Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2105: The Stories We Missed in 2023

Episode Date: December 30, 2023

Ben Lindbergh is joined by Hannah Keyser and Zach Crizer, formerly of Yahoo Sports and the Bandwagon podcast, to discuss at least one listener-nominated, previously overlooked topic from 2023 about each MLB team. Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to The Bandwagon Link to Hannah’s Yahoo archive Link to […]

Vroom, vroom. Here's your primer on Beef Boys, Baseball's End, Roger Angel, and Super Pretzels, Lillian's Asked a Deal, and Mike Trout Hypotheticals, waiting for the perfect bat from a volcanic eruption. Ladies and gentlemen, the Effectively Wild introduction. Hello and welcome to episode 2105 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by Meg Rowley, who is still on the road and dealing with uncooperative Wi-Fi, but I am joined by two great guests in her stead, Hannah Kaiser and Zach Kreiser. Kaiser and Kreiser, Kreiser and Kreiser. Yes, yeah. We've encountered that before.

I'm sure you have. Formerly of Yahoo Sports and the late lamented Bandwagon podcast. Hello. Welcome. This is a nice little reunion we've engineered here. Yeah, we really appreciate you engineering an on-mic reunion. As we were just telling you, we reunion in person. Occasionally, we were at dinner when you asked us to do this. So we've talked baseball with each other, but no one else has gotten to hear it for

a few weeks or I guess a couple of months now. If a podcaster podcasts in person, does it make a sound? I mean, if there's no mic, if no one's recording, does that even count? It could be personally satisfying, but no audience. You're not performing for anyone. It's entirely authentic. Yeah. Other than like the people sitting at the bar at a specific Brooklyn restaurant last night, no one has any idea what we think about baseball right now. Yes. And our respective significant others. They were there. They know too. Yeah. They probably know more than they want to if they're anything like mine. But as people may know, Yahoo Sports earlier this month laid off all of its MLB writers. So that's not nice and not fun. It's something that we're all kind of used to maybe when we work in media and also when we

work in tech adjacent media, you're kind of at the center of two layoff heavy industries, which is not always the most fun place to be. You both do great work individually and together. So I've missed being able to read and hear you lately. And I hope that we'll be able to read and hear you somewhere else soon, whether together or apart. Oh, gosh, this podcast was worth it already. Just to have someone say that. Thank you so much, Ben. Of course. Appreciate that. Has your experience of free agency so far been anything like Joey Vados, who tweeted this week that being a free agent is like that scene from Gravity where Sandra Bullock detaches from the Explorer. You're all alone. No one is answering your calls and you don't know if you'll get back to base.

Your only hope is George Clooney saving you. Is that how you would have put it? No, I think my experience of free agency has been less existential than Joey Votto's. But I will say that getting laid off is a great way to make people say nice things about you for about six hours. That is true. Yeah. And I didn't mind that, you know, that was that was nice. But no, I don't feel like I'm in space or anything. And I certainly don't expect George Clooney to save me. My experience has been completely existential, which is a perfect division between Zach and I's personalities in many ways. I have been pleasantly surprised both at how people do say very nice things about you

when you get laid off, but also stuff like this podcast. I've hosted some foul territory that like rogue YouTube show that all the players appear on and I still do TV stuff. So it's, I've said to many people that like, while it's the off season, it doesn't, I was like, to me, it feels like I'm doing just as much thinking and talking about baseball as ever, but with fewer paychecks on the horizon. Yeah. A little less financial security than Joey Votto, I would imagine. I appreciate everyone who continues to ask me to talk about baseball, even despite not having a day job. Zach knows the bet.

You do not. And you would actually probably find this story delightful. I was on BBC radio twice talking about Shohei Otani. And they know delightfully little. They were like, their questions included, how do you pronounce his name? What does he do? What's he like as a person? Is he also good at defense? I think he is, but we haven't seen it so much. I mean, as a pitcher, he is. I was like, oh, my gosh, there's so much. I was like, there's a lot of backstory there. I'd say there's not in any way to mock the people at BBC who I really appreciated.

It was it was very interesting. That was like one of the most interesting things I've done. Yeah, I went off, I guess, just because I was sort of like, well, then why do you even care? But I guess it's the headline of biggest sports contract ever. They had reasonably a lot of questions. Yes. And I'm sure you got into the time value of money and what the actual, you know, current day value of that. I'm sure the BBC audience was fascinated by the details, the nitty gritty of Otani's contract. Needing to lower the CBT hit. Yes. What interest rates are we talking about here? Yeah. I have also been on the BBC to talk about baseball and the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which, I mean,

they do have baseball in Canada, at least a little bit more than in England, though they have it there too. But it is a different audience and you kind of have to calibrate the way that you talk about things. So me on Effectively Wild, a little bit different from me on the CBC or the BBC, kind of have to remember that I don't have my fan graphs hat on. I hope that people are answering your calls, at least if they are letting Joey Vados go to voicemail. Hopefully they're placing calls because they should. Don't be a miser, hire Kaiser and Kreiser. That's my holiday message to everyone. So I have brought you on today because we have kind of a end of the year tradition here at Effectively Wild. We talk about stories that we didn't talk about all year, stories we missed.

We did, I don't know, 150 something episodes and I don't know how many hours. So you would think that there would not be one corner of baseball that we did not explore. But somehow every year there's something we miss. And, you know, when you cover baseball from a national perspective, even if you're getting in deep, there are things that you just aren't aware of or don't have time to talk about that people know about their team because they're watching that team and they're listening to the broadcast every day. And it just doesn't quite permeate the national consciousness. And so at the end of the year, we put out a call to our listeners and say, what did we not talk about about your team this year? And listeners send in ideas. And it can be anything. They can be some kind of statistical quirk or fun fact or some individual season or

some strange game or some funny or heartwarming off the field story. In most cases, I wasn't even aware of these things, but we just try to catch up with everything before the year is over. I guess Meg still will have missed these stories because she's not here today, but this is perfect for you because you get to just react to these stories and you didn't even miss them the first time. I mean, you may have, but you could just say, oh yeah, we talked about that on the bandwagon. Where were you on Effectively Wild with this one? But I just hope that you'll enjoy being regaled with some of these stories and you can let me know whether you were aware of them.

We love a podcast with no prep. That was my favorite part of this request. No prep required. You should we should make it very, very clear. We have no idea what you're about. Yeah, not a clue. Nope. I had Facebook threads. I had discord prompts. These submissions are coming in from everywhere. And yeah, I said, just show up and I will read you some stuff. So no prep for you. Probably the most prep that I do for an effectivelyively Wild all year long because I have a massive, gnarly spreadsheet with many, many links and 100 tabs open that I will be furiously clicking through as I explain these things. So Meg and I will have to catch up on some of the minor news and transactions that we've

missed over the past week. But too much to get to today. That can wait for 2024. But this cannot because if we wait till 2024, we will have missed it in 2023. We'll just go in alphabetical order here, starting with the Arizona Diamondbacks. So alphabetical order in terms of the city name. The Diamondbacks story, which kind of doubles as an angel story, is that Dominic Fletcher and David Fletcher played each other.

They are brothers. Dominic playedletcher and David Fletcher played each other. They are brothers. Dominic played for the Diamondbacks. David has played for the Angels, although he will not anymore. And they faced off for the first time at the Major League level, which is just kind of fun and quirky. But the added dimension that also makes it sad and very Field of Dreams and Fathers and Sons-ish is that their father, Tim, had died earlier that month at 60 years old. This was in June.

June 30th, they faced off for the first time in a major league game. So it was bittersweet because I'm sure they were both thinking dad would have loved to see this. It would have been nice if he had been around to see this. They said, Dominic Fletcher, this would have been one of his proudest moments. Every night he turned on the TV and had both of our games going on simultaneously. To be able to be here and watch

would have been one of his favorite things, which is heartbreaking, but also kind of nice that that happened and they got to cross paths and celebrate in some way while they were mourning on a baseball field. So baseball, fathers and sons, heartwarming, but also tragic. What could be more baseball than that? Yeah, I did not realize that their dad had died. I knew that they were both in the majors and I think Dominic actually debuted this year.

So I was just looking to see if he had debuted before their dad passed away. And it looks like he did. So at least he got the major league debut out of the way while his dad was there to see it. So that's good. I wanted to make sure he got the debut and that would have been more sad if he never got to see him in the majors. Right. And this happened, I think this was in Anaheim, and they grew up in Orange, California. They played together in high school, 10 miles from Angel Stadium, and they had crossed paths before in the minors. They had played against each other, and they also both played for Italy in the WBC because their mother is from Italy. So I guess their dad got to see them play

on that team, at least. But despite the circumstances, hopefully that brought them some sort of solace. Sad, but also sort of sweet. I knew absolutely nothing about this. So I went to Dominic Fletcher's Instagram. And he's got a great slideshow of pictures of him and his dad doing baseball-y things over the years. Which I highly recommend just because I enjoy pictures of tiny children wearing baseball hats that cannot be made small enough for their heads. So if you too enjoy that, highly recommend. Great genre. Okay. Moving along, the Atlanta Braves. So I've got a few submissions here.

I guess the main one would be that Charlie Culberson converted to pitching. Were you aware of this? Did he convert to pitching or did he just never get to play otherwise? Well, so yes, that happened too. And that we did talk about on Effectively Wild. So he was on Atlanta's major league roster for quite a long time and just was never getting into a game. He was just sort of like in a ceremonial honorary position, basically on the Braves active roster. And he got into one game, right? And had one plate appearance. And I think he got a hit, if I'm remembering right. And that was it. The Braves have had multiple players that they just kind of carry as mascots in recent

seasons. And Culberson was that guy. But his stint in the majors where he was just riding the pine actually interrupted his conversion to pitching, which was his plan, which I knew nothing about. He had pitched in the majors several times, I think with some success, just like as a position player pitcher. And maybe that gave him some false confidence about how good he was as a pitcher. I don't know. I don't want to denigrate his pitching performance. But lifetime in the majors, he's pitched eight games, seven and a third innings, and he's given up only one run, which sounds pretty good, except for the fact that he's only struck out one batter and he walked three. So we might say not so sustainable, but evidently

thinks it's sustainable because this is his career path now. And he was pitching in AAA with the Gwinnett Stripers and kind of got interrupted because he kept getting called up to Atlanta to not play. But this was the plan. Like in April, he's like, yeah, I'm just going to be a pitcher now. So I don't know how I missed this, but I completely did. Charlie Culberson, now a pitcher. So in AAA, across the season, he got in four games. He threw three and two thirds innings. He struck out five. All right. He allowed eight hits and five runs, only two of which were earned. I don't know exactly how that happened. And he walked two.

So maybe he was like the extra inning specialist in the minors. Yeah, he did say that he's open to being a two-way player, which is ambitious. So it's not a full conversion, like he's never going to play another position again. But he's just trying to broaden his skill set, I suppose, just trying to make himself as attractive to as many potential employers as possible so that people will return his calls as a free agent. But yeah, I was just not aware that this was happening. So I wish him well. We talked about Charlie Culberson a surprising number of times on the podcast this year,

but none of the times was about the fact that he was trying to make it as a pitcher now. I think this is, with all due respect to the Atlanta Media Corps, they let someone down because if this is, you're right, I can't believe that none of the three of us knew that Charlie Culberson was trying to be a pitcher. I'm very aware of Charlie Culberson's existence. Yeah, mostly the fact that he looks like Dedsby Swanson. Yeah, we've covered that. And I'm sure I'm equally surprised to learn that he wasn't on the Braves the past two seasons,

as I am to learn that he was taking up pitching. I just always think of him as being on the Braves. He had a 443 OPS plus this year, which I'm trying to figure out what exactly that calculation is based on. Because you're right. He had one at bat and he got one hit in that at bat. That's it. That's the whole thing. Yep. But 443 is such a specific number.

Where is that coming from? I mean, that's where the average was. 2,000 OPS, right? It's pretty good. such a specific number where's that coming from i mean that's where the average was 2000 ops right it's pretty good i gotta say this is a first world problem for the atlanta braves of just like we can put our shortstop who isn't actually going to play in triple a and just let him pitch because we don't even need this triple a roster spot to develop pitchers charlie culberson can pitch i mean yeah also a first world problem that they had so many things to write about that they didn't need to mention

Charlie Culberson. I mean, I remember when Anthony Gose was converting to pitching, it was like the only thing anyone talked about for, I think, Cleveland. Uh-huh. Yeah. And yeah, was he with Toronto for a while too? Yeah. I was well aware of the Gose conversion, but somehow this escaped my notice. Maybe it's us. Maybe it's no one else's fault but ours. I'm just thrilled to learn that at the age of 34, people still think that they have a whole new chapter of careers ahead of them. That's inspirational, right? Yeah. As a only 33-year-old, this is very heartening to me. I'm like, oh, I've got, I could learn an entirely new skill. Have you tried pitching?

Actually, she has. Yes, I guess that's true. Okay. Well, that was one submission. That was from Mary Beth, I believe. The Fletcher submission was from Levi. Also got some other ideas for Atlanta from Ezra and Paul. Some people mentioned Ronald Acuna Jr.'s wedding, which probably was fairly big news, although we didn't talk about it.

We certainly talked about Acuna a ton, but he got married just hours before a game because his fiance, she was going to have to leave the country because of a visa. And she would have had to go back with their two children and then they wouldn't be allowed back in the US for a few months. And then they would have missed out on a post-season run and the end of his historic season and everything. So they just got hitched to solve that problem so that his fiance and then wife could stay and keep him company. He wanted his family close to them, understandably. So he had a nice ceremony on top of all the other personal milestones and professional milestones that he accomplished this year. Also got married right in the middle of all of that. And his wife, I think, wore his trademark pendant at the ceremony, his number 13, and then subsequently

got a 4070 tattoo to commemorate. I did not know that part. Yeah, that's love, I guess. If you're going to get your husband's statistical milestones tattooed on your person, that's one way to express it. So yeah, I don't know that I would do that if my wife went 40-70. I'm not sure I would get a tattoo. I'd be very proud of her, but I don't know that I would memorialize it in quite that way. What if he goes 50-80 this year? I know. I guess you can get tattoos removed. People do that quite often these days. So can you just cross it out and tattoo 50-80 over it? I don't know. They'll have to figure that out.

Other nominations for the Braves. One is that they had a couple of days where they just gave their regular broadcasters the day off and had an all Hall of Famers broadcast. So they just had Chipper Jones and John Smoltz and Tom Glavin do the calls for those days, except that Jeff Rancourt was also there, who is notably not a Hall of Famer, you know, famous Atlanta Brave, but not quite as accomplished as a player. And they kind of trolled him on at least one of those broadcasts because all of the other guys wore their Hall of Fame jackets, which is a thing, I guess. It's like a master's jacket

or something. Just a less famous thing. So they all wear their Hall of Fame jackets. And Frenchie was left out because he doesn't have one. But he's part of the regular broadcasting crew. So they let one guy, one other former player on. So that's interesting. I mean, Hannah, you've done lots of baseball TV broadcasting in the past few years. So I say make room for more media members, if anything, but also kind of fun just to have like a laid back, I guess it's like a Manning

cast inspired sort of thing where it's just, you know, have some players jawing. And of course, you know, those players are broadcasters. I mean, John Smoltz, you know, we can't find a baseball broadcast. John Smoltz isn't on. Right. So it's not like they were complete neophytes here. See, Ben, that's what's wrong with this industry. Everybody wants something to be Manning cast. Ask that. That exact description is why we are out of work. No, that's not exactly true. Everyone is like, oh, yeah, I don't feel like the Manning cast. We'll just get some famous athletes to do your job. We'll just get A-Rod and Michael Kay hanging out. That's what everyone wants to hear somehow. Okay. And the last idea for the Braves was that Forrest Wall debuted for the Braves this year. Forrest,

Forrest, people make fun of my pronunciation of Forrest. I don't know if that's a New York thing or what. I say Forrest. But Forrest Wall, who is a former first rounder from the Rockies in the 2014 draft, and he was in the minors for nine years just bouncing around, finally made it to the majors with Atlanta this year, got into 15 games, 15 plate appearances, and he had a 264 OPS plus. So not quite Culberson-esque, but not far from it. As if the Braves didn't have enough good hitters. Like even the guys who got like a plate appearance here or there had like 1,000, 2,000 OPS pluses. But he actually made the postseason roster because, you know, he was speedy and he could do various things and play various positions. So nice breakthrough for him after being a highly touted prospect and then a minor league journeyman. I like that all of the Braves stories were like, can you believe how many Hall of Famers they have and how many great players?

And Ronald Acuna Jr. could barely make time for all of his accomplishments. The wedding is the one we did cover the wedding on the bandwagon, I will say. But the rest of them very much know. Yes. All right. Baltimore Orioles. So this one I was aware of. I don't know if we actually talked about it.

Some of these things we may have had a passing reference to on one podcast. It's hard to remember all the things that we've said. Cedric Mullins met AJ Rodriguez, who is a well-known streamer, Twitch streamer, specifically with MLB The Show. And he has a very viral clip from a few years ago where Cedric Mullins, the show version, the digital polygonal version of Cedric Mullins, robbed a home run. And AJ Rodriguez went on a little rant about how he's always getting robbed and thwarted by digital Cedric Mullins. And he said, I can't escape him, which became kind of a catchphrase and something that Orioles social media will use when Cedric Mullins does something good. So they had interacted from afar before.

I think Mullins had sent Rodriguez, who goes by LittleMan17 when he's streaming. Mullins had sent him a bobblehead, I believe. But they finally met in person because Rodriguez, who's an Angels fan, attended an Orioles fan and they met up. And Rodriguez was wearing a WBC jersey that I think was Mullins' and Mullins signed it and he signed it.

You can't escape me or something like that. Right. Playing on this viral catchphrase. And it was just a heartwarming, you know, people meeting in real life after interacting in an interesting way online. The subplot to the Mullins meeting Rodriguez game was that Zach Hample got involved. Oh, no. Which is, yeah, that's usually the appropriate reaction when Zach Hample gets involved. So Mullins homered in that game and Zach Hample caught it because, of course, he did, right? Famous fly catcher, Zach Hample. And people prevailed upon Hample to give the ball to Rodriguez,

which would have been sweet and appropriate, right? And he declined, he refused, and he was caught on camera saying, I'm the Mullins guy tonight. So really leaning into the trollishness that Zach Hample is known for, fairly or unfairly, and he got roasted for that, obviously. A week later, Hample caught another Mullins home run ball, which spread the wealth, like let some other people catch some balls now and then. But then he bowed to the public pressure and he did offer that ball to Rodriguez. I'm not sure what the resolution of that was, whether Rodriguez accepted or not, but he did repent and change his ways when he got another Mullins home run ball sent his way. I did not think as you were telling this story that the famous streamer was not going to be

the person I related to the least by the end of this story. I thought, whatever, I don't care about that guy. And then Zach Hample entered the picture and I was like, I don't care about him even more. Yeah, the streamer is the sympathetic person in this story. Yeah. Yeah, there's only one Twitch related baseball incident I could say I'm actually familiar with. And that involved Blake Snell. So this was news to me. Yeah.

I regularly thought during the 2020 season that Blake Snell was remarkably good at doing Zoom press conferences postgame. I don't know why that came up more than once, but I distinctly remember thinking, like, he's significantly better at doing these press conferences over Zoom than every other baseball player. And I think that's a credit to his time spent doing Twitch streaming. Yeah, maybe so. In front of a screen. So maybe more players should take that up. Yeah. Xavier Edwards, who is the prospect,

Blake Snell called the slapdick prospect in that stream that you're referring to. He made his major league debut this year for the Miami Marlins, which I wish I had known an hour ago or realized an hour ago when I was desperately searching for a Marlins story. They were the one team that I was like, was desperately searching for a Marlins story. They were the one

team that I was like, anyone, Bueller, Marlins story that does not involve Louisa Rice, please, someone. Eventually we got one, but Xavier Edwards, not such a slapdick prospect after all, a bonafide big leaker. Next team, Boston Red Sox. So this one we're going from lighthearted to a little more serious, but still heartening. So something that I think we've all noted and have celebrated perhaps over the past few years is professional athletes and specifically baseball players, because we cover baseball, being more open about mental health and some of the struggles that they've gone through and trying to set an example and say, hey, we're professional athletes, but we have feelings too. And sometimes we struggle with depression and anxiety and everything else that people who are not professional baseball players struggle with. So the Red Sox had a couple such examples this year. One was Jaron Duran, who had a rough rookie season right in 2022. I guess that was his

second major league season. You know, didn't hit in his first couple of seasons in the big leagues, had some defensive gaffes, et cetera, and got down on himself. And he really had a big comeback, successful season for the Red Sox this year. He was one of their most valuable players. And he talked about how he sort of reset and changed his mental approach over the offseason leading into this year. But he also went through a slump at one point in 2023 and started to suffer from the same negative feelings and, you know and posted about it. And the team talked to him and Alex Cora talked to him. He's been pretty vocal about opening up about these things and saying, hey, it's okay to not only feel this way, but also vocalize those feelings.

And similarly, a Red Sox minor leaguer went through sort of the same thing. Blaze Jordan, great baseball name. I don't know if Blaze is his given name. One of you can tell me perhaps. But he went through something similar and he tweeted about this also and put that message out there. This was in October. He captioned this, it was finally time to share my story dealing with anxiety and depression after seeing so many stories about it. And I know as an athlete, it can be especially

hard dealing with these things. You are not alone. He talked about how he dealt with this, especially earlier in his career and a highly touted prospect and was pressing and was going through all those difficulties. So, you know, it's part of a larger movement. Right. And I guess we even saw that in some cases this year with professional baseball players going on the injured list with mental health issues. Right. Like not inventing some phantom shoulder injury or anything, but just saying, you know, anxiety, depression, whatever it was and and not trying to camouflage that with something more macho, right? So the Red Sox stand out here, but I think this happened with a lot of teams and a lot of players

and probably a lot of sports. I believe his name is, in fact, Blaze. Wow. I have a, yeah, I have an MLB.com interview from when he was drafted, and we'll get back to the serious part in a second. But they said, how did you get the name Blaze? That's not one you hear every day. And he's 17 at this point. He says, my parents just kind of read it out of a magazine. They were going to name me something else before that. And then they just went with it from there. And MLB.com says, so it's not even a nickname? Your official first name is Blaze? And he says, that's my official name. It's on my birth certificate and everything. Well, that settles that. Okay. That's pretty awesome. I like that. Not stressing the name, you know, I mean, hopefully don't give your kid a name that's like going to haunt them

forever. In this case, it's, it's kind of cool, especially if you're like a speedy athlete, but I like the, just, you know what? I read that name. It spoke to me. And you are now named Blaze forever. Is he speedy, though? He doesn't have the build necessarily. He's speedy. Yeah. Well, speedy relative to the average person. Yes.

Let's say that at least. OK. The Chicago Cubs. So we got a lot of submissions for the Chicago Cubs from Ralph and Dave and others. Some people talked about Seiya Suzuki's resurgence and how, you know, he started slow and finished incredibly fast and hot. He was great. And he actually took a mental health break, too. The team gave him one, like sat him down for a while so that he could sort of reset.

And in his case, at least that really worked. And he came back and was just, you know, toward stretch down the stretch. I guess I just said stretch twice, but he was really great. And that to me, like, I don't know if that would work for me, like the mental break. Maybe I just kind of like working a lot but also i feel like if i were sort of benched in a very visible way that that might compound my problems personally like if i were already pressing and then it's like okay i'm just gonna not play for a while here maybe when you get to that point where you can think of nothing else but how you're struggling and and you're coming up empty that it's good to just completely reset and detach for a while.

And maybe he made some mechanical tweaks, too. He ended up having a really strong sophomore season, and that was one reason why. So why don't you mention that? He actually, he also, I will say, as an added reason that this might be stressful, he has, as a lot of the prominent Japanese players do, kind of a media contingent that follows the Cubs around. I saw the Cubs when he was on his mental health break or whatever. I was going to say, we were around the team then, right? I was double checking that that's when he was back.

It was the press conferences with the manager were just like six questions about how close he was to returning, which would really stress me out if I were him. Six questions about how close he was to returning, which would really stress me out if I were him. Yeah. So maybe it's better to just say I'm on an indefinite leave for now and I'll be back when I'm back. Right. But he ended up having a great season overall. A couple others to shout out. Nico Horner stole 42 bases, which is impressive on its own, but actually 43 bases. is impressive on its own, but actually 43 bases. I said 42 because 42 was his career stolen base total at all levels of professional baseball

entering 2023. And he then stole 43 bases in 2023 alone. So if you want to talk about players who took advantage of the new rules, Nico Horner should probably be on that list. Combined 345 games in the minors and the majors prior to 2023, stole 42 bags. 150 games in 2023, stole 43. However, my highlight for the Cubs is the season of Miguel Amaya, who was a rookie catcher for the Cubs. There are a couple notable things about Miguel Amaya.

One is that he attempted to frame a pitch that bounced. So, and it bounced, you know, into the center of the strike zone and he really framed it. Like he held it there for a while as if he thought he might actually get that call. He did not get that call. It reminded me of, you know, sometimes in the Little League World Series, you'll see a kid try to frame a pitch that's like three feet outside and it's amusing. Sometimes it even works at that level. But this is that same sort of energy, just like, hey, why not? My glove is there. I might as well hold it and see if the umpire was paying attention. Are you aware of all of the Travis Darnot instances of this?

Yeah, yeah. It's not the first time. All the time. And it is, I had at some point made a Twitter thread of Travis Darnot framing pitches that were so far. And I, you know what? No offense to Travis Darnot, but I think this guy did it better. No, yeah.

I mean, if you somehow didn't notice that it bounced, then you would say, well, how is that not a strike, right? I mean, umpires have to blink at least once. An umpire has to blink during the flight of a pitch. And if you blink and then look down and see that, you probably call it a strike. That would be embarrassing. I wouldn't be surprised if that's happened at some point at some level of baseball. But you know what?

This is I need to find out an answer to this thing that I'm about to present to you, which is in the world of robo zones, could a ball bounce early enough and then travel through the zone and get counted? Because you're right, this pitch, I've now watched this clip a thousand times, and he doesn't jerk it into the zone. Like it's not, he doesn't grab it off the ground and try to frame it. It bounces into the middle of the zone and that's where he frames the pitch. And so now I am curious if that were to happen with a robo zone, because it appears to bounce before the plate, would that have counted as a

strike? The new money ball is cricket bowlers. I was going to say, yeah. I mean, StatCast tracks the entire flight of the pitch, right? So in theory, it should know that it bounced. But I guess you'd have to make sure that you programmed it to actually make sure that it was looking at the entire flight and not just where the pitch ended up, right? at the entire flight and not just where the pitch ended up, right? Because if it were just looking at where it crossed the plate without factoring in the flight of the ball, then you very well could end up with an erroneous strike call there. I believe that the part of the sort of consternation around the robo zone as it stands is where to measure where the ball passes, that they've changed it from being the front of the plate

to the middle of the plate to the hole of the plate, that whether or not that plane should be two-dimensional or three-dimensional and where it should be measuring is a subject of conversation and continued evolution. And right, if they had gone with a two-dimensional plane, that would have been called a strike by the RoboZone. Yeah, man, we shouldn't have mentioned this. We could have just hoped that MLB never factored this into the calculations

and we could have gotten a bounce pitch strike. I asked historian Richard Hershberger if there was ever a time during the foundational days of baseball where pitches that hit the ground were eligible to be called strikes. And he said no, because of course you could catch balls on a bounce and you could catch foul balls on a bounce like through the 1870s, like in actual National League history, you could do that. It is kind of weird because it's like if you hit a ball that bounces, it still counts. I mean, that happens once in a while. And if you get hit by a ball that bounces, then it still counts as a hit by pitch,

right? It's not a ball. So you could say, wouldn't it be consistent to have this be a strike? But then, yeah, we would have just reinvented cricket, I guess. And you would have like bounce pitch specialists, which would be kind of cool, but also it would probably be pretty hard to hit those pitches. I would imagine Vladimir Guerrero returns as baseball's best player. Yeah. Not that he was bad before, but it's like, this is my time. Yeah. So that wasn't the only thing that was notable about Miguel Amaya though. The other thing that was notable about him, and he was apparently a pretty good framer on like actual pitches that were eligible to be framed.

So, you know, he was a couple of runs above average and 200 plus innings as a catcher. So maybe he was just like, I don't want to get out of my rhythm. You know, like this is my framing technique. I'll stick with it, even though this ball bounced. Might as well try it. But he also got hit by pitches a whole heck of a lot. So he had only 156 plate appearances this year. He got hit by 11 pitches.

That's a lot in that number of plate appearances. In fact, he led all major leaguers, minimum 150 plate appearances in hit by pitch percentage. So he got hit in upwards of 7% of his plate appearances, which led the league. And he actually got hit five times in his first nine games in the big leagues, which at that point, it's like, do I even want to be here? Is this like punitive? Is this what big league baseball is like? I checked to see how unusual that was, like if that had ever happened before, if anyone had ever been hit that many times in their first nine games. And as it turns out, that happened twice this season alone because it

happened to Zach Netto also. He got hit five times. Zach Netto of the Angels got hit five times in his first nine games. He went on to get more playing time than Amaya did. So his rate came down. He got hit 16 times in 329 plate appearances. But that was notable because those are the only two times in history, or at least since World War II, which was as far back as I could go in Stathead without it timing out. That has never happened before. And it happened twice this season, which is both weird and random. And also, I guess, partly a reflection of the fact that the hit by pitch rate is really high now. It's like basically never been higher except for the 19th century than it has been

in the past couple of seasons. But no one was getting plunked as often as Miguel Amaya. That's probably more than you knew that you wanted to know about Miguel Amaya. You now know everything about him. Going to take the over on his OVP next year based on this. Yeah. For his sake, I hope that that part of it comes down because it's got to be a lot of bruises. I hope that that part of it comes down because it's got to be a lot of bruises. Okay. For the White Sox, we talked about aspects of this. This was submitted by Steve. The White Sox just had like the worst week of maybe any team potentially.

This was in August and this was commemorated in a Sox machine post by Jim Margolis, who noted that in this one week, so on Monday, Crane's Chicago business reported that the White Sox were beginning to explore relocation, potentially to sites outside the Chicago city limits, but also potentially outside of Chicago entirely. On Tuesday, Jerry Reinstar fired Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn, which I guess if you were a White Sox fan might not have been such bad news. But then on Wednesday, Bob Nightingale reported that Chris Goetz was expected to be promoted to take over that job with Dayton Moore maybe being brought in to assist him. On Thursday, nothing notable happened off the field, but the White Sox gave up five home runs in a loss to the worst team in baseball, the Oakland A's. And then on Friday was that weird incident with the shooting, with the bullets at the park.

Right. Which. Yeah. Do you remember what exactly happened there? I forget what the resolution of that story was. I should know this because my husband is a sports editor at the Associated Press, and they were all over this story for some reason and continued to provide updates to me on the niche machinations around the security investigation and everything. But I don't totally even remember if they decided it came from inside the park. Like, I think they did decide it came from inside the park, right? That it was, like, initially that was also a question? Yeah, that was sort of disputed, right? The victim said in September, I heard a loud pop,

I felt an impact on my leg and I looked down and I did not see anything. I thought somebody in the crowd had thrown a beer can or something, bottled water or something. There was nothing there. But then her leg was bleeding. And then I realized I had been shot. And the game continued. The White Sox played on. So it's not to cause a panic is what the White Sox said. But yeah, there was all sorts of speculation and rumors about what actually happened. And the police initially said that the shot was fired inside the ballpark, but then they were considering whether it came from outside the ballpark. I don't know if this is like still an unsolved mystery. Is this still an active case? But yeah, that was that was a weird story.

So all of that happened within one week. So White Sox fans were reeling. I thought the White Sox played on because they didn't know this had happened. Did they actually say that they played on so as not to cause a – were you editorializing? No, that is what I read in this story that I'm reading as we are recording. That seems concerning, right? That they would just be like, in the event of a shooting, we think it's best to just keep going. Yeah, no, that sounds like a bad approach to that situation. Yeah. I'm reading an ABC7 Chicago story that says the White Sox decided to let the game continue so as not to cause a panic. I don't know if that is accurate.

I hope that that's inaccurate. I hope they just didn't notice. They felt the need in all of these stories to make this woman deny that she brought a gun into the ballpark. I guess they thought she shot herself. That was one theory. Yes. Right. So this was a weird story all around. It was a weird season

for the White Sox, but all of that was concentrated within one weird and stressful week for White Sox fans. I texted my husband, who's literally just in the other room, but I figured this would be a quieter way of communicating with him. I said, the White Sox shooting, what do we know now? And he said, basically nothing. And I said, do we know if the shooting came from in or out of the park? And he said, no. So that's your official update from the Associated Press. Okay. Yeah. It's an X-file at this point, basically. Cincinnati Reds. One weird thing that happened, these submissions from Josh and Peter, for the first time in history, I suppose, a pitcher gave up more runs than he threw pitches in the game, which was a product of the zombie runner,

naturally. Derek Law pitching for the Reds against Atlanta on April 10th, zero innings pitch, two runs charged, one pitch thrown, right? Because he came in, he inherited the zombie runner, and he gave up a game-winning home run to Sean Murphy on the first pitch that he threw. So two runs on one pitch. So only guy in history who can say that, I suppose, which I hate the zombie runner, but that's kind of fun, I guess, if we have to have it, that something weird like that could potentially happen. We haven't had like a perfect game loss or any of the strange scenarios that could happen with a zombie runner, but that at least happened. However, the main story for the Reds here is the return and subsequent release of Michael Marriott.

I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's not spelled quite like the hotel. It's only one T. Michael Marriott came up with the Reds in September after going on a real odyssey. He had been everywhere and played everywhere because he had initially made the majors. He just turned 35, but he made the majors like with the Royals and the Phillies 2014, 2015, 2016, and then was not back in the big leagues until this year with the Reds. And in between, he played in Taiwan. He actually got released, I think, from his Taiwanese team. He played in Mexico. He played in Indy Ball. He played in several minor league organizations. And finally, he set a deadline that if he was not signed by someone by June 9th, he was going to retire. That's so specific.

It was extremely specific. He chose June 9th because he was going to go with his family to Hawaii and he booked flights and a hotel that would be leaving on June 16th. And the last day he could cancel the trip without paying a penalty was June 9th. So if he had not gotten an offer by June 9th, he was going to pitch one more time for Cleburne in the American Association in Gary, Indiana.

And then he was going to call it a career. And on that very day, the Cincinnati Reds called and said, come pitch for us. So he got back to the big leagues. The Reds pitching staff was just like ruined in the end of the year because injuries, COVID, they were just extremely shorthanded. They ended up using, I think, 65 players on the season, which was, I think, second only to the Angels, maybe. So they were just going through pitchers like the Angels used a lot, the A's used a lot. The Reds were actually a winning team, which is not typical of a team that's using a ton of players like that, but they were. And Michael Marriott was part of that parade, but he made it back, which was great and heartwarming.

And David Bell, Red's manager, said at some point in the next couple of days, I want to have him take me through the whole journey. And I hope they did that immediately because the very next day, Michael Marriott was designated for assignment. So that's the end of that story, which is a little less heartwarming. But he did at least make it back, which was nice. And hopefully he was happy that he stuck it out and didn't go to Hawaii, though I'm sure Hawaii would have been nice, too. He had a 6.49 ERA in 51 and a third innings at AAA, which really tells you what the Reds were looking at in September. Yeah, yeah. And he pitched pretty well, though, in his one big league game,

which could be his last. He pitched two and two thirds, gave up one run. So that one went okay, if you don't look at the FIP at least. So that was a happy ending, at least until the next day when it was sort of a sad ending to the happy story. Elsewhere in Ohio, Cleveland Guardian story. This was submitted by Nick, and it's about Josh Naylor's late game heroics, his late game go-ahead homers.

I don't think I was aware of quite the extent of this. Of course, Sarah Langs was all over the fun facts here. Naylor, he hit a go-ahead home run in the eighth inning in three consecutive games and was the first player, at least in the expansion era, to do that, to hit a go-ahead homer in the eighth or later in three straight games. that to hit a go-ahead homer in the eighth or later in three straight games. And Sarah tweeted that he now has eight go-ahead homers in the eighth inning or later since the start of 2021, which is two more than anyone else in the majors in that span. So if I were to ask you, who do you think has the most go-ahead homers in the eighth inning or later over the past few seasons? Probably you wouldn't say Josh Naylor Probably wouldn't be your first guess, but that would be the correct guess.

Josh Naylor just turns into Babe Ruth in the eighth inning or later when the Cardians really need a go-ahead home run. Didn't he headbutt Terry Francona or smash his head on a helmet or something after a go-ahead late home run a couple years ago? Maybe he has learned something since then. Hang on. I'm going to save that. Yeah. Look it up. That's probably a story we missed in whatever year that was. Yes. June 29th, 2022, Josh Naylor painfully headbutts Terry Francona after a walk-off win. On purpose?

Unclear. Hang on. on purpose uh unclear hang on okay well one way or another that's uh that's a good segue actually into our rocky's story here which is uh almost an almost painful head related collision so i'll uh i'll paste this into our little window here for you to look at, too, in case you miss this. But Noah Davis, who is pitching for the Rockies and I think was making his major league debut, his first start, there was a line drive, a comebacker back through the box. And he, yeah, he turned his back to it like he spun around, which I guess understandable impulse, but could have been bad if he'd been hit in the back of the head. But he ducked just under it and it hit his hair. Maybe he has long curly hair, but also his hat. And it whisked his hat off his head, kind of like Charlie Brown style, where like Charlie Brown will get all his clothes and his hat knocked off by a line drive. It was like that. He escaped getting hit in his head, which was good.

But I don't know that I've ever seen that exact thing happen. The hair does seem to be a contributing factor to protecting his head. It's providing some level of insulation between the hat and his head. Because if you're trying to picture this and you're like, but if it hit his hat, wouldn't it hit his head? And he's got a thick mop of curly hair. Yeah, it might not have hit his hat at all if he hadn't had so much hair. It might have just been above his airspace. But as it was, it hit the cap. Glad he's OK. his airspace, but as it was, it hit the cap. Glad he's okay. And secondly, lastly, Rockies related,

we got a message from Corey, who is a long suffering Rockies fan, who says, Meg asked on an episode a couple months ago, whether any Rockies fans listened to the podcast and if they did, whether it made them sad when y'all remark about how bad they are. I will say the Rockies being the butt of most jokes on every baseball show I listen to does make me sad, but that's not your fault. It's the team's for having earned that derision. Okay. But Corey said there's some reason for hope, maybe optimism. Many things about the Colorado Rockies go unnoticed by the general public because, well, they're bad at most things. 2023, however, brought with it a notable change in the way the organization operates that I think is worth remarking on. They traded with other teams significantly more than they have in a long, long time. According to SpotTrack's transaction tracker from the end of the 2022 regular season

through the end of the 2023 regular season, Bill Schmidt's Rockies made 15 trades. Compare that to Jeff Breidich's final three plus years as GM, where the Rockies made a total of 12 trades. Most of these deals were relatively minor, with the exception of the Nolan Jones trade, but getting back even back of the rotation prospects like Mason Albright and Jake Madden for veterans on expiring contracts is simply something the Rockies didn't do for years. Their reputation as extremely insular was earned, but under Schmidt, it appears it may be time to alter our expectations of them. If that turnaround in willingness to talk to other orgs doesn't fit the bill,

there's also the opening of their performance lab. They have begun trying to catch up with the rest of the league in terms of analytics and development. In 2020, they had an R&D department of one employee, which has risen to 11, still second lowest in MLB, and they've completed construction on the aforementioned performance lab

that will open in January. So they are now maybe on an island, but they are at least trading with other teams who are not on islands. And they have followed suit and opened a performance lab, which was all the rage like four years ago. So they finally got on board with the performance lab trend. I'm not sure the Rockies discover trades is a sign of optimism. I mean, yeah, you got to take the optimism where you can get it, I guess. So, Ben, I have to give you I think you're underrating you.

You guys did talk about that. I listened to the episode where I believe you recapped the bold predictions. Yes, that is true. I snidely predicted that they would not make any trades. And you were forced to acknowledge that they did. Yes. I guess I had not realized the extent of the trading that they had done, but I was aware that they had made a trade, which was progress, I guess.

Okay. Okay. So the headbutt of Terry Francona was intentional. We have determined. Yes. And Terry was wearing a helmet, so he was fine. Okay. I hope he has a happy retirement and no one headbutts him intentionally or unintentionally.

All right. Detroit Tigers submitted by Isaac and Chris. The first thing is that Matt Manning broke the same foot twice this season, both times on comebackers. Unlike Noah Davis, he did not avoid the line drives back. He got hit and broke bones in the same foot, like at the beginning of the season and toward the end of the season, which is extremely snake bitten, line drive bitten. And in between, he pitched OK. drive bitten. And in between, he pitched okay. The peripherals weren't so strong, but he pitched pretty well, all things considered, given the fact that he was between broken feet. I would say he had a pretty successful season. So not the greatest Tiger season, but Manning and Torkelson and Green

and others made some strides. Scooble was good. So the core was kind of coming together, despite the fact that everyone was trying to break Matt Manning's foot and multiple times successfully. So that sucks. I have no thoughts about that. Foot injuries are so unpleasant to think about. Yeah. And the second submission was the existence of Tyler Holton, who we probably didn't talk about on the podcast, but he existed and he was an important contributor to the Tigers bullpen. And the interesting thing about Tyler Holton was that the Tigers claimed him off waivers from the Diamondbacks, who had placed him on waivers because they signed Andrew Chafin away from the Tigers. Chafin had been with the Tigers and was good in 2022. So the Diamondbacks signed him away from the Tigers. Chafin had been with the Tigers and was good in 2022.

So the Diamondbacks signed him away from the Tigers. They had to make room. So they cut Tyler Holton adrift. The Tigers said, OK, we'll take Tyler Holton. And then Tyler Holton outpitched Andrew Chafin. So it worked out really well, I guess, for the Tigers and for Tyler Holton, who tied for the major league lead in relief innings pitched. I think he and whoever else he tied with, I think it was Jake Bird, also of the Rockies, was an opener at times. But that's kind of nice. That wasn't quite a trade, but in effect, it was a trade and it worked out quite well

for the Tigers. This could get even worse for the Diamondbacks and better for the Tigers. I mean, we have no indication they're going to do this, but Mike Xisa at CBS Sports just wrote about Holton as a pitcher who could become a starter, basically, a reliever who could become a starter a la Zach Littell last year or Michael Lorenzen. And so maybe he could take Eduardo Rodriguez's spot and poke the Diamondbacks in the eye again. Yeah. Okay.

Now we are up to the Houston Astros. This was submitted by Michael. This is something that I was aware of, though I don't know that we brought it up. But the Dusty Baker, Chaz McCormick playing time pudding saga. Does that ring a bell? There was something about him being overweight. Yeah. Yeah. Right. does that ring a bell there was something about him being overweight yeah yeah right so there was some controversy about how much mccormick was playing or not playing some astros fans were

upset that he wasn't the everyday starter although at that point he was really the regular starter maybe some platoon splits issues or whatever but people were wondering why he wasn't playing absolutely every day one of the things there was like a report that maybe Baker was concerned about McCormick's weight, which he denied. Michael writes in to say, amid frequent outcry and concerns about Dusty Baker's reluctance to consistently start Chaz McCormick, Chandler Rome wrote an article for The Athletic detailed how a source from within the team claimed that Dusty privately had issues with McCormick's weight. Dusty then publicly responded to the allegations with an incredibly amusing defense centered around his frequent procurement of banana pudding for Chaz McCormick.

Quote, as far as his weight is concerned, if I had something against him with his weight, and you can ask him, I wouldn't bring him banana pudding once a week. I stopped by. I get him banana pudding. If I was concerned about a guy's weight, I would not bring a guy banana pudding. So I guess that's a conclusive defense. The banana pudding defense could not have been concerned about his weight because if I had been, would not have brought him so much banana pudding. So Michael wants to know what our take is either on that situation or on banana pudding in general. My thing is that I am very unhappy to learn at this point and only at this point that he name dropped where the pudding came from. I knew this story, but I did not know that we could have gone and gotten the pudding ourselves.

I just Googled this. I was like, that's where he got the pudding? I love banana pudding. I was like, that's where you got the pudding? I love banana pudding. And I spend a lot of time in Houston in service of covering baseball because the Astros have been quite good lately. And I have a really great rotation of all-day cafes and breakfast places in Houston if you ever need them because I spent a lot of time there for the years. But I didn't know about Houston This Is is it. Soul food. Yeah. Banana pudding. I think that may have been like a story we missed about the Astros in a previous season.

Dusty Baker's food buying for his team. But yeah, this started sooner, but it just it flared up. It became a controversy because of McCormick's playing time. So I don't have strong feelings about banana pudding personally. But I love banana pudding. And I, in fact, have Magnolia Bakery here in New York has banana pudding personally, but I love banana pudding. And I in fact have Magnolia bakery here in New York has banana pudding cookies that they make. They put banana pudding in the batter and then make cookies out of it. And those are, those are quite good too.

Okay. Wow. All right. Well, that's, that's a food that we've missed, not just a story that we've missed, but we can rectify that in 2024. Kansas City Royals. Okay. This one was not submitted by anyone. It was me just realizing that this player existed. was a speedster for the Royals who stole 71 bases, not in the majors, that you probably would have known, but in the minors and the majors combined, 71 steals in 118 games and, you know, didn't have like the greatest on base percentages or anything. So I would guess that as a percentage of opportunities, all levels combined, he must have been way up there. And, you know, he's 30 years old. It was his first season getting regular playing time, but total speed demon, Dairon Blanco. So that's something to know about the Royals. Maybe even more noteworthy, though, and this was submitted by Robert. Now, you probably are aware of Zach Greinke's win-loss record because we don't talk that much

about pitcher wins and losses anymore, but we do maybe when the pitcher goes 2-15, right? And especially when it's Zach Greinke. We like Zach Greinke. We don't want to see him lose. But one of his wins, I did not know this, he threw 44 pitches in a start and got the win in a five-inning start.

This was May 3rd, 2023. He threw five innings. He gave up three hits, three strikeouts, no walks, 44 pitches, and he got the win. He is the first to start a game and get a win throwing 45 or fewer pitches since Greg Maddox. You would guess, I guess, that the Maddox, the person who authored the Maddox would also author a 43 pitch win. I don't know what that's like a less than a half Maddox. I don't want to know what to call that. But Maddox in 2003 won a game, five pitch start, 43 pitches.

And Sid Fernandez in 1993 did it with also a five pitch start. So I guess every 10 or 20 years, a year ending in three, someone has a start where they win a game throwing 40 some pitches, which I would not have imagined could or would happen in this era of baseball. Against the Orioles. So yeah, that that had to be a pretty rare occurrence against the Orioles. So yeah, that, that had to be a pretty rare occurrence against the Orioles to have any innings go that quickly. Yeah. For him to win a game at all was a rare occurrence. I know he's wanting to come back. I hope he comes back. I want baseball to include Zach Granke for as long as possible. It was not such a successful season, but that was, I guess that's the model of how you want a Zach Greinke game to go. Just incredibly efficient, not walking anyone, not really striking out anyone, just getting

fortuitous contact and good defense behind him and 44 pitch win. Who knew? Okay. The Angels already mentioned the Fletcher versus Fletcher story. The only other thing that I wanted to mention for the Angels submitted by Scott is that the Angels are now the only organization never to have lost 100 games in a season because the Rockies did, finally. These are two teams that we tend to dump on, right? But the Rockies until 2023 had not ever lost 100

games this season. Now they have. And that leaves the Angels as the lone team standing. I honestly didn't realize that. They haven't been abysmal, obviously, in recent seasons. We've talked so much about how they have lost despite their stars, but their stars have been good enough that they've never been truly bad. But they've like never really been truly bad. And the Angels go back a ways, right? They're not like one of the more recent expansion teams. So that's actually pretty impressive that they have avoided being truly terrible, even as they have also avoided being good lately. This is one of those extreme facts that is going to stop being true the moment you notice it.

Probably, yeah. It could well stop being true in 2024. If ever there was a year to predict the Angels to lose 100 games, this might be it. This could be it. Okay. The other Los Angeles team, these were submitted by Peter and Zan. So one was the Freddie dance celebration that caught on. You know, every team has some sort of celebration. The Freddie dance happened because he was at the Dodgers Foundation Blue Diamond Gala and he was caught on camera doing this dance where he was like mostly standing still, but waving his arms kind of like one of those like car dealership balloon guys.

And that caught on. I guess it was fond mockery maybe. And so the Freddie dance became the thing that Dodgers would do. Let's say after extra base hits, people would do the Freddie dance. So that's something to know about the Dodgers. But the other thing to know about them is the hottest Dodger bracket. You may both be aware of this. It's a thing online on Twitter. It's been a thing for a few years. But McKenna Martin, a Dodgers fan, started this in 2018 just without thinking that it would turn into anything. Just put like a Dodgers hotness bracket on and tweeted it and people discussed it and it like blew up and it became a thing and they talked about it on MLB Network. And this year it blew up even more like it's progressively gotten more and more noteworthy

every year. Dodgers broadcaster Steven Nelson filled out the hottest Dodger bracket this year and tweeted it like it's been a subject of some discussion among players and personnel with the team. And it is now done for a good cause other than time wasting on the internet, which is also a pretty good cause. But an even better cause is that after all the Trevor Bauer allegations, Martin decided to use this to drum up support for domestic violence relief and solicit donations and has raised several thousands of dollars in the past couple hottest Dodger brackets. Like this year, more than $9,000 raised by people inspired by the hottest Dodger bracket.

So it has become a force for good in the world, as well as a force for wasting time and being thirsty about Los Angeles Dodgers. Well, this is lovely. Who won? Who's the hottest Dodger? Yeah, I guess. The thing is that like, that is a natural question, right? But I guess there is no real winner. Like, I guess it's part of the spirit of the Dodger, the hottest Dodger bracket is that it's just subjective. You know, it's up to you. Everyone fills out their bracket, but it's not a tournament to check it against.

Right. It's because who decides who the hottest Dodger is ultimately, right? I guess. So there can be no ultimate winner. I guess it's like we don't want to make anyone feel bad about not being the hottest Dodger, right? So it's kind of everyone- They're Dodgers. I'm sure they feel fine regardless. Everyone determines their own hottest Dodger. The hottest Dodger in their heart, I guess, is the idea. I did look up the bracket just to see if they were seated and they don't

appear to be seated. They are matched up. I'm curious if, because that I actually think whoever wins the hottest Dodger is not nearly as insulting as having to do the seeding of the Dodgers. That's true. And especially with this offseason,

I mean, they just added Otani and Tyler Glass now. I was going to say. It's like two number one seeds. Just got pretty competitive. Yeah. I think McKenna does some seeding like without actually assigning seeds, but I'm reading a Dodger Blue post. When the bracket was first created, all the names were put in a randomizer, but it led

to some brutal early round matchups, including an infamous second round Corey Seager versus Kike Hernandez battle. round matchups, including an infamous second round Corey Seager versus Kike Hernandez battle. As a result, each year since I go through and do a cursory seed based on historical favorites and my judgment. So there's some human input into the actual bracket. But after that, it's up to each person's personal taste. Who do you think was the hottest Dodger of 2023? And I'm just going to tell you who they were seeded against. Man, okay. Hottest Dodger.

James Outman did well, I think, in hottest Dodger bracket in my reading on this subject. So he'd probably be pretty high up there. He doesn't appear to be in a top seed type spot. Yeah. And his first round is against Dustin May. Oof. No points for height, huh? Yeah.

I don't know. Jason Hayward, JDM. Yeah, Jason Hayward's a good under the radar contender there. Yeah. Okay. Well, fill out your own hottest dodger brackets and let us know. Okay. Miami, fill out your own hottest Dodger brackets and let us know. Okay. Miami Marlins. This one was the toughest one to fill. Maybe not as many Marlins fans perhaps, but a couple

submissions. One, we talked about their deadline trades at the time. They were pretty active at the deadline. And I think we applauded them for trying, but also the consensus was they kind of gave up a lot maybe in those trades. But the offensive additions worked out really well. The pitching additions, not so much. David Robertson, Ryan Weathers, Jorge Lopez, not so great. But Jake Berger and Josh Bell did great as Marlins. So they were, I think, along with John Birdie, the best hitters on the Marlins after the

All-Star break. So it was Birdie, Bell, and Berie, the best hitters on the Marlins after the All-Star break. So it was Birdie, Bell, and Berger, the killer bees of 2023. They bolstered a lineup that was not good and was actually worse after the break than it was before, but would have been a lot worse if not for those trades. Berger breaking through with them was a nice story. Obviously, he's been around and was a big prospect and has had injuries and everything. So well done adding to that team just enough maybe for them to make the playoffs. But the main one here is a quote by Jeffrey Loria, who normally we're probably not going

to be complimentary about things that Jeffrey Loria said or did, but he came out in August and he blasted Derek Jeter for the alterations that he made to Marlins Park. And I feel like we're all kind of on board with Luria here because Jeter consigned the Marlins home run sculpture to like outside the stadium, right? Which was one of the redeeming elements of that stadium. And I guess it wasn't professional and Yankee like enough. And he banished the home run sculpture. And Loria claimed that Jeter destroyed the ballpark. He said destroying public art was a horrible thing to do. We're calling the home run sculpture public art. I think it qualifies. I think it qualifies. And Loria talked about he tried to get it back and the artist didn't want to get involved. Now it will rot outside where it is condemned to neglect and outdoor decay. And Loria also condemned Jeter doing away with the colorful tiles that they had and making everything kind of bland and blue and removing the fish tanks behind home plate.

All the characters, the Miami touches in Marlins Park, gone during the Jeter era. But now that the Jeter era is over, maybe we can bring it back. I think this is one thing Jeffrey Lurie is right about. Yeah, I don't know if Peter Bendix, the new GM there, has control of this. But, you know, the Rays have a tank. They could at least get the tank back, I feel like. Yeah. Okay. We're halfway through. You're like, wait, how long, the Rays have a tank. They could at least get the tank back, I feel like. Yeah. Okay. We're halfway through. You're like, wait, how long are Effectively Wild episodes?

Again, what did I agree to? Sorry. We will try to go a little faster. Milwaukee Brewers. This comes from Nathan, and it concerns Caleb Bushley's debut. Are you aware of Caleb Bushley? Not even a little bit.

Okay. Me neither. I wasn't, but now I am. So Caleb Bushley, just another entry in the kind of heartwarming guy made the majors after having a long road to get to that point. And Bushley came up tail end of the season, September 30th, the Brewers had already clinched the division and they were playing the Cubs and he struck out five Cubs in two and a third innings, got the win. So he was called up from AAA Nashville. He's a Wisconsin native who grew up going to Brewers games and rooting for the Brewers. He's from Hortonville, Wisconsin.

The MLB.com story says he estimated he had around 400 family and friends on hand in the ballpark. 400 family. I don't have that many friends. Right. Let alone who would come to the ballpark. I mean, I guess they're all in the area, but 400 family and friends. Is he interested in managing the team? I know.

They could use a local boy turned manager. Yeah. There were fewer than 40,000 fans in the park that day. So like more than 1%. Yeah, I initially thought 10% and I was like, no, 1%. But still, 1% of the fans of the park that day were either family or friends of Caleb Bushley. Like if he could actually bring out that many people,

they should employ him just to sell tickets. Like you wouldn't think Caleb Bushley would like, oh, Caleb Bushley puts butts in the seats, but apparently he put 400 butts in the seats. Granted, it was his first game. So maybe 400 wouldn't come to every game, but 400. Can you imagine like on short notice too? If I messaged everyone in my phone in the contacts, I don't know that I would get, I mean, 400 people. That's just a ton of people. I'm going to let the two of you continue to exclaim about how you don't have that many friends because I don't have that many friends either, but I don't feel nearly as comfortable admitting. That's an abnormal number of friends. He must be just a great guy. The town of Hortonville, Wisconsin has a population of like 3,000 people. So I guess they're all friends of Caleb Bushley. I mean, you know, pride of Hortonville, maybe. But he's a former 33rd round draft pick, which I'm going to miss when we stop getting debuts by like 30 something rounds guys. Cause they don't have those rounds anymore. I always love when someone in a really late round will, will come up and do that. But he bounced around a lot and, uh, he got to get into that game and it was heartwarming and everyone he ever knew or met was there to watch. So that's really nice, I guess. Okay. I actually looked up this game

and as it turns out, I watched this game. Caleb Bushley was not i actually looked up this game and as it turns out i watched this game caleb bushley was not the reason i watched this game but this was when the cubs were in free fall too i mean they just kept finding a way to lose games that would hit like any one of these games would have put them in the playoffs and they lost all of them and uh i think this was yeah he he pitched in extra innings and the Cubs loaded the bases against him, but wisdom struck out swinging. And then Carlos Santana won the game for the Brewers the next day. Yeah. I think he gave up the lead. He gave up a homer to Ian Happ, and then he stayed in the game and he ultimately ended up winning. So the Brewers called it the

Caleb Bushley game. Where were you for the Caleb Bushley game? They tweeted. And I guess if you know Caleb Bushley, you were at the Caleb Bushley game. They were all like several seating sections behind first base, apparently were just acquaintances and friends of Caleb Bushley. All right. That's the Caleb Bushley game. Next, we have the Minnesota Twins. There were a few submissions we got. One was the sad death of Mike Radcliffe, who was the Twins VP of player personnel and went back to the 80s with them as an area scout and was absolutely beloved. He was their scouting director. He drafted Joe Maurer. He drafted Torrey Hunter, like everyone, multiple twins cores. His fingerprints were all over that team and he was beloved.

And if you ever talk to a twins front office person, which I have, they will just spontaneously bring up how much they love and respect the scouting acumen of Mike Radcliffe. He was in his 60s. He had cancer. He passed away, sadly. I guess on a lighter, more positive note, they had a fun call-up too. And it concerned Cody Funderburk. So the fact that Cody Funderburk exists is worthy of mention. But also he had an extremely Minnesotan call-up because he was on his way to the state fair to enjoy a AAA off day.

And he got the call and he had to skip the state fair because he was needed at Target Field that night. And of course, the Twins, you know, St. Paul, they have their AAA team just a short ride away, which is highly convenient. Most teams don't have that. So Cody Funderburk was able to change his plans and go to the game instead of the state fair. But the state fair is like a huge, huge thing in Minnesota. So he was living his best Minnesota life and then had to divert to an even better life. He got to be in the big leagues, but it was a well-deserved call up and obviously a great name as well. And he went to school in Dallas, so I'm guessing he was familiar with state fairs already. Yeah, probably so. So just taking in some of the local color.

And also we got a submission that's from Paul, Chris, Joel. Someone suggested we talk about Ryan Jeffers and how good he was, kind of a breakout at catcher. And Mitch Garber had been a previous breakout at catcher for the Twins know, Mitch Garver had been a previous breakout at catcher for the twins. And Ryan Jeffers was this year. They were among the best hitting catchers in 2023, although Garver was mostly DHing. But those two actually had a run in, I noted in August, where Mitch Garver and Ryan Jeffers, twins breakout catchers, surprise catchers were at each other's throats and were upset with each other because the twins were playing the Rangers.

And there were, you know, both benches cleared and Jeffers got hit. And he reacted in a way that angered the Rangers. And Garver was especially vocal. Sonny Gray hit Mitch Garver and everything was just going wrong, right? Garver didn't take his plunking kindly. And I think Garver called Jeffers an idiot, which is not nice. So I guess their shared history. Sorry, it was Dane Dunning, actually, who called Ryan Jeffers idiotic for his actions during that fracas. But the Rangers not pleased with Ryan Jeffers idiotic for his actions during that fracas. But the Rangers not pleased with Ryan Jeffers, but the twins were. Next one, we're up to the New York Mets.

How could there be anything we didn't talk about with the New York Mets this year? Well, there was one thing, and that's that Francisco Lindor finally made good on his promise to buy Jeff McNeil a car for winning the 2022 batting title. During the 2022 season, Lindor had just idly said to McNeil that if he won the batting title, he would buy him a car. And then McNeil did win the batting title, but Lindor did not buy him a car. For some time, a year went by, Lindor would periodically be asked, where was the car? Put up or shut up, make good on your promise? And he said, oh, I will.

But he didn't say when or how. Finally, he did. Just last month in November, he bought him a car and it was a brand new Ford Bronco. You didn't talk about this? Did you talk about the lack of Lindor buying him a car? No, I don't think we talked about that even. This entirely escaped podcast notice. Which is interesting just because I feel like it was such a top of mind topic in New York.

I feel like I talked about this ad nauseum throughout the season of like, shouldn't someone just buy him the car? I heard from people who were convinced that this was like why they were, that the Mets were bad, that this had brought bad karma on the Mets, that at some point. Mets fandom is not a mentally healthy place. Cohen should just step in and buy the car, like break the curse or whatever it was. Yeah, I guess that's good news for the Mets in 2024. 2024. We certainly talked about like the rat raccoon Lindor McNeil thing a couple of years ago where they had an altercation and had a cover story for it and everything. But I guess they made up enough that Lindor finally did deliver on the car. And that reminded some people in our Facebook

group of the fact that Mike Piazza, when he set the record for most home runs by a catcher, the Mets gave him a Chevy SSR and people were wondering what happened to the Piazza SSR. It was this like aggressively yellow, sporty car. And according to a forum post that was turned up by our listeners, someone claimed that it was on sale because he lost it in a bet. Someone claimed that it was on sale because he lost it in a bet. Cannot confirm or refute that that's the case, but it's possible that he lost it in a game of sabacc like Lando lost the Millennium Falcon. Although it looks more like an Abu starfighter. Anyway, just in case you were wondering what may have happened to Mike Piazza's SSR. You know, Lindor didn't give McNeil a Porsche or anything like Otani did with Joe Kelly.

You know, a Ford Bronco is maybe not quite as exciting, but maybe it's more useful. Maybe it's more practical. I wonder though whether McNeil, he didn't have a good season this year. So I wonder whether it's weird for him to get the prize for the batting title in a season when he was not hitting for a high average. He batted 270 this year,

which is quite low by Jeff McNeil standards. And yet he's being rewarded for his 326 average the previous season. Probably strange for him. I wonder if there was like a side bet where Lindor told him like, OK, I'm not going to give you the car yet, but I'll give you a really nice car if you do it again. And it was like, nope, sorry. Right. Just afford Bronco. All right. For the Yankees, says Andrew and Eli. Now, this you probably were aware of the disastrous Carlos Rodon last start for the Yankees, right? I mean, his whole season was disastrous, but his last start in particular, zero innings pitched. He did not get an out. He faced eight batters through 35 pitches, which was almost as many as Zach Reinke threw in that win. pitches, which was almost as many as Zach Reinke threw in that win. But Carlos Rodon did not get a win. He gave up six hits, two walks, one homer, eight earned runs. And that was actually not the worst start of the season if you go by game score, because, you know, if you give up more hits and runs, it counts against you. Right. And so if you have a really short start, even if it's a truly

terrible start, you won't rack up as awful a game score. So his game score was like four, but there were people who had negative game scores. However, it was the worst zero innings pitched game score ever. And there have been hundreds of them over the years. This was the worst start ever where the pitcher did not get an out. So that was one accomplishment by Carlos Rodon. And then we got an email from Eli, Patreon supporter, who said, inspired by that start, that reminded him of the last Yankee to give up eight runs without getting an out, who was Bob Kammeyer, who gave up eight runs against Cleveland on September 18th, 1979. He had no other appearances that season,

so he had an infinite ERA. And Eli wanted to know, is that the most batters faced with an infinite ERA in a season? And I can answer, yes. Yes, it is. Eight batters faced is the record for an infinite ERA season. The runner-up is seven. Next one, we're up to the Ocones. We talked about them a lot this year, not for positive reasons usually. A couple suggestions. One was from Brandon. Actually, all of these were from Brandon. A couple Estuary Ruiz-related stories.

So we all know he set the rookie record for stolen bases. He sold 67 bases. He also had an extreme runners in scoring position split. He batted 365 with runners in scoring position and 214 with the bases empty. Also, he's not very good at defense. You'd think he would be because he's very fast, 97th percentile sprint speed, but he had negative OAA and like negative 17 defensive runs saved, which would have made him one of the worst fielders. And Brandon said, kind of weird to see someone who's so fast and yet also seemingly so bad at defense,

kind of like a Lou Brock skill set where you're really fast, but maybe you just don't get good reads or take good routes. So that's something to know about Estiari Ruiz. I think he was actually an infielder before in the minors. So I think he's still relatively new to the outfield, if that helps at all. Yeah, that's a mitigating circumstance. We're about to get to another infield-outfield conversion. But Brandon also noted, are you aware of the season that Zach Gelof had for the Oakland A's? I feel like this did not get

a lot of attention. It certainly did not get a lot of attention from us. Zach Gelof was really, really good. Rookie second baseman for the A's. He was called up mid-season. And after that date, he was 13th among position players in Fangraph's war. So he was like almost a top 10 player from July 14th was his first game of the season. It was like Mookie, Acuna, Freeman, Olsen, Julio, Semyon, Riley, Bobby Witt Jr., William Contreras, Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, JP Crawford, and Zach Gelof, who hit 267, 337, 504, maybe a little bit of batted ball luck involved there, but he was not a top

100 prospect anywhere before the start of the season. He was fifth on the fan graphs A's list, and it said maybe he has a shot to be an average second baseman someday. And he was one of the best players in baseball in 300 plate appearances after his call-up, which was maybe lost in the Superfund site that was the Oakland A's 2023 season. So that's a silver lining. I knew about Zach Gelof. I know he spells Zach wrong. But I thought of him as a power pull guy, like one of those sort of, honestly, a little bit of a Max Muncy type to recycle an old A that just pulls. But he actually steals a lot of bases, too.

He had 14 steals and 20 steals in the minors. So I underestimated his speed, apparently. I thought of him as a bulkier guy. Yeah, an old A and also a current A because there's the other Max Muncy who also plays for the A's. The other younger Max Muncy. Yes. Okay. Philadelphia Phillies.

Weston Wilson stayed at Nick Castellanos' house when he was called up to the Phillies. So this was submitted by Jeremy. Kind of touching. Nick Castellanos seems like a fun guy. You know, he's unbuttoning his jersey. Seems like a good hang. And he was a great hang for Weston Wilson. The two of them bonded in spring training for whatever reason. Castellanos took Weston Wilson under his wing. That's a

difficult sentence to say. He's a 29 year old and he was like utility guy. He played some outfield, played some infield, and he was up with the Phillies from time to time, got into eight games. But whenever he was up in the majors, he would just be put up with his wife, I believe, at... Weston Wilson's wife? Yeah, Weston Wilson's wife. Weston Wilson and Weston Wilson's wife both staying at the Castellanos. I wonder what Weston Wilson's wife is named. But that's a nice thing to do. I found out that Nick Castellanos' house used to be Ben Simmons' house, actually. It's a mansion. It's gigantic. And so I don't know whether Nick Castellanos even knew that Weston Wilson and his wife were there because just this gigantic house.

In fact, I looked up how big this house is. Apparently, it's six bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms. So, you know, Weston Wilson and his wife just taken up one of the six bedrooms. It's a 1.78 acre lot. So it's not like a lot of land or anything, but 10,500 square feet mansion. Yeah. So I guess if I had a 10,500 square foot mansion, I'd probably be like, sure, you can stay at my house too. I won't even notice that you're there. So I don't know. It's still a nice gesture. Do you know about the tattoo element? No, tell me. This is credit to Alex Coffey of the Philadelphia Inquirer who reported on this. I think it was as some sort of thank you for letting me stay or it was just a byproduct of

them being in the same house. But Weston Wilson did a tattoo for Nick Castellanos. He apparently does tattoos and he had his tattoo gun with him. According to Castellanos, we're about two bottles of wine deep. And he was like, I have my tattoo gun here. And I was like, I'll get a tattoo. Sure. Yeah, that sounds like Nick Castellanos to me. Why not? Do we know what the tattoo was? The tattoo was a J for his

wife or girlfriend's initial. Okay. Weston Wilson's wife, her name, I have discovered is, assuming it's the same original wife, is Madison. He proposed to her at a minor league baseball game that he was playing in right after she threw the first pitch. Oh, wow. That's nice. We got more. Nick Castellanos' wife is named Jess. Jess has an N on her hand. This is Nick Castellanos speaking. So I just said, all right, here, Jess, you get to draw a J on my hand. And Wes tattooed it completely spontaneous. But honestly, he did a great job and Jess is pumped about it. So sounds like they were having a great old time together. That's really nice. Yeah, that seems only fair just to reciprocate with the initial there. It's better than getting a 4070, I would say. Anyway, I sent you, I looked at the real estate listing,

some pictures of the Castellanos, former Simmons mansion. Look at this room. This is, it's the biggest couch I've ever seen. It's, it's almost like a 360 couch. Like the entire room is a couch almost with a giant screen. It's like a theater, but it has an enormous aquarium fish tank also in this room. Yeah. The fish tank is really what jumped out to me. The couch looks large, but sure, because the room is large. The tank in like this is clearly a room dedicated to to TV watching, movie watching. It's a theater with an aquarium. Yeah. You'd think the aquarium would like be loud, right?

Like the burbling and the gurgling while you're trying to watch something. Right. Anyway, it's a big enough house to accommodate all of Caleb Bushley's 400 friends, probably. So why not one Weston Wilson? Okay, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Submission from Guy. Now, some people mentioned the incredible comeback that the Pirates had. They came back from 9-0, which was a first for them in franchise history.

This was in September against the Reds, speaking of the Reds late season pitching staff. But that I think I will put to the side and just celebrate the breakout, the second breakout, the post-hype breakout of Brian Hayes, who I feel like for years we'd been like, if he could just hit a little,

he would be amazing because he's such an incredible fielder. I guess he got our hopes up that first fractional rookie season when he came up and was amazing with both the bat and the glove, like in fewer than 100 plate appearances. He had a 201 OPS and we're like, OK, this is the best player in baseball, I guess. And then he was a well below average hitter the next couple of seasons. He missed some time and everything. But this year he started off really slow and he made some mechanical tweaks like he started the season with a leg kick and then he traded in the leg kick for a toe tap. And then he went back to the leg kick and whatever it was, it really worked. After June,

he had a 127 WRC plus. He was a top 40 position player in that span, despite missing basically all of July with back inflammation, which probably hurt his hitting too. And despite that, he was a really good hitter in addition to being third in DRS, fourth in outs above average, so still an elite glove, but actually was hitting, really lowered his ground ball rate, doubled his launch angle or more than that on average. So it was all just like, can he elevate? Can he stop hitting the ball into the ground? And he did, especially toward the end of the season. And he was great. He was the Pirates' most valuable player. But if he could sustain that for all of next season,

he could be an MVP candidate. So I look forward to seeing if he can. Yeah, he's very fun when he is. Well, I still am choosing to remember his 2020, the crazy good 95 plate appearances as what Cabrian Hayes is. So maybe he'll be that and the Pirates will be good again. Yeah. When you're anchored to that, it's hard to live up to that. But he did quite well this year. So that's an encouraging sign while O'Neal Cruz was out the whole year. All right. San Diego Padres, I alluded a moment ago to an infield-outfield conversion. Obviously, this was news. This was known. But I think we undersold it and underdiscussed it. Just how good Fernando Tatis Jr. was in the outfield after barely playing any outfield before, that can be a tricky

conversion. Like Jazz Chisholm, for instance, he converted and the defensive metrics were mixed on him. I think he got better. He had some notable gaffes out there with the glove, but the metrics, he was negative nine DRS plus four OAA. Fernando Tatis led the majors by a lot in defensive runs saved, 29 runs above average. OAA had him at plus 11, which is still good. And again, super inexperienced. Like I'll quote from Sarah Langs here. He had played just 24 career games

in the outfield entering 2023, the fourth fewest entering a season at a gold glove winning position for a non-rookie. Okay. A couple of qualifiers there, excluding pitchers and considering outfield as one position per Elias. The others, 2022, Ramon Rios at third base, 1999, Pokey Reese at second base and 2023, Gabriel Moreno at catcher, who was also excellent. But man, he bounced back like not fully with the bat, although he was a big expected weighted on base underperformer. So maybe he got jobbed a bit with the batted ball quality. But if the offense comes back even more than it did, and he's that good as an outfielder, then, well, he is once again one of the best players in baseball, just at a different position. It makes you feel better about the defensive spectrum and like the positional

adjustment and war because it's like, oh, yeah, we put the shortstop at another position and he was actually amazing. I feel like it doesn't usually work that way. Right. He's probably better off in the outfield because he is so good there. And at shortstop, he was, you know, rangy and talented, but also pretty error prone and inconsistent. So, yeah, this might be the better home for him. All right. Seattle Mariners.

We certainly talked a lot about the Seattle Mariners this year because one of our hosts is a Mariners fan. However, I don't think we talked about how annoying Jose Caballero is. Annoying to opposing pitchers, not to Mariners fans who quite liked him. But Jose Caballero, I mentioned that hit by pitch rate leaderboard earlier that Miguel Amaya was a top of. Jose Caballero was second in hit by pitch percentage, which might be because he is such a pest at the plate, specifically when it comes to pitch clock manipulation.

at the plate, specifically when it comes to pitch clock manipulation. So he was the best or at least the try hardest at just trying to piss pitchers off by manipulating the pitch clock. He annoyed Martin Maldonado. He annoyed Garrett Cole. He annoyed Lucas Giolito. He had the seventh slowest between pitch pace of any batter, minimum 250 plate appearances. But that doesn't convey his techniques, which like he would take timeouts and he would stretch them out. There was one tweet with a video I saw where it was like 80 plus seconds between pitches, which, you know, prior to 2023, you might not have batted an eye at that. But now it is wild to still see that.

And what he does, he has this technique. So Maldonado was quoted as saying, I told him to get the expletive back in the box. He didn't say expletive, but I don't know which expletive he used. Much to Scott Service's delight, Caballero didn't back down from the veteran catcher whose nickname is Machete. Cabby is really savvy on how to use the clock, Mariner's manager service said. He doesn't like the pitcher out there holding the ball on him. He likes to slow it down. Per the rule, you've got to have your head up at eight seconds or earlier, but Cabby doesn't usually lift his head up right away. He'll be in the box, but his head is down until he gets to about 10 or nine on the clock, which is perfectly legal. It's different. The Astros didn't like it,

whatever. I love it. Since Cabby showed up here, he's played with some edge. He plays the game his way. It's perfectly legal. It's just different. And I had no problem with it. Others did, but I love the way he's playing right now. So he did this repeatedly. He'd be in the box, ready to hit, but not quite ready because his head was not facing the pitcher yet. So he'd kind of like deke the pitcher basically by not fully facing him until the last possible second, which just pissed everyone off, even though he wasn't actually breaking any rules.

I really like this. Early on, who was, see, this is going to be better if I could have remembered what it was. Zach, you might actually know what I'm talking about. There was a back and forth of pitchers and batters in like a single game or a single at bat, even sort of deking each other with the clock and MLB kind of closed some loopholes. Maybe Max Scherzer was involved. I'm pretty sure Scherzer was involved, but I don't remember who the batter was.

At the time we talked about that at night, I was like, I'm in favor of players figuring out a way to use it to their advantage. If you want to install the clock so the games take less time and so the action is more regular, that makes tons of sense. That's a fan issue. I like the players then turning around and taking this rule and using it to their own unique advantage and finding a way to kind of play with it. MLB did not close any loopholes is sort of my point.

You made these rules. Let them find the loopholes. This was actually in spring training. Max Scherzer did a long hold and no way we would have remembered who it was. Nationals catcher Riley Adams. Okay. I feel better. Took his time out. So he couldn't take any more timeouts.

Scherzer just never stopped being set from his long hold. He just stayed there. Yeah. And then as soon as Adams got back in the box again, he threw it. So they closed that loophole. Well, this is just gamesmanship. It's clocksmanship. If you can get away with it, clearly he was getting in players' heads. So it made some sense. All right. San Francisco Giants. That was by Andrew M., that submission, by the way. The Giants, we had a bunch of Giants fans write in to be like apologetic

about how boring the Giants were, which I didn't say it, but they were like, not a good place to be. I know. I mean, maybe they're still smarting from the recent comments of Yamamoto being like,

yeah, I might assign with the Giants if the Dodgers didn't exist, just twisting the knife even further as it's already protruding from the backs of Giants fans. But a lot of them were like, yeah, we were mediocre Dodgers didn't exist, just twisting the knife even further as it's already protruding from the backs of Giants fans. But a lot of them were like, yeah, we were mediocre and it just like wasn't that fun. You know, like nothing was that notable.

People were like, talk about Patrick Bailey's defense. It was good. I think we did talk about it, in fact, but people were coming up empty. However, we did get a couple submissions. So Jen Alfred Payton wrote in. There was one weird play against the Dodgers where there was a dropped pop-up. Casey Schmidt dropped a pop-up and deflected it to the pitcher, Jacob Junis, who threw the ball into the outfield. And then it was like a cavalcade of

errors. The play lasted 32 seconds, which is long for a baseball play to last. I feel like Sam Miller wrote, or we talked about like, how long can a baseball play to last. I feel like Sam Miller wrote or we talked about like how long can a baseball play last? What's the longest baseball play? This could be a contender because it went on and on and on. The ball was everywhere. There were multiple errors on a infield pop-up somehow. No one scored. There was a runner on second, but Mookie, the batter, didn't really run out of the box. And then Michael Bush, who was on second, didn't score. And they both ended up at third base, which was bad. And John Miller was on the call. So that was the one saving grace. He said, what is happening, man? That was just embarrassing. He compared it to a Greek

tragedy. So it actually worked out OK for the Giants. Maybe it's more embarrassing for the Dodgers that they didn't take advantage of that. But I think the best submission we got, It's more embarrassing for the Dodgers that they didn't take advantage of that. But I think the best submission we got, apparently the Giants or some Giants were obsessed with the card game Pusoy Dos, which is sometimes known as Filipino poker. This somehow swept the Giants clubhouse. And apparently it got to the point where reportedly it was like affecting the clubhouse dynamic. And there was an Andrew Baggerly athletic report from late September. where reportedly it was like affecting the clubhouse dynamic. And there was an Andrew Baggerly athletic report from late September.

And I'll just quote here. Outfielder Mike Yastrzemski, second baseman Tyra Estrada, and infielder Wilmer Flores are among those who sought to refocus a clubhouse that has included too many ho-hum reactions to losing, along with a near zealotry to Pusoy, a Filipino card game that Jock Peterson and some other Giants players appear to find more compelling than studying the Knights' opposing starting pitcher. I was not expecting Jock Peterson to be the player singled out as obsessed with this. I know. It's like, yeah, we talked about Jock and Tommy Pham and the slap and everything the

year before. And now maybe it's a Tommy Pham redemption arc. Like Pham was like on the Mets clubhouse case for not being intense enough or not working hard enough or preparing enough. And now you have Jock Peterson reportedly playing Filipino poker instead of studying opposing pitchers. I will say like Jock wasn't that bad. He was much better in 2022. His ex-woba was unchanged this year.

So was it the Pussoidos or was it just worse batted ball luck? I don't know. I guess it could be both. But whenever a team doesn't do well, you tend to hear like, oh, the clubhouse was too laid back or they were playing music after losses. Apparently, the Giants were playing Bob Marley songs after they lost, you know, they weren't somber enough. It's like the chicken and beer Red Sox sort of thing, except in this case, it's playing a card game. I don't know. You never know whether it's kind

of like a post hoc, they didn't do well. And therefore it's because the club, because if the Giants were winning, it'd be like, hey, they're so laid back. They're just having fun. They're playing poker in there, you know, and they're lost. And so it's the opposite. And it's hard to untangle the cause and effect there. Yeah, I think the Giants fans mostly have pinned this down because I thought the Gabe Kapler firing was weird, too, because it's sort of yeah, the players just aren't that good or interesting. So it's hard to have a good team that way. Yeah, it's a variation of Big Two, a popular type of shedding card game. The object of the game is to be the first to discard one's

hand by playing them to the table. If one cannot be first to play all cards, then the aim is to have as few cards as possible. We also got a submission. Apparently the Giants were blowing kisses to each other. That was their celebration after hits, which I think would be of great interest to Meg because she is very much in favor of PDA among players. And she approves of players smooching only if they want to, she always says. But when they want to, when we see public displays of affection and kisses, she is very tickled by that. And the Giants were doing that. And in fact, after someone forgot to blow a kiss, Brandon Crawford got on their case and reminded them to blow the kiss. So that was nice. I don't

know if Giants fans were blowing kisses to that team, but the players were blowing kisses to each other. I don't know. That sounds compulsory. Compulsory kissing is crossing a line. That's true. Yeah. At that point, it's not really if they want to. It's just Brendan Crawford ordered me to, but it was just an air kiss. Okay, the St. Louis Cardinals, this is from Riley. They had another player who was gone for a long time and came back in their and got into nine games for the Cardinals in his age 30 season this past year. So he had been bouncing around for a long time, made it back. Always nice to see. And also Adam Wainwright just fully became a singer, songwriter and musician, transitioned into his post playing career career career or multiple careers because he's been a broadcaster too he's also really embraced the like country singer thing too and he has an album coming out next year so that's something to look forward to in 2024 we cannot look forward to

adam wainwright's pitching not that cardinals fans were really looking forward to Adam Wainwright's pitching, particularly in 2023, but he gave a post-game concert at Bush Stadium where he played three of his three original compositions, which you can hear on his website if you're interested right now, adamwainwrightmusic.com. So he's really embracing this. He does have professional songwriting partners who co-wrote the 17 songs that he recorded at Muscle Shoals, 14 or 15 of which will be on this album. But he has lots of friends like in Nashville in the country music scene, and apparently they told him he was pretty good. I don't know whether they were humoring him or whether they genuinely believed it, but he has taken that as a vote of confidence and he is now just a performing and composing musician. Do you think Randy Johnson will show up to

photograph his concerts? Or maybe Joe West could accompany him? Yeah, Joe West could accompany. I don't know if they were friendly or if they had battles over the years. Yeah. Well, I wish him well in his musical career. Tampa Bay Rays. This is a quick one, but Pete Fairbanks and his black eye. Jason Stark just did his rundown of the weirdest injuries in baseball of 2023. And number one on the list was one that I don't think we talked about. And it was Pete Fairbanks who had a more serious baseball injury. He had hip inflammation and he came back after returning from the IL stint for that with a big, bright black eye. And when everyone wondered, why do you have a big, bright black eye? face after dunking on a three-year-old to kind of teach him an early lesson in life that when you're in the paint, you cannot be caught unawares underneath the rim.

I guess he was hoisted on his own rim here because he was caught unawares by the fact that the hoop crashed down onto his face. I assume this was his three-year-old and not someone else's three-year-old that he happened to be dunking on to teach a life lesson. Just a three-year-old at the local YMCA. Just playing a pickup game in kindergarten or pre-nursery or whatever, teaching them some hard knocks. Yeah. So I associate Pete Fairbanks with like looking scared and, you know, blinking a lot and looking nervous out there. But in this case, he looked like he'd been in a big fight and got the worst of it. But it was just in fact that he was playing pool basketball with a three-year-old.

That might have been why he did it. Too many people associating him with looking afraid. And he was like, oh, I'm going to change your sense of me. And he was like, oh, I'm going to change your sense of me. If anyone's unfamiliar with Pete Fairbanks, too, just to visualize this, he is six foot six. Yes. Huge. So this would have been really weird looking. Probably. Yeah.

Probably also weird for the three year olds to get dunked on by a six foot seven man. OK, Texas Rangers, they won the World Series. We did talk about that. I know you talked about that on your last bandwagon episode as well. RIP. Couple submissions here. One is Nathaniel Lowe's defense. I feel like we talk a lot about pitchers and hitters who make themselves over and do something different mechanically and transform their careers. We don't talk about defensive makeovers as much, maybe because there just aren't as many. Maybe it's harder to do that. But our pal Mike Petriello had a good thread on this back in June about how Lowe had improved from negative 11 outs above average to at that point, plus five. I guess he ended up at plus two. So there was

some slight regression after that. Apparently, he knew that he was bad and that he really had to work on this. And he decided to work with Francisco Lindor, who in addition to giving Jeff McNeil a Ford Bronco also helped Nathaniel Lowe improve his defense. And they had a group of players. They worked out together in Florida and Francisco Lindor, he knows how to play defense and he imparted a lot of that to Nathaniel Lowe. So, you know, it's hard to be maybe terrible or great as a first baseman or it doesn't stand out as much. But in his case, he went from really bad to really good. I wonder if he sent Francisco Lindor a Ford Bronco for the help. And that is how Jeff McNeil got a car.

Right. He just re-gifted it to Jeff McNeil. Nathaniel Lowe also has a very cute dog, by the way. That's all I can add. I was trying to think, I was racking my brain as you were talking. I was like, I wrote so much about the Rangers. What would be an interesting addition to what you were just saying? And he has a very cute puppy named Mondo. Oh, well, that's good to know. So that was a nice little turnaround. And then we mentioned the being open about mental health issues and legendary Rangers broadcaster, Eric Nadel, he did the same thing.

He missed the first 109 games of the season while taking some time to get treatment for anxiety and insomnia and depression. And then he came back and thanked everyone for their support and fell right back into the rhythm and got to call a World Series win for the first time in franchise history, which was a pretty storybook ending to that season and also his season in particular. So happy for him. Now we are down to our last couple of teams here and the Toronto Blue Jays story. So this also falls into the kind of harrowing but heartwarming category. And that is reliever Jay Jackson, who was pitching in the

bullpen throughout the season, even though his son was born extremely premature, born in July at 25 weeks, under 25 weeks, almost four months premature, weighed one pound and six ounces, and was just in the NICU for months and months and months and going through all sorts of health struggles. And Jackson was traveling back and forth to be with his son and fiance and was doing that with that while also trying to be a major league pitcher. So that just sounds extremely difficult. I mean, Max Stassi went through something similar, right, where his child was born extremely premature, similarly premature. And he just took the season off or most of the season off to just focus on that. I'm sure it's difficult however you try to handle that.

But Jay Jackson was doing that while trying to balance baseball. The story had a happy ending. Their son, J.R., got to come home for Christmas, seemingly out of the woods. So 166 days in the NICU and J. Jackson was pitching for a lot of that time. So you never really know what challenges are going on off the field. I mean, I guess maybe we knew that that was going on, but he also pitched well. When he was able to be out there, he was doing well. So kudos to him and glad JR is doing well as well. I think he's a free agent now, but he should, you know, Jay should stay with the Jays. I mean,

hopefully he had a positive experience with them and hopefully they were helpful in that entire ordeal. But yeah, I like Jay on the Jays. Yeah, makes sense. Okay. And last but not least, we come to the Washington Nationals. Now, there are a couple submissions here. Laura wrote in for some. One was Jacob Young's meteoric rise from high A to the majors. We have a segment on the show where we do a meet a major leaguer, and we talk about guys who made the majors who might have a segment on the show where we do a meet a major leaguer and we talk about guys who made the majors who might not have come to our attention otherwise, the Caleb Bushleys and the Funderburks of the world. This one, more of a prospect and a young guy who just

catapulted up from high to the majors. And it was not such a successful season, maybe for Nationals prospects as a whole. You know, there were some highly touted guys who went backward or didn't go forward at least, but Jacob Young was a bright spot. And C.J. Abrams, specifically what C.J. Abrams did on the base paths. So in his first 77 games of the season, he stole nine bases, nine on 11 attempts, okay? In his last 74 games, he stole 38 bases and 40 attempts,

including a franchise record 25 in a row without being caught. So again, nine stolen bases, two caught stealings in his first 77 games, his last 74 games, 38 steals and two caught stealings. His OBP went up from 285 to 312 in those spans. So maybe he was just on base more, but he just had to decide to turn on the afterburner at that point. And he did so successfully, in fact, that from the day when he really decided to start doing that, again, kind of arbitrary endpoints a little bit here. On July 6th, he stole two bases and that was sort of the start of it. From July 6th on, C.J. Abrams led the major leagues in stolen bases. He stole 38 bags, which was six more than Acuna over that span, eight more than Corbin Carroll. Pretty impressive. Like if he keeps that up, he could be going for 70 or 80 next season. Did not realize that he had

become such a speed demon in the second half of the year. They were pretty good in the second half, right? You didn't say that. He was definitely better. I mean, he had a really nice season compared to what, you know, I was a little worried about him after the initial exposure to the major leagues. He didn't look like he was fully up to speed, but this year he looked good. They did okay. They were close to 500. They were close to 500. They were 486 in the second half.

It's a big improvement. They were 607 in August. They were 17 and 11 in August. Okay. Well, we've done it. This was probably more podcasting than you bargained for, but hopefully you saved up some podcasting time from not being able to do the bandwagon lately. Yeah, we had pent up podcast energy. Exactly. Well, thank you for filling in during a week when people mostly aren't working on short notice. Really happy to have you. And I hope that we will be able to hear you and read you somewhere other than Effectively Wild very soon. Thank you for having us and have a happy new year,

everyone. Yes. Thank you so much. We were so available because we do not have 400 friends who would attend a baseball game, even if it was our debut. Or anything else. Okay. If you want any more information on anything we talked about today, check the show notes where instead of listing hundreds of links, I will just link to the spreadsheet, which is stuffed to the gills with all my notes and links and credits to the people who nominated these stories. Thanks to all of you. 2023 complete. We talked about all of the baseball. Didn't miss a thing. And that will do it for today and for this week and for this year. Whether you listen to one episode this year or 156, that's how many there were. We appreciate it and we hope you'll be back for more in 2024. And if you'd like to help us keep making these podcasts, you can go 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. James Smith, Che Ryan, Bobby, Brian Riley, and Matt Ittingson.

Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, discounts on merch and ad-free fan crafts, memberships, and so much more. Patreon.com slash effectivelywild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com. Send us your questions and comments.

Send us an intro theme if you're musically inclined. We're always interested in adding to the 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 effectively wild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EW pod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Shane McKeon has returned, so thanks to him for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful New Year's, and we will talk to you in 2024.