Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2209: The Catcher Bug Catcher

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Derek Jeter‘s (and Aaron Judge’s) championship-or-bust rhetoric, Alex Rodriguez’s date night, Judge’s home-run robberies, Judge’s offensive prowess compared to Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds, how clutchness (or the lack thereof) could affect the AL MVP race, Juan Soto’s defense, how the trajectory of Seattle’s season may have sealed […]

Did Richard Love Lady ever strike a Taylor T God and who had more war? Jason Kendall or Russell Martin? What if Shohio Tani's dog was also a good lawyer? What would you do if Mike Trump just showed up in your foyer? Or is it foyer? Find out on Effectively Wild. Find out on Effectively Wild. Find out on Effectively Wild today.

Hello and welcome to episode 2209 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graaf's presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Van Graaf's. Hello, Meg. Hello. So this past weekend, Jose Molina and other Yankees legends returned to Yankee Stadium for Old Timers Day for the 15th anniversary celebration of the 2009 World Series Championship team, the last Yankees team to win the championship. And Derek Jeter was one of the non-Malina legends in attendance.

And Derek Jeter said the sort of thing that Derek Jeter has often said over the course of his career, which is, and I quote, it doesn't matter what you do during 162 game schedule, it all boils down to the World Series. Win a championship or it's a failure. And I got to say, I've been hearing this refrain my whole life as a New Yorker, as someone who grew up rooting for the Yankees during the Steinbrenner era, when this line was really popularized. My time as a Yankees fan essentially overlapped with Derek Jeter's career with the Yankees.

I am sick of this. I am sick of this attitude. This is toxic Yanksculinity. This is what I'm calling this attitude of nothing matters unless you win the championship. Yeah. Everything else, everything short of that is a failure. And Derek Jeter had this party line for years as the Yankees captain and his successor

as Yankees captain, Aaron Judge, has taken on the mantle of saying this thing every year, right? So he's repeated this refrain many times, just to pick one time, 2019, any year you're not the last man standing, the season is a fail. It doesn't matter how many games you win in the postseason, you can win every single game in the regular season. But if you lose in the postseason, it doesn't matter. Okay. They're like competing to one up each other with like how much of a loser you are if you

don't win the World Series. You can win every single, every other game. You shouldn't have even bothered to show up. Why are you wasting all our time? You bunch of, I just don't, I don't get it. Probably part of this is PR and I wash, I guess. Right. And George Steinbrenner said this and Derek Jeter said this and maybe Aaron Judge now feels he has to say this because you've conditioned Yankees fans. They've internalized this attitude of we must win every

single year or we're a failure. I guess that suggests that the Yankees should not have shown up for the last 15 years. Aaron Judge's entire career, all of his exploits, worthless because he has yet to win a World Series. To me, this is just a misunderstanding, a twist on what is actually valuable about sports and baseball. Yeah, you want to win. That is why we watch to a certain extent. There's something at stake here.

It's a competition, but it just doesn't invalidate all of the entertainment, the spectator experience, the success, the exploits along the way. Yeah. If you don't win, cause only one team can win every year and you are just condemning 29 teams to their season just being a complete failure and waste. Like, sure, on a technical level, it's a failure if you fail to win the World Series. One team wins, one team loses. So sure, you failed in that

particular series, but I just think it's so overblown and such a distortion of why we watch sports and how you should measure success to suggest that the entire enterprise wasn't worthwhile if you are not the one team still standing at the end. I strongly agree. Maybe this is the rhetorical version of a corrective to like the depoto 54% comment, right? True.

Because like part of our objection to that, we had a number of them, but one of the most fundamental one was this like misunderstanding that, yeah, sure, if you really were doing that every year, it would be impressive. But part of how teams get to that as an average over an entire decade is by aiming to overshoot that mark, right? And so then you have some years where you're above and some years where you're below, but you really need to try to win more games like that to consistently win that money. And so maybe this is just like, judge being like, nothing else matters. I actually do think it's fine for players and front office folks to look at their project,

as I often like to say, as sort of a fundamentally different one than fans, right? Like if a baseball player, an active pro player told you that part of what he likes best about baseball is that it lets you nap, you know, in a comfortable way, we'd be like, okay, look, we don't have to do eye wash, but like that's maybe a little bit much, buddy. So I think it's fine for them to be kind of single minded. What they do is incredibly difficult. It comes with a lot of sacrifice of sort of time and, and, you know, availability for like personal stuff in your life.

You're not as present for your people during this long slog of a season. It takes a toll on your body. So I can get why they might get kind of tunnel visioned, even if I would hope that someone, especially someone like Aaron Judge, who is so fantastically talented can have an appreciation for how amazing his years have been in the course of his career, even if they haven't resulted in getting a ring yet. But I think it's fine for players to say like, no, this is what I'm here to do. I'm not, you know, I'm here to win a ring. I want a ring.

But for fans, I think that we should actively resist this mindset, you know, and it's a tempting one because, well, I don't have a ton of experience with my favorite teams winning it all, but it does feel really cool and good when your team wins a championship. And I get why that can be a pull and why it might be such a strong one. And I think when you're caught in the wake of that goal, you can sometimes be a bit nasty. And so I think it's good for fans to resist that. And we can be the appreciators of the regular season, even if for players and executives and analysts and scouts and what have you, they might need to be a little more single-minded. But we should take our role as regular season

appreciators I think pretty seriously. For no other reason than it's less likely to sort of accrue to the folks actually playing the game. Yeah. And I think it reinforces the sense that you can will yourself to a championship, which you just can't do in baseball. You're setting yourself up for failure because there's just so much randomness inherent.

You cannot, even if you have the will to win, quote unquote, you cannot will yourself to winning necessarily. Maybe if you're Derek Jeter, it seems like you can because you won so many times. But then again, Derek Jeter was surrounded by many excellent players, right? Which is not to suggest that he was not himself an excellent player who,

who made major contributions to those championships. But it's almost like easy for him to say everything else is a failure when you have a handful of rings and you win in your first full season in the majors and everything like, okay, sure. But a lot of guys never really have the opportunity to win a championship. So is their entire career a failure because they didn't happen to play for the highest payroll team in the biggest city with the best players around you? I don't think so, right? So yes, if you want to say our goal is to win a world series, anything short of that, we're disappointed.

Like, not expecting you to say, eh, you know, we lost, but yeah, whatever. It was a fun ride. Like sure, take the loss hard, but just saying like appreciate the journey, you know, it's not just about the destination. Certainly for us it isn't. I guess it's fine for the big bad Yankees,

the evil empire, the team that's gonna be the villain, the heel of Major League Baseball, regardless of what it does to lean into this attitude, to act like winning in the regular season is slumming it, that's not good enough for them. Fine, that just makes them more hateable by everyone else. And if this is maybe just one of those weird athlete mentality things

that normies don't understand, it's like this is how you have to motivate yourself if you're Derek Jeter or if you're Aaron Judge. And I would love to know in their heart of hearts, do they really feel this way? Like if they, at the end of a, they have a fantastic season, they hit 62 homers or whatever, and the rest of their teammates weren't great and they don't win or they make it close and they don't win. Are they really going home at the end of that feeling like this was an entire failure all along? Like, what a waste.

Like I kicking myself all off seasons doing about this or is this just something you say? That's what I would like to know how they actually feel. But if they do actually feel this way, well, I guess I can't say that. And maybe that is one of those things where you always have to have a chip on your shoulder or convince yourself that nobody believed in you or whatever it is. And so if you're a hall of fame caliber player, like Jeter or judge, and you have

to remain motivated somehow, and this is the way that you do it, then okay. I guess if that goes you on to greater heights, do what you have to do. And maybe it's just the sort of mindset that I have a hard time empathizing with. I also think that when you're someone like a judge or a cheater where you have your real responsibilities as a Yankees captain, again, a role that remains a complete mystery to me and I refuse to learn any more about it. Because, you know, I think it's just important for there to be people out there who look

at Yankee stuff and go, are you sure that matters as much as you think it does? Just like to keep everybody honest. I'm just, I'm providing public service here, but you know, there's, there's the leadership responsibilities that come with being the, being the captain, right? And I also think that there is something to the quieter team building, team recognition piece of it when you are, you know, in Judge's case, literally head and shoulders above many of your teammates where this is a way for you to indicate we're all in this together. Like this collective accomplishment

that we cannot do on our own is the most important thing. So don't worry, I'm not going to be too caught up in my own stuff and my own triumph to recognize the broader collective projects that we're all sort of pushing toward here. So I think there's value in that, not only in terms of like what it brings from a rallying cry perspective and a leadership perspective, but also in a like, figuring out how to get on with your coworkers, which they are, you know, they're coworkers in the weirdest possible job ever, but- Yes, it's true. And it is a way of deflecting the spotlight from yourself, which I find frustrating too, because at some point if everyone's celebrating you, it's okay to celebrate yourself a little bit.

I agree. Jeter's entire career and judges to some extent too, every time they're asked about what does it feel like to have a great game or have a great season or some individual accomplishment? Unfailingly, they will say, oh, well, I'm just glad we won or I'm just sorry we didn't win. If we don't win, then my personal accomplishments don't matter and everything. Okay, maybe you're the most selfless man in the world, but you could say that, yeah, it's cool to just be amazing at baseball and you could take pleasure in that too. We won't hold it against you. It's okay. Right.

And, and this is why I had a hard time kind of connecting with Jeter, you know, even as a Yankees fan, he wasn't my guy. And, you know, Jose Molina may have been my guy, but that was for framing related reasons, but I was a big Bernie Williams guy and I don't know, maybe someone will look back and find sometime Bernie Williams said the season was a failure if they didn't win the World Series, but I don't know that that wasn't his line so much. And I just had a hard time kind of connecting with Jeter because he just

would not show his personality, right? If he had one, I thought he probably had one and he just wouldn't let it out. You know, it always had to be so perfect. And even now post-playing career when he's on pregame shows and stuff, you know, he just doesn't really say very many interesting things, which is not that he doesn't have anything interesting to say, maybe he does, but he just always has to sort of maintain this persona, this facade, which as much as I appreciated his play,

made it kind of hard for me to connect to him on more of a personal level, I guess, or identify with him. But Judge has kind of carried on that legacy. And maybe again, that goes along with the captaincy, you know, the heavy burden of being the captain of the Pinstripes. It's got to be all about the team. no I in that. I also think that, I mean, like maybe the way that Jeter asserted his personality was just to never move off a shortstop. But also, you know, we should allow that, like some of these guys, and I'm not saying that this is true of Aaron Judge, I do not know Aaron Judge personally, I do not know Derek Jeter personally. So like, I don't know what they're like when they're in front of friends and family

and aren't worried about being a particular way in front of media. But we should also allow that a lot of these guys just aren't actually that interesting. That is quite possible too. Because first of all, a lot of people aren't that interesting, right? And I don't mean that in like a, I'm so interesting, here I am, the most interesting woman alive above all of you, borings. I just mean that like, we're people, we have a lot of stuff the same, we worry about the same kinds of things, we got to eat and drink water.

And people ask them to comment constantly, whereas most people are not asked to publicly comment constantly and you don't always have something interesting to say after every single game. And plus the tabloid attention that those guys are subject to, Derek Jeter dating various people in his twenties. And that was always a big New York item of interest. And so maybe it's sort of a protective mechanism. But still. And also, they've spent so much of their lives, not just their adult lives, but like

their formative years as children and then teenagers playing baseball and often playing baseball to the exclusion of a lot of other activities. And so like the thing that they might have something to say about the most is baseball, you know, and they're human beings. They have interests and families and all kinds of stuff going on. But the idea, I think that when someone is really exceptional in one area of their life and they are so much better at the thing they do well than not only normies, but like their peers within that group. I think that we have this tendency to assume insight or particular expertise beyond that.

And that's why you end up with people designing phones being like, I'm going to reinvent public transportation. I got, I, you know, how much can we expect them to have something to say about, you know, like there's just so much stuff, Ben. There's so many things. Yeah. Anyway, take it from me, a 2009 Yankees baseball operations intern. I mean, I know what I speak here. I'm speaking from experience. You know, I was riding in that ticker tape parade with Derek Jeter. I was there. I was in a duck boat and people were throwing toilet paper rolls at me chanting, who are you?

You were in a duck boat, like the ones that can go on the road and then also in the water? Yeah. There was no water in the Canyon of Heroes, but also I'm not a hero and I was there. Okay. So wait, now I have some questions. The first of which is, why duck boats? Why of all the things they could be like, we got to move all these people slowly for a while. And they were like, I know the ticket, duck boats. Why duck boats? CB Maybe to make us look less majestic, to cut us down to size as the people in the parade who

no one was there to celebrate. But I't know. But I was there. I was down there in the clubhouse popping the champagne and everything with those guys. Did I play as important a part in the proceedings as they did? No. And did I get a ring? No, I didn't. And in fact, I was boycotting the 2009 reunion at Inky Stadium because I'm still waiting for my ring. To be clear, I was not invited, but also I was boycotting informally because I and my fellow 2009 baseball operation interns are still awaiting our rings. It's not too late to rectify that oversight. So that was my first duck boat question. And then my second one, and this is a more

somber question. I don't want people to think I'm making a goof about this one. Wasn't there like a duck boat tragedy? Like didn't a duck boat sink at some point, maybe in Boston and like kill some people? So then this part is a little bit goofier. Was the duck boat decision made before or after that? I suppose if the duck boat ran into issues in the water that you were fine on land, but what a curious vehicular choice, duck boat. Jared Ranere Yes. I think there was one incident in Boston

that looks like in 2016 in particular, but when I Googled, I found an ABC News article headlined, a look back at past deadly duck tour incidents. Kasey Panetta That seems bad. Jared Ranere Yeah. Jared Ranere Multiple, more than one. Kasey Panetta Wow. Well, anyway, the balance between pride and, you know, self-confidence and then being an egotistical jerk, it can be a fine line for people. And so I understand when they decide to be all about the team thing, but like to your point, it's okay to enjoy the

other stuff. I have a feeling that Aaron Judge enjoys being Aaron Judge quite a bit. Like I think, you know, I think Aaron Judge is probably like this going well for me. He should. Yes. Maybe I'm just selfish. I don't know. But hey, I've, I've been to the pinnacle. I've been to the mountain top. I'm a 2009 champion and I'm here to tell you, don't buy into the toxic Yankskei linearity. You can enjoy seasons when you don't win it all. They're still worthwhile and still worth celebrating. Did you see, by the way, I don't know why you would have seen this, but another 2009 Yankee, Alex Rodriguez, in fact, 2009 postseason hero, winner of the Babe Ruth Award as the

best player in the playoffs that year, He had a date night with his girlfriend, Jacquin Cordero. This was after the reunion at Old Timers game. And it was a very funny how it started versus how it's going kind of thing on Jacquin Cordero's Instagram, which I will send to you. So she put up a picture of herself, tagged A-Rod, they were going out for a date and she had on

her little back dress and it looked like they were going somewhere fancy. Then later that night on her Instagram stories, again tagging A-Rod, she sent out a pic of where they actually were on this date. From all appearances, they were sitting on a dock somewhere and you can see presumably A-Rod's legs and knees sitting next to Jack and Cordero.

And they are taking in the sight of a Yankees game on an iPad on a little table that is perched in front of them. And so this was evidently the date. I mean, maybe there was more to the date, but this was the public look that we saw getting all gussied up, dressed up to go out on the town. And then where does A-Rod take you? To a dock where he has an iPad set up with the Yankees game. And you know what? This is why I'm into A-Rod. I mean,

the man is a cheater. The man has been a phony at times, but I always just felt for him and he's just so strange. He's so strange. He's so strange. But in just this fascinating way and almost this wholesome way aside from the PEDs, from the PEDs, you know, which it's just like, he's kind of not quite like the typical human interaction. And also he just loves ball. He does love ball. You know, he just really loves baseball. Like you can't take that away from him.

You know, I don't know if he cheated because he just loved baseball so much. He wanted to stay in it and be in the best of it and everything, maybe I'm projecting there, but he has stayed in the game, obviously has stayed around the game. He's constantly talking and thinking about the game, even though he made all the money in the world

and doesn't need to be around the game. And you'd think that the dishonor he brought upon himself, he might've wanted to stay away, but he can't stay away. And even when he takes out Jacquin Cordero for a night on the town, they end up on a dock, watching an iPad perched on a table where the Yankees game is on. And look, for all I know, this is her idea of a good date and this is what she wanted to do, but this is not what I expected when I saw the first image of them going out together.

Okay. So I have to say this just off the bat. You keep saying Jacqueline Cordero, like I'm going to know, am I supposed to know who this is? Like now I'm looking at her Instagram and she's like a fitness influencer? Yes. A-Rod romantically certainly seems to have a type and he's very into the fitness women and this is the latest one. And no, I wouldn't say she is a household name or anything. I don't think I was aware of her before I became aware of the A-Rod relationship.

I mean, I will say this. I don't know if it is a reliable way to view these things because like, who knows? But I will say that the daylight in these two photos is quite different. So to me, they went to dinner and then when dinner was done, they went to this dock and were hanging out post dinner. It's broad daylight in the little black dress picture and then it's a sunset. Yeah. And then it's like magic hour. Yeah. It's quite picturesque actually. I mean, the, the, the Yankees iPad doesn't really enhance the view, I guess, but it looks nice. It's like a deserted dock and the water and the clouds and the sunset and everything.

So if the iPad hadn't been there, then it would have been, Oh, okay. This is a nice, you know, after dinner, just sitting and talking and, and looking at this nice view, But A-Rod cannot be away from baseball even for one night. And for all I know, she liked baseball and she wanted to watch the game. I don't know. We don't know how their relationship works, right? I don't even know who this was until two minutes ago. Right. So a lot of people were laughing at this and I was also laughing at this because

it was just so quintessentially A-Rod. But look, maybe it's kind of nice. Who knows if they can bond this way and she enjoyed this too and was enjoying the view, then all the better for them. LS. Yeah. I mean, good for them, I guess. I don't know them, so it's hard for me to get too invested in their relationship, but good for them. I hope that everyone involved is wearing sunscreen because it's very tan people. They're such tan people, the both of them, you know, they're both so tan. It's true. All right. So sticking with the Yankees theme, I did want to talk about Judge and not for his championship robust mentality, but for his incredible play, which has continued.

And the thing that I'm invested in these days is can he catch or catch up to Barry Bonds for best WRC plus, like best offensive? Obviously he's not going to hit 73, 74 home runs. He's making a run at his own American league record, but the records, the all-time records there are seemingly out of reach, although it's hard to say anything is out of his reach, both figuratively and literally. But yes, he has hit 51 home runs now and actually Mark Simon of SAS pointed out that since 2018, he leads MLB in home runs and home run robberies, 2018, he leads MLB in home runs and home run robberies, which seems unfair. Or maybe that is fair. It's like he has to balance the scales somehow. He's hitting all these home runs. He has to make sure that it's like home runs can either be created nor lost. It's the conservation

of home runs or something. If he's going to hit all of the home runs, he has to prevent some others from being hit. That's a really great headline. It's a good article title. You should scroll that one away. Thank you. Also, it seems like we have to do like a height adjusted home run robberies. Right. I was just about to say again, because he's so tall.

And he had one this week and it was fairly impressive from a timing standpoint. He had to make the leap and the grab at just the right instant, but it wasn't one of these ones where he had to like climb the wall or anything because he's a judge. He kind of just had to put his hand up, especially like in Yankee Stadium, you know, sometimes he's just standing there stretching out. Like I don't know that he even has to jump necessarily. So it's still impressive. I guess I am, you know, people always say, I'm not trying to take anything away. I guess I am taking something away just as he is taking away home runs, but you know, it's still impressive, but it's not quite as impressive as maybe someone with a smaller

stature who had to really defy gravity to get up there, I guess. But you know, the fact that he is a home run hitting monster and still has the capacity to rob home runs regularly, like just speaks to his all around athleticism, which is maybe an underrated aspect of Aaron Judge's play. So he didn't hit a home run in his most recent game, as we speak on Wednesday. In fact, Patrick Corbin, of all people held him homeless, though he went one for three with a double and a walk. You can't keep him off the board entirely. And so he has a 225 WRC plus on the season, which is just preposterous and is the best WRC plus that anyone has had any qualified hitter other than Barry Bonds

and Babe Ruth. So he is already in ultra elite company. He's also on track to be top 10 all time in park adjusted batting runs above average, if you prefer accounting stat. But I've made this point before, I keep thinking what if, you know, if he hadn't started the season so slow

for that first month by his standards, if he had been just tepid even by Aaron Judd's standards, then he really would be kind of knocking at Barry Bonds' door here. And I calculated what he would have to do to catch up. So he's at 225 WRC plus, Barry Bonds' single season record is 244, which was 2002. And then Bonds also had a 235 in 2001 and Babe Ruth had a 234 in 1920 and then Bonds again had a 233 in 2004. And these era adjusted metrics help his case, not that it needs any help, because as in

2022 he's putting up this extreme offensive performance in a non-extreme offensive season. So if we do the calculation extrapolating from his playing time thus far, he is on pace for 714 plate appearances. 714, notable number in Babe Ruth's career. He has 586 so far. So in theory, he has 128 plate appearances remaining. So what WRC plus would he have to have to bring the weighted average of the season up to those milestones?

I calculated that to get to $245 and bump bonds aside, he'd have to have over his remaining 120 played appearances a $334 WRC+, which I think even that is out of Aaron Judge's reach, and we just said nothing is, but I think over more than a hundred played appearances, even he probably cannot do that. Although he has come close at stretches this season, right? To get to 236 and have the second highest WRC plus single season ever, he'd have to have a 284 WRC plus over the rest of the way and to get to 235, which would beat Babe Ruth. And I guess give judge the quote unquote clean record or non PD record if you want to draw that distinction though, you know, Ruth was doing it pre-integration, et cetera, et cetera.

He'd have to have a 279 WRC plus to get to 235 on the season and that is within the realm of Possibility, I think a 279 over 128 play princess I mean it it sounds ridiculous and yet he basically has done that lately You know like in August he has a 293 WRC plus. So he could cool down a little and just coast the rest of the way. And he could maybe do this. And again, since May 1st, just to use that kind of arbitrary cutoff,

he has a 261 WRC plus. So if you just lopped off that month, which you can't do because it counts, but 261, that's over a hundred games and 445 play appearances. Plus, so if you just lopped off that month, which you can't do because it counts, but 261, that's over a hundred games and 445 play appearances. So I think he might be able to make up for his slow start and possibly ascend this leaderboard even more, which is just incredible. And I don't know if he was serious or whether this was partly tongue in cheek, but he has

multiple times in recent days said that he is not locked in yet. What? All right, I take it back. He needs to chill out with these comments. Like, come on, come on, buddy. Come on. After he hit his 49th homer, he said, I'm trying to get locked in. Oh my gosh.

Once we get locked in, I'll let you guys know. I try to keep it simple. The best thing I can say is I try not to do too much every single day. Was he goofing? Classic cliche. Was he doing a little goofing? It seems so, but then he was asked about it again the day after and they asked him, are you locked in now? And he said, not yet, we're still getting there. Now, initially he said it with a straight face

and then he kind of cracked up that he was being asked that. But I don't know that he was entirely kidding the first time. But if he was, then I give him credit because that would be like slightly self-aggrandizing and showing some personality if he was like, wait till I'm locked in after what he's been doing. So that makes me think probably not, but that's scary if he's like, you know, it's almost clicking. I'm almost there. That suggests that he has an even superior September ahead

of him. Wow. I don't even like, what would it even look like? I don't know. I don't know how he could find a new gear here. This is just ridiculous. Do you hold his lack of clutchness against him at all this season? LS No. CB Okay. Next segment. Next question. LS Oh, sorry. Would you like me to expound on that? CB I mean, that is probably where I will come down on this too, but it is striking that

there is a significant disparity in how he has performed in high leverage this year versus low leverage and medium leverage. It's not a base out thing with him. He has performed exactly the same actually with the bases empty and men in scoring position. He has a 215 WRC plus in each of those cases, plus a 236 with men on base. So it's not that he is choking relative to his lofty standards with men on base or men in scoring position, but given the game state, like what inning it is, what the score is in high leverage, he has kind of come up short relative to, you know, he's coming up extremely tall at all other times. So he has a 250 WRC plus in low leverage

and a 207 in medium leverage and a 123 in high leverage. So, yeah, he's still been a better than average major league hitter, but he has been a mere mortal. And because of that disparity, he currently is last in baseball, according to the fan graphs clutch stat, which basically just weighs your high leverage

against your low leverage, right? And again, WRC plus in low leverage is setting such a high bar. Like that is so contributing to what seems to be this enormous disparity here. And also, I guess, you know, in high leverage spots, maybe you might be more likely to be facing good relievers or something, right? There might be some institutional disadvantages for you in those spots, but he does have the worst clutch score in the majors this year. And certainly it's not predictive. We're not like saying he's a choker or

you know, unclutch regularly or anything. But I bring it up merely because of the close MVP race that we and everyone else have been nattering about this season, right? If you wanted to use that as a tiebreaker, I guess you could, right? Because despite Aaron Judge leading the majors in war and every offensive stat, he is not leading in win probability added. In fact, his teammate, Juan Soto, poor unsung Juan Soto. Yeah, no one thinks that guy's good. No, he is leading in win probability added now.

And after him, it is jerks and profar of all people. I know. Isn't that great? Isn't that great? Yes. And then Bobby Witt Jr., who of course is Judge's main competition for the ALMVP. So you could say like, yeah, Judge has the offensive advantage over Witt, which clearly he does, but maybe Witt wakes up for it with the defense and the speed and everything. But if you want to consider the clutches in the context, which obviously matters in games,

then Witt by that metric has been slightly more valuable offensively. By the way, don't want to give a short shrift to Emmanuel Classe, the Guardians Closer, who actually leads the major leagues in WPA and also championship WPA because he's just been nails and the Guardians have needed him to be because close race in the central and a lot of close games and high leverage moments and Classe has been close to flawless. So if you wanted to make a CWPA based case, which is kind of a fun thought experiment,

but I wouldn't take it much more seriously than that, then he is actually at the top of those leaderboards. So all credit to class A. But if you're looking for a reason, if you're trying to split hairs because you have to, because the war is within the margin of error, then do you say, well, judge the moments that he's come up big have not been the biggest moments? You can say that. And like if you need a tiebreaker, okay. But I just, I don't view that as like a particularly predictive or sticky state of affairs. Sticky state of affairs is perhaps

regrettable, but it is, you know, like August. so it's humid out there. It's not like he's been bad. He's just been less good than the like incandescent version of himself that he's been in slightly lower leverage situations, but so good, you know? Yeah. I'm more of the camp of, I like the context neutral, you know, because I just, it's hard because for MVP, yes, it's retrospective value and there are real differences in value there based on the timing of your production, even if it doesn't say anything about your character, it's not repeatable or anything. So if someone wanted to use that as a tiebreaker, then I wouldn't begrudge them that, but I don't know that that many people are actually going to be agonizing over the AL MVP race, even though the war would suggest that they should. It seems to me like probably Judge will win that handily. Although,

if the Royals actually manage to pull off the AL Central win and have maybe the biggest year over year improvement in wins of any team ever. Like, you know, that would be a reason again, I'm not someone who's like, you got to give it to someone on a playoff team. And these are both people presumably on playoff teams. But again, if you want to go with like championship, wouldn't probably add it or like do those moments really matter? Because you have to win every game. You know, the Yankees are in a division race of their own, obviously, but maybe their, but maybe their playoff odds are a little more assured. But compelling cases for both of these guys, it's just like we were saying about what Judge and Otani

a couple of years ago. It's like, unless you have an MVP vote, you don't actually have to choose. Right. You don't have to choose. You just can appreciate. Right. And I get that it's a fun debate and we're here to have and deliver interesting conversations and this is something that's interesting to talk about. But ultimately, it doesn't have to be tearing down the other guy or saying this guy's better than that guy. You can say they're both having unbelievable seasons and the top handful of players in the AL especially are just having all time

seasons and if he doesn't win MVP it's just because he has the misfortune of going head to head with someone who is a head taller than him and just amazing, right? So how many times can we make jokes about Aaron Judge's height in this segment? He is extremely tall. By the way, speaking of the unsung Wonsodo, I did want to mention one other thing that he has done well this year, which is play pretty decent defense. Yeah, it hasn't been bad. This was actually foretold by a long ago, effectively wild episode. We brought this up back in February, because I don't know if you remember this, it was one of the first spring training games and Juan Soto went all out to try to catch a ball in the outfield. This was episode 2130

and he didn't actually make the catch. But the effort impressed me and I thought, man, like he's going into his platform year, his walk year and he has to stay healthy. And I made the comp to a previous nationals outfielder and Boris client, Bryce Harper, who his defensive metrics declined precipitously in his last season before free agency. And it certainly seemed like he might've been, you know, taking it just a little easy in the outfield, trying not to hurt himself, who knows.

But he wasn't diving and sprinting much that season. And I was like, look, if Juan Soto is diving and going all out in February, that suggests that he's not going to be playing it safe this season and taking it easy. And then we were alerted to the fact that he had been working with another Boris client and outfield defense specialist, Jackie Bradley Jr. on his outfield in Miami over the off season. So maybe that has paid dividends, but Juan Soto's defense has been extremely tough to pin down over the course of his career. It's just been wild fluctuations and I don't know whether he's good or terrible or what, but it's been trending toward terrible in recent seasons. And this season, he's plus five above average,

five runs above average DRS in the outfield, defensive run saved, which would be a career best for him. And he is, as we speak, negative one by outs above average, which would still be his best since 2021, because he's been very far in the red the last couple of seasons. So that appears to have improved. So maybe that was actually predictive, his effort level in the Grapefruit

League. It would be probably among the first times. But yeah, I think that mostly what we know about him as a defender is that he is consistently inconsistent. And obviously it's not the plus or carrying tool for him. So to be clear, I think you could port in his worst defensive season of his career into this season and he'd still make like $500 million in free agency. But if he could hold off the DH future that will probably be coming to him at some point. Exactly. Yeah, I think that the longer you can be at least serviceable in a corner, the better

off you are, the more receptive your team's going to be. And this is where it's useful to remember that the guy's still so young. He's so young. Ben, have you seen this? How young this guy is? You know? And so, you know, which he's been in the majors for a while now. So you do have to, I suppose, at least to some degree balance his, you know, having gotten into broken into the big leagues in a meaningful way when he was 19. Um, against the fact that he's still not even 26, they can bounce back from stuff quick, you know, cause they're young and their bodies are like, I can deal

with that and I'm, I can eat Tupperware. It's fine. Don't do that, you know, but like your odds of making it if you did are way higher than mine. So. So I wanted to ask you now that we've had some time to reflect on the Scott Service firing. One thing that occurred to me and this is coming on the heels of yet another typically Mariners loss where they got a strong start from a pitcher and did not deliver the offensive support. So

that, you know, even though Dan Wilson, they won his first series, but clearly they're still Mariners-ing with a new manager who is not the interim manager, he's just the manager. Yeah. I have some thoughts on that one. We get to that part of things. Yeah. I just wanted to ask you, do you think that Scott Service would have been fired at all or fired when he was fired if not for the sequencing of the Mariner season, that is, if they had not gotten out to a big lead and then blown that 10 game lead in the division with historic rapidity, do you think that he would have been let go the way that he was? Like if they had the same record now, but had been, let's say trailing the Astros all season, you know, instead of having a big lead and then losing it.

I don't know if it would have saved him in the off season. I think I can't remember if it's this year or next year. Like he was he was due up from a contract perspective. So, you know, I'm sure that there would have been an evaluation of some kind this off season regardless, and who knows what the results of that would have been. But if they had been just like around a 500 team and had always been looking up at the Astros or had only been a game ahead or two and then lost that lead, I don't think he would have been fired in the middle of the year.

No, I think it was the combination of losing the 10 game lead that they had and then they just had like a terrible road trip at a time when it was like really important that they not do that so that they could be potential division champions, Ben. So I think it would have at least saved him until they exited the playoffs or the regular season depending on what they were able to muster here. So I think so too, which is interesting because they were projected by Fangrass as an 85-win team, they're now projected as an 82-win team. I mean, that in itself is probably not a fireball shortfall.

Now they've followed up their breakthrough in the playoffs with a couple disappointing seasons, which is, again, not necessarily service's fault, But you could say, well, does it matter that they got here in this particular sequence of wins and losses? I guess you could say it does matter. Like, you know, if you're riding high in your head and then the team kind of falls apart again, is that like on you? Is that on the manager? I don't know. Maybe it's just, that's the way that the cookie crumpled and maybe it doesn't really reflect any differently on your managing that you got out to this big

lead and then you blew it as opposed to never getting out to a big lead at all. I guess, I guess you could say like, if you do get out to a big lead, you should manage differently or hold the clubhouse together differently than you're trailing all along. I don't know, but I think a lot of these things do kind of come down to how different the season feels if you get off to a slow start versus a hot start. Like we talked about this last year, I think with some teams that had performed notably differently earlier late.

And it's like, you know, the whole season would feel differently with the same ultimate record, just based on how you got to that record. I think that the sequencing ends up mattering a lot and part of it is that there are definitely times when like managers are let go because it turns out like they're really bad tacticians or whatever but I think a lot of the hiring firing decision around a manager is vibes based and sequencing has a big effect on vibes. Yep, it's true. So hey Ben, here's a question for you about Dan Wilson being named the manager and not

the interim manager. I know that maybe it was last year or the year before there was a clarification of the SEALIC rule by Major League Baseball where they, you know, they created avenues for internal promotion in organizations, but they require, you know, in the event that an internal promotion is made and that manager is not a person of color, that like there be justification given for why that person should be promoted without a process. And then there are rules around backfilling that person's position with diverse candidates so that there's still some accountability under the SEALG role.

But there is the, you know, organizations do have the ability to promote internal candidates who they think are really good to positions of authority, upper management. So how the Mariners dealing with that? You know, this is a question I have because, okay, Dan Wilson was a special assistant, I believe. So he was in the org. It's an internal promotion, I guess, but they presumably have to justify him over anyone else within the Mariners organization, including, you know, members of their own coaching staff, and certainly have to justify promoting him without doing any kind of external public

search that we know. And as we discussed when he was named the interim manager and we went, huh? No managerial experience really to speak of. I mean, I think he maybe was an interim for a couple of days down in Tacoma last year, but like he's not managed in a meaningful way. Or even really coached, right? Correct.

He was the minor league coaching, catching coordinator, right? But he has not been on a coaching staff. I would really love to know the answer to that because it seems like they surely have to have been asked about it, hopefully by Major League Baseball. So that's been a thought that's been percolating. It is interesting to be like, we need new voices in the dugout. That's why we hired Dan Wilson.

And it's like among the older voices, in fact. And I know that Dan Wilson has been a great mentor to Calralli. Calralli has also been one of the more vocal players when he's been unhappy with the front office. So I don't know if there's some strategy there, but I remain flummoxed by the Seattle Mariners. I remain confused by them, disappointed at times, but often just like perplexed. Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know the answer. Maybe I will- I don't know the answer.

Maybe I will ask, actually. I mean, maybe I should ask. We do, we do journalism. We'll inquire, one of us will find out. Also on the subject of teams that have blown big leads, the Guardians, now they lost their lead, which was at least seven in the AL Central. The Royals have been very hot. They caught up. They caught them on Tuesday. Now they did subsequently lose on Wednesday just before

we spoke. And so the Guardians now have a one game lead again in the AL Central. That was a loss for the Royals despite a home run by Bobby Witt Jr. And I just got to say about the Guardians, one factor that I think we underrate a little bit is health, like when a team has good health. We talk a lot about when a team does not have health, which I mean, it's the classic, you know, it's the kind of thing you take for granted until you don't have it. And then suddenly it's the worst thing in the world, right? On a baseball level, you know, we're not usually talking about life-threatening types of injuries here, but you can talk about season-threatening injuries. And we've certainly talked about the Dodgers and the Braves and just how

many wins they've lost to injury and how many days and how many games. Everyone is aware of when things go wrong. We pay less attention to when things go right in that way, you know, because it's like everyone's available and no one's getting hurt and the Royals have the fewest projected wins lost to injury, according to the baseball prospectus, injuredless ledger. They're way down there. Again, the Dodgers have lost nine warp and counting, the Braves at 10 and counting. The Royals are at one. They have basically lost one projected win above replacement player.

And that is a big factor. I mean, that's a huge thing when you're talking about a close race like this, and especially a team that maybe doesn't have great depth, and that lack of depth would be exposed if they had a bunch of injuries. And that's not to say the Guardians have been particularly hard hit by injuries. In fact, like their success a couple of years ago was sort of the same story, right?

And they were young and they were durable and they weren't getting hurt. 2022, the Guardians had the fewest Wins of Everplacement player lost to injury. And now it's the Royals turn so far. And Joshian pointed this out in his excellent newsletter, Joshian.com. And I was appreciative of that point

because it's something that can kind of go under the radar. Because like, you know, it's, you don't notice an absence of something happening. I mean, in this case, I guess you do notice the absence of players, but you don't notice the absence of absences. If that makes sense. If everyone's just there, it's like, well, yeah, they should all be playing, but that's usually not the case. And so Joe wrote during a season when injuries to great players and contenders are one of the big stories, the

Royals have been one of the healthiest teams in the sport. They've used 18 position players, fewest in baseball. And one of those is trade pickup, Paul DeYoung. All but 30 plate appearances have come from 15 guys. And he noted that in March, Zipps, Peggs, Witt and Garcia and Perez and Pasquentino as the Royals four best players. And those four combined have missed 11 games this year. And then pitching wise, their top four starters, Lugo, Waka, Regans,

and Singer have combined for 103 of the 106 starts you'd project for them to have by this point in the season. The fifth starter spot has been split more or less between Alec Martian, Lorenzen, who just did hurt himself, I guess. They've needed just five off-rotation starts all season long. And so they started the season, Joe continues with no upper level depth. They still have no upper level depth. They're in first place in no small part because that weakness hasn't bitten them at all. Right.

So, you know, is that a credit to them and their training staff? Who knows? Is it just luck that they've avoided injuries? I don't know, but these things they do sometimes swing seasons. avoided injuries, I don't know, but these things they do sometimes swing seasons. SONIA DARA-MARGOLA Yeah, I remember when the Guardians had, I think it was 22 when they were so much better than we projected them to be. And, you know, youth and health obviously don't align perfectly, but they can be good proxies for one another. And they can do kind of a number on projections because

really, really young teams and I think that year the Guardians were the youngest team in the majors on average. Sometimes their projections can be a little conservative because there's not a long big league track record and then those guys are also healthy. So if they are much better than their projections and then they are very available, you get yelled at by a team's account on social media and you're like, I'm just standing here. I don't understand why I have to be involved in your day. You should just be excited. Why am I getting yelled at? we love Stephen Kwan too, clearly. You're right, that is often an area where we tend to be blindsided a little bit and it's because they're always around.

The absence you notice or the sudden return, you're like, oh, thank God that guy's back. But if they're just there every day, all that's left to do is cook up a weird conspiracy there at Pollywood Junior. So not us, but people. It hasn't died down, Ben. People are still on this train. The Guardians are still extremely young. They're still the youngest team position players and their pitchers are below average age too.

The Royals are not super young. They're like average, but they have been fortunate for whatever reason. Right, see, because it's not a perfect indicator, but they can go hand in hand. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It is funny that Paul DeYoung had a 96 OPS plus for the White Sox and is at 172 for the Royals entering Wednesday. It'd be funny if like, there have been some guys who have gone from the White Sox to other teams and have been much better, whether it's DeYoung or Kevin Pilar, who's cooled down, but for a while there, he was red hot, right? And I guess you can mention Michael Kopec, who has had a very predictable Dodgersing, right? He's been basically untouchable since he went to

the Dodgers, which was predicted on this podcast and probably many other places too. I guess it's not perfect because Tommy Fam and Eric Fetty haven't been better for the Cardinals than they were for the White Sox. And it's not everyone, but I guess Miguel Vargas has also been worse for the White Sox since he got there. That viral sad Vargas dug also been worse for the White Sox since he got there, that viral sad Vargas dugout image.

He has a seven OPS plus in Chicago in 72 plate appearances. Yeah. I'm not saying that it has to be this, and we should bear in mind that these are still relatively small samples. Again, maybe you just got to get in the headspace of not being on maybe the worst baseball team any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Who could say? Maybe that has an impact on people.

I maintain that the guys on that team should get compensation from the union, like special additional hazard pay. Are the White Sox and no-sha violation? We want to know. Does the NLRB need to get involved with the White Sox? I'm just asking. To be fair, it seems like Kopec's improvements started when he was still with the White Sox.

Like his last five, Jay Jaffe wrote about this the other day. His last five White Sox outings, he was really good. He made some maybe minor tweaks to his profile, like fewer fastballs. And maybe his spin rate ticked up, which is, I don't know. But with the Dodgers thus far, he has a 0.73 ERA and a 1.14 FIP. And his walk rate has been less than half of what it was with Chicago. I mean, you know, again, like maybe the White Sox deserve some credit there too, but also someone going from the White Sox to the Dodgers and being yet another great find for them.

Who could be surprised by that possibly? It does seem like the Dodgers, I don't know how to quantify this, but like they have basically given away as free talent, a number of productive players this year, like James Paxton, Ahmed Rosario acquired and then removed from the Dodgers roster, Jason Hayward, who's now gone to the Astros, Justin Wilson, Kevin Begio came and went, right? I guess he's still in the minors now, Astros, Justin Wilson, Kevin Bezio came and went, right? I guess he's still in the minors now,

but a number of players have like been contributing big leaguers for the Dodgers. And they were just like, we don't have room for you. And then some other team picked them up on waivers or made some minor trade for them or just signed them for the minimum. And I guess, it's the haves and the have nots. And I think that when you're an organization like that, what you're trying

to do is make sure that you're on average keeping the right guys and giving the right guys away, which isn't to say that there aren't going to be productive big leaguers who find their way to other teams or, you know, prospects who become productive big leaguers. And their track record isn't perfect because no teams is, but I think that's what you're looking for. You can't play them all, despite us joking about some teams getting special dispensations have more roster spots than others. They really don't let you do that.

So if you're really good at player dev, if your pro scouting department is good and you're bringing in guys and they're good, you're going scouting department is good and you're bringing in guys and they're good, you're going to have to make these, you're going to have these roster crunch decisions. Crunch is a really satisfying word to say. It is, yeah. It's like, it's not quite onomatopoeia, but like, it's close. It's close. It's got good mouth feel.

I feel like I'm very heavy on my S's today. I don't know what that's about. Now I'm self-conscious about it. Oh dear. Okay. Last quick few observations. Did you know that Dallas Keichel is an NPB now? No.

Wait, what? Yeah, I know. Was he on a 40 man like two weeks ago? He was in the Mariners organization, right? Never made the majors. And then he went to the Brewers and he was briefly in the big leagues with them. And then next thing I knew,

Dallas Keichel is on the Chibolote Marines. He's a teammate of Roki Sasaki right now. No way. Yeah, why did that happen? I mean, it did at the end of July, apparently, but I didn't know. We need like a where in the world is dollars critical. That doesn't really fit the, but you know where-

That doesn't fit the rhyme scheme. No, it doesn't. But like that guy just, he must really like baseball, you know? Yeah. Which is something I said about him earlier this season when he kept just kicking around after having his Cy Young pass and everything, and you know, getting shelled in the big leagues

and keep coming back for more. And now he's going to Japan and continuing to pitch. That guy, he's really clinging tenaciously to being a baseball player, which I really like. You used to see that more in earlier eras when players didn't make as much money. And so when they would get cut or not be a big leaguer anymore, they wouldn't generally enter a post big league journeyman phase. I mean, that used to happen. Now that doesn't happen so much anymore. But Dallas Keichel is continuing that tradition.

He's just a, I guess, have arm will travel, have to tear the uniform off me or have to tear several uniforms off me kind of guy. Ben wants to see Dallas Keichel. No, uniform on. Yeah, it's, I think it's cool. I don't want to discount like the small challenges and the big challenges for that matter of moving abroad, particularly when you don't speak the language. But I feel like if I were a baseball player and I had the opportunity, especially like in the twilight of your career, you're probably pretty realistic in your expectations of what opportunities

you're going to have in a major league organization. I think going overseas and playing in Japan or Korea and getting to experience a brand new place and you're busy, you're playing baseball. It's not like you have infinite time, but being able to use that as an opportunity to like explore totally new country and culture. Like I think that would be so cool. Like what a great way to kind of go out. Yeah, I think so too.

And I also think it'd be nice like after your skills start to slip and your stats aren't up to par anymore to go to a slightly weaker league and be good again. I mean, I don't know if he's had a couple solid starts there, but I've always said, you know, like if you go to the Mexican league or you play Indie Ball or wherever it is, just to kind of continue your career, even though the spotlight is not as bright and the salaries are not as high and I guess, you know, the attention is not nearly what it was in the sense of accomplishment and pride and everything, like, must be kind of nice to just like go back to being dominant again for a while, right? Like to get that feeling back even if it's against lesser competition. thing and, you know, heck, they're, heck, wow. There have been so many cases in the last couple of years of guys going to Japan or

Korea and revitalizing their career, right? Finding something over there and being able to find a place in a big league organization again. I'm not saying that's going to definitely happen with Kaiko, but that's hardly unprecedented. Yeah, I think it would be great. I think it would be a really cool final or close to final chapter of a baseball career. But maybe that's just because I want to go travel to Japan. Maybe that's really what's making me say that, Ben.

Yeah, I've been there long ago. I didn't get to go to a baseball game. I'd like to go back. I really want to go there and go to a baseball game. I'd like to go back. I really wanna go there and go to a baseball game and do other stuff, you know? Also, Jacob DeGrom on the comeback trail, he's made a couple rehab starts, one in AA, one in AAA.

He's probably got a couple left. And he is throwing a hundred down there. Oh my God. Yeah, if you were worried, if you were either worried that he would change or hopeful that he would change. What do I want? Right. Is this encouraging or discouraging? I've been trying to figure it out. He's pitched

pretty well. He's missing bat seed through two perfect innings in his AAA rehab start, but he touched 100 in his first rehab start in AA and at least 99.5 in his second one. So on the one hand, it assuages your concerns that he's not going to have his stuff anymore coming back from surgery, like in his mid thirties, apparently he can still dial it up there. On the other hand, if you thought that maybe he was going to learn a lesson from blowing out and say, Hey, I can be great throwing 96 or 97. Maybe I'll just take a tick or two off and I'll probably still be dominant, but maybe I won't hurt myself. No, it doesn't seem like it.

Even in a rehab game, I get that like maybe his first rehab start, he might've been pumped up by that, but like your second rehab start, I mean, it's the miners, you know, like you don't have to be throwing max effort. And maybe this wasn't even quite max effort for him, but close enough. So it seems like his mindset has not changed and who knows, maybe he feels like, Hey, I have a new lease on major league life here, right? Like I've got a fresh UCL to wear down. I mean, there's no guarantee that like, it's going to last as long as the

first one did obviously, but maybe that's how he feels. No need to moderate my behavior because, Hey, I'm starting fresh here, but it just still scares me. I kind of hoped that, like, you know, I'm heartened that he can still do this, but I'm still sort of scared that he is apparently eager to. I imagine both from de Grom's perspective and certainly from the perspective of the Texas Rangers that like, they're at least monitoring what's going on there very, very closely and probably wanting him to be careful because they really haven't gotten much anything out of him.

So maybe that'll be the order of the day and it'll decide what it needs to. But it does make me feel nervous. I think I'm just going to have until he has a year where he like throws at least 150 innings, I'm going to feel nervous and probably even then. So I don't know Ben, really? I don't know about that. I just don't know. Yeah.

I don't believe that it's impossible not to throw max effort. I don't believe it's impossible. No, like to be clear. Even if you're used to that, even if you've been encouraged to do that, even if you've had great success doing that, like he used to be great throwing 96 or 97. Now maybe that wasn't Max effort

or maybe that was Max effort at the time. And he just raised his ceiling even higher. I don't know which, but he knows or should know that he can succeed at that speed. So everything else just feels like gilding the lily a little bit and potentially hurting yourself. But I hope for the best. But right.

And it's like, I guess I don't know what his goals are specifically because one could argue that like, screw it, max out, have a good year. So what you can do. Like, you know, he's probably not going to make the hall on like a career value standpoint, whatever he does. Right. So maybe, yeah, just max out, just have the peak be as dominant as possible so that you could be remembered as one of the best inning for inning starters ever.

Even if it's not that many innings. Right. Maybe you just have a need for speed, you know, and you should just lean into that. I don't know. But the minute you said it, I went, ah. Yeah, me too. So that's my initial reaction. Yeah. I was like, ooh, oh. Yeah, precisely.

Yeah. And one last thing about pitchers, Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery have been talking about Scott Boris, not together, but individually, separately. Montgomery was asked about his off season and his free agency, specifically like if he could have ended up with the Red Sox. And he said kind of casually offhand, obviously Boris kind of butchered it. So I'm just trying to move on from the off season and just try to forget it. And then Blake Snell and Montgomery, of course, we knew was not happy with Boris because he soon after signing switched to Wasserman. Whereas others like Cody Bellinger, gave a vote of confidence in Scott Boris and Blake Snell has stuck with him. And Matt Chapman, of course, has played very well and Snell has been

a lot better of late and they've kind of turned their seasons around to some extent, but Montgomery has not. And JJ, he just wrote about this too, right? And I don't know whether it's the fact that Montgomery has not had his season look up and so he's still sort of stewing and festering in some bitterness about how things worked out and he's been sent to the bullpen. I mean, it's a big indignity for him, right? And Snell stepped up, came to Boris's defense and said, my experience with Scott has been great. He told me everything that was happening, all the offers I got.

So for him to just get bashed for what I believe is false, that's not fair at all. I really strongly believe that. And he said about Montgomery, he signed the deal that he ultimately wanted to sign. He has the choice. I don't know what other deals he was offered, but I know everything that was offered to me.

It's just sad that he thinks that way when I see Scott as a very honorable man. And then further, he said that it could just be a free agency where no one was really pushing to get anybody. It sucks because that was our year to get our deals that we work so hard to get, but ultimately the market's the market. You can't control it. You can't get upset about it the way it is. Just pitch better, find a way to do better, continue to compete, whatever

you believe you deserve, you go earn it. So I don't know whether Stell would have sung a different tune a couple months ago when he was struggling and injured. But now that he's riding high again, he evidently has a pretty good attitude about how that whole thing worked out. And I guess he's got another bite at the apple potentially, because he can opt out and try it again, whereas Montgomery is kind of looking at like, maybe I missed my big payday. And I don't know what the problem with him is, whether it was just the workload from the post-seasons or what, because I thought that signing was good and would work out and that

he'd be fine. Yeah, he did too. And it has just been a disaster. It's been a disaster. I think a couple of things can be true at once. We have talked about how whatever else you might say about this free agent market, and I think that there is a lot about what went down with these four guys, specifically the class more generally that is like sort of idiosyncratic to the players involved. All four of the quote, Boris four had knits to pick. The Boris Glyton

is at the best season might just be Gia Martinez. But I think that we were in agreement that Boris seemed to have misjudged the market. And that doesn't mean that he's forever lost his fastball or anything like that. I think time will tell unless anyone forgets. Juan Soto was a Boris client, so his offseason is probably going to go better than last year, if only because of Juan Soto. Again, a couple of things can be true at once. Boris seems to have misjudged the market. There perhaps

were times when he had he had a better feel for the direction it was going to go for any one of these guys in particular or them as a group might've given different advice about which of these deals was the right one to take. He might've modulated his asks of teams. Also, Jormag Norey's having a pretty terrible season and some of that, I think, is probably him having had a weird spring and some of it at this point, it's like, come on buddy. It's August. I know that he had the weird spring, he's had some injury stuff. It's not like he's been bad the entire year like there was a stretch in the beginning where he looked pretty good But it's just been it's been really bad You know some of this is just the reality of a Diamondbacks roster that is pretty good right now that is playing

You know, they just don't seem like they lose ever. They're like, we're behind in the fifth inning. Who cares? We're going to go win by like six runs somehow. They keep doing this. Like I'm, what? And in addition to a really potent offense, they've gotten a bunch of guys back. And so they have the flexibility in that rotation to say, well, you're going to pitch out of the bullpen now.

And from Montgomery's perspective, it could be worse. His contract is structured in such a way that I believe has met the number of starts he needed to have this vesting option and it vests into a player option after a certain number of starts. So like, he can make a decision about next year and say, okay, I'm gonna, you know, exercise my player option, try to rebuild some value. You know, it's not like he's going to be out in the cold this winter, but I get it. Like, you're probably right. I think that his opportunity to like really get paid is probably done for now. And you know, some of that is probably on Boris and some of that's on Jordan Montgomery. So what are you, you know, what

are you gonna, Ben? What are you gonna, what are you gonna do, Ben? You know? I understand. Not feeling great about how this whole thing has worked out for him. Yeah. And honestly, the thing about it is I don't think that the Jordan Montgomery popping off about Scott Boris really matters that much. He changed agencies. No one was confused about what Jordan Montgomery thought of Scott Boris. And I think that he's probably speaking to something that's broadly a consensus and also not really maybe a consensus, at least among his clients, because if you're Blake Snell, you could choose to be annoyed by how your off season went, even though you've certainly turned your season around and look like you're in pretty good shape to have options this

off season in terms of what you want to do. And he still loves Boris, clearly. This is news in August, man. This is what the news is in August. What else are we going to talk about other than the Mariners being bad and the competitive central race and you really wanting to see Dallas Keighel without a uniform on. Well, we never struggled to come up with things to talk about at Effectively Wild.

Well, maybe sometimes we struggle, but ultimately we transcend that struggle. We find things to discuss. And the last thing that we're going to discuss today is Danny Janssen making news in August. Some pretty major, major league news because he became the first player ever to play for two teams in one game, thanks to a suspended game and thanks to a trade from the Blue Jays to the Red Sox. We previewed this weeks ago with Kenny Jaclyn

of Baseball Reference and how Baseball Reference was going to try to future-proof itself against this possibly bereft breaking event and now we're going to have Kenny back to talk about how it went so we'll be back in just a moment. If baseball were different how different would it be and if this thought haunted dreams well stick around and see what Ben and Meg have to say Philosophically and pedantically It's effectively wild

Effectively wild! Well, on Monday, at Matomic on Twitter, originator of the famous Tungsten arm O'Doyle tweet tweeted, MLB has convinced us to tune into the Danny Jensen game like it's the moon landing. But once the game starts, it's just a 2PM Jays Red Sox game, the only ramifications of which are a trivia answer and someone at Baseball Reference having to debug an error. That someone at Baseball Reference, or one of those someones, is Kenny Jacqueline, who is a software developer at Sports Reference and the primary developer of BaseballReference.com.

Welcome back, Kenny. Thanks for having me back. So we talked to you a few weeks ago, episode 2198, August 2nd, about the looming Danny Jensen apocalypse, which you had told me could be a Y2K level technical problem. And of course, Y2K could have been a Y2K level technical problem if nobody had done anything

about it. I guess opinions differ about whether that actually was going to be a big problem or whether the problem was avoided because people planned for it. But you planned for this particular problem. Danny Jensen made baseball history. So he also made baseball reference history. And I thought we would have you back here for a brief debrief and after action report,

a code review to find out how it went. So at what point after we talked to you, did things get real on your end where you actually all buckled down and decided what to do about this? I did let it sit for a little while, mainly to make sure I didn't waste my time. In case I went to prevent a bunch of problems and then the very next day MLB comes out with

the ruling that no, this isn't allowed and I have wasted my time. About a week in advance, so this previous week, I made sure that we had this accounted for in the work I had planned for the week to spend some time on this and really just get ahead of the most avoidable things and the things that would prevent the site from being able to be updated.

We wanted to make sure that even if one game or one player looked a little bit funny after this one happened, we still got the rest of the site updated on time. So our users would get the stats they're used to getting. And what you feared last time we talked, that all the attention would turn it into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy,

that it would happen because everyone wanted it to happen, that did kind of come to pass. Alex Cora was being bugged by a lot of baseball writers, not me to be clear, but others. He said, he will play game one, by the way, for all the people who have been looking at history. Yeah, let me throw it out there. He's playing game one. And then he wanted to say, I've been getting texts from Jason Stark and Buster only. Is he going to catch? You know what? Yeah, he's catching. Let's make history. And look, maybe he would have played anyway. Who knows? He played the day after that. He is a catcher on the Red Sox, but it does seem like Cora and the Red Sox got into the spirit of things and we made it all happen, I guess,

which was nice because it was a fun thing. But also for you, you must have been seeing this all coming to head and thinking like, oh no, it's happening, what I feared. A little bit. I'll tell you that it is a little bit of a relief to know that we can handle it now. Because this has always been kind of one of those things that's out there that we know could be a problem. We had known for some time and then in 2020 when they changed the rules to have more suspended games for these games that did not reach an official length instead of just being called off and restarted, now they're suspended games.

It just became more and more likely that we'd run into a situation like this. So a little bit of a weight off of our shoulders that way to know that we can survive it. It's a weight off of your shoulders. I don't know if Cora really wanted to set the precedent that he could be badgered into lineup decisions based on their historical significance. Jason will be responsible with that power, but others might use it for ill. I don't know if you wanted to do that one. If Jason Stark can will more weird things into happening in baseball, I'm all for that. I think that's good for everybody.

As long as you have a heads up in advance. Exactly. Yeah. Get ahead of it. And the situation doesn't arise often. In fact, it had never arisen before. So even if it's more likely to happen now, it probably won't become a common thing,

but do your worst, I guess. Baseball reference can weather the storm just to trade a bunch of players and have them play for both teams in one game. So last time we talked, you weren't exactly sure what the scope of the problem was yet and what actually might be subject to breakage. So once you really drilled down on this, what did you discover?

The way that I kind of went about it was last week I took a copy of the play-by-play data that we import each day and I took the previous day's Tigers versus Yankees game, just randomly picked that one and changed the data to somewhat match this scenario. So I took my test ended up being Jose Trevino. I took him as the catcher. I replaced him midway through his first at bat. To keep things sufficiently weird, I had pinch hitter Carlos Rodan replace him and then immediately put Trevino into the Detroit lineup in the batting order slot that

would lead off the following half inning just to keep things nice and close together in the play by play there. In the bottom of the second inning in that game, in real life, it was Kerry Carpenter who grinded out. In my modified game, it was Jose Trevino. And then I just took all of the play-by-play from the third inning and beyond and just took it out. Because our tools can handle a shortened game. They have done it under plenty of circumstances, whether it's rain, dark, seven-ending double headers, things like that. So just to keep all of my tests running fast, I just wanted to limit the amount of data

I was kind of piping through. And then from there, it was pretty much kind of trial and error and see what we run into. Made a copy of our database to run against without impacting anything else, and was just testing over and over again, running the play-by-play processing that we do each night. When that process is successful, it takes about nine or 10 minutes.

A lot of these were failing a lot faster because we'd run into problems. And I'd be taking a look at the error messages that it's printing out and figuring out what I needed to change. So a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole there where I'm just always just kind of moving on to the next thing that errors out in the process. And once I got to the point where that stage of our build would be able to handle this

sort of a game, I was feeling quite a bit better about, okay, I know that we can successfully build the site with data that's consistent with itself, and this isn't going to be something where it hits an error and terminates before we have a chance to load all the data from that day. Right. And I can go to baseballreference.com right now, and I can go to Danny Jensen's game log, and I can go to the play-by-play for that game and it all loads. So clearly the site is not inflaming wreckage or anything. But it sounds like your concerns were not overblown even though they did not end up blowing up baseball reference.

If you had done nothing, this would have caused major issues, it sounds like. Jared Ranere Yeah, it would have been, I mean, I think we would have been delayed at least into, you know, pretty far into the day on Tuesday before we'd have an update if we got one out that day at all. Just given that it's a bit time consuming to run through this and find all of the places that need updating. And some of it is not just updating code, some of it is we've got to add a column to a database table, and then we have to backfill it. Finding the right data to put in there, there were plenty of tables that we

had that had a player ID and a game ID, but no corresponding team. Because up until this point, you could assume which team they were representing, but not anymore. So yeah, a whole lot of situations like that, that especially kind of under the gun of getting the site up to date would have been a bit of a challenge. Now I have a new concern, which is that Alex Cora will decide that he has a grudge with one of the baseball sites and will intentionally goof with his lineups to mess with us.

It's within schemes. I wonder what he could do or what a manager could do to screw with you if they wanted to, because Cora could not have done this unilaterally, right? He could not have traded for a player and had the suspended game and everything like, circumstances had to fall this way. So I don't know, a manager's hands would be somewhat tied by the rules, presumably. Although I know there was a suspended game just this week, right? That was suspended while the first batter was at the plate, right? And that's kind of a weird one because it's being resumed as we speak. There's going to be a double header on Wednesday.

This was on Tuesday. And technically it was the White Sox game and Garrett Crochet started that game, but did not face a batter or did not complete one plate appearance, right? He didn't get an out before the rains came. And yet he is not starting the game again in the double header. So I kind of wonder, we got a question about this from a Patreon supporter, what will happen there? Cause don't you have to get an out if you are the listed starter?

So I don't know if there's going to be a special dispensation for this game or what, but I guess that wouldn't necessarily break baseball reference because you probably don't have kind of a hard coded must face at least one batterer get one out or something, right? That's kind of like an MLB rule, but maybe not a database breaking rule. Right, right. We actually do have a, I think it's probably a few dozen lines of exceptions of starting pitchers that were warming up and were officially in the starting lineup but then it rained or there's at least one example where the pitcher was ejected from the game before throwing a pitch.

We do have some special logic in there to credit the game started to somebody who may not have officially faced a batter. So that may be coming into play with Garrett Crochet, but that at least we've got a good pattern to follow. Or you could imagine injury causing something like that, right? Absolutely. Where a guy like blows out on his first pitch or what have you. Yeah, that was Rangers Whitesuck suspended after four pitches.

So with Jansen, I don't know how technical you want to get here or how interesting the technical details would be, but just how many different places did you have to input something or change something if you're playing whack-a-mole and problems kept cropping up? And was it always just some kind of add a line, add a column? What was the most in-depth kind of fix that you had to make or clutch, I guess? Luckily, for the most part, the changes we made were fairly clean, but they were widespread.

So I put together this morning a little bit of the tail of the tape on the Danny Jansen crisis. And I found there were 10 database tables that we needed to add a column to. There were 20 tables that we needed to add an index to. So tables that they had already included a team ID in them, but they were set up in such a way that they would enforce that there could only be one row per player game combination. So we needed to expand that to allow multiples. And then corresponding to those changes, we needed to update, it ended up being, I hope

I counted right, because this sounds way too clean, 100 queries on the dot that needed to change the way that we join tables together or needed to have additional criteria passed in, saying which team we're querying for, or to include the team ID in the data we're selecting, and things like that. So those were, once you know the changes to make, not hard to make, but it's really the time consuming part is kind of what I was describing before. And just trying to find where the right place is to be changing and making sure you found all of them. Was this a solo effort or a collaborative one? It was just me, yep.

Wow, okay. The only firewall against the Danny Jensen crisis. I did have plenty of help in the aftermath of just identifying things that didn't look right on the site. We had Sean Foreman tweeted it out yesterday, a screenshot of it. There's a thread on Slack that I started that morning,

just this is the Danny Janssen thread, add something to this thread if you notice something weird. And I was just adding checkmark emojis to him as we knocked him out. So had a good, some good team effort there. But yeah, it was, you know, the, the initial effort, especially because it was just kind of like that iterative process. It didn't really lend itself to divide and conquer that well. So it was, yeah, just kind of something for me to be working through. The end result of that work is nothing's different.

Which is exactly what you wanted. Yeah, it's a little bit tricky to feel super confident about in advance, but ended up well. That first build went through on Tuesday morning just like we wanted. How many hours would you estimate you put into the Danny Jensen problem? Ooh. Man, there's like, so there's the hours I spent to like actually working on code,

but then there's the hours I spent worrying about it. Yeah, and podcasting about it. Yeah. I mean, it was the majority of my work last week. I'd probably ballpark it at like 20, 25 hours, something like that, to get all the way ahead of it. And then a good amount in response to issues that happened that we only were able to notice once we actually had the data.

So. And guys on the Red Sox, a bill. I know, right? Yes. 25 billable hours for this. So when you went to bed on Monday night, were you confident? Did you have to set an alarm early to make sure everything went smoothly? Like, did you still have doubts that you had accounted for everything?

I felt pretty confident that we would at least get through the build itself. I did not feel confident that everything would display really cleanly on the site. I was up early. I was ready to figure out what was going to be needed so that I could have a sense of what was ahead of me that day. The first thing I see on my phone when I wake up is a notification that either says the build worked or it didn't work. So I was very happy to see that it said it worked.

You said you had a few hiccups, right? So what was the extent of that? A lot of that was just kind of small display things that were really confined to Danny Jansen and that particular Red Sox Blue Jays game. So if you had gone early in the day on Tuesday, if you'd gone to his game logs, his fielding game log only had one line. His batting game log had two lines in it, one for each team, but they both had all of the stats, each line did, so it doubled up.

His game logs, we have a column in our game logs that say, did they start the game? Which innings did they play? Things like that. Those were wrong. I think that the Red Sox one said that he only played in the second inning as opposed to played in the second inning and finished the game. We store a count of which number game in our player's career a game is. So yeah, the game was being double counted as you might guess the box score up until actually Wednesday morning. This was one of the longer ones that that we fixed had his batting stats listed in the

Toronto section instead of the Boston section. Yeah, I saw that. That is that is addressed now. That one is one of the ones, I think there were three places where we had to have actual code that checked if this is Danny Jansen in this game do something different. And that was one of them. But we also did have a brief period yesterday where his 2024 stats went completely missing from his page. But none of that is great, but it is about what I could have hoped for, I feel, and that

it was very confined to the thing that we knew was weird. Which was Danny Janssen. It was probably the strangest that Danny Janssen has ever been in his entire life, really. I'm curious, it sounds like some of the code changes you had to make were specific to Danny Jansen. And then some of this has broader applicability. So do you view this as an opportunity to like, now you can leverage this maybe for, if not this exact circumstance, other circumstances that are sort of proximate to it?

Is it really 25 hours of work that is going to mostly benefit Danny Jansen and the Red Sox stats, or do you think that this is overall an improvement? I know you said you can do it, but are there other applications for these kinds of changes that you foresee? I don't think so, unfortunately. I think that unless this happens again, this is probably 25 hours spent for Danny Janssen. Man. Who is now, I mean, he's a minor celebrity at Sports Reference HQ right now. So it needed to be done.

I did leave a comment in the code at one point that said that I think my lucky stars, he's not a pitcher because there was one spot that I would not have been able to super cleanly fix. I think it probably would have required if Danny Janssen and this game kind of carve out, but I knew he was not going to pitch for both teams. So I went ahead and left a note for whoever the unlucky person is that gets to deal with that if it happens. Yeah. And you didn't come across anything in the process of all that scrutiny that you were subjecting the tables to like, oh, good thing we did this because we found this other thing

that's unrelated, but this could have been a problem too. Nothing else was exposed. It was just this one vulnerability. There was one small thing in our box score building code that was more of just a performance improvement than anything, but the code being written incorrectly only came to light to me because it was messing up on Danny Janssen. So you're saying the daily update is seconds faster than it used to be? I don't even know if I would give it seconds.

We might be deep into the milliseconds here. Well, it's something, I guess. We should say, well, we won't name any names, but there were other data providers that were not unscathed in this experience. Fangraphs was fine, at least the internal Fangraphs processes were fine, but perhaps other data providers were not quite so lucky or quite so prepared. So there were some out there who got bitten by the Janssen bug, we should say. The Janssen bug. This guy, his career is going to be illegible to him when we recount this incident.

He's like, why do these nerds care about this one stupid game so much? Yeah. I wonder, I'm sure Danny Jensen is not aware that he inadvertently caused you to do 25 extra hours of work just coding baseball reference. I know he knows about how weird it was and that it was historic and everything, but he's probably not aware of just what he subjected Kenny Jaclyn to personally. I don't know if it'd be nice if he like sent you a gift basket or something. I mean, not in the Derek Jeter way, but you know, just like some nice note or something. Again, not that it's Jensen's fault.

He didn't cause himself to be traded or this game to be suspended or anything, but still, you know, it would be nice. Kind of courtesy. Sorry, Kenny, sorry for all the extra work. Yeah, if you didn't fix it, then he just wouldn't have stats for 2024. And what good would that do him? No good at all. Yeah, yeah, he'd never be paid in free agency or anything. No one would be able to tell what he had done ever before.

Yeah. Right. Have you heard or have you talked to anyone with teams about whether there was any like internal baseball reference database architecture conversation? I haven't actually asked any front office people about this, but I wonder whether it caused any issues for MLB or for any MLB teams. I haven't heard anything like that, but I also haven't asked. It would not shock me if there are other systems elsewhere that ran into the exact same kind of problem that we were solving here. The systems that stored information about baseball games with the long history that

baseball has and the weird history that baseball has, they're pretty flexible. But we found a way here. So it kind of surprised me if we were the only ones. CB Well, we know a bunch of front office folks listen to us. So if you were the Kenny Jaclyn of your organization and you also had to spend 25 hours or some number of hours on this, drop us a line. Let us know. We'll keep you anonymous. but I'm curious about whether anyone else had this issue. Is there any other aspect to the Kenny Janssen crisis that we have not discussed? You mean Danny Janssen? Oh, yeah, Kenny Janssen.

Kenny and Danny, you're just like, yeah, one person now. Kenny and Danny, you're just like, yeah, one person now. We've gone from having two Danny Janssens to Danny Janssen and me becoming one person. Yes, exactly. And that was the follow-up tweet from at Matomic. He said, like, I think the way this is hyped up, people are expecting two Danny Jensens on the field, one good, one evil. And then when the game starts, they'll just be like, oh, well, this isn't as interesting as I'd expected. And it's true. I didn't watch the resumption of the game. I mean, once Cora said that it was going to happen, that was kind of it,

you know? Unless Danny Jensen stepped on a rake or something before the game. Once he's in the lineup, that's it. So it's this weird kind of, I don't want to say anticlimactic because I think it's a really cool thing that happened, but as a spectator experience, it's not really that exciting, which I used to think about Cal Ripken breaking the consecutive games played record because he didn't do anything. He was just in the lineup and he was in the game, but at least he got to take a victory lap and take his bows and it was a big moment for baseball and everything. But in that specific game, nothing really that exciting happened. And that's the case here too. So it's a strange sort of like unprecedented, historic, incredibly cool kind of event that in person or when you're watching

is a nothing burger basically. It does seem that with the Red Sox being the home team, they could have had a little more fun with it. Yeah. We were joking on Slack that they could send him out in the Blue Jays uniform and then it's like a Superman reveal that he's got the Red Sox uniform underneath. The crowd goes wild on a Monday afternoon at Fenway. Yeah, that would have been good. A little pageantry. Well, thank you very much for your work and continuing to ensure that we can enjoy baseball reference uninterrupted. It's just a lot of behind the scenes, under the hood stuff that no one would

know about. You'd be an unsung hero if we were not singing your praises here on Effectively Wild. And of course, you're often a help to us and our staff blasting, but this you've gone above and beyond here. So thank you very much, Kenny. Yeah, thank you. All right. Well, right after we hit stop on the recording with Kenny, I thought to ask him whether he was glad that this happened. Cool baseball history in exchange for a lot of labor on his part. And he said, I am now. And yeah, now all of that work is behind him. His site still works. We can all enjoy the fruits of that labor. Good answer. I have several updates and followups

for you, including some insight into why the Mariners were allowed to hire Dan Wilson without interviewing a minority candidate. Why didn't that violate the SEALIG rule? I have an answer, but I will save that stuff for next time so that I can talk to Meg about it instead of monologuing now. And don't worry, we're recording another episode soon. We've been backloaded this week because of some power problems at Meg's house. You can support Effectively Wild, and make sure these podcasts keep coming to you at some point in the week by going to Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild and signing up to pledge some monthier yearly amount to help us keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get yourself

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No ads, subscribers will support us. Vroom, vroom, fast on your slog, the rig of mortis. I have so many tabs open that I cannot see the tabs with Cast. Oh, stop recording. have so many tabs open that I cannot see the tab with cast. Oh, stop recording. That's very funny. I find that quite funny. How am I even going to, oh, okay.

I can do control tab to get, okay, there we go.