Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 676: Questions You Asked Us to Answer

Episode Date: May 13, 2015

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about ace vs. ace matchups, videos they wish they could watch, high-strikeout starts, and more.

Everything writes itself in the end, and this sure ain't no different. Everything writes itself in the end, and this sure ain't no different. Everything writes itself in the end, everything writes itself in the end. Good morning and welcome to episode 676 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Bentley Berg of Grantland, joined by Sneaky Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. From yesterday. Callback.

Yeah. Hey, I want to address two things on that episode. We got into a lot in that episode. One thing is that I besmirched Branch Rickey, Branch Rickey's name. I said that he was, what did I say? He was generally immoral on all but the big things. That was a very quick sentence that doesn't really capture the nuance. I was only just pointing, generally I'm totally fascinated by the fact that Branch Rickey is responsible

both for the greatest act in baseball history from an executive perspective and also the greatest cheater ever. Basically, half of his strategy was either cheating or borderline cheating, I guess, or suppressing the

earning capabilities of young and unsigned players. There's just this thread throughout his career of him doing things that are close to or are cheating. I'm sure he was great in general. Like I'm sure that everything about him was great and that he was immoral only in the fake world of baseball, which has no morality except which we assigned to it.

So love Branch Rickey. This came up because a person was considering naming his child after Branch Rickey and had second thoughts. Do not have second thoughts. Name all of your children after Branch Rickey. Retroactively name your children after Branch Rickey. Dad if you're listening, retroactively name me me branch ricky that would be fine with me branch ricky great guy also big old cheater okay uh all right so that's one thing um the other

thing is it was the 1987 ozzy smith oh okay right so that makes a difference because that is pre modern baseball by your play index parameters it is uh it is pre-modern baseball by your play index parameters. It is. It is pre-modern. So Ben is referring to a question that has also been asked of us, which is, is the 1988 Ozzie Smith his first card in the modern era or his last card in the pre-modern era? Because 1988 is when I consider the modern era. And it's a tough thing to answer. My gut says that 88 is the I consider the modern era. And it's a tough thing to answer. My gut says

that 88 is the start of the modern era because that's the year that I went from getting a few packs here and there to the year that I had probably 3,000 or 4,000 cards and had all of them. And so that's when I started collecting. So I want to say that's the start of the modern era. However, as was pointed out in the question, the stats on a baseball card lag for a season and the cards come out before the season has begun. So if the modern era started in 88 and the Ozzie Smith 88 tops came out before the season started and reflects only what happened through 87, you could make the very strong case that that is pre-modern era. And I'm going to accept that and say that the modern era starts in baseball cards in 89, primarily because I think upper deck is the dividing line between pre-modern baseball cards and post-modern,

or I guess modern baseball cards. Post-modern baseball cards probably started in about 96, 97, I would say, Modern baseball cards probably started in about 96, 97, I would say, when the parallels and inserts and subsets and tiny cards and cards with gold shavings and cards that came with slivers from game used bats and cards that had computer codes embedded in them took over. And so there was really only an eight-year modern era. From 89 to somewhere between 95 and 96 is the modern era of baseball cards. Okay. All right.

I'm disappointed that you rehabilitated Branch Rickey because the listener who emailed us about that, Tim, wanted us to name his son. He said, if I can distract you from imagining What baseball would be like if it was played on Horses and unicycles would you please Name my son Well I have Actually no I'm going to name your son Curry Favor

Right He wants to name it after a Real baseball figure though And Curry Favor is a fictional one sadly True How about Vec Vec is his name A real baseball figure, though. And Curry Favor is a fictional one, sadly. True. How about Vek? Vek? Vek is a name?

Vek McMahon. First name? Yeah, I like that. But would you spell it like Vek? I mean, Vek is a hard thing to spell. It's not intuitive. Right. Everyone would call him Vek. Would you go Vek, V-E-C-K, just like that? Like the sort of more sensible way of spelling the sounds? I think I would.

I probably don't want to saddle the kid with a name that he has to tell everyone how to pronounce for his whole life. Yeah, all right. Vek, I like it. I do too, actually. Okay, Tim. Send us a picture of your son Vec's birth certificate when the time comes. We got also a couple other interesting responses to our show yesterday, which was largely about cheating. We got this one from Jared, and he says,

I just listened to the cheating show and thought you'd get a kick out of the fact that two of your listeners are federal attorneys specializing in wiretaps and other electronic surveillance, primarily in connection with use by federal law enforcement, but also sometimes prosecution of wiretap act violations. Worlds colliding. Bugging a clubhouse would, in most circumstances, be illegal per federal law, presuming there is some basis for federal jurisdiction. And in each state, one party consent, federal and some states, doesn't help if the recording party is not present. Alas, there are of course a bunch of it depends scenarios. If the home team ball boy is wearing a wire and the opposing team chooses to talk in his presence, that would be kosher federally and in states with one-party consent laws.

That would be kosher federally and in states with one-party consent laws. It gets hazy and fact-dependent if there are notices posted in the clubhouse that warn visitors that they may be subject to recording. That would defeat the purpose. Although no one ever looks at notices published in clubhouses, right? Right. Yeah. Could put it high on the ceiling somewhere. Also, if the recording using standard technology occurs from an adjacent room or hallway and the visitors are talking so loud, bonus if there are large grates, open doors, etc., that their subjective expectation of privacy is not objectively reasonable. In those two scenarios, it may even be okay in two-party consent states.

No clue what happens if the Blue Jays are the perpetrators, but I'm guessing they may benefit from some prosecutorial discretion. So thank you, Jared. There's a listener who does everything that we ever end up talking about. And Emily asked us a question also about that. She says you were discussing in your podcast today the difficulty of punishing front offices, specifically with offenses like bugging the visiting clubhouse would a possible solution be taking home games away from the offending team you could remove one series from each of the division opponents and allow the other team to have those as home games that would provide financial incentive for the owner slash front office to discourage any cheating and would carry a slight competitive

disadvantage by taking away the home field advantage for those games while not necessarily punishing the players. It would benefit all of the division rivals equally as opposed to forfeiting or canceling any wins. It is also a solution that could be applied the following season in the case of a long investigation. Would something like this be too harsh a punishment for recording the other teams? No. Yeah, I think it's a good solution

Me too Emily says she has a 4 plus hour commute That she listens to us during That's a long commute I will have that commute this summer But it is a very long commute I hope you enjoy your job, Emily You would have to, to do that

By the way, Sean Rosales and I came up with a few more punishments. Some of these are mine and some of these are his. No sunglasses for outfielders during day games. No hats. Shoes, but no shoelaces. Everyone has to use the

same bat. What if it breaks? Well, you could have another one, but you have to use the same one, same size. Okay. Bubble gum replaced by raw radishes. Fence removed from the dugout. Yeah. Shower water cuts out right when they put shampoo in their hair. And no dumb and dumber on team bus.

The ultimate punishment. Yeah. Oh, also, a punished team has to use opponent's base coaches. Okay, those are creative. I like them. Joseph suggested that you would remove a roster spot, like on the 40-man. If a team bugs the visitor's clubhouse,

they lose two roster spots on the 40 man for the next two years. That's a good one. Yeah, I like that one. Okay, let's take this one from Russ from Massapequa. When my brother Adam and I found out that Michael Pineda had 16 strikeouts through seven innings, we had to get to a TV because this was huge. We paused for a second and realized that in the past, 16 strikeouts would be awesome, but it wasn't as rare as it is now.

Is it just us, or are these 15-plus strikeout games not as common as they used to be? Thinking further, we don't see seasons of 300 strikeouts like we did 15 years ago, but strikeouts in the game are way up. What gives? Is it just that we had once-in-a-generation players like Pedro, Johnsonson and clemens

back in the 90s and early 2000s so the lurking variable there is innings right so we see fewer 300 strikeout seasons because we see fewer 300 inning seasons and 250 inning seasons and 200 inning seasons so guys don't rack up as many strikeouts Even though they're striking out guys At a higher rate Yeah, that is true, that is the obvious thing And I would say that's probably The best explanation for why there are not more

17 strikeout games However, I think we might have talked about this a long time ago When Hugh Darvish In 2013 had 11.9 strikeouts per 9, which was the most by a pitcher since 2003, and it hasn't been topped since. And so it is weird that even though strikeouts are up generally, and even though strikeouts, these individual pitchers should be striking out more batters per nine if they're throwing

fewer innings, they should be able to muscle ups per nine if they're throwing fewer innings. They should be able to muscle up a little bit more because of that freedom. Yet, if you look at the best strikeout per nine seasons ever, 2001, 99, 98, 2000, 95, 97, 98, 89, 97, 01, 95, 04, 02, 07, 93, all the way down to Clayton Kershaw last year to find another person who's basically in the top 25 all time. So that is really weird, right? Yes, yeah, I think we did talk about that. It is weird. Even though guys don't pitch complete games often anymore, you'd still think that strikeouts are up so much that you would think that you would get a guy who would get to that level consistently, and that doesn't seem to happen.

rate has not it's been it's kind of you know lifted all pitchers but it hasn't really pushed the extremes for strikeout totals in a game which yeah is is odd what else could it be other than guys just getting replaced earlier and that cutting down on the potential number of high strikeout starts is there anything else i well i i mean nobody most of the things I just named, those totals, most of them were Pedro and Randy Johnson. Not all of them, but an awful lot of them. And there isn't really anybody who's at the level of those two or Clemens or, for that matter, Maddox as an overall pitcher. Kershaw is very close, but I would say below them still and really fairly recently at that level. I don't think before last year you would have put him as close to that level. So there is just something about that era where, as we know, the offensive performances were way out of line with everything

else. But the individual pitching performances at the highest tier of pitchers was also way out of line with anything else. And so probably it's striking that nobody has matched Pedro and Randy Johnson's totals, but it's not all that striking that nobody has matched Pedro and Randy Johnson. Nobody's as good as Pedro and Randy Johnson by any measure is what I would say. I meant to mention this a couple weeks ago, but does it sort of surprise you that Randy Johnson Randy Johnson struck out 372 batters in a season, which is ridiculous, right? I don't think anybody's within 60 of that in the last 25 years or whatever.

But he came within 11 strikeouts of the all-time strikeout record, which seems just unthinkable in this day and age. He probably threw 100 fewer innings than Nolan Ryan did that year. I haven't looked it up, but he probably did. And the crazy thing is that, to me, the crazy thing is that he didn't go for the record. Like, he pitched game 157 for Arizona, and so he could have pitched game 162. And so this was in the year 2001. It was the year they won the World Series. They obviously were looking at the playoffs. They did the right thing, right? Probably because they I assume held him for game one of the series and all that. But this is a record that is

unthinkable that it will be broken ever. And it's not a no-name record. It's a pretty big record, right? It's one of the 10 to 12 biggest records, single-season records out there. Like maybe if you take away wins because nobody's beating Jack Chesbrough anytime soon or whatever, I mean it's like you've got home runs. We all know that one. We all know stolen bases. 400 stands in for the record. 400 is its own record. I guess maybe triple crown

is too and everybody knows 191 and i think a lot of people know 67 doubles and 62 saves although it's not as big a deal as you know 46 was when righetti had it or whatever 57 was when thigpen had it but anyway saves maybe maybe Maybe I'd give you saves. But then it's strikeouts. And I'm kind of, I think they did the right thing, I guess. But I'm kind of surprised that they didn't figure out a way to get him a shot at that record. Yeah, I don't remember whether it was a big deal at the time. They pulled him after 86 pitches in his last start too. And so

if they'd wanted, I mean, he was going 120, 130 every game. So they could have gotten him an extra 40 pitches then maybe he strikes out four or five more. And then he only needs like six, you get him three innings of relief at some point and he's got the record. Yeah. I mean, he and schilling were pitching on short rest all the time in that postseason right and he was old and uh and their third starter was what brian anderson or something on that team it was a it was a big gap so i mean those guys really carried them through the playoffs so yeah it was probably the smart thing to do for the team i think one one reason I would have loved it too, if they had gotten him that record and then immediately pulled him, is that that's one of the great records existent because Nolan

Ryan broke it by one. And it's crazy to think that this record that is very rarely challenged and that is such a big number would get toppled by one. And so if it had got toppled by one again, it just would have been awesome to have Koufax and then Ryan and then Johnson each break it, you know, better each other by one would be just perfect. Right.

And that would be a perfect, perfect execution of a record breaking. Okay. From Francis in the Bronx. In the past few days, I've unsuccessfully searched for two of my favorite baseball Commercials ever the first featured A young Dominican boy named Samuel

Who insisted on being called Pedro for obvious reasons The second a Pizza Hut ad with Ken Griffey Jr. showed Jr. explaining that a Hitter must think up the middle Then taking a full swing at a flying pizza Box I have an answer Ben I don't even Want to wait for you to finish this question I didn't have an answer for flying pizza box I have an answer Ben I don't even want to wait for you to finish this question

I didn't have an answer for days I didn't have an answer And now I have it Go ahead read it Alas as far as I can tell The internet has failed baseball fans Because neither video exists What missing footage do you think you could

Do you wish you could find Would it be historical Like Roos called shot Pop culture related Film of the Copacabana incident Or something else i'll let you go first because my answer is awesome well footage of roost called shot exists right there was some footage of that that surfaced i guess it wasn't really conclusive because probably

no footage could be complete conclusive but that exists probably the most interesting baseball only on-field one would be Merkel's Boner, right? And that was well over 100 years ago, and yet I have read so many things about it, so many differing accounts, contradictory accounts that could be settled so easily with one little bit of footage of 10 seconds of that game. And that's one of the biggest baseball unknowns and controversies ever so the fact that everyone involved is dead and everyone who was watching is dead sort of sort of takes away from it a little bit maybe you wouldn't get any personal reactions from the parties involved but that's still to this day one of the biggest baseball

debates and it could be settled very easily with some footage and it can never be settled without that footage so that's that's one this is not my answer but i do i it does bother me that we only have one angle of randy johnson hitting the bird i feel like if it was a professional baseball game played in front of people, there has to be another camera. It's too bad, yeah. If that happened today, you'd get like the slow motion cameras. I don't know whether,

wonder whether they would show that on the air. Probably not. They would, of course they would. Why wouldn't they? You think they would? They'd show slow motion bird explosion? They show the, they show fast bird explosion with no warning or like attempt

at limiting themselves at all i don't you can't see any detail though it's just a poof of feathers uh-huh yeah i i think the detail can be pretty imagined anyway my answer is this and this will not be anybody else's answer but uh around 1988 ish 89 90 maybe 91 even will clark went to houston and will clark killed in houston like that he was from louisiana so that was basically his hometown as far as baseball goes and his dad would always be in the stand and he would just crush everything in Houston. And so one game, I believe, and the first part of this I'm going to guess, but the second part I can confirm. I believe he hit a double early in the game, but not a home run.

Maybe he didn't. Maybe he hit a home run. Maybe he didn't. Maybe this was his first bat of the game. I can't remember. But anyway, the batting question, he hit a double off the wall. And presumably he thought that it was gone. The Astrodome was, of course, very difficult to hit balls out of, so presumably he was upset because he thought he had a home run, and instead it was only a double.

Or maybe he was something else. This is an irrational thing that he did. But he gets to second base with his double, and the camera is on him him as it is when a guy coasts into second and he turns and he like sort of looks off into the distance maybe to the stands maybe to where his dad was maybe somewhere and with both hands just puts up two middle fingers

and the camera is like on him it's just sort of holding on him while he flips a pair of birds because he got a double and he's got that noosh look. He's like mad as heck because he doubled or whatever. And he's flipping off the camera. And they just showed him.

And it was like this incredible thing for me to watch as a kid. And then never, didn't think about it for 20 years. And now I desperately want to see footage because it can't be true. It can't be real, right? There's no reason. And I've looked, I've brought this up in the Covey Chronicles before, and I've thought about poking around and seeing if I could find it. I've thought about hunting down Hank Greenwald,

who was the announcer at the time, although he would have been the radio announcer, but asking if he remembers or figuring out if there's any way that I could report this out and get evidence that I'm not insane because it seems so irrational. I do have one friend who I mentioned this to and he goes, yeah, sure, I remember that. And it's good to have some corroboration. I know that memories, man, you can put anything in a guy's memory. And this was also 20, 25 years after it happened. But he did, right? He did sort of corroborate it. And so I really want to see video of Will Clark, for no apparent reason, standing on a baseball field, flipping off a TV camera.

All right. Yeah. Well, we've got... That's what he was expecting, I'm sure. We've got wiretappers listening to the show. Maybe we have a source inside the MLB network who can dig into their computers and watch a Giants game watch every Will Clark Giants game from the late 80s just to see you wouldn't need

to it's in the Astrodome and he hit a double and it was I would say it was within the first five innings I think although I wouldn't swear to that but you know there's probably seven games max. I'd settle for just being able to watch any game from before 2012. That would be nice. It's like games that we were watching a few years ago are now just lost to history or lost to us. Because every year MLB TV adds a new year and takes away an old year. I don't know why. I don't know whether it's because of some sort of bandwidth or storage issue or whether they're prepping for some kind of subscription service in the future.

It seems like a cruel thing to do to us. I mean, we were MLB TV subscribers in 2011, and we can't access the games that we subscribe to then. And it would be nice to be able to do that. So you'd only have to look at seven games, seven games in which he doubled in the Astrodome between 88 and 91, which I'm very confident that it's in those. My best guess is that it would either be September 16th when he hit a ground rule double and it cost him an RBI. He might have been mad that he lost an RBI because it was a ground rule double. And it's also possible that it was June 27th of 1989 because he hit two doubles.

And I vaguely think that it was because he had lost two home runs or something like that, or he was just tired of hitting doubles. So that's a possibility as well. those would be my two best guesses what you need is you know not that long ago someone died and they went into the person's apartment and just found that it was full of vhs tapes and the person had been obsessively recording like every news broadcast for the past few decades or something and just had every every news broadcast on a vhs tape you need that person for the giants you need a giants fan who's been recording every game for the past 30 years maybe that person is out there probably not listening to the podcast but if you know that person let that person know yeah how much would you pay for access to the entire televised archives

of major league baseball whatever whatever they have saved there on mlb network just on their database how much would you pay to access that like at any time as the editor of baseball prospectus you're asking me this or as a baseball fan you're asking me this, or as a baseball fan, you're asking me this? As you, as someone who would use it for articles all the time. How long does my subscription last? Well, let's say it's yearly. I probably would pay $80. That's all?

I mean, just for me, not for the whole company. Just for you, yeah. Yeah, I'd probably pay $80. I'd pay more than that. I don't know why, but I'm sure there would be opportunities to use that for something. All right, Playindex? I have one that I worked out, and I don't have any backstory for it. This will be a classic, like the original Playindex, where it was like, this is how you use Playindex, right? All right, so this is how you use Play Index, right? All right.

So this is a simple one. I just wanted to find out which team in modern history, modern history, 88 onward, has had the most players with a war in the positives. So who has had the most contributing baseball players in their team? And I forget. I think that this occurred to me because I was looking at the Blue Jays this year and I think they have two pitchers who are above replacement level at the moment and they have many more hitters than that who are so

they're doing okay, I think. I don't actually know how they're doing. How are the Blue Jays doing these days? I think okay is an okay description. So then I wondered, well, I wanted to know what's the fewest and what's the most that any team has ever had in a season.

And so the answer is easy. So I went to Playindex I looked for season wars over 0.1 or higher and then looked to see I searched by teams with this,

sorted by how many of the players of this description they had. I did that for hitters, and I did that for pitchers. And if you are a pitcher, you don't count if you are over replacement as a hitter. You cannot be double counted. So get that out of here. All right, so I put those in a spreadsheet, and then I did VLOOKUP and put them next to each other, and then I summed them, and then I had the answer.

So just out of curiosity, Ben, how many do you think the highest team has, and how many do you think the lowest team has? And it could be one plate appearance or one inning, but it has to be at least.1 more or higher. So how many of those players does the best team have and how many players does the worst team have? 24. 24 is the most? Yeah. And what is the least? 13. All right. You are very, very good on the least. The least is actually, the fewest,

is actually the 1991 Astros who had 15 players that were above replacement level. Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Ken Caminiti, Casey Kendall, Steve Finley, Luis Gonzalez, Carl Nichols, Ken Oberkveld, Javier Ortiz, Gerald Young, and then five pitchers who I don't have the names in front of me. So they have 15. That is very, very low. Obviously, it's the lowest. There are already 22 major league teams this year that have that many or more already. The lowest in baseball this year is the Braves with 11. And it's only, you know, May 12. So, you know, so sure, some of those guys could drop below replacement. But basically, they're all going to blow past the Astros. The Astros that year won 67 games, so they were a bad team, although they weren't any sort of historically bad team or anything like that.

The next is the Reds of 2004, who had 16, and I'm going to see how they did as a team. I assume poorly, but the Reds of 2004, they won 76 games. So despite having, I don't know, maybe you would say this was an extremely top-heavy team because they only, they had the second lowest distribution of positive wars in modern baseball history, and yet they managed to almost finish 500. And that's kind of a miracle when you think about it. That was a very bad pitching team. I don't know how they won any games. That was a very, very bad pitching team. But every player in their lineup had an OPS plus of 97 or higher, basically.

Yeah, in fact, every member of their lineup had an OPS plus of 97 or higher. So they basically had eight regulars who were all really pretty good. They didn't have a good bench but they didn't really need a good bench and then their pitching was a disaster all right uh so that's the lowest the most is much higher than you said the most is 34 the cleveland indians of 2003 had 34 the a's in 2001 had 33 they weren't even good that year, were they? Which year? 2011.

2011 A's, that was the year before they got good, wasn't it? I think it was two years. Was it two years before they got good? It was at least one year before they got good. Yeah, they were 74 and 88 that year. It was the next year that they got good. So the next year they had 32, which puts them the fourth all-time, modern all-time on this list. And in fact, if you look at it, this seems

to be, I believe this to be the case. I haven't charted it or anything like that, but it seems to be that more of the teams at the top are very recent. So like 34 was the record, right? 33 was the next best, only two teams at 33. And then 32, only like six teams at 32. And three of them came in 2014. So like there's only one team, even though half of my sample is more or less is before 2000, there's only three teams in the top, like, 30, 40. There's only, like, three teams in the top 40 from before 2000, which is kind of interesting. There seems to be much more balanced rosters, or I guess more teams.

It's just more players being used, right? Because bullpens. I bet if you just looked at the raw number of players per team per year, it would be up. Oh, raw number of players that are even rostered for any portion of time. I wonder. Yeah, maybe. That could be true. Probably true.

I don't know that it's necessarily because of bullpens, though. I could see it being the case for strategic reasons or something, but I wouldn't, maybe it's the bullpens. It's good questions. That's, I have to think about that. So anyway, the 2003 Indians had 19 hitters that cleared this mark. I believe that that is also the highest of any team. Josh Bard, Casey Blake, Milton Bradley, Ben Broussard, Ellis Burks, Coco Crisp, Alex Escobar, Jody Garrett, Travis Hafner, Tim Laker, Greg LaRocca, Matt Lawton, and someone Magruder, Victor Martinez, Johnny Peralta, Angel Santos, Shane Spencer, Omar Vizquel, Ryan Ludwig, Matt Lawton also. So 19 plus positive contributing hitters on that team.

19. It's an awful lot. So that's it. That's an awful lot. So that's it. That's the answer. I guess it makes sense that the A's would be up there with all the platooning and the multi-position guys and mixing and matching. Yeah, it definitely makes sense that the A's would be up there.

Although you would think that you wouldn't pick, oh, want to hear something really funny, man? This is awesome. The 2003 Indians went 68 and 94. Wow. How did that happen? And they barely underperformed Pythagorean record, so it's not even like that.

So let's see. So who were their worst players? They must have had some really anchors dragging them down. I don't think that it's about their very worst players. I think that it's that nobody was that good. Now, I might be wrong about that because Milton Bradley was pretty good. Casey Blake was pretty good. Jody Garrett wasn't bad.

But the positive wars, I'm going to read their hitters who had positive wars. Just not their names anymore, but what their war was. 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.5, 0.6, 0.6, 0.6, 0.6, 0.8, 0.81. And then you've got basically five guys who are even over one and only three guys who are over average. So I just think that they were mediocre all the way around. For their pitchers, 0.1, 0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.4, 0.4, 0.4, 0.5, 0.5, 0.7, 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2, 3.3, and 2.3 and 3.7. So they had Sabathia and Milton Bradley and a couple of guys who were averaging and a whole bunch of guys who were just barely above replacement level, I guess,

is how that happened. They didn't really have any disasters. Kareem Garcia was at negative.6 war, but they didn't really have that guy who was Two or three wins below On here. Kareem Garcia was the worst Interesting. Alright Coupon code BP Subscribe to the Playindex

Get the discounted price $30 On a one year subscription Let's take a question From Kenny. Kenny says So basically with the exception of opening day And the first week after the All-Star break, it's uncommon to see an ace versus ace matchup. I mean number one starter versus number one starter.

Sorry, Ben. While an NCAA Baseball Every Weekend series features a one versus one matchup on Friday nights, two versus two on Saturday, and three versus three on Sunday. I would like to see MLB sort of co-opt this idea by encouraging or incentivizing ace vs. ace matchups on one day every week. Putting these on Sundays would

almost create an NFL feel to each Sunday, which would help attract the casual viewers. Would you like to see this happen? What are some of the benefits or drawbacks to such a plan? Would every team cooperate do you like ace versus eights it gets sort of overrated because there's no there's no actual ace versus ace involved in the game it's ace versus the other team and other ace versus the

other team when it's it could be good but yeah when it goes perfectly to plan and somebody wins 1-0, when it feels that extra tension because they're both on, I support it. There's the potential for better games. And if you don't have a particular rooting interest in the game, it does make it more watchable when you're interested in both pitchers.

It just becomes a never-ending good pitcher in front of you. So if you like watching pitchers, it just becomes like never-ending good pitcher in front of you. So if you like watching pitchers, it's a better experience. I agree. I don't know what could they do to incentivize teams to do this. You could imagine, you wouldn't imagine, but you could imagine a scenario where before a game started, the difficulty of your opponent was rated. And like the ELO rankings on baseball reference that we talked about you got more credit for being for beating a better team i guess like college sports right

where you basically do get more credit for beating a better team so if you if you really if you incentivize the beating of the other team's ace if you made it so the teams needed to prove themselves by beating good teams well you could see that but that would be very complicated about coming out in favor of that plan. Yeah, me neither. If there were such a plan, someone would find a way to exploit it, probably. All right, last one. Henry in LA.

I've really enjoyed the mainstreaming of advanced statistics in the last few years, and I'm loving StatCast, but the profusion of data we have these days seems to separate the contemporary game from the historical And I've always enjoyed baseball history as much as the current game Do you think there are any modern statistics or advanced metrics or stat cast stuff that can help us to better? Understand the past or any that can help us compare the present to the past war kind of helps But I'm skeptical about how war is calculated with no fielding stats, etc. I'm reading a biography of Satchel Paige. It's all anecdotal, of course, but there are descriptions of his pitching that sound just like Bartolo Colon.

Four or five different fastballs, all strikes, ridiculous K to walk, etc. Do you think we'll ever have data that helps us link to the past, or will it all just serve to divide the eras? Well, we won't have more information than we have now, I don't think. I mean, there's the ongoing effort to get missing box scores and play-by-play logs for games of the past, and slowly those will be uncovered and we'll have a little bit better data about old years of baseball, and then you can extend war or whatever it is to the past with a little more confidence, a little more accuracy. But it's not like we're going to get pitch-by-pitch measurements

of players from the 50s out of nowhere. No, but you could imagine if there was a real desire for it and a market for it. I mean, most, I don't know how long it goes back, but a huge number of games do have broadcasts that exist somewhere. And you could imagine Baseball Info Solutions doing video scouting of those games just like they do for games now. And you could incorporate a lot of batted ball data that we don't have and pitch data, pitch count data, for instance, or pitch type data that we don't have and pitch data you know pitch like pitch count data for instance or pitch type

data that we don't have and defensive runs saved for those guys and all that i mean if you wanted to if somebody wanted to they could do that it's conceivable it's possible that'd be nice you could do it with your 80 subscription to the archives the other i mean that sort of differentiates the era in that, you know, what if we're doing play index in 25 years? Would you just do play index for, you know, 2008 on? Probably that will be a popular play index search at that point, right? Because that's when velocity stops and pitch movement stops. So if you want to say that so-and and so has the best curveball or best fastball or whatever it'll all be 2008 that will be the beginning of the modern era for pitch tracking

statistics so at some point that will sort of divide the eras it's not like we won't pay any attention to what happened before that but when you see guys ranked i mean it's already the case people will say that it's the best whatever of the PitchFX era, and it's an era. We sort of separate. It's arbitrary. Well, it's not totally arbitrary because the strike zone changed as a result, and other things in baseball may have changed as a result. But that will be kind of known as the era when we have tracking.

And if StatCast know everywhere this season for the first time then 2015 will be the modern era for all the stat cast stats that we track so in three decades we'll be saying 2015 to 2045 because we'll be able to compare stat cast stats for every player and maybe the stuff that happened before then will seem a little less real i mean in 30 years when we're all used to stat cast then uzr and drs and everything will seem primitive by comparison and we won't be as confident in that stuff just like when we look back at the pre play-by-play defensive metrics we're a little less confident in those so you've got bigger bigger error bars around how good you

think guys were yeah definitely about 2008 you're right that's a good point that it is we will think of 88 to 2007 i will think of that as an era i should start thinking about that as an era that no longer exists bryce tarper homer just now while you were talking is he wearing batting gloves or not don't know he had a homer he has homerun and a double in the game today. He now in the last six games has a 1600 slugging percentage. Turn the corner. Corner turned. And there are, I mean, I think modern statistics have helped us understand the past better because we have enough stats about old players to say things that people at the time wouldn't

have said about those players to say things that people at the time wouldn't have said about those players right i mean we've re-evaluated guys who were underrated at the time because whatever they were low batting average high on base percentage guys or that sort of thing so i mean you know people who write about history from a sort of sabermetric perspective have incorporated that information into their work and i think it has been enlightening so we definitely have a better understanding of player value of previous players than contemporary people did so there's that okay so that's it for today facebook group facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild ratings reviews subscriptions are appreciated on itunes

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