Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2222: Deuces (Effectively) Wild

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg’s return from vacation, Corbin Burnes’s cutter comeback, the demotion of CJ Abrams, the no-longer-dynamic duo of Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, the firing of Reds manager David Bell, the Tigers promoting Jackson Jobe, Shota Imanaga’s post-NPB performance, teams refusing to use injuries as an excuse, Charlie Blackmon’s […]

Well, it's moments like these that make you ask, How can you not be pedantic about baseball? If baseball were different, how different would it be? On the case with light ripping, all analytically, Cross-check and compile, find a new understanding, Non-effectively, why though, can you not be pedantic? Yes, when it comes to baseball, how can you not be pedantic? Yes, when it comes to baseball, how can you not be pedantic? Lovely.

Okay. Here we go. We should just start with that. Just a pregnant pause followed by laughter as you realize that you now have intro yips. Yep, I have intro yips. This is episode 2,222 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Meg Raulia Fangraphs and I'm joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer.

Ben, how are you? Well, happy to have you back and there you go. You ripped the rest right off. Once you got going, happy to have you back. And there you go. Yeah. You ripped the rest right off. Once you got going, the muscle memory came back. Yeah. I walked the first batter of the inning, but recovered from there. So here we are. I guess the twos are wild, unaffectively wild today.

So just a two, two, two, two, that maybe made it a little easier for you. But I have been imagining you coming back from a couple of weeks of vacation and just rip van winkling back to the podcast, not knowing what has happened in the intervening time and just imagining you looking at the standings and saying the tigers are where? And Tani has how many steals and homers? I'm sure you weren't completely off the grid, but it's been a while since we potted. Yeah, it's been a minute. And these standings, Ben, they look real different in some important ways. I mean, not top to bottom, but we have some feisty tigers.

We have swooning royals. And twins. And twins, yeah. We have a new franchise home run leader for the San Diego Padres. That's a little less impactful to everyone else, but interesting for my purposes, considering that that hit came against the Seattle Mariners. We have a, Ben, they're so close to just doing what I thought. Ben

Yes. You predicted maximum Mariners torment and that is what you have gotten. Just staying close enough to theoretically still be in it here in the last week of the season and yet continuing to blow big games and then follow the blowing of big games with big starts and staying in it. They're just totally putting the screws to you. Yeah, they really are. I got to watch them just get obliterated by the New York Yankees in person. Poor Brian Wu.

What a bad night that young man had. I still had a fine time at the ballpark despite the catastrophic score. I got to see the salmon run in person, Ben. Oh, nice. And let me tell you, what a magical, where is my embroidered dad hat for my favorite salmon? There is some salmon run merch I know because people sent it to us. I know, but there could be more Mariners.

There could be more and I would buy it. But yeah, we're looking at, I think a much more exciting conclusion to the end of the regular season than certainly I was anticipating. And I'm having a great time. I'm sure that fans of the Royals and Twins wish that things were a little bit different than they are now, but that's exciting. The Phillies won the division for the first time in 10,000 years. The Diamondbacks are holding on by their fingernails.

The Mets are a playoff team. My stars and garters, what is going on here? Well, we don't have to catch up on everything you missed because the podcast continued in your absence, but it is always an adjustment coming back from a vacation and realizing how much you have to catch up on. And that applies to baseball too, even if you're watching baseball while you're gone. You engage in it in a different way when at the end of the day you think to yourself, I should have somebody to write about that.

And I did, then it's like I took the part of my brain that is consumed by work, which let's be real, is like such a big part of my brain and I successfully unplugged that part. Got to see a concert at the Gorge, you know? I just, I wasn't too hot for the first time in 115 days, who even knows? I do love that Arizona broke its days 100 or over streak while I was gone and it is 107 degrees right now. Yeah, it's a different thing when you're on vacation and you engage with sports.

You're trying to stay in it, but you do feel like you miss critical moments. I wasn't watching that Marlins game live when Otani did his thing. I had to catch replays of that really just incredible performance. So it's a different thing. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you've recharged your energy reserves so that you can start to set them again once the postseason starts, which is maybe your biggest time of year. So Well, I'm glad you've recharged your energy reserves so that you can start to sap them again once the postseason starts, which is maybe your biggest time of year. So we'll get to that,

but some stuff that we can talk about that I didn't talk about while you were gone. So the last time we talked, we talked about Corbin Burns and the fact that there were some, if not really red flags, maybe some, some fuchsia flags, some, some ochre flags that were being raised just because his cutter was not what it was in 2021 when it was just this dominant, maybe the best pitch in baseball.

And he had so many whiffs and so many strikeouts and he's still been an effective starter this year, but he has not missed many bats. He basically had like a league average strikeout rate and the cutter was not moving the same way. We talked about this on episode 2215 and then Robert Orr subsequently wrote about it, made the same observation with more detail in a baseball prospectus piece. And it turns out that Corbin Burns did not need our help. He was not unaware of what was happening to his cutter. And as we noted, this was a concern, not just for the Orioles, but also for his free agency.

Because we were talking about, well, would teams back away from Burns? Would they exercise caution as they did with some of the top starters from last season because of his diminished strikeout rate. And he has, since we last potted, taken steps to correct that. And he has targeted the cutter and he has tried to turn back the clock with the cutter and make it more like it behaved before. And I read an excellent article just this week in the Baltimore banner by Andy Koska.

Corbin Burns fixed his key pitch just in time for the Orioles postseason. And here is how Burns explained what happened after what was an ugly August by Corbin Burns standards. He got knocked around that month. And Burns said, I was getting too efficient with how I was spinning it, which was making it a shitty four seam fastball.

And it was getting hit like a shitty four seam fastball. And he had shelved his four seamer years ago for that reason. And the cutter was the key that unlocked the ace inside Corbin Burns. And so his cutter had kind of morphed back into this four seamer. And so here's what he said,

it worked for the first half of the year, but it was more so getting away with it because our breaking balls and stuff were so good. It says our breaking balls and stuff. I don't know if this is like the royal we with Corbin Burns or whether it's just kind of a collective effort or what, but cutter wasn't

performing that good. It got to a point where guys weren't swinging at the breaking stuff and we're just keying in on the cutter and it beat us for two or three starts in August. Again, maybe this is the Orioles. He's just speaking collectively of the Orioles, not just like a first person plural sort of situation with Corbin Byrnes. Maybe he thinks of Adley Richmondutchman as an extension of himself. Maybe, yeah. Frankly, it may have cost me another run at the Siam.

So once we kind of hit that rough patch, those two or three in a row, it was, okay, now it's time to get back to the cutter we know we can get to. And he has pitched considerably better in September. He said, just changing the shape of the cutter helped me command it that much better, command it where I want to that much better. And we're getting back to getting the swing and miss and throwing to both sides of the plate, it just makes my world so much easier with the breaking stuff as well. It's definitely in a good spot.

And Andy goes over some of the changes in the pitches profile. It was diminished in terms of horizontal movement and that has ticked back up this month. There's some vertical dips that he's getting that he wasn't getting. And the cutter is getting more swing and miss and he's seemingly spotting it better and he's throwing it lower in the zone. It was getting too high up location wise too. So he said he got away from his best cutter early in the year, mainly because of his mechanics and he didn't immediately make a change because

he had success with it. So we kind of ran with it, but it started doing things I didn't normally do in the past, which is throwing that cutter up in the zone, getting better life to it. It was something new. So it worked for three months until the league caught on. So it was good to adjust and get back to what I needed to do. So he seems to be pretty content with the cutter now to add more horizontal,

took the ride off it, got it back to the bottom of the zone, which just profiles better with what I do. And obviously the last month has shown it. So that's an encouraging sign for the Orioles as they prepare to enter the postseason and also an encouraging sign for Cor Orioles as they prepare to enter the postseason. And also an encouraging sign for Corbin Burns and by extension, Scott Boris as they prepare for free agency. Yeah.

I have to imagine being able to walk into the room and say, yeah, that didn't go well for a month. Here's why. You know, I do think that he will continue to have questions to answer about sort of his long-term viability. But as I noted last time, like he is the best, I think, available starter on the market and that will, you know, create demand for his services. And if he can say, like, I was able to get it to look like it used to and here were the

results from that. And especially if he's able to add like a postseason run where he pitches really well, you know, I think it'll go okay for him. It's probably his ultimate contract, I imagine, will be diminished relative to his expectation from a couple of years ago. But, you know, I don't think he'll probably still do pretty well for himself. Yeah. And I was looking at the graphs on Brooks baseball and you can see that the vertical movement that has changed considerably relative to

the rest of this year. The horizontal movement as well has ticked up as Andy said, and it's back more toward what it was in previous seasons. It's actually being thrown slower by a tick, tick and a half, which maybe that's just a product of trying to command it better or the different spin profile and movement profile. Maybe he's sacrificing some speed for movement and command. It's interesting that he says, I was getting too efficient with it.

Usually that's a good thing to be very efficient, but not always in pitching. Sometimes you're getting great spin efficiency and you're not getting the kind of movement that you want. Yeah. I was going to say he sounds like someone in a job interview. I work too hard, you know, I care too much. But then when you follow that up with two sh** in a row, kind of, you know.

Right. And the other thing, I hesitate to pronounce him fixed or back to 2021 burns. Like if you look at his monthly splits, he was better in September. He's still, it was like a 23.2% strikeout rate this month, which is not that much higher than his previous months this season. Now, maybe the cutter is getting more whiffs, but it's not like he's bounced back to being just untouchable burns of 2021. So we'll see if he finishes strong and if he can carry this forward, but at least he is aware. And I guess I get it

because it wasn't like he had been bad. And so yeah, if you're still like the best starter on your team and your team is going well as the Orioles were until fairly recently and you're still mostly effective, then maybe you say, yeah, we'll just keep doing what we're doing here. And then it takes that month to be a wake up call where it's like, oh, okay, now I actually have to change. You would think that you would want to try to stay as close to 2021, Kerben Burns as possible because it was like the best pitcher in baseball. So any deviation from that, you'd think you'd want to correct. But I get why you can just kind of keep coasting along if you're still a really good starter, just not otherworldly. Right. Yeah, I think that's right. All right. Guess we can stay in the Baltimore DC area because there is some news concerning another player who has run into tough times of late,

both on the field and off, and that is CJ Abrams. So if you followed the CJ Abrams saga. I did. I saw that he was demoted and that he will not be playing in the majors again this year. I saw that he seemingly was out quite late into the morning before a day game. Is that right? Against the Chicago Cubs. That is correct. And his demotion will not cost him like a full year of service or anything like that. So there's no service time shenanigans. I was surprised that, you know, I know that they did not offer

too too many specifics. It did seem like his demotion was disciplinary, which teams tend to avoid admitting to, but I thought it was fine. What did you think? You went, you didn't go, but you like had an intake of breath. Are there details that I'm missing? Are we going to get emails because of my missing details? Well, I guess there's the detail that he has been bad at baseball lately, but there's that is that's not why he was demoted as you're saying it. If he had just been struggling on the field while their nationals are playing out the string and obviously has an important part of their future and you

would not just punish him by demoting him, You'd want to get it straightened out. The nationals AAA affiliate is not even playing anymore. So he's just sort of sitting around. This is purely a lesson learning sort of exercise, but he was very good down the stretch last year and he moved to the lead out spot and he was stealing bases left and right. He was an all star. Yeah.

I mean, last year though, like the second half last year, and then he was stealing bases left and right. He was an all-star. Yeah, I mean, last year though, like in the second half last year. And then he was a popular breakout pick coming into this year. And that looks good because he was good. He had a 129 WRC plus before the all-star break. And as you said, he was an all-star. It was weird because he was great in March slash April and then ice cold in May and then on fire in June.

So it was hot and cold, but overall quite warm. And so it looks like the breakout was happening. And then post All-Star break, 64 WRC plus, he'd actually been a bit better this month, but was just really scuffling in July and August and just not looking great. And so we don't know whether that is connected to the off-the-field behavior or whether this was a one-time only infraction. And Dave Martinez, again, yet didn't address the specifics, said they supported Abrams, said that he spoke with Abrams for a significant time, called it an emotional conversation during which the two wept together. So hopefully it was

cathartic for them both. But yeah, it was, there were tweets circulating before anything was officially reported that he had been sighted at this casino at 8 a.m. This was confirmed by reputable reporters, including Jeff Passon. So he went 0 for 3 with a walk and strikeout in that game. It was a 1 p.m. start and he was out at the casino at 8 in the morning. So yeah, probably not putting yourself in the best position to excel in that spot. And as you were saying, I guess teams might hesitate to say that it is punitive or for behavior because then maybe you open yourself up to a protest or a grievance. Yeah. And I don't know whether there will be in this case because maybe Abrams accepts that he made a boo boo and that he shouldn't have done that.

And it's been reflected in his performance, or at least it's coincided with poor performance. Initially, when I saw this, I did have the feeling of, man, being a professional athlete is kind of a 24-7 job. Because I could go to a casino until 8 a.m. and I could roll up to work. And granted, if I didn't perform well at work, I mean, if I were, you know, I don't know how many times I've done an Effectively Wild without having slept more than C.J. Abrams did that day. Now, I am not out at the casino. I'm not out on a bed or anything. I'm probably staying up working on other stuff, but you could still say it might impair my performance. I tend to think I'm good at least relative to most people on low sleep, but then again, maybe I'm fooling myself.

No, Ben, you are good. You have to be good on low sleep because it concerns me to this day. I worry about that and stretching in an active way. It occupies a forward part of my mind space. Imagine how brilliant I'd be if I just suddenly started sleeping nine hours a night. That's your business. I reach a higher level.

Yeah, but the point is I can do that. Sure. Yeah, if I'm late to work, I mean, it's a weird job that we have. It's a weird job, but I get what you're saying. Nobody's on the look for you, right? Even if you were at a casino at 8 a.m., I doubt very strongly that anyone would be like, oh my God, it's Kim Lindbergh.

You're able to be reliably anonymous in public spaces in a way that pro athletes really aren't able to be. Yes. And also a lot of people, if you show up for work on time and you punch the clock and you stay awake, let's say, I mean, if you're falling asleep at your desk or something, then okay, that's going to be a problem. But if you retain some minimal amount of functioning, some minimal capacity. We are betraying that we are both work from home types in a pretty profound way, just

reminding everyone constantly. But yeah. That's the thing. I mean, I can roll out of bed and I'm at work, essentially, for better or worse, and my hours are unusual and can be unusual, and most people don't have that sort of flexibility and luxury, I understand that, but also most people, what you do when you're off the clock,

you can do that, and unless it gets to a point where it's really impairing your performance in an obvious way, then that's okay, cause it's your time, it's not company time. And that's obviously true to an extent with a major league baseball player or any professional athlete, they do have personal lives, but also they have to maintain such a high level

of functioning and performance in order to compete against the best in the world at what they do. And you need the mental acuity and the physical edge to hit 100 mile per hour pitches and glove 100 mile per hour batted balls. And you just can't be dragging. And of course, like going back to time immemorial, I mean, you know, how many stories are there of players hung over and, you know, flu-like symptoms as a euphemism for I drank too much.

And that sort of thing happened more in previous eras than now, but perhaps still happens from time to time now. But the line there, it's kind of an all-encompassing job. And you're richly rewarded for those demands. You get fame and fortune and you get the off season off quote unquote, although again, you do have to be training and maintaining your edge or it's going to be obvious when you show up. But it's an aspect of the job that I don't think I would like and that I didn't like even when I was playing on school teams as a kid. I probably stopped playing sports on a school competition level before my talent forced me to

because I just kind of wanted the freedom to go home after school to pursue other hobbies. And even if you're on a baseball team in high school or something, you're giving up your evenings, your weekends, their practices, their team meetings, their outings, your traveling to events, right? I mean, you have to make a lot of sacrifices in your time and your agency. And especially if you're a pro athlete and then it's like, well, I can't even choose where I'm going to work necessarily or for whom or where I'm going to go. It's just a weird job. So I felt some sympathy for him. My initial impulse was like, leave him alone.

He can do whatever he wants as long as he shows up and enters the bell. But if you're not playing well and everyone knows that you obviously weren't prepared as well as you could have been for that game, then yeah, I don't know what the exact language in the uniform player contract or people's individual contract says about your obligations to be at your peak for a game, but that's why it's sort of a squishy thing to navigate. When can you punish a player for not being prepared if they're showing up? I also have sympathy for Abrams in this situation. The decision to send him down is obviously a punitive one, but I think that it's useful

to remember that Abrams is still only like 23. He turns 24 next month and that's an adult person, but it's still a young adult person. You know, the pressures of being a pro athlete are profound. The privileges that come with being a pro athlete are also pretty substantial. We continue to need sort of guidance and direction through our lives, even after we are adults, right, and can vote and drink and do all sorts of things, right? Not yet rent a car without penalty in CJ's case, but like, you know, he's an adult person.

Or in my case. Well, yeah, but you know, again, you're making active choices in your own life, Ben, and you get to live with those choices. But I think that having an appreciation for the strangeness of the job, but also the sort of unique necessity that that workplace creates for guys to be held accountable and in a way that is fair and proportionate, which this feels like it is to me, but is real. This struck me as fine. Again, I was surprised that, not that they said, we demoted him because he was at a casino at 8 AM, but it was obvious that this was sort of punitive.

But I think saying, hey, this isn't how we need you to show up for this franchise and for yourself. And there's going to be a consequence for you having failed to do that. And it does not need to be a thing that defines him or that we even remember. I think it's fine to say there needs to be a consequence for this going the wrong direction. And it's just an opportunity to course correct. And it does come with real consequence to him. He's not going to be making a big league game check while he's down, right? But it's not going to cost him a year toward free agency. So it feels, it felt fine to me, you know? And I think that it is such a strange job. And you're right

that like the boundaries of when your obligations to your employer end are so much squishier and amorphous when you're a pro athlete and what they expect of you is different. But I think saying to him, you're going to be an important part of this franchise and we're about to be good. You got to tighten up, bud. That's fine. I think it's fine.

And it doesn't seem, it seems like it was received in the way that's appropriate. I imagine that he felt embarrassed that this happened and that it was known to people. And it sounds like his manager met him with sternness but also compassion. It seemed fine. It seemed like it was well handled to me. Yeah. I'm not criticizing the nationals. I'm more just reflecting on this is just a weird occupation. It's such a weird job. Perfectly strange. Strange every day in ways that even though we have a sense of the list of at least many of the things that are strange about it that we cannot fully appreciate even as people who also have strange jobs.

But I think that if you approach accountability with compassion, like that is a form of care when it's handled correctly because you want to say, like he's so talented. We've seen what it looks like when it's going good for him and like it's being an all star. Like that's great. So tighten up, get your head on straight for next year. And I think as long as he shows up to spring training and goes about his work and hopefully has a better start to this, well, has a better start to next season than his second half looked this year, we'll forget, you know, this kind of stuff doesn't have to stick with

people unless they do other stuff that makes it stick. So long list of accomplished players who had some youthful indiscretion or misstep and then they got corrected and then they learned from that and hopefully he will. And maybe there will be sort of a rehabilitation of his public image. He shows up to spring training and I don't know whether he'll address it in detail or just obliquely, but can talk about how dedicated he is now and hopefully that's all sincere. And yeah, you never know if it's a one time thing or whether there have been other behind the scenes stuff that informed the decision to send him down as opposed to just benching him or giving him a stern talking to or something.

We're not really privy to all the details necessarily, but yeah, it costs him 30 K, which is not nothing. It's a lot for most people. It's less for someone who's even making roughly the major league minimum, but that's the difference between the major league salary and the minor league salary for that time that he won't be on the big league roster. And that's in addition to what he probably lost at the casino, which hopefully wasn't that much. But I guess you just have to tell yourself, if I'm good and lucky, maybe I'll have 20 years of my life as a professional athlete.

And then that'll be over. And then I can do whatever the heck I want for the rest of my life. And it's just odd because you know that you have an expiration date. And so you almost have to set aside certain things and expectations of free time and privacy within reason. Obviously you should still have plenty of privacy, I'm not saying, but there's kind of a panopticon nature of just being a public figure in this way

that we don't even do this podcast on video. So we're not even looking at each other, let alone someone else looking at us while we're doing this. So you just have to have the mindset, I guess, of, you know, this is just a chunk of my life and I will be richly rewarded. And lots of people would love to do this. And these are the things you have to do in order to live this dream. And then I can spend the rest of my life at the casino if I want to. Hopefully not. That doesn't sound really remunerative or fulfilling, but I won't pass judgment on people's private recreation. We sometimes experience being perceived in public by strangers. And I don't want people

to feel like it's not nice when they say hi, because sometimes it's very nice. And I think that the overwhelming majority of our listeners are respectful of boundaries and don't make it weird. But it is, at least for me, I'll speak for myself, jarring every single time just because I do not... We are not famous. We are known to a slice of the podcast world, I guess. But we are not famous people. And that little exposure to it makes me think that being actually famous must be a living

nightmare. Yeah. And consider the hierarchy because CJ Abrams isn't actually famous, really, in the grand scheme of celebrity. He's pretty far down the tier list, right? And yet high enough up that people will tweet about him being at a casino. So you can't ever feel like you're totally in command of your own private life, even at that level. And so imagine some top athlete in baseball, some top athlete in another sport where athletes tend to be bigger celebrities or the entertainment world where it's probably another level.

Yes, it's just a taste of that sort of scary intoxicating fame for CJ Abrams. And even that makes me wary. Yeah, no thank you. Hard pass. So hopefully, you know, this is just like a bump in the road of a long and great career and we'll come back next spring and brush it off and go from there. Two other guys who will attempt to do that and who are on the opposite end of their careers, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer.

They have struggled also, not because of casino time, as far as we know, but because of age and infirmity. And it struck me that there's something at stake here, which is Justin Verlander, I think, has one regular season start remaining as he really auditions at this point for a place on the Astros postseason roster because he has not really been deserving of one since he returned possibly prematurely, he said, from a neck injury that sidelined him for some time. And he's been bad since then. And those two together, Scherzer and Verlander,

if you go by baseball reference war, they have combined for positive war in every season since 2006. And that is in jeopardy now because Scherzer, whose season is over, he has a hamstring strain now, the latest in a long list of maladies. He finishes the season with 0.4 baseball reference war. Justin Verlander is at negative 0.4.

So without going beyond those decimal places, we are poised. We are, it's hanging in the balance. Will this streak continued? Verlander and Scherzer combined have been replacement level this season. And it has been a really long time since you could say that. 2005, which was before Scherzer debuted in the big leagues, Verlander just had some small number of innings and had negative 0.2 baseball reference were that year.

But every year since then, it's been kind of a constant with those two. The least war that they've had in any season since they showed up was, well, 2020, which doesn't really count. Sure, that doesn't really count. 2.4. Yeah. Yeah. And other than that that 2008 was a low ebb. They had three and that was before Scherzer was really Scherzer. Yeah. That was his rookie year. So really like,

they've been stars for some time and other than 2020, they haven't had a season of below even like five and a half war since 2008. Yeah. So like last year, 5.6, that was as low as they've gone really since they got started in a regular length season. From Scherzer's first full year, 2009 through last year, excluding 2020, they averaged 10.1 combined baseball reference war and now nothing out of the two of them, war wise at least. Now, if we go by fan graphs were, I guess we could say that they actually have a 20 season streak going, which has been extended because even though Verlander had a seven plus ERA and his first taste of the majors in 2005, he had 0.1 Fangrafts War, so positive.

And then I think the two have combined for 1.0 Fangrafts War this year, so they've been better by FIC than by Raw Runs Allowed, I suppose. But however you slice it and whichever war you use, it feels like the end. I don't think it's literally the end because Scherzer has already said that he intends to pitch and wants to give it another go. And Verlander, we know just wants to pitch forever or has expressed that desire previously. I don't know how that has changed given that he is no longer effective or able to consistently stay healthy.

But maybe there will be a last gasp from one or both of them next year. But yeah, this is the first year in decades and really almost two decades that they have been basically non-factors. Nicole Zichal-Burkardt It's so strange because Scherzers deal with the nationals, went about as well as a free agent contract can go. From a dollars per war perspective, bang on. If all you cared about is the beep, boop, bop. Obviously, did so well over that stretch, pitched such important innings, was just a

staple there. We got to know his weird eyes, you know, like they're not weird, but they're, you know, they're a little weird, like in a good way. But like, Connotations of weird. I'm fine with it, but also feel a need to clarify who could say. Anyway, so like, you know, that went so well. Verlander's career has been incredible. And I think that, you know, I had this temptation to be like, well, there's this pitch forever, you know, look at them, like look at their, you know,

they're like, you know, strong guys, you know, they're built well. And I was caught off guard a little bit, I think by just where the decline came and how quickly it did because it felt like they were doing such a good job of defying any real decline. And then it just came for them so fast. Like those guys were like big trade deadline acquisitions recently, you know? Like the Mets got real prospects back for both of those guys. It just, it fell apart so fast.

Like I think that you get to a point where the cumulative toll of the injuries is just such that it's, it's kind of insurmountable. But when you look at the, the guys, the starters from this era who, you know, we feel are just like obvious hall of famers don't really have to worry about them. Like those, those guys are sort of top of the list. I don't think that these last couple of years are going to impact the way we think about them when it comes time to evaluate their Hall of Fame case. But I do wish that they had been able to kind of go out, assuming, but go out on a higher

note if this does end up being the end for both of them. I wouldn't be surprised if they say they want to keep pitching fine, if they ended up being the end for both of them. I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, they say they want to keep pitching fine. If they ended up being guys who like take time to get healthy and then end up being like late signings into the summer next year, that wouldn't totally shock me. But it's just a good reminder. You don't, you don't get to decide the guys. We've talked about this before on the pod, like the guys who end up having their final year of their careers be like the retirement tour with great performance. Like I think David Ortiz is still like the pinnacle of this for me where it's like, wow, what a way to go out. It doesn't get to happen that often. You just kind of have to take your career as it comes. And I think that they've both accumulated so, with such impressive resumes or such important

guys to the sport that it is a little painful to see them diminished. Even if, you know, Verlander not pitching well, Freelancers has been useful to my family, but you don't, you know, you want them to have sort of an end that is fitting and representative and you don't always get that. if this ends up being the end, which of course we don't know if it will be the end. Like, you're gonna keep it, you're ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. And then, you know, I've said, I actually would wanna go out this way.

I wouldn't wanna go out, maybe with quite as many IELTS-tints perhaps, but then surgeries and such, but I would want to know that it was time to go. I would not wanna have any regrets, any second thoughts, any idea, any way of fooling myself. I could still suit up and get out there and be as good as I ever was.

I would want to be bad for a little while, just so I know. Like send me a strong signal that it is time to ride off into the sunset. But it's, I guess it's the fact that they haven't really had an extended time of sort of decline. Right, they've just been hurt. Yeah. Yeah.

They've both been really great old pitchers in addition to just great pitchers overall. And then sometimes the end comes quickly and you're just sailing along and oh, I'm untouched by father time. And then boom, it just hits you all at once. It's like, I've read that study recently that shows that like we don't age in a linear fashion, that it seems like around the age of 44, which is, I guess, too close for comfort for us. It's, you know, out there on the horizon. Well, it depends what you're going to say.

Well, it's not good. You get younger and better than ever. No, not really. You kind of have like a couple periods of sort of accelerated aging where like your body makeup and chemistry changes like around the ages of like 44 and 60 or so, which I was sort of skeptical because it sounds so specific like 44, like, you know, it can't be the same for everyone, but there's the idea I, that it's not just kind of a gradual incremental decline. It's like you actually kind of can get old all at once or like in stages sort of. And maybe that happens for athletes sometimes too, where we haven't had a long period to get used to the idea that these guys aren't good anymore. And maybe they're not going to be pitching anymore. It's not like a Greg Maddux, let's say,

who all time great, even better than these two. But he had that period of several seasons at the end of his career where he was roughly a league average pitcher, like still, still big league quality pitcher, but getting by on guts and guile and finesse, which I think kind of warped people's memories of what he was in his prime, what he actually did have better stuff. Yes, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He wasn't always that way, but he was that way for long enough that we got used to that image of him and we kind of came to terms with, okay, peak Maddox is long gone and now he's just kind of hanging around and this is, it's nice to see the professor at work and still outsmarting guys with diminished stuff. But yeah, we haven't had that so much with Verlander and Scherzer because they've been aces fairly recently at least on a rate basis and Verlander winning a Cy Young Award just recently after the comeback from Tommy John, which no one really expected. So yeah, that's what makes me wonder.

Okay, maybe there's a little life left if they just took some time off and came back, but who knows? It's kind of like Scherzer has not been bad on a rate basis. He just has been unable to stay on the mound for an extended period of time. Whereas Verlander really for the first time this year has been bad. He's been unavailable and also ineffective when he has been available. So that's tough to see, but maybe not for Mirrors fans as you said. Yeah, but I mean, it's still tough to see. It's not the way that you want him to go out. 44, huh? Well, you don't even have to go through MetaPos. Wow.

Yeah, I guess not. Verlander is 41 and Scherzer is 40 now. So they're, they're coming up on that. Well another guy who has reached the end of his rope at least with one team is David Bell, who was fired by the Reds after several seasons as their skipper. He's gone with a week or so left in the season. And I guess we have returned to not talking about the Reds this season. We really deviated from this podcast long-term policy of not talking about the Reds last year. Suddenly we were talking about the Reds a lot. And then we went back to not talking about them aside from the occasional Elie

De La Cruz conversation, because they've been pretty pedestrian and pretty mediocre and they have not taken any step forward. And that is why David Bell has been forced to exit. And I don't know that it's fair exactly, or that you can pin it on him. It's one of those, well, team is expected to make progress and doesn't make progress and thus the manager has to pay that price. Now, Nick Kroll, who's the president of baseball

operations for the Reds, he said, when you look across the board, I thought we should have been better. And I'm sure a lot of people thought that the Reds would be better than they've been this year. Although if you look at the preseason playoff odds and projections, they are dead on, they are bang on what they were supposed to be. In fact, I think they are maybe the third closest team if you compare their current end of season win total projection, which obviously at this point is not very different from their current win total to their preseason. The only teams that are closer are the Cubs and the Rockies who are like

0.2, 0.3 wins off because the preseason projections are fractional and the Reds are 0.6 off as we speak. So those are the three teams that are tracking to be within one win of what they were supposed to be. So I guess it's, it's not like a, they were who we thought they would be kind of thing, but, but they were who the preseason playoff odds expected them to be. I think it's just that there was a lot of optimism surrounding the Reds and maybe some irrational exuberance around the reds. And in fact, the reds, they, I guess you could say bought high on David Bell cause they signed him to an extension. I think it was last July when the reds were riding high and I believe we're in

playoff position at that point. And they signed him to an extension through 2026, obviously forecasting further improvement. And that improvement did not come, but then again, was it fair to expect it to come to the extent that would have saved David Bell's job? I don't have a strong read on David Bell. I thought he did fine. It seemed like he was doing fine. I don't think that like David Bell is why the Reds were, you know, meeting expectations in terms of our play of FODs. I think coming in below expectation in terms of what people maybe, I think they

were a popular like dark horse wild card pick for a lot of people, right? Cause like Ellie's so exciting. I think that when a team like them actually spends money, even though we were like, the way they're spending money is weird. I think that that does tend to generate enthusiasm because it suggests that the club believes in themselves, right? That they are like, now is the time we can actually go and do something because we don't generally spend and now we are. So surely they must know something, right? That they are like, now is the time we can actually go and do something because we don't generally spend and now we are. So surely they must know something, right? I think that that can be kind of a perspective that people have. You know, they do have young

and youngish guys who seemed poised to take a step forward, who've shown that they can be good in spurts, but you know, injuries. They dealt with players dealing with suspension. The pitching has not really come together. Have you looked at Noelle Marche's numbers this year, Ben? Not the best. It's not going great over there. You know who the Reds could have really used this year? Luis Castillo. They haven't really been able to put together a rotation to deal with that division. The Brewers were good, even though as we have noted, they have their flaws. So it doesn't really surprise me where they ended up.

I am a little surprised that they've moved on from him, if only because I expected their posture to be one of, and this may well end up being their posture of like, oh, we need to retool a couple of things and then we'll be ready to go next year. And whenever I see a manager get fired, it tends to suggest to me that maybe you think your problems are bigger than that, but also maybe not because again, is it David Bell's fault? No, I don't think so. So they were seven games better than their base runs record last year.

So they were playing a little bit over their head and they're right on their base runs record this year. So you can't say they've really gotten unlucky given how they've played. And yes, I think there was a lot of optimism even on this podcast. I was excited, all the young Reds. And you can say in Bell's favor, the most important players took steps forward on that team. Ellie really put it all together, had himself a great season.

Hunter Green as well, looked like the pitcher everyone wanted him to be. And then yes, there were injuries, suspensions. And also the way that the Reds upgraded, you know, you could say Kroll should be faulting himself for the way that those funds were allocated. I mean, we were kind of quizzical about the Jamer Condolario signing because there didn't seem to be a place for him. Now, as it turned out, there were plenty of places for him. There was a lot of room at the end for Condolario. What with the injuries and suspensions that infield turned out not to be as

crowded as it was supposed to be, but also he was not good. So that was one of their big additions. Now, Nick Martinez has been good. Frankie Montas, you know, they ended up moving him, but he, he hasn't been great and you know, Emilio Pagan and they're, they're big additions just didn't really move the needle much. So I think you could point to that. And Bell, he got ejected a lot. That was the most visible thing about him from afar. But yeah, I don't know that if you go from just over a year ago saying, yes, we want to be in the David Bell business for

multiple more years after 2024. Has he personally done anything that would make you think, well, he's no longer the guy we want or is it just a broader issue? And even if it's a broader issue, sometimes the manager is just the guy who's got to go to send the signal that there's going to be change and we take this failure seriously and we want to be better. And I think managers understand that that comes with the territory. Yeah. I think that they know that that is part of the gig that you might end up being kind of the sacrificial lamb. But again, they're close. They feel close to me. I don't know how much appetite there is going to be to continue to spend, which I think

is going to dictate a lot of this. But yeah, you're right. The sort of franchise anchors that they want had great years. Green really exceeded my expectations. That's sure something. I still think obviously that rotation needs work, although I'm looking at our leaderboards and they're not in as sorry a shape as I maybe expected them to be. And we'll kind of see how some of the guys who got hurt look when they come back in the

spring and maybe Marthe can figure something out over the off season. But yeah, when they spent it felt like they were doubling down on areas where they already had a ton of depth. Pagan in that ballpark just always seemed like a weird fit. I don't know. I think that it's not nearly as like egregious as the situation in Seattle where it's like, look inward, Jerry. But it is a little odd because I just don't know that the things that went wrong for them are really his fault. Did he get ejected a lot? I feel like I just, maybe I just didn't watch enough Reds.

I didn't know that he got ejected a lot. Did he get ejected a lot? Jared Ranere Maybe you can just conflate him with Aaron Boone as a part of the be named baseball bloodlines. But yeah. Nicole Zichal Yeah, he sure gets ejected a lot, Aaron Boone. It's like, why are you so angry, Aaron? Things seem like they're going well for you.

It could be worse. Well, we talked about the Reds. There you go, Reds fans. Probably not under the circumstances that you would have liked, but at least we returned to them at some point. And I would not at all be surprised if they enter next season as,

hey, this is the year for the Reds. And we'll see if it actually turns out to be. So sticking with the Central, although a team that things are going much better for, the Tigers and the Rays played a day game, which was rain delayed, but that game has gone final since we have started talking here.

And the Tigers victorious again. Another big boy, Psy quality outing for Tarek Scoobel. And another good job by the Tigers bullpen, which has been fantastic as I talked to Jason Benetti about while you were away, just more of the same, everything coming up Tigers. And I gotta say, they did not throw Jackson Job into the fire with this game, but I kind of love that call-up.

I love it. I love it. I guess in part I love it just because it's fun. It's so fun. It's so fun. Yeah. It's gutsy. You know, just like- Yes, gutsy is a great way to describe it. Do the David Price, just call up probably baseball's best pitching prospect at this point with a week or so left to go at the end of the season. And he's been pitching well, a little wild from time to time, but nasty stuff. And,

you know, three tough pitches and they're going to put them in the bullpen and he's going to just fire triple digits. And it could be a big bullpen weapon just down the stretch here and also potentially in the postseason. And we've seen that act before, whether it's a dedicated reliever like a Ryan Kirkering last year, of course, everyone remembers Francisco Rodriguez when he first came up, or sometimes it's a starter, a past and future starter who just in the short term, you throw him in the pen and hope his stuff plays up. The Tigers need that because as I talked to Jason about, they've been really riding their

relievers hard and they just have like two dependable starters at this point, maybe. And one of them is going to win a Cy Young, so that's a good start, but they've just been piecing that post-flarity rotation together and doing openers and bulk guys and just more bullpen innings, relief innings than any other team. And they could be excused for running on fumes. And after you've been riding those guys that hard just to get to October, then you run the risk of you get there and we ran the race and we won and then probably we snuck in and then everyone's gassed. So to inject a flamethrower with the youthful energy of Jackson

Job into that situation, I kind of love it. Could it backfire? Yes. But how exciting. Look, baseball gods, if you're listening, just take a beat, you know, go, you know, get a coffee, walk away. Here's the thing I'm going to say, and I swear I'm not trying to jinx anyone. I'm so excited to see Joe. I honestly don't think that there's a way for it to backfire in a way that they end up caring about long-term unless you were to get hurt, right? So that's the part where, okay, now you can come back in, baseball gods.

I wasn't talking about anything. I had no, we had no fun while you were gone. This is something I had to say to my nieces and several of my friends' children over vacation. We had no fun while you were in the bathroom. No fun was had. Okay, I love it. It's so fun.

It has a confidence, right? Because to your point, it's not just about getting in the postseason when you do something like that. It's about, hey, we want to have some freshness when we get there. We want to do something with this. Yeah, we wish we had Jack Flaherty back. Would so be useful to us right now, although the Dodgers are so grateful that they made the decisions that they did.

Forget that guy. We got our own Jackson. You guys out there think you have all the Jacksons? No, no, we have a Jackson and our Jackson is going to be great. I just think it's confident and exciting and it speaks to thinking you're going to be around not just a couple days from now, but a couple weeks from now. I love it so much. I think it is so fun. And like, if it doesn't go well for him, who cares? Who cares? I mean,

they'll care because they want to keep playing baseball, but they'll come into next spring and they'll be able to, you know, all the Detroit Beats will be able to write their piece about him, getting a taste for it and being around the guys. Then you go into the year and you're like, he already has postseason experience. Amazing. I think it's perfect. When I got the notification that they were calling him up, I was like, oh, what a treat for everyone.

Plus, you got to get all the Jacksons up at one time. You simply must have every Jackson. Every Jackson must be there. We've caught them all. We've completed the set. The Mount Rushmore of 20 to 22 year old Jackson's is now fully chiseled. And he's only made two starts in AAA. Of course, guys skip AAA fairly often these days, and he pitched very well in AA. He's climbed the ladder three levels. So you could say, well, is it, you know,

to throw him into the crucible like this, he does have issues with wildness at times. And so you could imagine, you know, every outing these days is pretty high leverage for the Tigers, typically. So maybe he comes into some outing and he's walking people. Hopefully they ease him in to some extent, if they even get an opportunity to ease him in, an opportunity that doesn't mean quite as much, but they haven't had a whole lot of those lately. So you can imagine if he was wild and the jitters, and he hasn't pitched at least professionally

out of the bullpen ever, he has exclusively started. And so you are asking him to do something he hasn't done before at a very high level in the thick of a playoff race or even the playoffs. And that's putting a lot on the guy. But then again, he's your third overall pick. He's your top prospect. You expect him to be a franchise pitcher for you.

And you give your fans hope. I mean, look, if somehow they end up missing now, and when I talked to Jason just last week, they were long shots and now they're not. Now they're favored to make it in. But if they were to blow it and if he were to play a part in that blowing it, that would stink and that would weigh heavy on him presumably over the off season, but hopefully not in a way that would be a long-term setback. And at the very least, as you said, he gets a taste of the playoff race and the playoff atmosphere. And this is what you have in store and

what you want to look forward to when this Tigers team really comes together. So you get a little seasoning there. And even if he's not pitching all that much, even if he's just hanging out in the bullpen, just soaking up that atmosphere in October, however long that lasts, that could be valuable. You could just feel a little more accustomed to being there the next time that opportunity rolls around. And you also like build on the excitement that Tigers fans are feeling right now. It's like, Hey, let's just pull out all the stops, you know, like they've waited a long time. They had the aborted rebuild and the restarted rebuild and then the trading at the trade deadline this year and all hope seemed lost. And then they've just come just crashing down the

stretch here and outplaying everyone and winning. And it's been so much fun. And why not just build on that and just accentuate the hype and say, okay, on top of all that, here's Jackson Chove. Here's a glimpse of the future who maybe can help us now. You want to be able to say, we did everything that we could, you know, we're excited, we're ready to be here. And maybe they'll fall a little short and not ultimately get in. Maybe they'll get in and they'll get swept out in the wild card series, whatever.

It's about saying, we think we're ready. We think we're ready to be here. We want to bring winning baseball back to Detroit. Like that's a big deal. I think that that's an exciting thing. And I don't think even if for whatever, like even if he somehow loses them the game that decides whether they make it into the playoffs or not, no reasonable person is going to blame Jackson Job for them not making a postseason run. Unreasonable people might, but we should just as a society make a habit of listening to

those folks less, you know? They get to say too much, in my opinion. Why are we listening to them? Just because they're loud? That's a bad reason. So you know, let's just, I love it. I cannot be persuaded, not that you're trying to think that this is anything but exciting and good. And it also has the potential, if it goes well, to be really special.

Like, imagine the flip side of the disaster scenario. Imagine, like, he secures the last out that gets him in. Imagine he's great. Like, it's so- He does the David Price, yeah. It could be so exciting, right? And we have a name for that, right? We have a name for that,

the doing the David Price, like that's amazing. It's so exciting. You can tell that it is genuinely great because those Detroit Tigers may very well keep the Mariners out of the playoffs and I am still like, let us go. It is time, here we go. You know? I also want to praise another pitcher in the central, though the opposite central. I'm switching centrals again here. And I just want to say a word in favor of Shota Imanaga,

who will not be pitching in the postseason, but has really pitched his ass off this season. And the projections, which were rosy for him, they were right. And I gotta say what really impresses me, so I was reading this at baseball prospectus, Matt Suspin wrote this the other day, a general observation on his season after his most recent strong start.

And I quote, there's a lesson to be learned as Imanaga wraps up his first season stateside. And that lesson is while baseball numbers don't always translate so well from NPB to MLB, sometimes they do. If one was to deposit some of Imanaga's stats during his inaugural season with the Cubs, alongside a number of years he had with Yokohama

and shuffle them up, it'd be essentially impossible to discern which is which. It would be like a Jumbotron shell game that nobody could win. And it's true, this year for the Cubs, discern which is which. It would be like a Jumbotron shell game that nobody could win. And it's true, this year for the Cubs, Imanaga has a 2.91 ERA. Last year for the Bay Stars, he had a 2.80 ERA. However, I think that undersells how well he has performed for the Cubs because this year he has that 2.91 ERA in a national league with a 4.14 ERA.

Whereas last year we've talked about the gradual offensive outage in MPB. So last year when he had a 2.80 ERA, the central league ERA was 3.19, which is almost a full run lower than this year's NL ERA. So even though his ERA is almost the same as what it was in Japan, he's doing that in a higher scoring environment. And so he has a 72 ERA minus per fan graphs, that's a park and league adjusted ERA relative to the league.

In this case, lower is better, unlike ERA plus where higher is better. So 72 ERA minus compared to the 80 ERA minus according to Delta graphs he had last year in Japan or 85 career. So he moved to a harder league and did better relative to that league in his age 30 season. He actually turned 31 this month. So that's pretty impressive. Nicole Zichalos I think that's great. Zips was over the moon about him coming into the season. And you know, I think he, he graded out pretty well by other projection systems too, to be clear, what a signing that has proven to be. And you know, he's putting up those numbers,

given like a stretch in the middle there that was kind of rough. And, you know, he's putting up those numbers given like a stretch in the middle there that was kind of rough for him, right? Like he had a bit where things were not going super great. So yeah, what a, what a year that guy's had really, really impressive. Now I'm cheating a little bit by using ERA, even Park and League adjusted. Cause if we dive under the hood a little, you could say, yeah, he, he has been a bit worse than he was in Japan, which again is what you would expect if you, well, if you compare to say Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who has an

almost identical 73 ERA minus this year, as I said, Imanaga is at 72, but Yamamoto had a 42 ERA minus for the Buffaloes last year and 54 a career because he was just ridiculous, right? Like his stats in Japan were just totally eye popping. So he has gotten considerably worse despite still being excellent when he's been healthy for the Dodgers. So that's what you would expect to see.

And you haven't seen that for Imanaka unless as I said, you dive a little deeper. Now he had a 76 FIP minus last year and 89 career in Japan and he's at 93 this year. So the FIP minus better than league average, but not that much better. Whereas Yamamoto 50 FIP minus last year, 61 career in Japan, 63 this year. So arguably Yamamoto, if you look by FIP, I guess he's had about the same sort of penalty to his stats as Imanaga. So the RA maybe can be a bit deceptive where it looks like he hasn't paid any price at all. In fact, he's gotten better. And that's why your preseason bold prediction that Imanaga would out-war, out-fangraphs war Yamamoto.

You are still in line to win that one, but even though Yamamoto missed a sizable chunk of the season, it's still quite close. I think the difference is a 0.4 war. So in theory, their last respective final starts could swing that potentially, that's still in theory, their last respective final starts could swing that potentially. That's still in play, but on a burning basis with a fit based war, yes, Yamamoto has been better as expected.

He just hasn't pitched as much. But still, you know, now that I've detracted, I've provided the other case. I lay out the pro Imanaga case and then I say, to be fair, the, the paragraph you always have to be fair once you're making a case and conceding some weaknesses in your case. Nonetheless, he's been really good. That's my point. And I also, I guess, while we're talking about Dodgers injuries, as we always are these days, and pitching injuries specifically, I wanted to play this quick clip from a post-game interview after a Dodgers loss the other day, where Mookie Betts was asked about whether the Dodgers' many injuries,

specifically their pitcher injuries, had disrupted their play overall. So that was the prompt, which you will hear. It's a little muffled, the reporter's question at the start, and then you will hear Mookie's response here. After the last couple of days been like Tyler going down, you guys just kind of trying to play a little bit better here in the last week. Does the stuff with the pitching staff affect the play at all? Is it hard to separate those things? Um, uh, I mean, just kind of depends, man. I mean, it does suck, especially, uh, you know, you win, you win a lot of ball games with pitching, but, uh, you also got a hit and you got to play defense. And, uh, so it does suck, but, uh, that's no excuse.

That's no excuse. We just haven't been playing good baseball by any means. So that refrain, no excuses, can't make any excuses. Injuries aren't an excuse. I think that people should use injuries as an excuse. I agree. I think people should just own up to injuries being an excuse and being a valid excuse. Yes. Because sometimes there's a connotation. You can use excuse to mean a bad excuse, right? Sometimes it's not a good excuse, but sometimes it is. Now, I guess there's a slight difference

between excuse and explanation. And if you go to the dictionary definition, they sort of sound like synonyms, an explanation offered as a reason for being excused, a plea offered in extenuation of a fault or firm release from an obligation, promise, et cetera. So that first definition, I think, specifies that an excuse is something that you offer to, well, to excuse yourself, I guess you could say. So there's an element of like, you're volunteering this information to explain, again, I'm using the terms almost interchangeably, but they're slightly different. And the second definition, a ground or reason for excusing or being excused. And then there's a later definition, a pretext or subterfuge. It's not that though. And in Mookie's case here, he really wasn't offering

an excuse because he was prompted by the reporter. He didn't bring this up on his own. He was asked to respond to that and he said, yeah, it sucks to have injuries, but no excuse, no excuse. And, you know, we're playing poorly in other ways too. So not slating Mookie here, but you just always hear players unwilling to offer injuries as an excuse or, you know, managers or executives, except that often I think when they are saying no excuses, they really are offering an excuse. And then they say no excuses, right? They mentioned, you know, gosh, we sure have had a lot of injuries, but no excuses, you know, but it really is. Like the no excuses is kind of eye wash.

It's like, don't let anyone say, I was trying to offer excuses here, like I was owning up to our failures. But also let me just squeeze in a mention of the fact that we've had plenty of injuries here. But I just say, don't be bashful about it. You can come out and you can say, you know what? The players we have had playing for us

are not the players who we signed to play for us or contracted to play for us or expected to play for us. That has a meaningful effect on teams' fortunes. The Dodgers have the most games and days lost to injury of any team this year, second only to Atlanta in terms of wins above replacement player lost. And I understand why team personnel are hesitant to offer that themselves, but

I say it is a valid excuse. And if others put those words in their mouths, then they should swallow them because it's okay. It's okay to say that we've been banged up. I think that you're right, but I think that the way to understand this is that, you know, there's a little bit of choreography that's expected here, right? Because I like to think that you and I are reasonable sorts. And we know that injuries, particularly when they are experienced to the degree that the Dodgers have, has just a profound impact. And that, you know, there's a version of this season and a narrative to the season where we should be lauding them for being as good as they've been given all of those injuries. kind of remarkable, right? We've seen what injuries to key players

did to the Atlanta Braves, for instance. They've had nothing like the season that the Dodgers have had. The Dodgers had more depth, I would say, than Atlanta, even if the top line talent was similar, as the preseason playoff odds and forecasts indicated. The Braves were maybe lacking that second and third and fourth line and they've been tested and the Dodgers had too, but as shorthanded as they've been, they have managed to avoid

the disaster scenario. Yeah, they've been able to, you know, they may well end up still being the number one seed in the NL when it's all said and done, right? And so we understand that, our listeners understand that, but I think that this is an area where the general public kind of is still pretty unsympathetic, right? Like they just want the team to win. They want the team to win big. They want it to be, you know, what we really want as fans is for it to feel comfortable, right?

We don't just want them to get into the postseason. We don't want them to just make the World Series. We want to feel not stressed while it happens, which is a wild thing to expect because baseball is so hard. And once you get to the playoffs, as we have discussed many, many times, pretty much anything can happen. So I think that players and team personnel understand that they have a little soft shoe to do. They have a little kickball change that they have to execute so that when fans decide to

get grumpy about it, they can say, I wasn't offering an excuse, right? And so I think that's the way to understand it. But I agree with you that, particularly in a case like the Dodgers or the Braves where, or all of those Rangers teams were just like every pitcher they had was like cursed upon entering the building. There are times when it is a very reasonable explanation. Indeed, it might be the only reasonable explanation for a season kind of going haywire in a way that you didn't expect. Now, I think that if you're the general manager of a team and you're talking about how you constructed a roster, you need to have a backup plan because players get hurt. That happens all the time, particularly pitchers.

I think you get to a point where the injuries are either so catastrophic to key guys or so many guys are hurt that it's like having the depth to counter that is perhaps unrealistic given modern roster constraints. But I think the answer does change a little bit when you're the person or people responsible for putting the team together. But if you're Mookie Betts, you don't have to soft shoe. You don't have to do jazz hands. You don't have to, I don't know what choreography is.

I don't know how to do choreography. I was a terrible dancer. You do not need to pirouette. You don't need to do any such choreography for us. We get it, but. Yeah, and of course that doesn't excuse everything. If you are playing poorly, if you're making defensive misplays as Mookie did in that game, then you can't really pin that on you while our pitchers are hurt, and that was bothering me. I was preoccupied with our pitcher injuries.

That would not really be a valid excuse, but I think it is among the most legitimate excuses. And of course, yes, you are opening yourself up to criticism because fans and media members will say, well, everyone has injuries. And that is true, of course. No one is unscathed over the course of a full season, but there are gradations and there are teams that are harder hit than others.

And yes, as you were saying, there's a raster construction element to this, what, Tyler Glass now got hurt and Clayton Kershaw is injured? You could knock me over with a feather. So Dan Siborski and I talked about Dodger's pitcher injuries while you were away. And yeah, they have a history of this. And it's not just they go get guys who have been injured in the past, but they also just have more injuries on their staffs. And so if they're going to have that tolerance for risk, well, sometimes you're going to get burned by that. And they have plenty of institutional advantages and high payrolls so that they

can survive that and keep on going. But yes, just in general, I wish that we would have someone come out and say, well, we just got hurt a lot. So that's what happened. That's, that's why we didn't win as much. Like, all right guys, got hurt. Excuse. That's our excuse. And I would accept it. LS. I think they should stand in the middle of a postseason scrab and yell, excuse, excuse. Like, I keep wanting to say the spruce goose, you know, wasn't that the plane they made out of? CB. Yep. LS. It didn't fly though, did it? It didn't fly.

CB. Not very well. LS. Not very well, you know? Spruce Goose, a spruce excuse. Do you think they offered a spruce excuse? I can't believe I've, I stumbled over the intro to the pod, but spruce excuse, I've managed to say like four different times. That's kind of remarkable. Here's one other NL West question I have for you. So Charlie Blackman of the Rockies announced his retirement and the Rockies, they cannot use injuries as an excuse. I don't think they have some other underlying issues but Charlie Blackman, he will be missed.

He will certainly be missed by Rockies fans. He was a career Rocky. He is beloved in Denver. He's had himself a fine 14 year career. He's had some star seasons. He's hung around. He's got a great beard. He's a character. Charlie Blackman, wish him well. Congrats on your career. He's had some star seasons. He's hung around. He's got a great beard. He's a character. Charlie Blackman. Wish him well. Congrats on your career. I note that he has one of the

widest home road splits ever, which is not really a surprise, I suppose, for someone who has played his entire career for the Rockies. Even in the humidor era of course field, there's still a pronounced road home difference there. And as we know, it is not just that you take advantage of the thin air or you're built for course field, it's also that there is a real adjustment and a course field hangover effect from all appearances there seems to be. The ball moves differently at altitude

than it does lower down. And Rockies players are constantly going from mile high to sea level and everywhere in between. And those differences seem to take a toll on their offense. And this has been well documented and there have been times when they've tried to adjust for that somehow and train for that. And you'd think what with all the fancy pitching machines these days, I don't know if the Rockies have them, but you'd think maybe you could kind of

correct for that and like training against the stuff that you're going to see at sea level before you go there. But it's, it's tough, I guess, because there might not be time to do that. You don't want to screw yourself up while you're still in Denver. And actually Blackman got fed up with the big splits. And there was a lot written back in 2020 about how he had resolved to do something about it and he was the ringleader, he was trying to change the training routine, and his proposed solution was simple. It was just take an extra round of high speed batting

practice when you get down from altitude before you play in your first game of road trip. Get used to how the ball moves there. So did it work? Well, I checked. I split his career into 2011 through 2019 and then 2020 through 2024 after he implemented this change. So in the earlier period, his WRC pluses were 98 on the road and 136 at home. In the later period, 88 on the road versus 136 at home, in the later period 88 on the road vs 101 at home. So before that change

he was about 72% as productive on the road as at home, after he was about 87% as productive, while of course declining across the board as he got older. So seemingly it did help him, his splits were still sizable but smaller than they'd been. And he inspired some of the other Rockies to start training this way, so did it have an effect on a team level? Well, same periods. Rockies 2011-2019, 80 WRC plus on the road, 99 at home. From 2020 on, 75 on the road versus 88 at home.

So they got worse at hitting in both places, but the split decreased. Before they were 81% as productive on the road as at home, after 85%. So that's better, but still way worse than the typical team. Because from 2020 on, non-Rocky's teams had a 97 WRC Plus on the road, 103 at home. So they were 94% as good on the road as at home. Granted, Coors counts as the road for everyone else. So even after the improvement, the Rockies' home road split is still more than twice as large as the rest of the leagues.

Anyway, this is a long-term trend that we've observed about the Rockies, and in Blackman's case it is one of the biggest splits ever. So I looked baseball reference, stat head. I looked for guys who've had at least a thousand plate appearances on the road in their career. And I just looked for the biggest difference between their road OPS and their overall OPS, which in Charlie Blackman's case is 109 points. And he is behind only Carlos Gonzalez and Trevor Story, two guys who also spent a lot of time with the Rockies. And if you do this as a percentage of overall OPS instead of just raw difference, then you get Damon Berryhill second, who was not a Rocky.

So I don't know what his excuse is, but it's mostly Rockies at the top of that leaderboard and Blackman, his career split at home, 939 OPS, just a monster in Coors Field. And I don't mean because of the beard, 722 OPS on the road. That's a big difference, right? That's a big split. Yeah. So he's a star in Coors and you know, average-ish on the road. I mean, you know, it's nothing special.

It means certainly playable, but nothing spectacular. And I wonder what that does to the perception of a player like Blackman, who spent his entire career with the Rockies, and Rockies fans absolutely love him. And they've gotten to see star Blackman. They've gotten to see 939 OPS Blackman. If they have gone to a game in Coors Field, that's the guy that they've seen.

Whereas in the 822 games, when Charlie Blackman has taken his act on the road, the home fans there when he's the visitor, probably not that impressed by Charlie Blackman. You know, collectively, accumulatively speaking, 722 OPS, this is no superstar. Do you think that over the course of a 14 year career spent exclusively as a Colorado Rocky, that that might have an effect on the national perception of how good that guy is? Like there's, there's certainly been conversations about Todd Helton and, you know, was he dinged unfairly for how well he hit in Coors Field or Larry Walker or others, but I just, you know, we're not talking about Hall of Fame

consideration with Charlie Blackman. I just mean, in terms of general reputation, do you think the fact that like you go see him anywhere other than Coors you think he's nothing special or if you watch him when the Rockies are on the road and he's playing your team and you tune in and you see Charlie Blackman on those days it's night and day it's like a Jekyll and Hyde sort of situation so I wonder if over the course of 14 years, that might lead to an actual diminished reputation among the general baseball fan

and I guess an inflated reputation maybe among Rockies fans. I think it would almost have to. That gap between your perception of like your favorite guy and the national perception, that exists for all kinds of players, regardless of profound you know, profound atmospheric conditions or whatever. And almost everyone has some home field advantage, most players do.

And I think every franchise, you know, there are franchises that have really great players, Hall of Famers, but there are plenty of teams or at least eras of teams where, you know, your favorite guy, your best dude might be just okay by other team standards. So I think that that perception gap exists regardless, but I would imagine that the effect is much more pronounced. Now, Blackman was, I think for a lot of years, the best guy on the Rockies. And if you are just looking at his baseball reference page, you'd see that he was a four-time

All-Star and he was a two-time Silver Slugger and he won a batting title. And those things are going to inform your perception of him, even if in the back of your mind you're like, well, some of that was aided by the fact that he was playing at Coors. I still think that you're going to sit there and go, like, he was a good player. You're not going to think he's like a scrub or anything. But if you're a Rockies fan, you're like, he's a great player. He might be one of the best guys.

You might think that. Plus the beard, I think the beard does help a lot. The beard makes you visible to fans outside your fan base. People might look at that and go, that's cool. Have you heard my Charlie Blackman story? Have I told you? This is really a Craig Edwards story. It's very endearing.

Are you ready to hear an endearing story about former fan grass rider Craig Edwards? We had a site meetup in 2018-19, somewhere in there, in Denver. And we went to a Rockies game. I have no memory of whether or not they won. That ballpark is so fun. We had a great time. We went back to the hotel. The hotel we were staying at was very close to Coors. We were all hanging out at the bar. Some time passed, Charlie Blackman walks in. Craig notices him, goes, hey, Charlie. And then it's clear there's no plan after that. He doesn't have the next thing to say. Charlie Blackman goes, hey, Charlie. And then it's clear there's no plan after that. He doesn't have the next thing to say.

Charlie Blackman goes, hey, man. And then he keeps walking. And I was like, that's endearing to me. I find that charming. He's like, hey. But it's like, I feel like Craig was all of us in that moment because whenever you encounter a famous person, even if you work in the industry adjacent that the famous person works in, very often you're like,

hey, and then you don't have a plan after that. That's the end of your plan. And then what do you do? You hear Charlie back and go, hey man, and continue walking. Jared Ranere I guess there's like a continuum where there's a level of beardedness where you're less recognizable, but then you go beyond that and you reach a level of beardedness where you're more recognizable. Oh yeah. And he's in the more recognizable. He's in that camp, yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Right. If it's just, you know, like everyone in baseball has a beard these days and you're obscuring your facial features somewhat and maybe every bearded guy looks the same to you. But then when it gets to a certain level of bushiness, when it becomes like a Brian Wilson, I mean, his wasn't bushy, but it was a notable beard or Charlie Blackman's, which is absolutely bushy. Then you recognize them because of the beard. You don't even recognize the face under the beard anymore. You just recognize the hair, but that alone is so distinctive that you can pick them out

of a crowd. When you see pictures of young Charlie Blackman, you're like, who is that? You know? Yes. I saw a GIF where it was like a Chia pet. It was like it goes from clean shaven to, oh, there's a little bit of a beard and then whoa, it sprouted. Yeah.

Or it's like John Breppia. You know, John Breppia like grows a beard over the course of the season. And I've maybe told this joke before, and if I have, I apologize. But it's like, you know, fundamentally Superman's disguise is like silly. Like why you would just be like, that's Superman. Clark Kent, did you know that you're Superman? But then you look at Brebbia and you're like,

I don't know, maybe it would work. Maybe people would keep following for that. Maybe the glasses are enough. You know, beard certainly would be. Superman should have a beard, you know? But then what do you do? Like you shave it off, but then can you grow fast because you're Superman? Like do you have like, you know, is that part of the lore? I don't know. Or can you even shave Superman's hair? Would you need some sort of special razor, some kryptonite razor? This must be in the lore.

He doesn't have long head hair, so presumably you can. Maybe it just doesn't grow. I got gotta look up how Superman cuts his hair. See, I rely on you for these things and then you should know. He's always got that little lock, that little squiggle, you know, the Christopher Reeve like kind of curl there. So is that natural and it's just static like that or does he have to style it and can he style it? Would you need the world's strongest razor or comb? Who do we ask this question of? I'll look into it. I'll provide an update on the outro.

So, this is, I think, a subconscious thing with Blackman where it's like you wouldn't even know that this was affecting your perception, but it just, it would bit by bit. And people can look at overall stats and there's just a lot of baseball fans only watch their teams games. And obviously some of their teams games when they play the Rockies are in course, but some

aren't and usually they aren't if you're physically going to see them. And so year after year after year, less likely to see Charlie Blackman do something special in your team's park. Maybe that adds up over time. That's all I'm saying to the point where maybe you'd be less likely than Craig Edwards to do something special in your team's park, maybe that adds up over time. That's all I'm saying to the point where maybe you'd be less likely than Craig Edwards to say, hey man, and be super excited about seeing Charlie Blackman if you happen to run into him.

But I also think you're right that like that is the way that most people encounter Blackman. But I also think that most fans are not looking at like home road splits, you know? Most fans are looking at a season stat line and they are not looking at a season stat line with something like OPS Plus or WRC Plus at their disposal. And so they're just like looking at the stat line going like that guy can hit, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Then again, a lot of people play fantasy and maybe they're paying attention to the home road splits when they're deciding whether to sit or start Charlie Blackmon. All right.

While we're talking about the NOS, one more quick thing. We got a question from listener Mark, who wrote in to say, Matt Chapman had an interesting outing Monday against the Dbacks. This is timely, topical, after collecting an inside the park home run in the third. He narrowly missed a second inside the parker in the seventh after driving one to centerfield, having the ball ricochet back toward the infield but just not quite far enough in order to make it all the way home. So he just recently returned from paternity leave, he's got the dad strength, he's got

the dad speed working. What I found most intriguing, Mark writes, were the distances of each respective hit. The inside the park homer traveled 415 feet with the triple averaging 412 feet. Has a player in the Statcast era ever had two hits in a game with neither of the hits leaving the yard, totaling more than Chapman's 827 combined feet? So I forward this along to the Statcast research crew

at MLB and I got back a prompt response from the great Jason Bernard over there who sent me the top 10 for the longest combined distance of top two non homer hits in a game. And it turns out that Matt Chapman ranks ninth on that list in the Statcast era since 2015, obviously. However, the fact that this happened in Chase Field is notable because it turns out that five of the top 10 performances happened in Chase Field. And you've seen a lot of games in Chase Field and maybe you've seen some odd ricochets and carroms, but this was 827 combined feet for these two hits for Chapman. It's a tie at the top between Freddie Freeman last April visiting Chase. He had two non-homer hits that combined for 845 feet.

And then Miguel Montero, April 2016, he tied with Freeman with two non-Homer hits, 845 feet also at Chase. So five of the top 10 are Chase. Three were Coors, one was Fenway and one was the TROP. So all places with either big outfields or odd structures or weird ground rules. And I think Chase has maybe the third most fair territory square footage after Coors and Kaufman, I believe. And then of course Fenway has the monster and the trap has the catwalks. Although the Randy Rosarena raise game in 2021 that shows up 10th year, that was not a catwalk occurrence. It was just a perfectly placed deep balls, one kind of misplayed. And that's what happened here with Chapman at Chase.

I guess it's like you got pretty deep power rallies and then like these, it's not like sort of a circular outfield gradual gradient. It's like angles, ricochets, carroms. Like you can get some balls bouncing off the walls there and then going a long way if you don't anticipate that perfectly. And then there's a long way to roll. So one of these was kind of like, I think left center and then one was sort of straight away more or less and could have been caught perhaps, but just wasn't.

And then these balls just rolled and kicked off the corners and went a long way. So I guess Chase, given the representation in this top 10 here, it's probably conducive to this sort of performance. And Freddie Freeman, Miguel Monteiro, there was this Chapman game, and then there was also JT Real Muto did it last year and Gene Sigura in 2016. And then the Coors games were Mark Reynolds, Ian Desmond, Nolan Arnotto, and the Fenway one was a Kyle Seeger performance, a favorite of yours in 2021. So yeah, Chase, I guess that's the place you're going to do that if you have balls that the ballpark contains, but go a long way. I think Chase Field is kind of weird.

I think the way that that outfield wall plays, it does seem to kick off of there at angles guys aren't expecting. And it's not like when you're sitting there looking at it, you're like, hey, that's weird. But I think it's weird. I think it does weird stuff. Jared Sarris I think it's kind of like an acute angle, I think from like center to left and right center, it's yeah, it's not just sort of your, you know, Kaufman style kind of rounded, it's more acute. And so you might just not anticipate, Oh, that's going to go way over there. Yeah.

And like, you know, Jacob McCarthy ran into that wall during Chavins or inside the Parker. But like, I think I have seen the ball carom off of there kind of weird and you know, it's like the center field wall goes like all the way up, you know, because they get that weird line. I don't know. Some weird stuff happens out there. It's true. Yep.

Okay. And then I will end with an Otani update, I think showing adromable restraint that I'm exercising here by saving Otani till the end. Of course, by the time people hear this, he may have homered and stolen more bases because he's doing that on a daily basis now. But as we speak, he is at 53 homers and 55 steals. And so as I noted before, to surpass Ronald Acuna on the all-time single season power speed number leaderboard, he had to get to 53, 53 or beyond and he has. And so he now owns the highest single season power speed figure. That's the harmonic mean of homers and stolen bases developed by Bill James to try to quantify

combination of power and speed. He got there and has gone beyond and counting. So he's been unbelievable lately. Ben Clements and I talked about him at some length last time. So we don't have to go over that fantastic Marlins game that you weren't able to watch live again, though I will just note we talked about people bandying about whether this was the best performance ever, whether this was the best batting game we've ever seen. And it's hard to answer that definitively. Obviously there were some narrative considerations

and soft factors here. We mentioned some stats and he's like close to the top of the leaderboard by various stats, whether it's runs created, I think he's second of all time or total bases. He's a two behind Sean Green, the leader. However, we did not mention that he does own the record for single game RE24. Now, maybe we're reaching here a little bit. There are just so many baseball stats that you can find one maybe that says that Shohay-Otani is the best. I mean, there are a lot that say nice things about Shohay-Otani, obviously, but this is one that says, yes, that was the best game of all time

surpassing hard-hitting Mark Witton's four homer game in 1993. RE24, which baseball reference calls Base Out Runs Added, which I guess is a little more palatable, but not much more, which maybe tells you why this is not a household stat. I think it needs better branding. Whether you say Base Out Runs Added or RE24, neither rolls off the tongue or neither really conveys that clearly what it is exactly. And it kind of falls into this saber metric nether world, this in-between status where I think it's a useful stat, but it almost splits the difference between the context sensitive stats and the context neutral stats because it's not like war or WRC plus these things that don't take the situation into account at all. Doesn't matter what inning it is or how many runners are on base. It counts the same or something like win

probability added, which takes all of that into account. What inning is it? What's the situation? RE24 is kind of a bit of both where it doesn't take the inning into account, but it does take the base out state, as it said. RE24 comes from the fact that there are 24 base out states, combinations of outs and runners on base or not on base. And so it takes into account that. And so it's essentially measuring the change in run expectancy for the team because of what you did,

kind of before and after, what's the run expectancy for the team because of what you did, you know, kind of a before and after, what's the run expectancy, what's the difference you attribute that to the hitter and also to the base dealer. It does take into account bases stolen, which helps Otani because he swiped a couple of bags in that game. And so he added something like 9.7 runs to the Dodger's expected total, which is pretty ridiculous. So that's a stat that does say that that was the best game ever. So if you want to find a reason to argue that it was and have that be based on something objective, then RE24 is there for you. I don't know how persuasive you find that.

I find it persuasive, but also so unnecessary. It's just not a game where I feel you just look at it, you know, Ben? Just look at it. He almost had a triple in that game. That's the wildest part. Yeah. He was almost thrown out. He got thrown out. Which was the one sign of a feet of clay in this case of game. He was not quite perfect, but yeah, look, I like a good stat and I like a good fun fact. And this is that I suppose, but yes, it does factor in that there were runners on base and that he drove in a bunch of runs when he got those hits. So that's one

follow-up, but the power speeds number, that's the big one. And really the fact that he's gotten to 53-53 is significant to me because no one has done this over the course of a career. No one has ever had a season with 53 homers and a season with 53 steals. No one has ever done that in their career. Not in the same season, but in any season, in separate seasons. And he has combined that in this season. And the batting value of his

current season is like eight times the value of his base stealing. So it is sort of silly that we make these things kind of equivalent in the 50-50. The homers are worth way more obviously, but the coolness factor and maybe just what it says about the talent and the physical tools, I get why we elevate the base stealing to that point. However, on Hang Up and Listen this week, I was asked by Alex Kirschner to basically find fault with Shohei Otani season, like to be a wet blanket, which I don't know that I'm the most natural person

to do that. I've never asked you to do that. Yeah, if you want to find someone to denigrate Shohei Otani, I'm probably not first on the list. However, as I said, I try to be objective about him. It's just that he's objectively the best and the coolest. So, you know, what can I do really? The thing is that he's the best guy I know and the coolest dude there's ever been.

Maybe the fact that he's the coolest is slightly subjective. I may be editorializing slightly there, but how could you not say he's objectively the most impressive baseball player? I don't think I'm going out on a limb there. And, you know, look, I did concede, okay, the conditions are conducive to this. It's a fairly high home run rate season historically, and it's a fairly high stolen base rate season, obviously, and stolen bases have gotten easier. And he's doing it in Dodger Stadium,

where it's pretty easy to hit homers and not to hit other kinds of extra bass hits. And so maybe he gets a bunch of singles and he can steal basses more easily that way. Okay, like things are lined up in his favor and every extraordinary outlier performance is some combination of talent plus opportunity. And he has both at his disposal here.

But I concluded the fact that no one has ever done this in separate seasons over the course of a career, the fact that no one's close to doing it this year, that no one who is even anywhere remotely close to 50 homers has anywhere near this many steals, or the fact that anyone who has this many steals has that much power, and the fact that no one has even gotten halfway to 50 steals who has hit 50 homers in the past. Cause as I've noted, Willie Mays and Alex Rodriguez, they had 50, 24 seasons. Like that's the most steals that anyone in the 50 Homer club has ever had.

They've never even gotten halfway to 50 steals. However, if you were to try to era adjust his power speed number for the fact that this is a season when the time is fairly ripe for this, this is if you do power speed number on a league wide basis, full season basis, then this year is the second power speediest season ever. I looked at like power speed number per 600 play appearances by year, going back to 1898, the first year with the modern stolen base rules. And only 1987 was power speedier than 2024. And that was that one weird year where there was just the rabbit ball,

where the home run rate spiked because the ball changed somehow. And then it changed back after that. And that was still the 80s. So guys were running a lot, but it was this outlier spike in home run rate. That was the power speediest season after that. It's this year and last year. So if you try to adjust for that somehow, if there's like a plus stat version of this or like some discount rate you could apply. I went to Patreon supporter Michael Mountain and asked for his thoughts and how he would do this because he helped me out with a recent stat blast about velocity and hard throwers who get fewer strikeouts than you'd expect and vice versa. And so this is a similar situation where you have more variation among players in power speed number than you do among seasons.

So his suggestion was to get all qualified batter seasons for each year, calculate the mean and standard deviation for home runs and stolen bases, then calculate a Z score, which is the standard deviations above the mean for each player season. And then for any player seasons that are above the mean in both metrics, power and speed, then calculate the power speed number of their Z scores instead of their raw home run and stolen base totals. It's kind of complicated. But the point is you're trying to adjust and compare to what other

players in that season are doing, at least qualified players. And if you do that, then Shohei Otani stands out as second all time. He is displaced and not by Ronald Acuna, but by Ken Williams in 1922. Now that is not Kenny Williams of the White Sox, who was born after Ken Williams died. This is Ken Williams, mostly of the St. Louis Browns.

And this is, I think, a good teaching opportunity. It's a good moment to remind people of the existence of Ken Williams. And remember this guy, if you don't know Ken Williams, go look at his stats because he really was just a man out of time. He was the first 30-30 player ever. And then it was like 30 something years until the next guy,

until I think Willie Mays was the next to do it. So he was way ahead of his time and he almost got to 40-40 that season. He hit 39 home runs and stole 37 bases in 1922. And this like in the context of his time was really extraordinary, especially because that was his age 32 season. And I'll link to some history about Ken Williams,

but he's just really a fascinating player. And Craig Wright wrote about this for his excellent story series, Pages from Baseball's Past. And I'll link to what he wrote. He said, in 1917, Ken Williams had an epiphany while playing for Portland in the Pacific Coast League. Babe Ruth had stumbled upon the value of power hitting

while he was a pitcher and untrained in the fine art of contact hitting that dominated the dead ball era. Ken Williams had been playing professional baseball as an outfielder for over 500 games when he made the bold decision to break away from tradition and take big swings, pulling the ball in the air for long drives. While Ken was skinny, he was strong,

and standing six feet even, he was tall for his era, the results of his experiment were startling. Ken had hit only 32 homers in his whole prior career, including going homer-less in his 81 games in the majors. And yet, in 1917, he led all of organized baseball by belting 24 homers, partly assisted by the long PCL schedule that allowed him to play 192 games, which is

also pretty preposterous, but applying the home run rate of his teammates to his number of at bats yielded less than four homers. So he was far and above a big power hitter. And then after that, he was drafted in the army and didn't play much in 1918. And then 1919, his manager for the Browns told him that the big swing approach wouldn't work. And he had to dial that back. And so he went back to being more of a contact hitter. And then in 1920, he had a new manager, and he

was more easygoing and Williams wanted to go back to his swing for the fences style. And he did with great success. And he was helped by Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, which had a short shallow fence. And so he was really able to take advantage of that and hit many more homers at home than he had on the road. But the upshot is that he actually out-homered Babe Ruth one year and like he was that kind of player. He won the home run title in 1922 because Babe had missed some time and Williams out-homered him and he was an absolute outlier in that time. He was caught stealing 20 times in his 57 attempts. So there was that, but still, and he was a top 10 by war position player in the 1920s, despite the fact that he was ages 30 to 39 in the 1920s. He barely played before that in the majors. So even though he was an old man, he was absolutely one of the best players in

baseball and he did it with this great power speed combo. So we should know and be reminded of Ken Williams. And I'm glad that Shohei Otani gave us the opportunity to do that. Usually he's reminding us of Babe Ruth or Bullet Rogan, but no, Ken Williams, who was a two-way player in another way. And it looks like Otani needs a total of two more homers or steals in either category to surpass Williams and be the leader all time,

even in this adjusted leaderboard. Now there are other ways you could adjust. And I did do some other methods that knock Otani down a bit more. So what I did was I got the overall average power speed per 600 plate appearances again since 1898. And then I compared each season's power speed per 600 to that. So sort of like a power speed plus number for MLB each year. And then I divided each individual player season by that. So for example, 2024, the power speed per 600 figure is 1.32 times the historical average league wide. So you take

Otani's power speed number and you divide that by 1.32. So if you do that adjustment, it actually knocks him down to 29th all time. Yeah, then he's pretty far down. And number one is Willie Mays in 1956, which yeah, it feels appropriate. And really had, he had only 36 homers and 40 steals that year, but again, I mentioned this recently, the quote unquote golden era, what people think of the heyday of baseball,

like that brand of baseball was pretty boring. It was pretty slow, people didn't steal. So that was a lot by the standards of that time. And then you also get guys like 1908, Hannes Wagner, 1909, Ty Cobb, who have like nine or 10 homers, but that was way more than most people did because no one was hitting homers. And probably a lot of those in Cobb's case were not over the fence. They were Matt Chapman style inside the Parkers, but still for the purposes of this stat. So there's a lot of Mays and Cobb and some Ken Williams up there and Bobby Bonds who inspired the power speed stat, but mostly long ago seasons.

So I think Shohei is still top since Joe Morgan in 1973. The other way Michael adjusted it even more finally by instead of doing like a adjusted power speed per 600, he adjusted the power and the speed separately because sometimes powers up and speed is down or the other way around. If you do it that way, Ohtani falls merely to 13th and a different Willie Mays season is on top.

1955 Willie Mays followed by Ty Cobb and Ken Williams. So if you want to say that, yeah, Shohei is a product of his times and even Shohei probably would not have been able to do what he's doing in a different offensive environment. I think it's fair maybe to adjust in that way and say it's not quite the best. Maybe it's the second best, maybe it's the 29th best, maybe it's the 13th best. It's still close to the best that it's still the best we've seen in a really long time. And also, I guess probably people might have a hard time crediting someone who had nine

homers like Ty Cobb did with power speed. Even if it was by the standards of his day, it's still, it doesn't seem that potent. Or you could just look at it. Or you could just look at it. That works too. I did my best though, just to be intellectually honest here, you know, I took the blinders off, no rose colored glasses here, tried to make the impartial adjustments to Otani season. I think it's fair to detract a little bit.

Sure, sure. All right. Well well I figured out how Superman cuts his hair. He goes to supercuts. Badoom. Now there are actually a couple explanations. In the Silver Age comics, his hair just didn't grow. How convenient. Something about the radiation of the yellow sun stopping his hair and nails from growing. Later, post Crisis on Infinite Earths, he has an elaborate shaving routine where he uses a piece of curved reflective metal from the rocket that brought him from Krypton and he directs a slender beam of his heat vision which then reflects off of the spaceship metal and delicately shears off his facial hair. As for the

hair on the top of his head, it's not exactly explained. Maybe he finds more spaceship metal and makes some super scissors, maybe he uses red sun lamps to make himself temporarily vulnerable so he can give himself a trim. It's one of those questions that's best not delved into too deeply. Thanks to Screen Rant for the assist on that one. By the way, on episode 2214 we talked about head first versus feet first sliding, citing some Sports Info Solutions data provided by friend of the show Mark Simon. Well, Mark wrote that up as well on the SIS blog. He went over some of the same stats that we did on the podcast. However, he also noted something we didn't about Shohei Otani's tendency to slide feet first. He was actually more or less prohibited from sliding head first by the Angels back in 2018.

There will be no head first sliding, obviously, Mike Sosha said. And Otani at the time actually said that the fighters had banned head first sliding, so it wouldn't be much of an adjustment for him. The only time it would happen, he said, or I suppose the not yet disgraced Ipe Mizuhara said, would be when it was reactionary. So Otani has slid that way for a long time. Obviously you want to protect your hands and your fingers if you're a pitcher in particular, though hitter's hands are pretty important too. Mark also included some data that we didn't have at the time. He broke down the rate of feet first and head first sliding by base. Nothing surprising, I suppose, but the rate of head first slides this season is 63% at first base, 30% at second base, 48% at third base, and 38% at home plate. So by far the highest feet first sliding percentage is at second base 68%.

It's 34% at first, 46% at both third and home. Home has a far higher rate of other types of slides, 16%. That would be hook slides, hand or foot reaches, swim moves, et cetera. And lastly, last time Ben Clemens and I talked about Bud Black becoming the Rockies all time wins leader for a manager. We noted that while he's also the all-time losses leader, and his winning percentage isn't even that hot among Rockies managers. So is this something he's aware of? Is it something he takes pride in? The answer is yes and yes. He actually delivered a press conference after

that victory, still doused in beer and shaving cream from the clubhouse celebration. And here's what he said. Again, I've been a part of those in there before. Like I said, for milestones and first win, first save, first hit, stuff like that. It's great. I mean, that's part of what makes us love the game. And when it's over for all of us, it's moments like that that you remember, right?

I mean, listen, no doubt, I, hey, World Series, I remember big games, playoff games, we're first, but you know, that's the type of stuff that stays with you. Well, congrats to Bud. I'm glad he has another memory to cherish. And I'm glad that we have support from people on Patreon who have gone to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signed up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount

to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks. Our thanks today go out to all of our Patreon supporters, but specifically the following five, Bradley Woodrum, C.Crosh, Tyler Woods, Joe Smith, and Samantha Bertocchi. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus

episodes, playoff livestreams, two of those coming up next month for patrons at the Ned Garver level or above, monthly bonus episodes, prioritized email answers, discounts on merch and ad-free FanGraphs memberships, autograph books, so much more, check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us at the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions and comments and intro and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild, and you can check the show page at fan graphs and the episode description in your podcast app for links to

the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. Thanks for watching!