Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2323: Look Ma(scot), No Pants

Episode Date: May 17, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about listener suggestions for terms for tandem home run robberies (and the opposite of home run robberies), whether it’s so O’sver in Baltimore, Jacob deGrom succeeding despite slightly less dominant stuff, and the realness of the rivalries in MLB’s inaugural “Rivalry Weekend,” then (48:46) answer listener emails about awarding […]

How can you not be, predented? A staff last will keep you distracted. It's a long song to death, but the sure to make you smile. This is Effective in One. This is Effective in One. Hello and welcome to episode 2323 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Minberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of FanGraphs.

Hello Meg. Hello, I feel like I burped a little bit, sorry. Got a little bit of a burp there. Sorry, sorry. Hello, it's me, Meg, burping. Got it out of the way early. That's always good, I guess. So we've gotten a few responses to our call

for what we should label those types of home run robberies. Either the tandem deal, the cooperative collaborative home run robbery, or the reverse of the home run robberies, the tandem deal, the cooperative collaborative home run robbery or the reverse of the home run robbery which is what we kind of informally labeled the home run gift when someone propels a ball over the wall that otherwise wouldn't have been over. So one submission we got for the two person, the dual home run robbery was, I guess, sort of in the vein of my smash and grab suggestion, but aiding and abetting.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not bad. I like that. And how about a home run heist? Because as I was saying, you need to recruit someone else, right? And someone else, you got to get someone, you got to get the safe cracker, you got to get the getaway driver, et cetera. So you have to have your right fielder and

your center fielder or whatever fielder you're using. So the home run heist, it's not bad. It's not bad for the oopsie daisy one friend of the pod. Zach Buchanan texted me, it should be a home run own goal. You know, I liked that. I thought that was a good, where you like propel it over the wall, you know? Like, that is evocative. Yeah. Or it could be, could it be an own home run? Is that something?

No. An own run. No. No. Okay. We also got a suggestion, home run handout for that. Again, could be the pitcher doing it though. It's not clear who is.

Yeah, and I'm like, you know, here's the thing. Here's why I am not a fan of that one. The thing about it is, like, in order to be in a position where you can get a little boosty over the wall and it becomes a home run You still have to hit the crap out of it. You know, it's not like true and a handout that's has such a pejorative negative connotation and And you know the the fieldersers do an oopsie, right? Like there's error there that is contributing to it being a home run, but I don't want to

completely remove the part of it that is, hey, you hit the snot out of the ball. So I am a little, you know what I mean? Yeah, I do. I do like that handout is almost literally describing what happens usually because you are just kind of propelling it out with your hands or with your glove. Unless it's a Jose Canseco situation and it's off the dome, in which case, I guess we'd just call that a home run header, maybe stick with the soccer lingo, but we don't get a lot of those. I was going to say, us in soccer lingo seems like a way for us to embarrass ourselves more

than anything. Yeah. Also, how about home run Robin Hood? That was another suggestion we got because it's a gift to the home run needy. Yeah, but so, but here's the thing though. Robin Hood felt good about his acts. You know, he was intentionally trying to give something away. Yeah. Whereas Julio was despondent, you know, I sitting there on the ground, like, what have I done? So, yeah, I don't know about that. Yeah.

And then one more was instead of the alley oop, this is for the cooperative one, where you have an accomplice and alley whoops, alley whoops. Yeah. Yeah. and Alley-whoops, Alley-whoops. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I kind of like that because Alley-whoop makes it sound intentional, whereas it's not really, I mean, you're not intending to deflect the first fielder, it's not intending to deflect the first ball to the second fielder,

it's kind of accidental on the first fielder's part, usually, I guess. So Alley-whoops, not bad. I like Alley-Whoops, not bad. I like Alley-Whoops. It's sort of suggestive of the physical action that most often results in it happening, you know what I mean? And so I like it.

I like that and Homerun on goal, probably the best of any of them. I still think that the strongest contribution to that entire conversation was my Mary-Kate and Ashley. Of course. Yeah. Don't mean to diminish that contribution. Obviously. No. Well, the submission box is still open. So thanks for the suggestion so far. We welcome others if you have just the perfect label for these types of plays. So here's a question for you.

Is it over for the Orioles? Is it Osver? Is it can they cut bait? Are they going to be sellers? Is it too soon to say? Because man, they've been bad. Is it over? Well, okay.

So on the one hand, like it's May 16th. So they could, they could go on a little run, right? Like there's time. We've just watched a couple of teams reel off like 10 game win streaks, changed their fortunes somewhat. Those twins. Look at those twins, right? Look at those twins. So you still have a good bit of time, but on the other hand, this is a pretty poorly performing team right now and you know, it's not like they're getting unlucky.

So we, you know, we have them, if you look at their Pythagorean record or their base runs record, like really only, not only are they not unlucky, they're like a game better than they ought to be, which is like kind of amazing. They have a negative 74 run differential. I'm on the base runs record page right now. Yeah. The Rockies are dead last and then it's the Orioles. So it's like the bottom four or five teams are exactly who we thought they'd be.

Basically, it's other than the Orioles, it's the Rockies, the angels, the Marlins, the White Sox. Yeah. Wouldn't have batted an eye at any of that if you had told me that a couple months ago. Right. basically, it's other than the Orioles, it's the Rockies, the Angels, the Marlins, the White Sox. Yeah, wouldn't have batted an eye at any of that if you had told me that a couple months ago. Right. But the Orioles between the Rockies and the Angels and the Marlins and the White Sox. Right.

And then there's the fact that they're bad in the way we expected, right? This pitching staff is really quite poor. They are allowing 5.4 runs a game. The only staffs that have been worse so far this year, the Athletics, the Marlins, and the Rockies, again, company that you're not particularly keen to keep. But I think maybe the more alarming piece of it is that they also just have really struggled to score. They are not a productive offense scoring 3.71 runs per game. The teams that are worse than them, some of them, the Royals are good, but the Pirates,

the Rockies, the White Sox, the Rangers, that's also confusing. But the Angels are scoring more than they are. That seems odd. So, you know, they're bad in the ways that we thought the pitching has just been a real problem, but they're also not producing particularly well when they're at the plate. I'm officially worried about Adley Rutchman. 85 WRC plus Ben. That's not, that's not especially good. You know, he's, he's betting 200 slugs, 329. Yeah. I kind of declared victory when he had that two homer game opening day. Yeah. We're like, see, he's fine. Oh yeah. And I, as I recall, I was like, now we don't draw conclusions

too hastily here at Effectively Wild and to everyone else, you know, they do their confirmation bias, what you see in the first few games. And this though, this seems like an exception because he had gone so long, it took him months to hit two home runs toward the end of last season. And so I thought, okay, two in one game, that's got to be a good sign. He hadn't done that in a while. And then, yeah, it kind of went back to not hitting after that. They still have productive guys who are prospect eligible, but now you're in this spot where like some of those guys are far away and they still don't have much in the way of pitching down in the farm system. And you know, gosh, maybe you give Samuel Bisayo a try now, but I think he's hurt. the way of pitching down in the farm system.

Maybe he gives Samuel Basayo a try now, but I think he's hurt. They're not in quite the position that they were when the rebuild was in full force where you could say, well, okay, look, these guys are bad. They're bad in a way that is causing causing their fans to re-evaluate. But they have all of this promising talent down on the farm, right? They have Adley, they've got Gunnar, they got Jackson Holliday, like they got Heston Kearney, so they got more hitters than they know what to do with. Like they should be doing consolidation trades.

And now what? Right. Because if you're them, you have to really get hot over the next little bit, I think to remotely justify being like a buyer at the deadline. So are we looking at kind of a little mini step back from this team? They got two good years with no postseason victories and like that's the best they have to offer. I was skeptical coming into the season that even if they weren't especially good, even

if they didn't take a meaningful step forward, you know, I was like, Michael Ice probably doesn't get fired. I don't know now, man, because like my version of maybe they just won't be that good didn't necessarily involve them missing the postseason. Although now I'm worried that I made that as a prediction. Did Bowman predict that they wouldn't make the postseason? Was this one of our predictions? Why don't I? Oh, right. The reason I don't remember is because it's in the middle of PPR. So it's like, I'm barely alive during that time. But I thought that a bad season would probably involve them making the playoffs but then having another wild card round exit.

But I mean, I don't know, man. This is a real problem and the staff is bad. I mean, I know Eflin's coming back, but it's like, this is not working. Kyle Gibson looks not good. You're not a Grayson Rodriguez away from contending, right? Like it's not one guy away from turning it around. So, I don't know.

Yeah, and that's the thing is as much as you could have Schadenfreude, not that I'm rooting against the Orioles, I've been rooting for them to be more aggressive because I liked the core that they had and didn't want them to waste it. And as much as you could say, told you so, you should have spent more, you should have gone after more pitching. That's still true. And I guess to the extent that this shows,

well, you couldn't be confident that you had enough as it was, but it's not as if they had blown away Corbin Burns and brought him back or, or signed, you know, anyone name, like if they had signed Max Fried or someone, someone who's been good, who'd been exactly what they'd wanted. They'd still be in a deep hole now, not as deep, but yeah, you can't even point to that and say, see, your weakness was exactly what we thought it was and, and you were overconfident. And if you had just done this one thing, then you'd be fine. No, it's just an across the board flop by them. And

I guess as you were saying, yeah, it has just been bad overall. If you wanted to find some positives, I guess you could say that their offense has been on clutch. Now I think their pitching has been more on the clutch side. Their pitching has had pretty good timing on balance, but their offense by FanGraph's clutch score is sixth the worst. If you go by WRC plus with runners in scoring position, it's Rockies, Royals, and then Orioles. So they have a 65 WRC plus with runners in scoring position. So they have had bad timing on top of everything else. And I guess if you wanted to look at the difference between weighted on base and expected weighted on base,

they've seemingly underperformed a bit there. I guess they're the seventh biggest differential there in the direction you don't want to be. So there's some stuff under the hoods that you'd say, okay, the offense probably isn't this abysmal and you know, just the track record of those hitters and some of the underlying results, they could be a bit better, but yeah, still just not great.

And it's just, it's really getting late early. but yeah, still just not great. And it's just, it's really getting late early. You know, they have a 94 WRC plus. So if you figured that maybe they've been okay in those non-clutch situations, but still not good. Not as good as you would have wanted them to be. But the fact remains that their playoff odds are down to like 4%. I mean, that's incredible. It's just, honey, I shrank the playoff odds are down to like 4%. I mean, that's incredible.

It's just, honey, I shrank the playoff odds. They're almost gone. They have disappeared and it's a pretty deep hole. I mean, they're nine and a half back in the AL East. And then obviously you start turning your attention to the wild card, because you figure, well, that's gonna be a competitive division. But even there, I don't know.

I just don't know that I believe in them anymore. I did for a while. I figured slow start, they'll pull out of it. And I think if they left their roster alone and didn't touch it and just let them play out the rest of the season, I'm sure they would be pretty good from here on out, but maybe not good enough. the rest of the season, I'm sure they would be pretty good from here on out, but maybe not good enough. I think that my preferred means of team building when you have a really robust farm, but a

so-so to bad big league product is I think you just got to powderize it, you know, because part of the problem is that they wouldn't spend. But to your point, some of the problem was that you go into any given off season and you're not necessarily going to be super enthused about some of the free agent additions. Now, I think there were guys that they could have added who would have helped their fortunes this year. But I just wonder if the approach that you got to take is like, Hey, we're going to spend and if there's a free agent on the market, even if you know, we're a season or two off of where we think we are going to need to be to be

competitive to, to really, you know, take it to the Yankees or whatever, you just got to go get those guys when they're there. Because they're there, you know, the thing is one person signs Manny Machado and then you can't get Manny Machado anymore. I'm not saying they should have signed Manny Machado. They sure do not need... The infielders are not necessarily a problem, but you take my broader point, which is like if you see the talent you want there, even if you end up kind of eating a season, no, it's easier to say for position players than it is for pitchers, because the health is more stable in theory and you don't have to worry about them just, you know, sprining. But yeah, like if all they get out of this rebuild is two sweeps out of the first round of the playoffs, that's like, that's pretty,

pretty bad. And now you're in a spot where, you know, if you're Gunnar Henderson and they come to you with an extension offer, what do you do? You know, like, how do you feel about it? Because if you don't think it's gonna get better next year, do you wanna stay? And I'm not saying that like knowing anything about Gunnar Henderson's thinking, they to

my knowledge have not made an extension offer to him. But like, if you're one of the young guys who is producing, wow, which at this point is just Gunnar and I guess Cedric Mullins, who's, you know, not so young anymore. But like, what do you, what do you do? This stuff has consequences beyond just the win-loss record in any given season. Of course, you'd have to show an appetite to actually spend some money for it to be a question that matters, but I don't know. It's a weird, they're in a very odd spot and it's not like, you know, the talented parts

of that organization, both on the field and off, have suddenly disappeared. And for all of their reticence to spend, it's not like that's the only thing that they're good at. But this is a club that, you know, for all of their vaunted analytics and like player dev acumen, they really haven't been able to deliver that with any consistency on the pitching side, at least not at the big league level. Now they have other guys in the farm system now and who knows, maybe one of those guys breaks through, but their best pitching prospect has been Grayson and he just hasn't been able

to stay healthy. So I don't know. It's a weird cautionary tale because on some level, I think they did the right stuff, which was mostly concentrating their draft resources and the, you know, the focus is the sort of focus of that core has been on the position player side, which I tend to be a fan of just because I think it's more stable, you know, if you want that to be like the center of your rebuild, but you still have to pitch, you know? And so if you're not, if you don't have the Gunner Henderson of pitching in your system, or you haven't

been able to produce that guy, or you haven't been able to keep that guy healthy, you got to find him somehow. Where is he? Is he on the free agent market? Well, if you're not going to spend, you're limiting your options there. I don't know. It's just like a weird bummer of a thing. I feel bad because I think fans in Baltimore really endured a lot. They stuck through with a lot. I think there was such optimism when ownership changed that finally, finally, you'd be able to really punch through and it would be this bright new day and you're going to be a perpetual power in the East. I don't know, maybe they take a totally new approach this winter and things turn around. And to your point, like, you know, part of this is that they're heard and maybe they

play better ball, you know, as the season progresses. But you have to be downshifting your forecast for them, not only for this season, but for the next year after that. And that sucks. Like fans in Baltimore deserve more than that. Yeah, normally I'd say, yeah, well, just use this setback to evaluate what you had. If you thought you had depth and you needed to trade some guys, OK, play all the young guys and figure out who's good and who's part of your core and what you want to do to reset the roster for next season. And I guess you can kind of do that, but just the younger guys just aren't

playing so well. And then you start to have misgivings about, gosh, do we even have the depth that we thought that we had? Do we feel confident enough to trade from that to get pitching? You know, you need pitching because you have a sub replacement level staff. And even if it's been a bit unlucky, it doesn't project to be good. So yeah, it's tough. And obviously if this persists, I think they're eight out of the third wild card too.

So they're not even that much closer there than they are in the division. Right. If that persists, then their deadline could be really interesting. Like, do you trade some of the, like a Ryan O'Hern or someone like that, kind of the, not old, but older generation, some of the logjam and guys who aren't under team control for a while, and then play the younger guys and see what you have.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, maybe. And like, that sucks, because it's been a long time coming. So I don, maybe. And like, that sucks, because it's been a long time coming. So I don't know. And I think that part of why this is so... And Mullins, by the way, O'Hern and Mullins. Right.

I have maybe failed to totally clock, like, just how long Elias has been there. It's been a while. I wonder about him as sort of a comp. Maybe we should be putting the track record and personality and reputation of Elias in conversation with Dipodo. Because Elias comes out of Houston, he's got this hard nose, analytical thing, he only eats meat. It's not that he only eats meat, but he was doing like the carnivore diet that we learned that in, in Evan's book. And I was like, Hmm, that's a, it's at least an orange flag for me for other stuff, but that's neither here nor there.

So we're going to be hyper analytical, we're going to play our dev our way out of this. We don't have big payroll, but it's going to be worth it. And we're going to have all these great prospects and they're really going to. And he doesn't have the trader part of it. You know, that's not quite his reputation. They've made big trades, but that hasn't been, you know, central to the to the philosophy of the rebuild, right? He's not like a churn guy the way that Jerry is.

But, you know, it's like, we're going to not like a churn guy the way that Jerry is, but you know, it's like we're going to bring playoff baseball back to the city and we're going to be a force in our division. And you know, they've been a better team of late than Seattle has been. I mean, not right now. Not right. Even with this swoon, not right now. Topoto went on the radio and was like, we're already great. And then they immediately started losing. And I was like, why do they let Jerry talk anymore? Anyway, that's not the point.

So I just, like, you know, these guys who've like overseen Rebuilds, the ways they're similar and different and sort of the way that they talk about it is interesting to me. And it's interesting to think about how they sort of sit in conversation with each other, not literally, but just in terms of their styles. I don't know, Elias has this reputation as being so smart and being able to really build

and they can do player dev and we're going to do Astro's East, but without the cheating. He hasn't been able to actualize that, you know, and for all of the like efficiency talk and you know, like the the kind of like, it's not quite tech bro Jerry has more tech bro parlance than than Elias does. It's such an interesting anyway. They all just be studied. Breslow has tech bro. He's kind of a res bro. I don't know. He's got a little bit of that.

He definitely has a little bit of that. I mean, they all do. Almost all of them do is the thing. But like some of them, I'm not gonna name names, do sound more like they're trying to sell you a product that can diagnose you off a single drop of blood. Some of them have a more pronounced grifter vibe than others.

Who could say who? You know, who could even say Ben? Like who could name one of them? Am I thinking of a name? I mean maybe, but like am I gonna say it out loud? No, I'm a professional. I'm a pro. I've already had feelings on the pod this week. So I don't know. It's just like an interesting thing. And I think that there's some really great players on that Orioles team and I want to see them play like actual meaningful competitive baseball in October.

And I want the people of Baltimore to get to enjoy a perpetually good team or at least a predictably, stably good team. One that is worthy of some of the talents they already have on the field and can do work to try to retroactively justify the pain they went through as a fan base when they were sitting through just those god-awful rebuild teams. Some of those clubs were pretty bad. And I want Cedric Mullins to be able to play

really meaningful October baseball for the Orioles, get a playoff win, get past that first round. As Bauman wrote when he wrote about him, he was there, this bright spot on a bad team. And he's almost certainly out the door. And if they're bad and they think they're going to be bad for a while, you don't bring that guy back, right? You let him test and he'll go somewhere else and hopefully win some games.

But it just feels like a real missed opportunity. And some of that is just the vagaries of baseball. Not all of this can be laid at the feet of any particular player or certainly even the front office, but it's hard to walk away from them as they're currently constituted in this fix they find themselves and not feel like a lot more could have been done to try to get them in a better spot to compete. That doesn't mean that it would have worked. Guys get hurt, guys underperform, whatever.

We all thought Jackson Holliday was going to be amazing. Now you look at it and you're like, on the one hand, I'm relieved that you're a slightly above league average hitter, but also you're only a slightly above league average hitter still? That's not great. average hitter, but also you're only a slightly above the average hitter, like still, like that's not great. So it just feels like opportunity was not captured, you know, they didn't grab it as fully as they could have. And, and that's a bummer. I've abandoned a lot of hope in a comeback for this season, but I, I still have a lot

of hope that's going into next season. there will be optimism and reason for optimism about the end. So I'm not declaring that the contention is dead. I'm just declaring that this season, man, it sits on life support at best. So I wanted to shout out Jacob deGrom, who had another strong start. And I'm very heartened to see that this is working. His new approach, his more measured approach, he's coming off of eight shutout innings against

the Astros in a one-nothing win for the Rangers where they needed all of those zeros from him and he delivered. He had a couple lousy starts earlier in the season, but for the most part since then he's been solid and he hasn't always gone deep into games, but he has been effective and efficient and he's making it work with lower speeds, not low speeds. He still throws hard, but he's doing what I wanted him to do all those years pre-surgery

and what he told Jeff Passon this spring about how he had committed to doing it and he wasn't gonna be Max Effort, Jacob at all times and he was gonna take a little off. And so he's sitting 97.3, which most pitchers, most starters would kill to do. And this is him taking it easy. And I know that's preposterous,

but he used to throw a lot harder than that. He used to throw a couple ticks more than that. And as recently as 2023, he was sitting 99.1. That's where he was 2021, 2022, 2023, as he was hurt on and off. And most of the time those years, that's where he was sitting. And now he's back to where he was sitting in say 2019, when he was great, he was great then. He wasn't as great on a per inning basis as he was in 2021 or even 2023 in a tiny sample, or maybe 2018, but he was great then too.

And so that's what I always wanted just, hey, throw 97. You can be the best pitcher in baseball, throw in 97. Maybe you will preserve your UCL. And now with age, with experience, with wisdom, perhaps he feels like he's on his last ligament at this point. Who knows what it is, but he's making it work. And it's not otherworldly the way that it was, but it's good enough.

It's good enough to have a low twos ERA and a sub three expected ERA and the FIP is mid threes right now, but it's been coming down. Yeah. And so his strikeout rate is not what it was. Nothing is what it was, but even though he has allowed more home runs, the Babap has been in his favor, but basically he's not as dominant as he was, but this'll play.

Like this is, you know, and he's already at 51 innings, which is like obviously more than he threw last year when he was just coming back from injury and more than he threw in 2023 before he got hurt. He's coming up on his 2022 innings total and his 2020, which was short in season innings total. So really, like, you know, he just has to stay healthy for a little longer, fingers crossed.

And this could be his most durable season since like 2019. So whether that's the fresh UCL or it's this new approach or a combination of both, please keep doing this. Jacob deGrom, I want this to keep working. I'm going to confess something that's going to sound very silly. I've been afraid to watch him pitch because I don't want to watch him blow out again. Yeah, me neither. Which is Ben, you, you say me neither. And there's such a generosity in your tone when you say that in response to

what I just said, but like, what a, what a, what a thing to, to confess. Right. Because like I should be watching Jacob deGrompich, you know, I should be, I should be watching Jacob deGrompitch for, for like enjoying baseball purposes and also my job purposes. But I've just been afraid, I've been afraid to watch him, you know, come off the mound and shake his hand and then have it happen. So I haven't really watched him much. That's understandable. On the other hand, we have to cherish him

when he is out on the mound. Right, exactly, exactly. If he's not out there that often, and then we're costing ourselves his outings because we're worried about what will happen. I know, you're right. Better to have DeGrammen lose him than not to have had him at all.

So appreciate him while you ask. Yeah, so I gotta engage with it. But it is it is amazing. I just appreciate the difficulty of the task. It really drives home how incredible he is, how incredible any of them are really to be able to sort of successfully tap a regulator on your VELO seems like it of successfully tap a regulator on your VELO, seems like it would just be very challenging to have the precision and the control to be able to do that in service of a noble project, which is being able to continue to pitch. It's really a remarkable thing to be able to do that. Can't imagine it.

Can't imagine being able to throw as good or as hard as he does Even without you know taking a little off so there's a good deal about his whole thing that I find pretty remarkable, but See I'm I know I'm I shouldn't have said anything I shouldn't have said anything Ben because now I'm gonna be like oh gotta watch him gotta watch the next time and then we Do it and he's gonna blow out. It's gonna be my fault. It's gonna be like, oh, gotta watch him, gotta watch the next time. And then I'm gonna do it, and he's gonna blow out, and it's gonna be my fault. It's gonna be my fault as an individual.

Also my fault because I encouraged you to watch. So if that happens, you can blame me. Just watch through your fingers, just spread them out a little, peek with one eye, and just make sure that the water's warm before you go back in. He has maxed out at 99.6, so he still has that top end. Right, he can still reach back for it if he wants it. Yeah, which is lower than his top end

was. He used to top out at 102. And I don't know at what point this is coming back from injury and being older, and perhaps he has just lost a little bit of that top tier elite, but I'm choosing to take him at his words that there's more in the tank that he's just not emptying out for now. And that's working well. So it is a rivalry weekend, happy rivalry weekend. What do you think of this concept?

I'm so confused by it really because first of all, I don't think you can, I can't manufacture rivalries, you know? Rivalries are organic and I know they picked some of these to like try to take advantage of that, but also, so like the mariners Mariners now like rival in this is the, is the Padres who have been like their quote unquote natural rivals in the past. So I'm like, how is this different than that? Is it just that it's branded now? Yeah.

It's just that it's sponsored and they're like, Oh, the Vedder cup. And I'm like, but we've been joking about the Vedder cup for years. Like this isn't new. Informal. Yeah. It might be official now, but people have been saying that forever. So yeah, I think I like the idea. I'm not like super into it. I'm not like, Oh, I'm going to watch way more baseball this weekend than I usually do

because it's rivalry weekend. I don't mind the attempt because it's a long season and anything you can do, it's a little bit gimmicky, absolutely. But we've seen other sports do this, like the NBA with its in-season tournament. You know, let's try to come up with some way to juice this a little bit. We're a long way from the playoffs. How are we gonna get people to pay attention in May?

Hopefully just because the baseball's good and you like baseball. But it's a little extra intrigue. It's just that not every team has a real rivalry or at least you can't have all the rivalries happening at the same time. And so some of them are bound to be stretches. And that's okay, I guess.

You know, as long as everyone understands what's happening here and that we're reaching on some of these. But like if we had to rank the least rivalries here, like some of these, you know, I mean, okay, Rocky's Diamondbacks, I guess're Western 90s expansion teams and NL West teams. That's the other thing. If, if you do have the intra-division rivalry, now if it's Rangers Astros or something, okay, you got the intra-division and you have the intra-state.

And, and if it just works out that way, I mean, you know, Yankees, Red Sox, they're intra-div division. That's the rivalry. So, okay. If that's organically what it is, that's fine. Rocky's Diamondbacks, there are commonalities there. They're both legal weed states. Sure. Yeah, I see the vision. Both high altitudes, you know. It's not literally. Yeah, high in many ways. Sorry, I'm going to keep making these jokes.

That one, look, it's not like they have a better one that I would say, Oh, you're trying to sell me on the Diamondbacks Rockies rivalry where there's like, do you have a better suggestion for no, the real rival of the Rockies is themselves. Right. Yeah. Play a split squad game to figure things out internally. Yeah, just to divvy up the wealth of talent that they have on the roster, just split it up.

Or Atlanta Braves versus Boston Red Sox. Okay, the Braves and the Red Sox used to both be Boston teams, but not many people remember those days. So, and they're both original franchises and it's, there's not a lot of head to head here lately, so that's kind of a nothing burger. And then you have Tigers Blue Jays, which like, they used to be both in the Ale East and, but no, I mean, I guess geographically.

Is it because of the proximity to Canada? Maybe. See, like this is why I, I know that the cynical answer is like, it's a way to get a sponsorship and they probably sell some stuff. Like I'm sure there's like a veteran cup hat or whatever that you can buy But I just I'm wondering are the folks in the league office under the impression that every fan base doesn't already Have another team that they hate in a way that if they had to talk about it in great depth with like other People wouldn't make them and those other people uncomfortable.

I submit to you that this already exists, right? It's like when I talk about my feelings about the Los Angeles Rams, I'm like, this is a real test for the people around me about whether they actually like me or not. I feel gimmicked. I feel like I got gimmick all over me. I don't care for that, you know? I feel like I'm covered in gimmick. Like you remember in the second Ghostbusters where he comes out of the trance at the end and he's like, why am I covered in goo?

Yeah, you're covered in gimmick. Yeah. I feel like I'm covered in gimmick. I'm covered in gimmick goo. I just don't care for it. I'm like, let people already, people already joke gimmick goo. I just don't care for it. I'm like, let people already, people already joke about Eddie Vedder. We don't have to. Yeah, it was like taking something that was kind of fun

when it was unofficial and trying to monetize it. Yes, why? Why? The nicknames for some of these series like Twins versus Brewers is the border battle. The border battle. I get that there's some geographic overlap there, like Twins versus Brewers is the border battle, the border battle. Yeah. I get that there's some geographic overlap there, but it's just,

Yeah. Well, what they can't, I mean, I guess they can't, they're like, Oh, we can't call the Tigers Blue Jays series the border battle too on the nose. Uh, no. Um, I don't know. I just like, you know, baseball, here's the thing about baseball. It's not college football, you know? It's just not. And that's okay. There are things about college football that are wonderful. And there are things about college football that are not

as good as baseball. And we don't have to do a mush of those, you know? We don't need to, you already have rivalries. Like the Rangers and the Astros already make a big deal out of playing each other when it happens. Like they, Ben, I don't like it. Like who else is playing? What are some of the other ones? Who's the, is the Dodgers and Angels? Is that what?

Yes, yeah. They play a freeway series already or a highway series. Is it Mets and Yankees? It's Mets Yankees. Yeah. They're already calling it a thing and wanting to have a name. Well, that's okay. Yeah. They're not giving it a new name. I don't think. No, I understand what I'm just saying. They're just putting together some of the actual rivalries. Well that's good. I think that's real. We would celebrate that if you were actually stacking the real rivalries, then I think that's kind of fun.

I don't like it. Maybe you could say, let's stagger them so that we get that intrigue throughout the season. But I don't mind it. If you lump them together, I just, the ones that are stretches, because you have Yankees Mets, well that means you can't have Yankees Red Sox at the same time. Maybe you do multiple ones. It's tough because some teams they just don't have the same sort of rivalry. I guess both the Diamondbacks rivals would be probably more the Dodgers and Padres at this point than the Rockies, but there are at least some commonalities there between the two.

And then Braves is probably Mets, right? And Phillies, it's not Red Sox, obviously Red Sox main rivals, not the Braves. So some of those. And then who's the, like Tigers, I don't, did the tigers really have a rival white socks? Did the blue jays really have a, I don't know. This is also part of it where it's like what you prioritize in the rivalry. It says a lot about you, right? It says a lot about your understanding of like, they're not picking,

they're not always picking the rivalry where the people involved are the most likely to fight. And that's the other thing. You got to pick the fight rivalries. You got to pick the ones where you're like, I am worried about Mets fans going into Citizens Bank Park. I'm worried about that because they will fight. They'll fight Ben.

And they're not doing that. They should, you have an opportunity to put Yankees Red Sox on TV one more time and you're not doing it. Who is deciding this? Yeah, I'm sure that there will be other opportunities for that. Yankees Red Sox is good too. It's just that then the Red Sox have to settle for the Braves. And then the Brewers, like probably if you're a Brewers fan, you feel more enmity towards the Cubs, the Cardinals, then the Twins certainly. And the twins,

probably it's just the other AL Central teams. And then Phillies, Phillies are playing the Pirates, which is like, it's not really a thing, right? Like the Pennsylvania series. I mean, maybe, maybe it's a little bit of a thing. It's a thing in so far as people from the Eastern part of the state and people from the Western part of the state sometimes people from the western part of the state sometimes are derisive toward one another. Like that's a thing. They were both in the NL East a long time ago and they played each other a lot. The Phillies should be playing the Mets. What are we doing?

If somebody's not in danger of getting stabbed, what's the point? Yeah, it's kind of, uh, I guess the Phillies would be the pirate's best rival, but the pirates are not the Phillies best rival. It's one of those situations. And then you have John Ham. Right. Cause the madman. I don't think about you at all. Exactly. Yeah. There you go. Raise Marlins, intrastate. What? But, yeah. But, no. Yeah. Lightning and Panthers, that's a thing, but Ra's and Marlins, not really a thing.

But Ra's, who would it even be? I don't know, the Yankees, I guess, though they're letting them use their ballpark. Maybe that helps mend fences. Marlins, you know, you have to be good consistently really to have a rivalry, I think. I think that's true. Like if you're, if you're bad most of the time with some outlier seasons, that's going to make it hard to have a rivalry because the stakes aren't there for your games. So, and similarly with angels Dodgers, it's such a

mismatch now. There could be bad blood and like a little brother sort of syndrome if the Angels were good. And it's like, oh, Tani left us for you and, and we're calling ourselves the Los Angeles team, but everyone knows we're not really, and you might feel kind of inadequate about that. But the Angels are just so bad that it's geographically. I'm fine if you don't really have a real rivalry, you just say, okay, they're technically nominally ostensibly in the same area. They're in the same geographic region, if not actual city, but Dodgers, you could probably name several teams that have a little more of a rivalry with them than the Angels and vice versa, frankly.

And this is why making it like a sponsored, forced, everyone has to have one kind of a situation is the problem because instead of allowing these things to just develop naturally or to acknowledge that different teams might have a variety of rivals with varying levels of intensity and you have an opportunity to go take it to the Red Sox, but then also take it to the... You can't because you got to pair them up. You got to know as our rivalry week and that's silly. Just let it happen when it does

and let it not happen when it doesn't and that's better. It's better that way. I don't care for it at all. I think it's forced and cheap and I'm covered in goo. Yes, I think that there's a gimmick with Padres Mariners. If you wanted to have the real rivalry, it'd be Padres Dodgers, Mariners, if you wanted to have the real rivalry, it'd be Padres Dodgers, it'd be Mariners Astros? Astros. Yeah, I guess Astros. And then Natzos, okay, you know, the Massen series. Sure, yeah. I guess that's fine.

And then it gets better from there, like A's Giants. Now that's weird and awkward now because they're not actually both Bay Area teams anymore, so you can't call it the Bay Bridge series. So that's odd, but at least there's a historic rivalry there. And then Guardians Reds and, you know, White Sox Cubs, obviously, and then Cardinals Royals and Mets Yankees. These are the good ones, the real ones, Astros Rangers. Listen to the sound that you made before you started describing some of these. If that sound is coming out of your mouth

while you're describing, then it's no good, no good. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see how it goes. I don't think it's gonna be a ratings bonanza, necessarily. And some of these matchups are just good fun. Like I'm looking forward to watching the Mariners and the Padres play. That's great. Like that'll be a super fun weekend series. It's not like the baseball is bad.

It's just that the whole thing is so ham fisted and I don't care for that. So, okay. Well, we do care for what if sports and it is time for our What If Sports What If of the Week, where we consider a hypothetical question submitted by a listener in a segment sponsored by What If Sports. And as we have told you for the past few weeks, they have partnered with us for some time here,

and they have created a dedicated landing page. Makes me feel special to have a landing page for our podcast here at whatifsports.com. Yeah, you go to whatifsports.com slash effectively wild. You see the What If Sports logo right next to the effectively wild logo. Just Partners United in branding. And you also get a great offer. So if you want to sign up for Hardball Dynasty, which is essentially franchise mode, and you take control of a team,

and you can start it from scratch, you can do the drafting, you can do the big picture stuff, and you can also do in addition to the roster management, the in-game management, down to setting your lineup and managing your budget. You can go multiple seasons, you can do player development. You can do financial modeling. Who does not want to do financial modeling?

How can you not be romantic about financial modeling? That combines your love of baseball with your previous occupation, probably, which I guess was not a love affair, or you might still be doing it, but still you can do that. And you can compete against other people. That's hardball dynasty. Then you've got sim league baseball where you're drafting and you can just put it together from all different eras and teams. And it can be completely anachronistic. And you can have your hypothetical scenarios,

how would this guy do against this guy or in this era. Every MLB season is available and you can just jumble them up into a big baseball melting pot and potpourri and of course they've got the fancy stats and simulations and all the rest. So go to whatifsports.com slash effectively wild and you can sign up for a buck. Come on. Exclusive offer. They're not, yeah, they're not handing out this offer to anyone else. This is exclusive and it says the offer in soon and that you should act fast. And I do not have information to the contrary. So I'll say sure. And you can get a first season in either of those games for $1. Come on, what a deal.

What a sports slash effectively wild. Okay, so our hypothetical this week is I think a good question that I had to ask you whether we'd talked about this. Maybe we have in passing, but I don't really recall discussing it in depth. Here it is. Why should hitters have to let themselves get hit by pitches? I propose we consider it a hit by pitch, even if the hitter gets out of the way. As long as the pitch enters

the hitter's side batter's box, the batter should get to go to first. With the obvious benefit of reducing hit by pitches, it also sorts out this really weird incentive in the game for hitters to let themselves get hit by hard objects traveling a hundred miles per hour. Pitchers would be disincentivized to pitch inside, but as reasonable members of society who are expected to not perpetrate even accidental violence,

I think that's kind of fine. So this question was submitted to us by listener Michael. And I seem to recall Sam Miller may have written about this, perhaps suggested it himself. I don't think Michael is the first person ever to have thought about it. And perhaps we have brought it up in passing before, but what do you think?

It's almost like a process over results. It's not, did you manage to contort yourself and get out of the way? Okay. But if the process was still quite hit by pitch ish because you threw it way inside, then you should perhaps be punished for that as a pitcher. I think that the devil might be in the details on some of this stuff. Like how, how confident are we that we would be able to properly parse the, Oh, that was a hit by pitch pitch from the non that would have been a hit by pitch. I guess we were using like ABS for that, right? To

like say, Oh, it was far enough in that it was just in the box. Yeah. Yeah. You wouldn't have to go to fully BS. You would just get, you'd have to have some flag, some alarm, some alert, I guess, that the umpire, not to call balls and strikes, but just to flag. Yeah, that was way in there. That was far enough. Or it could even, I guess, it could be a challenge system situation. Potentially we could add it to the challenge system. So instead of checking, was it a ball or a strike? You could say, was that too far inside? And if it's within a certain threshold, then you could just take your base.

What percentage of hit by pitches do you think that this alleviates? Because I can't decide if I think it's very many or not. The rule is it's currently written as you, if you're the hitter, you have to try to get out of the way. If the umpire thinks that you haven't, or if he sees you do the little like, whoops-a-daisy, like dip in, you know, where I'm dipping my elbow into a foe strike zone that you can't see. You can't see me dipping my elbow, let alone the strike zone. But, you know, if you do one of those, if you do a whoopsie, it doesn't count as a hit by pitch because they want you to get out of the way because they don't want you to get hit. Right. Which is what I'm trying to land on. Like the rules as they're written now don't want you to get hit. They want you

to get out of the way. And I wonder how many hitters this spares. And I wonder how hitters would feel about it because sometimes guys are, they're up close on the edge of the batter's box, especially guess hitters who maybe don't have his greatest sense of the zone. I think about Ty France. Ty France gets hit by pitches a lot, although I think a little less this year. He's having an okay season, but a better season than I thought he was going to, although I haven't checked in on him in a while. Maybe the first week and a half is biasing my understanding of Ty France. But Ty France

is like a guess-sitter, you know? He doesn't really seem like he's always doing a great job discerning the zone. And so he's up on the line and then he gets hit. And he wants to be up there so that he can try to manipulate the barrel to hit. So he doesn't want to move. So I bring that up not because there wouldn't be guys who would appreciate like not having to like dive out of the way, but they still have to dive out of the way. I'm rambling, but what I'm trying to discern is how many hit by pitches does this actually spare us? You know, how many guys are really standing in there

being like, ah, hit me, hit me, you know? How many of them are doing that? I mean, they're not doing exactly that because that's pretty wild to do. I think Rob Arthur has found that it does actually seem to be partly hitter driven. He's concluded that a younger generation of hitters is maybe more liable to wear one,

that maybe they're less eager to get out of the way, and so it's not entirely... Is that because they're wearing more gear now? It could be, although, I don't know, are they? Because, I mean, not relative to PD era, Bonds era, they did kind of limit the body armor from back then. But that's what he found at least. So I think part of it is probably hitter tendency,

and then a lot of it is just pitchers throwing harder and more max effort and more nasty movement, obviously. I think the big difference wouldn't even be so much just are you getting out of the way or not, it would just be that pitchers would have to be quite wary of coming inside because they'd know automatic hit by pitch. And so you would spare some injuries. This would help hitters obviously in multiple ways. It would help them not break their bird bones or worse, but it would also just kind of give

them the inside of the plate or off the inside of the plate. And they wouldn't have to worry about dancing out of the way as much. They could kind of dig in more and really focus and just eliminate that part off the inside of the plate at least. And so it would really help them if you kind of just took away pitching inside.

Now we're not suggesting you take away the entirety of inside just beyond a certain place. And you'd have to study it and you'd have to look at, okay, beyond what boundary is it typically a hit by pitch or something, and then you just draw the line there so that ideally you're not actually reducing the hit by pitches that much, because well, I guess you are,

but you're not drawing that line so far away that things that would have had no chance of being a hit by pitch previously would now be hit by pitches. You would want them mostly to have been hit by pitches before or at least to have required the batter to really twist away and contort themselves. So, but still the predictability

and the weariness on the part of pitchers and just knowing as a batter feeling more confident and comfortable in the box, it's kind of hard to quantify that, but I think it would be a pretty significant advantage. Now, maybe that's not so bad because a, we want to promote safety. It stinks when guys get hit by pitches and they are out for a while. Right.

They have ouchies and no one feels good about that. And then we also want more offense to some extent, or at least different shape of offense. And so I'm more receptive to this now at a lower ebb of offense, or at least batting average than I would be otherwise, where it would imbalance things. It just feels like the pitchers kind of have the upper hand. And so I'm more okay with taking away a little bit from them. That's kind of why I didn't get so worked up about the strike zone testing definition, just the reducing the size of the buffer for the umpire grading,

which has had the effect of slightly compressing the zone. I was kind of like, eh, well hitters need the help anyway. So this would be bigger than that, I think, and potentially too big. And hit by pitches generally have been on the rise, though it looks like so far this year, they're not, they're down a bit. I don't know if it's compared to last year, full year, at least. I don't know how much of a seasonality effect there is, but last year was even down a tad. Like it seems like we were sounding the alarm over, oh, it's peaking, it's spiking.

There are just more hit by pitches year after year after year. And it's kind of flattened out. It's plateaued the past few years. It's still high, historically speaking. And the pitches are also going faster than before. Although fewer fastballs, so some of those are just buried and they're going to hit your back foot or something. And they might not hurt you as much, at least.

Easy for me to say sitting here watching you hopping around because you just got hit on a toe or something. Anyway, I'm just saying. Austin Adams isn't pitching, so that helps. Well, yeah, the safety concerns are a little less acute than I would have said they were a few years ago, but they're still up there. Yeah. I can't decide if I think it's too much. You're right that I want reduced injuries.

I don't want guys to get hurt. And I am mindful of the fact that the avenues we have to try to balance things out in hitters favor, just generally are, you know, they're limited. We don't have like an endless supply of ways to make things a little more equitable between the hitting side versus the pitching side. Because at the end of the day, they just they don't get to decide what pitches getting thrown to them, it's always going to put them at a disadvantage. But I also am mindful that this might be like a much more dramatic change than we are necessarily giving it credit for, because I think it would really alter some guy's approach.

No hit by pitch is good, but it isn't like every guy is getting plunked constantly, you know what I mean? like every guy is getting plunked constantly. You know what I mean? So I don't wanna overreact in the name of safety either. It's a tricky thing to know what to do with candidly. I don't know, I don't know. Studying it, and then it's like, studying it, it feels like the sort of thing

that you would want to study to your point. And I wonder how flush the comp would be between the miners and the majors, because you do have a difference between the ability of big leaguers to command the ball and minor leaguers. So it's like, if you are guys going to be able to, you know, are you going to get meaningful data by having them do it down in the miners? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that.

Yeah. And Sam did write about this. I found his pebble hunting substack piece from last September. He dubbed it the no-go zone. That's what he would have called it. And he did consider these unintended consequences and whether they would be bad. He did say that it could be offset the offensive advantage by a corollary rule, which is if the pitch isn't in the no-go zone, then the batter doesn't get the base

whether it hits him or not. So that would help because the guys who are leaning into it were standing super close to the plate and are getting kind of cheapies and often aren't getting hurt that much anyway, they wouldn't count anymore. So you'd give that back to pitchers. It would actually have to be way inside

because every now and then you get one that's either on the fringes of the strike zone or not far from it. And someone just really didn't make much of an effort to get out of the way. Yeah. And I don't love when that happens either. Yeah. Hmm. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about it. You could also make it a limited no-go zone.

So it could be just for especially dangerous regions. Like it could be up and in. Yeah. So it could be like, okay, if this is gonna buzz the tower, if this is gonna make you hit the deck, if this is gonna be the kind of hit by pitch that would lead to you getting beamed, plunked in the head, serious injury,

maybe that we take away? I'd be more into that, I think. Sam even couldn't remember whether this was his idea or he'd heard it elsewhere. I feel like this has been floating around and probably independently proposed. This is one of our less wacky and out there hypotheticals. This is one that I could imagine maybe being adapted

in some form and potentially being good and maybe also being quite different, even though many of our hypotheticals are, it wouldn't be that different. Yes. This could be different, or I'm open to the idea that it might not be that different actually, if it kind of mirrors the way things work currently.

I think it might be really different. I think it might be really different, or maybe it wouldn't be different at all, you know? What if? It does feel, that's why we do these, but it feels less arbitrary. It feels fairer somehow. Yes.

If you're throwing away inside, then okay, if the batter got out of the way at the last second and scrambled, good for him, but why should you not suffer the same penalty? You did the same thing. If a guy just happened to be more nimble, well, your hands are no more clean

than they would have been, right? So it just- You just got lucky. Yeah, and so yeah, it's a process over outcomes, kind of a results independent answer to this. I guess that that part of it is perhaps the reason why I'm a little nervous now that I think about it, because we don't have a ton of those, like where we're grading on field action based on process rather than results in terms of like

what the outcome of the particular at batter played appearances. Like we, we are a results oriented sport, right? Like, am I thinking about that wrong? Have I misunderstood baseball? I'm always open to that notion to be clear. That I was just like fundamentally, I had a moment, sorry, can I just admit to a moment of, this is like the editing equivalent of like trying to braid your hair and thinking about it for even one second

and then not being able to do it. I had a moment earlier this week where I briefly was panicked that I didn't know like where commas should go relative to the word that preceded them. It's fine. I think a lot of people have that concerned them. It's fine. I think a lot of people have that concern. No, but not enough.

Some people are not self-aware about the fact that they don't know, but I think that's a strength of yours knowing where they go. You had comma yips, you had punctuation yips for a second. Yeah, but I was less worried about it. I briefly, I can't believe I'm admitting this on this podcast. Not so much like where did they go from a grammar structure perspective, but like whether there should be a space between the word and the comma. I was like, wait a minute, what? And then I was like, whoa, Meg, get it together, lady.

You know, you weren't on vacation for that long. You forgot like how words and commas work. Anyway, I figured it out. It's fine. Don't worry about it. Glad to hear that. I had a brief moment though where I was like, wait, is there supposed to be space? No, there is not supposed to be space. Slack Matt Martell. Hey, Matt. I didn't, I didn't slack Matt that one. I mean, Matt listens to the pod sometimes and he's going to be like, whoa, do I need to like go back through and re edit

her stuff? Anyway, I think you're right that people bristle at hypotheticals, even though that's what we're doing here, but not fun hypotheticals, but, but awarding people things based on hypotheticals. Yeah. That's what people always say about defense-independent stats or expected stats or FIP and they'll say, oh, that's imaginary. When I'm doing award voting, I want to know what actually happened and what runs were allowed and then I always protest. Yeah, but FIP is actually just as real as ERA, if not more so, because it's isolating what that picture actually did. That's not hypothetical.

The hypothetical is maybe they had better defense behind them or something. But if we're actually handing out awards based on individuals, then we want to know what the individual did. And I get that it then kind of becomes infinite and you can go down to a, you know, greater and greater remove from the actual results.

And we do care about the results. Paralyzed by the possibility of what could have been. Yes. And eventually you get to just like neurons firing and I thought about swinging and it was going to be a great swing. I just didn't actually go through with it. Yeah. And then it's just entirely removed from actual results in the spectator experience. So that's not great. And so I think what you're saying is true, but eventually it would just, the new results would just be,

well, you threw too far inside and there's nothing hypothetical about that. Sure. It would be based originally on the idea that if you throw too far inside, you might hit someone with a pitch. But eventually that would be replaced with just the outcome that if you throw too far inside, you might hit someone with a pitch. But eventually that would be replaced with just the outcome that you want to avoid is throwing a super inside pitch. And so that's what would be measured here.

That is a fair, that is a very fair retort to the concern, but yeah. Here's a question that is of the pedantic kind. We haven't done a, how can you not be pedantic about baseball? Official segment, at least in a while, other than just our typical pedantry. But. Well, who would be the ideal sponsor for the pedant section? Is it like the dictionary?

Yeah, it'd probably be some kind of like, yeah, Strunk and White or MLA or Chicago style or AP. I don't know. Yeah, someone who handles standards like that. a Strunk and White or MLA or Chicago style or AP. I don't know. Yeah, someone who handles standards like that. I'm not in the market for another. No, but it just struck me. I'm like, oh gosh, who would get on board with that one? Anyway, continue.

JC says, in the fourth inning of the Nationals Braves game, this was just a few days ago, Braves catcher, Drake Baldwin hit a two run homer, the Braves first runs of the game. In Baldwin's next plate appearance, the Braves broadcast said, and here's the guy who got the scoring started. However, he did not start the scoring. Marcelo Zuna, who was on first base when the

home run was hit, scored ahead of Baldwin. Therefore, Baldwin didn't start the scoring. Ozuna started it. I was never bothered by this before, but now that I thought about it, it drives me nuts. So I'm looking for your guidance. Am I justified or should I start looking for a therapist who takes my insurance to deal with this? Well, I don't know if I feel qualified or comfortable answering the therapy part, although I think that therapy is often beneficial to all sorts of folks under many circumstances. I appreciate where you're coming from, but if I can put your mind at ease, if I can help you let this go. Yes, he scored the first run, but his scoring was as a result of Baldwin's actions.

So Baldwin got the scoring started by hitting the home run. His action of hitting the home run. Like his action of hitting the home run is what allowed Ozuna to score because otherwise Marcel is just running around with no directive against the rules of the game. So it was Drake who got the, Drake Baldwin who got, and see, you can't just say Drake, that's tricky now. It was Drake Baldwin who got the scoring started because he hit the ball over the fence and then run, run, run and score a run.

So I think you can let it go. I think you can let it go. I agree with you. Yes. I think we've resolved the conflict there. Hopefully. No, even if it's, let's say there were two outs and Ozuna had to reach base to extend the innings so that Baldwin would even get the chance to hit the home run, then it would

almost be necessary. But no, cause yeah, then you could just say almost anyone started the scoring cause they had made it such that Baldwin would be up at that particular time. No, I think it's, yeah, it's the hitter who initiates the scoring of it. Right, yeah. Yeah, whoo, I thought we could resolve that. This one, well, this could have been a what if of the week.

It's in that vein, but I'll give you another one. It's from David who says, I was just thinking to myself that I miss seeing pitchers hit. Not a thought that I have had lately or ever really. Not for wanting to see bad hitters occasionally, but if you want to see bad hitters, there are some teams out there, David, you have to resort to the pitchers. But the real reason is because I miss seeing the strategy decisions played out by the managers, such as when and whom to double switch,

importance of the eight hole hitter, pitcher bunting and potential hand injuries, when to take them out of the game, just lots of great strategy that is lost now, but does it have to be? And I will say that I think there's something to that. I think the most compelling argument that I heard back when Universal DH was still a debate was not even just the decision about do I pull this starter now or do I bring in a pinch hitter or reliever or whatever, because

that had kind of become rote by the time they did away with pitcher hitting where there just wasn't that much variability because pitchers went deep into games anyway. And everyone was aware of the times through the order effect, but the roster construction, I think that was a valid point, just you had to have a bit more of a bench maybe when there were more levers to pull and buttons to press. And now it's just, it's a little more. Yeah. You don't need that anymore.

And so I think in the sense that I'd like to bring back bigger and better benches and variable rolls for bench bats and bench gloves. I think that is something that maybe we miss a little more now. It's not worth it to me to have that, to bring back pitcher hitting, but just saying, I think it's fair to lament the loss of it to an extent. Anyway, David says, I don't expect MLB to make one league pitcher hitting and another league not again. However, MLB could institute a special pitcher hitting month. Pitcher hitting month. I know that the league gets in a rut around the All-Star break, so a special pitcher hitting month could be in place just for July.

Guys hired as DHS wouldn't have to lose their spots. They would just be more useless pinch hitters during that month. Maybe you'd have to expand the rosters or something to accommodate this. What do you think? Would you like to see this? More importantly, could it be feasible? I like the idea that the league's getting in a rut and we're like, OK, mix it up. Let's see something new here.

Let's let's bring the fans who've gone away from the game back because their fans have their teams have fallen out of contention. Here's what we're going to give you. Pitcher hitting month. Are you in? How does that sound? Can I interest you in Pitcher hitting month. Are you in? How does that sound? Can I interest you in Pitcher hitting month? I think that, you know, on some level it's useful to realize when you're a sicko for a thing versus other people. I don't want to harsh your vibe here, but I don't like

it when you have like a difference of rule arbitrarily introduced for a stretch. This is part of our objection to the zombie runner, right? That you have one set of rules for the first nine innings, and then because Rob Manford is bored at home, we have to play it differently after that, right? And so I'm gonna, I think, end up being like accidentally derisive about Rod Manford for a little while because I'm still mad at him for the Pete Rose thing.

You know, I'm just like, sorry, sorry, you're in the crosshairs, buddy. You're gonna get some bile, you're gonna be covered in goo. Anyway, I just, I want there to be a consistency to the way the game is played because, one, I think that it allows us to say more about the game with greater confidence because we have sort of consistent playing conditions across the duration of the season. And yeah, in this instance, the thing you're asking for is to see worse hitting in service of strategy.

And maybe there is a bigger audience for that than I am appreciating, but I'm skeptical that that's the case. Now, having said that, if you wanted to restrict the number of pitchers allowed on the roster at any given moment in an effort to like balance the scales better between pitching and hitting,

you might end up in a situation where you get more interesting bench options just by virtue of those slots not being able to be filled by pitchers, which would be in service of a broader project that we support and also have sort of consistent rules across the whole thing. But I think I would lean more toward that than I necessarily would having a special little month, you know, I don't know that I'm into that as special month.

Can you imagine how bad the pitchers would be at hitting now? Oh my god. If they just had to hit for a month, just give it a couple more years on from the last time they hit, where they basically haven't had to think about it at all. And then they'd take some perfunctory BP, I'm sure before that month, the way that they used to,

if it was inter league or something, okay, I guess we better remember which end to hold the bet at. Yeah. And if it were just a month, can you imagine just how rusty they'd be? How bad they'd be? I think that would instantly be the end of pitcher hitting month. It would turn into pitcher hitting day or something because they'd go over the day and

then we remember, oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's why we don't do this anymore. Yeah. I think, I think you might be right. I think I don't even know if it would get to day two. Okay. Here is a question from JJ, Patreon supporter. This was from early this month.

Blaine Crim debuted for the Rangers tonight. He had a chance to record a put out before his first plate appearance, not uncommon for position player debuts. As far as I could tell, he did not signal to save the ball. Why don't players save the ball from their first put-out like they do for their first hit or strikeout? Outs are just as important as hits, yet they don't appear to hold the same sentimental value for

players. Would you save your first put out? No. I think a lot of it has to do with like, well, first of all, the primacy of hitting, but also I would imagine that like the anticipated success rate on a put out is much higher than hitting. So I think there's, and I don't know that they've necessarily processed it in as specific a terms as that, but I would think that a not small part of the like indifferences like, well, of course I'm going to do that. If I, if I couldn't do, if I couldn't do that, I'd be a DH, you know? I wonder if part of it is just about

unassumed roteness to the activity, a presumed success that isn't there when you're stepping in against a big league pitcher for the first time, my God, you know? I think you're right. Yes. Now, what if your first put out was a spectacular play though? What if it was a five-star stat cast catch and a single digit catch probability would have been a web gem back in the day, then there actually would be great value to it in an expected value sense. And it would be kind of equivalent to getting a hit because you just robbed a

hit not to get back into what we call depriving people of hits or home runs. What if it was a home run robbery was your first? Now that you would save, right? What if that's your first put out in the big leagues? I robbed a homer. I would want that one. So if it's just a two hopper to second or something and it's totally routine, maybe not. But I think if it were a particularly fine play, I think I would want it. I mean, maybe. But also, well, first of all, you have the you have the web gem, you know, like you have the highlight, it's that's you have the highlight, that's going to get played, that's going to get played all over the place. You know, the highlight from that Tigers Red Sox

game, I'm sure that made the rounds. But also I just think that, I don't know, maybe you would, maybe you'd ask for it, but I don't know. I think it's just part of it too is that everyone else hasn't done the thing. Part of what you're doing is participating in the culture of like, I don't know, part of it too, Ben, is how sentimental is the person involved? Ben Frick Yeah. Well, they just might not be materialistic and I don't want anything, but if you're the usual person who wants to decorate your trophy room or whatever with mementos from your career, yeah.

Yeah, but like, I think part of it is that you, you know, you've, imagine you have a long and prosperous and successful big league career and you're showing, you know And you're showing your neighbor Bob when he comes over for a barbecue, you're like, oh, you want to see all my stuff? And maybe your neighbor Bob's like, that's a weird thing to ask me because now I have to say yes because what am I going to say? No, I don't want to see your stuff. And so you and Bob go in there. And if you say, this is my, the ball for my first putout, he's

going to be like, why did you say that? You know, cause the, the sentimental thing is your first hit, you know, your first strikeout. You also have to imagine that over the course of a long career, you just accumulate a bunch of stuff. You know, if you're a pitcher, it's like, you have these milestone strikeout numbers and you're going to save all of those balls. And if you're a hitter, it's going to be like, oh, here's your hundredth home run or whatever. And you got to draw the line somewhere. You just got to say, and if you're a really good defender, you're going to end up with other accolades from your defense. Like you'll be like, here's my gold glove award, Bob, hold it. And then Bob's going to be like, this is so heavy.

I don't know why your neighbor's named Bob. That's just a hypothetical. Yeah. No, I feel that way about stuff that I save because I'm not really a pack rat, but when it comes to like school stuff, periodically, I just leave as much of it at my mom's place as I can. But every now and then... Does she rebel against that though?

Yes, understandably so. She's like, come and get this crap out of my house. I am a grown man and have been for quite some time, so she is well within her rights to protest. But I, yeah, when I have something like that, if it's an essay I wrote, a paper I wrote, or a test I took or something, there's no

reason to save that stuff. And yet, I do, some part of me wants to cling to that. And I guess that's the equivalent. For me, a paper I wrote would be like a ball from a player. And so yeah, then you end up, and the ball looks the same as all the other balls, unless it had some memorable scuff mark or something on it. And so, yeah, that probably diminishing returns maybe. I do think that if I were a pitcher, I would save my first out ball regardless of what kind of out it was.

Because it does seem like there's a real bias towards strikeouts. Like you save your first strikeout pitch, And I'd want that too, I guess, but I think I would want any out that I got. The thing that gave me an ERA in the big leagues, gave me an inning pitched or a fraction of an inning pitched. I don't care if that's just a ground or two second or whatever. I would want that. And I don't know that pitchers save that, do they? I feel like if a pitcher is making his debut

and there's just a roller to second for the first out, then that's just gonna get thrown back to him. That's not gonna be sent out of play, is it? I don't think, but I would want that. Yeah, I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, like, sure, I wouldn't judge, put it this way, I wouldn't judge you for saving it,

but I think you're right that you'd have to make a point of asking for that because that's not understood as like one of the first, one of the keepsakes that typically people are like on the look to pull out of play. That's weird. You just recorded an out in the big leagues. That's a momentous moment. Like, that's... I mean, it doesn't... I guess maybe is it because... I, you or I could record an out in the big leagues if we threw enough pitches and someone hit a ball hard at someone, then we could record that kind of out,

but we probably couldn't strike out a big league batter. So it is really... Absolutely not. Yeah, unless they were just so phased by the fact that we threw so slow and so badly that they didn't know what to do with it. Maybe just real change of speeds. That's the art of pitching. But, um, but maybe that's it. It's like, well, anyone could theoretically get an out on a ball and play given enough attempts, but a normal person, average person's probably gonna have a tough time striking out a big league batter,

so maybe that's when you've made it, that's when you've really separated yourself from a normie. Yeah, that's where the separation comes in. I... How confident am I that I, from the mound, would get to the plate? Throw it all the way. Yeah. I know that like if I, well, I think if I warmed up, I could do it, but it might take

a couple tries. I'm not a very strong person, you know? Well, it might not be the only thing that separates a major pitcher from us, but it's an important one, I think. So yeah, I would save any out. My first out, that would be memorable to me. I mean, yeah, it would be incredibly memorable, but also. Okay, maybe we can end with this. This will be a good Friday pod capper. This comes to us from Shasta, who writes, while I understand Meg's horror about Blooper and your collective repulsion to Mr. Met's new upper bod, Ben, is he blasting? I can't say for sure whether whether he's blasting.

We're not repulsed. Well, were we repulsed by Mr. Met's he's blasting. We're not repulsed. Well, were we repulsed by Mr. Met's, bralic Mr. Met? I don't really recall whether, I thought there was something off about it. I'm unsettled, I think is a better way of describing my feeling than repulsed. I'm not repulsed. I'm on, I'm unsettled. I continue, I continue to wonder exactly how long they expect us exactly how long they expect us to pretend that we don't know that they are, you know, having meetings. They're having meetings about how much people wanna with the mascots, you know, like this meeting is happening. It's happening. Also, I was dis-confited by like, the body composition was weird. Skipping leg day. I don't know.

I was just like, are they trying to make him sexy? Is he meant to be, like is the canon, is the lore associated with Mr. Met that he is like insecure? And so he has to get bluffed? Yeah, that's what we were thinking because- He has to match Mrs. Met and her donk. Right, we've discussed Mrs. Met's attributes. Donk.

And also the fact that there was mascot competition for the Mets last year. And so maybe Mr. Met was worried about someone stealing this girl or something. And so he hit the gym. I don't know. There's lore there. But anyway, Shasta's coworker, Willie and I, would like to present an argument for Billy the Marlin being the most horrifying of all. Now, a humanoid Marlin in and of itself is not horrifying relative to the other team's humanoid mascots.

Where we take issue is the length of Billy's jersey. Now if you want to search our email inboxes here, if you want to search for Billy the Marlin, there is a photo accompanying this, which I will link from the show page. Where we take issue is the length of Billy's Jersey. Unlike clearly whimsical cropped jerseys, such as those found on the fanatic or Fredbird of the Cardinals, Billy's jersey is often depicted startlingly close to his crotch area and often with the bottom button undone, which makes the viewer feel as though he's trying to air out the region.

In the attached illustration of Billy, one feels as though one has unintentionally run into an uncle at night in his night shirt with just a little too much of his bathing suit area showing. To be direct, Billy is shirt cocking and it's not okay. Shirt cocking. I did not know that term.

I was not familiar with that term. Okay, so here's the thing though. And look, I agree that in the image that we were sent, he appears to be wearing pants though. Like if you Google Billy the Marlin, he appears to be wearing some pants. They're just the same color as the rest of him? Yeah, but like they're obviously pants though.

So he's got the unbuttoned top and then, I'm not so sure about that. I mean, they're pants in real life in the sense that the performer, the friend of Billy who's inside the suit is covered, but Billy himself. But look at, okay, so like look at Billy, here's why I say that they're pants, Ben. Here's why I think that they're pants.

Because if you look at Billy the Marlin, Billy, here's why I say that they're pants, Ben. Here's why I think that they're pants. Because if you look at Billy the Marlin, they're pants. He's wearing pants. He's just wearing pants. They change. The pants change. There are multiple pairs of pants. He's got a whole wardrobe. Yeah, it depends on his attire on any given day, I guess, but that does suggest that he does have a tire. So you look at some... Well...

I think that, look, are there times when the pants are the same blue color as the head? Yes. Yes. And the same color as his sleeves or what is under his Marlin's jersey? Look at this one I just sent you. Bar, Billy the Marlin liking a jumpsuit is no crime. That doesn't make him a creepy uncle.

But the- liking a jumpsuit is no crime. That doesn't make him a creepy uncle. But, but, but, but- This one I sent you, whatever is on his bottom and under his jersey is the same and also is the same color as his head and his fins. Well, sure, but, sure, sure. But here's the thing, bud. He's wearing pants. It is baggy.

That's a good point. It's baggy. He's wearing pants. And then, and then if you Google Billy the Marlin, like there are times, he's wearing pants. And then if you Google Billy the Marlin, there are times when he is wearing pants that have like a stripe on them. There are times that he's wearing pants that, I think he's mostly wearing pants. Here's what I'll offer as a midpoint between these two notions. I do think that there are times when he is supposed to be understood to be pantless, but well, now I'm seeing the fin.

Now I'm seeing his fin when he's wearing the orange and it's the same color. So maybe he's not wearing pants. And we could broaden the conversation to extend beyond Billy because Billy is not the only mascot who arguably may not be wearing pants, right? I mean, like the Cubs guy is not wearing pants at all. He's just-

Yeah. I just, when I was Googling this, I came across- He's winning the pooing it all over the place. Yeah. A post from our pal, Grant Brisby, from SB Nation back in 2014, headlined the five creepiest mascots and the nature of pants. And this was prompted by the Cubs had a new mascot who was a young bear, right? Clark.

And Clark was like the kids. Clark is not wearing pants. Yeah, Clark's not wearing pants. And Clark's just wearing a jersey and a backwards cap and is also a younger bear. And it's sort of like the bears in the toilet paper ads where it's like, you don't have holes and it just seems like there would be just crusted. I'm so mad at you. I can't believe you just said,

you don't have holes and you just expect me to move on from that? We can't see the holes at least. Not that I'm requesting that we see the holes to be clear. I was gonna say, well, you want hyper realistic cartoon bears. That is not what I want. And yet when the advertisement is premised on the fact that they're wiping

and it's not clear what they're wiping, if anything. OK, I'm not asking for hyper realism when it comes to bear anatomy down there. I'm just saying there are mascots who are like this, right? Like DJ Kitty doesn't have pants like Lucille doesn't have pants. The fanatic doesn't have pants, like Lucille doesn't have pants. The fanatic doesn't have pants. But he's an alien. Grant did a, yeah, Grant did an infographic of Major League Baseball mascots with pants

and then Major League Baseball mascots without pants. And then one's in a frock, which is the swinging fryer where we don't really know what's going on under there. Yeah, what's going on under there. Yeah, what's going on under there. But it was fairly evenly split between clearly with pants and clearly without pants. And like Baxter the Bobcat does not have pants. He does not have pants.

Sometimes he wears a Speedo. Yes, sometimes he, right. And he has the jersey top. And is he the one that you have wondered why he's so jacked or that's a different mascot who's kind of jacked? No, that's the Memphis Grizzlies mascot. He's like, jacked.

Yeah, right. Natty or not for that guy, you know? Yes, so when you have that, when you have Baxter and there are no pants, now it's not anatomically correct Bobcat. And so there's nothing actually, it's a Ken doll mascot situation. And that's for the best, I think.

Again, there are some people who have relationships. Look, that's none of my business. Yeah, that's whatever they wanna do in the privacy of their homes or Andrew McCutcheon's general vicinity. They're welcome to do that. But I just, when there are no pants and there's just the Jersey top,

what message does that send? That does seem like there's- Well, but are you worried about, you know, here's the thing. Are you worried about adhesive fish? Yeah. Do they have? Grant ruled on Billy the Marlin having pants,

to be clear. So that's the side he came down on. And it's because they're baggy. It's because the bottom is baggy, I think is why he reads as having pants. But I think upon closer inspection, he isn't wearing pants. I think that the, because there are multiple Billy's, like there are multiple versions of Billy. The base Billy, it changed, like the head changes, it looks like.

Sometimes Billy is all blue on the fin on his head, and sometimes Billy has color on the fin on his head, but not always. And so I think that we are meant to read the bottoms because here's here's here's Ben Here's how we know he's not wearing pants Here's how I think we know he's not wearing pants because there are times when Billy the Marlin is Wearing the throwback pinstripe jersey and when he does that he is not wearing pinstripe pants Okay, and so if they were pants you would think that they would match the jersey, wouldn't you?

Although, you know, he's not, so I think we're not meant to read them as pants. I think we're supposed to read them as whatever the bottom of a marlin looks like. But again, are you worried? It's a fish. He doesn't have, they don't have stuff hanging out off of them. Regardless of his pantsedness, Grant ranked him the third most disturbing mascot, just I think mostly because he looks like

he could actually impale you. Right, he has a weapon on his face. Yes, now he put Baxter second back then, partly because of the pantslessness, and then he put Mr. Redlegs number one. Well yeah, he's crazy eyes. He has pants. He's got crazy number one, because the eyes. He has pants.

Yeah, the eyes. Yeah, he looks like he's on well. Yeah, so I think that it does add something to the creep factor, potentially, not to have pants. And then to have the jersey that ends right there, it does look a little bit like they're exposing you, perhaps, on purpose. But they're not're not actually because there's nothing to expose and we know that and we're all on the same page About that and so we can't port

Normal human clothing behavior and norms over to mascot clothing. I guess the anatomy is just different Yeah, it is different. I mean, he's a fish, you know? Yeah. And like, what is Blooper supposed to be? You know? What is he? Right. He's a, you know, he's a fanatic knockoff is what he is. We've pondered the nature of Blooper before and... I have thoughts about Blooper that I will share on the next Patreon pod. And Blooper, to be clear, was spawned, burst, decanted, visited us, however he originated.

That was in 2018. So Grant's post-predated existence. Right, he would have absolutely. The unholy existence of Blooper, yeah. So we need to re-rank clearly. Oh yeah, Blooper, easily the most terrifying mascot. Yeah, it's not close. Valid question, how do you decide pants or no pants?

And you might think that it would be like the more anthropomorphic mascots, you'd be more inclined to have pants, but I'm not sure that that's actually true. Like, no one sees the fanatic and says, hey, put some pants on, fanatic. No, because he's like a weird alien or something. Yeah, when you have a more humanoid shaped one, at least. I guess all of the like mascots who are vaguely human, even if they have baseballs for heads or something, they all have pants. They all have pants. But the animal ones.

Oh, I have found, no, I found definitive proof that they are not pants. Are you ready? Ready. Okay, I'm going to send this to you. You tell me if you agree. It's going to make noise on your computer maybe. Sorry.'s a YouTube. Here's Billy the Marlin wearing pajamas. He's got pajama bottoms on They are matching. These are pants Right. Is there he is certainly covered here, right? And so he's not wearing pants the rest of the time I think I think it's definitive. I think that this is the proof we need. Why does somebody had to like make this?

Somebody had to be like, he needs pajamas. Let's make those. Yes, next time we interview a mascot designer, we have to ask, how do you decide pants or no pants? Yeah, and how do you source pants? You know, you can't go to the big and tall store. No. I mean, maybe you can.

Maybe. All right, one late submission for the home run helper, the outfielder who inadvertently propels the ball over the wall. Home run giveaway, or if that's too ambiguous, home run assisted giveaway, as in the pitcher gives up the home run with an assist from the outfielder. Actually, we got another suggestion along those lines.

Offensive outfield assist, an offensive assist in baseball. What will they think of next? This makes me think back to our pedantic question of the week. What if the first scoring in a game comes when an outfielder knocks an opposing hitter's batted ball over the wall, then who got the scoring started? Was it the guy who hit it?

Was it the guy who batted it over the wall? Was it some combination of both? Much to consider. We will ponder these and other questions. Was it the guy who hit it? Was it the guy who batted it over the wall? Was it some combination of both? Much to consider. We will ponder these and other questions. I believe I recommended this on an outro last week, but because we talked about Jacob de Grom today, I will plug it one more time. Michael Rosen wrote for Fangrass.

A fine post headlined, Jacob de Grom command God. He's not the kind of God who issues commandments. He's the kind of God who has fantastic command. So that has helped him despite his moderately diminished stuff. He has maybe the most pinpoint command in baseball, yet another of his gifts. And I thought I'd leave you with a little bonus gift

at the end of this week. As some of you know, since last summer, I've been one of the three panelists on Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast, which comes out every Monday. It's a sports podcast where we talk about all sorts of sports. That could have been the name of the podcast,

all sorts of sports. But no, it's Hang Up and Listen, and I host it with Alex Kirschner and Lindsey Gibbs, and I'd love it if you'd check it out and listen if you're interested in other sports. We do talk baseball sometimes though. And this past week, I did a baseball-related after ball, which is what we call the segment

at the tail end of the show, when one of us does a monologue about someone or something. Well, I did one about eight minutes long on Ayami Sato, who is the first woman to play professional baseball in Canada. We haven't talked about this yet on Effectively Wild, but I thought some of you might be interested

in the story if you're not already aware. So I'm gonna play my after ball here from the most recent hangup episode. If you want my video game and nerd culture takes, you can find them on the ringer verse feed. If you want my non baseball sports takes, you can find them on hang up and listen. And you also could have heard this on Sunday, the Toronto Maple Leafs lost two to nothing to the Florida Panthers in game four of the Eastern Conference second round, nodding that NHL series at two. But those were not the only Leafs to lose to Panthers on Sunday, because earlier the same day, the Toronto Maple Leafs lost 6-5

to the Kitchener Panthers. I am speaking, of course, of the Toronto Maple Leafs of the Inter-County Baseball League, who narrowly lost their season opener but made some exciting history nonetheless thanks to their starting pitcher Ayami Sato, who became the first woman to play professional baseball in Canada. The IBL, which has operated continuously since 1919 and currently comprises nine Ontario teams, is sometimes described as a semi-pro circuit, but it's the top independent baseball league in Canada. The league has employed loads of former and future affiliated minor leaguers, and more than 40 former or future major leaguers have passed through it,

too, including 48-year-old Fernando Rodney, who is pitching for the Hamilton Cardinals this season. Normally, we wouldn't take note of IBL opening day, but there was something notable that happened here. Over the winter, the Toronto Blue Jays failed to sign Roki Sasaki, whose performance for the Dodgers so far hasn't given the Jays much cause to lament losing out on him. But the Maple Leafs landed the highly touted Japanese pitcher they targeted in December when they signed Sato, who is widely regarded as the best female player or certainly pitcher in the world. Now, I want women to succeed in professional baseball, whether in women's leagues or in leagues

predominantly populated by men, but I must concede that on the whole, they have not been very effective in their high level trials against the guys. We don't have very reliable or comprehensive stats for turn of the 20th century stars like Lizzie Murphy and Lizzie Arlington or 1950s Negro Leaguers Tony Stone, Connie Morgan, and maybe Johnson, but the numbers from the

past few decades tend to tell a similar story. Julie Croteau, the first woman to regularly play NCAA baseball, batted.222 as the second string first baseman for a Division III team that went 120 and won, then batted to 078 with no extra base hits for the 6 and 38 Colorado Silver Bullets. Silver Bullets versus Rockies might be an interesting showdown. They were a women's team that played against semi-pro men, followed by a 1 for 12 showing by Croteau in the Hawaii Winter Baseball League. Isla Borders recorded a 6.75 ERA with more walks than strikeouts over 52 games and 101

in the third innings in Indie Ball from 1997 to 2000. Former teenage knuckleball sensation Eri Yoshida, who's actually younger than Sato, managed a 7.62 ERA with way more walks than strikeouts in 21 games and 78 innings in Indie Ball from 2010 to 2012. Stacey Piagno had a 7.67 ERA in 16 games and 27 innings for the Sonoma Stompers, the franchise featured in my book The Only Rule Is It Has To Work. Back in 2016 and 2017, her former teammate Kelsey Whitmore, a two-way player, has compiled a 12.04 ERA in 39 games in 49 and a third innings and a 169 OPS in 91 plate appearances in Indie Ball from 2016 to 2024.

She tried out this spring for a team in the Mexican league but didn't quite make the cut. Olivia Pichardo, the first woman to play NCAA Division I baseball, has appeared in only a few games for Brown, and in two seasons of collegiate summer ball she's batted 107 and slugged 179, albeit with enough walks and hit by pitches to post a.356 on base percentage. In other words, we're a long way away from Ginny Baker, star screwball artist for the San Diego Padres, in the late lamented single season TV series Pitch, which aired on Fox in 2016.

I don't mean to diminish the pioneering nature of what these non-fictional women have accomplished, and I think they had it harder than their male competitors, what with the publicity and pressure heaped on them, the sporadic play they've received, the isolation and subpar facilities they've faced. But if you're holding out hope of seeing a woman in the majors or even the affiliated minors, and I certainly want women to have the opportunity to play in those leagues if they have the desire and talent to, then a necessary step along the way would probably be not just to play against men but

to play very well against them. And so far, that hasn't happened consistently. That's why all eyes, or many eyes, including mine, are on Sato, who may be the most accomplished woman ever to play against men. The 35-year-old 5'5' righty has thrown out a ceremonial first pitch for the Padres, but that's not her main claim to fame. Sato has helped pitch the Samurai Japan women's team to six consecutive Women's Baseball World Cup titles, and she's a three-time

MVP of that tournament. She also dominated the Japan women's baseball league, leading that circuit in strikeouts in three of its last four seasons before it shut down in 2021. Sato was featured in See Her, Be Her, a documentary that premiered on MLB Network last October and is now on Prime Video. She's also supposed to be the subject of another documentary called Iami Sato curve ball, which will chronicle her season in the IBL. Will her mid seventies mile per hour heat paired with a splitter and a high spin curve ball play in this league? I don't know, but so far so good. The two to swing and a miss strike three,

I am a Sato with her first strike out in the Intercounty Baseball League. This is fun to watch. Another former Leaf Jamie Cabral he hits it softly on the ground to first gobbled up by Costaldo Cabral with a headfirst dive. Ayami Sato fantastic with LePard Wolverine up in the bullpen that's probably her last inning yet. She gets the handshake from Rob Butler Unbelievable Ayami Sato two one two three innings including a strikeout Great start to her Maple Leafs

career in her debut Sato got Kitchener's leadoff batter Nick Parsons to tap a ball back to her for an easy putout and she kept cruising Since this was the first game of the season, she didn't go deep, but as you just heard, she pitched two perfect innings. Six up, six down, with one strike out. It took her only 15 pitches and 12 of them were strikes. Maple Leafs manager Rob Butler, a former Blue Jays outfielder who's still the only Canadian to win a World Series with a Canadian club, said,

It's a beautiful story. I can't believe how lucky I am to win a World Series with a Canadian club said, It's a beautiful story. I can't believe how lucky I am to be a part of this. Reliever Alex Karabian said, She was completely unfazed before, during, after. I don't know how someone goes up there in that spot in this setting and doesn't seem nervous at all and she killed it. About 2,000 spectators were on hand, including multiple girls teams who came to see Sato and chanted her name. Sato, holding back tears, told the Globe and Mail, I was looking at the future

of female baseball. Speaking of which, Sato is a special advisor to the Women's Professional Baseball League, which is slated to launch in the U.S. next year. Last December, she said, if I have the opportunity to play in the league in the future, I would love to participate. If women's professional baseball gets reestablished in North America, it could be a springboard for some standout players who want to test themselves against men, but it could also put an end to the idea that female baseball players should aspire to play against men. It's not as if we talk about WNBA or NWSL or WTA Tour players as prospects

for men's leagues. Those women's leagues aren't means to an end, but ends in themselves. So one way or another, Sato's season seems significant, whether as a proof of concept for female players in men's leagues or as a swan song for that tradition of trailblazers. Regardless of whether the NHL's maple leafs advance, you can catch the IBL's maple leafs and Sato's exploits between now and mid August. They have 41 games to go. Well, make that 40 games to go now,

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