Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 948: Is Smart Baseball Boring?

Episode Date: September 2, 2016

Ben and Sam talk to BP’s Rob Mains about what Billy Hamilton’s career might have looked like in an earlier era, and whether baseball teams’ increasing efficiency has made the sport better or worse as a spectator experience.

No, I'm still standing better than I ever did Looking like a true survivor Feeling like a little kid I'm still standing after all this time Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind I'm still standing Yeah, yeah, yeah I'm still dyin' Yeah, yeah, yeah I'm still dyin'

Yeah, yeah, yeah Good morning and welcome to episode 948 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, presented by our supporters on Patreon and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller, still of Baseball Perspectives for now. Hello. Hey, how are you? All right. So we have a guest. We're going to talk about baseball with that guest in just a moment. But for once, you have an announcement to make.

Yeah. Well, I have an announcement to acknowledge. The announcement was made a few minutes ago on Twitter. You scooped us. I scooped you? I guess ES on Twitter. You scooped us. I scooped you? I guess ESPN's PR people scooped us. Yeah, exactly. So I am, yeah, I'm at the end of the month. I'm going to be starting a new job at ESPN,

which means I'm going to be ending my current job at Baseball Prospectus. So that's the news, Ben. Yeah, congratulations. Thank you. It is well-deserved. I'm glad that you're making this announcement because when Alex Speer introduced us at Saber Seminar and he made a joke about how you're the one who can keep a job and I'm the one who keeps going from place to place, I started wondering whether there was anything to that. Yeah. So well-deserved.

Thank you. And I hope your ESPN tenure lasts longer than mine. And I hope your ESPN tenure lasts longer than mine. Should we, a lot of people replied to this asking about the podcast. And that is going to be a discussion for another day, I think. I can tell you this. We are, my first day on the new job is October 1st, which is a Saturday. I can tell you there will be an episode on October 3rd.

And there will be an episode on October 3rd and there will be an episode on October 5th. And from that point on, I think, like I said, we're going to have to figure it out. We've been nervous about the life of this podcast. Every time one of us, Ben, has taken a new job and there's always been obstacles and we've never quite known. And I think at this point, it's something that we're going to have to see how things play out. But right now I'm here with you, Ben, and I'm happy to be. Yeah. So we both have a desire to keep doing this. We'll just see how it works out once you start your job and figure out how that works. So yeah, that's the news. Are you going to be, you're going to be writing more often? You're going to be on the website and in the magazine? Do you have any idea what your schedule is? Not yet, but it'll be, yeah, both of those things. I'll be writing for the website and for the magazine simultaneously. All right. Well, that's great. Lots more people will read you now, which I know you have mixed

feelings about. I remember when you went and your first article was like a thing about Tim Lincecum. It was like, just like a whatever Thursday piece. Like, you know, you did a good piece like you did three days a week at BP. It wasn't even good. It was bad. Really bad. Well, whatever it was. Yeah, when you saw the,

it was like, you know, it was like you hit the jackpot. You saw the traffic going up and it was like, wow, there's actually a whole world of people out there. Yep. Like you went overnight. Overnight you went from like that became the most read thing you'd ever written in any format.

And it was like your 6,000th favorite thing. That's what you were known for. But that's what drove you from that point on, I assume, to have your most known thing be not a piece of Tim Lincecum, but a thing on the Tigers playoff rotation. Yeah. Which is the thing you did next and which I think even got more views. Yeah. It's really that. Yeah.

No, I'm really excited. I'm really excited to have a lot more people responding to things that I get to write. And that'll be really fun. That'll be one of the great things about this job, which is going to be great. I can't wait. Yeah, the ESPN comments section. It's one of the best parts of the job. No comment from you. All right, good. So congratulations. I'll look forward to your work there. Thanks. And it will continue to be great. And now we're going to talk about some baseball.

Okay. there and it will continue to be great and now we're going to talk about some baseball I'll be around When other guys have gone I'll tell you a song I still love you so And you still want me

And you still want me And you still want me So we are talking about a couple articles that were posted at Baseball Perspectives in the past week that caught my eye and that we could discuss them and also use them as a springboard for a larger discussion. So the articles were by Rob Maines, who is a Baseball Perspectives writer. Also a Banished to the Pen writer. Always happy to see Banished to the Pen alumni join Baseball Perspectives. The blog started by Effectively Wild listeners. And Rob has been writing for BP for a while. And he wrote a two-part piece on Billy Hamilton. And the first part was called

What We're Missing Out On. The second part was called Why We're Missing Out On It. And it was about how Hamilton is treated differently now. He's played differently now. He's used differently now than he might have been, say, 30 years ago. And Rob used Vince Coleman as an example of the Hamilton of that era and compared and contrasted how they were used and what the impact of that was. So hello, Rob. Hello, Ben and Sam. So tell us what we are missing out on. We know that Billy Hamilton is fast. We all like watching fast Billy Hamilton. He is having a better offensive year than he had last year, but certainly not a good offensive year. He's stealing, you know, he'll probably end up around 60 or so still in bases, maybe a little more than

he had the last couple of years. But you are making the case here that we are being robbed of excitement. So what would Hamilton have looked like, do you think, in the 80s, or what did Coleman actually look like? Yeah, what Coleman looked like was Hamilton's speed with a little more on-base skills, though he was still below average at on-base percentage, a worse glove, less power, believe it or not, but abundant opportunities to steal bases. And that's really, I think, what resulted in Vince Coleman, his first three years in the league, he stole 110, 107, and 109 bases. And he was really a sensation back then. Teams would play the Cardinals, and the big thing that you'd worry about is if Vince Coleman got on base when he was going to stop running. And Hamilton has gotten 56, 57, and 54 with, you know, pretty comparable speed. And I think that the reason is that from the date that Vince Coleman broke into the majors in 1985,

he was penciled into the Cardinals' number one position in the lineup, let off virtually every game. And once he got on base, he had a green light, I wouldn't say completely regardless of situation, but pretty much when he was on first and second and there was an open base ahead of him, he was sent about 60% of the time. At Hamilton, it's been under 50%. So Hamilton, sort of by merit, hasn't been playing as much. He hasn't been playing as much he hasn't been sent as much but um i think part of that is intelligence in that it doesn't make sense when a guy has a subpar on base percentage to put him in the leadoff position every single day but that's what the cardinals did in the mid 80s yeah and it i mean if you there have been times where i've wondered well is billy hamilton

just not as good a base stealer? And maybe that's why he's only going to steal 60 or 70. He hasn't even stolen 60 yet, but he will this year. But it really does seem like the evidence is in the difference between what happened in the minors, when the games don't matter, and you're just working on getting good, and presumably there were no restrictions on him. And he stole 155 bases, which is like, you know, an all-time record at any level. And as soon as he comes up to the majors, he, you know, starts running a lot less,

which seems to be fairly convincing evidence that the stop sign is more or less on. Or if not the stop sign is on, this a strategy play not an ability play is do you guys agree that billy hamilton's zone base totals relatively low as they are are more of a reflection on the way that the reds want to use him in the way that the game is played and not ability yes i i'd agree with that he you know he kind of stumbled in his first season, but he's been stealing an 88% clip ever since, but not given the type of opportunities that Coleman got. Do you agree, Ben? Yeah, I do agree. Apologies if you said this already, but what was Coleman's success rate?

He was low 80s, if I recall right. So it wasn't like he was making terrible base stealing decisions. He was getting lots of opportunities because he was batting leadoff and he was going constantly, but he wasn't really costing the team runs in that aspect of his game? Yeah, except to the degree that he was possibly stealing bases at times when opening up first base wasn't the strategic thing to do. Uh-huh. Right.

He had an 80—when he was at his peak, his first six years when he led the league and sold bases all six years, he had an 83% rate, which particularly for that era was very good. Yeah. So I agree that Hamilton could steal more bases if he set his mind to it. Hamilton could steal more bases if he set his mind to it. It would help, of course, if he were batting leadoff like Coleman was all the time and if he were getting on base more regularly. But even so, I'm sure that if all he cared about was stealing bases, he could certainly steal more bases than he has. Do you think there's any aspect of it that is about the fact that stolen bases are an injury risk? It's sort of one of the most injurious plays in baseball. Very easy to hurt your finger, to get stepped on, to bang your shoulder, especially the way that slides are so much more violent and creative these days,

that maybe the benefit of a stolen base is less now than it might have been perceived to be, even removing the run expectancy table from the equation? Yeah, I wonder about guys who, you know, somebody like Tim Raines or Ricky Henderson, who are great ballplayers in addition to stealing bases. I sort of wonder why managers would risk that sort of injury and send them 80, 100, 100 and odd times a season to steal. Yeah, I think that that's become a consideration as we become smarter at injury prevention.

And we were all very excited about Billy Hamilton a few years ago when we were anticipating when he would come up and Sam was writing articles about whether it made sense to carry him just as a pinch runner. And we were envisioning Coleman-esque steal totals. And then I think once he arrived, it became clear pretty quickly that, oh, well, this was going to be fun. And we were all going to get excited the first time that he was on first and Yadier Molina was catching and there would be a matchup between those two, that kind of thing. But it became clear pretty quickly that he was not really going to break records. We were not going to see anything that we hadn't seen for decades. But that excitement when we thought we were going to see those things was very tangible. And so I don't want to date

you, but you witnessed the Vince Coleman, Ricky Henderson years in a way that I didn't and probably Sam didn't either. I remember the old Vince Coleman, but I was not around for the triple-digit steel totals Vince Coleman. But I imagine that it was as exciting as the baseball reference page makes it appear. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I wrote in the article, in 85 and 87, Vince Coleman got more MVP support than Tim Raines, Mike Schmidt, Pedro Guerrero, when Tim Raines, Mike Schmidt, and Pedro Guerrero were having typical seasons. He was really a sensation. The Cardinals would come to town because I was a Mets fan then, and that was a big rivalry. And the guy we worried most about was Vince Coleman getting on base and stealing,

which, you know, in retrospect, he didn't get on base that much. So it was a little overblown concern, but we didn't have the obsession with OBP that we do today. And he was really, pretty much from the first day that he was in the majors. Cause like Hamilton, he stole a ton in the minors. He was the guy that you'd, that you'd watch during Cardinals games. Yeah. If I, I, it almost was, it was almost like Vince Coleman existed to put up good stolen base totals. Like it, I don't remember, I guess he was thought of as a good ball player, better than he probably was, but it really felt like the game was almost secondary. It was like he had a hundred stolen bases his first three years.

It felt like, you know, somebody was breaking, was breaking the measurements of the baseball field. So it like he, his part of the game was to build up stolen base totals in a way that I don't think that we would necessarily laud a player quite so much for that same thing. And I guess I might be misremembering. I mean, he was not a very good overall ball player, as Rob has said about six times already. But his rookie year, 2.4 wins above replacement he finished 11th in mvp voting which is you know wildly uh out of touch with where he would have ranked on the war leaderboard if that if they were looking at that in his third year he had 2.8 war and he finished 12th in mvp voting

in his third year he had 0.8 war and he was an all-star that was in his fourth year and in his fifth year he had 1.7 war and he was again an all-star. So there was a feeling that this was doing something for sure. And, you know, Whitey Herzog, when he was with the Cardinals doing most of his best running, Whitey Herzog had built up this idea that he had this indefensible team of rabbits. They had no home run hitters. I think I remember one year they had like their home run leader had like 11 home runs or maybe 13. But everybody stole, everybody bounced off the turf. And it felt like, well, you can't defend this type of offense. And that is probably, that turned out to be basically true, in a sense, but also it wasn't the best offense. Like, like, it'd be like if,

you know, just I'm going to exaggerate, but it'd be like if an NBA player just decided that he was going to dribble at the half court line all game. And you're like, you can't defend me. You can't defend. Well, yeah, but you're not shooting. Like you're just standing out there dribbling. I don't really want to defend you. And so maybe that's another reason that we don't see it anymore is that it's not that good an offense. No, and especially when you're not even getting on base at a league average rate.

And so in the second part of your article, you talked about stolen base attempts rates and success rates. And so we're not all the way back to station to station 1950s baseball, but we are at the lowest rate since what the early mid 70s, early 70s, it seems like is roughly where we are so it's been a while since the game has had this little exciting base running and i guess the orioles are the team that you know is kind of taking that trend to the extreme this year and just never attempting steals at all and they are kind of showing that the steal is pretty

inessential when it comes right down to it. At least if you are a team that hits 250 home runs, you can be a good offense and you can score lots of runs without ever attempting to steal a base. So it's strange because it's such an integral part of baseball as a spectator experience, at least watching stolen bases and stolen base attempts in the Orioles. I've just decided that that is not part of baseball anymore for them. It's not really hurting them either. Right. And the team that's going to undoubtedly lead the league in or lead the majors in stolen base attempts is the Brewers, who will not be playing meaningful games in October. Yeah, right. So we wanted to expand this discussion into a larger one about whether

smarter baseball is better baseball as a spectator experience or more boring baseball, because in Hamilton's case, it seems very clear that we are being deprived of excitement here. And it seems all the more unfair because the Reds don't need to win games. The Reds are 55 and 77 as we speak right now. If they cost themselves a win or something here or there by putting Billy Hamilton in the leadoff slot or having him go crazy on the base paths, it would make zero difference to anyone. They'd have a better shot of getting the number one draft pick. It'd probably make them happy. It would make their fans happy, you'd think. It would be a much better ticket if you knew that Billy Hamilton was going to channel Vince Coleman. So it seems like a very concrete example of league trends that make sense in the aggregate and save teams runs and are more efficient but are costing us something as spectators.

So you brainstormed a bit about some other tactics that might fall into this category. So what else do you think of as things that aren't as common anymore or are more common now and are smart but are boring? Well, the first thing I thought of was balls in play, that it's fun to see the ball get hit on the field and base runners run around and fielders trying to catch it and throw it. And, you know, with the growth of, well, walks aren't really up that much. They're down. But strikeouts and home runs, you know, two-thirds of the three true outcomes reduce that. And to a degree, the old-timers lament that, you know, there's no shame in striking out anymore. It's true.

And it's better to strike out certainly with the runner on first than to hit a sharp ground or to shorten, you know, erase the base runner. But it results in more action on the field being guys walking from the dugout to the batter's box and back to the dugout. So I thought that that was one casualty that immediately came to mind is we just don't see as many balls in play. that immediately came to mind is we just don't see as many balls in play. Not that that's hurt the quality of the game in terms of the outcomes, but certainly the action. Yeah, and I think it's fair to attribute that, at least in large degree, to teams being smarter, right? Because it's partially just, you know, in a sense,

everyone has always known forever that having pitchers throw hard is good and hard throwing pitchers is something that you should try to acquire. But between the different bullpen usage and having guys throw shorter outings and throw higher intensity in those outings, that's part of it. Specialists, that's part of it. Less of a stigma surrounding strikeouts, that's part of it. Less of a stigma surrounding strikeouts, that's part of it too. So you put all of that together and whether it's that or whether it's, you know, it doesn't necessarily just have to be stats or sabermetrics. We could be talking about training techniques and nutrition and who knows what else, whatever is resulting in the higher velocities that we are seeing, the higher pitch speeds we're seeing now, training techniques, exercise plans, all of that stuff can fall under the umbrella of, I think, baseball teams being

smarter. And so I think you're right about that. I want to talk about one particular aspect of that. The pitches per plate appearances seems like an obvious example where it is not actually fun to watch a guy work the count. Like that's, uh, obviously good. Well, it has generally been seen as good practice. It's a result of more awareness of how offense runs. Uh, but, and you know, and, and you want guys who do that on your team. So it's certainly more fun to have to watch a team win than to watch your team lose. Uh, but it's not fun to watch. It's more fun to watch people swing, right? Obviously. And I feel like the trend toward more pitches per plate appearances for a long time was on the hitters, that there was more of an

awareness that working the count was good. There was a belief that getting the best pitcher out of the game or getting his pitch count up was good. And now I think there's a lot less of that on the offensive side. There's less of a assumption that that's good, particularly because it's not really worth getting the pitcher out of the game a lot of the time. And yet pitches per plate appearances continue to go up. Is this now that the pitchers have decided that, or maybe the defenses have decided that more pitches per plate appearances are good for the pitcher? And so we now have the same thing being driven by a completely opposite strategy of like make the batter work more or less. Well, I do know that when a pitcher gets ahead in the count, they're much less likely to throw a strike than when they're behind. I don't know if that's

changed dramatically over the last 20, 30 years, but it's why things like wild pitches and hit batters are much more likely to occur when pitchers are having to count than when they're behind. So there may be, you know, a feeling that once you've got a guy 0-1 or 1-2 that you don't give them a strike, and if it's a disciplined batter, they're not going to run, or they're not going to swing. Yeah, and if you're a pitcher and you know that your pitch count is no longer that big of a deal, and you know that the most successful thing you can do is to get a hitter to go out of the strike zone and either make contact or whiff on it, then now you have a lot of incentive to waste pitches, to nibble.

The pitches per plate appearances this year in Major league baseball it's 3.87 which is up from last year and up from the year before uh and uh just to put that in perspective in um 1989 it was 3.61 so it's been a pretty steady climb and climb and uh and it just keeps it just keeps going even though last summer like there were it seemed like there were a lot of teams that were uh encouraging their hitters to swing early in counts and to be really more aggressive as stat head teams were yeah that was the storyline yeah i wonder whether the one exception to the fewer balls in play equals boring argument is pitchers like andrew, pitchers like Edwin Diaz. When I made my MLB TV game changer list last week of players that I wanted the tool to switch to

when they were in the game, those guys were on my list. I wanted to see Edwin Diaz strike out everyone and Andrew Miller strike out everyone. And I don't know whether some people are already tired of that and whether the idea of a reliever with a near 50% strikeout rate or above 50% strikeout rate is just unappealing to everyone or whether that kind of dominance is still intriguing. And if it is still intriguing, whether it will wear off at some point, because I do enjoy that. I agree on the whole that balls put in play more fun than strikeouts, seeing guys run, seeing fielders field, all of that is good. And yet I really like the Edwin Diaz's of the world. I think, yeah, I think watching Jose Fernandez pitch for a strikeout is exciting and watching Ian Kennedy

pitch for a strikeout is boring. Right. Yeah, that's true. So how do we get rid of one and keep the other? I don't know if we can do that. All right. What else you got, Rob? Well, one thing that I thought of was the idea of preserving pitchers' arms and health is certainly laudable, but it's resulted in not only fewer complete games, which I don't have a big affinity for, but the guy who I always think of, Mike Marshall, the idea of the fireman who comes in when you need to get the other team's best hitters out in the seventh inning or maybe the eighth and the ninth, you know,

so you don't have just the ninth inning closer, which may or may not be smart baseball. But I think it is smart baseball to not ask a relief pitcher to pitch a hundred games a year and go 200 innings. But that, that's something fun that I don't think we'll ever see again. Hey, I, Mike Marshall is one of those guys who's before me. And so, uh, I look at what he did and how he was used and I have a hard time believing that it was actually real, but you, you could, you could answer this for me. Was Mike Marshall representative of the way the game was played or a trend in the game at the time? Or was Mike Marshall just a singular freak that if he were active today, you know, he might also be used in a way that would sort of shock our senses and that there just simply wasn't ever anybody else like him? If he were around today, I just don't see any way he'd be used the same way. But in the era, he was an outlier for sure. But there were, and I don't think, I should check

this first, I don't think there were other relief pitchers who were ERA qualifiers during that time. But it's not, you know, relief pitchers getting low hundreds innings rather than 60, 70, maybe 80, 90 like they do now. Certainly, they pitched a lot more innings. The number of games that they pitched probably hasn't changed that much, but innings per outing were different. So he was extreme in kind of every way. He was crazy outspoken about some of his pitching techniques. He used to have, I remember he had this rule that if kids asked him for autographs,

he wouldn't sign their autographs unless they could show him that they had autographs of other people who had meant something important to them in their life, like their teachers, which I think probably guarantees he didn't have to sign a lot of kids' autographs. So yeah, he was way the right the right side of the curve but he wasn't you know it was a curve that everybody else was still on i uh by the way i do see there are a few quality there are a few relievers not a lot a very small number but i see about five ish pitchers who qualified for the era title with relief innings alone or i guess without making a start and then a few more who uh who would have made it even if they hadn't made one or two spot starts.

There's even like Bob Stanley in 82 won the ERA Plus crown as a reliever and didn't make a single start, and Hoyt Wilhelm did too. Yeah, Wilhelm throwing the knuckleball helped. But yeah, it's inconceivable that we would ever see anyone come close again, let alone make it. And the fact that a player who's in his 30s is not likely to be just as good as he was in his 20s. But we are perhaps being deprived of players we like and players we have some emotional attachment to. There were a lot of old guys who were cut back in the, you know, before today than we might want to romanticize about. I remember growing up in Minnesota, it was a big deal when the Twins let Harvin Kilbrue go. On the other hand, they kept Tony Oliva on as a DH when the poor guy could barely run at all. And he was a sentimental fan favorite for a team that at that point wasn't going anywhere anyway. I think that's been shown that since free agency, players are somewhat less likely to spend

their entire career with one team, but there wasn't as much of it as we might think. But having an old guy stay on either in the bullpen or as a DH slash pinch hitter. I miss that a little. I'm trying to find the active leader for most played for, you know, longest career with one team. And I'm already well, let's see, I'm down to the number 20 player with played appearances, and I still haven't found anybody i'll keep oh it's david right it's david right at number 22 and that's kind of because his like he might make that because his decline was essentially you know snipped and perhaps yeah i mean i i i understand that argument my counter to that argument i, would be that if players were lingering longer than they should have, then maybe it wasn't so much fun to watch them anyway.

You know, like no one's really thrilled that Albert Pujols is playing right now, right? Like when we see Albert Pujols in diminished form and, you know, he's still playable. But when we see him now we don't think oh well great albert pools we we remember how great he was and uh we're happy when we see him no i think just the opposite right we're we're kind of sad when we see him now and see how much worse he is than he was five ten years ago so i don't know whether we're missing out there there are probably some cases where, you know, there's a fan favorite who just had some small role and wasn't helping all that much

and wasn't hurting anyone, but it was just nice to have him around. And maybe that kind of thing is rarer now. But the other, the flip side of that is that we have lots of young guys coming up really early and being really great out of the gate. And that's exciting too. So what we're losing on one end, we're probably gaining or more than making up for on the other. Hey, Albert Pujols has 103 RBI. What do you mean he's not still good? Yeah. I wonder, what do you think people would have thought about Albert Pujols, say 30 years ago, current Albert Pujols? because I tweeted this last week when I happened to be watching the Tigers broadcast, and they were having a serious discussion about whether Albert Pujols or Mike Trout was better. comparing home run totals and RBI totals. And they had the same home run totals and Pujols had more RBI because he drives in trout a lot. But that was a frank discussion. And it was very anachronistic

to hear that in 2016. But what do you think? If this were 1986, 1976, would that be a common line of thought that Pujols is still great because he hit 40 homers last year and he is going to end up as one of the RBI leaders this year? Yeah. How long ago was Joe Carter doing well in the MVP votes? I mean, that was that was 90. So certainly that that I think that that thinking predominated. that thinking predominated. I think there were years when Tony Perez, who always drove in a lot of runs because there were always a bunch of guys on base ahead of him. He was a good hitter too,

but he wasn't the hitter that Morgan, Bench, and Rose were in most years. But I bet you he got more MVP support in a lot of seasons. Actually, he probably did, during his during the years where he was actually seen as like during his good years i think with pools it's a little different because uh he was actually the greatest player of his era and now he's in a decline and so i'm trying to think of who whose decline might have been disguised maybe eddie murray was eddie murray eddie murray seems like he kept on putting up good rbi totals long after he started you know after he was uh a uh you know really truly good player yeah he didn't really either his best years were his peak and he didn't really finish

he only had one yeah i'm not finding one i'm not i have nothing to contribute to this still working on it all right it's ernie banks ernie banks is probably the answer right because ernie banks once he was no longer playing shortstop uh he was no longer as good a hitter as in his peak but he was still ernie banks batting in the middle of a lineup and yeah 36 37 38 he finished uh he got mvp votes all three years years. He was still routinely the Cubs all-star, even though his wars around that time were one, two, and three. He actually had a year. He finished 12th in MVP voting with a negative 0.7 war. And made the all-star team. So there you go there's ernie banks yeah and another thing you brought

up that was interesting was the batting title or a race for any sort of title or honor and we were banding this about on email but there is really no competition that we're as excited about now or nearly as excited about as people used to be excited about the batting title and and you know from your research that it was the big story in some years in some cities oh yeah because i do retro sheet research um and i do a lot of micro filming of game accounts of new york area teams games during the 30s and 40s, and the batting title was absolutely the biggest story in terms of individual races. I was trying to think this morning of an analogy to it.

It's not quite the same as the Maguire-Sosa thing was in 98, because nobody in most years is going after a record. But in terms of the individual race that the newspapers covered most closely, absolutely his batting title. In 1945, which of course that was a war year, so baseball was kind of diluted anyway, but Snuffy Sternweiss won the batting title for the Yankees. And that year, the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers all finished well out of contention for the pennant. And that was kind of the big story once he hit about August in the Daily News, and the New York Mirror, and the New York World Tribune was who was going to win the batting title and whether Sternweiss was going to be able to hold on.

And you're right, it's something we don't even think about anymore. I was checking this morning. In 2014, Justin Morneau won the batting title by four points over Josh Harrison. And I think that if we were to sit here for 15 minutes guessing who the top two hitters were in 2014, we wouldn't get either of them. It's not an issue. And partly it's because, you know, we know that batting average isn't that important

of a metric anymore. And it's not like the on-base percentage crown has replaced it in the public imagination. has replaced it in the public imagination. But also the idea of this being an individual competition has kind of gone away as well. I was reading Dan Epstein's book, Stars and Strikes, about the 1976 season. The batting title there came down to two guys on the Twins and two guys on the Royals. And that was a big story, and it actually ended up in a really ugly controversy.

But the fact that it eng up in a really ugly controversy. But the fact that it engendered a really ugly controversy tells you what a big story the batting title was. And that was 40 years ago. I wonder if we can blame smart baseball for this. We can blame smart baseball for discounting batting average. But why haven't we replaced batting average with some other stat? We certainly haven't decided not to care about stats or about individual performance. So why is it, do you think, does either of you think that we haven't replaced batting average with something we care about just as much? Fragmentation. Yeah, right. Just baseball being a regional game and we're each watching our own teams and aren't paying as much attention to the league or just culture-wide? Yeah, we're each watching. Well, no, I think we're each watching our own stats. And so there isn't necessarily a mass following of any particular stat. The things that you care about are not the things that your uncle cares about.

of any particular stat. The things that you care about are not the things that your uncle cares about. And so if people are not sharing that experience, then it's not really worth writing about. Yeah, 1939, there is no question that the way that you measured who the best batter was was by batting average. And, you know, I might think it's war. You might think it's WRC+. Somebody else could be a total average person. And, you know, do you like on-base percentage? Do you like slugging? I think that lack that there's not a consensus around the one number that we should all watch,

like there was around batting average. I think that drains the excitement from any batting race. And we could, I think, make the case that baseball is more boring because of bullpen management, because benches are smaller and hitters have been replaced by pitchers. And so we get more pitching changes. Pitching changes are boring. We don't get to see the big pinch hit plate appearance because there are no pinch hitters left. And instead, you have to see the worst hitter, your utility man hit in that spot or the worst starter in your lineup just stays in that

spot. So you don't get that kind of dramatic confrontation. You don't get platoons. There's maybe less, well, not less managing because bullpen management is a type of management. But that is certainly something you could say as a result of smart baseball and that teams are trying to optimize their performance. Relievers keep getting more and more effective. You could argue, I guess, whether it actually is optimal and whether teams have taken that too far. But the impulse at least seems to be based on analysis or performance results, unless you just think that it's, you know, everyone looked at Dennis Eckersley and drew the wrong lessons from that and that smart baseball would actually say that you should do something completely different. Yeah, I was kind of torn as to whether the modern bullpen management actually is something we can blame on smart baseball because, you know, there certainly are plenty of us who

would suggest that it's not that smart. Right. Okay. And we've been piling on baseball, smart baseball, and laying all of these terrible developments at smart baseball's door. So what can we credit smart baseball with? In what way has baseball become better? Well— Deafening silence.

Well, no, speaking for myself, I was never a big fan of sacrifice hits. I didn't love the hit and run. And I thought pitch outs were often stupid. And we see a lot less of all of those. So that'll make sense. Yeah, intentional walks, same thing. All of these little small managerial tactics that were probably overapplied in the past and are at all-time lows right now.

And I don't think anyone really misses any of those. I certainly don't. Well, putting a guy with a 270 on base percentage in the leadoff spot, we might have not known that that was stupid 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. But we do now, and we don't see it as much. And that makes sense. Yeah. And that means that we don't have to watch bad bettors as often, which is good, I think. And I mean, we could certainly say that, you know, coaching and training techniques have advanced. And so today's players are just generally better and more talented and more experienced and just play at a higher level than players did 30 years ago.

You could then debate, though, whether that has actually made baseball better. If the rising tide lifts all players, is baseball actually more fun to watch now than it was then? I mean, could you even tell if it's just great players facing great players or almost as great players facing almost as great players? Does it essentially look the same to the spectator? Yeah, and I guess that as the training techniques and selection processes have been sort of an equalizer, you don't get as many outliers. I mean, when's the last time we've had a guy dominate?

Well, I guess Pujols and then Trout have really been the only guys in the last, what, 20 years that have completely dominated the game the way that they have? that have completely dominated the game the way that they have? Yeah, I'd say there's... Right, it's harder for you to dominate in the way that you once might have if everyone is great and everyone's kind of clustered toward the extreme end of human performance more so than they once were. So that's something.

By the way, we forgot to mention one of Sam's suggestions, which was the gaming of service time and delaying rookies coming up. I don't know. On the other hand, you do maybe get guys being good at younger ages and more prepared to play in the majors. But you do get teams waiting until June or whenever it is to call up someone who we could be enjoying sooner than that. And it's not always just the Marlins. No. All right. Have we neglected anything?

Are we giving smart baseball short shrift here? I guess since you have spanned these eras in a way that I haven't, I gather that you don't significantly enjoy baseball any less than you used to, or you probably would not be writing these articles and talking to us right now. But I mean, do you feel this absence in a very visceral way? Or is it just sort of a intellectual, well, baseball would look different. It used to look different. I liked it then. I like it now. Yeah, I'd say that. The thing that it's difficult to separate out

if you've been watching baseball really for more than 20 years is how vastly superior the experience is as a spectator of the sport than it was. You can watch any game at any time with much better camera angles, generally smarter announcers. Going to the ballpark is a more pleasant experience, if certainly more expensive. The quality, year-round, you can read really well-done articles about baseball. well-done articles about baseball.

So all of those things, in my mind, it enhances the experience of a fan so much that, you know, to be honest with you, I really thought that Vince Coleman, those first three years when he was stealing 100-plus bases, that was really cool. But I'll take the fact that I can watch every Cardinals game, if I ever desire to do so over being able to get the New York Times the next morning and see that Coleman went two for four but got three stolen bases. That, you know, baseball has, like, what we're talking about are essentially, you know, market forces or something where teams are doing the thing that is the right thing for them to do to win. And we want them to do that.

Like, it works because they do that. And sometimes that leads to aesthetically displeasing things for us. But, you know, we don't want to keep teams from experimenting and exploring the best way to win. Like, that's why we turn it on. And in the meantime, these same sort of, well, different market forces have made baseball more interesting to watch and follow than you could possibly have imagined 20 or 30 years ago. And analyze for people like us. And analyze. Yeah, exactly. And I imagine that if I were a Reds fan and Billy Hamilton was doing a Vince Coleman thing, it'd be really fun for 29 teams fans, but it would suck for me because I'm not, you know, I'm not that easily fooled anymore.

And I'm probably glad that I can, you know, that we can all root for a team that generally does fairly smart things. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I agree. I think we're, if we're talking, we've been talking purely about the game on the field and the tactics and the strategies and the player development, that kind of thing. So you can debate whether you would sort of swap the on-field product that we have today with what we had in the 80s, say, but everything else I think is just a landslide victory in favor of now. But everything else, I think, is just a landslide victory in favor of now. And if you have to weigh that against the on-field changes, I wouldn't go back. Let's put it that way. Absolutely not. And I think there's, you know, as much as we all decry, especially pitcher injuries, we're not seeing as many young pitchers, guys in their 20s or early 30s, just leaving the game because their body breaks down.

There's Gary Null and Sandy Koufax. Even arguably a guy like Dwight Gooden was overused like crazy well before he discovered recreational drugs. The fact that the guys that we like to see play are able to stay on the diamond healthily longer, I think, is a victory for smart baseball as well. Alright, well we will link to these articles in the usual places. People should check them out. You can

find Rob on Twitter at Cran, C-R-A-N underscore boy. Rob, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Alright, so that will do it. underscore boy. Rob, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. This was fun. All right. So that will do it. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. My friend Thank you. You can buy our book, The Only Rules It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team.

Check out the website at theonlyrulesithastowork.com for more information, and please leave us a review on Amazon and Goodreads if you like the book. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. I talked to Terry Francona about his use of Andrew Miller. I also interviewed a bullpen catcher

about why being a bullpen catcher might be the best job in baseball. You can email me and Sam at podcast at baseballprospectus.com or by messaging us through Patreon. We hope that you have a nice long Labor Day weekend. We will talk to you next week. The stones and the red are me No, I don't need much When I still have me you