Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2221: 50-50 Shot

Episode Date: September 21, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens dissect the glorious game in which Shohei Ohtani founded the 50-50 and 51-51 Clubs, Ohtani’s most awe-inspiring feats, and his future, followed (29:51) by banter about the state of defensive stats, the mystery of Salvador Perez’s swing decisions, questionable kudos for Bud Black, whether Victor Robles made the worst […]

I wanna know about baseball I wanna know about every single team I wanna know about Sadglass, and Van Graf, Santa, about Oh Oh Oh Donnie I'm a very modern fan Reading up on all the analytics I wanna know about baseball Presented by Patreon supporters Oh, but back in the wild Hello and welcome to episode 2221 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Joined today not by Meg Rowley, who remains on vacation just for this episode. She'll be back next time. Instead, I am joined by Meg's colleague and sometimes my colleague on this podcast, other Ben, Ben Clemens. Hello, Ben. Hey, Ben. How's it going? Well, you've drawn the assignment of talking to me the day after the latest awe-inspiring Show Hey Otani game. So I guess you know what is in store for you here and what that assignment calls for.

Absolutely. You've already blogged about Otani, so you are well prepared to discuss. Two bends raving about Otani and neither named Verlander. What an upset, but we will do our best. So Mookie Betts said that this game and Otani's exploits in general makes you speechless. And now it's time to test that contention because speechlessness doesn't work so well on podcasts, but you kind of echoed that sentiment in your article. When you wrote what else can you say? And then you said some other stuff and it's hard to say much more than that, et cetera. And that was my initial reaction. Just the generic raves about Otani. What new aspect can I bring to light here?

Yet, like Otani, who keeps finding new ways to impress us, I think I can find new ways to express how impressed I am. At least that is the challenge I'm setting for myself here. How did you experience the latest, greatest Otani game? This has been my beat for a little bit, projecting the likelihood of unlikely feats. Yes. You've become a Japanese news sensation. That's true. I got into it because I wanted to figure out how likely it was that Aaron Judge would get to 61 homers.

And then I've just kind of, the idea was like, I've got a little system for doing it. Like, I'll just, it'll be not too big of a deal. I'll do this for every exciting feat. Yes. Some fan graphs articles got translated onto yahoo.co.jp, which is their big news site. Then the news came calling and we've done some segments about how the model works, how likely it is that Otani would do this. And it's really funny, I've been exchanging emails with producers over there,

like, oh, can we have you back on to update after this game, after that game? And I think what I've come away with after thinking about all of this now for quite a while is that, hey, it's really hard to model just Otani's sheer greatness. Using his own history doesn't do it because he's learning and improving all the time. Using baseball history doesn't do it because no one has done this before. You can take stabs at it. You can look at what he's done this year and say,

oh, he's probably going to continue to be this good. But I asked this model, which has done a pretty good job of projecting likelihoods of things, how likely it was that Ohtani would have a two homer one steal game and little less than 1%, which mirrors his career. His actual career rate is a little bit less than 0.1%, but the steals are just a little easier now.

And not only did he have a two homer one steal game, he had a three homer two steal game. It just, like, I think that the one thing that I've learned from this is don't try to use his own limiting past and less limiting than any other player in baseball's past and yet too limiting for him. So a camera crew went to your apartment to film you coding this projection of Otari

was that that must've just been some scintillating footage. They managed to make it look like I think decent, but yeah, a lot of it was like, and now I'm going to click run. And then as you can see, the model is running a million simulations, so it'll take a little bit. Yeah. We'll cut through that. Don't worry about it. It'll look good. People wonder why we don't do video unaffectedly wild. This is what we're missing out on, me tabbing between spreadsheets. There's a lot of dark mode, like just various matrices

that are getting manipulated. I don't think it was that thrilling. But I do think that there's a lot of appetite for, like, how can you predict Otani? Like, predicting most baseball players is boring, right? No one wants to know, to think about someone else I've been writing about recently, how good Tyler Holton will be in the next 20 games.

Like, yeah, probably about as good as a lot of random relievers. Second Tyler Holton mentioned on the podcast this week, courtesy of you and Jason Panetti. So he's on everyone's mind. Maybe everyone wants to know how Tyler Holton will do. It's true. So that is eminently doable, projecting Tyler Holtan because there have been a lot of players of roughly his skill level in baseball's history.

Otani is just so different, that that's what makes it fascinating. But you really do have to wonder, how can I conceive theoretically of a guy like this and do the math right? Because he's not like using baseball history as my guide is going to do a poor job. It's not every day you get to see that. Yeah, because as you said, he's learning.

And ever since you said that, I've been having the Terminator 2 quote running through my mind. My CPU is a neural net processor, a learning computer. Apologies, Arnold. But as Skynet, that'd be pretty terrifying. Yeah, but a much friendlier version. I mean, I guess the Terminator eventually is sort of friendly in a way.

Some Terminators, depending on who they're terminating at the time. Not at all envious, by the way, that the Japanese camera crew went to your apartment, not mine, that I've been plugging away at Otani content for years and no one has ever sent me a. It's true. My apartment is not what we'd call Japanese clean.

When the crew came over, they were like trying to figure out where they'd film and they set up and I said, oh, you guys can rearrange anything you need to make it look good. And they kind of went like, oh, God, I don't know if this is doable. Well, my apartment's nice and neat if anyone is interested.

I've got my angels giveaway Otani pillow sitting right behind me. Now, my daughter knows who Shohei is and says it very cutely as befits an almost three-year-old. It would just be great gold footage. But no one's come and calling. I want to talk about Otani, not you even though you are also a celebrity, a more minor celebrity perhaps in Japan these days, but you're drafting off his fame.

I suppose we could say. And this game was pretty incredible. And one thing that stands out to me is that I referred to this as the Otani game, but you have to specify, which is kind of incredible because he has yet to play in the MLB playoffs. That will change next week, but you would think, oh, that's when the signature games happen that are these indelible memories that we associate with a player. And he hasn't had that yet.

And yet if you were to talk about the highlights of his career, even the single game highlights, you'd have a very long list to go through. Now, one of them of course would be the WBC final, which was playoffs of a sort, right? So that brought that postseason atmosphere and environment and stakes, but it's not just that. You could talk about plenty of regular season games too. Games where he had a two-way

star performance. The doubleheader, right? Where he had like a one-header and then a two-homer game or something. Exactly. Right. He's had games and weeks that at the time seemed like, wow, it can't get any better than this. This is exactly what we hoped and thought he could do one day. And yes, then he keeps topping himself. So six for six, this box score is a thing of beauty. It's unreal. Just two doubles, a single, three home runs, two stolen bases, four runs scored. And really look, I'm not an RBI guy and it's kind of gilding the lily to talk about how many runs someone drove in when they produce 17 total bases, but I don't care.

Double digit RBI totals are pretty fun. I was going to say, I'm not an RBI guy, but I'm a 10 RBI guy. Definitely a double digit RBI guy in a single game. Just preposterous. And I was not watching this game from the start. I tuned in when he hit the first Homer, because then we were really on 50-50 watch because he'd gotten to 51 steals and was one Homer away.

And then I figured that I had missed the fireworks cause I was doing other stuff and following from afar. And no, there were plenty of fireworks still in store because he had two more homers ahead of him. I saw the second one, the third one, again, I had to step away. I forget what I was doing. I was picking up my daughter from daycare

or getting her ready for bed or whatever it was. And then I was getting tweets and people were messaging me, Ohtani homered again. And I was like, yeah, I know. He homered, he hit that second one. I saw, no, this is a new one. This is another one.

And I was messaging people multiple times to say, Oh, Tani homered again. And they were like, what, again? You just said that. Is this message somehow getting duplicated? But no. I was sitting at home like frantically updating this spreadsheet, this model, like,

what's happening now? And then he got to 50-50 while I was still seeing how likely it was that he'd get there. And then I was like making sure the math, right, he had another home run. I had a very similar experience. I was basically, my wife was doing her normal job from home, and I was just busy like,

oh, Tony just did this. And she's like, wow, put that in context for me. And then by the time I did, I was like, oh, he actually did something else. You look at this game and how did he steal two bases in this game? He barely had any chances. He got thrown out trying to stretch a double into a triple. Yeah, that's the lone flaw. The only thing that Mars, this otherwise pretty perfect offensive game is that he was thrown out trying to stretch a double into a triple, which would have given him the cycle on top of everything else, but he did

make it out on the basis. So he had to settle for 0.7 war on the day. And I asked you to calculate what that might've been if he had not been a DH, because I was trying to say, well, could it have been even more impressive? And you said, well, with average defense at a non DH position, it probably would have added like a 10th of a win. So it doesn't make that much difference. I don't know how much difference if he had not made that out on the bases. But that's probably the much bigger difference than. Yeah.

So then he'd probably be, I mean, he was most of the way to a win and a healthy 961 WRC plus. Is that good? The day. So people are trying to turn this into a White Sox unfun fact, just pointing out how few White Sox players have produced what Otani did in a single game. Look, I'm in the market for White Sox unfun facts and we might devote an episode to those, but let's just let Otani have his shine and not use it to denigrate the white socks. They're taking plenty

of abuse as it is. So let's just glory at Otani. They can be bad on their own terms. They don't need Shohei to point out how bad they are. But the fun facts have been coming fast and furious and they were being updated during the game because he kept doing different unprecedented things. Now he was the first player with two homers, two doubles, and two steals in a single game. And then he was the first player to have three or more homers and two or more steals in a game. And he's the first player to have 16 total bases and a stolen base in the same game. And then in your article, you embedded maybe the mother of them all from Optistats, which was since RBI became official in 1920, only one MLB player has had over the course of his entire career, same game or not, a game with 10 plus RBI, six plus hits, five plus extra base hits, three plus homers, two plus stolen bases. That one player is Shohei Otani.

He did all of it today. So that probably puts it in context for your wife, perhaps. I told her that one and she was like, it doesn't, it's actually too impressive. Too many things. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, conceiving of a billion against a trillion. Like at some point you're just like, well, this is, this has passed my brain's ability

to process. And so it's all the same. That's how he is to baseball, which is crazy. I don't know what more he could do. And we've said that before, but how could he continually top himself yet again? It makes me feel bad for Mike Trout. Again, we don't need to turn this into an opportunity to bemoan Mike Trout's career aspects of it, but he hasn't really had a signature game except for the one where he was

owned by Otani. And that sort of speaks to like, you can be a great player, an all-time great, a hall of famer, and not have any memorable moments that compare to the many memorable moments that Otani has had here. And every time he does this, it causes something of a sensation by modern baseball standards. And I have always loved the awe that Otani inspires in other athletes, other people who are incredibly physically gifted

and the best at what they do. And yet they, when he does one of these things, come out of the woodwork to just celebrate him, namely LeBron James tweeting, this guy is unreal. Wowsers people stays. People still say wowsers. I guess LeBron sound like a child again. Yeah. Right.

And people in other sports and other spheres and other walks of life feel like they have to sit up and take notice and say something about Otani. And there just aren't really any other baseball figures with the possible exception of Aaron Judge, who prompt that sort of societal cultural response. Yeah, I've had a decent amount of time to think about Judge against Otani in terms of outside of baseball context, because a lot of my friends are not baseball fans. I just think Otani is miles, miles more impressive than judge. Judge does a thing very well, and people can conceive of that thing.

They remember Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa. Maybe judges is more impressive, maybe not. I think that's a difficult question to answer and has a lot to do with whether you think the steroid arrow or steroids or the ball, so on and so forth. This is different. This is just like, pick a skill, now he's the best at it. It just feels like it's not a quantitative difference. It's different in quality.

It's like, wow, this just looks separate. I think the thing that I want to see Otani do next year is hit more home runs than he allows runs in a full season of pitching. He came really close in 21. I was going to say, he's almost done that. Yeah. I think he had 48 runs allowed and 46 homers in a pretty much full season of pitching. So let's see him beat that.

Yeah. The thing he could do at some point is either level up even more as a pitcher, win a Cy Young award, which he hasn't been that far from deserving to do, but maybe play defense. If the cards fall in such a way that he is, I guess it would probably take him becoming just a one-way player. And then if he adds that to his career resume, oh, I became a gold glove corner outfielder, then that would burnish his case more. Or I suppose if he became a closer at some point, if he showed that he could

become a reliever, if he did those things at the same time, if he was- What if he stole 50 bases without getting caught at all? Yeah. I mean, I think, I think he could do that. That's the incredible thing because stealing bases at a high success rate was not a skill he previously possessed. And that was something I talked about on the podcast. I think the only things I've really dinged him for pointed out, oh, this is sort of a relative weakness for him is his two strike hitting, which I think he has improved, but he's still relatively not as good

as a two strike hitter, whether it's because he's shortening up or whatever it is, he's generally not as otherworldly productive with two strikes and not being that great at stealing bases despite being fast. And I mentioned this with Trout too, and those guys had at one point just essentially stopped running for the most part. And Otani's success rate wasn't particularly impressive when he did go. And then in the middle of the season, as I've noted, and as you noted in your piece, he just seemingly decided, well, I'm a base stealer now. I'm a prolific base stealer. I'm just going to suddenly start swiping bags and I'm not going to get caught. So Joshian had this stat, best stolen base percentage

in a 50 steal season. It's Max Carey in 1922, Jacoby Ellsbury in 2013, and Shohei Otani this year with four caught stealing in 55 attempts. I never know whether to say caught stealings, times caught stealing. That always confuses me. Caught stealings maybe. Yeah, I haven't had to figure out how to say it very often because it hasn't happened to him. So

like a 93% success rate, it's not just the volume. It would be one thing if he was kind of compiling steals, if he was just like, yeah, I'm going for 50-50 and I don't care how many times I get thrown out in the process, which you could do. Acuna last year had 70 steals and 14 caught stealings and he was just going every time. Yeah, and that's not even what's happening here. That would still be cool, but at least it would be like, well, I guess a lot of people could do this if they were willing to just run into a bunch of outs, but that's not what's happening here. I don't understand how that specifically is happening. That, to me, is perhaps the craziest of it all,

is that, OK, yes, he's stealing more bases because he wanted to get to this plateau. OK, great. Why is he more successful? Since he basically kicked his steals into overdrive, starting in July, he's stolen 35 bases and been caught twice. Like, yeah, that's really good. Yeah. And I guess it would be impressive if he continued to do that when he returns to

being a two way player, which I kind of doubt that he will do. Yeah. I assume that this is just sort of a, well, I can do this. Now you all know that this is within my skillset, but he has been reluctant to run on days when he's pitching in the past, which is understandable, obviously. And yes, when he has the full two-way workload,

obviously he's been rehabbing, he's been throwing off a mound. There are real rumblings that the Dodgers could use him as a pitcher in the postseason, which whether it's advisable or not would certainly provide another signature Ohtani moment this season. It would be exciting. Do it for the story.

And I would assume that he will not continue to combine all of these skills at the same time. And it's more like, well, this season I'm going to do this thing and then this season I'm going to do that thing. And sometimes I'll do all of those things together. He hasn't quite had the Cy Young pitching season and MVP hitting season yet, but I never say never. So people have been talking about, is this the best game of all time?

Is this the most impressive game of all time? And I think that's probably a bit overblown. I don't know that we could support that statistically. Of course, I was stat heading along with everyone else to see how the total bases compared. And he is a couple total bases behind Sean Green. And then I decided, well, can we retroactively just say that stolen bases go toward total bases because then he'd have 19, then he'd be tied. And we'll forget about when he got thrown out. He didn't lose a base, I suppose. He just failed to gain one, but it doesn't quite work that way.

But if you said that it would really be about the narrative, it was the one year anniversary of his surgery. It was the game when the Dodgers clinched a playoff spot, not that there was suspense or doubt about the fact that the Dodgers were going to clinch a playoff spot at some point. And of course it was to go 50-50 and to go 51-51. And so yes, that makes it much more special and memorable than if it had been any other random regular season game. Against that, I guess you could say, well, DHing, it's against the Marlins.

The third homer was against the position player pitcher, right? Which I got to say, I was slightly deflated initially, because again, I was not watching when he hit the third homer. And so when I heard he hit the third homer, I was like, Oh my goodness. And then I saw that it was off a 68 mile per hour meatball from Vidal Brujjan. That, that sapped some of the luster from that moment. Although I then reevaluated and in my mind, imagined that as even more of a testament

to Otani's greatness because that's what it looks like when pretty much any other position player pitches. So it was in a way very appropriate that he would show what happens when anyone else really steps on the mound. They have lousy stuff and they're just firing it in there trying to get it across the plate. And then someone like Shohei Otani comes along and hits it 440 feet. So it just reinforces maybe the fact that yeah, that's what a mere mortal would do on the mound and Shohei Otani, you put him on the mound and he's one of the best pitchers in baseball.

So that sort of saved it for me. That was my narrative reclaiming of that home run, but it certainly is a little less impressive. I was very impressed at how much power he generated on that one. It's not that easy to hit a ball that soft, 440 feet. No. You know, they do it in the Home Run Derby some, but not on most swings. Poor Vidal Brujan. I guess he has a story to tell, as does Big Mike Bauman, who was the victim of the 50th Home Run.

And we've talked about, well, how does this compare to the best power speed seasons? And I've said that, well, in order to surpass Ronald Acuna Jr.'s record power speed number, the Bill James stat, the harmonic mean of homers and steals that he posted last season, that Otani would have to get to 5353 or 5452 or something like that, which is well within his reach. He is on pace. If we just look at the fan graphs on pace extrapolated stats for 5454, I don't know what your as seen on TV model

says currently. What does it say? I give him somewhere between, let's call it 10% to kind of round of getting to 5555, which is like not that low, to be honest. I think it was much lower when I started doing this. And I checked it because I was curious. 60-60 is just not happening.

I wish. But he would need several more games like this one. And again, this is perhaps the greatest offensive day in MLB history. So expecting several more of those seems a bit much even for Otani. I mean, my model is not really set up to do these kind of median outcomes. It's hunting outliers basically. But it's entirely possible that he gets to 53-53 to set the all-time power speed thing.

One thing, the only thing that I think remains to be seen about this is when will the next 50-50 season be? Not that it's likely to happen anytime soon, but we have had two attempts at it in the last two years after having essentially zero in, I don't know, a very long time. So you have to think that the new steel rules will make it more likely that when guys have the outlier

50 homers season, I think that is really hard. Hitting 50 homers. Might as well complete the set, yeah. Exactly, then it'll be a little bit easier to be like, well, I'd like to have a 50-50. Yeah, as if you can just will yourself to that. You can kind of will yourself to the steels to some extent. You can't really will yourself to the homers.

And that's why, regardless of the final power speed number, I think probably this impresses me more just because hitting 50 homers is really hard. And this is actually appropriately the 50th ALNL season when someone has hit 50 homers. Now there have been only 88 ALNL seasons of 70 or more steals, so it's not dramatically more common. And of course, it's been quite rare in recent years until these rules changed. So it's not as if that is easy to steal 70, but the combination of hitting 50,

I mean, that's just really impressive. And I think that would have been within Acuna's powers, if anything. I mean, that was my bold prediction on our bold predictions pod last spring that Acuna would go 50-50. So I jumped the gun, I was one year early and I picked the wrong guy,

but it wouldn't have totally shocked me if he had done that, but that's just really hard to do. And also when I was thinking, well, how much should we discount this because of how much easier it is to steal a base now? No one has even gotten halfway to 50 steals who has hit 50 homers.

So 50-24 is the previous max. Willie Mays and A-Rod had 50-24 seasons. So like no one has really even been close to showing that sort of base swiping ability combined with that power. So yeah, I guess you could apply some discount rate to the steals, I suppose, but it would still be way more steals

than anyone else with that power output has accumulated. So it doesn't cheapen it much for me. 50 home runs is just so hard. That, that I think is the more difficult achievement here, particularly with the new rules, but like probably someone will hit 50 home runs again. A fast player will, but I don't think we're going to see a season where the steals are just so... like easy is the wrong word, but it's not really the wrong word. Do you think he could have stolen 70 if he was really just interested in getting the most steals regardless of how many times he was

caught? I kind of... No, or if he had decided to turn on the afterburners at the start of the season instead of midway through. Exactly. Like, this is a silly way of thinking about it. But last year, our little like weighted stolen base thing, you know, you get credit for stealing a base, you lose credit for getting thrown out or for not going. Okunyo was one and a half runs above average

with his 70 steal season. Otani is seven runs above average stealing because he's just never caught. I think that is, look, 50-50 might be done again, Otani is seven runs above average stealing because he's just never caught. I think that is, look, 50-50 might be done again, but I don't think it'll be done like this, where it's like a guy who would be the MVP if he hadn't done this.

This is certainly more replicable than Otani's two-way feats, which I would not at all be surprised if we just don't see the like of that in our lifetimes again. This could certainly happen. And as always with some record setting performance, it's a combination of talent plus opportunity.

We know about the talent. Also, we have a fairly high home run rate era. Historically speaking, we have the more permissive stolen base rules and restrictions. Kyle Kishimoto of Fangrass pointed out in our discord group. Well, Dodger stadium is a pretty good home run hitting park. Yeah, for lefties especially. Yeah, and not so favorable for other kinds of extra base hits,

which means that maybe he's ended up with some singles, which gave him more opportunity to steal. So some things are favoring him here. And yet mostly how he has accomplished this is by being Shohei Otani. So I have consistently said that I fear being so spoiled by these exploits that I will never be thrilled like this again by any future baseball player because seemingly everything else would pale in comparison to this. As amazing as what Judge is doing is what Bobby Witt is doing. They're doing like the best

possible version of conventional baseball player stuff. And even if that's more valuable than what Otani has done this season, and I think it is because of his DH duty, it still just doesn't provide the awe. And look, I think Otani ended any MVP debate, probably on Thursday. And maybe that's not entirely fair. I mean, Lindor is still very much within the margin of error in fan graphs were, but narratively speaking, I think probably Otani put the nail in the coffin

of that case and it doesn't help that Lindor is banged up right now and not playing. But really it's just, how can you resist of that case and it doesn't help that Lindor is banged up right now and not playing, but really it's just how can you resist the luster of Otani? Yeah, I just agree. I think this is a similar but different case to like Whit versus Judge. Even though the numbers are close, I think the MVP race is not. And I think that is the case with Otani too. He even has the signature game. Ben? I feel feel makes voters be like, oh, yeah, that guy.

Right. I remember that. It was so cool. And it was a week before people will be voting on that award, which probably doesn't hurt. And having the best game of all time to set a previously unsettable record, the narrative is so good.

And that matters. But also, for me, MVP definitely has some, uh, some feel to it and he's the MVP. He feels like the MVP. Well take that Mookie. It didn't make us speechless, at least not for long. We, we had plenty of speech in us as it turns out, but I do have some non-Otani topics that I wanted to turn to and get your thoughts on. Hopefully we'll still be interesting, if not necessarily up to Otani standards. So one thing I wanted to ask about, which is sort of relevant since we were just

talking about the defensive adjustments, I wanted to ask you about defensive stats because we got a question about this the other day from a Patreon supporter, Michael, who said, I'd love it if you all could do a state of defensive metrics podcast after the season is over. What are the pros and cons of each? What can slash should the baseball community do to improve them? Is Statcast the gold standard now for defensive metrics? I don't know if we have an entire podcast worth of material there, though sometimes

I say that and then I look up and we're an hour into the episode. But I did want to ask you about this because there was a timely and relevant post that Tom Tango produced at his site, of course, of MLB, someone who is maybe the primary driver of the statcast derived defensive stats. And he did a little evaluation this week of FRV fielding run value, which is the runs based version of OAA, Outs Above Average. That's the stat cast based defensive metric and defensive run saved. And I sent this to you and you said that this had been on your mind because you're a fielding Bible voter this year, which I'm not, but I've been a bunch of times in the past. And so you're weighing which stats to look at too. And these are not the only ones,

they're the two most prominent and probably respected or certainly most commonly cited ones. So I guess philosophically, how does one even evaluate this? You could talk about how Tango did, if you think what he did was fair and why it's telling. That's a great way to start looking at these things is which metrics do a better job of predicting how, like, of being stable from year to year, of year one looking like year two. I think there's an interesting philosophical question of, well, is defense just fundamentally unstable?

I think the answer is yes. Your opportunities really determine your ability to have a great or poor defensive season. And not every 15% ball is the same, right? If you happen to have a few of those on when you were leaning the right way, you don't get many of them in a season. Defensive metrics, I think, will just be inherently volatile.

So it's not a failure. You don't say, oh, I have to throw this one out just because it's noisy from year to year. Defense is noisy from year to year in the same way that like say BABIP is noisy from year to year. And let me put it this way. I can measure BABIP absolutely.

And that like, I'm sure that I'm not measuring it wrong. My BABIP calculation is perfect. I'm just counting. You don't have to brag. So I don't think that a metric not being perfectly correlated from one year to the next is disqualifying. And I do think that the best way to look at them is to see how well what you think about someone in year one, what they say about someone in year one, uh, correlates to what they say in year two.

Because granted, defense is very volatile, but there is still some underlying skill there that we're trying to measure, and a good measure should have more correlation. That skill should be able to be picked up a little bit more. So I like this. If I'm trying to determine like true defensive skill, I do care how well what a statistic says in year one

is then reflected in year two. That's basically Tango's method, right? Take two years of data, look at how DRS does year one versus year two, look at how DRS predicts, what is it, FRV, I think is their chosen abbreviation now for the out-to-the-bub average except turned into runs and with arm. Yep. And I have gotten to pretty similar answers to him. I don't really agree with their outfield take so much that that you should only use stat casts outfield metric. His conclusion was that both stats still provide some value.

So it's not as if the stat cast one has supplanted. Yeah. So it's not as if the Statcast one has supplanted DRS. And we should note DRS is to some degree Statcast powered too. It depends which version of that stat you're using, but it is Statcast informed. Yes. And also Tango is obviously not an impartial source here. He's evaluating his own creation. Though I think he's generally trustworthy.

I don't think he's cooking the books on purpose. Yes. Yeah. I think that his takeaway was. I don't think he's cooking the books on purpose. Yes. Yeah. I think that his takeaway was that DRS still is outperforming FRV actually very slightly for infielders. However, DRS is much worse than FRV for outfielders. I would regress both of those to use a common tango technique towards saying it's pretty close to 50-50 of each.

And I might use FRV slightly more for outfielders these days. If you look at one of the last versions of these studies done by Jonathan Judge at baseball prospectus, there the outfield metrics were all pretty similar actually. That's kind of where my intuition would go, that it's much easier to measure outfield defense because it's just like, did you run to the ball? There's a lot less kind of nuance and where do go, that it's much easier to measure outfield defense because it's just like, did you run to the ball?

There's a lot less kind of nuance and where do you put the scoops and how much does Eric Cosmer being at first base influence the fielding? Not him specifically, but, you know, good scooping first baseman. Infield defense is tricky and shifts and the runner and does the identity of the runner matter even if they don't bust it down the line? And are you covering a base? I think infield defense is tough. Outfield defense models kind of tend more towards each other.

In my fielding Bible research so far, I've been 1 3rd, 1 3rd, 1 3rd weighting DRS, FRV, and I mean, I don't even, what is it called now? Range defense added the baseball prospectuses. Baseball prospectuses? Yeah. I call it derp. Isn't it defensive runs prevented? I think that might be right. And then it has components. I just have it as BP defense in my spreadsheet because I don't know, they have a lot of names there. They like naming

their components, many things. I don't see that I'm going to get a lot better at predicting these by doing like, oh, different weights. Like I'm going 40, 30, 30 instead of a third, a third, a third. I think that if you are trying to make these minuscule weight adjustments, that's a waste of your time. Those aren't that different from a third, a third, a third. And we all agree that this stuff is pretty noisy. And all of these models do slightly different things,

but they're trying to point out the same thing. Like you pointed out, they're all getting the same data now, and so it's just a matter of slicing it ever so slightly differently. Being reliable year-to-year, as in producing the same numbers, might not be the same as doing the best job of explaining what happened on the field. I like blending them,

and I think that that does a pretty good job in my research of getting close to what's happening on the field when I'm voting for fielding Bible. Again, I have not finalized any of these ballots and I won't until all of the defense is done because that's how it's supposed to be. I'm going to take all of these things into account. I don't know what I'll do for tiebreakers yet, but I think if you say that one of these models is bad, you're missing something.

I don't think you should toss any of them out offhand. Maybe UZR, I feel like UZR is not sufficiently updated anymore, and its handling of the shift was very much made for a time when shifts were rare, as opposed to a time when kind of what I'd call, what are they, strategic shifts, the way that people are positioned now, are much more common.

I think UCR just hasn't really kept up with the times. And hey, if you want one example of why DRS is good and why DRS is evolving with the times, it used to be about the same as UCR in terms of doing a good job of predicting stats. And honestly, I preferred UZR. This is in the kind of pre-Statcast era or the early Statcast defense era. And that's no longer the case.

DRS has just gotten a lot better. I think it's still actually goofs up core's field a little. So that that is one point that I should make. I will not use DRS as heavily in cores. I think that one of its components, like one of the rules that it uses to figure things out, does some kind of BABIP fixing. So cores has a higher BABIP, but it's all outfield BABIP basically.

I think cores' extra BABIP is largely down to the fact that the outfield is huge. So line drives and fly balls are just really hard to field there. And so they're infielders because it smooths it out across all positions, kind of get over-credited. Like if you look at the best DRS infielders in these past any number of X years,

it's usually somebody who plays in cores. So OK, take that with a grain of salt for that specifically because of this weird reason that they're forced to deal with a weird park. But overall, I think they all do a pretty good job. And I think DRS is definitely getting better and better. It's evolving with time, which makes me more interested in using it.

It's learning like Otani. Although not as fast as him. No, I guess not. But I think also that it makes sense still to use a blend and you don't see BP stats cited as often just because a BP is paywalled and more than that I think the interface is just a little lacking. Yeah. That's been a problem for BP for a bit and I'm speaking from experience as a former BP

editor-in-chief. But I think there will perhaps come a time when Statcast just supplants everything. In theory, it should, or maybe not. I suppose there could always be better analysts who slice and dice that same data outside MLB and do it better or add value in some way. Tango is essentially alleging that DRS still has an edge for infielders, whereas the outfield FRV trounces outfield DRS, he says, because Statcast has better info on positioning and that matters more maybe for outfielders, which I suppose sounds plausible, but you'd think that once they refine all the arm stuff and work on the infield defense

even more, we might get to a point where that will just be the one number and then eventually there'll be Statcast war and maybe that will just take over entirely, who knows? But I don't think we're there yet. The one thing that I would, I'm not sureaticast will be able to handle is how to apportion... Because the way it works cares about the player's initial position, and it measures their skill in going from that initial position, which is assumed to be a given neutral, no credit or debit to the player, to making the play. So you'll see situations where like Paul DeYoung was a good example of this. He basically started trying to make more plays going to his left back in the day and it like made him

look a lot better defensively because by changing his positioning it made some balls impossible to get to. But it made more of his plays in a way that like the model liked because you know it set it up to where more of the balls were, quote unquote, difficult but suited to him. So these weird positioning versus ability to go from that positioning questions will remain. I think that that might be a place where DRS will have an edge based on their philosophical ideas about how to calculate defense. But yeah, I do think that all of these things are tending better year over year.

They have a lot of smart people working on getting the better, and the data that they're getting is better. And I honestly don't think that one will ever just be strictly better. I think there's a lot of value to having an ensemble model. Even if you had perfect information, the assumptions you make about how to turn how quickly a player runs and grabs and throws into something about their long-term defensive skill. You'll make different assumptions and there's usually

value in making two different types and blending them. My guess is that there will always be some merit to using multiple ways, as long as the methods are different. Once the methods are the same, whoever has the better data will win. Well, while we're on the subject of different defensive evaluations, I wanted to say something about Salvador Perez because I brought him up on a recent episode, Meg and I talked on

2204. I postulated that Salvi might be the most divisive player of this era in terms of valuations, not in terms of whether we like him or think he's a good guy because who wouldn't love Salvi, but just in terms of what the wars say or what the old school versus new school perception of him says or the eye tests versus some of the stats. And partly that is framing related where he's just always graded out as a substandard framer. And so fan crafts war, baseball prospectus war, but warp is going to have a very different number for him than baseball reference war, which doesn't currently include framing.

It's partly that it's also maybe partly just his durability and his impatience, I suppose, coupled with his power. He's a player with glaring flaws, I suppose you could say, and also maybe some subtle flaws, but then also some glaring strengths. Those words don't usually go together, but very obvious strengths and celebrated strengths. And he deserves to be celebrated for those things. And of course, all the soft factors of him being a clubhouse leader and a mentor and the face of that franchise for years and being in big moments for all, I don't need to discount any of that. However, I think there are frequent disagreements because

some people think, oh, Salvador Pérez, Hall of Famer. Other people are like, what are you talking about? He's nowhere near my hall, whatever that looks like. And I don't even want to weigh in so much about that or return to that topic, except to say that I think I discovered another way in which Salvia is divisive. And it's not an old school versus new school way. It's sort of a new school versus new school way, which I guess you could say about baseball reference war

versus fair grass war. But in this case, it's swing metrics and swing discipline metrics and plate discipline and pitch selection metrics, because there are a whole suite of those now. And people probably know Seeger from Robert Orr at Baseball Prospectus, who's an excellent analyst. And then there was Swing RV, which was publicized and introduced even earlier than that by Drew Haugen at Down on the Farm, the substack, and he has recently been working for the Phillies, so that hasn't been updated.

And Kyle Bland at Pitcherlist has his own version of this, which is sort of similar to Swing RV conceptually, and it is called pitch location value decision value. There's a pitch location value that's for pitchers and then there's the decision value for hitters. It's hard to remember all of these acronyms. Sometimes it is an alphabet soup in Saber Metrics, but it's a tasty soup and I love soup even when it doesn't contain statistics. So I've surveyed all of these swing decision metrics and I found that some of them disagree starkly, just a drastic difference here. And my attention was drawn to this

because Robert Orr published something about Seager this week at baseball prospectus and he had a leaderboard in there. And Salvador Perez had one of the highest Seager values of this season. And Robert even noted in that article that seeing a name like Salvi at the top of leaderboard there is interesting. And it certainly was interesting to me. And to quote from his piece, he says Seager is a measure that captures how well a hitter balances aggression in the zone with smart decisions outside of it. Seager tries to measure that captures how well a hitter balances aggression in the zone with smart decisions outside of it.

Seager tries to measure if hitter's swing decisions were actively helping or harming their quality of contact and in doing so, bore a stronger relationship to batted ball statistics than the traditional plate discipline metrics that came before it. So all these things are looking for, well, can we do better than just chase rate or in-zone swing rate? Those were sort of the standards before that. And these are blending those things to try to come up with a holistic number because yeah, it's good not to chase, but it's not great if you're just being super passive and not swinging at anything and

letting a lot of meatballs go by. So you want to be, as they say, selectively aggressive and swing at the pitches you can hit and let the other balls go by. And that's what Seeger does. And that's sort of what SwingRV and PLVDV do in different ways. And the thing is that Seeger loves Salvi. And so that's been consistent and you can look up the stats for all years. And Salvi has been in the upper percentiles of that stat going back to 2020, I think is as far back as it goes. And then I looked at Swing RV for the year it's available 2022, there's a leaderboard online and Salvi is like ninth percentile in their metric Swing RV plus.

So one thing thinks he's among the best in baseball and another thinks he's among the worst and pitch location value, decision value agrees with swing RV and says that he is among the worst at this. And I've talked to the creators of these stats to try to suss out the differences because sort of superficially they seem to be attempting to do the same thing more or less, and yet they both come down with completely contrasting views of Salvi. So suddenly I was questioning everything because I thought, well, if there's one thing I know about Salvador Perez, it's plate discipline, not really a strength of his. And yet Seager suggested, maybe I'm underrating him because Seager acknowledges that he swings at lots of pitches outside the strike zone,

but also he does not let any hittable pitches go by. So he's swinging at everything in the zone. And initially I thought, well, is it that he's like a bad ball hitter and the model's accounting for the fact that he's able to hit balls that would be unhittable for others? But no, it is not currently accounting for that. So that's not why. Really? I thought Seeger was. No, not yet, apparently. That's on the roadmap for Robert, but it's not currently doing that. So the difference is, and here I'm quoting from Kyle, although Robert concurred with this, as did Drew. I just brought together the League of extraordinary swing decision metric creators. And Kyle explained the discrepancy for someone like Salvi is that Seeger's style of analysis

sees the downsides of swinging at bad pitches and taking hittable pitches the same. In reality, swinging at bad pitches is a much larger difference in value than taking a pitch in the zone. So aggressive swingers like Salvi will be aggressively dinged for swinging outside the zone because that's a huge swing in value. And that jibes with something that Drew had written about Swing RV last year. I know we're in the weeds here, but Swing RV essentially said the same thing that you kind of can't rate well in

this metric. If you have a Salvi style approach that you're swinging at lots of pitches outside the strike zone that you'd be better off letting go by. Whereas Seeker still allows for you to rate well despite that seeming weakness. And Kyle went on to say, and he cited some stats that per MLB stat cast run values, taking a pitch out of the zone last year was worth 4.9 runs per a hundred pitches

while swinging there was worth negative six. So there's an 11 runs per a hundred pitches difference between the two choices. Yeah. And so in zone taking is equally bad, but in-zone swinging is significantly less valuable than out-of-zone taking is, because you can still whiff, mishit,

or get unlucky with BABIP. So SwingRV and this Decision Value Plus metric use that imbalanced weighting, while Seeger assumes a more one-to-one weighting. And Robert conceded that that's roughly right. It's comparing percentages of correct yes or no binary choices rather than using point estimates of run value to evaluate how good or how bad a decision is.

And currently Seager is the difference in the appropriate swing and appropriate take measures based on a level of aggression. So what his strong showing is saying is that Salvi is still showing a good amount of restraint given his level of aggression. So it gets kind of complicated, but the point is two metrics that purport to tell us something sort of similar about a player drastically divided on Salvi, whereas for instance, both agree that W Soto is great. So there's no difference of opinion about Juan Soto and yet on Salvi, just polar opposites, which just

is appropriate. That just speaks to the conundrum, the riddle inside an enigma that is Salvador Perez. So I have done my own non-standardized,, non put it into a stat look at questions like this. Justin Choi, you know, sometime fan grass contributor and great baseball analyst has also looked at this a bunch and he and I were definitely on the why does anyone swing ever? Yes, that was a big thing, which we talked, you know, wrote about that for the athletic. The big trend was maybe hitters are swinging too much. Yeah. And that ties with the PLV style things. I've attempted at times to break out a, you know, the bad ball hitter-ness of this. And I remember in particular, in reference to P Kavi Baez, he was such a good bad ball

hitter, but in addition, he was so bad at taking walks that it was just not that valuable for him to let a bad pitch go by. Because he could get to 2-0 and it just didn't matter. Although I guess that's sort of circular because if he did let more 2-0 pitches go by, then he would walk more. Yeah, it is very tricky. But because he both is aggressive by nature and because he was capable of doing a lot of damage on bad balls, it made it less disadvantageous to swing at bad pitches. And all of these swing decision metrics, by the way, even the ones that say Salvi not so great, they're using league level analysis of should you swing at this pitcher not tailored to each individual's strengths and weaknesses,

which if you did that, maybe it would reveal, actually, no, this seems like a chase, but it's not really a chase for him because what would be weak contact or a whiff for someone else, he could drive. And maybe if you're Salve and you have top tier power, perhaps you should be swinging more often because when you make contact, it tends to go a long way.

I will say that's very hard to do at a metric level. I messed around with this for a while. It doesn't stabilize quickly, like your bad ball hittingness. And so trying to figure out a way to do it algorithmically and to understand the difference between levels of bad ball hitter-ness and like, should you give extra credit for swinging at one inside if you're more of a ball hitter-ness. And should you give extra credit for swinging at one inside? If you're more of a pull hitter, it's really hard. I think doing that is probably not, maybe it can be done.

But it's a lot of work for, I think, a fairly small gain for our understanding. Maybe teams should be looking at this for training reasons. Yeah. I guess I'm inclined to think closer to the PLV version because just that that's how I've conceived of this before. Me too.

That it really is worse to swing in a ball than it is to take a strike. And then you need to like do some count adjusting. And one thing that I've looked at these a lot, one thing that I've looked at doing a lot is ignoring two strike counts. Or at least like coming up with a completely different model for two strike counts. Because there your aggression is like, then it changes, right? Like then taking a strike is really bad. That really changes things in a one oh count. It's like much worse to swing in a ball than to take

a strike. That's less true in two-two. And so I know that at least Seeger and probably all of these actually do that. Like they are treating them all different, but that's very important. And that's one reason that looking at the broad metrics, chase rate, zone swing rate, is gonna steer you wrong. And that's why we,

that's why people do these fancy things, right? Yeah. Is that there really is a lot of context in when you swing and when you don't and how much it matters. Yeah. I feel for people trying to figure out Salvi because- It's just not possible. No, it's not even like, okay, if you look at a certain suite of stats, the advanced sabermetric stats, they'll say one thing and then the old school stats will say another.

No, they're all internally divided and inconsistent. So someday maybe we'll develop a grand unified theory of Salvador Perez and we'll understand exactly what he was worth on a baseball field in terms of runs and wins and losses, but not today. So not yet. Okay. I have two more things I think to say to you. One, you just mentioned Coors Field. And that reminds me that I wanted to bring up an accomplishment, I guess, that Bud Black was just congratulated for by the Rockies Twitter account. So the other day, September 17th, the Rockies Twitter account tweeted,

congratulations buddy, which sounds very sort of impersonal, but they meant that specific buddy as in Bud Black. And the graphic was of Bud Black waving his arm from the dugout. And it says, Bud Black, most managerial wins in franchise history, which sounds pretty impressive. Sounds like something you would say congrats for. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't. And yet I wonder how much personal pride Bud Black takes in having the most

wins in Rocky's history, because A, he also has the most managerial losses. Losses, really. Yeah. In Rocky's history, which is an important part of the equation, wins and losses. They often go together, maybe not in a celebratory graphic from the at Rocky's Twitter account. Also, winning percentage wise, he doesn't even rate that well among Rocky's managers, of whom there have been seven, which is not really that many given that the Rockies have been around for 30 years and have not been very successful.

And I guess that's sort of a theme of the Rockies organization in general, sticking with people, which generally we prize loyalty, but not always if it's a Rockies case. But there has been no Rockies manager with a winning record and Butt Black actually has the second worst unless you count Jim Leland who spent one season with the Rockies and then quit

because he decided that he hated Coors Field. He was like, I'm a pitchers manager. This is like peak Coors Field pre-humidor, it's the moon. I don't wanna do this anymore. And so I'm leaving. And he walked away from the last two years of his contract. So he had one year as Rockies manager. Walt Weiss had a 437 winning percentage in his four years with the Rockies. Leland at 444 in his one year and Bud Black at

451 in his now eight years. And so I guess in terms of games managed, Bud Black has surpassed Clint Hurdle this year for the most games managed in Rocky's franchise history. So he's done well at keeping his job, which is a difficult thing for managers to do, especially managers of losing teams. So I'm sure he's happy about that part, but I wonder if he went to bed that night thinking,

yeah, most wins in Rocky's history or whether he was, if he even saw that thinking, but what about the other side of the ledger? Yeah, I'm sure that someone told him like, you know, keep a game ball from that game or something. Yeah. It is very impressive to stick around for so long, but I think the longevity is more impressive and that if I were him, the thing that I would be most interested in is most stick around for so long. But I think the longevity is more impressive.

And that if I were him, the thing that I would be most interested in is most games managed. Like, it's not necessarily a mark of success. Like you said, the record's not great. I never know how to think about the Rockies in general. Like, shouldn't they have fired Bud Black at some point? I mean, maybe. Not that that would have changed anything for them, really. Right.

Might as well. If you like Bud Black and players like Bud Black, I guess keep him around. He's probably not the primary problem. So not, not blaming Bud Black. I completely agree. Yeah. Like there's no chance that he is the big thing wrong here, but no chance. Yeah.

But, uh, he certainly does not seem to have risen above it. Maybe some of managing is not about making the playoffs, but about the friends you made along the way. Having a fun team, a good team, keeping guys heads on straight, being good for the community and the fans. In a lot of ways, if you just never looked at records, the Rockies would be a model franchise. Yeah. I love going to games there. It's fun, they spend.

Sometimes. So in that way, congratulations. He is living the Rockies ethos of, hey, the things that we're measuring, they're not good at, but they must be measuring different things. Yeah. And win or lose, we'll keep showing up. And it's a nice place to take in a game and have some cheap beers. And we'll just keep coming to work.

And eventually we'll have the most wins in Rockies franchise history. So this is kind of the definition of compiling, career versus peak value, I suppose. And I support former pitcher and pitching coach managers. We don't have enough of those. And I love catchers, but catchers have cornered managers' offices. They're hogging the manager. We need some pitcher and pitching coach representation here. It shouldn't always be bench coach to manager pipeline. So I support Bud Black just representing for the former pitchers in the house,

but not representing that impressively, I suppose, if you dig deeper than this one social graphic. I will say it's a monumental achievement to do this kind of surely exhausting job for so long and at a fairly good level. I don't look at the Rockies and go, yeah, if they got Bud Black out of there, everything would get better. I feel like I probably don't think the opposite. I just think he's managed to remain neutral for a long time,

which is, again, quite impressive. I don't think another organization would have kept him so long. Also impressive in its unimpressiveness was a couple of outs that the Seattle Mariners made at third base this week. And one was worse than the other, but it's hard to decide which and the Mariners, they had a couple losses and the Mariners cannot really afford to be thrown out on the bases because they're not on the bases enough as it is, but they had a couple mishaps by people at third base that really, I don't know which one takes the cake.

So the second one was when Julio standing on third, straight from third because Randy Rosarena, who was hitting, let go of his bat after swinging through a pitch and the bat went out in the general direction of Julio and understandably he strayed into fair territory to avoid the bat. I don't know that he needed to, but understandable impulse, except that he just sort of stayed there as if he maybe thought that it had been a foul ball or his brain short-circuited or something. And so he was just in no rush to get back to third base and he was thrown out. I don't even know if you can call it a heads up play to throw over there.

Cause he was taking his sweet time getting back as if he had just had a brain freeze, basically. I'd never seen this exact sequence happen before. I don't think. Yeah. And so that would have been bad, but I don't know that it was the worst decision made this week because this is when Victor Robles joins the chat. And then stealing home the throw. Got him. That makes zero sense. You have a three old count and you're going to try to steal home zero cents So, there was a blog about this at FanCrafts this week.

Actually there were multiple blogs about Victor Robles this weekend. One was celebratory and one was more condemnatory. And the first by Davey Andrews was about how great Victor Robles has been for the Mariners, which we've talked about. And to my surprise, he didn't really regress much after we talked about him. He continued to produce and then Bauman blogged about this baffling base running decision.

And I think it might have a case as the worst steel attempt ever. You can tell me if I'm exaggerating. Now, the backstory here is that Robus has been great on the bases this year. And he's 25 for 25 in stolen base attempts entering this game, which maybe makes what happened next more funny or makes it more understandable because hey, he's feeling himself. He's invincible on the bases. You can't throw out Victor Robles.

And so this was a heat check and he got burned because what happened here. It was a bases loaded situation. Now it was the top of the first inning. The Mariners were down two to nothing. So when you're down, even if it's the first, you don't really want to run into outs. You want to stay on the bases and score. Hopefully it was two outs bases loaded loaded, and a 3-0 count to Justin Turner, who's a pretty good hitter even at his advanced age. And the additional context was that there had already been

two walks and a hit by pitch in this inning. It was Luis Hiel pitching for the Yankees and he was not pitching so well. And also the first three pitches of that plate appearance had been way outside the zone. So like clearly he was not throwing strikes. That's the ultimate make him throw a strike situation, I would say. Base is loaded, can't throw strikes, is wild, is walking people, is hitting people.

Why in the world would you choose to steal when you're losing in that situation? And Victor Robes did decide to attempt to do that. And he was not successful. I mean, it wasn't close to successful. No, and that's one of those situations. And I saw some quote to this effect, like you gotta know if you're gonna And that's one of those situations. And I saw some quote to this effect, like, you got to know if you're going to go, that

you're going to make it. There's a break even point for any situation, but... This one is quite high. Yeah. Like, this is a really bad time to get thrown out. Extremely bad. So you have to be totally certain. Like the in billions dollar bill when he would say, I am not uncertain

when he had some shady unsavory secret Intel on some deal. You have to have some sort of like inside info. You have to be able to predict the future and know that you're going to be safe in order to go in that situation. And he was not close. And I asked frequent stat blast correspondent, Ryan Nelson, to try to determine whether this was the worst still attempt of all time, or whether this is exaggerated or hyperbole.

And he went above and beyond and he built a whole win expectancy framework and run expectancy framework that is count sensitive. That's RE245 or whatever it's called. Yeah, took into account the fact that it was 3-0. Can't take into account that Luis Hiel was walking everyone and was wild, but so there's the additional context that makes it maybe even worse. But if you do it based on win expectancy, then it's not so bad just because it was the

first inning. And so there's a limit to how much you can hurt your win expectancy. Yeah, the worst deal like ends the game. Yeah, exactly. And so by win probability added, he sent me a spreadsheet and I will link to that. And some of the worst ones are like suicide squeezes

or something, some kind of mischaracterization or, and some of the steals are like, someone threw to second and then the runner went as opposed to just like a straight steal going for it, like Robles's was. So by win probability added, Ryan said it wasn't anywhere near the top. The expected win percentage with a 3-0 count with two outs down two runs in the bottom of the first was 43%. If Robles had been safe, the odds would have increased to 48%. Since he was thrown out, the odds were 31.2%. I bet you're glad I didn't ask you to run these numbers, but Ryan did it for us.

So Ryan says, if we assume he had the historical average chance of being safe of 27%, the decision to steal was worth negative 7.2 percentage points. That's bad. It's very bad. It's really bad to be clear, but the top of the leaderboard, or I guess the bottom, depending on how you sort it, is like negative 20 percentage points. I can imagine.

You get thrown out in the ninth inning down one. That's just- Right. Yes. Just because it was earlier in the game, the leverage was lower. However, if you go by runs expected, so run expectancy, not win expectancy, just how many runs you're expected to score in that inning. It was plus 1.43 runs before the steal or 1.72 with the steel, including

the guaranteed run scored and obviously after being caught zero. scored and obviously after being caught zero. So that's expected runs added of negative 0.97, which is a lot. And so I asked like, well is that as bad as it's possible to be? And Ryan said, I think by runs expected it is mathematically impossible to be worse, which I guess makes sense, right? Because I mean, basis loaded, Rio count, I guess it could have been fewer outs,

but Ryan said, no, not even, right? He said, I believe I can confirm that there is no scenario where stealing home is a worse idea from a run expectancy perspective. And he noted, no one has ever done it before. It does seem to me like it's actually impossibly worse. Yeah, I think this is categorically the worst time to steal possibly ever, at least not considering the inning.

I mean, you could get thrown out trying to steal second with the bases loaded, like everyone else forgets. Yeah, I guess. So there would be less upside, the upside would, like everyone else forgets. Yeah, I guess. So there would be less upside, the upside would be like needing to retreat. But if you're talking about reasonable steel attempts, like just how could it be worse? Right. And on a run expectancy level, this is not a small sample. And so even just going to 1988, which is how far back we have the count information. Entering this season, Ryan had a record of 2,956

bases loaded, two outs, three O situations. And no one had ever attempted to steal in those situations. Then I said, I assume there have been steal attempts in that situation before after 88 without the three O condition. So just bases loaded, two outs. And he said, yes, 232 of those, but never with a 3.0 count, at least on record.

And that 232 is any steel of home, not necessarily straight steel. I was gonna say how many of those are straight steels, probably not many. Yeah, exactly, right. And of those 232, there was exactly a 50% success rate, which is extremely high in that situation, which surprised me a little bit, but the overall rate is 27%. It's hard to steal home as Victor Robles found out.

Well, I feel like the way you successfully steal home is to make it weird. It's like onside kicks in football. When you do it, when everyone's expecting it, it just doesn't work. Like the math doesn't work. There's the numbers are wrong. The distance is wrong. Yeah. Coverage is wrong.

You need to like make it strange. You need to make it on a like return throw or like you're picking on a tendency or the guy's not looking. And Robus is just like I'm going to run home. He's just vroom vrooming just let's go. He's vroom vrooming this is a very vroom vroom guy steal right? I mean I guess he made it to 3-0 so it's not perfect. Yeah he never would have stopped at third if he was vroom vroom guy but it's pretty close and Ryan noted because

the success rate is twice as high as usual in this situation, could just be because you're picking your spots or if you're going to go again, you have to be sure, or because it's so unexpected, you're more likely to be successful. He noted that there have been 15 attempts with two outs and the bases loaded this century, and those attempts were successful eight times, only one attempt in the last 10 years, and that was in a Marlins Blue Jays game on August 12th, 2020. And he sent me a video of that quote unquote steal, and it wasn't really one, it was a throw down to second and the guy on third.

So yeah, so no one has straight stolen home with two outs and bases loaded in over a decade, potentially much more than a decade, let alone the three Oo count condition. So I salute you, Victor Robles. You've been really great as a Mariner. They extended you. They want to remain in the Victor Robles business. I would too. And his aggressiveness is part of his success and has even been attributed. Like maybe the Mariners have just let Victor be Victor more so than the Nationals did, and maybe that's

part of why he has excelled there. And you know what? I guess if occasionally you have to let him make the most ill-advised steel attempt of all time, maybe it's worth it. But yeah, that was a howler. You got to crack a few enormous eggs to make an omelet, I guess. Ostrich eggs. Yeah. And the Mariners ended up losing that game by a lot anyway, I think. I think someone said, oh, everything was different after that moment. It was close and then it ended up the Mariners didn't score again. Or I guess they scored a couple of times, but the Yankees scored nine more times and

ended up winning 11 to 2. The next game was a one run game, the one where Julio was thrown out at third. So that was quite costly. So this one may or may not have been costly, but legendary in some sense. So. Yeah, I will say this.

What will we remember about the Mariner season? Yeah. This will be part of it. I'm with you. I think the Julio play was so strange. Yeah. His brain just broke. Extinguishing circumstances. He thought he was going to die or have a bat 40 miles an hour or whatever.

That looked pretty painful. Then I don't know, it just blacked out for a second. Yeah. I'm less shocked and appalled by that one than my one ever wrote by. I've watched it so many times. I know. Because that was like carelessness. It wasn't like Julio decided to, I mean, he did on some level, obviously decide to stand where he was standing, but Robo is like considered his options and picked the worst one. So he had time to think about that. Like it was

the third pitch in the plate appearance. So he had time to consider and weigh whether he should go. And then he said, yeah, to hell with it. Exactly. Legend. So that's the last thing that I had for you. Although I did want to mention, you know how MLB on its app is pushing this player of the game voting thing now?

That's something that FanGraphs has had kind of quietly for a really long time. And I've mentioned that before, that you can vote on players of the game at FanGraphs. I don't know whether anyone does, but no one ever really cites it or uses that data for anything as far as I'm aware. But I've always thought it was kind of cool because I like the hockey tradition of the players of the game. Yeah, the stars or whatever. Yeah, stars of the game. And so I kind of wish that would catch on in baseball and you could just do it with WPA or whatever. But now they've been aggressively pushing, literally push notifications, the player of the game thing to the point that I think everyone

was instantly sick of it. I think they've dialed that back a bit. But what would you do with that data? Let's say if there was a robust data set of all baseball watching app using people voting on players of the game stars of the game. And it's the three top players. Would that be useful for analytical purposes? Do you think that would be better than just say, looking at WPA, if you wanted to quantify either like the story of the game or a season or some kind of context,

sensitive metric that would take into account more narrative considerations that even something like WPA can't or just like how cool something was as opposed to just solely how valuable it was. Like would it just be totally a toy stat and kind of a curiosity and kind of a garbage thing or is there a real use for that? It sounds like a toy stat to me, only because there aren't like scrubs in the game. Victor Oblis would have won that one maybe.

Right, it's not doing the, like, you could imagine a player who is magically gifted by, I don't know, the baseball gods with either hitting a game winning home run or committing a game losinglosing defensive blunder, or whatever the inverse is, every game. And he'd do really well by the starts of the game thing, just because half of his games, he wins the game.

And half of them, he loses it. So I wonder if it could create a cool narrative over who has really delivered the most big moments. There's the plus WPA minus WPA, you can split it out that way. That's not quite right, because it does it at the play level instead of at the game level, and we'd probably prefer it at the game level. If someone has a terrible first at bad and then redeems themselves at the end of the game and has net zero WPA, I want that to be zero. That guy didn't really participate in the game, in swinging the outcome of the game in a net way.

So I think it could be very interesting for that. I like story stats. I mean, this would definitely be a junk story stat, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Like I think it tells a good story. Who has like carried their team to victory the most times? Yes, maybe this is what we need to finally figure out Salvador Perez.

Maybe this is what will unlock him. He'll just be the best in baseball. I'm sure he would do well in this metric. I mean, it's probably biased and kind of a popularity competition and contest to some extent, right? So we might have to adjust for that somehow. But yeah, it'd be kind of fun. Jersey sales. We'll adjust by Jersey sales to make it as junk of a stat as possible. Well, this has been fun. Always a pleasure to have you on for a double banner. And thanks for indulging my desire to talk about Otani. And it seemed like you shared it. This has been fun, always a pleasure to have you on for a double banner. And thanks for indulging my desire to talk about Otani.

And it seemed like you shared it. So you're not simply humoring me here and we will stay tuned to Otani and we will stay tuned to NHK or wherever you are appearing on television. So across the pan. Great. Always happy to hear that. Well, folks, he homered again. After we recorded that conversation, Shohei hit 52 on a pitch at the letters.

He's now one homer behind Aaron Judge. He also stole a base to found the 52-52 club. How is he breaking our brains like this, despite not even doing the thing that he originally broke our brains by doing? The two-way play. This was supposed to be the dull lull between Otani two-way seasons.

And then, before the season even started, surprise, I'm married! Oh no, my interpreter and confidant has stolen massive amounts of money from me. And then he made us forget all that by going out and having himself a different sort of historic season. Okay, now, at last, on this subject, I'm speechless. But not on this episode. We're down one Ben, but we're not done here. I'd like to end this episode with a great guest and a conversation that I think merits going a little long.

At the 1977 World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees, a then 26-year-old reporter for Sports Illustrated named Melissa Lutke was accredited to cover the event. She had a press pass that gave her clubhouse access. She had already reported at the tail end of that season in the Yankees clubhouse after the players had approved her presence, which was sanctioned by the Yankees PR people, but not known to the league. That access, which Melissa had gained after covering baseball for a couple of years, went smoothly, and at the series she told Tommy John, the Dodgers player representative, that she might be entering the Dodgers clubhouse too.

Technically, she didn't need the permission of the players to enter the clubhouse, but she wanted to warn them. Baseball players weren't accustomed to women in the clubhouse at that time, and so she wanted to go about it by the book with the maximum respect for players' privacy. John polled the players. By majority vote, they agreed that Lutke was entitled to report from the clubhouse, and so it was set. Until word got back to Bowie Kuhn, baseball's commissioner.

Midway through game one, Lutke was summoned from the auxiliary press box to the main press box, where a PR person informed her that the order had come down from Kuhn. She was banned from both clubhouses. Not just for that game or that series, but as far as Kuhn was concerned, forever. Inside baseball, the commissioner's power was absolute, and so Lutke was forced to take Kuhn to court. The decision in the famous case that resulted, Lutke. Kuhn, came down in September of 1978. Judge Constance Baker Motley found in favor of Ludky, thereby opening the clubhouse doors to Melissa and to the many, many female media members who have followed her inside.

Now she has written a book about what it took to get inside, Locker Room Talk. It's out now, and she's about to join me for some Locker room talk talk to discuss the case, its ramifications and what hasn't changed in the decade since. Let's listen to a minute of Melissa talking to Howard Cassell on ABC Sports on January 15th, 1978 about her upcoming case. Now there are female sports writers in growing numbers. And so we have one of them here today. Her name is Melissa Lutke. She is with Sports Illustrated and she is suing

Booy Q, Major League Baseball, the Yankees and the City of New York to secure her right to gain the same immediacy of access to the clubhouse as her fellow sports writers who happen to be male. Melissa, I'm delighted to have you here in the studio with us. Our viewers can't read the complaint that can be seen on the wall behind us, but I have the complaint in my hand, and the thrust of it is that you're entitled to the same access and the same rights as male reporters. It's as simple as that, is it not?

It is as simple as that, and it all started out as simple as that. I wasn't asking for anything more. In fact, what I was asking for was the exact same thing that's been going on for years and years in clubhouses and baseball since the beginning of baseball. It's always taken place in the locker room and yet because I'm a woman, I can't be a part of that. Well, I'm joined now by Melissa Lutke.

She was the Lutke in the landmark case, Lutke versus Kuhn, and she's now the Lutke on the cover of her book, Length, the Count of that Case, and that turbulent trailblazing time in her life and in the country. Locker room talk, a woman's struggle to get inside. Melissa, I'm very glad you got inside, and I'm also happy you're here.

And I'm very delighted to be with you this afternoon. Thank you for asking me. So as I read the book, I could of course only imagine with the aid of your narration what it was like to be in your shoes as you were very respectfully, very patiently, but also very determinedly breaking down the door to MLB clubhouses. Yet despite the dissimilarities, I thought back to my early clubhouse experiences. When I first talked to a player in a clubhouse,

I think I was even younger than you were and looked a lot younger than I was. I was one of the early online only Saber Metric writers to join the BBWAA when it was still the province of ink-stained newspaper people. That coupled with the inherent awkwardness and anxiety of that setting was enough to make me quite uncomfortable at first. But of course, I was a white guy covering baseball.

I could hardly have fit in more. And so I thought my discomfort could only have been the tiniest smidgen of what I would have felt in your position. And yet, you make clear in the book that you were often frustrated, understandably upset, righteously aggrieved, but I didn't get the sense that you ever felt like you didn't belong, even though the powers that be in baseball were telling you you didn't. Is that the case? And if so, where did your confidence come from? I think that if I did have confidence, I'm not quite sure that's the word, but I did feel as though I belonged. And I think that potentially traces itself back to the early

roots of my life where my mother and I really bonded over baseball. And I think that her always making me feel as though as a young girl, I belonged as a fan of this sport. I belonged with her in a room watching a game, listening to a game, doing what baseball fans do, perhaps criticizing an ump's call. I gained confidence by being around her, seeing and perhaps living off of her own excitement for the games. So by the time I miraculously found my way to this job as a baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated by the time I was about 24 years old

because my tenure had started two years before my lawsuit. I think that in your reading of the book, you'll find that I was very tenuous at first, very much holding back, certainly not in any way barging my way in, but sort of poking my head into the scrums of male writers, hoping that they would teach me by the questions they ask the players, the way they quiz the manager, teach me really how this game is well reported.

So I had a lot of teachers, my mom was the first, and then I think the male sports writers, the male baseball writers, were my teachers, even if they didn't really know they were. When your case became public and became national news, you received many letters, most of them not so nice, but many quite supportive from girls and young women who had read about your case and wanted to reach out and say thank you and I support you and I aspire to do what you're doing

someday. And that hadn't been the case for you even though you had this lifelong love of and relationship with baseball. It's not as if you had set your sights on becoming necessarily a journalist, let alone a sports reporter, let alone a baseball trailblazing reporter. And maybe that's because at the time it wasn't conceivable that that could happen. It wasn't really seen as an option until you helped make it one. And so I wonder whether the fact that this was, as you said, sort of miraculous, the path that you took, it was a whirlwind, it was fortuitous connections and opportunities and your go-getter attitude that put you in this position without really

having devoted your life to working up to this point. And I wonder whether that helped or hurt that it wasn't as if you had been in this restrictive discriminatory baseball environment and embedded there your whole life though, of course you had been embedded in the culture, which was quite restrictive and discriminatory at the time. Did it help that this all happened quite quickly, that you were then able to immediately say, well, this isn't right and this is what I have to do?

Sports had always felt to me very empowering. I was very lucky and incredibly fortunate to grow up in a school system in a community in western Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, which had four colleges and universities that really were part of its arena. Girls were given opportunities to play sports. This is in the late 50s and early 60s, that girls across America really weren't given at that point. So I considered to be, to sports, I always considered it to be both an equal playing field

for me in the sense that boys were playing sports and girls were playing sports. That I could play sports and did play sports and loved playing sports really in essence did set me up for what became, you're right, that serendipitous moment where I was given entree through meeting Frank Gifford, who was a broadcaster at ABC Sports. We had a time to talk across the dinner table one night, and at the end of it, he gave me a great compliment. He said, for a girl, you know a lot about sports. And again, that felt very empowering for him to say such a thing to me. And when he followed it up with an invitation

for me to come to New York and meet him at ABC Sports, and he would introduce me to the people who ran it, the people who were the broadcasters on it, I took him up on that invitation. I would say that, quite frankly, before that, I was floundering. I really did not know what direction my life would take. If you had asked me then in the summer of 1973,

what I would have been doing a year from now, there is no way, not an iota of a chance, that I would have told you that a year from that point I would have been hired as the entry-level position at Sports Illustrated magazine and began a career in journalism that would take me through Sports Illustrated and then on to other publications after that. It would not have occurred to me in my wildest dreams. What did occur to me at that point, soon after Frank mentioned this, is the notion of working in sports media suddenly had become extremely attractive.

I would say I became passionate at that point about this as a possibility. But at that point, I had no skills to offer anyone in this. I'd never covered a game of sports. I'd never written a story myself. I had gone to a liberal arts college, no journalism classes. I'd never worked on the school newspaper. So again, if you'd ranked my odds that previous year, they wouldn't have been very high.

But you're right, I was persistent and I think I was driven by this passion that I had found once this opportunity was presented to me. In fact, a year later, I was hired by Sports Illustrated to be a reporter researcher, which is the entry level position at that magazine. ISKRA and how much times have changed since then, that that comment Gifford made to you for a girl, you know a lot about sports, would be empowering. I understand why it was, but of course today,

if someone said that, it would be seen rightly as condescending and insulting, right? Because it would not be out of the norm, of course, for a girl or a woman to know about sports. And that strikes me because I was thinking of the ways in which the times were conducive to your efforts, but also kind of conspired against you. Because we certainly can't say that the time was ripe for you to do what you did, given how hard you had to fight to do it. But it was at least within the realm of possibility. And there had been other women who

had been trailblazers themselves, whether in baseball or in other sports, who at least made this something that you could consider an attempt to do. And yet, because of feminism and the inroads that women had made and the Equal Rights Amendment movement and everything that was going on at the time, that both put some wind in your sails, but then seemingly also made people dig in their heels even harder against you and say, this is where we draw the line. This is our last stand, the MLB clubhouse.

So I wonder how you thought about that or think about that now, given that on the one hand, yes, it seems like everything had been building toward that, but that's with the power of hindsight. And at the time, it seemed like that only made your opponents more determined. Well, I think it had been building. I think you're exactly right. Certainly in courtrooms around the country, barriers that had legalized discrimination against women had been falling. That is exactly right. And also particularly in journalism, where a succession of companies were sued by their own women for discriminatory practices and policies in both hiring, pay, and promotion.

What was also starting to happen when we get into the late 70s, when my lawsuit was filed, it was filed in the end of 1977, and it was heard by the district court judge, Constance Baker Motley, in April of 1978. What you're starting to get then, which we've seen ripples of since, is you're starting to get then, which we've seen ripples of since,

is you're starting to get that backlash. You're starting to get the cultural backlash to the progress that women had been making. Now we would call it a culture war, I suppose. I think it was a culture war because it was in the personification of Phyllis Schlafly, who at that time was beginning the conservative backlash to the ERA. The ERA had been going along very, very well,

and a number of state legislators had passed it to become a constitutional amendment. It needed only a few more when Phyllis Schlafly entered the arena to try to stop its momentum. And in fact, she did succeed. And one of her key arguments, aside from the frightening notion that women would potentially be drafted into the military if the Equal Rights Amendment passed, I think you could argue that the most effective argument was the specter of men's and women's bathrooms

no longer being separated by gender. You know, we see that and we can use, you know, substitute the word locker room for bathroom and see the potency of the arguments that were raised against my action. I said I'd be the plaintiff in this suit very naively, believing that the reason I was filing this suit and the arguments that would exist around it, would whether I should be given equal treatment in doing my job.

I did not forecast that it would become such a cultural touchstone and in fact would be considered to be a laughing case, a case that evoked laughter, or that I would be demeaned and degraded from my moral standards, you know, by wanting to go into these clubhouses. I do want to point out for a moment here for what it's worth is that as a magazine writer, the time that would have been most valuable for me in a clubhouse would not have been after the games when the chaos of that time evoked

this notion of a clubhouse out of control and naked men running around in it, which didn't have to be the case. But the time that would have been most valuable for me was before the game. That was the time after the teams took batting practice and they had roughly 45 or 50 minutes to be sitting in the clubhouse. Not one of the players ever changed out

of their uniform from when they did batting practice to when they took the field to play the game. I was kept out of the clubhouses then too with the same argument that somehow my presence in that clubhouse would be invading what the commissioner would call the sexual privacy of men. And I frankly have to say that we ought to pause here and wonder exactly how my presence in a clubhouse where all the men were dressed from head to toe in their uniforms would in fact invade any aspect

of their privacy since the male reporters were already in there. And another almost contradiction is the fact that you had the support of your employer, Sports Illustrated and its parent company, Time Inc. But it wasn't necessarily a wholehearted support and there were barriers being erected at your company that ostensibly had your back. Now you had great legal representation and so in that sense Sports Illustrated absolutely supported you and yet there was a history of

discrimination at that magazine such that it was compelled to sign a conciliation agreement just a few years earlier to resolve to do better in its treatment of the women on its staff. And even when you have the breakthrough and you win your court case and you have this unfettered access to clubhouses, you actually left Sports Illustrated shortly after because you didn't really see a path to advancement. And then you even uncovered some memos that suggested that management was even less supportive of the women on its staff than it had appeared to be and had helped out in previous cases only out of obligation. So I wonder what it was like to, on the one hand, have that backing and yet find yourself fighting the powers that be

even on the same side. Indeed, that was the case, although I want to correct one thing because I think it's very important. I believe that I had the wholehearted support of Time Incorporated and Sports Illustrated for the effort that they made to bring my case into court and to pay for outstanding legal counsel by bringing their outside counsel in to fight this case and eventually win it. The reference you're making to documents that we discovered did come during the time of my case because we then had access to what's called the discovery phase of a legal case where both Baseball and Time Incorporated had to make available documents that they had in their possession that had to do with this issue of gender discrimination. So in the process, my lawyer was given documents that had to do with

a woman named Stephanie Salter, who held the same job as I did, the baseball reporter at Sports Illustrated, prior to me getting it. She had left to become a writer for a newspaper out in San Francisco. What we discovered in those documents, and you're exactly right about this, is that she had been in 1973 physically evicted from the baseball writers annual dinner in January of that year for the simple fact that she was a woman. Obviously the men were dressed to the tees and their tuxedos and the rest there was no issue of indecent exposure but in fact just her sitting at a table eating her fruit salad and sipping soup was enough to enrage the

men to what point they got a security guard and removed her from that dinner. For many, many years, I would say close to 40 years, she believed that the managing editor at that time had supported her in the sense of writing a letter to the baseball writers to protest her eviction from that dinner. The papers that we found in the discovery process, in fact, painted a very different story, which I shared with Stephanie much to her dismay because it broke down what little faith she'd had that people actually supported her in that effort.

What happened is that the managing editor at all but refused to write such a letter. It wasn't until the legal staff of Time Incorporated reminded him that the company was under an obligation due to signing this conciliation agreement about gender discrimination in 1971, that he had to write this letter, had to show his support. Even being told that, he still refused to do it, gave the task to an assistant managing editor who wrote the letter for him, sent it up to the lawyer, the lawyer sent it back and finally forced him to get his signature on that letter.

So it was hardly an enthusiastic support for their female baseball reporter. I found, you know, when it was four years later, a very different reception from a different managing editor. It made a difference that there was a different man sitting in that chair. And his response to the baseball editor was, yes, let's go ahead and do whatever we need to do to, uh, to back Melissa in this. And yet even so, women reporters were still often relegated to the lower rungs of the editorial ladder. We had the title reporter researcher,

but in fact our paychecks came to us because we had the inglorious job at Time Incorporated of being what was known as fact checkers. And until this conciliation agreement was signed in 1971, in fact, virtually everyone who'd been hired at all of the magazines in Time, Inc. to fill this entry-level role as fact checker had been women.

Only after the conciliation agreement did they begin to bring men into that role. It became a reporter researcher title and the men did not stay very long because it was like a bus stop for them. And then oftentimes they would disappear from what we called our bullpen where the fact checkers had their offices, and soon enough they'd

be on the rise as writers and editors. For the women, it was not the same. The basketball, a reporter, a woman left to take a writing job covering the NBA at Newsweek. The woman who I replaced when I got hired in 1974 had been hired from being a fact checker, reporter, researcher at SI, to being the editor of World Tennis. But to move up through the internal system of Sports Illustrated was a whole lot more challenging. I'm not saying that there weren't some women who did it in those days, but it was a very difficult thing.

I started at the magazine as a reporter researcher, and after probably writing, I would say 25, 30 columns, the feature in the spring baseball issue, a cover story, and the rest, I remained a reporter researcher five and a half years later when I left the magazine. And I would imagine that for perhaps some younger readers, it might be difficult in 2024, knowing how your case came out, knowing what happened in the ensuing several decades, and to think how did baseball think it had a case here? How did it think it could win? But Buikun believed that, right? Because on the one hand, he was essentially the personification of hidebound baseball trying to stand the thwart progress and be the beacon of traditionalism. But it

wasn't purely that he knew this was inevitable and he was just insisting on giving you a hard time, fighting tooth and nail, being dragged, ticking and screaming. He seems to have actually thought that he was in the right here despite all the precedents. I mean, despite the obvious unfairness of it, but despite the precedents in other sports where women had covered soccer and basketball and hockey in clubhouses by that point. Bowie thought baseball was different. It stops here. Was it just purely, simply sexism that made him think that? Was it some sort of sense of baseball's exceptionalism as the national pastime, et cetera, et cetera? What do you think he had in his head?

Oh, I think there was definitely that baseball exceptionalism. I mean, why should baseball be held to the same standards as what he considered to be these very minor sports leagues, the NBA and the NHL. Now, for your younger listeners, the NBA was not at all the league it is today. So it was a considerably smaller league that got less attention, both in terms of broadcast as well as coverage and had many fewer teams. The NFL and major league baseball in particular, major league baseball was considered then the national pastime and I think was really at perhaps the height of its ascendancy just before the NFL would take off and pass it. So you have that, you have the exceptionalism,

but I really have to say that I think it was also paired with a sense of personal hubris. He had been the commissioner at that point for roughly seven or eight years, I'm thinking that's right. It wasn't all that long. But in that time, he had won two fairly prominent cases in the courts, in the federal courts.

One was against Kurt Flood, where he had pushed back for a period of time the idea of free agency. Kurt Flood, of course, went to court to try to become a free agent and not be what he considered a slave to his team. He lost, and then just about a year before my case, Kuhn had also succeeded in beating back one of the owners, Charlie Finley. He had stepped in, Charlie Finley.

He had stepped in when Charlie Finley tried to sell some of his star players at bargain basement prices. So on both of those cases, federal courts had ruled convincingly in favor, in his favor, in many cases, they had relied on the baseball's antitrust exemption as well as on the best interests of baseball clause, which gave him in the role of commissioner a virtually unlimited power within that league. And that's really how those court decisions came down. His attorneys in my particular case in the hearing, tried to rely on the best interest clause, but were sort of slapped back and really told by the judge

that she's not going in that direction. I do not work for the commissioner. I am not under his authority as an owner or a player would be as part of that league. So that defense didn't hold up. I'd say the other thing, and I don't want to get too much into the weeds here, but Major League Baseball as well as the New York Yankees, which were in this lawsuit because this had happened at Yankee Stadium, were both private businesses. And so we were going to argue this case eventually on constitutional grounds using the equal

protection clause of the 14th Amendment. For us to get to that point, we had to get over a very key barrier in convincing the judge that we saw what they called an entwinement between the private businesses that we were charging with gender discrimination and some state entity. And I believe that Kuhn was counseled by his attorney who came after us on that one and took his stand in arguing that the state action doctrine should not be used, should not apply to our case. Had he won that argument, of course, the judge would not have been able to rule based on the constitutional

guarantees of the 14th Amendment. So I think there was both a legal strategy, but also your very good points about exceptionalism and hubris. CB 0 The person who ultimately had the authority and responsibility to rule was, as you mentioned, Judge Constance Baker Motley, who was assigned as the judge for your case, which was luck of the draw. And Bowie Kuhn and his legal team considered it bad luck because of her background. Of course, if people are not aware of Constance Baker Motley, she's a very significant figure in the civil rights movement who became the first black woman to become a federal judge. Someone like Katanji Brown Jackson

and Kamala Harris have cited as an inspiration. This is the magnitude of this figure. And superficially, one would think, well, who could be better to hear this case in a favorable light? to hear this case in a favorable light. On the other hand, she had no interest in baseball whatsoever, and in fact seemed to be a bit perturbed that she had to care and become interested in baseball for the duration of this case, and was not necessarily someone who would always rule in this way, right? And certainly had been a trailblazer when it came to civil rights discrimination cases, but not necessarily gender discrimination cases. Now, as it turned out, she read it the right way

from your perspective. And I think the way that history would judge to have been the right way, but on balance, do you feel like you locked out with Judge Constance Baker Motley or was that not as much of a cinch as it seemed? Let's look at first of all, some of the incredible work that was done by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who wrote the definitive biography on Constance Baker Motley. She's a constitutional scholar who has taught at Harvard Law School. She went back and looked at, examined all of Constance Baker Motley's decisions that

involved the use of the 14th Amendment. You're right, she had used the 14th Amendment in most of her cases as a civil rights attorney when she overthrew many of the Jim Crow laws in southern courtrooms and took those cases to the Supreme Court. So she understood both the power of the 14th Amendment and also the ways in which many of her cases had established precedent that was used later on by women's attorneys in gender discrimination cases when they use the 14th Amendment as well. But Tamiko Brown-Nagin, in looking at these cases,

discovered that she ruled more often for the defendant than she did the plaintiff in 14th Amendment cases, which would move against the assumptions that I think most people would have had for how she would have handled herself as a judge. The other thing I would say is that the use of gender in using the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause was almost brand new when I arrived in the Southern District Court and by lottery she became my judge.

She had had one prior case of gender discrimination and it ended up being a case that was settled out of court. So she never wrote an order on it. We should also just pause to remember at this point the work that was done by the iconic RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from 1970 to 1976. In the early 70s, she began a campaign to try to get judges up to the Supreme Court to recognize gender as worthy of protection under the Equal Protection Clause, which of course came in with the 14th Amendment after the Civil War having to deal primarily with racial discrimination. So Ruth Bader Ginsburg was essentially laughed out of courtrooms when she first came in with women plaintiffs to make the cases. She soon began to find plaintiffs who were male that she could

bring in and show gender discrimination against them. And by 1976, just a year before my case is filed, she had finally, in a case having to do with an Oklahoma alcoholic beverage purchasing law, she had managed to have the Supreme Court raise the judicial scrutiny of gender. And it was up to intermediate scrutiny, not as high as the highest scrutiny, which was given to racial discrimination, but extremely high. So my case, and one of the things I really point out in this book, is this was new territory for her and for most judges at this point. It wasn't as though, you know, gender using the equal protection clause was a familiar case at that point.

It would become more so, but it wasn't at that juncture. So yes, I mean, obviously to get the first woman, black woman judge who had this experience with the 14th Amendment from my attorney's perspective, I think was a hopeful sign. But it didn't mean that his argument didn't have to be extraordinarily persuasive and built solidly on the precedent that she understood so well with the 14th Amendment use in court. So, and I think from baseball's perspective, from what we can glean from some of their memos that we found in Discovery and some of the conversations I recall among baseball writers, my understanding was that

baseball's perspective was, well, we didn't draw the judge we wanted on the district level, but even if she rules in the plaintiff's favor, we do feel that we can take this up to the appellate court where that appellate court in the Second Circuit was filled with all white men. So I think they felt like they stood a pretty good chance of potentially overturning a ruling that she would give. What actually happened is it went to a three judge panel on a summary appeal and the three white male judges ruled three nothing to fully support Judge Motley's verdict in this or her finding her order.

Yes, baseball did not accept defeat graciously, which perhaps isn't surprising given how they proceeded with the case. But as you mentioned, you had not anticipated the degree to which this would become big news. And of course, the case was reported on and described in the most inflammatory possible terms and your motivations were distorted and people implied prurient interests on your part. And maybe it's not so surprising but it's nonetheless pretty reprehensible and you reprint many examples of cartoons and columns and shocking things that people said just a pack of hyenas really and there were exceptions and there were PR people who were in your

corner and there were players who supported you and there were some people in your profession who helped you. On this podcast, we revere Roger Angel. I was relieved that your book gave me no reason not to. On the contrary, he was an ally of yours and not only wrote a long feature for the New Yorker after your case about you and about other women who were breaking into sports coverage, but also submitted an affidavit in your court case. And as an unabashed Roger Angel fanboy, I'd love to hear your recollections about what it was like to watch games with him since as a fellow magazine writer, he was often

your press box companion. But more importantly, I wonder what it was like to have him in your corner and to see your side of things. I didn't understand back then the great friendship that I would develop with Roger Angel through the years, where even when he was approaching his hundredth birthday, we would sit and visit on the front porch of his home up in Brooklyn, Maine. Ours was a lifelong friendship, and I am indeed honored to have called him my friend. And the fact that he took on writing the story he did

called Sharing the Beat, which was published in April of 1979, was really quite extraordinary. It was a comprehensive piece. You're right in saying that he wrote about myself as well as fellow women's sports writers. There weren't many of us then, so I think he pretty much captured the breadth and width of our existence at that point. But what was most striking to me and what was a little bit painful to read were the very honest remarks of many of the men in baseball who I'd come to know but had not had much of a relationship with in part because I Felt from their body language and the rest that they really didn't want to have much to do with me and they would rather I wasn't there

But I really didn't understand in many ways the depth of their feelings Until I think Roger made them feel very comfortable in talking about it and sharing it with him. And he goes on at length, several paragraphs by men like Jerome Holtzman and Maury Allen, some of the people who I knew very well. I think that my biggest takeaway from that piece in some ways is just being rather startled to find out the depth of their feelings about why they just didn't want me there.

It felt like a personal affront at that point rather than necessarily yet another story about me in which it was often told by someone I didn't know that well. And of course, writers who mainly knew nothing about you were baselessly implying that you and other women were in the clubhouse not to report but to leer but to try to find someone to date. I mean these were the things that people were saying about you, not even implying, just stating outright and far worse than that. Of course, that wasn't what was happening. This was portrayed as we must protect the poor players from these women who want to invade their sacred space with who knows what on their mind. If anything, it was more the other way around, I suppose. Now you talk about how you in your mind had a red line that if a player crossed that with

you, then you would report it and that that didn't quite happen. And probably where your red line was in the late 70s is far different from where a contemporary reporters would be. I'm sure that you tolerated things that would never fly today. But I wonder how much of what writers were accusing you and other female reporters of was in fact what you were being subjected to by the athletes were subjecting me, in this case, to things that I was accused of, kind of inciting from them,

or as a temptress or something. I can't recall once, I don't remember once, ever being approached by an athlete with anything involving, anything that I would take as a Come on or wanting to have a date or inviting me to have a drink now I think I was very fortunate because I have followed these issues for the last 46 years After this and I've seen numerous examples

and talked to women to find out that in fact, sexual harassment did go on for a number of women, whether it was by a manager of a team or possibly a player, where sexual abuse also happened. Again, one of the things to remember is we didn't even have this language back then. We did not have the phrase sexual harassment or sexual abuse.

The word misogyny was something I would not have understood at that point. I didn't know it, it didn't exist. We simply lived in an environment in which I recognized that I was going into their territory and I had to roll with the ways in which they spoke to one another, potentially the ways in which the language that they used would be used against me, and it was on occasion. I had to be ready for pranks that might be played against me. As were

other women. I think there was a sense that when you walked in you sort of put yourself on alert and I thought that was maybe the best way to be because if you started to feel that something that didn't quite feel right to you was happening, basically the clubhouse was big enough that I could move on and go somewhere else. I never confronted what Lisa Olson confronted in the New England Patriots Clubhouse, where players surrounded her and decided, as they later said, to show her their manliness. And I never had that happen. I mean, nothing even close to that.

When Robin Herman, my dear, dear friend, went into a hockey clubhouse at the All-Star game in 1975, where she ended up really being the pioneer opening locker rooms for all of us, she went to talk with Dennis Potvin, who was a player that she covered on the Islanders. And while she was talking to him, another player came over and pulled his towel off. He'd wrapped a towel around him. They were doing fine. But Prankster

decided wouldn't it be funny to embarrass the woman sportswriter and I suppose embarrass the player. So yes, those things would happen. I walked into the Yankees Clubhouse one day to discover on a table that someone had brought in a cake, a one layer cake that was decorated and had a sign saying for women only, and it was in the shape of a penis. Well, you know, I walked by that table once, but I never walked by it again that time. I just stayed in other parts of the clubhouse. So I think there were ways to handle it and you're right. My red

line may have been a little further at that point than it might be today for those kinds of behaviors, which are still going on, I have to say. Now, we discussed your confidence and your reluctance to show any weakness in the face of this adversity. And publicly, you were pretty unflappable, but you were certainly subjected to plenty of inner turmoil that maybe you weren't even fully cognizant of at the time. And that I think is one of the most compelling aspects of the book.

This is of course an account of your case and everything you went through, but it's also a personal memoir and the ways in which this case and all of the fear surrounding you took a toll on your personal life, I thought were maybe the most affecting part of this story. So I wonder to what extent those insights came upon later reflection and to what extent you realized the ways in which it was affecting you at the time, but did your best to bury that knowledge. I think I was aware at the time that I was bearing a lot of my emotional reactions to what was going on around me.

I was not forthcoming about what I was going through emotionally. It led me to make a very, very horrible, you know, mistake in telling a man I'd known for three weeks that I would marry him and decide to marry him within five months of me saying I would. And then becoming so stubborn when my friends tried to persuade me not to do this that I basically shut them out. I shut a lot of people out of what was happening to me at the time. I think part of that came from,

and I think any women who are listening to this who were found themselves as kind of single soul women, the only woman in a very high-pressured environment that was really dominated by men. The one thing you knew that you couldn't do was to whine or complain. You had to sort of suck it in and just kind of show up and try to put one foot in front of the other and do what you did. I think I overdid that and I think one of the reasons, and this does come after years and years of reflecting back on that decision to marry this man.

It was not a marriage that lasted, but it was one that I went through with. I think that I really was looking for a safe harbor. I felt like being single, having blonde hair, being fairly slim at the time, you know, just being that young, single, somewhat attractive woman had set me up for a lot of the things that were said about me, particularly the reasons and motivations of why I would be where I was. And it may sound very simplistic, but it sounded very enticing for me to say yes and become a married woman, which I felt would give me some protection from what I considered to be this onslaught. I'm going to just take a little bit of personal privilege to just read, if I can, from a very

lovely email that a colleague of mine at Sports Illustrated at the time and a very long time friend of mine sent to me after reading the book. It's not long, but I think it gets to your point. He said that there is so much information and such great detail that I never knew or was fully able to appreciate in your book, including most importantly,

the depth and persistence of pain, pressure, and excruciating frustration that you were forced to endure and you worked so hard to keep hidden from your many, many dear friends and colleagues. Of course, I wish we all could have done more to support you in your historic crusade." So that's a part of his email. And I think that, you know, as a dear, dear friend, looking in and looking back at that time, I think he's exactly right. I just didn't open up to the

people that I should have and trusted them that they would understand it as not coming from a whining or complaining or sort of bitchy woman, but it was coming from the heart of someone who was really enduring something that she really didn't know how to deal with. Well, I think it would be easy to read your story and say, that was then, this is now, and pride ourselves on our progress as a society, which we should do because we've made much progress and it's been hard won progress by people like you, and yet history repeats itself. And so I was thinking as I was reading this book and then you made the connection explicit

toward the end of the story, you mentioned Phyllis Schlafly and the scaremongering about bathrooms and the ERA, not earned run average in this case, Equal Rights Amendment. There are clear parallels to things that are happening today, right? And similar moral panics, trans athletes, not just athletes, just in the culture and the society at large, right? This specter of the personal private space being invaded. And having been through something similar almost 50 years ago now, I wonder how clearly you view those parallels and what you make of the fact that though we have moved beyond that in many ways, perhaps we haven't in many others.

I definitely see the parallels. And in part, I'm glad that it took me longer than it should have to write this book, because I feel that on a number of levels it's coming out at the right time. And one of them is coming out and joining the time in which we are having a cultural divide, cultural moment focused on issues such as trans athletes and how to determine where they belong or who they belong competing against and who are they. And then just in a broader cultural sense,

just the whole rancor and division that we see in our country, those sort of wedge issues that we talk about politically and certainly trans women, trans men are definitely part of that cultural wedge that's being placed between us to divide us. You know, I have a daughter who's just turned 28 years old and when I wrote the prologue for this book she was 26 years old and it was during that same year that the Dobbs decision was reached by the Supreme Court and I thought back to in

two ways. One is she's exactly the same age I was when I went through this legal case. And so I began to associate, obviously, you know, seeing her now as my daughter from my case a generation later, the same age. But I also obviously saw the fact that back in those days, we had fought for Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wade had opened up possibilities for my generation that women before us had never had. Obviously, the issues of contraception had existed before, but now women had the right also to seek an abortion and also to really take control of their reproductive health. Where you see that challenged and you begin to see the threats that have been made

by some of the justices who ruled against Roe v. Wade, really signaling what might come next. I feel like my book is a really a story about the value of a court that sees in the constitutional protections that we were given, you know, by our founders, sees in them protections that I think have been walked over recently. And you know, I just watch my daughter's generation as they come to terms with how they're going to come back and fight against some of the things that we felt were resolved when I was

her age. So, yes, I'm quite pleased that I'm a very slow writer and that my book has come out at the time that it has, particularly I will add with the incredible emergence, just absolutely stupendous emergence of women's professional sports, women's college sports, as a legacy of the title nine, which also was passed in the same era

that my suit took place. I think it's just a really wonderful time for us to celebrate both women in sports and the contributions that have been made and continue to be made by women in sports media. That would probably be the perfect place to end this conversation, but I have one final relatively frivolous question for you.

Okay. How do you feel about the fact that Bowie Kuhn is in the Hall of Fame? Ha ha ha ha ha. Let me tell you that I did not make an extra effort to go look at his plaque when I was at Cooperstown. Interestingly, I am not alone in my view that that was perhaps not the best considered decision the Hall ever made. Other people have said, but I will

align myself with their comments, and that is that he always seemed to end up on the wrong side of history. Well, it's striking reading this now also because as a member of the Baseball Writers Association, I know that my fellow members are always fighting for access to clubhouses, which teams in the league are often eager to restrict, and the media environment has changed and, of course, has dwindled in some ways. And also players and teams, they have their own outlets. They can reach people directly and often they don't see the utility of talking

to reporters and having reporters in what they consider their space. Only some players of course, some players welcome those interactions. But there is still sort of a fight for that right and access going on for completely different reasons against completely different sorts of assaults and ones that may prove implacable, but also I think are a lot less daunting than the ones that you faced and that you overcame and helped others enjoy the fruits of for the past several decades. So thank you for that fight and thank you for writing about it.

Well, thank you. And I wish all of your fellow sports writers good fortune in fighting that because I firmly believe as someone now who devours the sports pages and is on the other end of wanting to receive the news that actually hearing from reporters who clearly have been in a clubhouse and convey not just the quotes of players, but perhaps

some other sense of what's going on in the dynamics of the team, things that you can only pick up when you're around the whole team in an environment like the clubhouse, I would strongly argue that those pieces, the ones that convey that sense of baseball, are the ones that I'm going to gravitate to the most. And I sure hope that you win your battles to continue to have the access. So we as readers can experience the game in that way. Yes. Locker room talk is pretty important. And it is also available in a bookstore near you.

Thank you very much, Melissa. Thanks so much, Ben. You talk very well. Now we'll see what happens in court. We'll see. That will do it for today. And for this fun, overflowing week at Effectively Wild, Meg will be back next time.

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