Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 969: The Literally Hot Hitter

Episode Date: October 28, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about mean-spirited nicknames, then answer emails about Kyle Schwarber’s bat, Jon Lester’s long con, the neglected White Sox drought, the Nationals’ 2016 “success,” overcoming bad broadcasters, paying to play in the World Series, and more.

Take your past and throw it on the fire. Take your past and throw it on the fire. Did everything turn out like you thought it would be? Take your past and throw it on the fire Hello and welcome to episode 969 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN.

Hello, sir. Hi, Ben. How are you doing? It's okay. How do you feel about this World Series so far? It's fine. I can't give it more than that, but plenty of time left for some exciting games. Yeah,

I don't know that you really make your money in the first two games. I guess not. I don't know. I mean, you want to have a couple good games in the series, but I think that an overwhelming majority of the value is going to come by how many games you have and not by what sort of games they are i mean clearly if they're all blowouts that's no

good like yesterday's game was a total slog yeah not that interesting at all but you know it was fine like through half the game it was worth watching um and uh so you want to have a couple that are that are good uh that are classics but the difference between a five game series and a seven game series is night and day in my yeah and so right you know the fact that the cubs haven't won both of the first two and taken all the suspense out of it is fine it's good it's a strength all right Anything else you want to talk about? Yeah, sure. I, as you know, as I've mentioned, I'm sort of slowly going through the Bill James historical abstract, the first edition of it. And I, yesterday, was reading a page from the 1930s chapter in which our friend Fat Freddy

Fitzsimmons shows up. And I was just... Out to lunch when necks were handed out. That's what I hear. And I wanted to... I realized as I was reading this, though, that this is like two of the greatest pages of baseball writing I think I've ever read. There are three little topics on these two pages

and they're all wonderful. And so I'm going to just read the whole two pages uh-huh okay i'm just gonna do it you ready that's a lot of reading it is i'll probably yeah i'll probably uh i'm gonna edit a little bit out but not much okay okay all right first first section nicknames okay he has a every decade he talks about the trends and nicknames. Okay. He has a, every decade he talks about the trends in nicknames. This is a really good book, by the way. Yeah. Which, hey, in case you've never heard of Bill James.

So he has, he talks about trends in nicknames or what nicknames were like. So this has a, okay. Nicknames in the 30s got nasty. There have always been a few less than complimentary nicknames around, sometimes more than a few. been a few less than complimentary nicknames around, sometimes more than a few, but in the 30s, under the pressure of economic catastrophe on the one hand and journalism as hero worship on the other, nicknames in large numbers emerged as a way of defining the limitations of one and all. Harry Davis was called Stinky. Frankie Hayes was called Blimp. Red Lucas was the Nashville Narcissus. Ernie Lombardi? Schnoz. Eric McNair, boob. Hugh McCally,

who lost 76 games in four years, was therefore called Losing Pitcher McCally. Walter Beck, a pitcher with a career record of 38 and 69, was called Boom Boom. You didn't want to be fat in this climate or it became part of your name. Freddie Fitzsimmons, a fine pitcher, was called Fat Freddy. Babe Phelps was also called Blimp. Walter Brown was called Jumbo. Alfred Dean was Chubby Dean. Bob Fothergill, of course, was called Fatty.

And a couple of players were called Porky. Johnny Riddle was called Mutt. Bob Seeds was called Suitcase because he was traded or released so often. Nicknames in this way tended to call attention not to the player's strengths, but to his weaknesses. Leo DeRocher was not called the Little General or the Peerless Leader, but the Lip. Nick Cullip, whose face was beet red,

was called Old Tomato Face. Harvey Hendrick was called Gink. Sammy Bird, a defensive replacement for the Bambino, was called Babe Ruth's Legs, a nickname which has no parallel that I know of. Dom D'Alessandro was called Dim Dom, a play on sounds. Bill Zuber was called Goober Zuber, a terrific play on sounds, but again, not high on my list of things I should like to be known as.

In this context, even nicknames that were intended to be complimentary, or at least innocent, started to sound suspicious. Maury Arnovich was Snooker. Harry Danning was Harry the Horse. Odell Hale was Bad News. I'm going to skip to the punchline. Hazen Shirley Kyler, who stuttered as a youth, was called Kai Kai because that was what he would say when attempting to pronounce his last name which is the meanest name i've ever heard i cannot believe you would call that to a person's face so uh all right the rest of the

nicknames are more more the same and then okay so next section is that possible this is just such an amazing stat okay this is like the ultimate fun fact. This might be the greatest fun fact ever. It's just been buried in a book this whole time. Charlie Gerringer in 1936 led the American League in both errors by a second baseman and fielding percentage by a second baseman. The fluke occurrence happened because only four men played regularly at second base in the American League that year, and each of the four happened to make exactly 25 errors. Geringer, with more total chances than the others, thus led in both errors, a four-way tie, and fielding percentage by himself. Great fun fact. Wow, yeah. Finally, new terms and expressions. Sometime between 1925 and 1940, baseball, with a space in between, became baseball, one word.

That seems rather odd. You don't usually think of the spelling of a word changing while it is in common use, being written down about a million times a day. It seems kind of like president suddenly becoming precedent, where the I is now an A, or suburb suddenly becoming subspace-erb. The guides were the last holdouts using base space ball as two words through 1940. There's probably some old fogey out there who is still offended by this corruption of the language. 1940. Yeah, I definitely would have guessed earlier than that.

I would too. Two pretty good pages of baseball writing. Yeah, it's many good pages of book. All right, so we are going to answer some emails now. I guess I'll start with a couple quick ones. This one from Brady. If a pitcher comes in after pitching the previous day, is he coming in on zero or one day's rest? And you have answered this already. It's zero days rest. Yeah. It is confusing. I do have to think through it myself to remember how many days, what counts as a day of rest. Yeah.

It's not just a day since you last pitched. It's a full day when you didn't pitch. A day that you rested. Yeah. This past week, I've been going through the confusing math with my daughter of how many days it is till Halloween, where you can constantly like you, you can't decide which days you're going to be counting. So I've always preferred wake ups as a unit of, of, uh, of measurement to define the gap between two events. All right. Quick one. I think also from Anton who says watching last night's game, I saw Kyle Schwarber rotating his bat

In front of the heater in the dugout The commentator mentioned Before you go on I was struck last night by How far behind the times Baseball stadiums are when it comes to To heaters What do you call those

Heat lamps I put a gIF of that. Oh, okay. So when I, I mean, you know, I was, I remember going to Cheesecake Factory in 1999 and sitting under a heat lamp and thinking, well, this is futuristic. But that was almost 20 years ago. And you see them last night. The dugouts all look really cold. The fans in the, at the field level seats right behind home plate, they probably paid like

four grand, as far as I could tell, were cold, no heat lamps. And so now that you mentioned this, I was wondering if, in fact, if there was a heat lamp that has been identified, but it sounds like you're saying just a space heater. Well, yeah, there's a gif of it in my article from today about the game, because it was such a strange looking thing. It was like a, I guess it's a gif of it in my article from today about the game because it was such a strange looking thing. It was like a, I guess it's a space heater, but it looks like a small portable jet engine that's just exposed to the air in the dugout. There doesn't even seem to be like a, I guess there's like a grill protecting the players from the flames, but it's a pretty unsafe looking space heater i'm sure it is actually safe but anyway oh wow yeah it's like uh it's an inferno in there so schwerber bent over and kind of rotated his bat in front of this in front of this open flame so i thought that was

curious anyway anton thought it was curious too He says the commentator mentioned That he was warming up the wood Is this a common thing? I hadn't seen it before What advantage would there be to warming up the bat? Could a player do the opposite? Say soak it in liquid nitrogen

So it would shatter for a good bunt Are there rules about adulterating the bat like this? So yeah, I couldn't figure it out either. I figured that if you made the bat warmer, if anything, it would be softer, and then it wouldn't drive the ball as hard. But I also figured that on a night that cold, by the time he actually got to the plate, it wouldn't make any difference anymore. Anyway, I emailed Alan Nathan, of course, baseball physicist. And he says, yes, I remember that from last night and I was going to tweet about it, but got distracted. Note that

he is heating the handle. The handle, right. So can I give my non-trained suspicion? Sure. Okay. So first of all, of course, Adam's when heated expands. So he might just be trying to make the sweet spot bigger. Like you can't miss he's basically swinging uh yeah you know one of those uh bat balloon bats that you win at a carnival uh now but uh i would have guessed that he uh just pine tarred it and he wanted to uh sort of dry the pine tar oh yeah i didn't think of that and neither did alan alan says note that he is heating the handle i suspect the only reason is that it feels better on a cold day, which also makes sense. He's not heating the handle, though, either.

He's heating what you would call the handle if he made contact with the bat, with the ball. Like, oh, he hit it off the handle. True, but it's not where your hand is. But it's not where he grips. It's nowhere close to where he grips. Hmm. Yeah, and Alan says, I have some vague recollection that someone actually investigated how heating a wood bat affects performance a few years ago. I'll see if I can dig up the report. He hasn't yet. But the bottom line was that there was no effect expected and none observed for wood bats. There may very well be an effect for composite bats, which are not used in MLB. Yeah, I look, I reject, I reject all explanations that have been offered so far. I believe that it is that he is trying to preemptively reduce the vibrating pain that

you get when you hit a baseball off the handle in cold weather. And that this is not effective, that it is an old wives tale, but that that is what he's doing. Maybe it's some sort of symbolic gesture to make himself hot. Is it also, is it at all possible that, I am only watching the gif here. Yeah. Are we certain that this is not just, that we're misreading the context here at all and that he doesn't even know the heater is there? I think he does. He's pretty clearly rotating it. It's like an

animal suspended over a spit or something he's rotating his bat yeah but you don't see that i don't know you maybe have but i don't see the 10 seconds before or after this and you know maybe he's uh i don't know i don't know what the other options would be i don't need i don't either but there's only a second or two before that. The camera didn't get him bending over to do this. It just picked it up mid-rotation, but pretty curious. I would give it a 20% chance that what he's doing has nothing to do with the heater, but that means that it's very most likely that it is.

But anytime you see human behavior that is unusual and strange, there's often explanations that you aren't even imagining. And that grabbing the most obvious one in front of you is quite often wrong. But I agree with you. All right. Question from Jake. Let's say that Jon Lester cares only about championships. He doesn't care about money, accolades, or any regular season goals.

In game seven, with two outs and the bases loaded in the ninth, protecting a one-run lead, he picks off a runner on first, thus clinching the World Series for the Cubs. In a post-game interview, he admits he's had this move the entire time and has been running a career-long con just for this moment. He also adds that we're all idiots for thinking he couldn't throw to first. With the amount of championships added strictly from this play outweigh his career long inability to hold on runners and it's it's not actually a career long but yeah a few years long so we talked about we've brought this uh idea up at times as a as a lark that this is a long con and we've we've rejected it we have found moments where if it was a long con, he would have had ample cause to take advantage at that time.

The leverage was high enough that he certainly would have used it then. In the playoffs even, right? Right, in the playoffs. In the playoffs particularly. That's when we've, I think, said this. Taking the question seriously, though, the odds are that Game 7 is not going to, that game seven is not going to happen. That, like, you can't, you can't run it.

If you're running a long con in your life that involves you getting to game seven of the World Series, that con is probably not going to pay off. How many people in the world have ever played in a game seven? Like, 400 maybe? Like, in history? Yeah, it's pretty rare. And you gotta, you know you got to be on the mound for that game seven which lester is not scheduled to be on the mound like he had to somehow know back in 2014 when he was blowing the wild card game that two years from now he'd be

pitching game seven for a world series on a world series team which there's just no way of knowing that would happen and in fact almost certainly won't happen. John Lester will probably not pitch game seven of this World Series. So at a certain point, you have to decide that now's as good a time to put your chips in as any other. And he has had many of those moments. Yeah. And people used to say this about David Ortiz and why he never bunted when the shift was on. And I think Russell Carlton may even have written something about this. And the flaw in that theory was that David Ortiz had played in World Series games.

He had played at the most important moments it's possible to play in. So if he was waiting for one of those, then it would have happened already. All right. Question from Alex. All the talk about the Cubs and what their World Series means for Chicago baseball got me thinking about their crosstown rivals' similar season back in 2005. I was only a young teenager then and spent much less time reading

the baseball internet than I do now, but it seems like the White Sox breaking an 87-year drought was oddly lost to history compared to the Red Sox, Cubs, and even Indians' efforts. Why do you think this is? I imagine winning a year after the Red Sox did didn't help. Curse fatigue, maybe.

There wasn't an iconic moment of agony beforehand like Bartman, Buckner, or even Edgar Renteria. And the team itself came out of nowhere and then descended back down to nowhere, while the 2004 Red Sox and potentially the 2016 Cubs have some of their generation's most famous stars in multiple years of postseason series. But is it basically that, even for a big market team, we just don't care about the White Sox as a franchise? I think that all of those reasons played some part of it. And I think there are two other things. One is that I think that he is forgetting some of the attention paid to that. I certainly remember the White Sox growing up as

being one of three teams with this drought. And so I don't think that it was overlooked that much. I think a lot less attention was paid to it. And America didn't, you know, stop and celebrate for them necessarily the same way that they will for the Cubs. It seems to be overlooked more in retrospect, maybe. Like, no one's bringing it up now, really. I mean, I don't know why you necessarily would, but everyone's bringing up the Red Sox because Theo is the common link there, and there are other common links. But still, I mean, it's still a Chicago team that just about a decade ago broke a very long drought. I think also, this maybe isn't fair to say and maybe it isn't but maybe it's true and if it is true then maybe it's still not fair to the white

socks but i just i think that the white socks the red socks fan as an abstract idea and the cubs fan as an abstract idea have always been much more romantic and sort of kind of significant. And maybe that's chicken and egg. Maybe that's basically what he's asking. It could be chicken and egg. It could be that the droughts took hold much earlier for all these reasons that he described and therefore those fans became overly romanticized. But I don't have a vision of a White Sox fan the same way that I have a vision of a Cubs

fan and a Red Sox fan. And so that might be relevant as well. Profile heartbreaking moments maybe make sense. So, yeah, I think probably a combination of those things. I can't think of any other factors that really would have played a part. Yeah. All right. Question from Frederick. Just listen to your latest podcast, which was excellent. Thank you, Frederick.

However, I'm not sure how you guys can consider the national season a success after another embarrassing playoff series loss. The Nats were the rebuilt Cubs before the rebuilt Cubs. They drafted can't miss prospects, Harper and Strasburg, the very good Anthony Rendon and Lucas Giolito the following year. In all, they had five top 15 picks in consecutive years. They've also made outstanding trades for Trey Turner, Joe Ross, Gio Gonzalez, Tanner Roark, just like the rebuilt Cubs. Like the rebuilt Cubs, they added through free agency, et cetera, et cetera. And the up Cubs, they added through free agency, etc., etc. And the upshot is yet they haven't won a playoff series ever. Despite being the best team in the NL since 2012,

they cannot advance out of the first round. For the amount of money they've spent, the top players they have on their roster, how can you not consider their season a big fail? Can you guys please reevaluate their quote unquote successful season? And they also gave Strasburg seven year extension. That alone should be considered a failure. So I didn't really realize this, but the only reason that this franchise, even going back

to their formation, has ever won a playoff series is because the one time the Expos made the playoffs was in the 81 strike year. And so they had a division series and they won that division series. Otherwise, if not for the strike, they would, which who cares? That's not a qualifier that probably matters to anyone. But if not for that strike, they would have never in 47 years have ever won a playoff series. That's amazing. Yeah. All right. Yeah. That seems fair. I don't know. I just, I don't feel like, I mean, certainly they wouldn't consider that their playoff run to be a success. If you, if you told them at the beginning of the year that they were going to make the playoffs and that they would lose in, in five to the Dodgers in the first round, they would say,

that's horrible. We should do something about that. But they, you didn't start with that premise. You started with a team that didn't make the playoffs last year, that had a formidable division opponent in the Mets. And making the playoffs is successful. They weren't a sure thing. They won a lot of games. They were a good team. They're still a good team next year. I mean, for the reasons that I think we stated, I think that what makes it a success and it's, it's one of the least successful of the successes that we, I think we only called the Dodgers a non-success out of all the playoff teams. And so maybe they're the next closest, but I think that the key thing here is that they didn't have to weaken their future to make the playoffs. Their future does not look really any weaker next year than it did this year.

And the players that he describes, the good moves, the additions, Harper, Strasburg, Giolito, Turner are all still there. You can make the case that a couple of them were less reliably stars or are less reliably stars than they appeared a year ago. And so maybe that hurts. But this is a, you know, they basically did what they set out to do until losing a couple of very close games against, you know, a very good team and a historically great pitcher. Yeah, I guess in the sense that they went home more disappointed than the average team, I think like when their actual flight home probably for the winter probably felt more disappointing than the average team's flight home did. So maybe that makes it less successful. But I think if you describe the season at the beginning of the year to the owner, he would not

have fired any, any front office or on field staff, he would have said. Well, sounds like a job well done. Yeah, it's just, I think there's a difference between disappointment and failure. I think you can be disappointed and still acknowledge that you did everything you could. It just kind of comes down to your philosophical stance on the playoffs and five game series and there's only so much you can do to ensure that you win that it's much harder to ensure that you make it there and they did that and all the reasons you said they have a good chance to to be there again so yeah i i don't know i don't think i can say failure i guess like in the context of the franchise, I mean, if you win the division every year, then the only thing left is to win a playoff series.

And so maybe that kind of becomes your only goal. Like you just winning the division or making the playoffs is not even that worthwhile a goal because you've done that before. And so maybe you could consider it not really a success if you just keep doing the same mildly disappointing thing over and over again even if it's still an achievement so i see what frederick is saying i do too i do too but i don't feel like i mean we have to think about the fans that we're talking about these are washington fans that the his the 40 years before that are completely irrelevant uh and i don't really feel like there's

any real sort of sense of fatigue about the Nationals. I mean, maybe there's a little bit of it, but a team that's been in your city for 12 years, 11 years has given you, you know, a half decade of winning, not utter dominance, but it's not like, there's no 85 year old in Washington who's been waiting their whole life for the Nationals to win a World Series. Waiting for the Senators, maybe. Yeah. And so I think that it's still a ways away from feeling any of that sort of franchise urgency that some franchises, I think, justifiably have. Yep. Agreed. All right. Play index? I think justifiably have. Yep. Agreed. All right. Play index. Sure. Uh, this play index, uh, was encouraged by a listener, uh, named Jonathan who, uh, tweeted at us after the Dodgers, after one of the Dodgers games. Uh, I feel like this is the entrance to a play index rabbit hole. The Dodgers

had 26 at bats tonight. So when I was I was a kid, I remember distinctly having a conversation with my dad where we tried to figure out, probably I tried to figure out, he probably figured out quite quickly, but I tried to figure out what the fewest plate appearances a team could have in a game is. And so Ben, what's the answer? The fewest plate appearances? Yeah. Fewest plate appearances that a team can have Nobody's expecting anything from you here I asked you a little bit of a puzzler A little bit of a riddle

And you don't have the benefit of 45 minutes sweeping the brick patio To think this through You have 45 seconds on a podcast Nobody will judge you They will probably in fact enjoy the show more if you get a little bit wrong. 24. All right. It's 20. Well, it's not 24 because if you had, you would have to score a run to, in order to not have to play the bottom of the night. So 20, 25 in a nine inning game, 25, but really the answer is 13. Cause you could have a game

rained out, uh, after four and a half, uh, in which you you win one nothing as the home team on a solo home run or something of the sort. And so that would be 13. So 13 in a game or 25 in a nine inning game. And so I will just get out of the way that in fact, there have been three 25 plate appearance games in major league history. The first one was in 1915, and then they went 77 years without one. And in the meantime, my dad and I puzzled this out. So at the time, if we'd had Playindex, we would have known that this scenario we imagined had only happened one time in history. But it then happened again in 1992 between Atlanta and Pittsburgh. And then it just happened again. 20 years later, it happened again between Houston and San Diego in 2012. And I meant to, but didn't get around to looking up the game stories

of the time to see if anybody noted that. If I were the beat writer and I did notice that, and I knew that it was only the third time in major league history, I'd be pretty excited and I would lead with it. Especially if the home team, the home team. Oh yeah. Of course the home team won. All right. Okay. To answer your second question, has the 13 plate appearance game ever happened? Yes, it has happened twice. Once in 1913 and then once in 1971. So we were in a 45-year drought. Oh, drought, because it's a rainout. We were in a 45-year drought of the 13 plate appearance game. But then that's not what this question was asking. This question was asking something different. This was 26 at bats, not plate appearances, but at bats. And of course, if you imagine a very simple baseball game where, say, every batter hits a fly out to, you know, to the outfield,

except one of their fly outs goes over the fence and they otherwise hold their opponent scoreless, that would be 25 plate appearances, 25 outs. But you could, of course, have fewer at-bats than plate appearances. Wouldn't be easy, but you could do it. You could, for instance, have one of those fly outs. Instead of being a fly out, it could be a walk, which is a plate appearance, but not an at bat. And then that walk could get wiped out either on a double play or on a caught stealing or attempting to advance on one of the following fly outs. One way or another, it could be an out that does not take an at-bat.

Similarly, that walk could come around to score on a sacrifice fly or a wild pitch or something. And instead of having a home run, that could be a 25th plate appearance but not an at-bat. So I went looking to see what the fewest at-bats in a game is, and we know that the fewest plate appearances possible is 25. We also know that the sequence of events that would lead to fewer at-bats than plate appearances in a game like this is fairly unlikely or unusual or sort of nonstandard. So now, Ben, I'm going to ask you to guess what is the fewest number of at-bats in a nine-inning game in history?

Huh, 22. 22, not a bad guess. There have been some 22s. There have been a few 22s, like 14 22s. There have been eight 21s. There have been three 20s. There have been a few 22s, like 14 22s. There have been eight 21s. There have been three 20s. And Ben, one time there was a game in which a team had 19 official impacts. Wow. Which is crazy.

How did that happen? I'm going to describe it. So remember, we're starting with a baseline of 25. We know that there have to be 25 plate appearance-like events, in which a plate appearance is either a runner reaching base, because somebody has to score, or a hitter making an out, because 24 outs have to occur. So those are our 25. So we have to get rid of six of those. And in fact, well, I'll just go through it. So first inning, the Orioles and the A's in 1964. First inning, ground out, ground out, strikeout. Okay. Three up, three down. There's three. Incidentally, there was a walk, not a walk, there was an error that inning. So the A's also

had an error and most errors are plate appearances, but this one was not because it was an error on a foul ball. The third baseman dropped it. So it counts as an error, but not a plate appearance or an at-bat. All right. So three up, three down. Second inning. Fly ball, strikeout, walk, strikeout. So we have one runner left on base, but it was on a walk.

Doesn't matter. Third inning. Fly ball, line out, fly ball. Three up, three down. We're good. Bottom of the fourth. Walk, stolen base, fly ball, line out, fly ball. Three up, three down. We're good. Bottom of the fourth, walk, stolen base, fly ball, walk, fly ball, strikeout. So five batters, but only three at bats. Two of them left stranded.

So we are still at the minimum number of at bats, but not played appearances. All right. Bottom of the fifth, fly ball, walk, sacrifice, fly ball. Fly ball, walk, sacrifice, fly ball. So no run has been scored, but we are still at three outs per through five. We're on pace for a 25. All right. Bottom of the sixth.

Fly ball, walk, ground ball, double play. We've cut one off of our 25. We're down to 24 is in reason. All right. We have a lot of ground to make up here. We do. I know. I was panicking.

When I went through this, I was panicking when I went through this. I was panicking thinking that this was going to be a, like a bookkeeping glitch. Yeah. Bottom seven, walk, sacrifice, ground out, base runner out,

advancing. Oh, all right. So, uh, I guess maybe like tried to steal home, something like that. So now we are at,

uh, we have, we have shaved two of the six we need. Bottom eight, double, but how are we going to get there? Double. Okay. So that's an at bat. Yeah. Bunt ground out. How did I get there? Wait, we're not going to get there. Oh, so, oh, that's right. The sacrifice earlier, the sacrifice didn't count. Okay. So that's three. We got three down. Did I lose another sacrifice?

There was another sacrifice. I forgot. I forgot to count the sacrifices. So the sacrifice in the fifth and the sacrifice in the seventh. Both count as outs, but not at bats. So we've shaved four. All right. Double, sacrifice.

So that's five. Sacrifice, fly. So that's six. All right. So there's five. Sacrifice fly. So that's six. All right. So there we go. So we had, I think we had three sacrifice bunts, a sacrifice fly, a double play, and a runner caught advancing. So this probably couldn't happen in 2016. Not enough bunts. Not enough. No, right. It'd be challenging. But you could do it with enough double plays. I think that would probably be your best chance.

All right. So there was a rabbit hole. Yeah. And we went down it. All right. You can discover your own play index rabbit holes at baseballreference.com. Use the coupon code BP when you sign up to get the discounted price of $30 on one year subscription. All right.

Nathan says, you've recently discussed how much you'd pay as a general manager for a player to play just in the World Series. But how much would the average player pay for the chance to play in the World Series? And I think, I mean, it depends on the parameters here. If he just gets to be added to the World Series roster of a team that he wasn't playing for already, I'm not sure anyone would pay for that. It would be a very uncomfortable situation. How much would a player have to be paid to do it? Because I feel like if the Indians called up Cole Calhoun today and said,

you fit what we're doing. We'd like you to play the next five days for us. Do you think that Cole Calhoun would do that? Or do you think it would feel just too weird and not team spirited? If you're not in the organization, yeah, you'd have to pay a lot because I mean, every player wants to play in the World Series, but this brings none of the honor of playing in the World Series. You didn't earn it at all. You just paid for it. And on top of that, there's the awkwardness of, I guess, having to take someone's roster spot or something. So, yeah.

The answer to this question is none. But let's say that there was no union considerations, that you didn't have to worry about offending your union, and that you had the chance to play for the Cubs. Are the Cubs stronger going into next year than they are this year? Well, probably wouldn't expect them to do as well. Let's say next year, because A, I think the Cubs project at least as good, maybe better next year than they did going into this year. I think that at the moment, their division rivals probably project a little worse next year than they did this year. And I don't want to skew this by having it be a historic Cubs drought-breaking victory. So let's assume that the Cubs win this World Series and go into next year

as the clear favorites in the majors. You don't have to worry about angering your union. You are a top free agent. Say you're Jose Bautista. 12 teams have offered you identical contracts. And so that is your market value. And you can go anywhere you want of those 12. So there's guaranteed to be a city with avocados. Now, let's say that that contract is four years and $100 million, okay? Okay. So how much do you think Jose Bautista would demand to sign with the Cubs? Just knowing that they're the favorite?

Knowing that they're the clear favorites to win the World Series, right, exactly. Okay. So last winter, we seemed to see some Cubs discounts. We seemed to. With Zobrist and I don't know who else, but Lackey maybe. But that was also historic Cubs World Series, possibly. Okay, so maybe that doesn't apply anymore. So just for the favorite, assuming all else is equal,

I'd say he'd take, instead of 4-100, he'll take 4-95. And let's say the choices are between the Cubs and, and he only has one offer of 4-100. Everybody else in the league has offered him 4-20. They just are lowballing him. But the Twins have offered him 4-100. So he can play either with the Twins for the next four years or the Cubs for the next four years.

What does he demand from the Cubs? So he can go to the Twins for 4-100? He could go to any team in baseball for 4-20. He can go to the Twins for 4-100, and he's negotiating with the Cubs. So the Cubs will not go to 100. Where does he say yes? I don't know if there's a number where they would both say yes. Well, it doesn't matter what the Cubs would say. The Cubs,

maybe we don't know what the Cubs think. The Cubs are the dealer. We don't see their down cards. I mean, I said 495 before, so I think this time he would say 490. You don't think that he would give up $10 million to spend the next four years in Chicago winning World Series as opposed to ending his career on the Twins? Are you saying that because you think the Twins might be good at some point in the next four years? Because maybe I need to pick a different team. Yeah, well, if we just said generic worst team or team with the worst outlook yeah that might change things and i guess it changes things that this will be his last contract probably and this is his last chance so and he's made plenty of money already so i think with those

considerations maybe now he goes down to I mean because only one team Has offered him 4 in 100 He might start to doubt I don't know that he's actually worth it Just because no one else Will offer him anything near that So maybe he'll go down to Eh I'd say

4 in 75 now So if the Cubs offered 74.5 million dollars You think he would turn it down And go to the Twins? If he rounds up, no. I actually don't have any idea what the answer to this question is. We almost never get to see it in action because we just assume that players feel an obligation to take close to the most money. But I would like to think that he would take less to be in a

situation he would like, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I forget what the original question was. The original question was... The thing about the first example I gave, the first question I gave is that of those 12 other teams that have offered him this, like the Cubs might be the favorites, but only by a little bit over the Red Sox or over the Indians or over Astros or over any number of other teams. And so it's not like he's choosing between the Cubs and the Twins in that scenario. And if his priority is winning, he could probably do that while also getting the most money and being in a cool place. All right. Question from Matt. Every time MLB broadcasters say, now we go to New York for the review, I hear missed opportunity for MLB and for mid-market cities across America. Presuming the current structure of a single league wide replay hub, that hub need not be in New York, the city with the greatest brand awareness on earth. Why not get creative with the location of the replay hub?

with the location of the replay hub. Possible ideas include auction the location rights to a high-bidding city that sees an opportunity to get its name out there, to our friends in Des Moines, to make the replay booth a traveling circus where replay officials conduct reviews inside a fishbowl that fans can see. Picture doing replay inside a sportsbook in Vegas where it's just part of the sideshow.

My question is, where should replay be held to maximize fan enjoyment, MLB profitability, and general ridiculousness, since replay seems unintentionally optimized for this as is? Have you ever been in the replay room? I have not been in it, but I have looked through the door. Yeah, yeah. I've been there.

I've looked through the window, and it's a big operation. It's not like a couple of monitors. It's a sizable room with big banks of TVs and everything. So it would be tough to take it on the road, but not impossible. I don't know. I like it in New York. Well, it certainly makes the most sense for MLB to have it in New York and that it's in MLB headquarters or MLB headquarters in Chelsea and everyone's

there if you need technicians or whatever. And it's easier for umpires to get there because there has to be an umpire there. So if there is a traveling replay bus or something, then you have to arrange for the umpires to meet that bus and rotate in and out. So it's definitely better for baseball to have it in an easy, central, convenient location. But for the viewer, for the spectator, it would be more amusing, I suppose, if it were in some public place or in some place you wouldn't expect it to be, but not enough to make it worth it.

I don't know how much you could get for the naming rights to the replay room. Maybe some small town would pay something, its tourist board, so that it could get mentioned on major league broadcasts all the time. I don't know. I think the appeal to New York gives it an air of authority that it might not have if you appealed to Des Moines, but maybe that's just me being big city centric. All right, last one from Rob. I'm a lifelong baseball fan, Yankees at the major league level and any minors, especially the mud hens and the lug nuts. Anyway,

I loved your book and I read it right before picking up Brian Kenny's book between the two. I'm convinced I need to watch or listen to baseball in a different way. Unfortunately, as a Yankees fan, I am relegated to listening to their coverage on radio most of the time. And he goes on to list some examples of the Yankees radio coverage not being very friendly to sabermetrics. And he says, do you have any recommendations for how to listen to a game when the announcers are stuck in the past worse than the manager? Duck in the past, worse than the manager. You're kind of out of luck, unless you're, I'm assuming that you're in New York, in which case, well, MLB Radio, Game Day Radio is not blacked out, right?

It's just the TV is blacked out? I believe that's correct. Yeah, I think radio is easy. Yeah, so if you choose to pay for MLB Game Day, you can get the visiting team's feed and still listen to the game. So that's one way. And if you can find your way to a TV, the Yankees have David Cohn, and he is very analytics friendly and is always citing articles from baseball perspectives and fan graphs. So you'll get a dose of that there. and fan graphs, so you'll get a dose of that there. And otherwise, I think you don't really need to rely on the broadcasters to educate you, right? You can find many other sources. There's tons of other sources, and I think that it's also healthy to have a lot of different sort of philosophies reflected

in your consumption of baseball or anything else. I tend not to have any problem with broadcasts that are not, you know, whatever stat head or anything like that. I, I almost, I don't think I care about that really at all, as long as it is not kind of cartoonishly or really at all hostile toward it. I don't like hearing people with like grudges, insulting people, insulting people. That's not good. And so if you're one of the, if you are unlucky enough to have insulting broadcasters, then you got to find another way. But if they just view baseball in a, in a different way and in a way that, uh, that observes different aspects of the game, then maybe Ben and I do, I think that can still be really

strong and you can get a lot out of that. Most of the broadcasts that I don't like, most of the broadcasters I don't like, it really has almost nothing to do with where they are on the baseball stat political spectrum. I just don't like certain voices. There's some people whose tone when they speak who's um sort of manner of speaking kind of it's not like a flaw but i just find it somewhat less comfortable less soothing um like if you have a real strong radio voice where you're um like really like speaking into a microphone i guess uh i tend not to like that as much for personal preference just like uh how i don't like xtc the band just because i just can't stand the singer's voice even though he's very talented i just don't like it uh and and other people love it that's good uh but what am

i saying here this is xtc yeah you don't like some radio broadcast i don't like some radio broadcast I don't like some radio broadcasting Because of how they sound I have very few though that I think Anybody's like harming me There are a few that I won't say But very few for the most part I just think that they're either

Really enlivening the game for me Or they're just neutral They're neutral descriptors of the event Yeah I never care if a broadcaster Is shouting out the game for me or they're just neutral. They're neutral descriptors of the event. I never care if a broadcaster is shouting out sabermetric stats or dropping acronyms or anything. It's more about not saying things that are wrong

or meaningless or the opposite of information, basically. So yeah, if your announcer is not the most progressive, then just listen to the game to find out what's going on in the game and do some reading or listen to podcasts. Okay, and quick update from Alan Nathan, who just sent me a follow-up email about heating bats. He says, I remembered incorrectly, warming the bats was not part of the study. Actually, it was the baseballs that were warmed.

Still, it is hard to imagine any effect on performance other than having the bat feel better in the hands. If anyone else has any theories about hot bats, feel free to let us know. That will do it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who are already doing so, Jarrett Haynes, Sean Kivlahan, Scott Kramer, Jake Devon, and someone who wishes to be known as Deep BS. Thank you, Deep BS. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild

and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. You can buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Check out the website at theonlyruleisithastowork.com Michael Bauman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up, talking about the first couple games of the World Series

and interviewing two people from the Cubs' mental skills program about what a mental skill is. You can contact me and Sam via email at podcastatbaseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. We will be back soon. What we lose in the fire we gain in the blood What we lose in the fire we gain in the blood What we lose in the fire we gain in the blood What we lose in the fire What we lose in the fire

Is never gone