Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 647: The Baseball Ethics Edition

Episode Date: April 1, 2015

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about whether we should talk about teams’ use of stats, whether injury research should be shared, how to break up with a team, and more.

Don't answer me, don't break the silence, don't let me win. Don't answer me, stay on your island, don't let me in. Run away and hide from everyone. From everyone And you change the things we've said and done Good morning and welcome to episode 647 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast for baseball practice. It's great to be here. It's been a while since we've had this format and I'm glad to be back with you. Thank you. Presented by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. Now we can screw around again with our intros.

We can relax. We are not doing team preview podcasts anymore. We can banter however we like. I don't even remember how to banter. I was just trying to think of things to banter about. I don't remember how it works. Got to get back into the swing of banter every day. You know what I was remembering recently? This didn't make the bracket and it probably shouldn't have. It's fairly weak. But there was a time where this counted as a recurring

thing. You asking for people to rate and review us on iTunes and and and as i recall me uh disapproving of the hard of the hard sell and finding it a little too attention grabby uh-huh i don't i don't remember you objecting to it you know maybe not i i know you object to it in spirit yeah maybe i didn't i'm not sure you were just thinking it every time yeah it felt like you were saying it. Okay, well, what else is there to banter about? Is there anything? Matt Albers made the White Sox? Yeah, that's not a good team for him

to get a save. No, I guess not. Although, David Robertson had some forearm issues, right? Not that I'm rooting for David Robertson to get hurt hurt he's one of my favorite pitchers but that would that would clear the path well except that they had they had a closer last year who was also still there true he would be next and then they have another guy who they

signed to a multi-year deal as a reliever this year so then presumably he would be next uh and he is currently listed ninth on the bullpen depth chart that i'm looking at uh-huh yeah well when you make the team on march 30th or 31st you're probably not first in line for saves so i was just i was just reading the ESPN, the magazine thing where they pulled all the players and or they pulled 117 players. And the most common answer for what would you do if you were commissioner for the day is shorten the season. 19% of them said shorten the season. Do you think that they realized that they would probably have to take a pay cut commensurate with the shortening of the season? I don't know that. Well, first of all, I don't know that I believe that.

You don't? I don't know. I mean, it's like that old. I don't think this applies perfectly. But you know how when that old thing about how they lie about how much revenue a new stadium is going to bring or the World Cup is going to bring to a community and they go, oh, it's going to bring in $2 billion because they've counted all $2 billion that are going to be spent at or on that stadium.

But of course, economists will just point out that that money is just being taken from other entertainment venues, that people have entertainment budgets. And that it's just they might spend $30 on a soccer ticket or a baseball ticket, but then they won't spend the same $30 on a movie ticket the same night or a new pornographers concert down at the Belly Up. You end up basically having no extra revenue. People more or less have the money they're going to spend and they're going to spend it. This is half a literal comparison and half an analogy. But I mean, most parks don't sell out most games, correct? You have a few that do. The Cubs are more or less

maxed out. And if you added 10 more games, they would sell 300,000 more tickets, and the Red Sox the same, and the Giants the same, although there might be some demand issue where they might be able to charge less for those. I don't know. But let's just assume that those three parks and maybe one or two others would get more money. But most parks, I feel like people go, hey, you want to see a game this year? And then they look at their calendars, and then they look at the schedule, and they go, how about this game? And they go to that game. And if that game didn't exist,

it's not like they would like notice the gaping vacuum in the universe and be like, well, I guess we can't watch a baseball game. They would just pick the game that is happening. And so I sort of feel like you could cut, I bet if you, like for instance, I bet if you cut 30% of games, this is a number I'm going to pick completely out of nowhere, but if you cut 30% of games, I would guess that baseball attendance would go down by 8%. Huh, okay, but there's also tv revenue except that yeah i mean that's like that is definitely money for sure but also do people really watch these people watch baseball games i mean like

a lot of these games really a lot of these games are on at prime time they're i don't know it just feels like it's... I don't quite know how to square this with the fact that people are willing to pay billions and billions of dollars to broadcast them. Just because you don't have cable and listen to baseball on the radio doesn't mean everyone does. Yeah, I don't know how it would affect TV contracts. It might affect... I mean, it would affect TV contracts. So they would lose money. I'm not saying that if you

cut 30% of the games, you wouldn't lose any revenue. I just don't think you would lose anywhere near 30% of revenue. And you'd have the same number of postseason games and so, and there would be some more scarcity

to the games. Maybe people would, uh, maybe people would watch. I mean, maybe, maybe not everybody is a fan who watches every game, but maybe people have sort of a, uh, uh, an amount of attention that they're capable of giving to a baseball season. And it varies from person to person. And for some people that's six games. Like that's how I would be with football is I have the attention for six games a year. If you cut the football season down to 13 games spread across 30 cities, there was a

total of 13 games among all the teams, I would still watch the exact same number of games. Some people it might be 50 and some people it might be 100. Of course for some of us it's just every day. It's part of your schedule and your routine. And if they showed 300 games you'd watch 300. But I'm saying that at this point, like once you get past, I don't know, maybe game 60 in a season, every game you add brings less than a full game's worth of revenue to you. And it's a declining return the higher you get. And that 162 is extremely, extremely high.

That is an extreme number of games. That is 500 hours that you have committed to baseball. And I'm not sure that people need that necessarily. No, I wouldn't object to fewer games necessarily the other thing and and i will i'll say another thing this was players who said that they would right yes so i actually think that they would take the pay cut for a shorter season because they're clearly they're clearly rich right i mean they have plenty of money to be rich forever most of these guys not everybody of course but they have plenty of money to be rich forever, most of these guys, not everybody of course, but they have plenty of money to be rich forever, a lot of them.

So it goes to that other old thing that economists talk about where people are less concerned with the amount of money they have and more concerned with how much money they have relative to their neighbor. I think that the reason you see Max Scherzer, for instance, or BJ Upton, I don't know why I picked those two, but free agents who are going to the highest bidder and really want to get paid is because they are part of a population of players that they compare themselves against. The salary they get is a prestige thing. They want to get more than other people. They want to know that they're valued because of the amount they get. more than other people. They want to know that they're valued because of the amount they get. But if we lived in a world where baseball simply wasn't as popular and therefore every contract was 20% less, again, it's not like they would notice or know that this was the case. They would still be happy. They would still play baseball. Every kid in America

would still be incentivized to try to become a baseball player. Certainly every kid in America would still be incentivized to try to become a baseball player. Certainly every kid in poorer countries would be as well. I don't think it would really change anything. And yeah, frankly, I think if you went in and told them, oh, you're going to get a 20% pay cut, they would respond and go, ah, I'm not. That's horrible. That's not fair. But I don't think it would affect their happiness levels at all. Yeah, I'm thinking of Rob Nyer mentioned on his podcast that he less revenue and a lower salary for Wilson. And suddenly he backtracked on that. But I don't know whether everyone feels that way. Or you're right.

Even if they don't like the idea of it, they might be okay with the reality of it. was that almost as many people, almost as many players thought that Alex Gordon should have tried to go home as not 41% to 46%. And maybe the more interesting part is that 13% hadn't seen the play. What? I didn't watch was 13% of the responses, which is kind of crazy. Even if you didn't watch Game 7...

Send me this poll, Ben. Even if you didn't watch Game 7, not to have seen that play somehow at some point in the last several months is pretty incredible because it's been written about a billion times. And it is interesting that 41 41 of players said yes because it feels feels like you know from looking at it and reading all the various analyses that it seems like it would have been fun if he had gone and and you can see why a fan would argue that he

could have gone or should have gone but that i i would have expected players to be more down on his chances of actually scoring, just from personal experience. Yeah, do you think this is just reflective of the attitude that you need to have or that is trained into players that it's sort of better to fail by action than to fail by inaction? it's sort of better to fail by action than to fail by inaction. I mean, I wonder if you can make the case that the third base coach... I think that's the opposite of the third base coach mentality, right? No, it is. That's what I'm saying. The third base coach is essentially a hired chaperone

that goes with you on a school trip. He is a baseball player's two-step authentication process to go home. We can't trust players. They would just run until they were tagged. I mean, I'm not saying that's true, but I wonder if that's the mentality, that you should basically always be going for it, and that a large part of what coaching is, is basically on the one hand, you are

training these guys to be aggressive and always want to go for it. And then you need to have some authority structure to control them. Almost like I'm thinking of, I'm like, I'm basically now thinking of full metal jacket, except in baseball clothes where you're kind of like training them to kill. And then, and then you have to have this elaborate authority structure above them in order to then restrain them from killing, except when you want them to kill. Yeah, well, it seems like every time someone does an analysis of third base coaches or sending players

or how often guys try to score on sack flies or that sort of thing. It turns out that they should send people more often. More often, yeah. Russell Carlton did something on that. Pete Palmer did something on that recently. Yeah. All right.

I guess we bantered, huh? This is how we used to banter. This was how it worked. 90% of players gave Bud Selig an a or a b and zero percent gave him an f which is interesting yeah i wonder if you'd ask them in 1995 well actually i don't wonder i think i think we could guess yeah it would have been a complete flip well most of these players never knew a different commissioner and made lots of money under bud selig okay so questions from other people all right sean says uh i brought this

up in the facebook group but thought it might be worth an email i am fascinated by the debate slash non-debate slash imaginary debate of sabermetrics versus scouting. Are we to the point at which sabermetrics slash analysis slash stats can and should be viewed in the same light as scouting? For the most part, we take it for granted that all teams are very good at scouting, and if there are differences, they are probably minor and indistinguishable, and or it's very difficult to figure out which teams are the best and worst. and or it's very difficult to figure out which teams are the best and worst. With sabermetrics, we seem to want to peg and rank teams as sabermetric or antisabermetric and figure out to what degree teams are or aren't sabermetrically inclined.

It seems to me we are approaching the point where all teams are very good at sabermetrics, and if there are differences, they are probably minor and indistinguishable, and or it's very difficult to figure out which teams are the minor and indistinguishable and or it's very difficult to figure out which teams are the best and worst i know you've touched on it before that the whole ranking of teams by how sabermetric they are is more about pr and public perception of teams and how vocal certain teams are about being sabermetrics but is it finally time to view all this the same way we view scouting if a team talked about how scouting friendly they were and that they implement scouting into all their decision making such comments would be ignored and would be pretty

absurd since scouting is such a part of the fabric of the game sorry i was on mute but what i was saying on mute was literally i'd like to hear your answer so oh well uh, I think we're probably getting to that point. It's not true that we never hear about teams scouting. Sometimes we hear about, you know, like when the Blue Jays hired a bunch of scouts and suddenly the Blue Jays had more scouts than anyone. We heard about that. That was not that they were using scouting, but that they were just investing in it more than other teams seemed to be. Or we'll hear about advanced scouting, which I don't know whether that's really sabermetrics or scouting.

It's kind of both. When the Dodgers invested all that money in international scouts, we heard about that. Yeah, so you do hear about that. Or, yeah, if a team gives up its advanced scouts and does it all from video or that sort of thing, you hear about that if someone deviates from the norm. You don't hear that they use scouting. You never hear someone in a front office say, yes, we scout. We incorporate scouting information into our evaluations.

we scout we incorporate scouting information into our evaluations but i mean scouting has a you know century plus long history so and and and it was the original way to evaluate players so naturally it's the default and stats and analysis you know sabermetric analysis is the latecomer relatively, even though it's not particularly new at this point. So I would guess that the longer we go, the less often we'll hear it. And the less likely you'll be to see a ranking of teams by, you know, sabermetric investment or number of analysts or whatever whatever criterion you use to to judge them i would guess that you would hear about that less i i don't know there may still be more variation in how teams use stats than than there is in how teams use scouting i would think that there probably still is more variation in that, but the variations will fade out eventually, and everyone will use it to more or less the same degree, I would think, just based on what your baseball operations budget is and how much you can afford. interesting if you're a writer to write about what a team is doing from the sabermetric side, the tech side, just because that's always changing. It's basically one approach is a

very conservative approach in that it is based on tradition, it is based on accumulated wisdom, is the scouting approach. It is a skill that has theoretically been kind of perfected over 100 years of baseball and therefore, it's much more about doing it well rather than doing it differently, I think, usually. And, I mean, that's why it's sort of seen as traditional and conservative, because it is sort of a traditional thing. And the other side, though, the sabermetric side, is defined specifically as being modern and new and ever-changing and ever-learning and ever-adapting and finding these little new places that you can go one day ahead of everybody else.

And so if you're writing about baseball and you're looking for examples of things changing or things being different, it's just natural that you're going to gravitate toward the ladder, right? You're more likely to find... Take the Pirates, for instance. The Pirates have an extremely good international scouting tradition, both in terms of investment and also the people on the ground. As I understand it, their Latin American scouting director or whatever that title is called is legendary and might be the giant in that particular field. But he's there every year. He's been there every year.

He's going to be there every year. And if you look at their scouting internationally this year compared to last year and the year before and the year before and the year before and the year before and the year before, it's basically the same story. It's a good story. It's a story of competence and it's a big part of their success, but it's basically the same story every year. Whereas if you look at what the Pirates are doing with their spreadsheets, it's going to be different every year.

There's going to be different every year. There's going to be changes every year. And so there's a publication bias, I guess, to focusing more on the stat head side of things for that reason, or the technology side more than anything, because that's really what we're talking about. It's mostly technology at this point. When you talk about what a team is doing, it's usually much less about who they've hired or even what their philosophy is, It's usually much less about who they've hired or even what their philosophy is and more about trying to figure out what technology and or new science they're leaning on, right? Yeah, which team bought the supercomputer. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, Eric in San Francisco.

Hi, Ben and Sam. I need some advice on how to break up with a team. I'm a lifelong Mets fan and I just don't want to support or care about them anymore. Collapses in 2007 and 2008, eight straight seasons out of the playoffs, incredibly disappointing stars, Alomar, Vaughn, Bay, and consistent underperformance were not enough to scare me away, but I'm finally fed up with ownership. The Madoff scandal was embarrassing, but the Castor gene discrimination lawsuit is sickening.

I don't want to root for a team owned by the Wilpons anymore. So how do I do it? It seems like you both have to give up your early life rooting interests. Is there anything you can suggest other than work in baseball full time? My disgust at ownership hasn't stopped me from turning a rueful eye towards spring training Matt Harvey updates, and I'm irrationally excited about David Wright's three spring home runs. How do I quit this team? Well, in my experience, it helps to have them win a World Series or a couple because it just lowers the stakes. As I've talked about, it's much harder to really care about a team, I think,

requires you to have extreme moments of disappointment more than it requires you to have extreme moments of joy. It's the heartbreak that keeps you caring because that's what you're trying to avoid. You're trying to avoid the pain. And I feel like that old saying about how, I don't know if this is an old saying, when I ran cross country, I remember somebody saying that the uphill is always much harder than the downhill is easy. And fandom is the opposite. The joy of winning is always much less than the pain of losing. And when you quit caring that much about losing because you've already won, then, I don't know, it's just hard to stay as focused, in my opinion.

Do you think that is – I remember you didn't quite feel that way because you were a Yankees fan during the whole four and five years run and it never got boring to you but yeah it did to me yeah I don't know if that would I mean that would suggest that that all Giants fans and Red Sox fans right now are they they care less than they used to which right which I uh it would suggest that some of them do. If there are 3 million fans, I would guess that a lot of them don't have the same relationship that I have or that Eric does with a team. So maybe this is only for a specific type of fan that this matters. Certainly if you're the casual fan, again, the guy who watches six

games a year like I am with football, it's the exact opposite. I'm far, far, far more likely to watch a 49ers game the year after they win a Super Bowl, if they did win a Super Bowl, than the year after they win four games. So it doesn't really work in that sense. But I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I have a very, A, maybe I'm unusual, and B, maybe I'm conflating that effect with the working in baseball, having it be your job effect. Anyway, I don't know that that answers the question this is way too specific for eric because neither of those is an option right you well yeah maybe the mets will make it so but he can't he can't make that happen so i wrote uh when i was covering the

angels i wrote about a guy who um was a blue jays fan and decided that the Blue Jays were terrible. He just could not deal with the Blue Jays anymore. And he had been a diehard fan, and he just couldn't take it. So he was going to find a new team, and he wanted help. And so I interviewed him, and he was going to think it over and get input, and fan bases could try to sway him. And in the end, as I recall, he went back to the Blue Jays.

And he was pretty devoted to the idea of switching teams, but ultimately it didn't work. I don't think you really can do it. Unless you... if you, well, he already lives in San Francisco is the thing. I was going to say if he moves and could just watch a different team, but he lives in San Francisco, so just go watch the Giants. I mean, he could certainly

be a fan of a new team. It's just that like, let's say you care about your childhood team. On a scale of 1 to 10, you care a 10 when you're, you know, a child child. Then as you're an adult, you still maintain that really strong bond. It's like maybe you're busy, but still you're like an 8 or a 9. I think that you could turn off the 8 or the 9. You could probably abandon that team. It would be easy. Just quit watching them. After a year, I think you'd quit caring and you'd just

be a classic bandwagon fan. You might show up when you want to, but I don't think you would miss them. However, you'll never replicate the eight or the nine again because it is a developmental thing, these relationships we have. You'll never love an adult the way that you love your parents because they were there when you were an infant and they took care of you and they did so much that was a developmental process. You can pick a new team and just start following them and you'll get up to like a three or four and that's all you have time in your life for anyway, so maybe that works. But I don't think you'll ever be able to match your original team. You know what you could do is have a kid and have the kid cheer for the other team. I actually think that you could get almost back up to an eight or

a nine. Maybe you could. Maybe you could align your passion with your child's exactly. If your child reached 10 again in his childhood, you might be able to, for those few years, have it be a 10 and you might reclaim your 10. So that's probably the best advice I have is have a child and have your child cheer for the local team and care with him or her. Okay. So that is a more doable remedy than having the Mets win the World Series. Eric can go have a child.

He can't do it by himself, necessarily. He needs someone else to be involved. And do we really want Mets fans to be procreating anyway? Do you think it's... If you think that the ownership of a team is bad, that they are discriminating against people or they are being a bad, I don't know, holder of the public trust or whatever? Are you obliged to stop following that team because you following the team helps the ownership somehow? Or are you hurting yourself even more by depriving yourself of baseball?

It doesn't say he doesn't care about baseball anymore. He just seems to feel bad about supporting the Mets because he doesn't like their owners. So is he morally obliged to stop supporting the Mets? Or is he just hurting himself? Is he just piling more hurts on himself like the Wilpons already have? The hard part is that you don't want to give money to a monster and so there's always if you're voting with your with your checkbook uh then by giving money you are technically you know you're casting a vote but i i don't you i

don't think that there's any reason that you can't root for monsters or teams that are run by bad people. To me, the fan's role is basically two things. One, you want the team to win, and you'll yell things that will help them win. The other is that you're keeping them honest. You criticize them. You're the guy who says the manager's an idiot, the pitching coach sucks, the ownership's too cheap, and that player's a choker.

And it's okay to hate aspects of your team. So much of being a fan is being critical and is being unhappy with them and is feeling like they are not as good of stewards as you deserve and as your community deserves. So I don't think that there's an imperative that you support everything they do or even think that they're good people. If they're winning by doing something that is wretchedly evil, then you can turn your back and leave them. But if they are simply wretchedly evil, then you can turn your back and leave them. But if they are simply wretchedly evil people who, because this world is not fair,

got a team instead of some good person getting a team, instead of a school teacher. School teachers should get teams. How come school teachers never get teams, man? I don't know. How come firefighters never get teams? Your wife can help us with the stoppers. I think you're on perfectly fine moral ground.

I don't think a Mets fan needs to quit following or cheering or rooting or hoping for the Mets because of this personally. Okay. So forget about the baby. You don't have to have one if you don't want you can keep watching the mets yeah or you could have a baby too yeah but i know you wouldn't recommend that no okay play index sure um so this is going to be kind of a live play index we've talked before about how it's odd that the shift, everybody thinks the shift is so effective

and is killing offense in baseball. And all these teams, like we see the numbers at the end of the year, how many runs they saved or how many hits they saved because the shift, and it seems like it's doing a lot. And then you look at Babbitt, and it's identical from previous years. It hasn't gone down. And we've wondered why that would be. And one of the hypotheses that we or I or you, I can't remember,

has offered is that many of the things that ballplayers do in the current era should lead to higher Babbitts, particularly because Babbitt correlates with high strikeout rates because you're swinging harder, hitting it harder, and sure, missing the ball a lot more, but having an approach that should lead to hard contact. And so this hypothesis is that BABF would be even higher, but shifts are keeping the equilibrium. And so I thought there's a simple enough way to quasi-test this. There are various situations where shifts are extremely uncommon, base out situations that is, where shifts are extremely uncommon. And so if this hypothesis had any

merit in those situations where the batters are constant, the pitchers are constant, everything is the same except there is no shift, BABIP should be up. And in situations where shifts are very common, BABIP should be down or steady or somewhere in between. And so what I've done is I've gone to the batting split finder. I have grouped all teams together, all Major League Baseball teams together, and I have sorted them by year, and I'm going to choose a split, a base split, either bases occupied split or a base out state split. We can choose with outs or without outs.

But with base runners where we think that shifts are least common and then we're going to see if indeed Babif is higher in those states. That seems simple, right? I mean, this is obviously not rigorous. If I were writing this, there might be seven more controls in place. But it seems kind of like an easy way to do a quick and dirty test, right? Sure, yeah. All right. So we have two options for choosing our splits.

One is that I wrote a piece about Ryan Howard two years ago and how his extremely good clutch slash RBI situation stats in his career are not actually a fluke. That if you look at what he does in situations with shifts, he's very poor. And without shifts, he's very good. And that many of the things we consider RBI situations

are no shifts. And I broke down whether he gets shifted or not in every state, in every base runner state, see whether teams did a full shift, modified shift, or no shift on him. So we could use that as a proxy, or since you think so much about shifting in last year,

particularly you thought so much about shifting for all hitters and not just Ryan Howard, I might just defer to you and say, pick a non-shifting base state. Well, what showed up as the least common shift situations for Howard? I mean, that seems that should be fine, right? Because he's a guy who gets shifted as much as anyone. I'd be happy going with the empirical information over what I would speculate. So what I found with Howard is that with nobody on base, he gets a full shift. With a runner on first, he gets a partial shift with none or one out and a full shift with two outs. With a runner on second, he gets a full shift.

With a runner on third, he gets a full shift. And in the other four, first and second, first and third, second and third, or bases loaded, he generally gets no shift except that with two outs and a runner on first and third, he gets a full shift. Okay. So, like, we could just look at basically first and second, second and third, and bases loaded because those were no shift. Do you want to just do those three? Yeah.

bases loaded because those were no shift. Do you want to just do those three? Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's anything else that has changed about bases loaded or that would make bases loaded a weird time. I guess it would be different from other times, maybe babbit-wise, but not relative to

itself, so it should be fine to use that. Alright, so I'll do first and second. I'm not going to worry about outs. I, so I'll do first and second. I'm not going to worry about outs. I'm just going to do first and second in all situations. And I'm sorting by year. All right.

So the first thing is that I have a Babbitt for 2014, but what are we going to compare it with? How do we compare? Are we going to compare with the league? Like, do we want to do relative to the league overall that year? Do we want to do relative to the previous years? Do we want to do relative to 1984 as a random year? How do you want to do it?

I guess we should use previous years, right? Because we don't... Well, I mean, depends on the question we want to answer. If we want to see whether the shift is actually having an impact on those situations, which maybe would be a good check just to see that we are

looking for shift-heavy situations, then we could compare to the league to see if there's a difference between our shift situations and non-shift situations. But that's a different question if we just want to see if there's a difference between our shift situations and non-shift situations but that's a different question if we just want to see whether if we just want to assume that that's the case and these are our non-shift situations or shift situations then we can just compare to previous years okay so uh let's see just to to bababbitt was lower in the 70s. I the 270s, once dipped into the 260s.

And so then from 94 on, it's been really fairly reliably around 300 since then. And it's 299 overall. So that's the overall BABIPS. So now I'm going to do this split. All right, so the hypothesis is that it should be higher? It should be higher, yeah, because this is the non-shift situation is that it should be higher should be higher yeah because this is the non-shift situation so it should be higher well there's some so there's a lot of fluctuation from year to 2013.

And it's about five points lower than the overall league Babbitt. It's exactly five points lower than the overall league Babbitt, which is actually a smaller gap than it looks like it usually is. I'm eyeballing things here, but it's either comparable with or slightly smaller gap than the overall lead Babbitt. So in this case, Babbitt is not unexpectedly high. It is more or less what we would have expected in all the years before ships were freaking out. Mm-hmm. All right. Now I'm going to do second and third.

So here we have, it's at 295, which is actually, again, lots of fluctuation because of things. But it's lower than it was in 2013, 2012, way lower than in 2008, 2007, 2006. Again, kind of the median for the era, maybe slightly lower than the median. Pretty close to the median. And again, four points lower than BABIP overall. And that's more or less right on the money. And now I'm going to do bases loaded. And again, I'm eyeballing this.

It's conceivable that if I really tried to make an article out of this and I just didn't care about truth, I could find enough here to make the case. However, it's definitely not jumping out at me. All right, so then bases loaded. 2014 was $299. Years before that, $300, $288, $292, $300, $296, $297, $302, $310. Again, it's like essentially the median. This one looks like it's maybe like the 60th percentile or so. But basically the same. It's basically the same and relative to the league's BABF overall, it also looks basically the same so uh that uh without digging in i would not want to quite rule out the hypothesis

but it is not good for the hypothesis it is not the hypothesis at all all right well so i guess we about that can stop saying that then i mean i need to say something yeah there is a there's a section in the new fielding bible volume four of the fielding bible that i mean the you know much of the book is about shifting and who should be shifted and who shifts the most and then there's this section that's like why doesn't the shift do anything um but it it of runs through that math of, you know, not every player is shifted. And the players who are shifted don't get shifted all the time. And they don't hit balls to the shift place in all the times that they're shifted. And so there is sort of ultimately you're left with this fairly small sample of balls that are taken away because of the shift or that even if one team could save 15 runs or something, that in this one situation doesn't have that huge an impact on the whole league-wide numbers, which is based on a much, much, much huger number of balls in play. And so it shows that you can do the math and that it should only

be like a point or two of BABIP or something like that. So I guess the answer is that there are a lot of balls in play. Even when everyone is striking out these days, there's still a lot of balls in play. And it takes a lot of change to make an appreciable difference in the overall numbers. Okay, we got another moral question or ethical question. I guess this is the baseball ethicist edition of the podcast. This one is from Russell. Last week, actually two weeks ago, there was a question about whether a team who had discovered the secret to ending all elbow injuries had a moral obligation to inform and share with the other 29 teams.

Let's turn that one on its head. Suppose that an independent researcher made the discovery. The person could either publish the results in some appropriate journal, where everyone would find out about it, or could shop his or her knowledge to all 30 teams and take the highest bid. Could a researcher be ethically-slash-morally justified by taking the latter approach? Even better, let's assume that freedom from elbow injuries is worth x wins, let's say two wins per year to throw a number on

it. Now let's suppose that the researcher found a foolproof, undetectable, uncopyable way for a team to clear two wins by adopting some weird strategic trick. Would that person be morally justified in shipping his or her services to the highest bidder? Or should that person simply post about it on their blog for all to see? So what do you think about the guys who catch a home run ball and it's like the player's first home run? I guess it's two separate things, but it's either the player's first home run or it's the player's 500th home run uh and then they're like uh the the clubhouse uh tendon or whatever goes out and goes hey i'll give you uh two tickets

to a spring training game for that baseball and the guy's like i think i'd like more than that yeah and then everybody pillories that guy if they find out about it or if the guy goes, yes, absolutely, you can have Barry Bonds' 756th home run for two hot dogs. Everybody writes articles about what a great guy that is. What do you think about that? Do you believe in shaming the guy who catches the ball and then wants fair compensation for it? Not really. I don't either. I think those articles would be very distasteful.

I like that guy. Do it. I mean, do it or don't care. I put those articles to be very distasteful. I like that guy. Do it. I mean, do it or don't. If you care to do it, then do it. And if you don't care to do it, you're not special. But you can do that too. So anyway, I guess it's a similar situation. What about?

Yeah, a guy has a thing that has value. Are we mad if he sells it to somebody with value? I mean, we've already established that elbow health is not a societal good, that it is not juvenile diabetes or whatever. It's simply a thing that has value virtually almost exclusively and entirely within the fake world of baseball in which winning is its own value system but has no actual apparent value to the world. So in that case, no, you are not covered by the hypocrites. There's pain and suffering. There's pain and suffering, but only within the context of being able to or not being able to play in and win at a sport that is essentially a giant illusion.

Right. Uh-huh. So you're not, I mean, when it does, when the pain and suffering goes into non-athletic territory, like head injury, I mean, that's a totally different thing. But here's my way of thinking about it. If your injury would not require a non-athlete to treat it, then it's not a real injury. It's only a sports injury. If my tendon snapped right now, they wouldn't fix it. It would hurt for a week, I think. My understanding is it would hurt for a week and then it would go away. Even if it hurt forever, I'm not sure they would fix it. They would just look at me and say, well, what do you... Yeah, life is pain. I don't know that my insurance would

cover a torn labrum. To me, that is not a societal good to prevent. It is only a baseball good. And if it is only a baseball good, then you are a rational economic actor in this economy and you can do whatever you want. And I would say you should. I would say that you would sell it to the highest bidder. I like the character of the fatalistic surgeon. When you consult with him he just just says yeah yeah that's too bad yeah imagine that was your dentist if you went into your dentist like my teeth really hurt and he's like yeah well it's gonna hurt worse when you die um how do you feel about the foul ball shaming i mean there are there are there are certainly there are certainly times when it's particularly egregious i

mean you know when you when you snatch the ball away from a couple of kids who are trying to catch it also that sort of thing not talking about that but like you have never caught a foul ball and you would be super excited if you caught a foul ball so So what if you were at a ballpark and you caught a foul ball and you were not with your family but some other person's family was nearby and a kid was making sad puppy eyes and you were crowing about your

foul ball and not handing it over? Is that a shame-worthy scenario? I wrote about this very early on in my BP tenure. I'm going to send you the link so you can refer to it if you want to. But my philosophy on this, as I explained it, is that as a grown-up, there are some ways of acquiring a baseball that are extremely important and memorable to you. If you catch a home run, for instance, that's awesome.

And you will get, on a scale of one to ten, you will get a ten of joy. And on the flip side, if a foul ball hits off somebody's hand, bounces off a chair, rolls down the aisle and hits your foot and you pick it up, you've done nothing. You are smart enough as an adult to know that you have done nothing impressive and that that is simply a baseball, like a generic baseball. Sure, a Major League Baseball, a game-use baseball, but you did not catch that ball. And so for that, you might get a three. And if a ball, if the first baseman's running

off the field and tosses the ball to you, uh, and even if you catch it from four feet away, you're not going to like, uh, hold it up and say, look at me, I'm a honorary jock. That's like a one. That's just, again, just a baseball. So, uh, as I then further explained though, to a kid, So as I then further explain, though, to a kid, all of them are nines. Every single one is a nine. They're only not a ten because kids have short attention spans, and kids are incapable of feeling a ten. Like they don't know that a ten exists.

That's why we don't let them get married or drink alcohol because they can't appreciate the joy of a ten yet. But they're all nines. That's the only reason why we don't let them drink. They won't fully enjoy it. They won't appreciate it. Right. They don't know. Right.

You think those kids are getting imperial stouts? No. They're probably not even all untapped. They don't know how to do it. So anyway, so those kids, in fact, not only, so all of these situations are nine. And in fact, it's so far that even handing a kid a baseball that you caught or picked up or had someone toss to you is a nine to the kid. Kids are just a constant nine. They're a nine or a two.

Everything in life is a nine or a two. And you're providing them a nine at almost no expense to you. So that's a long way of saying that if you catch a home run you keep it no obligation whatsoever to give up a home run that you catch if you catch a foul ball you get to keep it if it's your first one if it's more than your first one if you have more than one it's your discretion i probably lean toward not keeping it but i understand if you caught a ball that's pretty impressive particularly if you've caught more than one, it's your discretion. I probably lean toward not keeping it. But I understand if you caught a ball, that's pretty impressive, particularly if you caught it barehanded,

by the way. If it's a home run you pick up, depends on whether it's the home team, depends on whether it's your decent player. I lean toward give it away. I think I would give it away. But I understand a home run is a little bit different. I wouldn't shame a person who picked up a home run and kept it. Every other situation, you give it away immediately. Those are good rules to live by. I will post this link in

the Facebook group if anyone wants to see the full accounting. All right. That's all. I got to go. I got to go to the airport. Okay. We are done. You can join. I got to go. I got to go to the airport. Okay. So we are done. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. Rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. Sam is objecting to this inside as I say it.

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