Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 857: Joe Sheehan on the Scourge of Big Bullpens

Episode Date: April 7, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Kenta Maeda’s debut, then talk to Sports Illustrated’s Joe Sheehan about how pitcher-centric roster construction is making baseball more boring (and what might make it better).

🎵 I don't want to hear it, there's a new kid in town. I don't want to hear it, there's a new kid in town. Hello and welcome to episode 857 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com and our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben. In just a moment, we are going to be talking to one of my favorite baseball writers, Joe I'm Sam Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben. In just a moment, we are going to be talking to one of my favorite baseball writers, Joe Sheehan,

about some trends and some pitfalls of modern roster construction. But before we do, Sam wants to just sneak in a quick time-sensitive play index. So take it away, Sam. Yeah, this play index was recommended to us by Nomar in Los Angeles. Nomar looks like Garcia Parra is his last name. And after Kenta Maeda hit his home run yesterday, Nomar wondered aloud whether any pitcher has ever hit a home run before he allowed a run. So Nomar wondered after Kenta Maeda hit his home run yesterday, whether a pitcher has ever hit his first home run before he allowed his first run. And Joe forwarded this along to me and suggested that I play index it.

And I did. It's quick. It's easy. The answer is that yes, someone has. In fact, I did not even go through all the processes necessary to capture everybody because it was very easy to search for pitchers who homered in their first game and then skim the list of 10 or so and see if any threw a shutout. And Jason Jennings in 2001 did. He threw a complete game shutout against the New York Mets while also homering off of Glendon Rush? But more interesting than that, I was listening to the Dodgers broadcast and Oral Hershiser was in the booth.

And I don't know, I sort of I felt like I was sensing a little bit of a weird vibe by Oral. Like I was just waiting for some recognition that this pitcher hit a home run. And Oral Hershiser was also a pitcher. And, you know, like for him to talk about what a thrill it is to hit your a home run and oral hershizer was also a pitcher and uh you know like for him to talk about like what a thrill it is to hit your first home run or for oral to say it took me 400 games or whatever so i uh i quickly looked up oral hershizer to see how many home runs he hit in his career and he hit zero uh and and but but then strangely is that Oral actually was a good hitter for a pitcher. He hit 200, and I thought, so I wonder who the best pitcher is,

the best hitting pitcher who never hit a home run. And so I went to Playindex. I looked at a minimum of, I think, 300 plate appearances, which is not that many for a pitcher. If you have a long career as a starter, you'll definitely get more than that. Oral, for instance, had about 1,000 plate appearances. So I set a minimum of 300 plate appearances for a pitcher. Home runs equal zero, sorted by OPS plus.

And sure enough, Oral Hershiser is the greatest hitting pitcher ever to not hit a home run. Really only one pitcher is even close to him in quality. And I forget who it is, but he only had like 350 plate appearances. Oral had the best OPS plus of anybody in this group. And he had like double the plate appearances of anybody remotely close. Oral's OPS plus was 31. Only one other pitcher had an ops plus over 19

without a home run and in a lot fewer played appearances so uh strange strangely this like this weird little thing just wasn't sitting right with me this vibe coming out of the dodgers broadcast which um just felt slightly off uh turned out to have perhaps been extremely loaded. Yeah, so you're saying he was silent because he was seething with envy. I am saying exactly that, Ben. That is exactly what I'm saying. Some guys just have those homers handed to them on a platter. Other guys work for years and years and never get one.

Exactly, yeah. It's crazy. 29 doubles, by the way. Oral had 29 doubles in his career. A lot of doubles. I wonder if they were all grounders down the line or if he ever elevated. Bunts against the shift. Yeah. All right. So now we are going to get to the meat of this episode and we are going to bring in Joe Sheehan, whom I'm sure many of you are familiar with. It is sort of shocking to me that we have never had Joe on this podcast, but I'm sure many of you are familiar with. It is sort of shocking to me

that we have never had Joe on this podcast, but we are going to write that wrong now. He is, of course, one of the co-founders of the site for which we have done this podcast, and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and the author of the Joe Sheehan newsletter, which is certainly some of the best money I spend on baseball writing. Joe, it's a pleasure to have you. Welcome to the show. It's good to be on, guys. I'm a huge fan of the podcast. I'm just thinking today about doing Baseball Perspectives Radio back probably almost 10 years ago now with Will Carroll.

Will was like, you have to do audio, you have to do audio. Turns out you have to do audio. Well, someone had to carry on the legacy of podcasts sponsored by the Baseball Reference Play Index once Rennie got too big time to keep doing the show. I like the way you do the live play index searches. I think it's a lot of fun. It's fun for the baseball nerds. I don't know how many people actually enjoy that, but I actually do.

Yeah, I think our audience is almost exclusively baseball nerds, so it works out. I think our audience is almost exclusively baseball nerds, so it works out. So one of the things I enjoy about your newsletter is that, you know, as forward thinking as you are and as well versed as you are in all the modern statistical thinking, you are also equally well versed in baseball history and you bring some historical perspective to your writing. And so you are able to identify these trends that develop over time, which in some cases you compliment and you praise. And in other cases you lament, even as maybe you realize that you are fighting a losing battle on some fronts. So you focused on one of these in one of your

most recent post-opening day newsletters, and you did a little study on roster construction, which is obviously something you've always focused on. You've always been a very breaking down X's and O's and managerial moves sort of writer. So you've noticed that a trend that's been going on for some time has seemingly solidified at this point. So what did you find with your little survey of opening day rosters? Yeah, well, they say that baseball is never better than when you're 12 years old. When I was 12 years old, most teams tended to carry nine or ten pitchers, and it gave you a lot of flexibility. It was a time of max platooning and using a lot of aggressive pitch hitting

and even carrying pinch runners and defensive replacements. Over time, as we've used relief pitchers for fewer innings, as we've used starters for fewer innings, to make up for that, teams have carried more pitchers. And we've gone from a 14-9 or a 15-10 split. And I can remember in the early days of prospectus, teams started going to 11 pitchers and lamenting that. Well, if you look at the opening day rosters this year, you have 26 teams at 13-12, 13 hitters and 12 pitchers. You have three actually carrying 13 pitchers and just one, Billy Beans A, is carrying 11. So you look at the rosters right now, 48% of Major League Baseball is pitchers.

And I can tell you, I mean, like I say, if somebody came up in the 80s that seems a little bit out of whack, and it has real effects on the way the game is played. You mentioned that I tend to focus on tactical moves and in-game strategies, particularly in the postseason. I think in-season, a lot more goes into it. But when you get to late season, you get to postseason, you really want to look at some of these, the way teams manage. And one of the effects of this is that offensive strategy, pitch hitting and picking the right guys and platooning tends to not matter as much now because managers just don't have any options. You're carrying 13 hitters. Okay, nine of them are in the lineup or eight in the National League. One of them is a backup catcher who almost never plays and only plays in a game if somebody gets hurt.

One of them is usually a backup infielder who can play shortstop, and if that guy could hit, he'd be starting anyway. So American League managers only have two options. National League managers only have three, and on some of these 13 pitcher teams, it's's even fewer than that so i think it's had a lot of effects on the game i think that you look late in games now and you've got these dominant relievers who you know throw 95 with some nasty breaking ball and they're up against really bad hitters because those bad hitters have to bat and i the the imbalances we've seen late in games uh i think it makes for a less entertaining game come comebacks are less likely not just because the relievers are better, but because the hitters are worse. And I'd like to see some changes that encourage teams to carry more hitters. some variation or there'd be an outlier somewhere who had a different philosophy or even just a certain team that has certain roster strengths and weaknesses that lend itself to maybe more

position players than the typical team. But there's almost no exception. I mean, there's no one you can point to who's doing this differently. Well, there's no, because the one trend that's been, you know, dominated the trend that's driving this is that if you use pitchers less, if you use them for fewer outings and for fewer pitches per outing, they're more effective on a per-inning basis. And there's been no – I said a couple of years ago, I said let's start using pitchers for two innings. And the reason that teams haven't gone back to that is that they're more effective this way. And that's why I don't think you can fix this by saying, well, some team is going to do it differently. And that's why I don't think you can fix this by saying, well, some team is going to do it differently. I mean, we can talk about, you know, why don't the Andrew Friedman Dodgers or the Neil Huntington Pirates or the Billy Bean A's, David Forrest A's do things differently?

Well, because this is actually more effective. This is the best way to prevent runs. And that's why I think at the league level, you have to step in. At the NBA, the NFL, they've always been more aggressive about tweaking their game. You'll see minor rule changes from year to year. MLB has not done that until recent years with – you look at the Buster Posey rule. You look at the Chase Utley rule. Baseball seems to be a little more willing now to say how do we fix our game to make it better.

And to me, this is not a small thing. You look at late games now and the entertainment value. Look, not every game has to be 8-7 with four lead changes. but there are just way too many games now where a team's up 4-2 in the eighth and you really feel like the opposition has almost no chance to come back because the next 30 pitches they're going to see are 96 and above and the ones that aren't are some ridiculous, wicked 89 mile an hour slider or some change up that you can't see coming out of the hand. So I'd like to see a little better balance of the late innings. Yeah. So you offer one solution to this, which is to expand rosters, not necessarily expand the number of active players

available for an individual game, but expand the number of players that a team could carry with them and have, you know, kind of a cap on how many pitchers you could have available in a game. And this would free up teams to carry larger benches. And so as in the example you gave, Hank Conger would not be batting in the biggest moment of the game for you, you would theoretically have that classic pinch hitter type. The thing that I was sort of wondering about, and that I haven't really had time to dig into it yet, but I wonder if there is that classic pinch hitter type. I wonder how much of this or if any of this is, in fact, a reaction to people realizing somewhere along the line that, in fact, there aren't enough good hitters to fill out a bench, that it's partly about wanting more pitchers, but

that also there just aren't enough qualified hitters out there to move the needle, to have anybody who's much better than Hank Conger on the bench. And I know that all of us can probably think of a really good pinch hitter or two from our childhood, or maybe a dozen from our childhood. But I wonder of the, you know, scores of players that were filling out benches, even back in the good old days, how many of them were actually contributing? If you look at substitutes, offensive lines in the, you know, 1980s and 90s, they were really horrible. Like we're talking about, you know, cumulative lines of around 225, 300, you know, 300, partly because they're backup catchers and backup shortstops, but also maybe because there aren't really that many great Mark

Sweeney's out there. Well, Jeremy Hasselbecker hit a home run, so you're wrong. Okay. That's the extent of my argument. No, I think there are some of these trends towards using more pitchers have had an effect on how teams develop players you look at 40 man rosters now and they're dominated by pitchers as well i can remember looking at uh some trying to structure playoff rosters last year and guessing at who the 25 men would be for some of these teams and realizing that you know they didn't have sufficient position players on their 40 to add extra bench players there was a the tigers couple years ago were in the playoffs and they were in a situation where if they'd had one more injury they they actually couldn't replace them they only had like 15 healthy players on their 40

men uh so some of this i think is selective i think that you because teams benches now are so thin they're not looking to go out and and develop to the extent that you would develop pinch hitters um it's possible that if you compare this to say 20 years ago, I can't think of the last time we had a free Arubi Eldorado type of movement. We think to the classic, oh, the Roberto Pettigini's and these quad hitters who weren't getting opportunities. I do think that the baseline doesn't have to be even a league average hitter. It's just got to be can we give managers options that are better than running up a bad hitting catcher, a bad hitting infielder, these guys that are completely overmatched late in games, and just give better platoon options and even pinch running. Terrence Gore in September for the Royals is your last real pinch running option.

I can't think of teams carrying guys who are effective pinch runners during the season anymore. Teams don't carry defensive replacements anymore. And we can debate whether those are good uses of roster spots, but I certainly think they made the ends of games a little bit more interesting. And like I said, that's what I'm kind of focused on here. If we're not going to be able to do anything about carrying seven and eight relievers, can we do something about balancing that out so that the offense-defense balance late in games is a little more fair? I do think, Sam, it's a worthwhile point to say, are these hitters even out there? My contention is that they probably are, and we don't see them anymore because the roster spots have not been available for that type of player. That type of player has gone by the wayside. that you demonstrate that was especially interesting to me is that the long reliever has also gone by the wayside. And I can't quite figure out why that is. Ben and I actually just by chance yesterday, we're talking about the extinction of the three inning save. And it feels like if you have these specialized bullpens where everybody has their role,

that you would have, you would actually really want to have the guy who exists just to soak up innings, particularly because if you don't have a long man, you have to leave your starter in for these brutal outings where they have to muscle through four innings, even though they're, you know, throwing 30 pitches an inning and working out of stressful situations the whole time. And so I can't actually quite figure out why if you have have a 13-man bullpen or a 12-man bullpen, one of those guys isn't a dedicated long man who is capable of coming in at any point and going five innings. That feels to me sort of strangely contrary to the explicit role model of a bullpen. Yeah. Ben mentioned earlier about how there aren't a whole lot of – I can't remember this wrong. about how there aren't a whole lot of innovative strategies out there.

And this is part of it. The older baseball gets as an industry, we seem to be moving towards homogeneity, he tries to say at 10 a.m., in strategies. And this is part of it. Starting pitchers used to be used in a fairly wide range of roles. They'd go the distance. They'd pitch into the 10th, 11th, 12th. When we were all younger and men were men, you'd see guys go 16 innings at the start.

The flip side of that was that if a guy didn't have it that day, he might get pulled four outs into it. What we've seen is both ends of that spectrum have moved towards the middle so that even when starters are getting knocked around this year, they tend to go their four innings. Zach Greinke the other day, getting beat up by the Rockies, gave up six runs in the third inning. 25, 30 years ago, he would have been pulled during that inning. And this year, he actually went back out for the fourth because that's the model. Your starting pitcher pretty much has to pitch four innings nowadays, no matter how he's pitching. You look at quick hooks. Everybody remembers Sparky Anderson

being the king of the quick hook. 30 years ago, you were anywhere from 50%, 25% more likely to see a pitcher go one, two, or three. A starting pitcher go one, two, or three innings. And because that almost never happens anymore, rain delay situations or injury situations are the only times that a guy will be pulled that early in the game. You don't have a role for, I think about growing up, the true swingman. pulled that early in the game. You don't have a role for, I think about growing up, the true swingman, a guy like Tom Underwood, who would start 15 times and make 15 relief appearances, and all those relief appearances would be four or five innings starting in the second. That job just doesn't exist anymore. Because that job doesn't exist anymore, there's a bifurcation of the job of starting and relieving. A relief pitcher used to have a lot of different definitions.

of starting and relieving. A relief pitcher used to have a lot of different definitions. Now it's a guy who pitches three times a week, 15 pitches and outing, which is why it's so much harder for guys to go from starting to relieving. I don't know how you guys feel about the Aaron Sanchez decision by the Blue Jays. I think he's got the talent to be a starting pitcher, but one of the concerns I have is that he's gone from being a starter at the beginning of 2014 to a reliever at the end, to a starter at the start of 2015, to a reliever at the end. And those jobs have nothing to do with each other anymore. One guy is throwing 90 pitches once a week-ish and working, seeing the lineup twice, maybe three times. The other guy is throwing 15 pitches three times a week.

It's two completely different jobs when it comes to training. I think we've seen pitchers get hurt going back and forth because those jobs are just, 30 years ago, you could go back and forth. Now you really can't. Yeah. So we've just identified basically four reasons the long man should exist, that it's more strain on the starter to have to suck up these bad innings and a bad start. It's harder for Aaron Sanchez's and Neftali Feliz's and so on to make the transition from early careers reliever to later careers starter. It puts more strain on your bullpen because you don't have a guy

who can handle those innings when the game isn't close. You might actually want somebody who can handle those innings in certain situations and you don't have that. So do we have a hypothesis on this call for why no team carries a three inning reliever anymore? Because they're more effective pitching one at a time. There's no, you're not training a reliever to actually have that job anymore. It's an accident when it actually happens. The only time a reliever, and I did it in a separate newsletter, I counted up the number of long relief outings, defining long, I think is more than three innings. And those are also down because teams would rather use four guys for three to six outs each because they can, because they have eight relievers in their bullpen, as opposed to using one guy for three or four outings. I did a research project on Jack Morris's career 15 years ago, and it involved going through basically every Tigers,

Blue Jays, Twins box score over a period of 15 years. And it was fascinating. It was like a completely different sport. You'd see a guy go five outs, get pulled, and like Aurelio Lopez would come in and throw seven innings of relief. It was a completely different model that would blow your mind if you saw that kind of thing today. And I think what kind of calls back for me is just how recent these changes are. This has all happened in, you know, certainly my lifetime as a fan, certainly you guys. Ben, I think you're still, what, 13, 14, so maybe not yours. But these things have changed. And again, Sam, we talked about the problems, the four problems we've identified with this, but what you can't deny is that individual pitchers and therefore league-wide run prevention as pitchers are more effective and league-wide run prevention is as effective

as it's ever been. Strikeout rates are at an all-time high. That's kind of the basic coin of the realm dictating whether pitchers are better than hitters. If the league is striking out 21, 22% of the hitters that come to the plate, it's really hard to get anybody to change the way things are going. And in the past, you've advocated imposing certain restrictions on the way that teams can use their relief pitchers, whether it's a certain number of pitches you have to throw or batters you have to face before you make another change, something in that vein. And now you seem to have moved away from that to adding roster spots or changing roster rules solution. What made you switch from one proposal to the latest? Well, two years ago when i did a

whole big thing on strikeouts at the end i said how can we fix this and one of the things i wanted to address you you see a lot of people saying well we should have pitchers be forced to face two batters because you know it'll reduce mid-inning pitching changes and really whereas that might have been an issue 10 years ago pitching is now you come in to start the seventh and you finish the seventh and you leave and another guy comes in. Mid-inning pitching changes are actually not an issue. If you're going to actually change usage rules, you should force basically full-inning relievers and say, hey, if you come into a game, I think the proposal was you have to face at least six batters, which would mean you'd have to throw a full inning or give up a run. There's no way to get

through an inning facing six batters without one of those two things happening. And the idea was that let's try to encourage teams to select not for being dominant in a very short outing, but to select for endurance. And obviously the trends towards not doing that have gone in the other direction. So I don't think we can change this now. 12-year-olds are selected for velocity. 17-year-olds are selected for velocity. 22-year-olds are selected for velocity. And please, everybody, go read Jeff Passan's The Arm and find out the effects that this is having. You're not going to change that.

You're not going to get teams to select for anything other than can you miss bats with your fastball for the most part. So how do we fix it so that we can at least interject some balance between offense and defense? And I don't know if this is going to work either. I mean, there are roster things there. You got to work this out between the union and the owners, and they're going to really want to carry a 27-man roster. And I'm not saying this is practical either. I'm just trying to find a way to get a little more balance into the game. If nothing else, at least let's have a conversation about how do we make the game better when late-game sequences have really just come to be completely dominated by bullpens. I want to say Tom Verducci over at SI had a piece about this this week as well.

I just don't think it's a very entertaining brand of baseball, and I'd like to see MLB focus on how do we keep the game entertaining as opposed to these sequences of strikeouts in the end. Do you think the move from bench decisions to bullpen decisions would make you worry more or less about your manager's tactical skill? I mean, do you think there's more differentiation among managers in using a bullpen effectively than there once was in using a bench effectively? Or is everyone just sort of the same now because everyone has, you know, if not a Wade Davis, at least a Carson

Smith or someone like that? Well, bullpen rolls, bullpens are pretty much run push button now. You pitch the seventh, you pitch the eighth, you pitch the ninth. You'll have a lefty specialist because, you know, in case Bryce Harper comes up with two men on. For the most part, bullpen roles are set in March, and they don't change other than in effectiveness or injury. On the hitting side, there are very few decisions to make because this is the flip side of that. There's no players. So I think on an in-season basis,

the argument that we can select managers for other skills has a lot of merit. What happens is in the postseason, some of these guys, Ron Washington, Mike Matheny, and others tend to get exposed because they're not having to make those decisions on a day-to-day basis over 183 days. Whether you pick the right reliever or use the right pinch hitter comes out in the wash for the most part. When you have to win 11 games over three weeks, it becomes very important. So in the same way that pitching roles have become bifurcated, the roles of regular season manager and postseason roles have become bifurcated, the roles of regular season manager and postseason manager have become bifurcated. And we just kind of, we end up living

with that. We hope that you end up with Joe Maddon. And if you don't, well, you kind of accept that. But I think the importance of being a tactical manager is far lessened in today's game because of the way the rosters have been constructed. I should say a regular season tactical manager because of the way the rosters have been constructed. I think I basically agree with the entirety of your argument from an aesthetic standpoint. I think another aspect of it that you kind of allude to, but that I really feel strongly is that there's just something about seeing these kind of anonymous relievers who come in. Like there's, since there are so many relievers

in the game coming in, it almost becomes kind of like the offensive line of a football game where unless you're a super fan, you barely even know who's coming in half the time. And they're all in a lot of ways, fairly indistinguishable. Like you put it, they all have a 95 mile an hour fastball and half an off speed pitch.

And there's no real nuance to the way they're pitching. And I do feel like, you know, aesthetically there is something less appealing about, you know, the reliever world when it's, you know, not Kenley Jansen doing the relieving. The comebacks one, the comebacks aspect of it, though, the feeling that the game is settled anytime there's a two-run lead late in the game, is something that Ben and I have both worried about if, you know about in the strikeout era. But as Russell Carlton pointed out today, there actually isn't really a decline in comebacks as the era has gone on. And partly that's because there are a lot more close games. And I guess you could have your cake and eat it too

if you had a situation where the rules in the late innings don't so heavily favor the defense, but the rules in the late innings don't so heavily favor the defense but the rules in the earlier innings are as they are now and tend to keep games close but do you um i guess i guess i was sort of just thinking last night as i was going to bed i was trying to think about what parts of the game i am over nostalgizing and whether i am becoming the back in my day guy do you sort of worry at all that, in fact, baseball, like we are doing what everybody always does and missing the fact that baseball is still roughly the same game

that it always has been and that it's still pretty fun? I always do. And again, you go back to the whole thing where, you know, baseball was never better than when you were 12. And I'm old enough now that I could be making those mistakes. And to be clear, one of the things that baseball has right now is just a ridiculous amazing array of talent and one of the things to go back to something you said I want the game to be about Mike Trout and and Droughton Simmons and guys like that showing off their amazing talents and

it's less interesting when it's Will Harris coming out of the bullpen and nothing against Will Harris but these aren't the guys who sell tickets. And they're having, as a group, an outsized influence on the play of the game. My big argument against strikeouts is largely because we're in an era where we've got so much amazing defensive skill in play and we're also putting fewer balls in play than ever before. So Andrew Alton Simmons should be a superstar,

but every strikeout is less of an opportunity to watch Andrew Alton Simmons or Kevin Kier but you know strikeouts every strikeout is a less than opportunity to watch Andrew Alton Simmons or Kevin Kiermaier or guys like that do their thing so I'm kind of rambling a bit here but I don't think you can look at any of these issues in isolation roster usage drives individual reliever strikeout rates drives less interesting baseball and I've kind of written about any one or two of these issues or three of these issues over the years. And I guess I'm kind of trying to write about this stuff so that Rob Manfred and his minions on Park Avenue will say, how do we get to a baseball that's the most entertaining it can be? Last year, the rate of runs scored on home runs,

the percentage of runs scored on home runs was higher than it had ever been in baseball history, in prospectus database history, which goes back to 1950. I don't think that's the most entertaining brand of baseball. Chicks may dig the long ball, but it's a very stagnant game. And that's my concern. You talk about nostalgia, I'm perfectly willing to accept that I might be wrong about it. But I don't feel like the state of the game today

is as entertaining as it could or should be. And these issues, relievers, velocity strikeouts are probably the biggest reason why. is that the benches are shrinking. And one sort of smaller way that you could boost benches, and we've kind of seen, I think what we've, remind me if I'm wrong, but I think this is part of the all-star rules is if your catcher gets injured in the all-star game, can't you bring back your catcher? Yes. Okay, so you could, I mean, a lot of,

it seems like a lot of what has stifled bench usage in the last decade or whatever is that managers have become strangely, bizarrely paranoid about not having a catcher. And so they never want to use their backup catcher. They don't want to be in a situation where a foul tip off their backup catcher leaves them with nobody who can stand behind the plate. And if you had a situation where you could bring back your catcher in case of emergency, then A, you could pinch hit for your catcher, which is a lot of times that's the Hank Conger problem that you identified. And B, it would create a little bit more incentive to have a good bench bat knowing that you need somebody to pinch hit for your catcher. So this would be a fairly small thing. It's not the solution to all of it.

But I wonder if that sort of thing, which it's not, I don't know if it'll happen or not. It doesn't seem impossible that it would happen at some point in the medium-term future. Would that be too big a shift in baseball, the idea of a player who is out of the game being allowed back in the game? Or is that where we're going? I think you're creating a special category. When baseball first started, the whole nine players on a team thing pitchers were just like everybody else and over about a 30-year period once they started throwing overhand pitchers became their own separate category and continue to today and essentially be saying well catchers are going to be a separate category because they have

specialized skill sets and i think there's an argument for that because the odd neffy perez mike greenwell notwithstanding you know the catcher, you don't really ever want to put a guy like that behind the plate. So yeah, I think there's an argument for doing that. I agree. I think it would create more jobs for the Greg Myers, Jerry Willard class of catcher who isn't very good defensively but would make an effective pinch hitter. I think some managers would be quick to exploit that. I do think though the larger issue, you talk about managers being afraid to, you know, they don't, they're terrified of being left without a catcher. Managers being terrified of X is one of the biggest problems in today's, oh my God, I don't

want to have a lead in the 17th inning and not have a closer available, so I can't use my closer unless it gets to the 18th inning. Oh my God, I don't want to be left without a catcher, so I can't pinch hit for my really bad hitting catcher in the ninth inning with the bases loaded and two outs because the next guy might come in and take a foul ball off his finger. Managers being afraid of X is one of the, I'm perfectly willing to say these guys don't have to be tactical geniuses, but man, manage the game. Don't manage based on what you're going to have to explain to the press after the game. Just go win the game. All right. Well, you can read about these issues and many, many more, usually a few times per week in the Joe Sheehan

newsletter. Go to joesheehan.com. You can subscribe. I have done so and will continue to do so. You can also find Joe on Twitter at Joe underscore Sheehan. Joe, thanks for joining us. Fellas, thanks. It's an honor to be on. You guys do great work and I appreciate you having me. All right, that's it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's Patreon supporter shout outs, Brendan Bonner, Chris Wicke, Jose De La Torre, Scott Stevens, and James Turco. Thank you.

You can buy our book. The only rule is it has to work. Sam and I just got our first finished copies of the book back from the bindery. I love the word bindery, by the way. It's a place that binds books. So what else would you call it? And they look beautiful as far as we can tell. There have been no massive errors or omissions. You can have your copy in just a few weeks and you can pre-order it now on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or at your local bookstore. You can also rate and review and subscribe to the

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