Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2175: Whose Foul Line is it Anyway?

Episode Date: June 8, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s recent resurgence, then answer listener emails about what a dynastic team could do to avoid being widely hated, a mid-plate-appearance batting change, widening the foul lines to increase offense, whether reducing pitcher injuries would be worth bringing back pitcher hitting, the popularity of a perfect […]

And maybe if you're lucky, we'll cope all by chance. You never know precisely where it's gonna go. By definition, Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2175 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello.

I mentioned recently that we seem to have jinxed Mets reliever Reed Garrett because we talked in early May about how great he had been to that point, and he has not been so great since that point. So when we talked about him, his performance was through May 2nd, and he had a 0.54 ERA, pretty spectacular. And since that point, he has a 6.28 ERA. Now, if you look under the hood, it's not actually that different. His XFIP, for instance, was 2.58 in that first period, and it's 3.16 in the second period. So it's some regression and some good luck turning into bad luck. And he's still getting strikeouts and good strikeout minus walk rate and everything. But the surface stats have tanked since we talked about him. And just to establish that that does not always happen,

that there is not always happen, that there is not always an effectively wild jinx. In fact, sometimes there's an effectively wild reverse jinx, where we will talk about someone who is not performing very well, and they will subsequently perform very well. Well, that happened too, right around the same time in early May, we talked about one Vladimir Guerrero Jr. This was on episode 2161. And we noted that he had not been very good to that point. And, of course, he had a disappointing season last year, too. And so we were lamenting, when or if is Vlad going to rake again? He had a 107 WRC+.

Through the point we talked about him through the games of May 7th. He had hit 234, 335, 365. Well, I am pleased to report that from May 8th through June 6th, since that podcast, Vlad has hit 380, 461, 510. That's a 182 WRC+. And among qualified hitters over that span, 177 hitters, he has the eighth highest WRC+. Of all, just one point ahead of Kyle Tuck ever blasting. This nickname is not going to catch on if I can't even remember what it is. Mother Tucker, I can remember.

But Tuck Ever Blasting, he's at a 181 WRC plus over that period. Vlad, 182. So eighth best hitter in baseball over that span. So there we go. If we broke Reed Garrett, we fixed Vlad Guerrero Jr. The scales are balanced. Hire us to fix and or destroy your baseball team. Broke Reed Garrett, we fixed Vlad Guerrero Jr. The scales are balanced. Hire us to fix and or destroy your baseball team.

Now, you could say, I guess, that in the same way that maybe Reed Garrett's fundamental underlying performance wasn't all that different in those two spans. Maybe the same could be said of Vlad, because I note that over this recent hot streak, he has not really hit for a lot of power. He's hit three homers, and he has a 130 isolated power, and he has a 422 BABIP. So it's a lot of ball and play luck, more so than he's suddenly blasting the ball over the fence. But he has walked more often than he's struck out. It's been an improvement. So, you know, all fun facts lie, and the truth is always somewhere in the middle. I mean, I don't know why you would be so cruel to Blue Jays fans like that. They are having a hard year. Why not just let them enjoy it, Ben? You know? Yeah, I hope they can. Okay, well, we are going to hopefully enjoy answering some emails and then we'll be joined for a guest stat blast.

So let's start with, well, this email from Bo, who says, Looking back through history, I'm not sure there's ever been a universally beloved dynasty. Unless it's their own team, it seems most fans like to see churn with who's on top. This personally tracks as well. I rooted hard for the Red Sox in 2004, the Cubs in 2016, the Astros in 2017, and didn't, little did you know, and didn't find myself clamoring for them to get back. In fact, it seems most fans are kind of sick of the Red Sox, Astros, Dodgers, etc. And then there's the Yankees, of course. Would it be possible for a team to win the hearts of the country

and stay there for years on end while winning year after year? If so, what would it take? Could delightful personalities do the trick? Would there need to be continuity on the roster? Would it have to be a lower payroll team? The only example that comes close for me, a Twins fan, is the 83 to 93 Blue Jays, who I never tired of and was rooting for in 94 as well.

I also believe I would have welcomed a Mariners World Series win every year from 95-03. Right. As you would have, I'm sure. But I can't really figure out why those two examples work for me or any current teams that would fit whatever traits those two teams exemplified. So I'm not sure if this scenario is possible for an entire or at least majority of a league's fan base. So a couple of things come to mind for me here in terms of ingredients we might throw into the soup. And I think that the three teams that were highlighted in the email as ones that, you know, I think a lot of people rooted for and then felt their hearts turn against and for slightly different reasons, obviously, like the banging scheme of it all with Houston is its own sort of thing to wrangle. But I want to be careful about how I characterize this.

to wrangle but i want to be careful about how i characterize this i will draw on my own experience how about that i'll do it with a team that i root for not the mariners they've never won anything but um not anything but like not all of it you know what i mean seahawks fans are sure annoying a lot of the time and that definitely escalated after uh the seahawks won the super bowl and uh i think that part of what draws us to teams that have previously struggled and then are met with success and maybe even prolonged success um is that like we like to root for underdogs we like to to pick people up when we can. And that, I think, human instinct then conflicts with another different human instinct that people have, which is we're going to win again. We're the best. We're going to win again. And even that not coming from the team itself so much as the people who root for the team can turn our hearts.

It can make us go, a little much. I think that a lot of people looking back, if they had appreciated what Boston sports fans would become, I don't know, maybe you root differently.

I'm just saying maybe you make different rooting choices. I don't know. Some people might do that. I'm not saying you should. different rooting choices some people might do that I'm saying you should they might have been like got real annoying after a while there we could say that about Cubs fans and we could say that about Astros fans

I think we can just say that about fans I don't think that there's anything specific to those fan bases that made them prone to sort of bluster. I think that fans just do that. You know, you get confident when the most recent thing that's happened to you is that your team is the champions and, you know, suck it. It's hard to not just, excuse my swear, bug the shit out of other people.

So I think that's in there. I don't find this to be a virtuous thing necessarily. But I do think that a team that is viewed to be under-resourced financially would probably resonate with a broader cross-section of fans than like the Yankees and Dodgers of the world. And I'm again, I don't know that that instinct is a virtuous one. I think we tend to support teams wanting to win games by paying players money. So it's not good, but it does strike me as likely, you know, that if we were going to architect a team that people would just root for for a long, long time, being able to say they do it on so little would probably resonate with a lot of people who have maybe

become like GM pilled, you know? Yeah, I think that's true. Yes, having a heartbreaking history and a number of close calls before you break through, that would engender some sympathy. It would only last so long, as you said, because you win a few. It doesn't really matter how many you've lost or how long you lost before that. You become the worst gremlins that have ever existed. And every night you're eating after midnight and getting wet. Wait. Regrets. What about the recent Giants who won in 2010 and 2012 and 2014 and had that even year magic thing going on and weren't that great at any point, right? Like they won their division a couple of those times, but they weren't the best team in baseball or anything. They were usually the underdog. And so,

yeah, but were people less sick of that group than most three-peaters? I suspect that they were. I know I was. I'm sure that sure that you know fans of teams in the nls probably felt differently but if you set division rivals aside yeah i i was just about to say you know they perhaps the best kind of dynasty is the one that wins often but not always you know that is like competitive and gonna go to the championship series uh a lot and wins like a couple of world series but isn't isn't necessarily gonna wreak havoc on the entire league forever and i think for fans of teams that lost to the giants on the way to those world series you know perhaps it's more annoying that like a team that isn't particularly good is beating you. But I think for disinterested fans, there being like a weird quirkiness to it makes it kind of fun and exciting, you know, especially when that weird quirkiness like almost borders on inevitability, right? Like there was this sense, I think, with those Giants teams

that once they got in the postseason and they started rolling, you're like, I think they're going to win the World Series again, maybe. Like this seems like just what they do now. It does really bother fans of teams you lose to, though. Like the way that, and this I don't think was a Philly fan thing. This is just like a, this is just a fan thing. The way that Philly's fans talked about the Diamondbacks last year was amazing. They were furious, and they were furious into the World Series.

The idea that that team had bounced that Philly's team just seemed to make them unwell. And I get it. I think that's a natural reaction. But other people were like, well, I don't know. It's just like running around out there. Snakes alive, you know? Yeah, right. Yeah. I do think sometimes the narrative about those teams can get on my nerves, even if the team itself doesn't. Like the mid-2010s Royals, who won back-to-back pennants and were maybe the most entertaining team I have ever watched. But I think the fact that they kept getting there and they did it in kind of an unorthodox way or not a super-sebermetric way, they kind of became the team that a lot of people

would hold up and say, oh, the nerds are wrong because they underestimated these royals. Or maybe this is the way to do it. You got to be fast and speedy and defense and slap hitting and contact. Right. And I think people make too much of that. They want to turn every one of those teams into, no, this actually is the way to win. Everyone else is wrong about how to be good at baseball. Whereas you could just enjoy the improbability of it or like, actually, it's really hard to win this way.

And the fact that they're doing it, this is a credit to them. Like they're kind of the perfect way to put a team like this together, even if this is not the perfect model for team building. I think you can enjoy it for what it is without making it more than it is, or at least I'd like to think you can. what it is without making it more than it is, or at least I'd like to think you can. But that team was really fun because they weren't really seen as the favorites, certainly statistically projections wise, and then they made it back again.

So I think that is part of it. And I do think we have to redefine dynasty for this modern era. This will be relevant to our stat blast later about how the playoff format has changed how we understand the regular season and the playoffs and championship probabilities, et cetera. And so I know there was a bit of a debate about, oh, were those giants a dynasty? And I remember a Neil Payne piece for

FiveThirtyEight several years ago where he showed, yeah, they were definitely a dynasty. There's a Bill James method of like a dynasty accounting system where he hands out points for various things like playoff appearances, division championships, pennants, World Series. Did you have a hundred plus win season? Did you have a losing record at any point? Right. And you can kind of accrue dynasty points or lose dynasty points and you're above a certain threshold, then you qualify as a dynasty. So I do think that there's a lower bar for being a dynasty now when it's really, really difficult to repeat, let alone three-peat. Just getting there is pretty impressive.

Yeah. I do think that if there were a lot of turnover on the team, if it were different members of that team winning, I think that might help if you somehow refreshed your roster in the middle of your dynastic run. And I don't know how that would happen exactly. But if it did, if you just suddenly decided we're going to make a bunch of trades or maybe you have a lot of great prospects who come up in the middle of it. And so you can sort of separate, well, it's the same team, but it's not the same guys winning over and over

again. And that would be almost more impressive. Like, oh, it's a different incarnation of this team and they made it back again. And these guys are now getting their first ring and we haven't seen them do this before. I think that would help too. Yeah, I agree. Recently, I think the Dodgers, until they won at least and until they really broke the bank recently, I think they were a somewhat sympathetic dynasty. If by dynasty, we mean great regular season team that's always in the playoffs. I felt like I wasn't sick of them because they hadn't really dominated in the postseason. They were a dominant regular season team

that had a lot of heartbreak in the postseason. And also they had entertaining players. Like that's kind of a hard thing to quantify. But if the players are personable in some extraordinary way, then that helps if it's perceived that, oh, these are a bunch of good guys and people like in their good quotes and they're not heels and they're not villains.

Like, I think people would turn them into villains because they win a lot. But if they're not kind of courting that reputation, then that would make people slower to get sick of them. Yeah, I think that that's right. I think that having an infusion of fresh faces every now and again, because I think that you're constantly doing battle with this instinct to be wowed by the ability to win and win a lot in a league where that is very difficult to do and a and a wanting a freshness right not wanting it to get stale when it's not your team i think there's a reason that despite well i mean he might just be too good to deny but like i i think that there were a lot of writers who were kind of relieved at the notion of maybe we can take a year off from

kind of relieved at the notion of maybe we can take a year off from Otani MVP discourse because it's good to have some new guys, right? It's good to appreciate new dudes. And I think we understand intuitively that talent isn't so hyper-concentrated within baseball that there's only one team worthy of recognition. So if you have like guys moving around, if you can be like, this is the new look one-overs, then I don't know, it softens it a little bit and makes it easier to deal with. Yeah. And if you put the team together, as you said, maybe by not just having the highest payroll and signing all the superstars, which you can do that. It might even be a good idea. We might even approve of that, but a lot of people will think, oh, they bought a championship and we'll way where no one could really be mad at you for getting good because it's like you did it in quote unquote the right way, like you earned it.

You didn't take any shortcuts. You didn't just buy your way to a win and you didn't subject your fans to a truly terrible team for several years to earn that good roster. So if you can thread that needle, if you could spend enough, but not too much from some people's perspective, and if you could be bad before you get good, but not too bad, then maybe there's a Goldilocks sweet spot there where no one would hate you that much initially. Maybe. I mean, I do want to emphasize that people will hate you regardless because fans, boy, they look at a situation like that and feel like a gauntlet has been thrown. It's like, I will find a way. So I don't know that there will ever be an actually universally beloved dynasty. But I think there are ones that certainly inspire a greater baseline of, you know, disdain and ire from opposing fans than others. And, you know, maybe we mostly beloved we would settle for. I wonder if the city, do you think the region where you come from, maybe big market, small market plays into it, as we've said, but what about geographic region? Like if you're not a big city that has had a lot of success and attention in other ways, would that help? I think it has something

to do with it, maybe in a slightly different way than what you're proposing. Like, let's go back to the Boston example, just so you pick one. I think part of what caused some fans in some places to look at Boston sports fans and go, enough already, was that it wasn't just that they had one major sports franchise doing well. They had multiple sports franchises doing well all at the same time. And so I think that it's maybe less a big market, small market thing than a like, are you as a region perceived to be like getting more than is fair you know like perhaps you shouldn't be able to have a successful Red Sox team overlapping with a wildly successful Patriots team overlapping with a good Bruins team overlapping with like a good Celtics team and I know that not all of those were like good at exactly the same time and not all of them won championships in the same year but like they had multiple championships in boston in the same year and i think people were like we have seen

enough of these people they're just on tv during the postseason all the time and it's not the same folks you know but like there's overlap between the fan bases so i think that you know we want people to have a good time but you maybe you don't need every championship to come to your city at once. Like, share the wealth a little bit. Okay. Craig says, I have enjoyed the discussion of mid-plate appearance pitching changes, but the one that always made more sense to me would be changing the batter, not the pitcher. not the pitcher in crucial situations say with two outs and runners in scoring position and a slugger high strikeout guy do up any manager will let the slugger hit away in that situation however say he goes down oh two and you have a good contact bench bat why not switch the batter

to prevent the probable strikeout and give yourself better odds at continuing the inning and or getting the runs home obviously you can dig in the metrics more on this. If you have a batter who's really good in first pitch situations, this could come into effect too. Even though he'd be entering the game with two strikes, it would be the first pitch he sees. Or even just seeing the metrics on which players are better in two strike counts. I've just always scratched my head when seeing a team get a rally going

and then a free swinging batter comes up and quickly goes down 0-2. It seems like it would throw off the picture and really give your offense a better chance bringing in a solid contact hitter in that situation. So what do you think of the potential for the mid-plate appearance batting change? I think that it would run into the same issues of morale that the pitching change would. I suppose that like, it's also, you know, you're limited by how few bench players, big league rosters carry these days, which isn't to say they don't have anybody. But I think that you probably have more pressing But I think that you probably have more pressing scenarios for substitution than that.

But I don't know. Maybe you sit there and go, if we can get a guy who can knock one through, we're going to win this game. Maybe it makes sense. But I think that it's a more logistically complicated question than it is even on the pitching side, which has its own logistical complications. And at the end of the day, you're still saying you're not good enough to do that. And I know that like guys get subbed for and whatnot. So it's not like this is the only circumstance in which a manager might say we'd rather have someone else out there. But I don't know, there's something

about the mid at bat, the mid plate appearance change that feels, I mean, it is more pointed, I suppose. So maybe that's why it feels that way, you mean, it is more pointed, I suppose. So maybe that's why it feels that way, you know? Yeah. I think this is tough. I think there are very rare situations where you would want to do this or where it'd be advantageous. On one hand, you're not hamstrung by any three batter minimum, right? So you don't have to have certain conditions be met for you to be able to do it. But generally, we know that familiarity helps the batter more than the pitcher. And so the more the batter sees the pitcher, the better the batter does. And that's a big backbone of the mid-plate appearance pitching change idea is that you could give the batter a fresh look suddenly, right?

So if you are doing this in not the batter's first plate appearance of the game, then there's going to be a massive downgrade because not only if this batter has seen this pitcher before, then they have an advantage from having previously seen him. Plus, the pinch hitter is going to be subject to the pinch hit penalty, right? So, we know that there is a penalty when a batter comes off the bench, partly because he's, by definition, seeing that pitcher for the first time that day, but also maybe because he's cold. He hasn't been in the game. He's just seeing pitches for the first time. Maybe he but also maybe because he's cold. He hasn't been in the game. He's just seeing pitches for the first time. Maybe he hasn't warmed up optimally. So that's always going to put you at a disadvantage.

And if you're coming into the middle of a plate appearance with two strikes or something, that's going to be really, really tough seeing that pitcher for the first time that day. It's going to be really, really tough seeing that pitcher for the first time that day. So is there an extreme situation where you really, really just need the ball put in play and you have a strikeout hitter up there and it's two strikes and you have a high contact hitter on the bench? Maybe. But then maybe it would have been better to pinch it with that guy to begin with if you

knew you just really needed the ball put in play above everything else just don't make it even harder on that guy coming in with one strike to play with so i think statistically speaking i mean it'd be hard because we don't really have a much of a sample of like times when this has happened but i right i don't think i could justify it in all but the most extreme circumstances. Yeah, it would be a very particular, and I think because it would be so particular and thus because it would be so infrequent, like getting buy-in on it would be even harder, you know? You'd be like, why are we doing this? Why are we, you know? I think people have a real aversion to stuff that feels like too cute by half, you know, like we want to be clever, but our tolerance for that is actually more limited than I think it gets credit for. Okay. Question from Brendan,

Patreon supporter, who says, your discussion on outfielder positioning in episode 2174 reminded me of a rule change idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a few months as a possible method of increasing offense. Widen the angle of the foul lines to increase the size of the field. As far as I can tell, there's no actual need for the angle to be 90 degrees or for first and third base to be exactly on the foul line, so nothing else need change. I think this has a lot of potential upsides. One, the most obvious being that if you increase the area of the field, more balls should drop for hits. I think it's particularly good that it inherently scales to make more of an impact in the outfield, as it would ideally lead to more extra base hits up the line and in the gap. Two, it increases the value of good fielders, potentially giving us a larger variety of player

profiles succeeding in the game. Three, it could do away with any need for positional restrictions on defense and possibly offer high-risk, high-reward opportunities for defensive shifts. Four, the rule could be that the angle must be within a given range as opposed to a specific number, allowing for baseball stadiums to distinguish themselves a bit more in an era when new parks are often fairly similar. It would also allow teams to customize field size to help their team in particular. Maybe that's a downside, he acknowledges. Other than potential infrastructure limitations at some parks, I really struggle to find many downsides to the idea.

You can make very gradual changes to see how it goes in minor leagues, lab league. I think aesthetics are probably the main concern. And while I concede that it may look strange to have differently angled foul lines in different stadiums, I really think it could increase offense, incentivize players to just put the ball in play instead of swinging for the fences, and remove any need for moving fielders around. And it's true, I was going to mention when we talked about that outfield positioning stuff that yeah, you could just make outfields bigger and that would sort of solve the problem, but that's tough to do. And just logistically speaking, geographically speaking, you can't always just widen the

outfields or make the fences deeper. And then of course you cost yourself some home runs too. And people do like some number of home runs, at least over-the-fence home runs. So there are infrastructure difficulties there. And I kind of like this solution. And I must break it to Brendan that as with any seemingly pretty good idea, this has been proposed before. So there is actually a history of this, which maybe I've brought up on the podcast before. I know I've mentioned it in passing in articles, but this was a pretty serious proposal in the year of the pitcher or immediately after the year of the pitcher, 68, and the efforts to

try to bolster offense after the depths of offense in that era. And there was consideration given to this after the 1969 season. So in 69, they changed the strike zone, they changed the mound height, and that helped, but they were still interested in doing more. And here is an AP article from February 1970, headline, Continue Experiments to Aid Baseball Hitters Will Widen Foul Lines, Permit Automatic Walks. So this is very much nothing new under the sun. Everything has been thought of before. Baseball will continue its experiments to help the hitters by widening the foul lines, permitting automatic walks. That is basically what we have now, just issuing the automatic four-pitch walk. And wildcard pinch hitters for the pitcher in selected minor leagues.

This was pre-DH, so they were dabbling in DH-like ideas. The majors will confine their tests to use of a lively ball in Wednesday exhibition games in spring training and use of a yellow-stitched ball in one exhibition game. So Charlie Finley, eccentric A's owner and showman, was always trying to introduce colored balls like yellow or orange baseballs or bases or foul lines. But the idea was a yellow ball. It'll be easier to see like this cosmic baseball with the lights that we've seen recently. Cool.

There is no question but that the wider foul line will increase hitting, said Commissioner Bui-Kyun, who announced the unanimous recommendations of the Major League Rules Committee with his enthusiastic approval. I will not be unhappy if there is more hitting. Most people wouldn't. OK, it says rules changes adopted last year on lowering the pitching mound and narrowing the strike zone generally were credited with boosting averages in both majors from all-time lows. Experiments with various types of pinch hitters for the pitcher were conducted in several minor leagues last year. No solid statistics were kept on the results.

Well, that seems like a mistake. Wait. They were like, we're going to give this a try. How did it go? We don't know. We forgot to keep track. Couldn't tell you. Baseball. Some were enthusiastic about the changes. Others turned thumbs down. The 1970 experiments were confined to the lower classification leagues during the regular season. The most interesting suggestion is the widened foul line, which will be in effect in one Bradenton, Florida park in the Gulf Coast Rookie League for 60 games

in July and August. The idea is the result of a fan letter to Sports Illustrated with modifications. So maybe we got a fan letter to Effectively Wild. We can bring this back now. So the degree of widening was three degrees. So the foul line will be widened by three degrees after it passes first and third base. According to a projection by Kuhn's office, the three degrees would mean 12 feet at the fence in a park with a 320 foot distance down the line, they haven't figured out that the additional playing area would add up to 2,771 square feet in a park of that size. George McDonald, president of the Gulf Coast League, will assign a special representative to keep data on the number of times a batted ball lands safely in the new area. Well, it's good that they decided to keep track, at least of the results this time. It's an important innovation. Let's see whether it works before we make a determination on whether to keep doing this. A report will be made to Charles Seeger, chairman of the rules committee in October.

And then it goes on to say in the New York Penn League, a manager will be permitted to signal an automatic walk instead of letting his pitcher throw four intentional balls. The umpire will merely wave the batter to first base. What a world. The only exception will be when a relief pitcher comes in to face his first batter. Interesting. And they also had the Eastern League do this wildcard pinch hitter plan. A manager made designated hitter for the pitcher at any time, but the pitcher remains in the game. Wow.

We should call this a designated hitter, maybe. So a lot of things that were ultimately adopted were being tried then, but this widened foul lines idea was not adopted and has not even really been mentioned that much in recent years. I've maybe heard it every now and then, but not often. So what happened? Obviously, we didn't get this implemented, but why? Well, I found a bunch of articles from that period, February, when they were like, okay, we're going to try this. And then I found a bunch of articles from December. This is also an AP report. December 2nd, 1970, Baseball's Rules Committee rejected proposals for colored bases and foul lines Tuesday at the winter meetings and voted to discontinue wildcard hitting experiments in minor leagues. Charles Seeger, this was the guy who was going to keep track of the results, right?

Yeah. Seeger, aide to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, and chairman of the Nine Man Rules Committee, said a proposal for multicolored bases championed by Oakland A's owner Charlie Finley had been turned down. Suggestions for colored foul lines and a 20-second clock on pitchers to speed up the game also were rejected. Man, if we had just done all the things that they were thinking of doing at that time, like we would have just sped up several decades. Yeah.

The rulemakers voted not to continue the wildcard experiment. Again, confusing terminology because wildcard means something different to us. This is the DH, basically, used in the Class AA Eastern League the last two seasons, whereby a player could bat several times in a game without playing on defense. The automatic walks and expanded foul lines tried out at the Class A level also will be discontinued. And sadly, in none of these articles is there any indication of why they didn't go with the foul lines idea. I found February 1970, there's another article, I'll link to all of these, of course, but there's an image of Commissioner Buikun holding a diagram that shows the widened foul lines that they were going to be using.

So he was all gung-ho and this is going to be great. And yet they just said, well, no, we're not doing it. And I couldn't find anything that said, well, we didn't think it worked that well or people didn't like it. We kept track of the number of balls that landed in this expanded area and it was insignificant. Yeah. They just said, no, we're not doing it. Now, they did decide everyone has to wear helmets. So that was good.

That's good. Yeah. Kudos to them for that. But I don't know why they decided not to do the expanded file ranks. It'd be one thing if they presented some evidence to say this is why. But as of now, it is not known to me why that was rejected. And in principle, it still seems like a pretty sound idea to me. Do you see downsides to this?

I don't know. Like, I think I can't get over it. They were like, oh, we didn't write it down, though. I mean, I think it would be worth trying. Sure, try it. Try it. Why not? I like the idea of the colored bases.

Yeah, I guess. Why not? Why not? But we got bigger bases. We might as well make them more colorful, too. But it is odd to me that this was just rejected with no reported rationale for the rejection. But I don't see the problem. I do think it would work. I think it would incentivize putting the ball in play and a bunch of other good things that we would want.

And I don't mind if it were inconsistent. I value the fact that you have different dimensions and surfaces and such to some extent. So I like that. But even if you standardized it and said, yeah, it's just a bit wider, that would work for me. I think I like it. I wonder if they wanted there to be consistency and then realized that wasn't practicable for each ballpark, right? That not every ballpark could like accommodate this from a space perspective or something. That could be. Yeah. They were only testing it in that one place that year.

So maybe they just said it can't work everywhere this way. But I don't know. They could have said that at least. Maybe they're supposed to keep track of like all of this stuff. They forgot again. And someone forgot to do it. And they were like, it doesn't matter because it's a bad idea. We should not do it.

Yeah. It was so that no one asked like how big an effect did it have? Doesn't matter. It's a bad idea. That does at least seem like it would have been a harder thing to keep track of precisely back then. They didn't have stat casts, so they would have had to have someone charting batted ball locations and trying to eyeball whether it would have been fair or foul before. But still, you could have gotten a guesstimate at least.

Good try. I wonder if it was just that the need had changed because in 68, the batting average was 237, and then it rebounded to 248 in 69. And then in 1970, it went up again to 254. So maybe they figured this is fine. We don't need to do anything wacky, but it's not that wacky. You've already got differing amounts of playable terrain in some parks. Again, we're not talking about that big a difference in angle. So I would think any ballpark could accommodate this to some extent. Like there's always some small amount of foul territory out there that you could eat into. And I guess getting rid of the foul territory would have some effects and you wouldn't want the wall to be like

right on the line so that outfielders are running right into it but on the whole i think it'd be fine and i don't think would you get like a big traditionalist pushback about this the way that you do about like the fact that mlb went with the bigger bases in part because oh this is kind of a clandestine way we can shorten the distance between bases. We can just make the bases bigger and we won't have to tamper with the 90 feet. Or people are very precious about the 60 feet, 6 inches, the mountain distance, even though that's not even a round number or anything. But these are these numbers that we've been used to for a while. So would it bother people that it was not precise

angles for the foul line? Would it look wrong? Would it look slightly off where you'd think it was crooked unintentionally and it would mess up the aesthetics of the field or something? Do you think people would mind on those grounds? Yeah, Ben. Yeah. Anytime it was a way in baseball and we're like, what if we did it a different way? It makes at least one person mad. Certainly. Yeah, as we covered,

nothing is universally beloved, but I think I like it. Yeah, I think bring it back. I think they were ahead of their time, the rules committee back then with some of those ideas and maybe this was one of them. Maybe.

Okay. Question from garrett patreon supporter the continued waves of major injuries in 2024 particularly to pitchers got me thinking about a new version of meg's dreaded mysterious being that makes us choose between things for no reason inspired question what's up with that guy he's the worst you think it's one one being for all of these hypotheticals or oh or do i what an interesting What's up with that guy? He's the worst. Like the old Jason and the Argonauts where you had like the gods looming over. Right. You have like gods of this, a god of this, god of that. Yeah. Not just one overriding deity who's presiding over everything. Yeah.

Yeah. I can't decide which is more likely. Hmm. Well, regardless, we will mull that over and consult our spiritual advisors. over and consult our spiritual advisors. But the question from Garrett goes on to say, you've been visited yet again by a what-if baseball dementor, this being preying on your love for all forms of prime Shohei Otani.

Oh, this is a personal attack now. Poses a difficult choice. With the wave of his arm and an intact UCL, this dementor can return all pitcher injury levels and as a result, relative pitcher durability and performance to 2013 levels. Okay. Based on some very cursory digging, this 2013 cutoff feels like a reasonable tipping point for the steady increase in modern elbow injuries.

That seems roughly right. The cost of this change is steep. All pitchers, for some godforsaken reason, must all pick back up their bats, and the DH will be no more. So we'll be like the 1970 Rules Committee saying, no, no more of this nonsense. In short, the offer is significantly healthier pitching staffs and less pitcher roster churn in exchange for pitchers hitting. What does your gut say? I don't think I could stomach an automatic out in every lineup every night, especially in the current offensive environment. Then again, maybe the current

offensive environment, I guess it would be even worse maybe because we'd have healthy pitchers. All the good pitchers would be healthy. So that'd be even more need for a DH. So maybe the trade-off needs to be more significant. Would you trade an almost injury-free starting pitching staff for the availability of the DH? Could a potential drastic increase in the need for bench bats, pinch hitting, and so forth actually be worth the cost of Cy Nonotani pitchers

hitting against 2024 pitcher stuff? So we get intact elbows, but we also get noodles for bats back again. I think it would have a pretty detrimental impact on league-wide offense, right? Because of this combo where not only do you have healthy pitchers, so your best guys are going to throw more often because they're available to do so. But then also, it would be in both leagues?

We'd get rid of the DH in both? Yeah, it's a double whammy, a double-double whammy, because it's those combined effects and then both leagues. If you have perfectly healthy pitchers, maybe you don't have to cycle through as many guys, and so then you can have better bench players, but you probably still have the same number of bench spots. You just have better guys in your pitching spots, right? You see what I'm trying to say where it's like, okay, no DH, but like maybe your pinch hitting options are better late in the game, but would they be?

Would they be, Ben? You know? Good question. Yeah. Boy, I don't know because I really bemoan the rise in pitcher injuries, but I also bemoaned pitcher hitting. So this is really, really a tough call for me. I guess it's kind of a compromise that there are people who still lament the loss of the pitcher hitting tradition, which I do not. I do. There are, they're out there.

I don't hear that very often anymore. I don't know. There are hardliners in there, people who grew up NL fans. And of course, your stance on the DH mapped very closely to whether you were an AL fan or an NL fan. And I think that means that whichever brand of baseball you watch, you typically grow to like, right? And so now that we're in the universal DH era, I think people have come around to it, or certainly fans who are weaned in this era of baseball, they won't miss pitcher hitting probably. But I think there are people who grew up with pitcher hitting who still miss it. And I will acknowledge that maybe

the one thing that I think was good about pitcher hitting, aside from the rare occasions when a pitcher would get a good hit, and that was fun, wasn't a worthwhile trade-off to me, all the many automatic outs, but it was fun when that would happen occasionally. Not just Bartolo Klone, but mostly Bartolo Klone. But also, it did, I think, encourage NL teams to have a bit deeper It did, I think, encourage NL teams to have a bit deeper benches, arguably, and there was a bit more strategy. Not necessarily when it came to, like, are you going to pull the guy or not? Because that became a pretty rote decision in recent years with the times to the effect. But you did have to have maybe deeper benches and more pinch hitters and multi-position players.

And I think that was probably a plus. It's not something I miss too terribly. But this is really tough because I have said that I think this is the biggest on-field issue with baseball now, that pitchers get hurt so often. And so if I think that that's true and we can either do away with this issue almost entirely or at least make it much less acute, then maybe it is worthwhile because I don't know that I would have said pitcher hitting was the worst thing about baseball.

I thought it was a bad thing. I thought it was an artifact of an earlier era that was anachronistic and kind of quaint maybe, but just wasn't great from a spectator perspective and an entertainment perspective anymore. But I do think that maybe pictures constantly breaking is a bigger problem. Yeah. So I think I might make this trade if I had to.

I mean, yeah, yeah, we would make the trade, you know. To say nothing, I guess, of the human suffering and costs that it goes into from a utilitarian perspective. Granted, some pitchers get hurt, other guys get to be big leaguers, and you could really get invested in pitchers' careers, you still wouldn't necessarily have pitchers going super deep into games like the traditional starting pitcher protagonist. That wouldn't make a full comeback, but it might be a bit of a boost to that too. Maybe. People don't actually miss pitchers hitting. They don't miss it. You know how you know that it's a bad idea and a flawed strategy? It's not like you can't

give up the DH. You can sacrifice the DH if you want to. You're allowed to do that. You know what no one ever does? That. They never do it. Sometimes they do it, but they don't do it on purpose. Often they're like, oh, now I can't. It's late. Gotta have a gut, you know? You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah. All right. I'll do it, but I'll do it reluctantly. I'd rather try to fix this issue without making an aspect of baseball actively worse. But if I have to. By the way, I just looked up the batting average for the one team in the 1970 Gulf Coast League that did have the widened foul lines. Yeah. Based on what I can tell, I think it was the GCL Pirates because they were based in Bradenton. So wouldn't you know, they had the lowest team batting average in the league. Really? Yeah.

And I can't look at splits, so I can't see home and road to see if they had a higher batting average at home when they had the Wiedenfell lines. But the GCL Pirates that season, 234 average in a league that hit 243. And maybe it was just a bad team. They went 23 and 40. They were pretty bad the subsequent season too. So I don't know that that means that it didn't work. Maybe their batting average would have been even lower without the wider foul lines. But just looking at that, there's no obvious sign that they got some big batting average boost. Or if they did, they must have been truly terrible because they were still worst in the league even with that. Though I noticed that a 19-year-old just drafted Dave Parker led the team

by batting 314. Question from Evan. In your recent discussion about Angel Hernandez's retirement, you repeated the old adage that the best umpires are the ones whose names no one knows. But what if that isn't true? Let's suppose there was a perfect umpire. He is never overturned by replay review. He always receives 100% on his ump scorecard, and he never gets into petty arguments with players or managers. Would this umpire be well-known or even famous? Would he actually be beloved? I mean, you got really into that perfect game. Yeah, I did. I was just going to say we gave Pat Hoberg some love. I don't think he's been umping this year. But yeah, we did a whole interview and segment. We were tracking that. So I would say, yeah. I mean, this is basically like,

what if an umpire weren't an umpire? Because the whole thing with umpires is that they're fallible, as are we all. So if you had a perfect ump, then yeah, I think they'd be famous because they're somehow perfect. And who could be mad at perfection? You're combining the best of the theoretical robot ump with the human element, I think, as an exception to the rule of umps making mistakes sometimes that this ump would be very well known. I mean, I imagine that there are, I mean, there are umps that are well respected now. It's not like they're all cast as villains, right? I think that there are guys that, particularly probably to players and managers more. That's what I was going to say, yeah.

Not to fans, really. Right. But like, it's not like every ump is poorly regarded. I don't want to leave the impression that they're all perceived to be like terrible at their jobs. I don't think that's true. I think part of why some of the less well-regarded ones stand out is because they are thought to be worse than their fellows in a way that's appreciable, right? Yeah. So if you had a perfect ump, we'd all be wondering how could he do this?

Yeah. So if you had a perfect ump, we'd all be wondering how could he do this? It would turn into one of but just has clearly the best ump scorecards and overturned and everything. I think even that ump would be pretty well known and revered as the outlier ump. And especially if this ump is not doing ump shows and everything and is also just, yeah, like clearly head and shoulders better than every other umpire, then I think we would know that ump's name. So yes, I think that would be an exception to this rule. All right. We're nearing the end here, but here's a question from Adam, Patreon supporter, who says, I don't know if this falls into the pedantic about baseball category or not, but it's at least a complaint regarding the unintentional foul tip. I'm referring to those moments when a batter does not attempt to swing, but the ball happens to strike the bat and is then deemed a foul ball on a strike.

The most egregious of this kind of occurrence is when there's a pitch that is so far inside that the batter is contorting their body to avoid being hit, falling on the ground, or other desperate maneuvers. But despite this, the ball finds the bat and the pitcher is rewarded with a strike. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if a ball hits a player, but he's deemed to have attempted to swing, the hit by pitch is nullified and the pitcher is again awarded a strike. It seems to me that if the batter doesn't attempt to swing and a ball hits the bat and the ball is not in the strike zone, it should be called a ball. What say you? I don't know, Ben. I think I'm okay with this. I think I'm okay with this. If only because, well, A, we have lamented lately just the uptick in foul balls. So many foul balls. We don't love foul balls generally. So this would help cut down slightly on foul balls and strikeouts, I suppose. So hitters need help. This would be a small little helping hand you're not getting a chase, it's just trying desperately to twist out of the way out of self-preservation and it happens to hit the bat.

That does seem just unearned in a way that's kind of unsatisfying. and an author of Strike Four, Richard Hershberger, if there was any relevant history here. And he said, not much. There was a sense in the 1860s and 70s that if the batter hit the ball accidentally, such as while ducking, it shouldn't count. This was not entirely consistently applied. A batter was not given first base when hit by the pitch until 1887. I don't have any direct evidence

about rulings on accidental hits. The likeliest interpretation of this absence is that matters had evolved to the modern practice of not taking intent into consideration. But I can't swear to this. So there's at least a little precedent maybe for this in the formative years of baseball. Now, I guess you would then have to make a subjective judgment, I suppose, about whether there was intent, whether you were awkwardly swinging on purpose or trying to get out of the way. But it's usually pretty clear cut in most cases. It's usually fairly obvious. Yeah.

I find that persuasive. I mean, I do have a little bit of reticence about introducing intent into the rule structure more. But to your point, like, I think it tends to be pretty straightforward. You can look at it and go, eh, he's trying to get out of the way. All right. So we're making some good tweaks here. We're widening the foul lines and we're doing away with these clearly unintentional foul tip instances. All right. Finally, Josh, Patreon supporter says, I've recently rediscovered the joy of playing Mario Kart with friends and I've been thinking about some of the power ups, rediscovered the joy of playing Mario Kart with friends and have been thinking about some of the power ups or he writes powers up. Wait, he writes powers ups. Whoa, wait, wait, wait. Powers ups?

No, maybe it could just be a typo. I think power ups is fine. I think so. We don't have to make a federal case out of this one. Attorneys general. I guess they're not always federal. All right. Some of the power-ups in the game and how both fun and terrifying it might be for them to exist in real life. I've also been falling asleep listening to baseball games,

so naturally my brain is bridging both worlds. Yeah. This has me wondering which Mario Kart power-up item, bananas, mushrooms, shell, Starman, or lightning bolt, do you think would be most useful to baseball players?

And if each team had one Starman to deploy per game, which basically increases all abilities while making the user invincible to threats, when would be the optimal time to use it? So we answered a question about Mario power-ups not long ago that was inspired by Mario baseball games. question about Mario power-ups not long ago that was inspired by Mario baseball games and the idea that if you had good clubhouse chemistry, maybe like a double play combo, your abilities would be enhanced. There'd be kind of a boost, sort of a symbiotic thing there. But this is just using the standard Mario Kart power-ups. Some of these, you know, if you just have, like, green shells or something, and you can just sort of shoot shells at people, like, I guess there are situations where those would be helpful. Or if you had red shells that are more heat-seeking, then—

The red shells are heat-seeking? Yeah. I don't think I know enough about the power-ups. I'm a little worried I'm going to say something that people are going to go, that's the dumbest thing anyone's ever said because I don't know what the power-ups do. What do the various power-ups do, Ben? Mushrooms will make you – well, in some Mario games, they make you bigger. Or in Mario Kart, you can get boosts.

You can go faster. Or if you do the bananas, you cause people to slip, which would be the funniest power up. So if you could just drop bananas in the baselines in Mario Kart, when you run over a banana, unless you like hit a button at the precise time, you will spin out. So that's one possibility. And then shells, you just knock people over with shells basically. And then Starman, that's, you know's when you're shining and the song plays. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. You know, that one.

And then the lightning bolt, that's when you strike with the lightning bolt and it makes your opponent small. Okay. And so in Mario Kart, they're just kind of incapacitated. They're karting very slowly. Okay, because they can't reach the gas pedals? Is that why? Because they make it so small? I think it's because the whole thing is shrunk, so the wheels are smaller, the engine's presumably

smaller. The car is smaller. Yeah, everything's smaller. The whole car is smaller. Not just the rider, but the cart also. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah.

Hmm. I don't like mushrooms. I want to, you know, like as a food person. I like them sometimes. I want to like them, Ben, you know. I like them in certain circumstances, like prepared particular ways. But it's not a go-to for me, you know. I don't reach for them. it's not a go-to for me. I don't reach for them. I don't know that my opinion of them would change if they made me bigger if I was suddenly taller.

I think making your opponents smaller could be useful, right? Imagine you're a hitter and you can put the ball in play and you're running up the first baseline and then you can, Starman?

Starman? Starman is to make, that enhances your abilities. That makes every faster and vulnerable. The lightning bolt. Oh, okay. So you can lightning bolt the first baseman and then he becomes tiny and then he can't feel the ball, you know? Yep. That would be great or or like um you're you're a defender you know you're in the field you're like you're a middle infielder and you have banana and you see the the runner start to go up the first baseline

and you can like throw the banana and then they slip and fall and you go yeah i like that the hijinks ensue. Hijinks. But I think it's the lightning bolt, which is a powerful power up in Mario Kart 2. But you could save your lightning bolt for a high leverage spot, which you kind of do in Mario Kart 2 sometimes. Yeah. But if you're at the plate, you could lightning bolt the pitcher like Ray Caldwell in 1919. Right. And suddenly he's a tiny powerless pitcher, right? Yeah,

he's tiny. Might not be able to throw at all. You'd just get pitch clock violations. Or if he could throw, then it would just be an impotent pitcher. It would be very slow, right? So you would either force him to throw bad pitches or not throw pitches at all and get a walk, get some free balls. Or I guess you could force a pitching change because you lightning bolt one pitcher and they'd have to bring in a new pitcher who's not lightning bolted. Now, the lightning bolt only lasts so long, like the Starman, these things wear off. But because we have the pitch clock, you would still incur a penalty there. If it were pre-pitch clock, you could maybe just wait out the lightning bolt

and that way there might be no penalty at all. But nowadays there'd still be a big penalty there, pretty valuable regardless. Can you block them? Right, that's the thing. You'd wanna save your star man for the high leverage spot too because you'd wanna protect against the lightning bolt.

Okay. If you've got the star man, you're invulnerable, so you can't be lightning bolted. So when your pitcher is on the mound in that high leverage spot, you might give him the Starman to make him superpowered, which would enhance his abilities, but also protect against the lightning bolt. So it might turn into a game theory thing

where you're both just hoarding your power-ups for this one moment, but then they kind of negate each other and maybe there wouldn't be much of an effect at all. Yeah. And then if you don't use your mushrooms and you don't like mushrooms, at the end you're like, I just have all these mushrooms. What am I going to do? Eat them? No, I don't like them. I don't like mushrooms.

I think that we should just let people get in Mario karts and drive them around and play baseball. You know, like bumper baseball, but in Mario carts. Yeah. Not far removed from the golf cart, the bullpen pitcher cart. Well, but it would be smaller, Ben. Like, come on.

Faster, probably. It would be smaller. It would be like you're going around and it's like, ah, and then they spin. Don't they spin a lot? I haven't really – I've never played Mario, you know? Yeah. I think that's – is that obvious? That's coming across here.

Is that becoming clear? I just kind of like missed the video game thing, you know? Like I played Half-Life and I felt like I had accomplished everything I needed to and then I stopped. That is one of the, yeah, the epitome of the medium right there. So, yeah, it's about as good as it gets. Yeah. Yeah. I was good at Half-Life. Meg, you sound like such an experienced Mario Kart player. I'm shocked. Do I? No. No, but you did your best. You played along. Your yes ended. I think the real question is what can we bring to baseball from half-life, you know? Crow bars and think about that for next time. Crow bars, yeah.

Crow bars, man. I just have such fond memories of like crow barring things to death while sitting with my sister and eating bean pie. Gravity guns. That introduces a whole lot of hypotheticals. Yeah, yeah. I don't want any, like, you know, evil creatures, though. I don't want there to be, like, a, you know, an explosion. That's it.

Yeah, no headcrabs. That'd be bad. Headcrabs, man. Those headcrabs. And do you think that anyone affiliated with the Alien franchise was like, so, guys, we know what you're doing. What's up with that? You know, do you think that that ever happened? Did they get a cease and desist on headcrabs? an old Sam Miller article. So let me just run by you a couple of recent Sam Miller tweets. Have you seen Sam has, his mind has been boggled by the lack of decrease in Angels home attendance this season. He's pointed this out a couple of times that there just has not been a big decrease in attendance at Angels games, despite the fact that they lost the most famous marketable put butts in the seats player of all, Shohei Otani, and they have been deprived of Mike Trout's services for some time. Not that that's new, unfortunately, for them. And also, they're just very bad, like maybe even worse and more unwatchable than usual. Yeah. And most teams, fortunately, it looks like have increased again this year. But the biggest decreases come from the Mets, who are down more than 8,000 per game.

Okay, makes sense. They were like powerhouse going into last season. And then they sold. And now they might be on the verge of selling again. But they had a bunch of stars they don't have anymore. And high expectations they don't have anymore. Then the Astros, who are off to an uncharacteristically slow start. And lots of injuries there, too.

Then the White Sox, who we have discussed, they're historically truly terrible. Blue Jays, we've mentioned, off to not a great start for them either. Cardinals, who are coming off a disappointing season and have been not terrible, but not great either. And then the A's, who, of course, are actively repelling either. And then the A's, who of course are actively repelling people. And then the Angels, and it's just not that big a decrease. So why don't you think it's bigger having lost their star, the star of all stars, their best player, their most entertaining player, and also Mike Trout for much of the season, and came into the season basically hopeless, whereas their seasons have ended hopelessly, but they had hope coming

into last season, right? Like, they had a legitimate shot, you know, and there was a refrain of maybe this will be the year for the Angels, and we were all like, probably not, though, because none of the other years that seemed like they might be the year for the Angels. And we were all like, probably not though, because none of the other years that seemed like they might be there for the Angels 10 ended up being that year. But they had a realistic shot of like at least wildcard contention and they made something of an effort. And this offseason, they didn't do much. They didn't add any big players really. So like, why not a bigger drop off? You'd think this would be a huge drop off. So for the first part of the year, here are some teams they played. They played the Red Sox at home.

That was their first home series. It's the first series of the year, too. So, like, people, even though, you know, bad, bad team, projected to be bad, no Otani already at that point, no Otani. Like, it's the first series of the year. It's the Red Sox. Then Tampa came to town. No explanation for why people were going to that.

And indeed, their attendance numbers for that series dropped dramatically compared to the Boston series. Then they had Baltimore at home. Exciting young team, right? Then they had the Twins and the Phillies. People love the Phillies. Then they had the Royals, upstart Royals, exciting young Royals. Then they had the Cardinals. The Royals, upstart Royals, exciting young Royals.

Then they had the Cardinals. And despite the Cardinals not playing well, a very devoted fan base, one that I imagine both travels well. And if you're like someone from that fan base who happens to live in the greater Los Angeles area, you're like, oh, I'll go to Angels games. Then the Yankees came through. And then the Padres have been there. So some of this might be the teams that they have happened to have at home. Good point. Yeah. According to ESPN's calculation of strength of schedule, the Angels have had the second highest thus far. So, that does support the idea that they have played good teams.

Yeah. So, maybe some of this is just that they are getting a buffer of sorts by virtue of who their opponents have been. And, you know, like in the early part of the season, before he got hurt, like Trout was playing so well that, you know, it's not like that isn't a draw, even if, you know, he is sort of on his own at this point. Yeah. League-wide attendance looks like it's up about 2%. So that's nice after the, what was it, like 9% or something increase last year that we discussed. But yeah, you'd think maybe bigger drop-off. Maybe it's just that despite Otani's entertainment value, just so much of the enthusiasm for the Angels had been sapped already. Or maybe some fan bases are more sensitive to how well the team is doing than

others, right? Like, you know, if it's Wrigley, like you're going to draw regardless of whether the team's good or bad often, or we've talked about like the Rockies, people will come out and watch baseball on course field. Yeah. So maybe the Angels are one of these teams that's just sort of steady, whether they're winning or losing or have entertaining players or not. There's a little less volatility there, potentially. Maybe. Yeah, it is still, they're still like middle of the pack. They're 13th in per game attendance, despite being one of the worst and least watchable teams that's currently constituted.

So, I don't know. It's kind of a conundrum and i think this is through the same point in the season by the way to to clarify so nothing being distorted by the season kids being out of school or not being out of school or the weather yeah right i just think i i also think that um you know even when it's a really bad team, it's just nice to go to the ballpark, man. Like, it's just a nice thing. And to your point about, like, the Rockies and Coors, like, some ballparks better than others, you know? Like, that's a cool ballpark, even though the team stinks.

And I don't remember being, like, overwhelmed by how good their concessions were or anything like that. But, like, they got the party deck, good it's a good fun time you know i was not overwhelmed by my visit to angel stadium in the same way they got some rocks out there but yeah i've never been there yeah all right well we will welcome other people's hypotheses here and we will be back after the stat blast song with a guest stat blast by a guest stat blaster they'll take a data set sorted by something like era minus or ops plus and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to day stat blast. All right. We are rejoined now by listener, Patreon supporter, effectively wild listener, meetup organizer, extraordinaire, Michael Mountain,

who has done some guest stat blasts for us from time to time, including this time. Hello. Welcome back, Michael. Hi. Thank you for having me. So those of you who are Patreon supporters and are in the Patreon Discord group may have gotten a sneak peek at this one in the dedicated stat blast channel, which I'd encouraged everyone to join if they haven't already. But what do you have in store for us today? Some interesting research. But what do you have in store for us today? Some interesting research. Yeah, I've been doing a little bit of scraping on baseball reference to come up with a list of players that had been tickling the back of my brain for a little while.

I was rereading Sam Miller's newsletter post from February about incorporating postseason performance into career evaluations for modern players, which is a fantastic piece. Obviously, highly recommend just about everything that's on pebble hunting. But it reminded me of an idea I'd had that I was curious to see what it would look like, which is around the concept of MVP and specifically value. I know we're a little early in the season for that discourse, so craving your indulgences. I've been thinking about how the nebulous concept of value has informed discussions or debates around what, sometimes it gets twisted in all sorts of different directions. It could be just a context-neutral, independent value. It could be value to your team. It could be value to a team that matters more because it's a postseason contender. Sometimes it's even been applied to salary, which I think is an odd application of it. But every now and then you will see, oh, well, you got more value, more bang for your buck out of someone who's making league minimum and producing all that value, right?

So that word always resists consensus. Yes. And to be clear, while I'm very much on the context neutral side of that discussion, I was curious to see kind of what a logical extreme might be in the opposite direction. If you're much more in the mode of, well, what matters is winning a championship. And so the player who did the most to get their team to a championship should be recognized as the most valuable. So to that end, I wanted to look at players who led their league in championship win probability added during the regular season only. I believe most listeners are familiar with the concept of win probability added, which is just sort of a ledger debiting and crediting for events, all events and games that the players was involved in that contributed positively or negatively toward the outcome of that contest. Championship win probability added is an additional wrinkle on that which weights the importance of individual games based on their impact across the pennant race. So an early season game, relatively small multiplier. If you're tight in a pennant race down

the stretch in September, that gives you a bigger multiplier. And you're tight in a pennant race down the stretch in September, that gives you a bigger multiplier and so those games factor more heavily into your championship WPA. And then I limited it only to players who played for a team that actually made the postseason. If that's the ultimate goal, then you could say from an extreme logical position that if your team made the playoffs, then you're worthy of being considered an MVP. And if they didn't, then you shouldn't be. Again, not my personal viewpoint, but for the purpose of the exercise, I wanted to see what that would look like.

Right. The old Brinch Ricky, Ralph Kiner, could have finished last without you kind of conclusion. And I guess you also just focused on regular season championship when probably they added, because that's when voting happens, right? That's when we decide the MVP at the end of the regular season. So it doesn't take postseason performance into account. Exactly. So I was interested in comparing what the regular season numbers would look like to compare against what the MVP voting results were. And so that mimics the point in the season where the voting actually

takes place. So you use all the information you have up to that point. So it's not including any actual postseason performances. Win probability added is not a perfect metric. There's a number of limitations of that. It doesn't really break down contributions. Some types of base running are not really well accounted for in that, like going first to third on a single. My understanding is that it pretty much credits all offensive, you know, added positive value to the offense goes to the hitter, except for things like a stolen base, which are obviously the base runner themselves. Equally imperfect is that all negative value on defense gets assigned to the pitcher. So fielding is not incorporated. Pitchers playing in front of a poor defense is not allotted for. So there's definitely some

limitations here. The other caveat, of course, is that calculating this depends on having full play-by-play data available for an entire season. So this is a little bit incomplete in earlier eras. I did go back to 1931, which was the beginning of the modern BBWA MVP voting. But the first couple of decades were sort of in the 85 to 95 percent range in terms of data coverage. More as you get more recent, obviously, and fully complete after 1969. There's enough data there to sort of take a stab at getting a best estimate of what we know with the data we have. With those caveats, I found the list. I aggregated it into a spreadsheet with some additional data, again, comparing to MVP voting and also comparing to the war leaderboards.

Obviously, again, war not known for most of this time, but another point to compare to, especially if you're looking at MVP voting, it can kind of be a proxy for that of just who were known to be the best players around the league. So certainly before the divisional era, this is all just going to a player on whichever team made the World Series in each league. So you may be unsurprised to know that the Yankees win a lot of these. You may be unsurprised to know that the Yankees win a lot of these. In fact, the all-time leader in, I'll call these clutch MVP awards, is Mickey Mantle, who is awarded nine of them. Because pretty much that whole late 50s, early 60s era that the Yankees were winning the pennant every year, he was more or less leading the team in terms of contributing to that performance.

Now, I would say that the types of players who tend to get overvalued here, again, talking about the things that don't really get accounted for very well in WPA, good fielding players. So the types of players that are likely to be overvalued are corner outfielders who don't have a very good glove, pitchers who play in front of an excellent defense can get undervalued a bit, as well as pitchers who outperform their peripherals. And that especially comes into play with smaller sample sizes, especially in more recent years when the usage of relievers gets more involved. It's not very uncommon to see a reliever win this clutch award. It happens every once in a while. A couple of recent examples for my beloved Baltimore Orioles would be 2012 Jim Johnson and 2016 Zach Britton, both of whom received some not

insubstantial MVP voting consideration as well. And that was the other interesting thing I found, again, just comparing the WPA numbers to MVP voting, there are definitely some cases where a player who doesn't rank very highly in terms of wins above replacement does get some outsized MVP voting considerations. And you could make the case that even if it's not directly because they had a high championship win probability added, the numbers that went into generating their championship win probability added may be driving that same MVP consideration. So a couple of examples, mostly relievers, but not exclusively. 1984, Steve Balboni. 2004, Eric Gagné.

2002, Troy Percival. Devin Williams in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. Two different Goose Gossage years back in the 70s and 80s. All received MVP votes despite being outside the top 50 in wins above replacement for their league. In fact, Goose Gossage in 1980 finished third place in MVP voting on the strength of just being tough as nails for the Yankees that year, especially in a year when they had a relatively tight pennant race. they had a relatively tight pennant race. I was glad to see Britton show up there as your CWPA MVP for 2016, because I wrote an article that year, which is headlined, Baltimore closer Zach Britton isn't just a surprise Cy Young contender, he's the AL MVP. I don't think I wrote that headline. That doesn't sound like my work. It sounds a little bit bolder than I probably would

have put it. And in fact, in the body of the article, I was like, well, Mike Trout is obviously the MVP. But if you don't see things in a context neutral way, then you could make a strong case for Zach Britton. And of course, Mike Trout was elected MVP as he should have been. But Britton did finish fourth in Cy Young voting and 11th in MVP voting, as you said. So that argument, I was making it at the time from the perspective of someone who would look at things this way. Exactly. And that's what I found so interesting about going through this exercise was trying to look at the types of players who end up highly ranked or highly rated by this metric and where that seems obvious and where it maybe

seems counterintuitive. Just to give a couple of examples of the magnitude of the number here and sort of what goes into it. So the Britain season you mentioned, for instance, that's actually the best season in the wildcard game era. So from 2012 to present. And Britain's championship win probability added for that season was 6.71%. Now, if you think about the magnitude of that number, it's basically saying from the beginning of the season to the end of the season, how much did you increase your team's chances of winning a World Series? So in the expanded playoff era, obviously, even at the conclusion of the regular season, all things being equal, your chance of winning the World Series is not that high. So for one player to put up six and a half percentage points is pretty substantial.

The other thing I put in the spreadsheet here for each of these seasons was what was the player's single most notable game in terms of what was the one game in which they improved their WPA the most? And it's often, as you might imagine, a game near the end of the season, especially if the team's in a close pennant race. So again, for Britain, for that example, in 2016, the Orioles did end up finishing in the wildcard spot four games back of the Red Sox. But on September 14th, they were two games back and playing a game against Boston, Britain came in in the ninth to preserve a 1-0 lead and got the save, which added 0.43%. So again, not huge numbers in the grand scheme of things, but a lot of that is a result of the playoff format we have. If you look at some of the numbers from earlier eras,

especially 1968 and earlier, when there's no real playoff bracket at all, you just go straight into the World Series, some guys can rack up some seriously big numbers. The highest overall, all-time, is Karli Estremski's 1967 Triple Crown season for the Red Sox, where he added, during the regular season, 52.14 percentage points to the Red Sox championship chances. Most significantly,

a lot of Red Sox fans may know this story, may not, depending on their age. The last game of the regular season that year, the Sox were actually tied with Minnesota in the standings, and they were playing against each other again. So whoever won that game was going to go to the World Series. Minnesota jumped out to a 2-0 lead, but Jastrzemski hit a two-run single in the bottom of the sixth inning with the bases loaded and nobody out, which sparked a five-run rally. He went four for four on the day, and the Red Sox won the pennant based off of that one game added 18 and a half percentage points. Wow.

Impossible dream. Yeah. Exactly. How much CWPA does Buck Showalter get for the 2016 AL wildcard game? Well, yeah, we all know what happened afterwards. So that was the nice thing about limiting this to regular season only is I didn't really have to relive that memory. But thank you for that. Thank you for that.

The MVP results actually match up reasonably well. The BBWA winner has also been the what I'm calling the clutch MVP leader 48 times or about once every two years. If you look at both leagues together. It has gone down a bit. Prior to 1969, the voting matched a little more than a third of the time. And since then, it's been 20% of the time. But in 2022, the MVP award in both leagues was a match for the clutch MVP, Judge and Goldschmidt. Both of their teams made the playoffs

and both players contributed an inordinate amount to that. Again, smaller magnitude, 3.5%, 3%, but it was still more than any other single player in the league. So do you interpret that to mean that the context-neutral, maybe war-based way of determining the MVP is winning, is ascendant, that it isn't as much of a factor as it used to be, whether your team makes the playoffs or at least your context-sensitive performance as your team is making the playoffs? I think so, because a lot of the times where it

overlaps, it's more of a function of just the fact that these players are good at baseball. And so they happen to be the clutch leader, but they were also the leader or very close to being the leader in wins above replacement as well. The last time that the BBWA MVP winner was also the clutch leader, but was outside of the top five

in wins above replacement is Vlad Guerrero in 2004. So there's been a number of matches more recently than that, but it's all been guys who were at the top of the league in more context-neutral stats as well. So I would say 2004 was the last time that there was really an MVP winner who deserved it in a context-dependent way, but not necessarily in a context neutral way. Gotcha. I thought it was interesting how you illustrated the decline in regular season CWPA for the leaders over time based on the playoff format. So as you said, you had Karl Yerchemsky in 1967, when you just, the regular season winner goes straight to the World Series, do not pass wildcard game,

do not pass division series, do not pass division series, do not pass championship series, et cetera, then he could have a 52.1% addition to the Sox's championship chances. But then as soon as you add the CS round, then the leader goes down to Tug McGraw for the 1980 Phillies at 16.6. So that's a huge decrease, relatively speaking. And then when you add the division series in the DS era, you have Randy Johnson for Meg's 1995 Mariners at 11.8. That's right. And then Zach Britton in the wildcard game era at 6.7.

Zach Britton in the wildcard game era at 6.7. So it tells you the really significant decrease in the importance of the regular season when it comes to determining who's going to win the championship, which we all know, I think it certainly stands to reason. But when you see those numbers, it's pretty stark. Absolutely. And I mean, even that Randy Johnson number of 11.8% is sort of artificially propped up by the fact that he got more than half of that in a tiebreaker game. At the end of the regular season, they finished tied with the Angels and Randy went out and threw a complete game one run victory against the Angels in the tiebreaker game, which was worth 6.2%. So without that, it would have, you know, it would have been a more or less pedestrian season. I mean, obviously still a

very good season, but it wouldn't have been the highest of the divisional era. Tiebreaker games. What a wonderful feature of the sport that we will never do away with. They really are. I'd love it if they came back. But yeah, and that also speaks to, you know, a point that Sam was making in his article as well, which is just that the postseason has become so much more important in terms of how the course of a baseball year goes that having some way to recognize what players do at that point seems to be a spot where statistical analysis could continue. I do want to call out a few other fascinating single seasons that we had.

2008 was a fascinating year in both leagues, partially due to the presence of a tiebreaker game in the American League. The Minnesota Twins and the Chicago White Sox finished tied for the AL Central, excuse me. I believe there was also a tiebreaker game in the West too that year, me. I believe there was also a tiebreaker game in the West too that year, which was delightful. But John Danks ends up being awarded the clutch MVP leader for that season in the American League for the White Sox. Again, mainly on the strength of throwing eight scoreless innings against the Twins in that tiebreak game, which the White Sox went on to win. And in the National League, you have CeCe Sabathia's notorious half season, where he was traded over from Cleveland at the trade deadline that year, pitched 130 innings with the Brewers and still managed to put up 4.9 wins above replacement. Actually finished sixth in MVP voting in the National League that year as well.

in the National League that year as well. And again, because the Brewers were caught in such a close pennant race with the Cubs going down to the wire there, won the Clutch MVP award as well, despite only appearing in one half of the season. Although if you're going to only appear in one half of a season and still win this award, it's better to be the second half than the first. Yeah. And you also had a list of CWPA MVPs who got no MVP ballot consideration whatsoever. Yes, that happens rarely, but occasionally where someone will be the leader in this stat, but not get any MVP votes. And that's usually completely bizarre years. We've had 13 of those total and nine of them since 1982. So at least approaching what Sam would consider real baseball. That would be Claudel Washington for the 1982 Atlanta team, Frank Tanana for the 1987

Tigers, Jim Acker, who I had never heard of, played for the 1989 Blue Jays and was the 195th best player in the American League by Winslow of Replacement that season. Kent Herbeck for the 1991 Twins, Gary Gaietti for the 98 Cubs, the aforementioned John Danks in 2008 for Chicago, Joe Nathan for the 09 Twins, Walker Bueller for the 2021 Dodgers. Williams, Walker Bueller for the 2021 Dodgers. And last year, the American League clutch MVP was Hector Neriz for the Houston Astros. Again, another guy who just, he was tough as nails in September and the Astros were fighting to make it in to the postseason. And so he winds up 72nd ranked in wins above replacement, but first in clutch. You also named some of the most boring winners. What did you mean by boringest?

Well, just the opposite of the sort of highest rated. and Tug McCraw and Jastrzemski having the seasons where they were the clutch MVP leader and had very high Winspo replacement values. I did also find the players with the lowest rating while still being highest ranked for the year. So that would be the boringest winner of all time, excluding the pandemic. So the 2020 season, again, being excluded once again for data integrity reasons here. But that 2021 Walker Bueller season, just 2.96 championship win probably added because the Dodgers were 23 games up in the wildcard. The sort of common factor here, again, being if you're the league leader, but it's a very low number, it probably means that the pennant races were not very interesting that year.

So you didn't have a lot of opportunity to add large swings in probability there. The least exciting winner before the wildcard game was Pedro Martinez in 1998, 3.7 percentage points. Again, the Yankees had a huge lead in the division that year, and Boston won the wildcard by seven games. If you go back to before the divisional era, so 1993 and older, again, the strike year of 81 gets a little tricky because of the first half, second half winners. So if you ignore that as well, you have 1975 Fred Lynn for the Boston Red Sox at 5.02 percentage points. Boston actually didn't have a huge margin of victory in the standings that year. They only won the division by four and a half games. But they were comfortably ahead of the Orioles for most of the season. The Orioles

went 17-9 in September to sort of tighten it up a bit. And if you go back to before the divisional era, so this is a year when just winning your division, your league, winning your league means you go straight to the World Series. The 1963 Yankees, unsurprisingly, it's a Yankees juggernaut here. But 1963, I guess Mantle is sort of aging or had just left. Tom Trash was the championship win probability added leader for the Yankees that year with eight percentage points. They won a ton of games that year, so it was not particularly close. And as you found, there is evidence that MVP voters are not influenced by this exactly. These are many years where CWPA did not exist or no one knew about it, but they were looking

at the factors that went into something like championship win probability added. And you found that the median war rank for a CWPA MVP is sixth in their league while the median MVP vote finish for those same players is fourth. So they do better in the MVP voting than they do in war. And as you said, the BBWA MVP is sometimes also the championship win, probably added MVP 48 times that has happened, though that is happening less as time goes on and voters' priorities change. Yeah. And that correlation is actually even a little bit stronger if you account for the fact that pitchers have

historically been underrepresented in MVP voting in a way that they're not necessarily in this metric. So a lot of the, if you think about snubs or people who rank highly in win probability added but low in MVP voting, five of the six biggest snubs are pitchers. So it's Pedro Martinez, it's Andy Pettit, it's actually Pedro Martinez twice, 1998 and 2003, Johnny Cueto in 2016, and John Denny for the 1983 Phillies. Those are five of the six biggest snubs in terms of players who they were the clutch MVP winner for their league. They were highly

ranked in wins above replacement, but they did not get a lot of MVP votes. And the sixth of these top ones is probably the most amusing one. It's Mickey Mantle. But it's Mickey Mantle at 21 years old in 1953. He was the most clutch player for the Yankees that year. He was 21 years old. He was fifth in the American League in wins above replacement. And he got the seventh most MVP votes for a Yankee player. Crowded field. Talk about splitting the vote. Yeah, no kidding. Several ways. Yeah. Well, this is fascinating. I will link to the spreadsheet, of course, if people want to peruse it here. And you mentioned, what, Mantle was nine of these CWPA MVP awards, right? Did you say who some of the other many-time winners were? I assume they're just the obvious best players ever? Some of them are, yes, but it's interesting having the playoff restriction,

which limits some of the years that you can do it. So you might think, well, Barry Bonds probably has a lot of these. Well, he does, but they're more with the Pirates than they are with the Giants. Bonds has five of these, and four of them are from the 90s, and three of them are on Pirates teams, 1990 to 1992. There's a few other players who have three, which is Lou Gehrig, Sandy Koufax, Harmon Killebrew, Willie Stargell, Randy Johnson, and Pedro Martinez. And we talked about some regular seasons that ended well for the Red Sox, so one that did not end well. You also noted that the only recent season where the bulk of a player's championship win probably had for the season came in a single game that wasn't a tiebreaker is 2011 Evan Longoria when he hit a walk-off over the Yankees on that wonderful, memorable last day, night of the regular season,

right after the Red Sox had just gotten walked off by Baltimore to give the Rays the victory over Boston. That was a wonderful day, more so for some fans than for others. But for fans of baseball, it was a great day for the sport. Yeah, I'm not sure Yankees fans have ever been so excited to see their season end on a loss. Yeah. Didn't Robert Andino come up on the podcast because of that game in some context? He's a fan favorite, right? Because of that, people remember when you get a memorable hit for your team and everyone else is like, who? Like the curse of the Andino. That's what it was, right?

That's what we call it. He was the Orioles player who had hit the walk-offs to beat Boston that night. And again, the timing was just so close to just before Longoria had had the hit in Tampa. Right. We had brought up Andino because of the meme about his headshots, where he looks like he's getting sadder every year. But that's maybe not the most memorable contribution to baseball history by Robert Andino, at least not for Orioles fans. Well, it makes me think a couple of things. One of which is that every now and then we get asked and we discuss what stat would you want that is not currently available or that could be improved or refined. And sometimes I'll say something like, oh, I wish we had a better, more easily available catcher game calling stat if we could kind of crack that code, something like that.

But I think it would be really nice to have a WPA and by extension CWPA that did do a better job of apportioning credit to individual players because we have the ability to do that now, right? Like if we had a stat cast version of win probability added where we wouldn't just give the pitcher credit for every good defensive play and we could take into account base running, as you say, and not just credit that to the batter, that'd be good if we could get more granular. Speaking of Sam, he wrote an article one time about like, what if you could do war on a single play and break down all the many slight contributions that everyone would get? We could kind of do that now, or at least we could separate out some of the big things that now WPA just kind of lumps in everything with certain players involved. So it seems like we could have a better WPA.

certain players involved. So it seems like we could have a better WPA. And I still lean toward context-neutral stats more often, but for telling the story of individual games and seasons, it's still pretty handy to have WPA. And it'd be nice if those stats were less structurally flawed. And it seems like we could do that now. Tom Tango and Mike Petriello, if you're listening, please make this happen. I'm not good enough to do that, but if Tango and Mike Petriello, if you're listening, please make this happen. I'm not good enough to do that, but if someone makes it, I would love to play around with it. And actually on that same topic, I would love if there was like stat,

if this was stat-headable would be great as well. Ben, you helped point me in the right direction that there's a yearly leader, you know, top 10 sort of for CWPA for batters and pitchers. But there's not like a full, you can't do like a ranking of the whole league or a stat head search for this

to limit it to playoff teams. So this was a lot of sort of manually cross-checking data and compiling. But baseball reference, if you're listening, please make the stat headable. I'd be very interested to play around with it. Handing out homework to all the stat-pervading people here. Listen, I did my homework and now it's their turn. Yeah, right. And also one stat that might be nice to have, and that was the premise of Sam's piece

that inspired your research here, was something that takes into account post-season performance. And I have also been thinking about that article of his because I'm kind of conflicted about it still. And he was basically just saying, well, we should be able to have unified value stats that take into account postseason performance, especially because now that there is so much postseason and so many teams in the postseason and players racking up way more postseason performance. It's not in the realm of small sample, whereas it used to be for everyone but maybe the Yankees who were there every year in the World Series. Now it's a significant portion of a player's career is produced in the postseason and those games matter.

And so they should not be kind of cordoned off. We should factor that in. And I am still kind of conflicted about that. Yeah. I guess just because it does come down to opportunity and I'm wary of just kind of having everyone on the same playing field when they're not on the same playing field during the season because through no fault of their own, they may not have an opportunity to compile postseason performance, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't credit the players who do get that opportunity for doing that. And as of now, it's just kind of, it's like an extra factor that we weigh in in a not

very quantitative way where we just know, oh, that guy, he pitched a lot in the postseason and he was good. So we'll kind of give him informal bonus points, but it's not really incorporated into Jaws or anything else. And Sam was saying, well, it should be. And I would welcome having the option to look at things that way. I think always the more ways we can look at these things and customize the way that we want the stats to look, that would be nice. But I'm still not sure how much I would really rely on it personally if I'm evaluating players' careers, because it just feels unfair. And there are a lot of things that are unfair about life and sports, but I don't know how to handle that exactly.

I don't know how to handle that exactly. Sure. And even this regular season data has kind of the problem of just being prone to noise or random fluctuation to a certain extent. I mean, there's obviously a lot of players on this list are genuinely excellent players who were put in a position to succeed and executed sort of consistently all season long. And then you also have occasional just fluke years where, you know, somebody sort of happens into like Shinsu Chu being the 2013 National League Clutch MVP. You know, no slight against him as a player, but he's not really an MVP caliber player. But just because of the way that his opportunities happened to line up that season, he ends up being at the top of the league in this metric. And I think if you try to extend even not this exact stat,

because I don't think even Sam was advocating for using WPA or CWPA directly for postseason performance, but even something like this is probably going to run into those same noise or sample size issues, especially when you start talking about a much more limited sample of plate appearances in the postseason. It would be nice to be able to at least look at combined stats. Like, what if we just added in postseason performance to regular season performance, especially now that it's occupying a bigger portion of some players' careers, or if we had better stats that adjusted for the context of postseason performance, because that's not always easily available. We've kind of complained about that before, where the fact that we look at regular season stats mostly means sometimes it's just been very hard to find postseason stats at all. And Fangraphs has improved upon that situation, fortunately, of late.

But it'd be great if we could have like a playoffs war. It's just, it's complicated, of course, because it's just a different caliber of play and a different replacement level.

And how do you handle that? And is it worth it? But it would be cool if you could do that, if we could add that onto the wars that we have. And then is it weird to use war in the postseason when it's just all so context sensitive and maybe we just want to look at CWPA anyway? I don't know. It's a thorny issue. Maybe we should talk to Sam about that when October rolls around, but I'm still wrestling with how to

handle that myself. Yeah, get someone who's thought about it a little bit more than I have. All right. Well, before we let you go, we had you on earlier this year to talk about the fact that you were helping organize Effectively Wild listener meetups at every MLB ballpark, theoretically, at least this season. And a good number of those have happened already and a good number are still to come. And I've been linking faithfully in every episode's notes to the place where people can sign up for that

and mentioning it in the outro. But since you're here, would you care to say anything about how that's gone, some of the highlights and what's still to come? Yes, thank you for the signal boost and for continuing to link that. Not to gather credit or anything, but I will say that I feel like much more of the idea person than the actual organizer. I've had a lot of really great local people organizing and implementing for the

various locations. Yes, some have gone swimmingly well. We still have a number still to come. I'm looking forward myself to attending a few once they get a little bit closer to the East Coast. So please, if you have not been checking out those links, take a look at meetups near you. A lot of the organizers of the season, I would say post-All-Star break, check those out and get in touch via the Google form or other contact info listed and let folks know you want to hang out with some cool Effectively Wild listeners. All right. Thanks, Michael. Thank you. All right. After we recorded, Michael mentioned that he's added a tab to the spreadsheet breaking

down the number of so-called clutch MVPs by team and how that compares to the number of BBWA MVP awards by team. The biggest gainers, so more CWPA MVPs than actual MVPs. These will be teams with lots of playoff appearances. The Yankees plus nine, the Dodgers and Orioles plus four. Biggest fallers, the A's at negative seven, the Rangers at negative five, and appropriately, given our Angels conversation earlier, the A's at negative seven, the Rangers at negative five, and appropriately, given our Angels conversation earlier, the Angels negative four. Trout Notani, plenty of MVPs, but tough to get a CWPA MVP when your team is not making the playoffs. Reds also negative four. As Michael says,

Miguel Cabrera stealing even more MVP awards from Trout. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. Michael, Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, discounts on merch and ad-free Fangraphs memberships, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us via the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Thank you. at MLB ballparks that Michael mentioned, check the show page or the links in your podcast app. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will

be back to talk to you next week. And the stat blast queries are detectively compiled They're not a Jerry and baseball legend selectively dialed But their spiciest takes are still respectfully mild More than 2,000 episodes retrospectively filed And at each new one we still collectively smile that's effectively wild that's effectively wild