Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2156: Pluses and Minuses

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about how much dirt MLB players ingest in a season, the second-most-encouraging stat about Mike Trout’s season, Shohei Ohtani, Earl Webb, and the single-season doubles record, Cody Bellinger and whether the Cubs should pad the walls at Wrigley Field, whether replay review should privilege the call on the field, […]

🎵 You never know precisely where it's gonna go By definition, Effectively Wild Hello and welcome to episode 2156 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. I've been wondering this question since I saw one of our listeners and Patreon supporters ask it in our Patreon Discord group this week.

Have not been able to get it out of my head. This was a question from Scott Brady who said, as a thought experiment, how much dirt do you think an average MLB player eats in a season? Not intentionally, presumably, but just ingests, right? And so I think to answer that, you need to establish some sort of baseline, which is how much dirt does the average person ingest? How much dirt do we ingest?

Who knows, right? Zero intentionally, but unintentionally, from what I have been able to research, apparently the average person eats about 100 milligrams of dirt per day, which is 36,500 milligrams per year, which sounds like a lot, but that's only 1.3 ounces, which is about one-sixth of an aspirin tablet. So that's not actually a lot of dirt. Children eat more dirt. Yeah, they do. Sometimes very intentionally, right? So they, it's said, according to the EPA, apparently, children eat something like two to four times as much dirt, or maybe two to eight times as much dirt or maybe two to eight times as much dirt as the average person. And I guess you also have to wonder, well, what is dirt exactly? According to the EPA, dirt is made up of soil and dust.

So just over half is dust and just under half is actual soil. So obviously this varies very much depending on where you are in the world and what your occupation is. Thus, the question of baseball players. How much dirt do you think they ingest as a multiple of what the average person ingests? Like another two aspirin tablets worth of dirt. Wait, was the question daily or in a season? In a season was the question. Let's puzzle this out, Ben.

Yeah. Let's puzzle it out. This is like a question that you'd be asked in an interview for a tech company or something. And it's not really about whether you get the answer right. It's about your thought process, right? Yeah. What did you consider? Yeah.

Your willingness to crush unions probably. So she's got jokes today, folks. Yeah. on food itself, right? So you're like, oh, I got my lovely salad and it's got a little dirt on it because when I washed the lettuce, I wasn't super thorough with every single leaf, right? Does that seem like the primary? Yeah, more or less. And then if you work in agriculture or again, construction of some sort i imagine that a lot of your that you would ingest more on average and that it would be largely like inhalation of that material in the course of your job right okay so you're a baseball player cool and you're already getting the like i eat food and i walk around my house uh consumption of dirt and dust

because and like again it's going to depend where you live like here i'm just like in a losing battle with dust all the time it is a sisyphean task and then there's like all the actual like particulate matter in the air because our air pollution in the valley is worse than a lot of other places there's that piece of it that these guys are just taking in as like human beings out in the valley is worse than a lot of other places. There's that piece of it that these guys are just taking in as like human beings out in the world, breathing in air and eating food. And then, you know, at work they have, I imagine, some amount extra of inhaled particulate matter from being on a field made of grass and dirt, right? And running around out there and kicking stuff up.

And then there's going to be a subcategory of dude who is either a very active base runner or probably a catcher, maybe. Catchers, probably. It would vary by position. Yeah, catchers, they're closest to the ground. Right. They're like, you know, getting collisions. Dust is kicked up and batters digging in and, you know, umpires sweeping up the plate.

Right. And like dust coming off the mitt, you know, as the ball hits the mitt. Yeah. Balls in the dirt kicking up stuff. Oh, got it. So maybe catchers the most of any position. And then like pitchers. Probably pitchers, right?

Yeah. They're on the mound. Yeah, on the mound. And then I bet it kind of radiates outward, right? Like where infielders, especially now, because they got to be on the dirt, you know. At least when play begins, they're probably, there's like a kicking up of stuff. play begins, there probably there's like a kicking up of stuff. I'd say first baseman probably tops in the infield just because, yeah, they're kind of always on the dirt, probably part of the infield.

And then also like there's just a lot of traffic at first base. You know, you got guys landing on the bag. You got short hopped throws over there. Yeah. So would be OK. I think I think we have the hierarchy right here. And then outfielders probably last from a positional standpoint. And then there would be an adjustment based on, you know, if you're a hitter, are you, first of all, are you getting on base often? So do you have occasion to actually keep advancing a lot on the bases?

Are you a base stealer? Are you a guy who's diving back into first in anticipation of a pickoff move often? Because if you are, you're probably high on the list. Are you running and sliding headfirst, hopefully not into first base, as you're either stealing a bag or, you know, you're trying to be quickie on the base pass and you're like, oh, I gotta go. What that all like masks out to in terms of accumulated tablets of dirt aspirin, I don't know that I know.

Yeah. So if the average person is 100 milligrams per day, where would we put an average baseball player at? Because you're right. If you're a base dealer and you go in headfirst, you could get your recommended yearly quantity in one gulp, I would think. In one go, yeah. Right? I mean, your mouth is open while you're sliding. That's your full aspirin tablet right there. Apparently it's like lifetime and

average life expectancy is like six pounds of dirt a person eats on average. That seems light to me over an entire lifetime. You know, I'm surprised it's not more. We probably have six pounds of plastic in our body right now. If you're like a nose breather, mouth breather, you know, maybe you're... Oh, sure. Yeah. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, but I mean, my nose is currently a bit stuffed up, as you can probably tell. And so I'm a mouth breather right now. And maybe your nose does a better job of filtering out some of those particles, right? So, yeah, I'm just saying, you know, you get a gulp of dirt as you slide in.

That's more than your yearly quantity right there. So, I would say that a baseball player, it's probably like, you know, astronauts are exposed to more radiation, right? Radiation, right. Because, you know, they're above the atmosphere, above the ozone layer at times, and hopefully they don't get too much in their regulations and their shielding, et cetera, but they get more, right? And so maybe baseball players are like astronauts.

Astronauts are to radiation what baseball players are to dirt when it comes to exposure, I would say. Arguably away from the field, baseball players might be exposed to less dirt than the average person because they're just like traveling in style. You know, they're like, yeah, they're, you know, wealthy. They're probably not doing vacuuming at home, you know. They might not be right. They might have a housekeeper, someone who's doing that for them. They're staying at super fancy hotels that are probably vacuuming constantly, right?

But I think they make up for that and more with their disproportionate dirt consumption at the field. So I don't know. If the average person is 100 milligrams a day, I'm going to say a baseball player. Granted, they do water down the dirt. And so it's not super elevated, you know, like it's packed down. Sure. You spray it to keep it packed down. So then it's kind of muddy, but it's probably not like floating up into the air so much.

In Arizona where you're just like dodging particles all the time. Yeah. Right. In Arizona where you're just like dodging particles all the time, yeah. Right. But it's still got to be elevated over a normal person who's not doing work on dirt, right? Even if it is packed down, watered down dirt. So, yeah, I'm going to say if 100 milligrams is average, I'm going to say baseball players like, gosh, I mean, it might be like 10 times multiply. I might even go as high as that, you know, like it's not a typical office environment.

I think astronaut is a good way to think about this question. Wow. What sentences we say on this show sometimes? Because like, you know, if you're a person who works in like agriculture or construction, like you might be doing mitigation to try to inhale less, right? You might be wearing masks or ventilators or all sorts doing mitigation to try to inhale less right you might be wearing masks or ventilators or all sorts of stuff to try to because like we know about the deleterious effects of of well i think dirt's probably like okay in small amounts you know the you don't want to like breathe in asbestos but that's pretty bad for you. And then you end up calling into a class action suit on TV at one

in the morning. But baseball players aren't doing, there's field mitigation, like you said, they're wetting the field in an effort to keep it from being too dusty. But it's not like they're wearing a mask that you would if you were a house painter, you're putting pipes in or what have you. So, yeah, I think you'd probably get more than a dosage that is greater than your average bear. And how much that matters, I couldn't possibly try to say. Probably not much, no. But yes, I mean, most of the field obviously is not dirt, but there are important parts where people are stationed for much of the game that are. And yeah, I think the sliding alone, it's going to be disproportionate how much you're on base,

how much you're running, but that will really skew the averages. So yeah, I think it could be as much as five to 10 times as much dirt as the average person. I don't know if that's a harmful amount of dirt, but that would be my estimate. So if the average human is consuming six pounds of dirt, I'm going to say baseball player, they're not playing baseball their entire lifespan, obviously. And you also don't play baseball year round. So it's not every day that your dirt consumption is elevated. But yeah, I'm going to say, you know, 20 pounds of dirt.

Sure, yeah. But maybe you do more vacuuming in the off season. So that kind of offsets things a little bit. Well, you know who's probably consumed more dirt so far this season than he has in recent seasons because he's running much more? Mike Trout. Mike Trout. One of our patron players of the podcast. What a segue, Ben. Thank you.

What a segue that was. I want to ask you what you think the second most encouraging stat about Mike Trout's season so far is. I think the most encouraging stat is that he has played in 25 games. And the Angels have played 25 games. Yes. As we record on Thursday. He has played in every Angels game. So that's the best stat.

25 games played. But after that, we could go either with his five stolen bases, which equals his total from 2021 through 2023. He just has not run a lot, as we have discussed and as was written at Fangraphs by Leo Morgenstern on Thursday. You could also go with his base running runs, BSR, right, above average. You could also go with his base running runs, BSR, right? Above average, he's at 1.5 already. And that is more than his last four seasons combined, I believe, right? So the base running, that would be one. His strikeout rate is 22%. That was maybe going to be my answer.

Yeah, so 22% is his lowest since 2019 over a full season. And then I would submit that one more contender for most impressive Mike Trout stat would be 2.46, basically 2.5 runs above average per 100 four-seamers so far. Because he struggled against four-seam fastballs last year. He sure did. He was basically average, which when Mike Trout struggles, he's basically average. He was a tad above average, but barely. Whereas this year, he is on track to be as good against fastballs

as he's been in a few years. And that was kind of a concerning sign. It's like, oh, is he losing bat speed? Is he slowing down? You know, what's going on here? So back on track, even though it's not as much of a fastball league as it used to be, you still see a lot of fastballs. And so it's good to be good against them.

So of those three, the base running stats, the contact and strikeouts, the performance against fastballs, four-seamers specifically. What do you find most encouraging about Mike Trout's season so far? Can I couple the strikeout rate with his performance against four-seamers? Can that actually meld into one? They're probably related, yeah. Yeah, because at least anecdotally watching him last year, they did feel related. know we only saw him in you know 82 games or whatever but i just feel like there has been a really positive sort of arresting of of downward momentum across his profile right which is like kind of a cop out of an answer because it's like the most impressive stat is

everything but it doesn't feel like there is a real loss of bat speed the strikeout rate is encouraging both because it feels like he is seeing the ball better and not pressing as a result of not seeing the ball and like those things in concert are really encouraging i think that like one of the things that i've been most struck by and watching him and this is is probably pretty closely related to the base running actually is that that he looks great. The body looks really good. And it wasn't like he reported last year and it was like, oh, wow, Mike, he took the off season off, did you, buddy? But given the sort of continual battle with injuries over the last couple of years, to see him kind of looking good and strong and flexible in life

is like a really encouraging development because, you know, and we're recording this on Thursday and I, you know, I hesitate to have us have a segment about it in much the same way that Leo was like, should I actually write about this? Because what happens if he gets broken tomorrow but um yeah him being able to have a full healthy productive season is gonna i think do a lot to sort of change my opinion of what the you know the the twilight part of his career could be because he seemed like he was set up to maybe be one of those guys who like no doubt hall of famer we don't have to even have that conversation when

it comes to trout but a guy with a tremendously high peak and then a very precipitous decline as a result of his body just betraying him and he could have a season that isn't doesn't end up being over a whole 162 as good as it looks right now and i think still really alter kind of my expectations for what he is going to look like as he progresses into his mid and then later 30s so uh all of it but um if i were going to pick one thing i think the combination of strikeout percentage and performance against four seamers is like pretty primo yeah in large part because as much fun as it is to watch him running and running well and as good an indicator as that

might be of like him feeling good and strong and healthy he could steal no more bases the entire rest of the season and still be an incredibly valuable player for the angels if he continues to clobber home runs and not strike out a lot and sort of perform well against four-seam fastballs the the the base running is important but could end up being largely ancillary to what we think of his season when it's all said and done but like if he keeps you know and like he's he has you know he's a 206 babbitts when this is that he already has 10 home runs but like he has a 206 babbitt there's like a not small gap between his boba and his ex-boba like yeah we could anticipate that you know as good as he looks now he might look better if he starts to have better batted ball luck so

it's really cool. I mean, until he makes it through the season intact, I will continue to be worried about him not making it through the season intact. But I'm less worried than I was about his skills having eroded. Because the really concerning thing about last season was that even when he was playing, he was not his usual excellent self. He was still good, but not Mike Trout level, right? And so what he's done thus far tells me that he really hasn't lost that much. It doesn't mean that he will remain durable, but at least the skills are there. And the running, I would agree. I think maybe the four-seamer performance specifically I think is the most encouraging to me. The contact is encouraging, though you could argue that maybe it's a product partly of less good swing decisions in some respects.

Because he's swinging about as often, but he's swinging at pitches outside the strike zone more often and inside the strike zone less often. Ginny Searle wrote about this for BP. And so it seems like he's swinging at and making contact with some pitches that he might be up to fast pitches, it just reassures me that it's not like there's some chronic back issue that is sapping his ability to get around on four seamers, right? Like that tells me that he probably feels good, as does the running. But he's always been fast. And that's one of the incredible things about him is that he really hasn't lost any speed. I mean, maybe he's lost some speed compared to when he first came up as a rookie and he was lightning fast. We don't have stat cast sprint speeds for back then, but even though he's 32 turning 33 in August, he's 91st percentile in sprint speed, his feet per second sprint speed down a little from last year, but the same as 2020, the same as 2016.

Like he really hasn't lost a step seemingly. And so it's fun, I think, that he's running again, but it seemed to be more of a conscious decision not to run coupled with team philosophy and Phil Nevin not being really pro running. Yeah, we talked about that with him and Otani, I think, last season. And now it's almost like when Madden kind of took the reins off of Otani and was just like, you got to unleash him. You got to let him go. And Ron Washington seems to be doing sort of the same thing with Trout. And they've talked a big game about being aggressive as a team,

but they're really letting Trout do that. And Wash said, I think if you're out there holding back a little, I think sometimes it puts you in a worse position. You get hurt when you try not to just let your natural ability play, which I sort of understand what he's saying there. If you're walking around worried about being heard and you're changing your mechanics or something, then I could see how that might inadvertently make you more likely to get hurt because you're kind of in your head about it as opposed to acting naturally. I don't know that I buy that not running is more likely to make you hurt than running. It does still seem like stealing bases. hurt than running. It does still seem like stealing bases. As Mike Trout knows from personal experience, you can very easily get hurt and miss time because of a stolen base attempt. So I don't know that that- All those little bones.

Yeah, exactly. Makes sense. But spiritually, I get it. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's been encouraging. It's been nice. There was some small part of me, at least, that was worried that we would not see peak or close to peak Mike Trout again for any stretch of time. And we're seeing it right now. So I hope it lasts.

Yeah. Last year, like before he got hurt, you know, my my like dominant memory of him, which is kind of what I'm about to say when I acknowledge is like borderline a little bit wild because you're right like he wasn't as good as he normally is he's still in the time that he played at like a 134 wrc plus so like i don't want to overstate the case here but it did feel like you know there were a lot of times where you were watching him just swing

under four seamers and he seems like he's seeing those better, although you're right. Like, you know, when you look at his sort of underlying play discipline metrics, like it'll be interesting to see if there's an adjustment on his part because he tends to do that at least when he's healthy enough to pull it off.

So, but again, I like feel, I'm like looking over my shoulder as if like the baseball gods are sitting there going, no, no, no. Guess what? You're in trouble now. But if it makes anyone feel better, we were originally going to run Leo's Mike Trout

stolen base piece yesterday, but we had a lot of stuff going up, and I was like, why don't we hold this until tomorrow? And Mike Trout didn't break in the game that happened in between. So I don't know, maybe we're being a little silly here. Could be true. I hope so. Yeah. We try not to be bound by superstition here, but we just want him to do well. And I don't know that he was like late on fastballs necessarily or that it was related to

injuries or anything. He's talked a lot about just having mechanical issues and excess head movement. And he was just constantly in the cage and he couldn't figure it out. But then he had a breakthrough and he seems to have mastered it for now. So let's hope that continues. And as for his former teammate, Otani,

who I just mentioned, seen a bunch of buzz about his doubles pace. And it's obviously early to be talking about paces, but he did double thrice on Wednesday and he now has 14 doubles, which puts him just one behind the April record, which was set all of one year ago by Matt Chapman. I think it's partly because we start seasons earlier than they used to, and so you get a full April in now. Oh, sure, sure. But he is also on pace for 87 doubles now.

The record, of course, is 67 set by Earl Webb in 1931. And every now and then someone mounts a challenge and Freddie Freeman almost made it to 60 last year. He ended up at 59, which no one's hit 60 since 1936, right? So that was how fun is a doubles chase for you? Are you into it it i was just about to ask you this question look uh doubles good to hit you know like uh arguably not that there's nothing better than a double there are in fact two things i can think of but um as i am thinking through the hierarchy of chases i could not have told you that a record had been set last year or by whom or who the previous record holder was or what gap there was between april double's record i wouldn't get

excited about but oh but a season a season long i mean like is it exciting sure because like it's cool when guys do good stuff and they do it a lot more than anyone else. That's something to get excited about, but I don't hold it in the same regard as, say, a home run record or a hitting streak. I continue to advocate for greater primacy and attention being paid to on-base streaks

because I think that they are quietly impressive in a way that we should talk more about. But the whole time you were talking, I was like, what do I think about doubles? What do I think about being on pace for a doubles record either on a monthly or season-long basis? And I feel nothing about it. I don't think it's bad doubles objectively good again

like yay doubles love it love it when when you got ducks on the pond and you're the hitter for your favorite team gaps a little double so exciting you know yeah it's nice because it contains the thrill not only of getting a hit but but sometimes, you know, it rests on your guy having a little speed, right? You might get a close play at the bag in a way that you'll be like, oh, you're shifting. Or like you got to do a little move to get in there and stay safe. And like that's all very exciting. And stay safe. And like, that's all very exciting.

So I'm pro doubles, but haven't thought about them from a pace or record perspective probably once even in my whole life. Like even one time. Okay. Yeah. Some people do get kind of into the doubles chases such as they are. Yeah. And I think I could get into it. You're right. It's certainly not as sexy as a home run chase, but it has some

things to recommend it, namely that it stood for so long. Sure. Yes. I guess you could say that it's, I mean, it's certainly strange that Earl Webb is the holder of the, I don't know if that subtracts from the luster of the record. I mean, it makes it seem like it should be beatable. It should be attainable. We can't, no one can beat Earl Webb. Come on, right? Like, Earl Webb, it's been almost a century here. Let's go, people. Yeah. He wasn't a particularly long-tenured player. Much of his career value came in the season when he set this record. He was 33, I think, already. Of course, he was in Fenway, Great Doubles Park, and he was just sort of a journeyman. And he just had an incredible double season in a high offense, like rabbit ball era, right?

So a lot of circumstances were aligned for him to do that. Of course, I think the Red Sox that year only played 153 games. So modern hitters have the advantage of more games, but also just generally lower batting averages and fewer of every kind of hit except home runs, basically. So the odds are sort of stacked against you there. So I don't know whether the fact that it's Earl Webb, it's almost like he doesn't deserve to hold a record

that should be sort of prestigious at least, but it almost makes it more entertaining for me than someone so obscure, like that if you know Earl Webb, you know him for that and probably nothing else right so I think I could get into a doubles chase if it I'm not like excited about it yet but if we get late in the season and uh particularly if Otani is the one sure chasing it yeah I think I think I could get semi-psyched for a doubles chase we've lamented the lack of record chases in this era, so we got to take them

where we can get them. I would like to vet the remaining family members of the Webb estate to see how annoying it might be to have them on TV constantly. I say that not knowing anything at all about either Earl Webb or his family, so I don't mean to imply that they are frustrating or annoying in any way, but these are questions we have to ask because... You're going to have Maris's traveling from park to park if there's... We're going to get a lot of Buster Olney talking to those folks on Sunday Night Baseball if there's a big chase. So it's a low-key important consideration for this.

But look, I can manufacture enthusiasm about pretty much anything. So yeah, I could get into a doubles chase. Why not? Why not? Sure. Yeah. Looks like according to his saver bio,

Earl had five kids. I don't know how long they lived or how fertile they were, but there's at least the raw material for a long line of webs who could be a traveling contingent if someone were to approach the Earl Webb record. Yeah. Something to keep track of. Yeah, got to keep an eye on those webs. Let me ask you about two other time-honored traditions along with Earl Webb holding the doubles records. He had 43% of his career doubles in that single record-setting season. That's great. See, that makes me care about it more. That makes me want to really pay

attention because it was just a weird outlier thing for him. Huh? That's pretty cool. Sort of. Yeah. Sort of. Okay. So here are two things that we do in a certain way, and I wonder whether you think we should do them in a different way or whether they're fine the way they are. So the Ivy at Wrigley, right?

Oh, wow. This goes back almost as far as Earl Webb holding the single season doubles record. It was like 1937, there's been Ivy at Wrigley. It's associated with the park, with the franchise, right? It's history. And my fave, Bill Veck, claimed that it was his idea, which seems to be maybe a dubious claim. He could stretch the truth sometimes, but hey, we won't hold it against him. But it means that there's no padding out there because there's ivy. And occasionally, that has ramifications, as it seemed to for Cody Bellinger, who is now on the injured list

with two cracked ribs, which sounds painful, sounds uncomfortable. Now, initially, I guess it wasn't the most acute severe pain because he actually stayed in the game. So he kind of collided with the wall in center. There was a fly ball hit by Yainer Diaz that went for a double, actually. And he didn't catch that, but he, in his attempt to, collided with the center field wall and the ivy. And he stayed in the game for a while. with the center field wall and the Ivy. And he stayed in the game for a while.

And he said after the game initially, it's a very dull pain even now. That's a good sign. At first, I didn't feel anything. We're going to have to check on the wall, see if the wall is okay first. Well, pride goes before the fall, before the wall. Men are great.

Yeah. The wall's just fine, I think. But Cody Bellinger has a couple of cracked ribs and might be out for a while. I don't know how long they haven't given an exact timeline. I think according to the baseball prospectus injury database ledger, it's like 50 days is the average missed time for an injury of this kind, but I don't know whether his is severe or what, but that is probably because of the wall. I guess we can't say for certain, but one would think, right? And he didn't fully crash into the wall. Like he landed, he kind of hopped and came down on the warning track. And so he did sort of slow himself down and the ground took a little bit, some extra dirt we neglected to mention there, the warning track, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he, I guess, you know, wasn't a full speed ahead like Pete Reaser with the Dodgers crashing into unpadded walls during his career, which was incredibly promising. And he could have been one of the best players of all time but he just kept slamming into walls

and having concussions and then they decided we should pad the walls and that's been a good decision but they haven't done it at Wrigley because the Ivy, it's a signature so do you think I don't know whether this will be the precipitating

event but you could see something like this causing them to reevaluate. But then again, it's iconic, right? What would Wrigley be without the Ivy? Is it worth the occasional cracked rib to have the signature of your ballpark? On the one hand, I feel ready to give a take. On the other, I feel like Tom Hardy and Mad Max Fury Road going, that's bait. Because people are very protective of their ballpark traditions. Here's a question I would need answered to evaluate this.

Some outfield walls, they're all padded, right? So when you run into them, it's like the walls in gym at gym class where there's like – Most of them. Just about all of them at this point. Yeah. Yeah. So on the one hand, there are those. There are a lot of outfields that, to my mind, feel like they have greater potential for regular injury than the IV necessarily does.

Sure. Because you do have a very good like idea of where it is right i think the chain link stuff in the outfield at some ballparks strikes me as way more dangerous than yeah ivy right because you get your fingies twisted in there and then you can like yeah or the scoreboards some some places have the scoreboards there yeah were wrigley being built afresh today i doubt strongly that this would be the material that they would go with out there right they would probably deem it dangerous to have the brick or kind of silly to have the ivy but i think i'm gonna come down on the side of risk and not just because i'm a chicken and say that you know while it is

certainly unfortunate what happened to bellinger i don't think that it is the only material or configuration that could have resulted in that particular injury i think that going like full force into a wall even if it has some amount of padding like you can probably still do some some damage to yourself and i think that again it's it's a very of padding, like you can probably still do some, some damage to yourself. And I think that again, it's, it's a very clear, I mean,

like I know the ball can get lost out there, but like, you know where, you know where you're going. I know there's some like buoyancy to the Ivy. It's not like you touch the Ivy and there's brick, there's Ivy, but like,

you know where it is, you know? And he's, he's familiar with that ballpark. So yeah, I don't know. I, I think it might be okay. But I'm also okay with fast slides at playgrounds.

So maybe I have a little. What's a broken arm now and again? I'm just saying some of these playgrounds are so they're very careful. And that's good. You don't want crazy stuff. But you could have some taller slides maybe. Yeah. I broke my clavicle on a seesaw and it made me the man I am today. I've never broken a bone, Ben.

I've never broken a bone. Yeah. Well, maybe you've stayed off of seesaws with your grandmother who was well-meaning, but our timing was off. Oh, no. Clavicle breaks are the worst, too, because it's just like, what do you do? You can't set it, you know? Did you have to wear a sling? To wear a sling, yeah.

I was like five or so, five or six. It was uncomfortable. But I think if they were to change anything, they'd have to get approval from the city because it's part of the Wrigley Field landmark designation. Interesting. The ivy is kind of written in, right? And I love ballpark idiosyncrasies. And ballparks have generally gotten less quirky and distinctive over time in terms of fence distance, fence height, wall padding, or the lack thereof.

The oddities have been sanded down, which you could argue has happened to some extent with player mechanics, umpire signals, in-game tactics, and roster construction. So I'd hate to lose a vestige of that pre-homogenization, let your freak flag fly era of ballpark construction. And I like the IV. I like the look of it. I like the ground rules, right? That like if the ball rules, right? Sure, yeah. That like if the ball disappears, you get a couple bases. But then if the outfielder tries to retrieve the ball from the ivy, then the ball is live. I like these little quirks and wrinkles.

Yes. I wonder if there is some compromise solution where you could maintain the ivy. Yeah, I was just going to ask. But like why not both, you know? Right. Is there a way – can ivy. Yeah, I was just going to ask. Like, why not both, you know? Right. Is there a way, can ivy only survive on exposed brick? Like, can we- That is not my experience of ivy, so- Yeah, we need an ivy expert here. I mean, I guess you could have, you know, synthetic ivy. I mean, you could have fake-

That's ridiculous. Ivy, but- Why would you do that? But if we knew that it was fake and, you know, fake plants, they can be quite convincing. So, they could replace the ivy out there. We wouldn't even know. But if we knew, something would be lost. Maybe conspiracy theory, right? Oh, gosh, I have two things to say in response to that.

What a delightful idea, Ben. So, in my house, one of the walls, which is really the side of my neighbor's house has ivy on it and um it is uh wildly difficult to kill and we're not trying so that works out well for us but um it is a very resilient thing it is i think quite damaging to like sighting and stuff so i wonder if they could do some amount of padding out there and then just if if the ivy could grow, you know, kind of into the padding, you know, look like, you know, like one of the zombies from The Last of Us, just like sticking out of the wall. And it grows very, very fast. So, you know, if they, particularly if, you know, the season ended up not going well for them and they were done playing at the end of September, like, I wonder if they could, you know, yank it out and have it mostly grown back. I mean, like winter in Chicago isn't like an ideal growing season. So you might have a year where it looks kind of gnarly out there, but it would be cool to track the progression of the Ivy as it grows.

Also, I love the idea of them pulling it out and replacing it with a faux Ivy, but saying it's real because I am back in the market for a low stakes fun scandal, although I have not forgotten the pants. I think about the pants every day, Ben. I notice them at least once every game I'm watching. Yesterday, I was watching the Mariners play the Rangers, and they're looking at Corey Seager at first base because he got hit by a pitch, and I could see the tag on his jersey through his pants,

and I could see the tag on the first base coach's jersey through his pants, and I was just sitting there going, pants, pants, pants, pants, pants, pants, pants. And I almost am tempted to tweet about it every time i see it because i know enough people who work for the league for them to get annoyed by it and not do anything but be like meg's the worst and that might be a little fun to be like a little you know antagonistic in an annoying way but if it you know how long would it take people to notice? It wouldn't take the players long to notice at all.

Maybe this couldn't be a conspiracy theory or a scandal because you do have guys like out there touching the ivy. You know, when visiting players come in, they go out there to get a sense of like what it's like so that they can comply with the ground rules. I've sometimes been fooled by faux plants, even up close and personal. Like I touch them and I'm like, is that real? I don't know. Because, you know, some plants, they feel like they could be fake, depending on the type of plant. But if you kept maintaining the charade,

you just had like people go out and water them or whatever they do to maintain the ivy, have some groundskeepers go out and go through the motions, you know? Yeah, but they would never change. And that would give the game away, right? When they looked identical. And also, I don't think we can count on every major leaguer having the same plant blindness that you do. They'd be like, this is not a real plant. What happened to the ivy?

I think they'd know right away. I mean, if nothing else, like Cubs outfielders would be like, what's going a real plant. What happened to the ivy? I think they'd know right away. I mean, if nothing else, like Cubs outfielders would be like, what's going on with this? This is different. Yeah. Well, there's got to be some engineering solution here. Maybe we can grow replacement ivy on some sort of padding and then install it over the offseason with the ivy pre-embedded. Now you're cooking with gas. Yeah.

There's got to be some workable solution here. I think they can find a way. So the other thing that I want to ask you about, this was a suggestion by Joe Sheehan in his excellent newsletter, JoeSheehan.com. And this was prompted by a non-stolen base that looked like it may have been or should have been a stolen base by an Angel, not Mike Trout, but Joe Adele. Yeah. Yeah, this was a play in an Angels-Orioles game. The Angels had been ahead, and then they fell behind, and they were trying to come back.

This was one out. I mean, it was bottom of the ninth. The Angels were down two outs. It was a very consequential out call. Right. It was two outs, and Joe Adele appeared to steal second base. It looks like he got in there. It sure looked like he did.

Yeah. And he was called out on the field and then they appealed and the replay umps said the call stood, right? And that is probably because you need like really clear and convincing evidence that the call was wrong in order to overturn it. And arguably it was clear enough, but they seemed not to, right? They disagreed. The rule says replay officials review all calls subject to replay review and decide whether to change the call on the field, confirm the call on the field, or let stand the call on the field due to the lack of clear and convincing evidence. And we may have talked about this before, but as Joe notes, it all flows from the call on the field. And you have a higher standard to clear if you're going to go against the call on the field. And Joe is saying we shouldn't do that. We should go against the call on the field. And Joe is saying we shouldn't do that. We should not privilege the call on the field. The replay umps should just

approach the call as if they are making it fresh, you know, as if they're making it for the first time. Why give deference to the umpire who made the initial call? If it's being appealed, why not just go with the best evidence you have at that time? Yes. So it sounds like you agree. I agree. I feel like we have talked about this before. I think we have, yeah. And so I hope that I'm being sort of ideologically consistent with my answer here.

The priority, the thing you're driving towards should be getting the call right. I think in general, this is a place where I think umpires do a pretty good job at a very hard job because they are having to judge these things in real time where players are moving very quickly. They sometimes don't have an optimal view of what's going on on the field, although sometimes they do, and that really aids them. And they often get these things right. And particularly when it comes to, you know, safe out calls around base running, you know, as we've discussed before, like the amount you have to come off the bag to be out is it's infinitesimally small, right? It's just like so tiny, you know, we're just like looking for an out in there. You know, we've talked about other ways that we might mitigate that tendency because I think a lot of people find those safe out calls annoying. But within the structure we have, like you have all these different angles, you're able to slow it down, you're able to time up, you know, the contact that the base runner is making with the bag, with the contact that the fielder is making with the base runner, and when they have the ball and all of this stuff.

And so if you're going to invoke a challenge system, you should defer to the analysis of people who have the ability to sort of judge these things in their totality with a lot more looks i don't i just don't really see what value there is to deferring to the umpire on the field now i can already hear some of our listeners being like but you don't want an abs system but i want them to defer to the challenge system if somebody uses challenge you guys it's it it's the same it's's consistent. If you're going to do it, you got to, you know, and, you know, it puts the decision to challenge a call in the field on equal footing with the folks in New York. You're looking at the same stuff because when a team is deciding, yes, challenge that call or not, they're doing that often quickly. But by looking at camera angles and being like, oh, yes, he was safer. Oh. They're doing that often quickly, but by looking at camera angles and being like, oh, yes, he was safe, or oh, no, he was actually out. And I think you want New York to be kind of proceeding from that same place in the decision matrix, right? You should,

you know, you want the call to be right. I don't really feel the need to sort of like defer to the judgment of the field dump in these circumstances. And like, it puts the field dump in a weird spot in some ways, because on the one hand, you have to, the crew chief has to announce now to a ballpark full of people, someone else's decision. ballpark full of people someone else's decision and it's like kind of their fault but also not their fault it's like this weird gray area so i think get the call on the field right you want the you know the clear-eyed fans at home who aren't so you know blinded by fandom that they can't like see an out when there is one or a safe call when there is one to be looking at the same stuff that the the folks in new york are and be like yeah he was safer yeah he was out like i i once we introduced this again like when we introduce technology to these processes our expectations of their accuracy increase in a way that is sometimes unrealistic but they do increase and so then when you say well we can

we can see it but you know we gotta defer to It's like, well, what is the purpose of this project then? What are we doing here? Right. Yeah. It's like we're using a beyond a reasonable doubt standard instead of a preponderance of the evidence standard. You're a civil suit guy. I guess what the umpire is using initially. So then why should the replay ump, who is also an ump, right? Right. Why should their – it should only count less if you think that the replay ump is at some sort of disadvantage, right? Like if you think that there's something they can't see hundreds, thousands of miles away that the ump on the scene could. And that's a reasonable thought. Yeah, there might be, you know, and I could, especially when they put the system in place

and it was unproven and who knows, maybe they didn't have quite as many cameras and angles and high definition and 4k and maybe everything wasn't perfectly ironed out. And so you said, in 4K and maybe everything wasn't perfectly ironed out. And so you said, let's defer to the on-field umps a little bit. But if it's mostly about protecting their egos or not showing them up or something, then that's not a good reason because the whole purpose of replay is to get the calls right. And that means that sometimes the umps are going to be overruled. So there's probably always going to be a little bit of bias toward the call in the field because the replay ump is going to know what the call was. And so, A, they may be swayed by someone else's opinion, right? Someone in their cohort, someone in their union.

And they might feel some slight reluctance to embarrass that ump and show them up. And, you know, maybe they know the feeling from when they're on the field and their call gets overturned and they're like, oh, I made the wrong call. And they have to announce that they were wrong in front of the whole stadium, right? So there might already be sort of like a slight thumb on the scale, but then to say, you know, it has to be a higher standard, like it has to be beyond all doubt, say, you know, it has to be a higher standard, like it has to be beyond all doubt, basically. Yeah, that does seem like going too far. And there's just so many camera angles and such high quality that I don't know. I don't know that you legitimately could see anything in person that you couldn't see from afar. Is there an instance that we can think of where you would, by virtue of what you can

challenge or not, would have to know? I guess you'd have to know because of the direction of the decision one way or the other, what the call on the field was. I guess what I'm asking is, could replay work where the folks in New York are simply presented with, is this runner, whatever, safer out? Could they just, could, but you're watching it, so you're seeing the ump go, ah, he's You're not seeing the ump's go, yeah. I mean, that would be good if, but it would probably take some extra work, right? Like, I mean, if you had all the time in the world, you could just kind of like edit out

the umpire or blur the call or something, right? In the name of expediency, it might not work. Yeah. And sometimes you can, depending on where the call is and what the position of the ump is and how quickly the ump makes the call. There are some times, though, when they're like right in the frame and they're making the signal immediately. Yeah, they're doing the kapow like a comic book villain. Yeah. All right. A few more observations.

One, I think we should just be talking more about Matt Waldron. I don't know what we would say about him, but I just want everyone to be aware that Matt Waldron is pitching. He's throwing a knuckleball. He's pitching pretty effectively. And he's only 27 years old, which in knuckleball years is very young. Babe in arms. I just don't know that we're making enough of this because it looked like the knuckleball might be extinct or circling the drain. And yet here he is. And I don't know if it's the – I guess it's probably the fact that the knuckleball is not really his –

I mean, it's his primary pitch in the sense that it's a plurality of his pitches are knuckleballs, but not a majority of his pitches. And so I think when people think of knuckleballers, they think of like the Wakefield type of knuckleball, like really dependent on the knuckleball, throwing the knuckleball most of the time with a fastball kind of like as a change of speeds. And Matt Waldron is not that, but he's throwing his knuckleball more than he did last season. Last season he threw it 29.3% of the time.

This year he's throwing 35.1% knuckleballs, which is like almost twice as often as he's thrown any other pitch type. So he is like a legitimate knuckleballer, you know, and even though there have been many primary or exclusively knuckleball throwing pitchers, it's also a long tradition of guys who would just mix in knuckleballs and he's doing more than mixing them in. Like he's, he's throwing the knuckleball more than anything else. And he's been a good pitcher this year. Granted, his most recent successful start came against the Rockies, which will help. But still, the knuckleball's back, thanks to Matt Waldron, whose roster spot seems to be secure and could be knuckleballing for many years to come.

and could be knuckleballing for many years to come. And I think there's every incentive to have a knuckleball comeback in the sense that, A, maybe it's certainly less stressful on your arm if you're throwing a knuckleball. So if you can develop one, then that's good, given the pitcher injury epidemic. I've also argued in the past that if we do get an ABS setup or maybe even a challenge system, that that might benefit knuckleballers because historically knuckleballers have not gotten calls to go their way because it's tough to hit them. It's tough to catch them.

It's also tough to call them accurately. And so knuckleballs have gotten sort of screwed over by umpires in the past too. So that might be less true. in the past too, so that might be less true. Also, the fact that it's so rare, virtually extinct in the majors, was extinct in the majors for a couple of years, aside from, you know, position player pitchers maybe throwing one every now and then. It's not something that hitters are accustomed to, right? It was always a relative rarity, but in eras when, you know, there were several active knuckleballers, it was something everyone had seen at least. And now there are probably hitters facing Matt Waldron who've never seen a knuckleball, right?

And so I don't know how much like seeing one even helps you hit it because the whole thing is the movement is erratic and unpredictable. But still, never having faced one, it's got to be extra difficult. So I know it's tough because not that many people have thrown it, so not that many people are qualified to teach it, and it's hard to catch. And so you're inflicting a lot of extra labor on your catchers, or you have to train your catchers to do it. I get the reason why it's not more common. And as people throw harder and harder and have nastier and nastier stuff, I get why it's not in vogue. But Matt Waldron's making it work. And just salute to him. I'm happy to have him knuckleballing. I agree. Who's going to be the brave soul who does propose the knuckleball as the solution to the injury epidemic. Is it you, Ben? Me. I just did. You just did. And we'll be the change we want to see in the world in terms of talking about Waldron more.

I always find it funny when media people are like, we're not talking about this enough. And I'm like, well, just then do it. Then, yeah. And hey, I've already said it once in this episode, so I'm not digging you. But here we are. We have a Thrace Weekly podcast. Boy, we've said Thrace twice on this episode, so I'm not digging you. But like, here we are. We have a Thrice Weekly podcast. Boy, we've said Thrice twice on this episode.

Can we say it Thrice? Can we find another way to say it? Let's see if we can before the end. Now I'm going to be looking for one. It's not going to sound natural. I know that the drummer for Thrice is a listener of Effectively Wild. So there we go. I guess I just did it.

Yeah. Shout out to Riley. Maybe the solution is that we should have Matt Waldron on the show sometime because we had Mickey Janus, the previous knuckleballer on the show, and he got into knuckleball because it's all they ever get asked about. You know, everyone wants to talk about the knuckleball. But it seems like a lot of them really also love the knuckleball and love being part of the lineage of knuckleballers and the way that it's passed down from knuckleballer to knuckleballer. So maybe they're happy to sort of spread the gospel. Yeah. I mean, I know that like the way George Kirby seemed to really insist on throwing one in

honor of Wakefield, like he felt a way about it. I just want to come up with more ways for George Kirby to be good. You know, like I'm just like invested in that as a project for the season. So knuckleballs for everyone, I say. Sounds good to me. Another player, I think we're not talking about enough, haven't talked about enough. And I think I've made this point that we haven't talked about him enough and yet still haven't talked about him that much. Francisco Lindor, right? So

Francisco Lindor had himself a great game, hit a couple homers on Wednesday, and he has not been off to a great start this season. But I just don't know what happened to Francisco Lindor as one of the faces of baseball, one of the most talked about superstars. I'm not sure how it's happened, but it feels like he is under the radar almost. It's like I just don't hear as much about Francisco Lindor as I used to, which is weird because I remember when he went to the Mets, I was like, wow, he could run this city. He could be a super duper star here because he's so good and he's so personable and the demographic makeup of New York. If this guy's good, he could be a Jeter-level star.

And instead, it seems like his profile has kind of declined since he was with Cleveland. And I don't really know why, because he remains an excellent player. He had a down year in 2021, which was his first year with the Mets. And maybe that's a large part of it. I think that's a big part of it. Yeah. And Mets fans were sort of disappointed.

You know, our new superstar and big contract. And it's not like he was bad. He was like an average hitter. And with his usual excellent defense, he was like a four-win player by fan graphs. Like, it's pretty good. But it's not up to his peak seasons, his established level. And so that was a little bit of a letdown. But the last couple of seasons, he's been like a six-win player. I mean, 12-4 by Fangraphs, 2022 and 2023 combined.

He has remained a good hitter, like 20%, know, 20%, 25% above average with, again, still like best in class defense. He hit 31 homers last year. You know, he's not old or anything. I just, he's like, even since he started with the Mets, so including the down year in 2021, if we just look at position player war 2021 through 2024. So with that down year and with the slow start to this season, still 12th among all major league position players over that span. So what is it? Is it just the disappointment of that first season coupled with defense always being kind of underrated? So I think that you've hit on the two things that are attributable to him specifically, like individually, that are maybe leading to the sense that you have that he has sort of lost luster as a star. But here are some other things that I think had something to do with it, which is they assembling teams that projected really well at the beginning of the season,

pretty much all of Lindor's tenure there, they have one playoff appearance to show for it. They were wildly disappointing last year. They ended last year 29 games back in the East. So when that's kind of where you land, when you get to a point where you're doing a trade deadline sell-off of Verlander and Scherzer, like stuff has gone so wrong

in other places of the roster that I think standout individual performances also kind of get lost in the shuffle because there isn't an opportunity for them to play in October. You're right that he had a really slow start, and he certainly needs to turn the bat around here. But if they defy expectation this year,

if they were to somehow sneak into the postseason, it would almost certainly involve a very good Lindor season. And then I think the narrative might change in a real hurry. But yeah, I think the fact that the first year he was there, he sort of underperformed relative to expectation, even though by our version of war, he was still a four-win player. But like you said, a lot of that is coming from defense. He hit 230 his first season in New York.

He had a 101 WRC+. And I think that when you're when you're looking like that at the plate and and there were weird moments of discord between like him and Jeff McNeil weren't there like there were just there was a lot of metzing going on at various points in his New York tenure and some of that was like directly related to him a lot of it wasn't when you're a guy who's a really good defender and you're like a 20 above average hitter your team needs to be good around you for it to like really stick with people you know part of it too is like during this stretch you know aaron judge is setting american league home run records and everyone has all this consternation about the Yankees.

And, you know, I think that has something to do with it too. Like for as many people live in New York and as many Mets fans as there are, I don't mean to say that like that entire city is Yankees fans. It's not by any means, but like there does tend to be

kind of a push and pull there. And, you know, last year was so weird because like both of those clubs were really dysfunctional and not very good. So, or at least relative to expectation, you know, relative to expectation. And I guess you got other stars with the Mets. I mean, you know, some of them have come and gone,

but you had Berlander and Scherzer and, you know, you've got Alonzo and some homegrown guys, right? And so maybe part of why he was so beloved in Cleveland, well, he was drafted by Cleveland and he was homegrown and he was their guy and they didn't have the high payrolls that the Mets have had and didn't have maybe quite as much star power. And he was the star.

He was the cornerstone franchise player and he's one of several big-name guys with the Mets. So yeah, it probably is all of that. And maybe, I don't know, park effects, city field, suppressing the surface offensive stats a little bit. But he did have a 30-30 season last year. Yeah, I know. Along with being one of the best defensive shortstops in the game, if not the best. That's a star. It should be a star. And I feel like he just doesn't get star level recognition anymore. He's not really any worse than he was in Cleveland aside from his career year, his

fantastic year of 2018 when he hit 38 home runs and was like an eight-win player. But other than that, like his best Mets seasons are roughly as good as his, you know, second and on best Guardians seasons, Cleveland seasons. So I don't know. I just, I think he should be sung more. He should not be unsung, Francis Gullendor. He's going to be a Hall of Famer if he continues on this trajectory. And it's just kind of like

a quiet second half of his career thus far. So, yeah, maybe the Mets just need to be good and make a deep playoff run. Maybe that's it. I mean, I think that we should start the campaign right now to reinstate him to full star status.

Yeah, superstar status. Yeah, there are very few players who combine Lindor's personality and effervescence with such a fun style of play and so much skill and talent. You're right ben he should be sort of like front of mind when we're talking about the guys who you know might be on like the banners they put around uh whatever city ends up hosting the all-star game every year right like because there will be players and you'll be like oh it's you know it's juan soto it's ronald acuna jr you know it's garrett cole it's then Soto. It's Ronald Acuna Jr. You know, it's Garrett Cole. And you're like, oh, the big stars.

And he should just be on that banner every year, you know? He should just be on that banner every year. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know he's not the new hotness, as Will Smith says in Men in Black, right? But he's not old and busted either from that line, right? I know, like, everyone's like, Ellie that line. I know everyone's like, Ellie, right?

And maybe it's like, oh, Lindor, he's kind of old news, but he's still a superstar. So Ellie is amazing, by the way. I don't mean to short Ellie. It looks like he is really putting it together. The strikeout rate's down to about 30% now, which for him, that's good and that's workable.

And he's stolen 15 bases. Like, he's amazing. He's awesome. Like, this could be the total breakout happening here. Not so much the other crews. O'Neal crews, not such a great start to the season, surprisingly, after a great spring training. But at least one of the crews is the big NL Central shortstops with crews in their name really delivering.

Well, and I do think you raise a good point, which is it's not like the player population is static and there are going to be guys who come in and are exciting, who might have some amount of pre-existing attention being paid to them because of their prospect status and reputation. And, you know, Lindor has been around since 2015.

And so some of it might just be that it's good to, to have there be turnover in sort of the, the guys who are front of, of mind, because you don't want the, the most exciting player in the league to be, you to be the same as he was 20 years ago. But there is this cohort of guys who seems to be relatively stable year to year. Arguably, sometimes guys persist in that category after they should, really,

at least in terms of their production on the field. And I am comfortable not because his production has waned, but because of what I think he represents to the game and sort of how we will look back on his career when it's over. Like, yeah, put Lindor in that group. And he's, you know, the thing about Francisco Lindor is he's still only 30. He has plenty of good years of baseball ahead of him, I would imagine. And so I hope that, you know, a good, a couple of good Lindor seasons line up with good Mets

seasons. And then, you know, we can see him be like a postseason guy again in a way that lasts more than just like a wildcard series. So, yeah. All right. And two more things. I have not paid close attention to the all-time leaderboard of games finished without a save since many years ago when this was a recurring theme of the podcast, the Chase, Ryan Webb

and Matt Albers. And they had the most games finished without a save. They were always the bridesmaids, I guess, the closer in waiting, the finishing the game, but not getting the save. And Matt Albers finally got one. It was a big moment in Effectively Wild history. And Ryan Webb, who one of our Patreon tiers is still named after, the all-time leader with 105 games finished and he never got a save. Well, I did not notice until listener Patreon supporter Citar pointed it out in our Discord group that we have a challenger who's coming up hot on the heels of Ryan Webb, Jose Ruiz. Okay. Ryan Webb. Jose Ruiz. Now, Jose Ruiz has not had like a particularly distinguished major league career, which I guess is sort of a prerequisite for being high on this leaderboard. He's been

around. It would be hilarious if he had had a very distinguished major league career and was high on this leaderboard. I feel like we talk about that every day, if that were true. Probably. So, Jose Ruiz has pitched seven seasons in the majors. You may not have been aware of his work because, I don't know, he's got kind of a common first and last name. Sure. And he's been just kind of a common major league pitcher, you know, like working almost exclusively out of the bullpen with a slightly worse than league average ERA, and he's pitched for the Padres, mostly the White Sox. He was with the Diamondbacks last year. He's been around. He's been okay.

And if you're around and you're okay in Major League Bullpens, then you have the opportunity to finish games without ever getting a save. He's now up to 81. 81 games finished without a save. He's now up to 81. 81 games finished without a save. He's really snuck up on me. He's 24 behind Ryan Webb's all-time record. Now, he's not currently adding to his total and closing the gap with Webb

because he is in the minor leagues right now. So he will have to be back in the majors in order to keep tacking on games finished without a save. He is in the Philly system. He's with Lehigh Valley, AAA for the Phillies. And I guess that's not great because the Phillies have a pretty stacked bullpen. So that might limit his opportunities. Then again, if he does get major league innings, he probably won't be the guy getting the saves.

That's right. He has two saves this year in AAA. And he has 30 career minor the saves. So he actually, he has two saves this year in AAA and he has 30 career minor league saves, but zero in the majors. And he is just 29 years old. So he's got plenty of time to ascend to the top of this leaderboard. And I was just entirely unaware that he was creeping up there. So I feel like this is now something that I'm going to need to start to track. Yeah. And I'm rooting for him to be back in the big leagues now. I mean, I'm not rooting against Ryan Webb.

I love that Ryan Webb holds this record, but I want to see this chase. This is more exciting than chasing Earl Webb is chasing Ryan Webb, right? This is the Webb chase that I want to see. So, yeah, let's get Jose Ruiz back up in the big leagues and finishing some games but not saving them. Man, we're going to have to come up with some new Patreon benefits so that we can name a tier after him. I know, right. Yeah, or we might have to rename the Webb tier if he were to be supplanted. But then what if Jose Ruiz set the record but then got a save and thus removed himself from the record?

Then would Ryan Webb be reinstituted? I don't know. It's probably getting harder to set this record now because saves are distributed so democratically now. Right, yeah. You don't have the designated closer gets every save anymore. It's all matchups and you have a number of guys. I mean, we're having like record numbers

of people getting saves in a season on a team, right? So you can pick up a random save now, I think even more easily than you used to be able to. So if you were to do it in this era, that would be particularly impressive or perhaps unimpressive depending on your perspective. But man, I hope he does it now. Yeah, I'm rooting for him, question mark.

Sort of, yeah. Sort of. I mean, hey, he'd be getting big league checks, right? Right, yeah. So that's rooting for him. All right, lastly, I want to play a clip here Right. Yeah. Right. Hinch's usage of the Tigers bench and whether we need a new stat to describe that. This is about a minute and a half clip.

Yeah, I love how the Tigers players, they're bench players, guys that are on the bench, how they prepare. They prepare as if they're going to be a starter every single day. And A.J. Hinch, again, masterminding the way he communicates

with his players. Gives them a heads up of when they're going to possibly be in the ballgame. And for what? And for what at bat? For what situation? For what at bat, what pitcher you're going to face. Talking with McKinstry today, I was amazed with the fact that A.J. Hinch had already told him

exactly who he was going to face yesterday. Phil Maton, that's who you're going to get. And there you go. That's how it happens. I would love to see, you know in the NBA, they do plus minuses for different lines, right? So you can tell if they mix and match a couple guys in the second unit

with the three guys maybe from the first unit, what they do. I'd love to see a plus-minus on the Tigers' bench this year because it feels like the value add would be really significant. So maybe we can beg baseball savant to do something like that or like Eno Saris or somebody. I'm just going to start naming people that might be able to do it.

So if Eno could do it or Travis Travis Sawchuk, or Sam Miller, or Ben Lindbergh, and effectively Wild, if you can do a really good plus minus for the bench, we'd love to see it, folks. Anna Kaiser is really good at that stuff. Somebody do it. Thank you. Okay, two down.

That's what we do. We add work on other people. Whenever Jason puts out a call like that, I want to answer. He's flashing the effectively wild signal up in the skies. And so I would love to come to his aid and develop a stat here. I haven't as of yet, and I don't know how it would work exactly. And I don't know whether the concept is even sound, but I wish it were. So I don't know exactly what he has in mind here, but it sounds like he wants an equivalent of plus minus. Now, I guess we've had a somewhat commonly cited baseball stat called plus minus, which was a defensive rating system

from Baseball Info Solutions, right? But this is a plus minus hockey style, basketball style plus minus, which is like, are you on the floor? Are you on the ice when your team scores, right? And so I guess the baseball equivalent would be like, are you on the field when a run is scored or scored against you? And

so you could have a player plus minus in baseball, which I feel like I've seen this concept discussed at some point, but it's certainly not something that I'm aware of anyone tracking or making available. I also have the instinct to sit up straight when jason says i need i need this thing a question i have about this is like what are we not capturing with all of our existing statistics both aggregate stats like war and individual and very particular splits that something like this would capture. And I am open to the idea that it might be a great deal, right? That there might be a lot that we're not capturing. But I think that when we think of teams that have done a really good job of deploying platoons or bench players in specific situations,

and I think that that they are right to observe that aj hinch seems to put his guys in a good position to succeed and to it sounds like be able to give them because he has a good sense of when they are or will be in those positions to be able to say hey here's how i'm going to deploy you this series against these pitchers and these circumstances, what have you. I think that those teams are looking to stats, some of which are public, some of which are probably proprietary, about how individual hitters, and that's normally where we see this, I think, do in very specific circumstances. So not just like, how can I make sure that we have a favorable handedness matchup,

but this hitter's bat path moves in a very particular way and this pitcher's pitch mix is going to bring the ball right into the barrel and bing, bang, boom, that's how your bench player hits a home run, right? Yeah. This was something with the Giants, right?

Right. A couple of years ago where it was like, you know, they were, Gabe Kapler was pinch hitting constantly and there were articles written about, oh, maybe they're really good at deploying these players, playing the matchups, you know, putting them in positions to succeed based on their traits and the traits of the pitcher, right? And was that repeatable? Was that an actual skill? Was it luck? Was it, who knows, right? But it that repeatable? Was that an actual skill? Was it luck? Who knows,

right? But it did happen at least for a while. And I think that, you know, my next question was, or maybe observation was going to be, I think the potential exists to get like two cube by half with some of this stuff, right? Where sometimes, you know, you're trying to exploit the tiny minuscule edge so much that it's like you lose sight of the fact that, you know, maybe this guy is just like a better hitter, you know, or maybe the most relevant platoon split is just handedness. And that's is really valuable. But it does feel like the tweet potential is kind of high with some of these splits sometimes. I want to understand sort of what we aren't capturing now that Jason would like us to be. Because I think that how bench players are deployed and when they sub and how they're utilized, like that, I think, arguably is one of the most important remaining strategic decisions that managers make. You know, is any one individual substitution going to make or break your season? Like,

probably not. But I think that these things do kind of compound over the course of 162 games. And, you know, sometimes I do think that the difference in bench or utility guys season to season that we should do a better job recognizing as sort of public analysts is like, how are they really being deployed? Like, are they being used in moments when they are sort of best able to maximize their skill set. So it is an important question. I think more often than not, like you just want your best guys on the field and then you want to have a sound plan for when you make substitutions. And I think all of that just comes down to good self-scouting, right? Knowing like, hey, this guy, I also think that like a lot of times it's obvious. It's like, yeah, that guy's a great hitter, but we understand situationally that if we're in a close late situation and he's not up for a little while, we might go with a better defender out there because we need to guard a lead or we need to maintain, you know, a tight margin to give our offense an opportunity to score. So, you know, I feel like we have a lot of tools, but maybe what Jason wants here is something that, you know, in a way that is different than war aggregates that in a way

that is more situationally sensitive. Yeah, I think sometimes there's an impulse. I think we should look to other sports. I've advocated that, you know, there should be cross-pollination and analysts in one sport talking to others. And sometimes people will go from a front office in one sport to a front office in another sport. And sometimes you might look at the statistical framework from another sport and say, would that work in this sport? And obviously, a lot of baseball concepts have been ported over to other sports, sabermetrically speaking, but sometimes they don't map on perfectly because sports are different. And baseball is different in a lot

of respects from other sports, as we've talked about at great length. And so, you know, sometimes people will say, like, could you do a time of possession stat in baseball? And there have been attempts at that. Jeff Sullivan used to mess around with that idea. And it was like how much time you're on offense versus how much time you're on defense. And it was kind of fun, but there wasn't that much signal to it. There's like a weak correlation. It didn't really tell you all that much. Maybe because like in other sports, you were both on the same clock and there's only so much time available to the teams that are playing. And so if one team is eating up a lot of that possession and has the ball the whole time, well, that's probably going

to be a positive indication, but it doesn't quite work that way in baseball. And you might also just have other stats that would tell you that just as well. You know, you're hitting and pitching performance or just how many plate appearances, how many batters faced. You know, you want to have more plate appearances as a team and face fewer batters on the opposing team probably, right? So maybe we don't need a new stat. And plus minus, first of all, my understanding is that it can be really often misused in other sports. And I know they may have more advanced versions and adjusted plus minus and everything. Right, right.

It's kind of like catcher ERA in baseball, which can be meaningless or misleading in small samples. But if you do a sophisticated version with matched pairs analysis so that you're comparing catchers with the same pitchers and a big enough sample, then it can really tell you something. Or a long-term with or without you analysis, Derek Jeter versus other Yankees shortstops, for instance, which made more plays, but with the basic plus minus stats. There are lots of confounding factors, you know, in the NHL, it's very dangerous in small samples, right? Because you could be on the ice with some other player who's really good, and it's not really a reflection on your own performance necessarily. And so they're just more sensitive measures. And then in basketball, and my pal, my colleague at the Ringer,

Zach Kram, wrote a good article about this about a year ago, there are tons of easily available plus minus stats for all different configurations of players on the floor. And so you can say like, oh, well, when these five guys are on the floor, the team has done this well. And when they're not, then it's only done that well. Or you could even narrow it down to like when these three guys are on the floor together, then they do super well. But that is really landmine territory because it's very small sample. It takes a lot of time to stabilize and become meaningful. And most of the alignments that you're looking at don't become meaningful even in a full

season. And so, you know, there might be something to it, but you might also be reading way too much into it and extrapolating and there might have just been some lucky makes or unlucky misses while those guys happen to be on the floor together. And, you know, what with load management and people taking time off, like you're just not going to get the five best players on the floor together all the time, right? And then there's like a selection bias because if an alignment of players is not performing that well, then they won't get to keep playing together,

even if it was just sort of a small sample fluke. If you're more successful, then they'll keep running that lineup out there and it might be partly luck-based, right? So most of the time you're citing plus minus stats, it's probably cherry picking and it's probably reading too much into those numbers. So if we did have some equivalent for that for baseball, where if you were like, you know, pick some bench player who we don't think is actually that good, right? But it just so happens that Zach McKinstry is, you know, Buddy Kennedy or something.

It's like on the field during Tigers wins a lot. I mean, it might be skewed by like, if you're a defensive replacement and you're coming in with leads most of the time, that can mess up those sorts of stats, the like with or without you stats, or it could just be kind of random because how much is a bench player even playing, right? So I feel like you'd probably

get yourself in more trouble than it would be worth. Like it would be handing a tool to people and people would want to use that tool and it might be the wrong tool to use. You know, I wish that baseball were a sport. I think I wish this, that baseball were more of a sport where like individual matchups mattered more. You know, I wish there were more like interactive effects like that. more like interactive effects like that. Like in the NBA, there are real like synergistic effects where some players play well together

and their games are well-suited to each other. And they like, you know, they see each other well and they pass to each other and it's complementary skills. And in baseball, you don't have that so much, right? It's kind of plug and play. And yeah, there's like some clubhouse chemistry morale stuff, but for the most part, it's a team sport, but it's also maybe among the more individual of the team sports, you know, like there's not that much interaction on most plays.

And I do sort of wish sometimes that there were more factors like that where we could really drill down and analyze like, oh, when these guys are on the field together this other guy maybe could play in a different spot and could compensate for his shortcomings. And maybe there's something to that sometimes. But I feel like it's usually probably overblown and just based on small sample stuff. Yeah. You also want blindside blocks in baseball in a way that they aren't now. Let's see. You want to port over from another sport? I think that that's right.

I think a lot of the time, I don't know, I go back and forth on sort of the broader concept of this because I think maybe the equivalent that we see in baseball analysis now is like stack cast stats are so cool. And sometimes they get cited in ways that are really goofy. I still would rather have access to that data, but that doesn't mean that I don't sometimes get annoyed by like a wild and misapplied like X batting average, you know, because that one comes up a lot. It can be tricky to know what the balance is there because sometimes I think we have stats and people get really excited about them and they don't do a good job of explaining what they mean up front and then they get misapplied forever. And sometimes you spend a lot of time going like, ah, that's not how this goes. And then people still yell at you forever and so it's like maybe the answer is to

just do the best you can to explain what they mean and the circumstances they are good at describing versus not or predicting versus not and then you just let the the chips kind of fall where they may but i go back and forth like would it would it be better if we didn't have some of this stuff because it gets used in a wonky, and I don't mean in a push-up-your-glasses-on-your-nose-actually kind of way, but in a bar table that's tippy kind of way. We don't want any tippy bar table stats. Why do we still have tippy bar tables? We have been to the moon multiple times.

And those guys, they got exposed to more radiation. We've already covered that this episode. And I told you about my wife's fondness for wobble wedges, but as you've said, I think, you know, we shouldn't have to carry around a wobble wedge. They should just make non-wobbly tables. I have multiple

versions of wobble wedges in the house. I have a little box of pliable wobble wedges. They're both made out of plastic and one of them is like a softer plastic. And so it's like a little flexy and some of them are hard plastic wobble wedges. And I have two boxes. I keep one of each in my purse. That's not true. I just like stuff napkins under there sometimes. Yeah. Make an imperfect world slightly closer to perfect one, one less wobble at a time. One less wobble.

I do wish, though, that there were more of these effects. And the lineup is another area where people will say, like, oh, well, these players are complementary to having a lineup. Like, if you stack too many high strikeout guys, let's say, then that will have some kind of compounding effect. And it just doesn't really seem to. I mean, maybe like at the extremes, at the margins maybe, but Russell Carlton just wrote about that and based on his simulations and everything, it just doesn't really matter. You can just put any kind of hitter in a lineup and how good the hitters are really matters, but how good the other hitters in that lineup are just doesn't really matter that much.

Obviously, stacking a bunch of good hitters together is good. They can get on base in front of each other and drive each other in. But beyond that, stylistically, it doesn't seem like there's really that much to it. And I wish batter versus pitcher matchup stats mattered more. Maybe they do the way teams project those things, comparing not just head-to-head stats, but like versus like, considering swing planes and release points and pitch types and movement, batter versus similar pitchers as opposed to specific pitchers. But I kind of wish owning another player in a small sample were more meaningful and predictive. And I always sort of lament this too when it comes to

breaking down matchups when the playoffs roll around and we're like, oh, this team versus that team. And there's just only so much you can say about how well does that team match up with this team. And I contrast that to the NFL, for instance, where I look at what NFL analysts are doing. And granted, I don't know if they're right or if they're seeing things that are really there, but when they're kind of combing over the all 22 footage and they're breaking down the tendencies and like this coach's scheme and that coach's scheme and what can they do to counter the way that this team wins. And I mean, it seems like a lot of work to try to figure that stuff out. I know there are fewer

games. There's less footage to review, I guess, but it's still a lot. And yet I always feel kind of useless when the playoffs roll around. I'm like, well, this team is good and that team is also good. Most of the playoff teams are good and this team is a little bit better than that team maybe so i guess in that sense they're favored but you know because you can break it down into like well this team does well against this pitch type and this team throws a lot of those pitch types but i never know how reliable those splits are either and how predictive and stable they are really and or you or you could say like, well, this team, you know, hits a lot of ground balls and this team's got a great ground ball defense. There are things you could do, right? This team has a bunch of great left-handed hitters and this

team's got a dominant left on left reliever, but it's much more this team's talent versus that team's talent. And you play it enough times and it'll probably come out roughly what the probability says it would. So there's just a little less of that intrigue, which makes it easier to do certain types of analysis, but it also precludes other types of analysis that might be really illuminating and rewarding. And baseball doesn't lend itself to that quite as much that like individual, you know, team versus team, player versus player or player with player kind of effects. It's so tricky because it's like you don't want to overstate the case. But I do want to acknowledge like that some of that like in football, like some of that scheme work, like there is something to it, right? Where it'll be like, these guys are particularly good at defending this part of the field or efficient in this way. Those guys are particularly efficient, like pass catchers.

They're like, I, you know, maybe it's not satisfying to say it matters and then they have to execute and see how it goes. You know, that's goes. That isn't satisfying, but I think it's closer to right where you want to put people in the position to sort of play to their strengths or exploit the weaknesses of their opponent. It's not like we're advocating for teams throwing up their hands. If you're a batter, you want to know what the other guy throws and where he often throws it and see if you can you know what i mean like that doesn't matter yeah scouting certain tendencies all that stuff yeah like just where do you want to pitch this guy where do you not want to pitch this guy what what is he good against what is he not good against that that certainly matters yeah yeah so it you know, it's hard to, it's so tricky. All right.

Well, if anyone has any suggestions for how we can help out Jason here or whether there's a worthwhile goal here, let us know. That'll do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. If you want something else to listen to before we post our next pod, I was on the Ringer's excellent Trial by Content podcast to discuss some baseball movies, including a few of my very favorites. It's the most recent episode in the trial by content feed.

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and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Finally, you can find a link to all of the upcoming MLB ballpark meetups of Effectively Wild listeners. Check the last link on the show page or in your podcast apps episode description. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week, which means we will talk to you soon. Just a couple of baseball nights It could be Sam or Jeff Or Sam or Meg and Ben

Unless he goes on paternity leave again In which case Meg will find someone great to fill in But whoever it is, they'll still be just a couple of baseball nerds They'll still be speaking statistically, rambling romantically, pontificating pedantically, bantering bodily, drafting discerningly, giggling giddily, equaling effectively, wildly.