would imagine if you're in a if you're part of a player dev organization if you're a trainer if you're on the medical staff is that like you know how this stuff plays out at the population level but you're still dealing with, you know, what Russell Carlton would call an N of one with any of these guys. And so much of their ability to withstand velocity is going to be about like their individual physiology, you know? And so

you, I think, and I don't say that like we should despair and we can't draw any conclusions from that sort of population wide research. But I would imagine that it is frustrating because you're like, I don't know, maybe this guy is like literally built different. I don't know. And you don't know until he blows out. Yeah, right. blows out. Yeah, right. And maybe you can get a better feel for that with StatCast's biomechanical analysis and all this new age stuff and tools that teams do with the markerless motion capture. But I don't know, you might have to look inside to see what sort of strain those ligaments could withstand and how are you going to know that until you open them up for surgery after

you learned that it couldn't withstand the strain. So Bill James wrote in this study, and this is a point that we've made plenty of times. He says, just my opinion, but anonymity in athletes is not a good thing from the fans' perspective. Having so many players on a team that the fans don't know who they are isn't really a good thing, I don't think. isn't really a good thing, I don't think. And yeah, I don't think it's great that you can't count on the best pitchers now being good in five years or 10 years, like even more so than before.

Obviously, pitchers have always blown out their arms, but this shows that it's happening more often than ever. And it's not a good feeling to know that like the star pitchers now, any pitch, any outing, they could just come up grabbing their arm and then next thing you know they're they're gone for a couple years like you can't count on anyone staying healthy it's it's just not a great state of affairs so i hope that

there will be and i think mlb wants to continue to tighten that limit because that's the only way I think it could potentially work. I don't think you're going to convince any individual pitcher to, hey, just be less good right now because trust us, it'll keep you healthy in the long run and you'll make more money down the road. You can't guarantee that because you could get hurt anyway. And how are you going to tell someone like, we know you can throw 100 right now and you can get guys out, but just don't. Just take something off. It's like we always said with Jacob deGrom. Now, Jacob deGrom was amazing throwing 96, so maybe he could have done it.

But your typical pitcher is not as effective as Jacob deGrom, even if they're not throwing as hard. So for them, the calculus is like, hey, I want to keep making major league minimum, even if that's all I'm making. That's a whole heck of a lot better than what I'm making in AAA. I want to stay up here. And this is how I do it by going max effort all the time. And teams are sending that same message. And it's a tough sell to a team too, to be like, hey, we'll be the team of soft tossers, you know? And that could backfire spectacularly. When the Cubs were kind of doing that a few years ago and it was like, oh, you know, we've got all these guys who have good command and seam shifted wake. And it didn't really work out, right?

There aren't that many Kyle Hendricks's. There aren't that many Kyle Hendricks's, but I just wonder in the long run if like the new market inefficiency isn't going to be the guys who throw harder and harder, but guys who throw softer and manage to compensate with other stuff. And I don't know whether certain types of breaking balls are tougher on your arm, too, but just not throwing as hard that that seems to be the ticket that seems to be the key. So there have to be guys who are getting overlooked, the Hendrixes who are out there who just are not lighting up the stat cast readings or the radar guns and are getting written off and could maybe make it work. There have to be that class of pitcher. So I hope that we see things swing back in that direction, but I don't think it will swing back on its own. I think it's going to have to be that you put stricter limits in place so teams don't have as many pitchers and they are forced

to tell those pitchers, pace yourself, because otherwise we're going to end up throwing David Fry for four innings in every game. Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, that actually segues quite nicely into our future blast for today, which comes to us from 2055 and from Rick Wilber, an award-winning writer, editor, and college professor who has been described as the dean of science fiction baseball. And Rick writes, the big baseball news of 2055 was the emergence of FDA-approved tissue engineering as a successful and safe alternative to the more usual surgery for MCL and ACL tears and other damage to tendons and ligaments. The use of seed cells that were potent and available in the form of stem cells

from bone marrow or fibroblasts or other sources had been tried for decades and found to work, but the repairs hadn't lasted for more than a few months. Advances in tissue engineering meant that by 2050, the regenerated tendons and ligaments were not only fully repaired, they were enhanced to be stronger, more durable, and in the case of ligaments, have greater elasticity. And the changes seemed to be permanent. The first players to undergo these new treatments in the early 2050s, all of them minor leaguers, found themselves to be faster, stronger, and more supple than they'd been before. Supple. Supple, yeah. Probably not like their skin is smoother, but they're bendier

than before. Within a few years, top minor leaguers were undergoing elective treatments to enhance their chances of making the big leagues. And by 2055, established major leaguers were undergoing elective treatments to enhance their chances of making the big leagues. And by 2055, established major leaguers and even some top stars were electing to have the treatment and found that it did enhance their speed on the base pass, pitching effectiveness, and for players in the field, arm strength. The treatments quickly spread globally. Over the following few seasons, almost all players chose the enhancement treatments, and it had an impact on all of the game's metrics as faster, stronger, more durable players began to accumulate statistics that prior generations of ballplayers had only rarely been able to achieve. The pressure on all players to embrace the treatments was enormous, though some members of the medical and scientific communities noted that the long-term effects of these treatments on the players' bodies were unknown. that the long-term effects of these treatments on the players' bodies were unknown.

The players didn't seem to mind that element of uncertainty about their future and instead embraced their increased level of play in the present. So we'll see if this turns out to be a Pandora's box, if this turns out to have side effects, if we end up with enhanced and non-enhanced players' leagues. This could be problematic, but I guess it is one potential solution to all the arm injuries and other issues. Maybe medical science will bail us out of this one,

or maybe it'll turn out to be a dystopian nightmare. I guess stay tuned. All right. Well, after we recorded more good news for Trey Turner. He has been placed on paternity leave. He's going to be a dad again. When you're hitting that well, you probably hate to take a day off for any reason other than I'm having a kid. That's a good reason.

As a number of people pointed out, it's apparently been exactly nine months since Trey Turner signed his deal with the Phillies, which led to a lot of congrats on the sex. Once Trey Turner signed his deal with the Phillies, which led to a lot of congrats on the sex. I like the implication that he had to sign a $300 million deal to assure his financial future. It's like, OK, now we can have a second kid. We can expand our family. I think we can afford it. I mean, you don't have to tell me kids are expensive, but I think he was doing OK before the deal. Still, that doesn't mean you can't celebrate. Have some sex to consummate your $300 million contract.

Why not? Not that you need a special occasion. Still, that doesn't mean you can't celebrate. Have some sex to consummate your $300 million contract. Why not? Not that you need a special occasion. And of course, the length of pregnancies being variable as they are. Who knows exactly what day the deed was done, but it is amusing to point out the timing. And what a weird profession and occupation when people publicly comment on the timing of your conception vis-a-vis your contract signing and your employment status. Also, like a lot of you already are or soon will be, I've been spending a lot of time with the new video game Starfield, which takes place in the year 2330, but I'm pleased to report that it is indeed a baseball game. No spoilers here, but I have encountered several baseballs in my journeys,

most of which are labeled as postseason baseball circa 1978. They're vintage, they're antiques, they're artifacts of old earth. I haven't come across any evidence that baseball still exists and is played in 2330, but there does seem to be a similar game called batball, which from a poster I saw appears to be a hybrid of baseball and cricket potentially. Close enough. So that's a future blast for you. We're a ways away from 2330, but you can help us ensure that we get there by supporting Effectively Wild on Patreon. And you can do that by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the

podcast going, help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks. Bliss Han, Othon, Caitlin Ainsworth Caruso, Mark Chalifour, and Elon Kriegel. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, as well as monthly bonus episodes, one of which Meg and I just published this past weekend, and play off live streams and discounts on ad-free Fangraphs memberships and merch and so much more, patreon.com slash effectivelywild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. Anyone and everyone can send us questions and comments via email at podcast at fancrafts.com. You can also rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at EWpod. And you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectivelywild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Does baseball look the same to you as it does to me? When we look at baseball, how much do we see?

Well the curveballs bend and the home runs fly More to the game than meets the eye To get the stats compiled and the stories filed Fans on the internet might get riled, but we can break it down, uneffectively wild.