Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 901: The Best Candidates for Weird Defense

Episode Date: June 9, 2016

Ben, Sam and FanGraphs writer August Fagerstrom banter about the allure of Kelly Johnson and the Indians’ plan for winning without Michael Brantley, then talk about big league candidates for untried defensive alignments.

I know everybody here wants you I know everybody here thinks they need you I've been waiting right here just to show you Oh, let me show you Hello. Howdy. And we are joined once again by August Fagerstrom of Fangraphs, who joined us not too long ago to talk about a dominant start by Max Scherzer, but is here today in part because a minute. No spoilers about the book, so if you haven't read it and you're still planning to, you don't have to stop listening. We're just going to be talking about some of the unorthodox defensive alignments we tried last summer and whether they would make sense against major league hitters. Hello, August. Hello. Thank you for the inspiration.

So I was wondering what you guys think it is about Kelly Johnson that makes him so expendable and yet so acquirable at the same time. The Braves traded Kelly Johnson to the Mets yesterday. This is the second time that the Braves have traded Kelly Johnson to the Mets in as many years. And he's been going from team to team every year, multiple times in a year. 2012, he signed With the Blue Jays then they let him go 2013 he signed with the Rays then they Let him go 2013 At the end of the year the Yankees Signed him then they traded him

The following July to the Red Sox The Red Sox traded him to The Orioles about a month later Then he signed with the Braves who traded Him to the Mets and then re-signed him And then traded him to the Mets again Any of yousigned him and then traded him to the Mets again Any of you have any theories For what it is that makes

Kelly Johnson such a Common trade target? Yes Well he can be better than Replacement level at a whole lot of positions And he's worse than average at all those Same positions So you know

Whatever team he's on, there are 29 teams he's not on. And so of those 29 teams, they're going to be at replacement level or below at some position. So he'll be an upgrade. And, uh, the odds are that the one team that he's on, uh, can ably fill a one win player at that position. It's, uh, it seems like simple logic. Plus he bats left-handed, uh, which helps. And, uh, which helps. And he's an adequate hitter on the bench. Yeah. The good enough but not too good thing was what I was thinking too, especially at a lot of different positions.

I'd also submit, and I don't know anything about this, but I would guess that he's probably a good clubhouse guy maybe. I mean, although when you see guys get traded that much, sometimes they're not like Marlon Bird or something. But yeah, I would guess that if a team like the Mets has acquired him multiple times, it's probably because they like him as a person and that maybe he, you know, is a good influence on guys in the clubhouse or whatever.

But I would imagine that might have something to do with it as well. You could also imagine that whether he started as a good clubhouse guy or not, you could maybe imagine that the more times you move, that sort of the better your moving skills are, like the better your clubhouse, like at least as far as adapting to a new situation, the better you are. Like it might be a learned trait that he has really gotten better at as he's gotten older because he's, you know, had to. He's like the kid whose dad was in the military, right? He's going to be better on the first day of school at a new school than somebody who's moving for the first time.

Yeah, my theory was similar. I was thinking that he's actually maybe the most average player in the major leagues. Maybe that's overrating him. But in certain ways, he really is extremely close to average, right? close to average, right? He has a career 101 OPS plus, and his career batting runs and fielding runs at baseball reference are both within a win or so of average. And his career war on baseball reference is 16.7. So if you do a wins above replacement per 600 plate appearances. He's at 2.03, which is as close to the magic two mark that we use as an indicator of average as it's possible to get. So maybe that is overrating him because he doesn't play every day. And so he's average maybe when he gets the platoon advantage.

But when he's actually playing, he's of the most Average guy you can possibly get And everyone wants average At some position At some point as Sam was saying And everyone is willing to give up Average if they're getting something Can I one more hypothesis too Is you remember with

I mean we talked about this all the time when With the Stompers when you know your shortstop Gets hurt or gets you know deported You the time when with the Stompers, when you, you know, your shortstop gets hurt or gets, you know, deported. You the first sort of the first line of of of query for a replacement is like anybody's boy play shortstop. You know, like it's like this network of like who knows who and like everybody knows somebody who could who could rake in this league. Right. And so Kelly Johnson has played baseball with every major league baseball player at some point. And so maybe it's just a matter of like, you know, whenever a need comes up, there's somebody to go, hey, my boy Kelly Johnson can play. So it's like exponential growth, like the more teams that he goes to, the higher the likelihood it is that he'll go to a new one because he knows somebody else.

Yeah, exactly. one because you know somebody else. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Well, within those theories, I'm sure lies the actual answer for why Kelly Johnson is so often transacted. And before we get to the book stuff, I just had one question for August because you're a Cleveland guy and because you used to cover the Indians and the Indians are an interesting team. They were a lot of people's preseason pick for the AL Central, and so far they are living up to that, although they don't have a big lead. But the Michael Brantley news came out earlier this week that essentially we don't know what Michael Brantley's status is.

He hasn't contributed anything this year. We don't know when he'll be back or if he'll be back or what he'll be like when he is back. So what should we know about Tyler Naquin who has been Really good in his absence And how screwed are the Indians I guess if Michael Brantley contributes

Nothing this year Or is that a good position to be in Because they're in first place as it is Having gotten nothing from him And there are a bunch of outfielders who are Potentially acquirable I was just going say kelly johnson's available yeah right when was the last time uh kelly johnson played some outfield he played outfield this year this year yeah yeah all right yeah well they should go get him that's that's the first uh part of the answer uh i i guess i mean

the first thing to understand i guess is that right it seemed like they were screwed to start the year and their outfield has actually been pretty good. I think the last time I looked, it was like top 10 in war, which doesn't really make that much sense. And it doesn't seem like it's sustainable. A lot of it's been driven by like Jose Ramirez being like one of the best players, I think certainly outside of Francisco Lindor on their team and just a really good hitter and he's played good left field. But as far as Naquin goes, I mean, he was always kind of a – I mean, he was certainly a prospect. He was a first-round pick in 2012, and, you know, it seemed like kind of a reach at the time.

And he was never really a top prospect guy, but he was always a prospect. But seemed like more of a fourth outfielder type of guy. And he's performed well this year, but he's struck out 28 times and walked five times in 85 plate appearances. And he has a 469 BABIP. So I'm not totally sold that he's not still a fourth outfielder. He plays good defense and he was thought to make good contact, but he hasn't

really done that yet. So I don't know. It's kind of weird because I think he kind of embodies what the Indians outfield has been this year, where, like you said, it kind of looks like they're screwed and then it just kind of turns out that they've got a 470 Babbitt and they're not. So I don't know. I would wager that if they want to continue with the way that they're going, they probably need to look outside of the organization, especially if the Brantley news ends up being as bad as it seems. I just can't imagine how Jose Ramirez, Tyler Naquin, Lonnie Chisenhall, Rajai Davis outfield wins the division.

But I think Dave Cameron wrote a post at Fangrash recently about how thin the outfield market is this year. And I mean, especially when a couple of the guys are like Jay Bruce and Carlos Gonzalez, guys that are probably better suited to be a DH and the Indians don't have a DH spot open. So like Brett Gardner or Bust almost kind of seems like the outfield market if you need someone to actually play the outfield.

So they're in kind of a difficult spot, but I would guess, you know, I mean, it's not, doesn't seem broke yet. So they might not need to fix it quite yet. But I think that they probably will eventually. Yeah. And well, we kind of spent all offseason wondering when the Indians were going to make some big acquisition and they never did.

I mean, people were thinking it was irresponsible or risky to go into the season counting on Brantley as it was. And then it seemed like he was coming back ahead of his projected timeline and everyone was optimistic and then no so i don't i don't know whether uh whether they have the resources or whether they're willing to spend the resources to go get someone they obviously have big time attendance problems so i don't know whether they are in a position to do that or whether they'd be willing to do that do you have any speculation about that yeah well I mean as far as the offseason thing goes I mean everyone wanted them to at least sign an outfielder if not trade for one but my my argument against that kind of was that

both Clint Frazier and Bradley Zimmer are going to or at least expect to be pretty major parts of this team in the near future and they'll probably be here next year I think Zimmer for sure will be Frazier you know maybe will be a little later maybe next you know the year after but those guys are both going to be here very soon and so I I didn't think that it made that much sense to uh you know acquire several years of an outfielder when they uh seem to have two pretty good ones on the way but yeah I, I mean, like I said, I mean, I think that if you're getting a rental, that would make sense, but there just aren't that many appealing rentals out there this year. So they're kind of in a tough spot.

Indians attendance is down almost 1500 fans per game. It's bad. Compared to last year. It's bad. It was bad to begin with. Yeah. All right. So we have talked about enough things that this episode won't be completely self-centered now. So you have done two Instagraphs posts, which we will link to,

about our defensive positioning experiments that we did with the Stompers last season. We tried the five-man infield alignment, and we tried the four-man outfield alignment. And I guess just by doing those things, we were suggesting that they were a good idea, that some major league team should try them in the right situation. And so you went searching for the right situation for each of those alignments. So I guess we should explain what made us do it. Sam, do you want to explain what it was about Scott David, the guy we did the five- 400 against the league. He was doing it while hitting very few balls actually to the outfield. He's fast. And in this league, there are a few reasons that hitting the ball in the infield is a great strategy. One is that infielders generally are, they have weaker arms, they have

slower transfers. And if you can get down the line and make the infielders, you know, move quite a few steps, you have a pretty good chance of beating it out. And he didn't pull ground balls the way that most people in the league did. He would hit them everywhere. He would sort of do some Ichiro-type hits, both into the hole to shortstop. He was a left-handed batter. Into the hole at shortstop and also making the shortstop come in and sort of toward third base. You know, he could bunt.

He could hit a lot of line drives. And we just didn't really have a defense for him. He was hitting something like 450 on grounders. I just made that number up, but something like that. And he was hitting, you know, something like 900 on line drives. And we kept on. We were sort of like, we were in full shift mode. And so we were like looking at every batter, especially every successful batter. Well, no, every batter and saying, okay, well, where can we line these four guys up to cover the most amount of his spray chart? And with David,

no matter where we moved four guys, there was really no defense. And so we then started toying with bringing a fifth guy in. And what I think really sealed it was when we realized that he hadn't pulled a fly ball all season, that he would hit fly ball sometimes, but generally to straightaway left or left center and never right. He had not pulled a single fly ball to right field. And we thought, well, maybe he can do that. And if he does, then after the first time, then we can always adjust back. But in the meantime, we have to sort of take him at his word that that is either not what he is good at or what he wants to do or what he's best at doing.

So we thought, well, we can probably leave half the outfield vacant. We had at the time, I think, a pretty good defensive outfield. We had a much less good defensive infield because we'd lost some guys. And so we did the math and found that even if we were giving up more extra base hits, it seemed quite likely that by cutting down his low line drive hits and his ground ball hits, we could get a fairly substantial gain from it. Like he would have to basically hit a lot Like basically turn every single Into extra bases to make up

What we thought we could cut down in singles And then Jake Taylor Was this huge like Jose Canseco type clone who was Killing everything and what We realized with him is that he Had a ground ball spray chart that You know was consistent with a guy that we would Shift the infield on a lot of pulled ground balls.

But we found that similarly, he hadn't hit a ground ball to second base all season, granted small sample. field without going to second that we felt pretty confident that we didn't even need to shift a guy over up the middle on him that we could simply remove a guy without losing too much and hopefully cut down his extra base hits because he was hitting everything hard and everything to the outfield and so the now the and also the and also was that there were two benefits to it that had nothing to do with their spray chart one is that it felt like it was something that our team was into and that felt like action at a time in our season where we were really in a slog and really having trouble changing the narrative of the team or the tone of the team. And so it was this new experiment that people could focus on

and make that day feel different than the previous day and that made it seem like we had a secret weapon. And the other thing is that we had become convinced by watching other guys that simply putting on a shift made hitters worse that even if even if they didn't have a spray chart, like we were we considered whether we should just shift every hitter without even looking at their spray charts just to get them out of their normal hitting style and to kind of get in their heads a little bit. And we saw that with, well, we felt like we saw that with Scott David when we did the infield. And so then we thought, well, Jake Taylor is killing us. So let's see what he does. See if it messes him up.

We didn't think that he could hit singles to second base if he tried, but we thought he would try. And so we wanted to see him try. We wanted him to quit hitting home runs 400. I saw him hit a home run that I paced, that I tried to pace. And I believe it was 480 based on my pacing. That's how strong this guy was. And so we thought, you know, if he starts hitting singles, like our team had already said like a couple of times, this was one of the encouraging things is our team. And when we were getting feedback on whether this was something that gave them confidence or not, they said, hey, if if, you know, Matt Chavez, who was the first impossibly good hitter in our league, if he starts hitting singles to right field, then we've won, which isn't true.

I don't think that's true. If he starts hitting singles to right field, that would be bad. But if he starts trying to hit singles to right field and he can't do it consistently or successfully, then I think we would have won. And so with Jake Taylor, it was the same sort of idea. We felt like if we could just get him to change his approach, no matter what happened, our team would feel like more successful than that sort of feeling of hopeless repetition that came with watching him consistently hit balls over their head. Yeah, right. So there were a lot of benefits to doing it, and you can see pictures of how it looked in action on our website at theonlyrulesithastowork.com or in August's post because he included those images also. So I guess we can start with the five-man infield. So August, how did you go about trying to winnow down the candidates into someone it actually might make sense against?

might make sense against well as i was reading your guys chapter i i had the the same feeling that you guys are all too familiar with when you realize that you've just stumbled onto a new topic idea and you have something to write about it's a very good feeling and you guys basically kind of laid it out for me and you basically just laid out all the evidence for why david made sense and i just was like well we have a lot of data for MLB players I can probably put a number to all that so I mean it's basically you I mean for the five-minute field you obviously need someone that hits a lot of grounders so I just looked at ground ball rate and then you need someone that hits them all over the infield so I just took the difference between pulled ground balls and opposite ground balls and guys who had the smallest difference I'd put a number on how

often they spray their grounders. And then they need to be good at hitting grounders because if the grounders that they're hitting and it's spraying all over the infield are not going for hits, then you've got no incentive to take any of them away. So I took the ground ball, I think OPS I used. Then I just took guys who had predictable fly ball tendencies, which either they pulled all their fly balls or they went opposite field, just any hitter who, you know, it was easy to predict where their fly ball was going to go. And I just used some Z scores for all those and came up with one number to say, these are the best guys in order to use the five minute field against. And you arrived at one name. Yeah. And I was a little surprised that it was only one because, I mean, there were a handful of guys

who scored decently well, but it was all because, like, three of the Z-scorers were really strong, but then there was one that was, like, negative. And just that one negative, if someone doesn't check all the boxes, then I don't think it makes sense. Like, I was a little surprised

that you guys did it against a lefty, although I guess obviously it made sense given his profile. But I think in the bigs, if this were to happen, I really doubt that it would be against a lefty at least to start and probably not for a while just because teams would be so afraid of the line drive into the right field corner that could go for a triple or worse. And so at the top of the spreadsheet, there was like Eric Hosmer and Nori Aoki were up there. But again, like especially with someone with Aoki's speed,

I just can't fathom that a team would actually do that regardless of what the spray chart looked like. But yeah, the one guy that made the most sense and checked all the boxes with, you know with pretty strong evidence was Howie Kendrick. He hits his ground balls all over the infield. Similar to Scott David, if you look at his spray chart, he has pulled exactly one ball to left field this year in the air and it was a home run, so it wouldn't have been caught anyway. There's one blue dot that represents a fly ball in kind of like left center, but I'm certain that the center fielder could catch that. So basically, if there was not a left fielder against Howie Kendrick this year, it would really be no different. And he hits a lot of ground balls. And even though he's been pretty bad this year, his ground ball production has actually been above average. So there's still hits to take away.

Even though he hasn't been a good hitter on the whole, he has still been a good ground ball hitter technically. So there's still some incentive to remove some ground ball hits from his profile. And when I overlaid some yellow dots where I suggested fielders might play against him on his spray chart, and that to me is just about enough evidence to where if I were the one in charge of a team, I'd just look at that and go, okay, let's do it. Might be a little short-sighted, but I mean, it was, I don't know. I think it's a pretty convincing case. And you know, for him, it makes sense, but I was a little surprised that he was the only one that checked all the boxes, which is probably goes some way to explaining why we haven't seen this yet. Right. Do you have any idea how consistent

those tendencies have been for him? Like, would it have made sense for him last year? Or is it just this year when he's struggling, he's been hitting a certain way? That's a good question. I probably should have looked at that, shouldn't I? I mean, he's always been a really extreme ground ball hitter. And I mean, he's never been a big power guy. So I'd imagine that, you know, he's always been an above average hitter and, you know, a good or a extreme ground ball hitter without much power. So that would lend one to believe that he's been a productive ground ball hitter. So that's two of our boxes to check right there. Uh, I would imagine. Um, and then, I mean the spraying the ground balls and not ever pulling fly balls. I,

I can't speak to that, but yeah, I don't know. I I'm we're, we're halfway there. And, uh, four man outfield, what did you find for that and how did you search? Yeah, that one was a little trickier just because in trying to find, I mean, I used the productive on ground balls filter for the five-man infield, but it's a little trickier for the outfield because you can't just look at production on fly balls because a lot of that is driven by home runs and home runs can't be defended against. So it felt a little disingenuous to use fly ball OPS or air ball OPS to determine who was doing well on fly balls. But I kind of just use the inverse of the other things, you know, just find guys that spray their air balls and hit a lot of air balls and are very predictable

in their ground ball tendencies. And there was not quite as strong of a candidate as Kendrick was for the five-man outfield in the four-man outfield. And also the top couple guys that outfield and also the the top couple guys that uh that popped up were right handers uh which that was also what you guys did which i i again think that that would probably that if if or probably when we eventually see this in mlb i would assume it probably starts with lefties because with a righty you can't you can't pull the first baseman so you're still just leaving two guys on left side of the infield and then just pulling the second baseman so you're still just leaving two guys on left side of the infield and then just pulling the second baseman and it feels like if a team's going to do this they'll probably want to over shift the infield and also have four guys in the outfield kind of like you know covering

your bases two ways i don't know i just it seems unlikely that it would be against a righty to start out and so nick castellanos is the Howie Kendrick of the four-man outfield. He hits a bunch of balls in the air, a lot of line drives too, which I think is probably a line drive hitter. It's probably even makes more sense than a fly ball hitter because fly balls that have a lot of hang time, you don't need four outfielders to catch them, but line drive hitters, that's when it's, you know, that having a fourth outfielder would be more beneficial. So he gets a lot of balls in the air, hits them all over the outfield, and he pulls like all of his ground balls. He, looking at his spray chart, it looks like there's probably maybe four ground balls that he's hit this year that a

second baseman was necessary to turn the out. There was one hit directly to first baseman and everything else was on the left side of the infield. So, I mean, it seems like you could just leave the shortstop in the third baseman where they are and take the second baseman and put him in the outfield somewhere. But again, I don't know. It seems unlikely that a right-handed batter would be the first one to do it against. And so with lefties, the guy that I found that made the most sense was Cole Calhoun, who essentially has the same tendencies as Castellanos, but he's a lefty. So you could still load up the right side of the infield. You wouldn't be, you know, because teams shift Castellanos now. And so I feel like a team just wouldn't feel like they had the incentive to

remove the overshift in order to have the fourth outfielder. Whereas with Calhoun, who gets shifted, you could keep the overshift and you could also have fourth outfielder. Whereas with Calhoun, who gets shifted, you could keep the overshift and you could also have four outfielders. So he was the one that made the most sense, although Castellanos in my spreadsheet was the one at the very top. It's always the outfield was harder to envision than the infield because like a lot of balls that are hits in the outfield and particularly a lot of balls that are extra base hits in the outfield,

like you could have 30 guys out there and they're not going to get caught like like where do you put like we didn't know whether you just space them out like you would in a softball you know in a in a sunday softball league or whether you want to bring one guy in and have him rove or whether i think what we ended up doing is having the corners pinch in a little and then the uh gaps deeper. And so almost as though you were playing like how you would play with a two man outfield if you had to, where you have like the two outfielders in the gaps and then you have the corners pinch in. But like, again, like we're talking about a lot of line drives or balls over heads and you can't cover it. Whereas with the infield, it's pretty simple. Almost every hit through the infield is almost an out. It's like, if you're standing there, it would have been an out. If you're standing four feet

closer, it probably would have been an out. And so it's really easy to say, well, you add 20% more infielders and you're going to, you know, cut down a proportionate amount of hits. With outfield, like we really struggled to figure out whether that was even true. Yeah. And that was another thing that I was struggling with too. I mean, if you look at Cassianus' spray chart, a lot of, I mean, even though, I mean, I just looked at his overall air balls that were sprayed throughout the outfield. And while he does spray them throughout, he pulls most of his line drives and hits his fly balls to right field. So I was thinking that the fourth outfielder, like you mentioned, would be kind of a more rover type spot in shallow left field. And then the other three outfielders are more or less

in their traditional positions. But if you're going to do that, then that's basically just a glorified infield shift, right? I mean, that's not that much different. So maybe the key to playing Castellanos, I mean, I would imagine that the way they've been doing it is just they load up the infield. Maybe it's just take, I mean, I don't know who would go out in the outfield the shortstop or the second baseman and just kind of do a rover thing as opposed to having right like the more traditional four spaced out outfielders in that way and so maybe it's just I mean because that's basically that's how teams shift left-handed batters when they go on the over shift but we haven't really seen that with right-handed batters and so I think maybe for guys, for the right-handed batters that showed up high on my

four-man outfield spreadsheet, maybe the answer for those guys is just to do the left-handed batter overshift alignment to a righty, where you have a guy out in the outfield grass to cut down some of those line drives that drop in front of the left fielder. And you toyed with Mike Trout as a possible candidate. What was it about Trout that made him catch your eye? Yeah. So Trout pulls a higher percentage of his ground balls than any hitter in baseball, which that surprised me. I mean, I knew that he had kind of gone that way in his tendencies, but 80% of Mike Trout's ground balls this year have been pulled.

And he still sprays all of his line drives and his fly balls too. And so when you think of a Mike Trout home run, there's not a specific thing you think of. You think of right center, you think of left center, you think of dead center. And I think he might be a better candidate for the non-Rover four-man outfield with a left center fielder and right center fielder because unlike castellanos he sprays all of his line drives too his line drives are hit all over the outfield his fly balls are hit all over the outfield and he pulls all of his grounders so he he might be a decent candidate and also it's mike trout and no one can get him out so

you know everything that everyone's tried so far hasn't worked so why not try a four-man outfield uh but yeah i mean he he looks like someone where you could just load up the left side of the infield as teams do now with – well, not load it up, but just not – there's not a need for a second baseman against Stroup, which teams don't use a second baseman at second base now. And so it seems like maybe you could just – I mean, I think also part of it too is how good your defenders are.

You probably have to have a good defensive shortstop and probably a good defensive third baseman who have range because by doing this, you're removing one of the infielders against the guy who pulls most of his ground balls more than anyone else. And so that, that alone probably prevents it, especially with how fast Trout is. But at the same time, Trout's really fast and he burns a bunch of outfielders with all of his fly balls that he hits everywhere. So I don't know. He was an interesting one to play around with, mostly just because he's Mike Trout. And it seems like if you're going to do anything radical to stop any hitter in baseball, it should probably be Mike Trout. And he checks most of the boxes for this. So

it's a possibility. Yeah. So you, a person reading this analysis would conclude that there's probably not a lot of opportunities for this and there's probably not a lot to gain from it. But you just looked at the hitters, the hitters tendencies. There are sort of three other things. There is the, well, I guess there's four other things at play. There's the pitcher's tendencies. So probably like, for instance, when Dallas Keuchel's pitching, everybody's ground balls rates go way up, for instance. There's the ballpark where a park like, you know, Coors Field or Coffman Stadium has more

outfield to cover. And so there's probably more to gain. There's your defense. If you have, you know, two elite outfielders or even three, then there's probably less to be gained by putting a fourth one out there. And then the one that we've had to think about most of all was the situation. There are a lot of cases where a double is hardly more damaging than a single. And then there are a lot of cases where a double is like many factors, by a large factor, then there are a lot of cases where a double is like many factors by a large factor more damaging than a single. So do you, like having me say all that, do you think that there is a

realistic possibility that this sort of thing would be enacted on even a semi-regular? Like, is there a time in the next 20 years where we'll see defensive alignment like this, say, once a week even for an average team? I do think that we'll see it eventually. I mean, baseball is only getting more progressive and shifts in defensive alignments in general are only getting more progressive. And this is one of the next logical steps. So I would imagine we see it eventually, but just with, with how few guys, and of course, like you mentioned, I mean, my, my two searches were relatively rudimentary. I mean, I was just looking for very general batter tendencies that might suggest that it would make sense against these guys. And of course, if a team were actually to do this, they would

consider all the things you just mentioned more. So'm certainly not suggesting that you know at any time that Howie Kendrick comes up it makes sense to put the five minute field on him but yeah I mean because I mean of course we've we've seen five minute fields before I mean it's what was not necessarily dictated by the batter's tendencies it was more so dictated by the game situation but I mean it's not like teams are completely averse to doing something like that. I mean, the Cubs just did it a couple weeks ago. Well, I would say that that is like completely disconnected.

I mean, that's like saying, well, we've seen guys shoot 65 foot three point attempts at the buzzer. So therefore maybe it's a strategy that they'll employ the rest of the game. I mean, that's a desperation move that has almost no connection to standard baseball situations. Yeah, that's a desperation move that has almost no connection to standard baseball situations. Yeah, that's true. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think

that we'll see it eventually, but I don't think there's a place for it to happen like you suggested, like once a week or whatever, because I mean, just with how few guys in my search made any sense at all, I mean, Kendrick really was the only one that I could find that made any amount of sense. And even he has been a terrible hitter this year. So teams would probably, I mean, he wasn't killing, you know, anyone like Scott David was killing you guys. No one's scratching their heads right now trying to figure out

how to get Howie Kendrick out. So even he is not the best example. So I do think that when you consider not only the batter's tendencies, but defense and ballpark and game situation and all that, that I think that probably in the next five or 10 years, we'll start seeing this here and there. But I just don't think that it can really take on a prevalent role in the game just because there just aren't that many profiles that fit the mold for this to be enacted. Yeah. And the benefit that I mentioned that we were getting that it gets in the hitter's head, I think that's probably specific to our level of play. I mean, nobody had

ever seen a shift. They weren't, you know, great hitters in the first place. We weren't really pitching because our pitchers had so little command There was like you know much less of a Of an actual You know like Where the pitches were was sort of semi random And so the higher you get Probably the less that you could possibly Hope that you're going to like screw with

The hitter like I bet even Howie Kendrick Would just sort of you know shrug And hit right yeah Even Howie Kendrick Howie Kendrick's just sort of, you know, shrug and hit. Right. Yeah. Even Howie Kendrick. I said that. Howie Kendrick's a great hitter. Especially Howie Kendrick. Yeah.

Well, I will link to the post. People can check out the pictures and the stats and the spray charts. You should all be reading August even when he's not writing about our book. You can also follow him on Twitter at AugustFG underscore. Can you not get the AugustFG? Is there someone squatting on that? Yeah. And the account is suspended and it's been suspended for like more than a year. And it's so frustrating that I can't get it. And then I also... Is there a way to request that you get an inactive account? Yeah, I've searched for it before, but it has not turned up any results. And then there's also, there's an at August,

which I really want. And the guy tweets pretty infrequently. And I messaged him. In fact, I think I emailed him one day. And I was prepared to pay a not crazy amount of money, but maybe crazy to some people for it. And, uh, I asked him how much he wanted for it. And he told me like $10,000. And I thought that was completely insane. And I guess there's, um, there's, there's a rapper whose first name is August and he's

reached out to him before. And there's a company that makes like plastics or something, uh, who it's like August corp or something like that. And they've reached out before. So apparently there's very high demand for the at August handle. And the $10,000 request was, yeah, it was slightly above what I was willing to pay. So yeah, stuck with the underscore. All right.

All right. So that's it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's five Patreon supporters are Ryan Johnson, Michael Hunter, Thomas Areccio, Zach Brady, and August Kuehling. Another August. Thank you to all of you. You can buy the book we discussed today, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Get it for Father's Day if you have a father who'd like it. You can go to the website at

theonlyruleisithastowork.com to read more about it and to watch photos and video and to find out where you can buy it. Basically everywhere. We'll probably be doing a book club episode of the podcast at some point soon, answering your questions about the book with Theo Fightmaster, the Stompers GM. So if you do have questions, email them to us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com subject book club. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Get the discounted price of $30 on one year subscription to the play index using the coupon code BP. Email us at the address I just mentioned podcast at podcast at baseball perspectives.com or by messaging us

through Patreon. We'll be back with one more show for this week. Tomorrow. Show me something new Show me something new Show me something new Show me something new