Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 356: Bill James’ Predictions for 2015, and Our Predictions for 2030

Episode Date: January 2, 2014

Ben and Sam review Bill James’ old baseball predictions for 2015, then issue their own for 2030.

Well, don't blame yourself, big guy. Blame Will. He should have told you when Luther stole his baseball. What baseball? What, baseball? Well, baseball game where a man with a stick hit ball and run. Something like this. Hold it! Good morning and welcome to episode 356 of Effectively Wild,

the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectus.com. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller for our first show of 2014. Happy New Year, Sam. Thanks, Ben. Happy New Year. Thanks. You're welcome. Any catching up to do? Any banter? No. uh any welcome any catching up to do any banter uh no okay well uh your idea for the podcast today was to talk about a bill james essay uh that has recently been written about and it's an essay from

the the new historical baseball abstract it was not in the original historical baseball abstract. It was not in the original historical baseball abstract, was it? I can't imagine it was. I mean, it refers to many things that had happened in the years. Well, that would, well, okay. It could be extremely prescient then, maybe, if it was written earlier than we think. But okay, so it's in the Bill James historical baseball abstract. it's in the Bill James historical baseball abstract. It's called baseball 2015. And we're going to talk about some predictions Bill James makes in this essay and then possibly make some of our own. Um, we are, we're not usually big fans of, of prognosticating, but I feel like this is on a long enough timeline that no one expects us to be right anyway. In fact, I would say the world is reasonably unlikely to exist by then.

Yeah. Certainly the world and us. We should note, just in case people aren't aware, you said it's in the new Bill James historical baseball abstract. That is the title of it. The new is not an adjective. This came out in 2001, which explains the challenge of predicting what was going to happen in 2015. Otherwise, this would be confusing. Yes. So Bill James starts off this essay with a, a disclaimer. Uh, he says, history shows nothing more clearly than that one cannot anticipate history. This is true, I think, because many of the things that we all know turn out when put to the test to be untrue or to be true only up to a point.

Then he says, having said that, four things about the future of baseball seem so obvious to me that I am willing to put them on record in a hardcover book so that the next generation of sports writers can make fun of me 20 years from now. So here we are, only 13 years from then. But we are, well, we're probably not going to make fun of him, but we're going to talk about his four predictions. I have a paperback, too. Yeah, me too. I guess we should mention that this essay was recently rediscovered by Scott Lindholm at Beyond the Boxscore. And so now Rob Nyer has written about it and it's sort of circulating around, which is just interesting because it is not, in fact, 2015. It is 2014. So conceivably everything that Bill James says in this essay could still come true. And he also, just from skimming it, I don't think he ever mentions 2015 in the text. It's the title of the essay, but in the actual body of it, he sort of says like within the next 20 years, kind of, it's a little,

it's a little vague about when he thinks these things are going to happen. But his four things are first, that baseball will eventually solve or contain the problem of economics corroding competitive balance. Hang on, can I interrupt before we start? Are we talking about Bill James's predictions or are we making predictions of our own, or are we doing both? What is the agenda? The agenda, as laid out in the email that you sent me, was both of those things. Okay. Second prediction, that baseball will eventually gain control of the problem of the ever-lengthening games.

Three, that the hundred-year trend of using more and more pitchers will end, and complete games for the first time ever will soon become more common rather than less. And four, that the trend toward more strikeouts and more homers from the top of the order to the bottom will also end soon. from the top of the order to the bottom will also end soon. So if we're scoring him on these predictions out of four, we're giving him credit for maybe 1.5? What's the.5? Are you counting the home runs as the.5?

Yes. I wouldn't count the home runs as the.5. Even though home runs are down because offense is down, home runs are actually, if I'm not mistaken, a more substantial portion of the offense than they were. And the home run is still, I mean, the home run is God in baseball in a way that hasn't changed, even if it's harder to hit. I mean, it's harder to hit. I mean,

it's harder to do everything now offensively, but home runs are still significant. All right. So then we're giving him, we're giving him a 25% grade. That's right. We're giving him the, we are giving him number one, that baseball will contain the problem of economics corroding competitive balance. We've've we've talked about this on the show how spending has not correlated to winning lately um there has not been contraction of small market teams and some some mega league of the yankees and the other big market teams dominating everything there's been pretty good, especially relative to some other sports. So as Rob Nair wrote, it's debatable whether baseball has gained control of this problem

or whether it happened for reasons that are outside of baseball's control. But I don't know whether he's saying Major League Baseball. He's just saying baseball will solve this problem. Yeah, and I think it's one of his arguments is that every league moves toward competitive balance. And so if it happened organically, then that simply sort of absolves Major League Baseball with capital MLB from the need to do it. But, you know, so presumably they might have engineered it to a greater degree if necessary. Although I will say that while this is the one that I would unequivocally give him credit for, I mean, there's no doubt it seems to me that there's a competitive balance that seems almost illogical and hard to explain, given what we know about the importance of money. I might actually argue that it seems more likely to me that if we give him credit for a longer timeline than 2015, as you noted that 2015 is not a date that he actually laid down necessarily,

I would probably bet on this one overturning before I would bet on any of the other three coming true. It seems to me that this is quite possibly just a lull and that, in fact, the structural advantage is still completely with the big market teams and they just don't behave necessarily rationally with it. and they just don't behave necessarily rationally with it. And the others, at least so far, seem to be whiffs. Games are long, strikeouts are still up, and teams are still using more and more pitchers,

and starters are throwing fewer and fewer complete games. Those trends, if anything, have accelerated rather than reversed. What was the first one? The one before the strikeouts? The game length. The game length. Has that accelerated? I don't know. I don't know either, although it does feel like slowing down the game is a uh that has picked up for certain pitchers um and i don't know if i feel like the games themselves are longer overall or structurally longer but there i didn't really know any pitchers 10 years ago who very very deliberately and

strategically um held the ball the way that they do, the way that Josh Beckett does and Clay Buchholz does. A handful of pitchers, most of them seemingly Red Sox related, do. And sometimes you – I mean pace of game in any sport um, claimed as a sort of a strategy. I mean, some, you know, you see it in, you know, the, the run and gun offense in basketball, I think is a thing. And you see it in the chip read, chip Kelly, chip, chip, chip somebody on the Eagles, uh, the ducks, you know, the Oregon Ducks with the football, right? And I was thinking about whether, I was just thinking a couple days ago about whether a baseball team could do that. If you, if we'll ever see a team that speeds up the game on defense to the point where it's like, there's just, there's not even time to step out of the box. It's just,

you know, get the ball and throw the ball so quickly. Um, you know, just, just right up to the, to the, to the edge of legality and whether there might be some advantage to that, but in fact, it's gone the other way with, with specific pitchers. So, uh, yeah, so I guess, I guess maybe that's a long way of saying that, yes, it's accelerated. And he writes about this idea that baseball is a perfect machine um the the sort of cliche about how the the length between the bases hasn't changed in over a hundred years and yet throws are still just perfectly timed so that the runner is either safer out by a by a foot and it's so perfect and it's just divinely inspired. And he makes the case that this is wrong and that baseball does need to correct itself.

He talks about basketball and the many rule changes that have been made in the last several decades of basketball just sort of to preserve what people think of as basketball because teams and players are always looking for an edge or some way they can use a loophole and that the league needs to act in order to preserve what people think of as that sport. And at the time he was writing this, and probably still the case, he was making the point that baseball

doesn't really have a centralized power to the extent that it used to and that it's difficult to act what with all of the powerful unions and club owners maybe not being as unified as they once were, there being more of them and many of them being corporations and all these obstacles to baseball changing. And he posits that there will have to be some sort of crisis for the game to adjust, that

some parties will have to relinquish their power in order to deal with this crisis, and that will make it easier to enact changes. We have not gotten to that crisis yet. I would say that I am still sort of a believer in a couple of – well, in at least one of his predictions, I think that hasn't come true yet. Before I had even read the essay and your idea was that we would make predictions for 2030, which I guess is even more difficult than what, than what he tried to do because we're projecting 16 years out. Yeah. Although on the other hand, we're doing it completely thoughtlessly without any effort. Right. With actual consistency, whereas he had some integrity.

Always harder when you have integrity. So I think I would be willing to predict that in 2030, strikeouts will not be at an all-time high. Do you think that's crazy? I mean, this is what— I do, I do. I do, I do. And I will say that I would predict that there would be efforts taken to reverse the trend. Yes.

And they will not do so and that in fact strikeouts will continue to go up see uh i think yeah so dan dan brooks actually writes about this in the baseball prospectus annual and he he writes wonderfully about it it's a great great essay and i don't want to steal it and I don't want to give it away or anything like that. It's really great. But, I mean, one thing that I think that you have to appreciate about it is that strikeouts are going up because teams realize it is an optimal strategy in a way that they didn't before. didn't before. And meanwhile, similarly, offenses realize that in this sort of weird paradoxical way that I have never really gotten my head around, it is not a suboptimal strategy to strike out as a hitter. It's this weird situation, right? And so no matter what you do to change the

you know, the sort of environment that allows strikeouts, it is not going to be less the case that teams are going to have an incentive to get as many strikeouts as they possibly can. And so the game will change however it needs to around the new set of rules, but it will always be moving consistently toward the optimal strategy. So I don't think you can necessarily stop. I'm now to the point where I don't think you can actually necessarily stop strikeouts from going up without changing the way that baseball looks dramatically. And that, in fact, many of the things that you might think of would actually increase strikeouts. So I will take the under on you. Whatever you are worth, I am taking the under. I'm short-selling Ben Lindbergh.

Well, let me ask you this then, I guess. 2013 was an all-time high in strikeout rate. 2012 was an all-time high. 2011 and 2010 and 2009, all the way back to 2007, each of those was an all-time high 2011 and 2010 and 2009 all the way back to 2007 uh each of those was an all-time high so it has been increasing uh it has not increased every year throughout baseball history but steadily increasing so if we're projecting we're projecting 16 years out and you do not foresee a reversal of this trend, where will the league strikeout rate be by then? 24. Per nine.

Yeah. That's not a percentage that is. No, I don't think it, I don't, I think that the league will strike out a batter per inning by then. Uh-huh. Hmm. Yeah, I don't know. That doesn't strike me as that doesn't strike me as absurd. And I don't think it would even I don't think it would even look all that different from what we have now.

Yeah, you might be right. I mean, that would have to be a. we have now yeah you you might be right i mean that would have to be a i mean already the the league does strike out uh a batter per inning after the sixth more or less right um and they certainly didn't 15 years ago and it's not like we think you know it's not like after the seventh inning stretch we all turn it off because it doesn't look like baseball anymore. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I think, I don't know, I think that at some point it will, at some point it will, I don't know whether it'll reverse, that the trend will always be towards more, but I feel like at some point there will be an adjustment and it will continue to rise from whatever level that it that it goes to after that adjustment. But I think I think I don't know.

I don't know whether it will be by then or not. But at some point at some point you're going to get to to a crisis level. Right. And we've talked about where that is. And neither of us thinks that we're there yet but if uh if strikeouts rise and rise and rise and maybe maybe defense is more optimal and better positioning and all those things and you just get not only less contact but but fewer hits on balls in play um at some point baseball would become pretty boring. And at that point, I would think that something would be done. You would think that.

I would. I look forward to everybody reading Dan's essay. It's really great. It's really good. I haven't read it yet. I am looking forward to it. All right. The game length, i don't know uh clearly there is a point at which game length would just break baseball right i mean the the longer and longer it is presumably the

the fewer people are willing to sit and watch it um so i don't i don't know whether yeah it partly though depends on uh maybe maybe it depends on why it's getting longer if it's getting longer because there are more commercials uh then arguably you don't need as many people to watch it right arguably you're getting more you're getting more revenue per game maybe now. Now, I don't know. For the league to continue to exist, I suppose, although it would become more of a... Yeah, I mean, attendance is going... You'd get less and less revenue, right? Because there'd be fewer people watching. So you'd have more ads and you'd be making less money from them yeah but i mean attendance is is you know

clear is is way way way beyond record levels at this point right compared to where it was you know 20 30 years ago and certainly 50 years ago when it was a faster game so um you know that this has not been an existential threat to the game it would have to be something I would think really crazy. And to me, the trend is not necessarily to the kind of consuming public turning away from things that are longer. I mean, if you look at the way that people watch TV now, where they binge watch shows for, you know, an entire day, because they just can't get enough Longmire in their lives. an entire day because they just can't get enough long mire in their lives. Um, uh, you know, that, that's, uh, people, people like to sit and do nothing. I mean, it's, it's also, um, with,

well, I don't know. I mean, basketball games are not significantly shorter. They're like two and a half hours a game. And, um, football games are longer than baseball games. People like football and not only do they like football, but they sit there and watch it three games in a row. So the type of people who watch sports... But there's so many fewer games and they mean so much more. And yet, baseball's really popular. None of these things are going to be less true. I mean, it's not as though we're trying to figure out a

way to stem the loss of popularity and in you know in the sport it's really successful yeah uh market market share wise it's i mean there are you know i mean, there were 150 million Americans. So there are many more Americans now who could potentially be watching baseball. Right. Clearly, the billionaires would rather have extra billions if they could, but they're getting billions. Like, this is a tremendously successful sport. They're all making insane amounts of money on their franchises because of, you know, how much more valuable they are than they used to be. I mean, look at,

I mean, you, people will argue that it's a bubble, the TV contract bubble, but you could also argue that TV contracts are insanely valuable right now for a reason. So I don't know. I mean, it just does not feel like this is a problem that needs to be solved at this point it might be but i mean i think if there's if there's any point that um baseball gets sped up uh it would be probably in response well i don't even know this would probably be small beans but i mean if if the josh beckett sort of strategy uh annoys players enough and becomes successful enough uh it will be kind of taken care of in either unwritten rules or written rules in response to the sort of gameplay aspect of it i have a hard time seeing a imminent change in in the way the sport is managed for time reasons

that would knock off more than two minutes a game. Yeah, I wonder. It'll be interesting to see what happens to game length with instant replay next season and whether that leads to any sort of significant increase and whether that increases the momentum behind changing things because they're it's not one of these like the strikeout rate problem is pretty tough to solve because as you say it makes sense for teams to pursue people who strike out a lot and strike out people a lot

so it's hard to curtail that. Whereas shortening the game, there are more approaches to it, at least. There are. Bill James lays out like six of them or something in his essay. Yeah, but I mean, the two main ways are to speed up the rate that players play and to cut commercials. And players don't want to speed up the way that they play. And it's their game. And they have a lot of power and they probably should have a lot of power. There's never really been an effective attempt to get players to speed up regularly.

And umpires haven't even attempted to enforce it in my lifetime. So you wouldn't think that that's going to change. And then the commercial aspect of it, I mean, that is never going to change. I mean, if they can get more money selling commercials, they will. I mean, the only argument that you could really see is that they would think that cutting one commercial would actually increase revenue somehow. And there are scenarios you could imagine that. And maybe that's where the nine minutes comes from, ultimately. But that doesn't seem to be a commonly held belief.

The other thing is that even if games are long and boring and we have short attention spans, we also have so many more ways to distract ourselves during games. more ways to distract ourselves during games. Like, you know, in a way that 15 years ago you couldn't. You can navigate away from the commercials when they happen. You can look at your phone while you're sitting in the park for three hours. You were not divorced from reality for three hours. And so probably to some degree, the consumer has a lot more patience with a three hour game now than they would have ten years ago

alright I mean this podcast just keeps getting longer and longer by 2030 we'll probably have gone back to 12 minute shows would you predict that that's nice alright so so then you are not a believer in are you a believer in

in his third prediction that the trend of using more and more pitchers will reverse itself of course not no i'm gonna just be completely negative about this whole topic. No, I mean, I think it seems clear. I don't know. I'm very hesitant to say things like it seems clear since he started his essay with some things are so obvious. Right. to imagine anything, it would actually be that we would start seeing, looking at guys like, you know, uh, Jose Fernandez and, and, uh, you know, all the young pitchers who come up and are great immediately. I would actually expect to see a lot younger average pitcher and, uh, throwing a lot fewer innings in their starts. I would imagine that the, uh, that the idea of a horse could,

um, I don't want to say it's going to go away because I don't think it will. I think we'll always have the Roy Halladay, the Justin Verlander, the guy who pitches into the eighth or the ninth. I think we'll quit treating every starting pitcher like he's supposed to be that though. Like there's only one way to be a starting pitcher and certain starting pitchers who have certain repertoires will be used more effectively in a short bursts starting role. And young pitchers who have more fragile arms and who they want to keep on certain innings limits throughout the year without giving them up for the postseason, we would see in shorter bursts. And, you know, pitchers who bounce back better might pitch differently than pitchers who need an extra day of rest.

And pitchers who have different repertoires would have different expectations put on them. And so I think that if anything, I don't think that I'm ready to predict that in 15 years we're going to have the all-reliever pitching staff or anything of the sort, or even like the Rockies tandem thing. I'm not ready to predict that, but I do think that we will have a much more varied model of a starting pitcher that will actually increase short outings and increase the number of relievers that are necessary. What else you got? So my predictions, I got three. Do you have any predictions? Yeah.

All right. So I predict that there will be no significant record broken in the next 15 years. Huh. No. And I mean, you can argue about what I mean by significant, but no famous record, no record that like, uh, you know, the, the, the 75th or 80th percentile fan is aware of, uh, single season or career will be broken in the next 15 years. Well, I guess that makes sense. You're not likely to see someone hit as many home runs as Barry Bonds. You're not likely to see a really long hitting streak. What else is famous?

Well, yeah, and nobody's really close to any at this point. And nobody's really been challenging any for a few, you know, for the last six or seven years on a single season basis. But more than anything, I tend to think that a lot of the 90s and early 2000s were a post-expansion thing. And by diluting the player pool, the best players have more extreme performances. And, you know, that why when when people go oh well i mean of course barry bonds was on steroids look how good his numbers are but you know greg maddox's numbers were basically just as good um from a pitching perspective and pedro's were basically just as good from a pitching perspective and um so i i've always thought that it's much more a matter of

uh the league growing um the way that it did. And unless there's imminent expansion in the next few years, I just don't think you're going to see any extreme performances in that way. I mean, nobody is pitching. Right now, for the last eight years, nine years, nobody has pitched anywhere close to the way that Maddox did or Randy Johnson did or Roger Clemens did or Pedro did. I mean, nothing remotely like those guys. And it's not really – it doesn't seem to be on the way or imminent in any way. The closest thing to Barry Bonds' performances is Mike Trout. But, I mean, the extreme performances that we're seeing right now,

they don't tend to be extreme like kind of on the most basic level. They're extreme for the age. It's like, oh, look how incredible on the most basic level, they're extreme for the, the age, you know, it's like, Oh, look how incredible he is for a 20 year old. Look how incredible he is for a 42 year old. Um, and, uh, but, but you don't have anybody whose numbers like stand up to even like what Jeff Bagwell's numbers were like, or what Frank Thomas's numbers were like or what um you know like uh I think Jim Tomey had like a 700 slugging percentage one year I mean they're just sort of was this period where insane things were happening and I don't I just don't think that's happening right now so that's one um number two is uh that there will actually be more injuries or roughly, roughly the same

number of injuries I've come to for the last 10 years we've been hearing had like the next thing in sabermetrics is managing injuries and, and, and like, oh, we're going to, you know, like this, this is like, this is going to be something that's going to get cracked somewhere along the line. But I've actually come to believe that injuries are an equilibrium and that anything you do to prevent injuries will just make players play more in a riskier way to believe that injuries happen at a uh kind of a risk management advised rate and uh they i mean you so that's sort of a like a kind of a weird that i'm just saying right now and i haven't really thought about it so don't hold me to that but i will say that if you watch baseball players right now they are playing so hard compared to what they used to.

I mean they do everything so much harder. Like these guys are so much stronger, faster. They're swinging harder with so much more torque. They slide so much harder. They run into things so much harder. And to some degree we don't notice this because there used to be kind of more, it seems like there used to be more player on player violence in the old days. But I mean, they're just injuring themselves just running. They're just running so hard that they injure

themselves. They cannot stop themselves from being hurt. Yeah. And there's this, there's this idea and I, I would call it a myth, but I, I guess I don't know for sure that it's a myth, but this, this idea that baseball players hurt themselves more because they're better conditioned. Like you often hear people say, oh, all these players get oblique strains because they're like wound up so tight or something like they they have low body fat like players back in the old days didn't have those muscles so they couldn't pull them that sort of weird idea um which i i don't think there's really any truth to that but uh it is true i guess that if you better conditioned, you are exerting more force when you do things and bodies are still just as breakable as they used to be. So that the collisions and impacts are more damaging. I was sort of toying with making that one of mine too, because it would be easy to say that,

Oh, in the next 15 years, there'll be this biomechanical revolution. And I think there will be too. Like I actually think that will happen. Right. And that, you know,

all the, all the dangerous windups and deliveries will be weeded out at an early age or players will be taught not to throw like that and you'll you won't see tommy john surgeries anymore and that sort of thing but uh i kind of wonder whether pitchers are just getting stronger and throwing harder and that that will kind of balance out any any gains there i guess maybe you'd see faster recovery times but i don't know whether the the injury rates will really decrease dramatically um so yeah i'm kind of with you on that all right and my last one i'm not sure about this one but um i could see managers um either being well

i could sort of see managers in a weird way becoming irrelevant because as like a weird secondary effect of replay, there's a way that I feel like managers' significance to the game gets defined by the image of them on the field yelling at the umpire. Like this is part of, this is like their cultural, uh, their, their sort of cultural, um, cachet kind of like, this is how they show how important they are. And it's not explicit and it's not necessary. And I don't even think it's something that we kind of realize we're, we're judging the managers on.

And yet I do think that like, there is this, um, you know, over the years of seeing these, you know, lions of the game go out and assert their authority on the field of play. That's what's significant probably is that it's on the field of play and that it's extended and that all the attention is on them. That it has created the idea of the manager as significant, you know, lion. And I actually, I mean, I'm not trying to argue that managers are not significant, but I could see this sort of chipping away at how much we look at them and how much we project onto them. them and how much we project onto them. And basically in 15 years, having them just be very kind of faceless in a way that they're not now. Like, I guess if I were to make this prediction more specific, I might say something like there will never be a manager who achieves the sort of

celebrity that Tony La Russa, Joe Torre, and Bobby Cox did upon retiring a couple years ago. Something like that. Or the flip side is because GMs have become the sort of stars of the team and the face of the team's management, I could actually see the manager GM, like manager, like Socha, for instance, who was was he had his hands in a lot of personnel decisions I could see a guy like Socha just making it explicit and being the GM as well as the manager and having and having this trend toward baseball men GM slash manager uh jointly held positions yeah Bobby Koch you know, which was a thing. Yeah, I could see that.

And I also think the stuff that I've written about sort of taking some of the tactics out of the manager's hand and shifting it towards the front office, which sort of seems to be happening, could also contribute to that. But yeah, I guess I'm with you there. I think, I hope that by 2030, we will not be having the DH argument anymore,

because I hope, because there will be a DH in both leagues. I think by the time we get to 2030, to be old enough to feel nostalgia for pitchers hitting, I think, well, I guess you could. whether National League fans growing up now have the same fondness for pitcher hitting that, say, someone who was born in 1960 and was like a teenager when the DH came in would have, because pitchers just can't hit now at all. And it's really, it's tiresome to watch them try, I think. I mean, they're much worse than they used to be. Much, much, much worse. That's not an irrelevant consideration. No, it's getting to the point where when I'm watching a National League game and I see a pitcher come up, it almost ruins it for me.

Like if there's a rally going on and, you know, you just see the eighth place hitter walked and then the pitcher comes up and it's almost an automatic out and it's not fun. And it feels almost like a formality at this point. And that trend has been ongoing for many decades now. It will probably continue. So by that point, pitchers will be even more inept at the plate than they are now relative to actual hitters. And the fact that the NL plays the AL throughout the season now,

and by the time 2030 comes along, you'll have to be 70 years old to remember a time before the DH. I think by that point, I hope it will, it will be gone. Um, I just, yeah, go ahead. The other day I was watching a football game and I, uh, I just had this image of like, what if both teams had to have a seven-year-old on the field at all times? Like that was one of the rules is like you had to have a seven-year-old on the field at all times like that was one of the rules is like you had to have or maybe just the offense because if you had one on each side then the seven-year-olds would just guard each other off in the corner but if if only like if the offense had to have a seven-year-old one of their 11 guys and I was like oh I'm gonna

tweet this and I was like what why would i that doesn't make any sense and i wouldn't have said anything about it except i realized that's what pitchers hitting is pretty much yeah uh and i i sympathize i like the idea of two-way players i would love for there to be two-way players who are actually good at at both things but it's just it's not really possible now um hey do you think we'll ever have another player who plays in the nfl and the major leagues at the same time how come that was such a thing for so long and then it just stopped being a thing uh i don't know is it because the money is so great now that there's just not as much. They were life-changing rich at the time. I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, I guess if competition is, the level of play is constantly increasing in both sports, then it becomes more and more difficult for someone to be good enough to do both. But, yeah. And I, I think by 2030, we will see some sort of computerized strike zone.

There will still be umpires. There always, I think have to be umpires. And that seems to be the, when people say, oh, robot umps, get rid of the umpires, there doesn't really seem to be a way to get rid of them. Even if you wanted to, you still sort of have to have a home plate umpire, even if he's not calling balls and strikes, just to like rule on plays at the plate and foul tips and various other things not even connected to balls and strikes um or you know to make sure that the

hitter is in the batter's box and the catcher is not or whatever all of those things and to monitor no you don't need any of those things ultimately you need them as a as an intermediate step you don't you couldn't skip to those things. But in 100 years, it's not hard to imagine in 100 years there's no on-field personnel. In 100 years, you could probably have a robot that can do anything that a human can do. So yes. But I think, I don't know. I don't think it will happen within the next few years, but I think if instant replay goes okay and people get used to that, and I do predict that we will have a new commissioner by 2030.

I'm kind of going out on a limb there, but I think that by that point we'll have been watching pitch effects, strike zone displays on our TVs for 20 years. And it would be surprising to me if there weren't at least some sort of aid, like the umpire's helmet has a light that flashes or he's holding a buzzer that goes off when there's a strike or something like that. He might still signal for balls and strikes, but it won't just be pure human judgment. I mean, umpires are already using pitch effects-based systems. They're being graded after every game by pitch effects-based systems, and it seems a little silly. I think you still need them there as sort of a fail safe because there are pitches that are just missed by the system every now and then but if you are grading umpires based on how closely they align with this system then at some point

i feel like you're probably just going to cut out the middleman or at least minimize his role and make the system the thing that rules on on those calls so um it it might be it might take longer than that i don't know but i think it's it's coming um i'm a little sad that you're not on my my get rid of the strike zone completely team. I don't see that happening by 2030. Maybe 2035. And I don't know. There are lots of other things. I mean, we're talking about big sweeping changes. I mean, by 2030, Mike Trout will probably have won an MVP award, I think.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on the A's ballpark will still be deliberating, getting closer to an answer. But I don't know. I think you'll – maybe you'll see more diversity in hiring in certain roles. I would think that by 2030, there will be a female general manager, at least. It would surprise me if there wasn't. I don't know whether you'll see a manager who doesn't have a playing background, but that's also a possibility.

But I don't know. Those are mine, I guess. There won't be any more draft pick compensation, maybe. We'll finally get rid of that. And no more 40-man rosters, or no more expanded September rosters. That seems reasonable. Yeah. Although, the union's got to love that, though.

And nobody's that opposed to it. Yeah, I don't know. People are tepidly opposed to it, but I would think the union would be dramatically in favor of it. You have a passion problem here. You have a passion imbalance. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, although, I don't know. Those don't lead to permanent jobs, really.

It's just 30 days of Major League meal money and salary, which I guess is significant. So, yeah, I don't know. You hear GMs sort of whining about it every year, but so far no one has done anything. Yeah, it's only $80,000 for a month's work for people who had otherwise been working for $8,000 a year. Right. Raul Abanez will have retired. Did you write these down or are you making these awesome jokes up as you go? Aren't they great?

All right. Is that it? Yeah. Our crystal balls are empty. Oh, so is our emails, by the way. Oh, yeah. Tomorrow's an email show. It's been a holiday week, so we haven't been getting the usual volume of emails.

So if you're listening to this in time to send us something by late Thursday night when we will record Friday's listener email show, please send us some emails at podcast at baseball prospectus.com. And we will be back for that.