Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2314: Memento Mori

Episode Date: April 26, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a new contender for the highest bat flip, meet major leaguers (14:28) Ryan Johnson and Alan Roden, and (48:35) answer listener emails about how different baseball would be if losses were free for fans and wins cost extra, whether the Rockies will finish in first before the Dodgers […]

With Ben Lindberg and Meg Rowley, you can come for the ball when the banter's free. Baseball is a simulation, it's all just one big conversation. Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2314 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of FanGraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer Ben. How are you? Doing okay.

I have a very important question for you. It is about bat flip hyped. So we talked back in January, remember Junior Kim and Arrow? Yes. Just a bat flip for the ages. Yeah, who could forget? Game seven of the Lidon Championship, he hit a go-ahead homer in the ninth,

454 foot blast, and he threw his bat, not that far, but about as far as a human being can throw a bat, or so we thought. Yeah. And I think I may have even said at the time that that might have been an unbreakable bat flip height record. And now I'm already questioning that just a few months after that January flip, because we have a new contender for biggest bat flip of all time.

Yeah. And he swings and he rifles it deep into right center field and the drive win it. It will be a 425 foot single to the triangle. Lugo denied once, he would not be denied a second time. Blaze scores and how about this Greenville Drive team? The celebration is on out at first base. This one comes from a fellow 21 year old Dominican Republic player, though in his case, not a big leaguer, but an A ball player, high A.

I am talking about Andy Lugo, who plays for the Greenville Drive, a Red Sox affiliate. And he hit a drive that one hopped the wall the other day, just this week, and it was a walk off, and he bat flipped close to Caminero level height. And I have sent you the video and I will share it, of course, on the show page so that people can judge for themselves, but is this Andy Lugo bat flip

for the high A Greenville drive higher than Junior Caminero's bat flip for the high A Greenville Drive higher than Junior Caminero's bat flip. I think it might be. I think he might have gotten, it's difficult to tell. So much of this is about the angle of the video that we are seeing because it does sort of play with your perception of the sort of play with your perception of the height that the bat ultimately reaches. But Ben, I think it might have gone higher into the air. You have the netting as sort of a point of common reference, although again, we're getting these from different angles. And so, one of them is from like, and you're one of them is from in the stands. One of them appears to be the broadcast camera, like the high home camera.

But it really got up there, you know? It really did, yeah. It did. It's a skyscraper. I like that you see it initially just in the regular shot of, because it's so high. It's so high. As you're watching the flight of the ball,

as it's to deep right center, the bat enters the frame. Yes. Because that's how high it is. And then if you watch to the very end of the video, they give another angle that is also from behind home plate where you can see a little more of the trajectory of the bat flip, but it's still tough to tell. And when we talked about Kaminaro's Bat Flip,

we had people analyzing the video and trying to see, oh, how many pixels is this? And how many junior Kaminaro heights did this go in the air? And here it's a little tougher to do that analysis because we don't really have as broad of view. We don't get everything in the frame as we're seeing the flip. So it's tough to tell.

If you watch the Kamen Arrow technique versus the Lugo technique, he does a one-handed flip, Lugo, and Kamen Arrow put his whole body into it. I think he did like a two-handed, it's like a one-handed flip, Lugo? Yes. And Caminero put his whole body into it. I think he did like a two-handed, it's like a one-handed backhand in tennis versus a two-handed backhand. I think in that sense, watching the body language,

it looks to me like Caminero put more effort into it. That doesn't necessarily mean that his went higher, but his was like a full body. It's almost like when an outfielder makes a throw and they just lay out and go flying. It's almost like that. It was just a heave, whereas Lugo's, the method looks like more of a flip.

I don't know that we can call either of these a bad flip. I mean, that seems to undersell what is happening here. I guess it's like flips. I mean, there were many undersell what is happening here. I guess it's like flips. I mean, there were many, many flips happening here, but that's too small a word for what this is. This is a bat heave. This is like, you know, this is some sort of a game that you would see on like ESPN seven or something

where people are flipping logs or, you know, like this is, this is that kind of, this seems like it should be some kind of competitive event. So it's so interesting that that's how it registered for you because for me, I was like, wow, there's like a quiet confidence in one's strength to attempt that with just one hand, you know, that, that to me suggests he's like, I'm off, I'm off again, launch this thing. Yeah. That to me suggests he's like, I'm off. I'm off again, launch this thing. It's sort of remarkable.

You primed me for what I was watching. You wanted me to sort of assess whether it had gone higher. So I knew I was going to see a bat flip and that it would be Titanic in some regard. But it was still very funny and kind of arresting to see it initially and be like, was that the bat that just came into the camera? So there was that initial reaction on my part, which is perhaps coloring my perception of it as being more impressive. But I then like immediately,

immediately shifted to worrying about the bat then becoming a dangerous falling object. It's like an independence day where they were like, no, we can't blast him out of the sky. We'll risk turning one dangerous falling object into many, you know? You don't wanna do that because of bonk people on the head. Yeah, and everyone flooded out of the dugout

and so they were right in the line of descent. Right. This is what I always worry about when guys like toss their batting helmets as they're rounding the bases in celebration. I'm like, you're going to nail somebody, you know? What an embarrassing way to get hurt. It's like, I think even worse than Kendris Morales' injury all those years ago because you're being plunked by something.

You're not even celebrating your own achievement. You're just collateral injury damage. It's quite the heave-ho. If you were a scout and you were there that night and you saw that, would it alter the grade that you would put on his raw power? We're like, if he can do that, then maybe I'm a little light, you know? Right, that's the thing,

because Lugo's not really a prospect, right? He's not rated, I mean, MLB pipeline doesn't have him in their top 30, so. Yeah, he's, I think, more of an orc guy. Right, and yet, you see this, and you start to think, right? And a compelling demonstration. This is completely ridiculous.

I want to make sure our listeners understand that I'm not actually advocating this alter anyone's perception of his prospects, but it's like, wow, we just saw the game power actualize. Yes. We saw it actualize in games and then we're getting a hint of, wow, this is incredible. Yeah. This is bad speed of a sort. Of a sort.

Of a sort. I think that I would still stick with Kamen Arrow. It's almost like when there's a skyscraper race to have the tallest building and then you have to say, well, this one has a spire on the top or an antenna or something. Cheap. Yeah, does that count and how do you define? No. And so there's always sort of an arms race,

a height race with the skyscrapers and maybe that's what we're entering with Batflips for all. I know, I mean, I mentioned these guys are from the same country, same age, perhaps Lugo. I'm sure he saw Kameniro's Batflip and yeah, perhaps he was inspired by it. And I think just because it looked like Kamenero put more effort into it, the release,

and also because he's just a bigger guy, he's listed at 6'1", 220. So Lugo is listed at 6'1", even 160. So if those are accurate, Kamenero has an inch on Lugo, but 60 pounds. So that makes me think that his bat flip potential would be greater than Lugo's, but it's just, I'm judging based on these sort of

ancillary factors as opposed to a direct measurement because it's tough to do the latter. And so if I were just to evaluate the bat flips without knowing that surrounding context and one guy is a promising big leaguer who was the number one prospect in baseball and this other guy's not a prospect at all. And this guy's bigger and presumably stronger.

If I could put all of that out of my mind, then I don't know what conclusion I would reach. But I guess I'd stick with Caminero, but it's close. And I was thinking about the circumstances too, because like which one is a more fitting time to challenge the all time bat flip height record? On the one hand, that was game seven of a championship game for Kim and Arrow.

That's high stakes. However, it was not a walk-off. It was a go ahead homerun. It ended up being a winning homerun, but he didn't know that for sure then. And it was a homerun, whereas the Lugo flip comes in a game in April in Haie, so slightly lower stakes. It was also not a homerun, but it was a walk-off and it was in the 12th inning of a comeback victory. So I guess in that sense, it had some things going for it that Caminaros didn't, but the

stakes of the game, the contest itself were not quite comparable. So yeah, I wonder whether we will ever see this though graduate to MLB because we haven't, we've seen any number of bat flips and bat flip techniques, but I don't recall seeing one with this kind of airtime on in the big leagues. And so will that be reserved for international competition or for the minors with, would that touch off another round of discourse about this being Bush League or something? Or I'm sure it would, because we keep pushing the envelope when it comes to bat flips, to the point that we're all just desensitized to bat flips

and people used to be pissed about the bat flips. They probably don't make as much of a stink about it as they used to. And people who used to celebrate bat flips in opposition to the people who got all pissy about bat flips, probably don't make as big a deal of it either, just because, you know, we're all used to it now.

And so you have to really raise the bar for Batflips now to get us to pay attention, and that's what Kevin Arrow and Lugo have done. Yeah, we've moved on to other fronts in the culture war and are focusing our... I would worry about the safety piece of it. That's me being a fuddy-duddy, but it would be kind of fun. As for Lugo doing it in a smaller moment, you get the stakes that are in front of you. You can only really react

to your own stakes. True. And he might not have Kaminaro level stakes in his career. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so he ought to enjoy them. I am contemplating the bat flips, but I'm also sitting and reflecting on the fact that I apparently have very strong feelings

about the legitimacy of spires in building height measurement. Didn't know that until this conversation. But boy, I was like, no, that is bogus. That is cheating. Yeah, that's a communications mast. That's not a part of the building. I do think that they-

Communications mast. They draw those distinctions, I believe. Sure, yeah. It's kind of like- They do, the people who are out here being like really invested in building measurement. That feels like an old timey concern to me. I realize it's not.

You, I mean, you live in a city that is constantly like, let us build giant buildings. They might fall over and no one wants to live in them, but you know, here we do sprawl more. You can't set records that way. You can only make bad policy decisions. Yeah, we go up, not out, I guess. We're limited in our lateral movements.

But yeah, people know the Burj Khalifa or whatever the current record holder is, and there's always an urge to push it higher. And so we're seeing a similar urge here when it comes to the Bat Flips. We will monitor this situation. We wanna get to some emails and we will, and we also want to bring back a segment of ours,

making its 2025 debut. We've got a new season, which means that we have new and newly minted Major Leaguers, and we wanna meet some of them. Yeah. ["Major Leaguers"] And we want to meet some of them. Yeah. Meet a major leaguer. I am very eager to meet this nascent major leaguer. It's the thrilling debut of somebody new.

Let's meet this mysterious major leaguer. We're bringing back our segment, Meet a Major Leaguer, our periodic segment where we introduce you to some new guys who've become big leaguers. And usually we opt for lower profile players, just guys who weren't huge prospects. And maybe we're deviating from that slightly today, but, you know, we're not going to meet a Major Leaguer when it's Junior Kim and Arrow, because everyone has met him, anyone who cares

about prospects and new Major Leaguers, probably aware of someone like that. So we're trying to highlight the lesser known guys, because it's an incredible accomplishment to make the majors, even if it's just for one game. And so you deserve your flowers. So do you want to go first? Sure. I'd be happy to go first. I guess we both sort of violated the more anonymous principle. I decided that we should spend some time meeting Rian Johnson. And look, I want everyone to know, I am working on like a knives out glass onion joke. It hasn't crystallized the way I want it to.

It's not ready for prime time. So I'm gonna, unlike the Jimmy Stewart voice, which is perfect, I'm gonna refrain. It's not spelled the same way, Ryan. No, that's a different thing. Yeah. The more I think traditional way or common way. I don't have judgment about the way Ryan is spelled. It's not spelled any weird way, but Ryan Johnson, he was born and raised in Dallas and has sort of an interesting amateur background because he was a homeschooled kid and he played baseball for Christian Athlete Storm, which I might

have some notes about that as a name for our travel ball team, which was part of the Homeschool Texas Alliance. And then he went on to play collegiate ball at Dallas Baptist. He entered this season as a 40 plus future value prospect, 11th in the angels organization. But here's the thing, he was drafted last year, Ben, you know, our listeners might remember that he is blazing a, not a new trail, but a trail less traveled by skipping the minor leagues entirely. So here is Eric's scouting report from this off season. Perhaps the weirdest of all 2024 draft prospects, Johnson had six double

digits strikeout starts in that season, amassing 151 total strikeouts and just 14 walks in 106 innings. Johnson set the Dallas Baptist record for strikeouts in a season, became the school's all time strikeout leader and finished the year ranked in the top 10 nationally in strikeouts, walks per nine, ERA and whip. Why so weird? Johnson has a funky low slot delivery that features big effort and a huge head whack. As an aside, head whack is a satisfying phrase to me to say. I like saying head whack. I don't know. Something about that's good. He doesn't look like a typical big league

starter, but he certainly performed like a starting pitching prospect in college. Johnson uses an east-west attack and throws a lot of low 80s sliders. His fastball sits 92 to 94 with tailing action, and the horizontal divergence between Johnson's fastball and his slider was too much for college hitters to deal with. Johnson often changes the pace of his delivery to home. We'll return to that. With frequent quick pitches, catching hitters off guard.

At first glance, he looks like a deceptive long reliever, but let's be mindful that guys like Tanner Hauck have paved the way for pitchers with funcadillic low slot deliveries like Johnson to develop and thrive as starters. Ideally, Johnson will develop a splitter or something else to fill out his mix and make him better able to tussle with lefties.

His grade here leaves room for starter outcomes, even though I think it's unlikely. So he's drafted last year in 2024. He does not pitch in affiliated ball after the draft, comes to camp, is invited as a non-roster invitee. And as guys start falling off the big league camp roster and getting reassigned to minor league camp, there remains Brian Johnson. So our friend Sam Plum wrote about him several times throughout the spring, quoting his head coach at DBU saying, one guy described him last year that he looks like a cage tiger. He's strutting around really fast tempo. It's interesting what his personality is like, and it's kind of his

alter ego when he gets into the game. Sam goes on to say in the same athletic piece, there's still so much to unpack with Johnson, who is homeschooled throughout high school, is soft-spoken, keeps to himself and reads at his locker, which I thought you would like. But on the mound, he stalks around like a hunter and celebrates big strikeouts like he won the World Series. And he performed very well in camp, you know, the angels have some room on the 40 man for pitching. Um, and he made the opening day roster. He described making the opening day roster as surreal telling reporters. Not even now do I think really think it's possible.

There wasn't really a point where it was just like, I'm close. I think I'm almost there. It never even crossed my mind. It's a crazy road. He said of his quick ascent, it's just unreal. Not at all how I pictured it. I thought it would be more like three, four years down the road and just planning for the long haul, but it's just crazy, going fast." His making the opening day roster was of course

remarked upon by many outlets. So this is from a Carrie Anderson piece at Yahoo Sports who says, Johnson will be the first MLB player to skip the minor since Garrett Crochet, who made his major league debut with the Chicago White Sox two months after being drafted in 2020. Our listeners might remember that he debuted in the postseason. Prior to that, the only other player to skip the minor leagues in the past two decades was right-handed pitcher Mike Leake, who debuted for the Cincinnati Reds in 2010. Crochet doesn't even really count in my mind because that was 2020.

There was no minor league season. There was no minor league season. There was no minor league season. He didn't debut in the regular season. He was one of those weird ones where like he had played big league games, but because he had only played in the postseason. And I think at that juncture, we didn't have postseason stats on the site. I had to tell David Abelman to like create a player page for him because I was like, this guy needs to get tagged in articles and he doesn't have one because he hasn't generated regular season stats, which is typically when our like automatic process creates a player

page for a guy. So it was this whole big rigamarole where I was like, you gotta, you gotta fudge it a little bit cause we need to be able to tag Garrett crochet. Jacob Jervis, I think of mlb.com also noted that Johnson also had the chance to extend the angel streak of featuring the first draftee to debut in the majors from four consecutive drafts following Nolan Shanwell in 2023, Zach Neto in 2022 and Chase Silzeth in 2021. And I will just note that Johnson ended up actually tying for fastest debut with Cam Smith.

I think that when this article was written, Cam Smith of the Astros had not yet been named to the opening day roster and hadn't debuted. So Johnson made his debut on opening day. He threw one and two thirds innings. He notched one strikeout, one walk and five earned runs. And his first inning of work went much better than his second. He got Lenin Sosa to ground out and then Corey Lee to strike out looking and then Jacob Amaya grounded out and Walsh thought everything's wonderful and he sent him back out there and then Johnson's second inning of work went single, single fly out, home run, fly out walk, home run and then he got pulled for Nicky Lopez. And after his debut, he said, it was cool. Said Johnson, who allowed five runs over one and

two thirds innings, it's still a fun experience with all the learning. We didn't have the day that we wanted, but that's not a bad thing. We can learn from it. We can grow and that's what we want to do. And then Ron Washington said, he did a real good job in his first inning. I thought he was just one pitch away in his second inning of work, which like, I mean, it's not like he was more than a couple of it.

He left a few balls up and they didn't miss him. That's what happened. Johnson currently, when I pulled this yesterday, has a 6 ERA and a 503 FIP in his nine innings of work. He has much to save. But despite that being sort of middling, his debut story is notable and his funky delivery is still garnering attention. So Michael Rosen actually wrote about Johnson in conversation with Jackson Job for us and said, what makes this aggressive promotion

schedule notable is that Johnson doesn't have great stuff. He sits 94 on his sinker and throws only the occasional four seamer. And then he goes on to say that Johnson's viability as a major leaguer, I suspect is largely a function of his peculiar release. And having watched him, that is true. And if I may offer a not so complimentary thing, but one that I find delightful, truly one of the like derpiest pitchfaces you've ever seen in your life. Like I want Ben, you need to in this moment, Google Ryan Johnson, and then just like, look at what this guy's face is doing because it is very goofy. And he's got a perfectly normal face to be clear, but it does some

funny stuff when he's pitching. So it's like very elastic, you know? So that's Ryan Johnson. There you go. All right, nice to meet him. And yeah, what could be more angels than pushing a guy along? Fast, fast, fast. Yeah, and yeah, it's almost disorienting when you go to his baseball reference page.

I'm used to seeing the tab where you can click on minor league stats and it's just not there. It's not there. He has no tab because he has no minor league stats. It's just very disorientating. He has college stats, but that's it. So yeah, you don't see that very often.

Well, my guy is also not doing so hot in the big leagues, but he is in the big leagues and that is an accomplishment. His name is Alan Rodin and I got interested in Alan Rodin. More for his off the field interests than his on field play, though that is quite compelling too. He is a 25 year old. He is from Middleton, Wisconsin,

and he is listed at 5'11", 215. He's a left-handed hitter and outfielder, corner outfielder, and he is on the Toronto Blue Jays. Now, he was drafted in the third round, so this is a little earlier than we're used to. We're used to talking about, like, you know, 30th round draftees here in this series, and I'm gonna miss when those guys don't exist anymore

because they shortened the draft, but we'll still be testing the limits with our Mida major leaguer candidates. But my guy is a third rounder from the 2022 draft. However, he wasn't a top prospect. I mean, he wasn't like a top 100 guy. He was absolutely a prospect. And I think he was third on the most recent

Longin Hagen Blue Jays list. And that was from just this April, in fact. That was after Rodin had had himself quite a spring training and put himself in position to become a big leaguer and break camp with the club, which he did. But Eric did put him third on the Blue Jays list. I think he's fifth on pipelines and a future value of 50.

So average major league player. Yeah, he's a top 100 guy. He is. Is he is a top 100 guy now? If he's a, if he's a 50 future value guy. Yeah. 50s are where you start to get into the hundred. So. Okay. I think he wasn't, he wasn't in February. He wasn't in February. That's correct. Okay. So he was revised up after spring training.

Got it. Okay. And that's because he just went on a tear in spring training. He hit 407, 541, 704. That's a 1245 OPS, 27 at bats with six walks mixed in there hit a couple homers and got to graduate with the team and go north, way north to Toronto. Now he has not hit particularly well since then. No.

But he's still there, he's still on the roster. He's had 74 play appearances. He has a 72 WRC+, 203, 284, 297. He has hit his first home run. But I really got interested in Alan Rodin because of his academic background, which is not something I would normally say about a big leaguer, but he went to Creighton University.

He played division one ball there, and he didn't actually expect to be a big leaguer. He didn't see it as a career. He liked playing it as an amateur, but physics was his focus. Cool. He loved and loves physics. Reading here from a Sportsnet piece,

he didn't play much baseball at first, instead dedicating himself to his classes and his research in astrophysics. Cool. This caught my attention. His topic of choice, here's how Rodin puts it, specifically, I studied quasars, which are the supermassive black holes

at the centers of galaxies. What? Yeah, and you know that this is some nerd stuff because the article actually says the supermass of black holes, but I know, because I'm an astronomy nerd, supermassive black holes. This was a little bit of a transcription error there,

which reflects the fact that this is esoteric for the general population. But you know I'm a space nerd, I'm an astronomy nerd. And so this called to me and the Sportsnet piece notes, here's how the university described Rodin's research in a post congratulating him for receiving a NASA Nebraska space grant, which probably was a thing that existed

before NASA's budget and everything else is getting slashed to hell, but. Now I'm sad. A project that will be investigating the accretion mechanism that powers the enormous luminosities of quasars by developing and analyzing simulations of black hole accretion.

And I think I can translate this. I think I understand what this means. Tell me. So, a quasar, we have I think I understand what this means. Tell me. So, Equazar, we have actually talked about black holes on a Patreon bonus episode. Of course. Because one of my low stakes rants on a Patreon bonus pod was that the Milky Way's black hole is small, proportionately speaking, and I felt an inadequacy because our supermassive black hole is really not that massive by the because our supermassive black hole

is really not that massive by the standards of supermassive black holes, because every galaxy we know about has a supermassive black hole that's in the center, and everything revolves around that, and it's like millions of solar masses. And the Milky Way's central black hole, which has now been imaged directly,

is small as these things go, because Milky Way's a pretty big galaxy in the grand scheme of things. And yet our central black hole is only like four million solar masses or something. You know, it's a big boy, but as these things go, it's not that big. And as far as we know,

every galaxy has one of these beasts, but they're not all active. Like a quasar is when it's sucking stuff in. And there's an accretion disc of just matter of stuff that is around it, around the event horizon and is falling in and whirling around it at tremendous speeds and generating friction and tons of energy and putting out an enormous amount of radiation.

And so our supermassive black hole is not doing that. It's not active in that way. It's not a quasar. It's like feeding slowly on stuff, but it's not gobbling stuff down and shooting out jets of radiation that are more luminous than entire galaxies put together that we can see from millions, billions of light years away. That's a quasar. And so that is what Alan Rodin was studying.

That's a big boy. Yeah, very, very big. And so he got really interested in physics and he is the son of a microbiologist and a soil scientist. Cool. Yeah, so he comes from a scientific background. His parents are professors and scientists and he loved physics and he was preparing

to go to graduate school and continue his studies there. And so the Sportsnet piece says, when it came to time to decide whether to go back to school for a fourth year and finish his degree or enter the MLB draft, after hitting 378 for Creighton, the choice was easy. He was going to graduate. I had zero anticipation or intention of playing professional baseball, he recalled.

And then a year later he'd earned his degree in physics, but he'd hit 387 with a 492 on base. And this is division one against some of the best college pitching. I meant to mention by the way, Dallas Baptist where your guy went, Ryan Johnson. I wrote a bunch about Dallas Baptist and the MVP machine because they were like early adopters to analytics and having an advanced pitching program in college. Yeah, they're one of the better college pitching programs out there. Yeah, and they kind of branded themselves as Pitcher U.

Yeah. Yeah, so I wrote a bit, a bunch about them. Seisnied went there actually. I've always enjoyed Seisnied's name. Yeah, tremendous name. And I think he actually may have dedicated a facility there. Anyway, the Blue Jays were intrigued by these college stats, so they selected him as an outfielder in his third round

and he decided to put graduate school on the backburner just for a while. He's still interested in pursuing physics and studying quasars, but that will have to wait because he's a big leaguer. So he is said to be a good guy in addition to a smart guy. John Schneider told David Laurella of fan graphs for a Sunday notes in addition to a smart guy. John Schneider told David Laurella of Fan Graphs for a Sunday Notes in March, he's a smart guy when you can blend physics, astrophysics into the swing,

you've got a pretty good shot, but he's kind of a poster boy of player development. We've asked him to get better at things and he's done it, and he's done it really quickly. Couple that with a really good idea of the strike zone and a good idea of what his swing does. He's done really well. Laurella asked Schneider if the Blue Jays

have any astrophysics classes in their player dev program. Schneider said, not that I know of, but this place is pretty big, so they might have a classroom tucked away somewhere, but no, I think he's leading the charge in that category. And Laurella then followed up in a subsequent Sunday Notes edition and talked to Rodin himself and about the physics of his swing.

And he does kind of have an unusual setup, I guess you could say. I'll just quote from Eric here in the Blue Jays list from April. Rodin has posted God tier surface level stats dating back to college and he's done so in pro ball while making several significant mechanical adjustments to his swing. In 2023 he was given a Craig Council batting stance and a big leg kick while his hands were

lowered closer to his ear in 2024. The changes have helped Rodin, who turned 25 December, to access more power without trading off much contact. So yeah, last year, AA and AAA, he slashed 293, 391, 475 and had a 93% in-zone contact rate and an 83% contact rate overall. And his power was a little less than big league average, I guess, well below a corner outfielder, but still he has some pop. And so Eric said the short-leavered Rodin is best at accessing his power against breaking balls that finish middle in.

It's against these pitches that you can really see how much his swing allows him to use the ground to help generate power. Well-executed back foot breaking balls can be kryptonite to Rodin's bat path. He often struggles to scoop those and swings over the top of them. Maybe that is happening so far in the big leagues.

This spring, Eric said, he's dipping deeper into his lower half to go down and reach those pitches. Most importantly, he's adept at flattening his bat path to cover high fastballs to drive them the other way. And these are the pitches he hunts proactively, enough that he sometimes expands the zone against them. So Eric said there's a chance that his production is front-loaded during his years of

control because he's already 25 and has kind of a boxy build that might be vulnerable to early decline, but he's clearly worked hard to improve his conditioning since college and he's a good big league ready hitter with plus contact and plate skills. And I hope that he does have a good long career, but I guess whenever it winds down, he can get back to business. He came back to serious quasar studies. We need him out there. There's still a lot of unanswered questions about black holes and we need him on that while studying them.

There's very often a place for like smart guys, you know, who used to be players and then, you know, they find their way to the front office. And I, I'll be so curious to see like, where does it, where does his career take him if he, you know, hopefully he makes a course correction and he's able to have a long big league career, but if that sort of Peters out, will he return to physics as a, like a hard science or will he stick with a baseball application of it? That would be so interesting. Yeah, I am impressed when there are people

who are amazing at one thing, like among the best in the world, and then they also are like an astrophysicist on the side. It's like Brian May from Queen, lead guitarist, sometimes songwriter, like legendary rock figure, also has a PhD in astrophysics and has studied that stuff and did a thesis and is super smart.

Or I watched this one season of The Bachelor Australia, which is a little bit different from Queen, but I watched this one season starring Matt Agnew. He was the lead, he was the bachelor, and he was also an astrophysicist and he was also on The Bachelor. I mean, that was, he was the lead, he was the bachelor, and he was also an astrophysicist, and he was also on the bachelor. I mean, that was, you know, he was just like a handsome guy. That's not something he did.

He was born with that, I guess, as opposed to Brian May and everything he accomplished musically. But yeah, I'm always impressed by that, where it's like, you know, a lot of people, if they have the intellectual capacity and curiosity to be an astrophysicist, that's like, you know, a lot of people, if they have the intellectual capacity and curiosity to be an astrophysicist, that's like, that takes all your time.

Like that takes all your energy. You don't also, that's not like your side gig. That's something you have to dedicate yourself to fully and give yourself over to it. And then these other people are like, yeah, I'm into astrophysics and I'm gonna get my degree in that, but also I'm gonna be a super successful musician

or a major league baseball player. I just have so many options. I could be an astrophysicist, I could be a big leaguer. And Rodin told MLB.com he was drawn to astrophysics after a high school social studies teacher played a video that talked about explosions of stars and how they relate to life on earth. So that's interesting, because, you know,

like supernovas, they create the elements that make it possible for us to exist. As Carl Sagan said, we're all star stuff, you know, we all come out of those explosions ultimately. And Rodin said that really inspired me and was something I was always interested in. And still is, he's keeping his options open post-career to go back into this.

Now he was asked whether he could apply his physics acumen to baseball. He said, I definitely think there's some parallels in terms of looking at things analytically, being able to make adjustments quick on the fly and having a good self-awareness has helped a lot. You know, it's not necessarily that he's like in the lab, breaking down his swing exactly.

But when Laurel asked him about this and about how he's trying to revamp things, he said, I think it's less of the actual impact. That's better. It's more the shape of the ball off the bat, directionally the exit velocity are high enough to where if I'm getting the ball in the air to the pull side it's going to go, that's where the damage comes from, hitting the ball with more ideal launch angles. So he's talking about that stuff, but what player doesn't these days? You don't need an astrophysics degree necessarily. But he said, my exit velocities have gone up slightly just from moving more efficiently.

The stance is about pre-setting the slot so that once I get to launch position, I can just turn. It's how I'm posturing and directionally moving through the swing to match the plane of the pitch. There's a little more space behind me now and the turn starts a little bit earlier. It's been a process to get to this point, but I really like where I'm at right now. So he is thinking of these things

in an analytical physics-based way, I suppose. Cool. Yeah, all right. So that's Alan Rod way, I suppose. Cool. Yeah, all right. So that's Alan Rodin, that's Ryan Johnson. We wish them well. They are among the 66 new big leaguers who have debuted already this season. And of course they continue to get promoted

over the course of the year. And we will continue to cover some of them. So we always welcome suggestions, nominations. You can email us if you think there's someone who'd be a good candidate. Meant to quote, wrote in here, "'I'd love to continue in physics.'" This was when he was asked about his post-playing plans.

"'It's a passion project right now, but absolutely once I'm done playing, I see no reason why I wouldn't be able to figure out a way to get into it.'" But yeah, you do wonder whether he'll be co-opted into a front office career because front offices, they like physics, astrophysics people. They sure do. That's a very valuable skill set.

So maybe he'll end up blending both of those things. We'll see. But I kind of hope he gets back to quasars at some point. Yeah, it would be cool to see him reengage and like become a professor and have, you know, his students be like, wait, you did what for how many years? Yeah, yeah, that would make you the cool professor probably. Oh yeah.

All right, well, there are a lot of other excellent candidates, you know, some older guys who are more along the lines of the players we typically profile here, you know, your Jake Mangums or your JC Askaras and all sorts of interesting paths to the big leagues and maybe we will highlight them on a later episode. Okay, so let's get to some emails and guess what Meg, big news for the time being, we have a new sponsor. We do. I knew what the news was. Yeah, no, this is not a surprise to you, but...

I've queued you up. Yeah. That would be something if I sprang that on you. You're like, hey, by the way. This seems like something you should have a say in, but you did. I did. We have a new sponsor, and this is unusual for us.

It's not every day or every year, for that matter, that we have a sponsor. Longtime listeners will know that we have had two in the entire history of Effectively Wild, one being baseball reference and stat head specifically, or play index as it was called then, and another being tops and tops now baseball cards. And now we have a third sponsor.

We're completing the trilogy here. What if sports is sponsoring Effectively Wild? And we don't have sponsors very often because we're very selective. Because, well, in a way we have many sponsors. They're the listeners. We have sponsors on Patreon. And that mostly suffices,

but we do still get a lot of inquiries from advertisers. And there are a lot of podcasts that are on Patreon and also have ads. And we don't want to double dip to a great extent there. And because of that, and because we want to provide a good audio experience for everyone, and we don't want to advertise things that we don't like or approve of, and yeah, exactly. And we don't want to be disruptive. Like sports butter. Yeah, exactly. And we don't want to be disruptive and just intrusive

with just a bunch of ads and pre-rolls and post-rolls and mid-rolls and all the rolls. So we want to spare you as many rolls as we can. So the only ways that we've done advertising on this podcast, we have had a sponsor on to sponsor a specific segment that we've done advertising on this podcast, we have had a sponsor on to sponsor a specific segment that we do anyway, and that sponsor is very related to baseball and to Effectively Wild

and to our interests here. So nine out of 10 times we get an inquiry from a potential sponsor or an advertising network or whatever, and we don't even answer, and it just gets archived, and we don't even answer and it just gets archived and we don't even bother following up or the few times we've had conversations, it generally goes nowhere. Yeah. Because often it's like, we don't want to have sports betting ads though. And that's, that's all the ads though.

You understand that that's the only kind of ads. Yep. Most of them. Anyway, we got an email recently from the new owner of What If Sports? And my eyes actually perked up. Can eyes perk up? My eyebrows raised, my ears perked up. I don't know.

My attention was- You sat up straighter in your chair. I did. My interest was piqued because I am well aware of What If Sports and that seemed like something that might be well aligned with what we do here at Effectively Wild and then we had some subsequent conversations and it seemed like we were on the same page there. So the reason we got an email from What If Sports was that a lot of Effectively Wild listeners play What If Sports and seems to be the unofficial favorite podcast of at least the new owners league. And I would imagine that that is reciprocal. I would guess that a lot of effectively wild listeners already use What If Sports, but if you don't, that is why they are advertising on the show.

And so what we're doing here is What If Sports is sponsoring a What If segment, essentially, which is something that dates back to the beginning of the podcast, more or less, not by name, but we have done email hypotheticals, hypothetical questions from time immemorial, or at least 2012, and it's kind of the motto of the podcast. At baseball, we're different. How different would it be? And often the answer is not that different, but it's always fascinating to consider. And so once a week for a while, we will be having What If Sports sponsor

our hypothetical question that we're answering on an email show. And for those who are not aware of What If Sports, it goes back longer than Effectively Wild does. It's been around for decades and it's a simulation service. And so if you want to play sim leagues, if you want to play sim league baseball, if you want to play a dynasty mode

where you can construct a team, construct a franchise, as the marketing copy we were provided says, it's a playground for people who love baseball analytics, roster building and competing with other users. We don't even read the boilerplate that much because it's more organic if we can just speak from our personal knowledge. But you can play and just construct a team

with players from any era. So all the hypothetical scenarios like, what if this person played with or against that person, how would they fare? You can construct a team, pulling players from all eras. You can compete in simulated leagues. You can just be the architect of that roster. It's kind of fantasy baseball ish, but it's like that coupled with time travel, essentially.

So if you're into stats, if you're into history, you can combine all of those interests in what if sports, and you could play a single season and you can make it any season and pull from any roster, or you can do dynasty mode. And you can, you know, it's like a franchise mode in a video game. You can just start from scratch and create a fictional franchise,

and there's just all sorts of permutations, and you can answer all sorts of scenarios about what would happen if this or that, which was perfectly aligned with what we often consider here. And it's pretty in-depth as we are on Effectively Wild, so you can handle all the scouting and the drafting and the player dev and the contracts and the lineup management.

It's like a full-featured sim. So, seems very much up our alley and up our listeners at least. I will admit that the league I'm in has just used diamond mind forever. I'm sorry, what if sports? But I don't play fantasy baseball as like an endeavor, because it's so much, it's so much bad, you know? You just have to, do you know that they do it every day? They have to do it every day, like every day.

So after I was in a league and it had keepers and I forgot to keep my chat, I was like, this is probably not for me. So it seems like a major strategic mistake. Yeah, it was, it wasn't great depending on what year it was, I guess, but still, yeah, no, it wasn't great. My friend Thomas was like, so I guess, but still. Yeah, no, it wasn't great. My friend Thomas was like, so hey, you going to be doing this anymore? But I do play in a sim league and it's so much fun. You know, they're just, it's, it's a, you end up having so much sympathy for big league

managers after you do any kind of sim baseball because it's harder than it looks. So yeah, I think that it can be a really fun way to kind of engage with the game and do it in a way that doesn't involve gambling or any of that stuff. It's just like a fun time. Yeah, that was one of our first questions. You don't have any gambling ties or anything.

Nope. They feel the same way about that. So you can go to whatifsports.com to find out all the info and read FAQs, et cetera. And there's a whole community there. And by the way, they do have football and basketball and hockey products as well, if you're into that, but we're highlighting the baseball specifically as we are a baseball podcast.

And throwing it back to old school podcast advertising, there's a promo code. Yeah. We have a promo code. So the promo code is effectively wild. Just one word, easy to remember. It's the name of the podcast. And if you use that, you can purchase your first season of Sim League baseball or hardball dynasty or both for $1.

$1. I mean, what a steal. $1. Come on, what a $1. Come on, you gotta try it at least. Steal. Yeah. So we will link to whatifsports.com and include that promo code, effectivelywild on the show page as well.

And if you're interested, well, go use it. And that will send a signal to What If Sports that hey, advertising on Effectively Wild, good idea. So- Worthwhile. That is the extent of our advertising for this season as far as we know and for a portion of this season. So the first hypothetical that we will use to kick things off here, and it's funny, you suggested that we maybe solicit some hypotheticals and I was like, don't worry, the listeners,

they got it covered. Well, I didn't know what the current state of affairs was with our cue, you know. The mailbag is bursting with hypotheticals that we would have answered eventually regardless, most likely. And so this week's or this episode's or one of this episode's comes from Jacob,

who says, I wonder how baseball fandom would be different if fans didn't have to pay for a game if their team lost, but they had to pay a decent amount more if the team won. So teams would actually be incentivized to want to win games so their revenue would increase. So Jacob is laying out a scenario here where there's essentially a money back guarantee, or you don't even have

to pay until your team wins. It's like your team wins or the game is free and you just go home, not having spent a dollar. But if the team does win, then they're going to charge you. And Jacob suggested that teams would be incentivized thus to win games, because if they lose games, they're not going to be making any money. So I think this could change baseball in a number of ways and there could even be unintended consequences, but what was your initial reaction to this hypothetical? Well, I think first of all, that we would see a pretty profound split

between the teams that are all in on this concept and the ones that are vehemently, perhaps violently opposed to it. So if you're Bob Nutting, just pick an owner out of the clear blue sky, you hate this idea. And we should say that as I was thinking about it, I was like, so what are the potential downside scenarios? You miss out if you're the home team, you in theory miss out on some percentage of your gate, which is a not insignificant amount of money, right? But this doesn't impact your broadcast deal at all because presumably it would not apply

to like carriage fees for your RSN, but only to those who are coming to the park. And of course the people coming to the park aren't just spending money on the actual ticket, right? Like sometimes your most expensive, the most expensive part of your outing to the ballpark is all of the other stuff you buy while you're there, you know, your beers and your brats and your hats and other such things. So it's not like you wouldn't be making any money on the days that you lose, but you could potentially be making a lot less. I think that they might still be open to the notion, you know, particularly if you're a team like say the Dodgers, where you're just confident you're going to want a bunch of your games regardless, you would feel good about it.

But I also think that I think fans would hate it because the, the uncertainty feels well, I guess you encounter uncertainty at the ballpark regardless because you don't know if the team's going to win, but you know, it would feel potentially stressful and you have sort of a perverse incentive then if you're the fan because, well, do you want your team to win or do you want to see baseball for free? You know? And like that's a, that's a weird position to put fans in. But isn't that sort of a win-win though? Because even if you lose,

you win because you don't have to spend any money? I mean, I guess potentially, but I just don't think you ever want to be in a spot where you're even a little bit, maybe sort of kind of rooting for your favorite guys to take a dive. So there's that piece of it where it creates this feeling of uncertainty. And for some people, maybe they don't care, but I do worry that this would sort of stratify the baseball attending public more profoundly, right? Because if you're, especially if you're going, if you're going by yourself or, you know, with one other person, maybe it doesn't matter quite as much, but you know, if you're a family and you have kids,

that you're taking, that's a potentially very large swing that you're looking at between it being free and it being not free. So I do think that it would, just the risk of it costing money and costing more money than it currently does would price some people out just because they couldn't, they couldn't take the risk that they'd have to pony up. Like, and of course we're assuming that there's like a logistical way that you could actually execute this, which seems like it would itself be complicated. But the thought that actually occurred to me was I wonder if this would result in us having just really boring ballpark configurations,

right? Because if you're the home team, you want to win and you want to have some percentage of that win probability, not banked, but like more dependable. And if you have a more extreme park, right? Either it plays really well for hitters or for pitchers. It seems like you would have greater vacillation in your potential home performance. Like I think about a team like the Mariners where that park plays so well for their pitching and that's great, but it really depresses offense and you can kind of see how they might struggle

depending on the sort of composition of their roster at any given moment. Well, I had to start saying nice things about the Mariners because they're sort of playing good baseball right now. And I got to really say nice things about Jorge Polanco because like, he's playing really good baseball right now. We got to talk about Jorge Polanco, not right now. So, but I wonder if the instinct the teams would have would be to make the park play in a very neutral way. Although maybe they would embrace the extreme and just be like, let's really, really lean into something wonky in the hopes that we can construct our roster to specifically fit those specifications and the other and the visiting team is just going to be hosed by

them. I don't know. I wonder what it would do to like ballpark design and how the walls are configured and all of that. If it would like, you know, make people feel nervous to have a cool, weird thing. You know, it's like Tulls Hill is already dead, but I feel like this would definitely kill Tulls Hill. You know, yeah, so I feel like I'm getting that name wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how you could do this. I guess as more ticket sales migrates to apps and digital as opposed to hard copies, paper

tickets, maybe there's some way if it's all app-based, you'd have to have your credit card or your account on file and then you would just be charged or not after the game, I guess, yeah, it'd be hard to ensure, like they'd have to, I don't know, maybe there'd have to be like a deposit or like they'd place a hold on some funds or something because you could just imagine like you go to the game and then, I don't know, you empty that account or something when your team is winning

and then they can't charge, I don't know, like I'm sure there's some way, if it were all electronic, then I guess there's probably some way. If you had to... Now then again, you're also probably excluding people who might not have that. It's kind of like cashless situations.

Maybe even in 2025, there are people who aren't able to pay as easily that way. And so if you don't have an account and all, you know, banking and all that stuff set up, then, you know, maybe you're pricing out certain people and excluding people from just walking up and buying a cheap ticket one day.

And I had the same concern as you, just that you're gonna have to make the prices for the wins, at least as like double what your standard price would have been, if not for this hypothetical to make up for, I mean, something like that to make up, hopefully you want to win more often than you lose, but depending on the team, you're really going to have to jack up the prices. And I think fans, if they can afford that, would be in a better mood. Because, hey, I just saw a good game and my team won and I'm going home happy.

And yeah, I have to pay for the privilege now, assuming you're even a home fan and you're a fan of that team, which some people wouldn't. So, but if you are, then OK, it kind of eases the sting of the loss. If well, my team was, but at least I get to not pay. I get a scot-free here. It's like you were saying yesterday that you just generally recommend going to a sporting event and whatever it is, it's just nice to get outside and communal experience and, you know, see a game. And so it might be nice, like you're not even,

you want your team to win, but you know that worst case, I just got some free entertainment and maybe I got to spend some time with my friends or something, some socializing. So that's good that you'd feel a little less bad about a loss and while you wouldn't wanna pay the high price after a win, at least you'd be happy because your team won.

And so that's good, but yes, I do think it prices out a lot of people who just would not be able to have the single game exorbitant spend that would come with a win. And also you'd have to like budget for this as a team. Like there'd be so much uncertainty about your finances. And even though the premise of the hypothetical was, well, this will make teams spend more because they'll have more incentive to win games, to put a competitive, compelling product out there because they know they're only going to make money if they spend money, essentially.

But with the uncertainty, because there's always randomness and there's unpredictable tragedies and injuries that befall a team, even if it's trying. And so, would not being able to really like lock in a certain amount of revenue from attendance actually depress spending? Because businesses don't like it when they don't know how much money they're going to be making. We're seeing that right now across industry. Yeah. So like that might be bad where it's like, okay, we think that if we sign this free agent

and spend millions of bucks and make ourselves better, then that will lead to, you know, like we signed this three war player. Okay. Well, we just got ourselves three more games of gate where we actually are making a lot of money, but what if that guy gets hurt or something? What if something else goes wrong? Can you actually count on that?

And, you know, even now, I guess there's that relationship a little bit, but it's not quite as contingent on things actually working out well. And so that concerns me that it would actually backfire and have the opposite of the intended effect. And again, I think there would be teams for whom they might be able to entertain a certain amount of risk and do so with greater confidence than other clubs,

you know, especially if they have a lucrative broadcast deal, but that number is shrinking every year. Like there are just fewer and fewer teams that are in that position to begin with. So yeah, maybe it would actually be a disaster. It could be a disaster. I was going to say this would have been a bit more palatable maybe a few years ago before everyone was panicking about the cable bubble bursting and yeah because because there was more built-in money regardless of how

you did which is how nutting has gotten away with nutting and if you take that away well that could be good we've said that could be good because it does incentivize you to actually compete and if a greater percentage of your revenue comes from attendance, well, that might be good. There might be a little less nutting going on, but then yeah, does that make teams even more wary of a situation like this? I mean, teams aren't going to want this. They want certainty. That's why when we get questions about relegation,

they are entirely hypothetical, because what owner of a billion dollar franchise is gonna be like, yeah, let's allow for the possibility that we will get relegated. When now we have this sort of monopolistic system that we can't get kicked out of no matter how bad we are. Obviously they're gonna opt for that instead.

So yeah, I don't think you're gonna be able to sell this, but the fan dynamics of it are quite interesting. And I wonder whether, what happens if a team budgeted for a certain sort of season, because it projected that it would have X wins, and then it turns out that they far exceeded that, or they fell far short of that. How does that change their economics? Are they then jacking up the prices and the wins even more when it turns out that the wins are gonna be more scarce than they thought they were gonna be? And then I guess it's like,

is it variable pricing throughout the season? So you're kind of, okay, we're banking on this many wins, but if it turns out that we're way ahead of or behind that pace, well, we got to make up the shortfall somehow here. And so now the second half of the season, since we suck, there are fewer wins to go around. So we got to charge you even more for those wins. And then what happens if you bought tickets in advance? Then would they not want to sell tickets in advance because of that uncertainty? And so there's some inherent uncertainty regardless, because the season's pretty unpredictable,

but this really raises it to a new level. And, you know, to your point, not everyone who's going to a baseball game is a fan of the home team. And some teams, you know, they're counting on the schedule, putting them in a position where they are getting a ton of fans of the opposing team to sort of help supplement their, their season. Again, like the Mariners, when the Blue Jays come to town, like that ballpark has a ton of Blue Jays fans in it because everyone who lives in Western Canada who wants

to see a big league game in person, well, they're going to drive down to Seattle and see it, right? And so, you know, you're in, again, you're in a weird spot where it's like, well, do we, do we cater to those people? Like, do we tell the team to take a dive so that we have to, so that we can recoup the gate from all of these Blue Jays fans? Like, I think that it creates a number of very strange incentives, both in terms of the rooting interests of the fan, but also the team's behavior. So I think it could be the end of baseball, really. You know, not to put too fine a point on it,

but I worry it would destroy the entire sport, at least at the pro level in the US. Excellent question, Jacob. Always good when we can end on this might destroy everything. Yeah, we like it when we have to grapple with existential threats, because they're so thin on the ground, you know? Feels like a fun hypo.

Yeah. Okay, here's one from Sam, Patreon supporter. He says, which of the following do you think will happen first? The Dodgers finished in last place in the NL West or the Rockies win the NL West? Unless I am mistaken, Sam says, neither has happened since the Rockies first season.

It's true, the Rockies have never won the division. So Dodgers finish last, Rockies finish first. Which will happen first? Oh, I feel so mean saying this, but I feel like the Dodgers finishing last will happen first. It's a little bit cheating to say that because you have multiple avenues to that being true and you only have one avenue to the Rockies winning, which is the Rockies winning, right? But the notion

that particularly as the division is currently constituted, you know, like, let's say you managed to, you're the Rockies and you managed to slay the dragon that is the Dodgers. Congratulations. Well, now you still have to contend with the Diamondbacks, the Giants and the Padres. Those are not bad baseball teams. They're varying degrees of good depending on the year. But right now, all very stout, all looking quite strong. I just think that it's a harder thing to wrangle. Meanwhile, you know, look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you with a straight

face, you wouldn't be able to see it if I were, but I'm not going to sit here and say that there's much danger in the near or semi near term of the Dodgers finishing in last place. Man, they really have only won four games the Rockies. That's wild. And it's funny that I'm surprised because I literally edited Dan Zinborski's piece earlier today about like who is best positioned to challenge the White Sox record from last season this season. Spoiler alert, it's the Colorado Rockies.

I do like that their record is 420. I know, that's not the 420 you want. That's funny, that's funny. Look forward to reading Dan's post, but I didn't need the zips on that one, I don't think. I think that's going with my gut. That's funny. Look forward to reading Dan's post, but I didn't need the zips on that one, I don't think. Yeah. I think that's going with my gut. But to that point, I don't think that the Dodgers

are gonna do it, but there is a dark alternate timeline where all of their guys who have been hurt kinda go down at once. I mean, we're already seeing some other guys be hurt simultaneously. Michael Isis is shocked. He's like, I can't believe it that they would all be hurt at the same time. Multiple injuries simultaneously?

To pitchers? No. With injury histories? Get out of here. You are a scamp. But, you know, there's a scenario where they're just like so, so hurt. And because they are a team that is hyper competitive, has just won a World Series, is always trying to be competitive. I do think that they have like some goodwill banked where like if this team were to go into some sort of injury spiral,

and again, I'm not even naming specific players because you just don't want to put that energy onto the world, but like if they were to go into some sort of injury spiral and their front office were determined like we're well out of it, they might look at it as an opportunity to, you know, sell at the deadline and trade away some guys who are on expiring contracts and continue to replenish that farm system, which is just so good all the time.

And that's how you end up in a situation where the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers, who projected for the best record in baseball or the second best, it was Lemon Labriebs, decide to sell, do a little mini sell-off and end up in last place in the division. I don't think it's likely, but I think it's more likely than the Rockies winning because they are rudderless is my feeling about them. Rudderless. It's really, my mind reels and revolts at the thought of either of these things actually happening. It's just so hard to contemplate, which is why it's a good question. But yeah, I guess I'm with you on that one. It's like, to finish last, you almost kind of control your own destiny.

Like if you just suck. Right. Granted, you have to suck more than everyone else in your division, but it's just, it's easier to be bad than it is to be great. And so if the bottom falls out, if you just decide we're tanking or rebuilding it,

like it's, yeah, it's even though the Dodgers have said and then have also acted as if they don't think they have cycles of competition or like rebuilds or anything, they can just keep it going. There could come a day, yeah, where just all the guys get old and the prospects don't pan out and you know, it doesn't even have to be like a strip it down to the studs, rebuilds, taking effort, but just a step back. You know, we're kind of, and do the Dodgers have to do that with all their resources?

Maybe not. But look, we're taking the long view here, because we don't think either of these things is imminent. I mean, this could be beyond the Dodgers TV deal even, I mean, which lasts for a long time, but still. So, yeah, there could be a world where they decide in order to get great again soon, we have to be bad for a little while. I guess it's also possible that the Rockies

could just be sold and could actually bring in more competent management and could overhaul how they do things. But it seems like that's what would have to happen at this point. Like, you know, I mean, the Rockies have had good teams in the past, not the vision winners, but teams that could have conceivably won the division. Made the postseason. And made the World Series. And so like, you know, I guess it could happen. They could happen to develop some good young guys as they have, but that just hasn't been enough. So yeah, I'll say Dodger's nightmare scenario, free fall,

everything goes wrong and they decide to do a step back. That's maybe easier to envision than the Rockies actually being better than those four other teams. And granted luck can happen and health luck easier to envision than the Rockies actually being better than those four other teams. And granted, luck can happen and health, luck and on field luck. And you can have a fluky season where you just outplay your peripherals. And even so though, as bad as the Rockies are and have been, even give them a lot of luck. And that's just not going to be enough. I love how stressed you sound at the prospect

of the Rockies winning the NLS. Like I feel like this is potentially destabilizing to you as a person, the notion that you might look up one day and be like, the Rockies are doing what? Yeah, this would cause me to question everything. This would destroy my understanding of baseball. Two questions in a row. I mean, for Rockies fans' sake,

I hope that they get to experience this at some point. It's not that I wish the Rockies to be bad, but it's just so fundamental to my understanding of the sport. It's hard to envision a scenario where we've never seen it. They've been around for a few decades at this point, and it has never happened.

I do wonder, just to entertain a brief Rockies tangent, you know, like part of the criticism of that franchise, which has been bountiful to be clear, but one of the threads of criticism has been sort of reluctance to really look beyond the organization as it's currently constituted for solutions, right? Like all of all those Monfort kids are running around working for the org. And it's not that there aren't good people working for the team. And to your point, they have had squads

that have been competitive and have gone to, gone on to play postseason baseball, though not ultimately successfully. But I wonder, you know, at some point, Dig Monfort will be done with the team or we'll shuffle off this mortal coil, right? As we all do. And then I wonder like, are those kids going to be the, like, are his sons going to just run the team? Is it just going to be their team forever? You know, like they're

so involved already. It's not like, you know, he didn't raise an astrophysicist, right? This isn't a knock on any of his kids' intelligence. I'm just saying to my knowledge, none of them have studied that as an academic pursuit. So, you know, you can imagine a scenario where like other owners start to reach the part of their lives where the days get long and their kids are like, yeah, but I'm a doctor, you know, I'm not going to run this baseball team. We should just sell it or, you know, whatever. But I don't know if that's going to be true of old Dick's kids. It's Dick, right? Dick Montfort. I'm not misremembering his name. Because if I was, then it would sound like I was insulting him, but I wasn't. I'm just saying his name, which is Dick. Yeah. There's also the institutional disadvantage. I guess it's a disadvantage. We have to conclude

at this point. It's probably a disadvantage of course field mitigated as it might be by the humidor. It's just an environmental disadvantage that the Rockies have. They would really not like the proposal from the first hypothetical. They would be vehemently opposed. Yeah. Then again, the Dodgers have all sorts of institutional advantages that make it hard for them to finish last, even if they tried. But I think your point is a good one, which is that like, even though it would be uncomfortable for them and they wouldn't be familiar with it, at least not in this version of the franchise, you do have the ability to like trade away good players and make your- You can decide to be bad and accomplish that goal fairly easily if you commit to it.

Whereas you can't just decide to be good and pull it off as the Rockies have demonstrated. Right. Correct. So, you know, there's that. Okay. Question from Citar, Patreon supporter. When baseball does decide to get the calls right and we go full ABS. All right. All right. Do you think the home plate umpire will still stand where they stand? We're taking the pitch away from them and there's no reason to think they could be a backup to ABS if they never actually have to call it. They'd be the guy on the Zoom meeting that suddenly gets asked a question after 45 minutes of unrelated talk.

So no reason to stand where they're going to get smashed with fouled back pitches. You'd probably still want them around home for catcher's interference, check swings, plays at the plate, et cetera. But they could probably slide to the side a little. It's a tough angle for foul tips to hit you. You'd get a little better view at the pitch, the contact, things like hit by pitches, foul tips.

There'd be more box with ABS, wouldn't there? You're more ready to watch fielded bunts, fair and foul, et cetera. Or would the classic image of batter catch ump look so weird without it that people would viscerally hate a different alignment regardless? And C.T.A.R sent a little image

of like a disembodied umpire floating a few feet away from behind the catcher, but you can imagine that. So it's just catcher hitter on an island and then it's ump either farther back or to the side or both. I think that they would probably still be stationed right where they are. I think that the question assumes a greater rate of turnover in the umpiring rakes than we have seen. So I don't think you would have anyone, it would take a long time maybe is a better way

to say that it would take a long time before you had umpires back there who had never called balls and strikes and umpires are still, umpire ball and strike calls are still the backup if the tech goes down. So they would, they need to be able to call a good strike zone, which as an aside is another reason why we shouldn't do full ABS because you gotta, you need reps, you know, to do it. So that's a really tough assignment. If, if the ABS works 99.9% of the time, and then there's a malfunction and you're like, oh, suddenly you're on the spot again, what was the call? Even if the empires are told, you have to be vigilant here.

And it's not like they're gonna be completely zoning out because there's other stuff going on in the game, obviously that they have to pay attention to. But even so, even if you prime them with, hey, you're the backup here, if it is as routine as it probably would be, and they're called upon as infrequently as they probably would be,

it'd be really hard to be zoned in, so to speak, enough that you could actually make a good call. But I guess if you're watching at all, you could maybe get it not horribly wrong, hopefully. But yeah, until at least we get years in with a full Robo-Ump's and it's perfect or very close to perfect, then I think there'd be a mandate that they would still have to stay back there. But, but let's say years pass and it's, you know, there are no issues whatsoever.

I mean, even a human empire could keel over or something, I know, there are no issues whatsoever. I mean, even a human umpire could keel over or something, I guess, like nothing's perfect or you could blink or sneeze or have a medical incident or something, I don't know. But, you know, like if years go by and it's 100% or just about, then maybe we'd get to a point where we would say, okay, you probably don't actually have to be back there.

And maybe if umpires didn't have to be, even if you ask them now, if you said, hey, would you like to stand somewhere else? Maybe they would, just to get drilled a little less often by foul tips and bounces that get by the catcher, which happens fairly often. You know, if you gave them the option to stand to the side or something and they didn't have to call pitches, well, we talked the other day about whether umpires

would actually be fiercely protective or not of their role as pitch callers. If you take that away from them, then maybe they would say, yeah, I'm fine getting out of the line of attack here. Maybe but you still need someone back there for, you know, plays at the plate, um, catcher's interference. Like you, you kind of have to be up in, up in the business to, to do the other parts of the job effectively and maybe not on every pitch, but like if I'm a catcher, I'll, I'm about to say this.

I reserve the right to change my mind about the pronouncement I'm about to make, but I think my preference would probably be to have the umpire in the same place, you know, and they do move around a little bit back there, but like in generally the same place, every pitch, then to have them like roving, like only getting up close to the plate. Like when the ball's put in play or whatever, you still need them back there for catcher's interference though. Like I, I think you just have to have them back there and that's so alien. I don't want to like be, be all a theorist on you, but it's like, you're there and you're so close to the action.

You're required to be engaged. You're still getting the crap kicked out of you by foul balls every now and again, take on a little throat and stuff like that. And then you can't do the most important part of your job, the part of your job that makes you feel so powerful. It feels like a bad way to treat people, man. I don't know. I'm like so, I'm, I'm really protective of them. Even though they definitely read as people, man. I don't know. I'm like, so I'm, I'm really protective

of them. They definitely read as cops to me. I don't know. I just like, I feel like we, we treat them badly and I wonder if we treat treated them better if this is where the cop thing maybe breaks down. But anyway, like I'm, I'm open in all kinds of worms cans of them, but yeah, I just, I think you'd need them back there so that they could do, they could correctly execute the parts of their job that require close attention, even beyond balls and strikes. You certainly need them near at hand when, you know, you have a potential play at the plate. I just think you need them back there and you got to have them taken, getting reps in case the system goes down.

You know, like what if, I don't know, what if it goes down? Then what are you going to do? Then the fans are really going to freak out. Like, can you imagine the, cause I agree with you, the quality of the pitch calling would, or the ball and strike calling would decline precipitously without regular reps. And then like the system goes down, everybody's already freaked out. I think they'd end up just having to cancel games.

Like at a certain point, you just can't even abide it. Yes, I also think that when you implement full ABS, if they ever do, then that would be jarring enough. That'd be enough of a deviation from the norm that you would want to maintain the visuals. It would almost, it become kind of a skeuomorph to use one of our favorite terms, almost in a sense, like kind of archaic that you actually have to have the ump crouching with a hand on the shoulder of the catcher if they're not really calling pitches anymore.

And if the system works so well that you don't realistically need them as the backup all that often. But I could imagine down the road when everyone is so used to ABS, maybe they could shift over to the side just for self-preservation. Because if it's a workplace safety thing, you have to be in close proximity to make the calls, but you might not have to be directly in the line of fire. Yeah, you might not have to be quite so up on them. So yeah, what Sitar is saying.A.R. is saying about just shift a few feet over, a little bit back.

I think that might work eventually down the road. I wouldn't object to that. Okay, question from Freddy. Eric Plantenberg holds the all-time record for games pitched without recording a decision, 61. The closest active player is Hunter Biggie, who's pitched in 23 games as of April 12th. It's now up to 29 games without a decision. We're still a ways away, but at what point does this become something to look for?

I suppose the nature of the record is such that by the time you read this, it could already be irrelevant, but isn't that the fun of it all? So still relevant, even more relevant than when it was sent because Hunter Biggie of the Rays, he is up to 29 and that puts him into a tie for 17th place in career games pitched without a decision, neither a win nor a loss. So Plantenberg did this from 1993 to 1997, when he was pitching for the Mariners and also the Phillies, never got a single decision in his whole big league career. And Biggie is not even halfway there. Yeah.

But the nature of this pursuit, I suppose, is that he could get there in a single season, because the record is only 61 games. I would get a little less invested in it just because even if you were to displace Plantainburg, you're not necessarily assured of staying atop that leaderboard. I don't actually know whether there has been a pitcher

who has had a longer streak. Oh, well, certainly there have been pitchers who've had longer streaks since Plantainburg because the single season record for most games pitched without a decision is 80 by Randy Choate in 2012. And maybe we won't see that happen again because we don't see so many 80 game seasons, I guess. That was classic Lugui. Lugui. That was classic Loogie. So, so- Loogie. And I don't, I mean, Chote, I guess in 2012,

that was not the start of his career. So he had been pitching for a long time and he had previous decisions, but perhaps Plantenberg has been surpassed temporarily by someone who then subsequently got a decision. But even if not, you couldn't really get invested in it. But then again, I got invested in the games finished without a save record, and that was similar in nature.

Why are you underestimating us? We can get riled up about just about anything. Yeah, so that's like, if it were a fairly youngish guy, like Hunter Biggie is 26 and he's in his second season. So let's say, and he's pitched well, he's been a very effective reliever in a small sample. Yeah, he's getting opportunities for a reason. Yeah, so let's say he got there by the end of this season, which I guess is conceivable even.

If he did that, I guess I would hail that, but I wouldn't really get attached to it because I'd figure, well, he's a pretty good pitcher and he's young, he's gonna keep pitching. He'll get a decision at some point and then he'll be right off the leaderboard. Though that might be kind of fun to track, like the Hunter Biggie decision watch, even after he surpasses Plantenberg,

you could see like a root against him getting a loss or something, cause you want him to remain the no decision guy. So yeah, I guess, I guess that could be kind of fun. You know, I haven't really gotten invested in previous chases and there have been some like David McKay, he completed his career with 30 in 2022. He didn't pitch since then. Parker Machinsky is at 31. He pitched as recently as last season. Jordan Sheffield got to 32. He pitched in 2022. So there have been some guys in fairly recent years that were making runs at it,

but maybe not as promising pitchers as Biggie, but then in a sense being a promising pitcher makes you less promising for this chase. Plantenberg was like roughly league average exactly as a reliever in his work and it was 42 total innings. You need someone who's kind of like up and down probably and more of a fringe guy who you just hope he could get to 62 and then kind of call it a career.

So I have two really deep important thoughts about this. The first is, don't you mean, Sir Plantenberg? Yes, I should have meant that, thank you. Sir Plantenberg. Thank you very much. And then my second is that Hunter Biggie should be as tall as Sean Jelle and it's a crime that he's not, like what's up with that?

Your name is Biggie and you're like 6'2", 6'1", 6'2", 6'1", he's 6'1". 6' even at baseball reference unless one, six two, six one. He's six one. Six even at baseball reference, unless that was updated elsewhere. We have him at six one, but I, look, he's not a short man, but is he a biggie man? No, he's not. Not for a pitcher.

He needs to be jelly sized. What are we doing? Gotta go get that leg lengthening surgery. Don't do that Hunter. No, that seems bad. But that seems bad. Yeah. But Plantainburg amusingly had a save, but no winner loss. That's so funny. It's such a specific profile a guy, right? Because to your point, you can't be too good or you're going to get opportunities,

you're going to be in there enough that just by happenstance, it's going to happen. You can't even, you might not even want to be like mid. You kind of need to be an up-down guy. And it's an odd one. Did you see this week, speaking of the leg lengthening, did you see that Edwin Diaz had a leg length problem? I'll just read the quote. Yesterday, my legs, one was longer than the other one. We worked on that yesterday. I don't know if that was a problem. It was the first time that had happened to me.

We fixed it yesterday. It's just, I love that quote. Just like, suddenly one of his legs was longer than the other, don't know if that was a problem. It hadn't happened to him before. And then, Hey, we fixed it. So yeah, I saw that and look like I don't think it's uncommon actually for people's legs to be different lengths. I don't know, which is the more typical state. Candidly,

I've never really had my delivery matter to my, you know, professional career. So this is a new problem for me. I'm surprised though that it's a new problem for him because it seems like a sort of immutable thing, you know? I mean, unless you're getting the leg lengthening surgery. Right. Yeah, no, I guess I'm sure if you measured down to the millimeter,

leg lengths are usually not identical, but a pronounced difference to the point where you would notice or where it might affect your performance as a pitcher. And for that to sort of spontaneously happen, I think that's the thing that people were kind of wondering. Cause then he was asked if he figured out what had caused it. And he said, I don't know.

I didn't ask, which I feel like I would ask. I have so many questions. Then he talked about the trainer. He just did it and I was feeling better after. So the trainer just worked on his hips, you know, loosen stuff up. I guess that can happen, you know, like it's kind of a, a cramping or, or just like, you know, things aren't moving right. And then you just get someone to stretch you out and, and open you up and, and it helps your, your leg get longer or yeah.

And so like I, again, because my reference for this is the sci-fi film, Gattaca, they had to do was like a do his surgery, you know, cause he was shorter and they had to make him the same height so that he could go to space, you know? That's what that movie's about going on. Posture flexibility thing

than the inherent length of the leg. It's just- Yeah, but see, again, I'm thinking about it as like the length of his bones changed, which seems wrong. Probably not that. Yeah. Probably not that. It doesn't seem like something a trainer could fix instantly.

No. I mean, unless they're doing surgery like in the dugout. Yeah. Seems above the pay grade of your typical athletic trainer on the spot. So. Yeah. I could make a Met's joke, but it seems like it would be important. So it was a funny turn of phrase.

And I think you're right. He was probably referring to, you know, some sort of stretching massage, um, counteracting tightness or inflammation, you know, stuff that you would know to be problems if you believed in stretching, but you don't. So maybe your legs, who knows how long your legs are, Ben. They could be any length at all. I should see the Mets trainer, but yeah, it was just the nonchalant way and the kind of

incurious way that he presented this information to everyone. Right, and it's interesting, the seeming like indifference to it is interesting because I mean, we've talked about how Edwin Diaz is like, kind of, uh, doesn't feel reliable as a reliever right now. If you're a Mets fan, I bet he makes you feel very nervous. That's what my social media would suggest. Uh, the Mets fans I follow are always really biting their fingernails when he comes in

these days. But my understanding is that yes, part of what they have identified as the problem is that he is dealing with some hip issues and that the discomfort he is feeling in his hip is affecting his delivery and sort of his mechanics and their repeatability. And so it's like a question that would interest me as a human being who has to live with my legs. But also like, it seems relevant to some of the potential performance issues that he's been having. Like, oh, is this a, is this a mechanical issue in, you know, or your labrums tight, you know, do you got a rotator, like the, you know, the ball? Like for me, there's a fun fact about me, Meg, you know, you know how your femur, like the top of it's a ball

and if it's in the hip socket. Okay, so mine's like on the one side is like a little malformed. They're supposed to be balls, supposed to be a ball. And I have like a flat part to mine. It's not large. It's just like a little flat part. And so the labrum in my left hip ground over that over time and got a little tear in it because the femoral head's the wrong, it's not quite right.

And so then I feel like a pro athlete because pro athletes also get tears in their labrums in their shoulders or your hips. You have them in both places. They should name it something different. Maybe they do. I know. Maybe they call it something different. I've been confused by that, just the number of, and I get why, because it's the same sort of body part that functions in a

similar way, but you have to specify sometimes which labrum you're talking about. Especially with pictures, you know, because if you're dealing with a shoulder thing, really different than, oh, just your hip, you know. Anyway. Not that that's great either. Anyway. No, clearly. Yeah. Okay. While I'm stat heading something related to that last question, I will present these two questions,

which are the same question, essentially. Greg says that on 2025 opening day, every single catcher worked with a knee down stance behind the plate. Yes. It's true. End of an era, I guess. The breed died, I guess, with Wilson Contreras moving out from behind the plate, maybe.

We'll see, maybe there'll be others. But yeah, it's by far the dominant stance. And Greg says, Endangered anyway. Yeah, when viewing a montage of them all, something hit me, and I guess it's about something hitting the catcher potentially.

When will the equipment change? Obviously, catchers wear shin pads, I assume maybe mostly because a shin is bony and it would hurt to get hit by a ball there, but there also has to traditionally be some part of it that was based on a crouch stance, making your shins the leading body part. Now with a knee down and the thigh more front-facing or exposed, would we ever see a tweak to the equipment? Also, maybe more interestingly, what would eventual ABS do not only to catcher stances,

which has been discussed often, but also their equipment? Figured with all the bulbous bat talk, I would send a different equipment conversation your way and see what you both thought. And listener Jack was wondering the same thing. In the old days of catcher squats, the leg guards lined up to provide a solid wall of protection when set up in their stances.

As of opening day 2025, all catchers had a knee down when viewing their stances side by side. I'm worried how much less protected these catchers are. Way too much leg meat showing. Do you think catchers protective equipment will evolve to cover higher up on one of the catchers quads? Is this already in the works and I've missed it? I understand it isn't as vulnerable as shins or knees,

but I can't imagine any of these guys would enjoy a foul tip causing a lasting bump or bruise. So, yeah. You want me to vamp a little bit so you can look something up? Well, I think my stat heads search has concluded here, actually. How about that? Yeah, and so I reminded myself that Peter Moiland

had that streak of 154 consecutive games without a decision from 2016 to 2018, and he's the all-time record holder by more than 30 over Trevor Miller. So I was wondering whether anyone had supplantenberged Eric Plantenberg, but we don't know it. It's sort of a stealth thing

because they then subsequently had a decision. And I think that has actually happened. So I just stat headed the longest streak of consecutive games in the regular season from the start of a career with no decision. And it looks to me, you have Plantenberg at 61, but you have Michael Tonkin got to 62 in 2016. So from 2013 to 2016,

Michael Tonkin started his career with 62 straight decisionless outings. And so he did surpass Plankenberg, but then he subsequently got decisions and ended up, wow, 14 and 10 lifetime. So he made up for lost time there. And then it looks like a Hobie did it. Hobie Milner, Hobie Milner started his career

with 95 straight decision-less outings from 2017 to 2022. And so this hypothetical we were talking about with Hunter Biggie has happened. Plantenberg was Sir Plantenberged by Michael Tonkin and Hobie Milner, and both of them subsequently were ousted from the top of that leaderboard because they got decisions and Hobie Milner's 11 and five now. So that's why I guess I can't get too invested

in Hunter Biggie's quest. Cause even if he were to do it, it would probably only be a matter of time until he then took himself out of consideration. Plus he's not sufficiently tall. So you're just like, what is, what do you understand your job to be, sir? You know?

Not Biggie enough. Yeah, we've covered nominative determinism here with pitchers and he's not living up to that. So the question about catcher gear is a good one and I hadn't considered it. And then I did some light Googling and it would appear that the catcher equipment industry has already risen to the challenge here.

And I found multiple examples of gear that is designed for one knee down stances, or at least advertises itself as catering to one knee down catchers. So All-Star, the equipment company produces a MV Pro series of catching kits, and it actually specifically advertises on its website, MVP Pro Leg Guards. The MVP Pro Leg Guards are specifically designed

for the one knee down stance. It's about time catchers had gear that provided the added flexibility to work the zone and increase their responsiveness. And it looks like there's like a little attachment that covers the inner thigh maybe more so. And just, yeah, a little more padding there So that appears to be one that is already doing this and then there's also a thigh pro

There's something called a thigh pro, which is like a I think they make sliding shorts But also catcher gear like you it's like padded tights kind of like, you know, you, you put it on and it protects your thigh area. And, uh, I saw a video of someone noting that when one D catching caught on, so to speak, guys got tired of, of wearing balls off the inner thigh. And so these padded compression shorts or tights or whatever they are, they cover that inner area. And then like they make them with a cup insert

if you're a catcher. So it's designed specifically for catchers. So that's not quite the same, I guess, as having hard padding, but it's something. And then another one I found was called Force 3. And this also, it mentions, this is the first dual purpose catcher leg guard designed to optimize both the knee down

and traditional catching styles. So it appears that they're on it. And I don't know the fact that these questioners were seeing those catchers catching and thinking, oh, look at all that exposed area, makes me think that maybe it's not adequately protecting or they haven't adopted this new hybrid gear, but it seems like there are solutions out there.

And yeah, it's like a little more flexible or they're like moving parts so that if you get down in the one knee, then it will like rotate and kind of transition to cover that area. So yeah, this has not occurred to effectively wild questioners for the first time. But they're not getting rid of the shin guard component of it, right? No, I don't think so. Because you wouldn't, you know, the ball might ricochet weird and you're not, a lot of guys

will still, you know, they might change their stance depending on like count or whatever. So you won't want to, and it does, you know, it's so vulnerable, because there's just so little between you and the ball when it's your shin, you know, you don't wanna break anything. Like it's important to keep that guarded, you know, with like a shin guard.

Yeah, this dual purpose one is made such that it can be used with either stance, I guess, and it adjusts. So they've thought of everything, I guess. But yeah, if there are big league catchers who maybe are just using the standard traditional equipment and haven't adopted some of this hybrid gear, then they should get on that. Yeah. Hopefully someone gets to know about that.

They're just going to look like goalies back there eventually. I get on that. Yeah. Hopefully someone gets to know about that. They're just gonna look like goalies back there eventually. I know, probably, yeah. Okay, lastly, this is also a catcher related question. And this came to us a few years ago and I answered it via email at that time. And then I just recently read something that jogged my memory of this question and maybe wanna answer it on the show.

So this was pre the past WBC from James Patreon supporter who says in gearing up for the WBC, I was perusing the NPB stats leaderboards, which now exist on fan graphs, by the way. That's right. NPB stats on fan graphs.com. And I noticed that Oryx Buffalo's catcher, Tamoya Mori's war totals really stand out

having led the NPB Pacific league for all position players in 2019 and 2021 and at a relatively young age. This led me to wonder why I don't think I've ever heard of him as a posting candidate or seemingly any Japanese backstop for that matter. I do understand that catchers have unique game calling responsibilities and other duties for which the language and culture barrier might be significant, but presumably there are currently many sets of battery mates who speak English and Spanish respectively and similar divides between pitchers or catchers and the coaching staff and many Japanese pitchers

have had plenty of MLB success. But as far as I can tell, the only Japanese catcher to play in MLB was Kenji Jojima for the Mariners back in the mid-2000s. That's right. Any idea why we haven't seen other NPB catchers follow in his footsteps? And so my initial answer was that in addition to the language barrier, specifically in Mori's case,

it might be a size issue, because he is listed at five foot six. Oh, that's tiny for a catcher. It is, yeah. It's funny because like- That's impressive that he's, sorry to interrupt you, but that's impressive that he's catching an NPB at that size even.

It's funny because like catchers can be kind of squat in addition to squatting all the time. Right, and so yeah, in fact, it's like you don't want them to be too big because then you worry about knees and everything, but you also don't want them to be too small because there is a lot of wear and tear. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it matters. Those are real Gold is a lot of wear and tear. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe it matters. Those are real Goldilocks zone that you're aiming for there, yeah. Yes, I wonder in fact, if we check that, that might be an interesting stat blast. Like the variability, the standard deviation of historic player heights by position. I wouldn't be surprised if there's

just a more compressed range for catchers than anywhere else. Yes, that's my instinct too. Yeah, but maybe these days that matters less because we've kind of done away with at least a lot of collisions and so that's not as big a concern, but there's still contact. They still happen.

You get beat up back there. And I mean, I guess a bigger catcher is a bigger target for getting hit by stuff. So maybe- But you worry about, you do want them in sort of a Goldilocks zone, because if they're too tall and they're too big in their crouch,

are they gonna be able to get down when they need to for low stuff? You kind of want them in just the right spot. Yeah, anyway, Mori is still trucking along. He's still with Oryx in his 11th NPP season. Wow. Yeah, but he has a lifetime 840 OPS over there. He's been a very good player.

Yeah. It's true, you don't really hear him mentioned or you haven't heard him mentioned as a posting candidate. And he's still just 29. He started young over there. And so I said with Mori specifically, I think it's probably size, he's five, six. No MLB player has played even an inning at catcher

that short in the AL or NL since 1925. There were some sources I think that said he was five, seven, but even if he's five, seven, you have to go back more than half a century to find the last like regular real catcher and back to Yogi Berra to find the last like full-time, you know, durable catcher, though obviously Yogi was pretty good, but I think the last catcher five-seven or shorter even to catch a single inning in the big leagues was Nick Deeney for the Royals in 2019. And before he played like 20 games before that,

you have to go back to 1991 and then 1971. So it's been a very long time. So that plus the language barrier, I think is a lot of it. And one other thing I said about Morrie at the time was that I thought he was seen as sort of a bat first guy and his bat hadn't been that great since he was seen as sort of a bat first guy and his bat hadn't been that great since he was old and experienced enough to come over because he wasn't great in 2020 or 2022. And then I said, Jojima debuted in MLB

in 2006 when it was less common than it is now for NPB players to make that transition to come over to the US. So I did say that I think teams would be willing to give the right catcher a chance. And I do think that's the case. Although the language barrier issue, that did potentially become a problem with Jojima because as I recall, there was some controversy about how he handled games.

Like I'm reading from a ESPN story here from 2009 when he left Seattle and went back to Japan because he opted out of the last couple seasons of his contract with the Mariners and went back. And this ESPN story says, veteran starters complained about how Jojima handled games. And when Jojima wasn't injured this year, the Mariners chose Johnson's leading of the pitching staff

over Jojima's offense. By the end of the season, Jojima only played when Seattle's newest and youngest pitchers started. So he did at least develop a reputation as not being good. And who knows whether that's bias or, you know, maybe it's language barrier, not actual performance. I don't know, but that was an issue even for him.

And so it could potentially still be an issue. I will admit, I don't really remember the ins and outs of that piece of it with him. Um, cause I was like busy, you know, navigating the financial crisis, but, um, but I also wonder if part of it is like a weird rub between when guys, you know, catchers famously develop late, like that trajectory can take a while. And decline early often. Right. And so I wonder if part of it too is like the age, at least now, these rules have changed

over time, but like the age at which guys become true, unrestricted free agents to be posted, they still have to do the posting fee and all that. But when they are optimally aged to be attractive to major league teams versus when their development has them really ready to be scouted and you know like did they kind of miss their window basically? I don't know. I wonder how that is sort of playing into it in sort of the in generalities you know with any particular guy it might vary obviously but. Yeah and Jojima was a good hitter even in MLB. And for the two years that we have framing stats for him, not so hot, but yeah, he hit well in his prime.

But the new thing that I hadn't considered that made me want to revisit this was something that Jim Allen, former Effectively Wild guest who covers NPB and has for decades, he wrote something on his site, jballallen.com, about this because Jason Kendall had gone over to Japan for the MLB Japan Series at the Tokyo Dome.

And so he was talking about catching and fundamentals and difference between catching in Japan and the US. He did a youth baseball coach clinic over there and so he was talking about the differences and here's what Jim wrote, the simple reason we don't see more Japanese people playing key defensive positions in MLB is because Japanese baseball's priorities work against players here having the offensive skills needed to compete in America, Japan's focus on defense and fundamentals

filters out catchers who cannot earn the trust of their pitchers. Now, maybe this is going against the Jojima example as more of a bat first guy, but he was kind of an outlier, I guess, in the sense that he's the only guy who's come over. Thus, it is rare for high quality hitters to earn regular major league playing time as catchers

and helps explain why only one Japanese player has so far caught in MLB, where athleticism often trumps fundamental know-how in the eyes of front offices. So what he's saying there is they place such an emphasis on defense at premium positions and at catcher that even more so than in MLB, catchers tend not to be good hitters. And so because of that, they're less appealing to MLB teams where of course,

defense is a priority here too, but still you want to have your catcher hit a little unless he's Austin Hedges or something. So like, you know, in a world that allows room for Austin Hedges, I don't want to discount the possibility that a Japanese catcher could come over. And I imagine that that will happen. But he said, because Japan's tolerance for below average defense is extremely low, teams will move good hitting players at catcher, second, short and center to less demanding positions at the drop of a cap. So they're just very quick to say, ah, you're not an elite glove at this position will move you somewhere else.

And thus, if you actually stick it catcher, you might not have the bat to intrigue MLB teams. Yeah. I, uh, I think that that's an interesting insight. Yeah. Wow. This is, uh, so Jim in his piece says, according to former Seattle manager, John McLaren, some pitchers conspired against Jojima by crossing him up

with pitches he didn't call for in order to make him look bad. The way he was treated was unpardonable, McLaren said recently. So that's nasty. Yeah, that's really not nice. So, yeah. Jeez.

Yeah, so there may have been a language barrier there, but maybe it was just kind of a discrimination or like not wanting to have to deal with the language barrier and thus sabotaging the guy. And so Jim continues, although often criticized for his pitch selection by Hall of Fame catcher Katsue Nomura, Jojima ranks fourth in career defensive value per game

at the position among the 53 players with a thousand games behind the plate. So he's saying that, you know, he wasn't actually terrible at defense. So yeah, different priorities, different skill sets emphasized at the positions. Yeah. All right, I'll leave you with this observation

from listener Andy, who wrote into my one size fits all advice to move back in the batter's box to allow more time to evaluate pitches. Andy notes, if a batter stands up in the box, isn't it easier to hit a ball down the line? The angle of the baselines essentially becomes greater than 90 degrees. Back in the box, the batter is basically standing deeper into foul territory and has a narrower gap between first and third. Andy even drew a little diagram which I will put on the show page for everyone. Yeah you make a good point there Andy. We've talked before about the possible benefits of widening the foul lines. How that could help hitters and make up for the babbip

decline league-wide. Well in effect maybe this is sort of the same thing. I don't know if I'm retracting my advice. I'm not sure whether this angle advantage of being up in the box is big enough to counteract or outweigh the reaction time advantage of being deeper in the box. I guess I'd still lean toward the latter, but valid critique. Physics lover Alan Rodin would no doubt appreciate this. Just reminding everyone that there is an Ella Black-related podcast excursion. Not this weekend, but next weekend, Sunday, May 4th, early afternoon.

If you're in the New York area, you can join me and fellow listeners and other people who worked on the Ella Black podcast series as we make an excursion to the cemetery where Ella was interred and we see the new marker that they have placed at her gravesite as a result of the research that went into the podcast. Hopefully the weather will be nice. Hopefully the company will be nice as well. Check the show page or the podcast description for links to the Facebook event invite, which you can see even if you aren't on Facebook. If you are, you can RSVP. If not, just show up. Hope to see you there. I also hope that you will support the podcast on Patreon, which we rely on almost completely to fund this podcast, despite the occasional sponsor. You can go to patreon.com slash effectively wild

and sign up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay almost ad free and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners, Zach Breeding, Mark Van Dusen, David Miller, Kelly and Bill Terry, not the baseball Hall of Famer, Bill Terry, he has long since left us.

But an Effectively Wild Hall of Famer for supporting the podcast, if you do, you get access to all sorts of perks, including monthly bonus episodes, one of which we will be recording this weekend. We'll be talking to producer Shane McKeon about his work on Effectively Wild and elsewhere. You also get access to playoff live streams

and prioritized email answers and personalized messages, autographed books, discounts on merch, and ad-free FanGraphs memberships, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you have no way of contacting us.

Communications blackout, which can mean only one thing, invasion. No, that is not true. You can still email us, send us your questions and comments and intro and outro themes at podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can leave comments on episodes on Spotify now. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. 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, including a link to our Effectively Wild Listener emails database, updated to include today's. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you next week. That's why I love baseball Special gifts is free New series pitching is pure poetry That's why I love baseball Effectively wild Effectively wild Effectively wild

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