Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 991: In-Shoots, Out-Curves, and Drop Balls

Episode Date: December 18, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Josh Harrison and old-timey pitch names, then answer listener emails about sabermetrics and fandom, baseball and birthdates, players’ phone numbers, managing bullpens, and more.

I'm Put my love on ice Teach myself Maybe that'll be nice, yeah baseballreference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Hey, how are you? All right. You wrote an article about Josh Harrison's pickle skills. Yeah, I did. How'd you get that idea? And how happy was your editor when you pitched it? I got that idea actually from my longest play research. Josh Harrison, actually from my longest play research uh josh harrison most of the longest plays that i was looking at were uh you know multiple throwing errors or or multiple pickles um you know pickle between first and second which then turns into a pickle between third and home uh and then maybe

some confusion with a runner going you know two runners ending up on the same base. And then the catcher has to go over and formally tag one of them or things like that. And then here's Josh Harrison all by himself, one man show creating long plays, extremely long plays. So that's where I got that idea. And my editor had, I don't know what you're suggesting. I seem to like the idea. Yeah, sure.

I'm sure it did very well. He's very famous. He's known to tens of thousands of people. People search, every day people wake up and search Josh Harrison. Yeah, it's a common name, and he's probably at the top of the Google results, even so. Yeah. Pickles are booming, too. So I got the pickle market.

Are they? I don't know. The edible kind? Some years ago. Yeah, yeah, the edible kind. I think I'm about six years behind. Remember, we had a pickle phase on this show. Yeah, I made pickles.

You were pickling. Yeah. That's very artisanal of me. Yeah. All right. So we're going to do an email show before we do yeah do you have anything one is roger bresnahan who uh was uh he's most famous for being the inventor of the uh shingard i believe we've actually talked about his inventing the shingard um before on this podcast and he's a i think he's a hall of fame yeah he's a hall of fame catcher but before he was a hall of fame

catcher he was just sort of uh he was a renaissance baseballer he could do anything and uh he came up at 18 as a pitcher uh and was very successful as an 18 year old and i forget what the good story is but there's a good story about how he ended up not pitching anymore but the bill james historical abstract describes his repertoire thusly he threw a speedy shoot an out curve an in shoot and a drop ball and i challenge you right now to tell me what those pitches are so we so i'll go one by one i'll go uh, okay, a speedy shoot. What's your guess for what a speedy shoot is? A fastball. Okay, that's a guess. All right.

And an out curve. What is an out curve? An out curve. I guess would that be like a slider? Okay. An inshoot. Well, I was going to say a cutter, but there wasn't a cutter then, I don't think. So I'll say a two-seamer or some sort of sinker. Okay. And a drop ball.

I'll say change-up, although I'm tempted to go with something funky like screwball, but I'll say change up. Okay. All right. I will go in reverse order. Based on the glossary definitions of another Bill James book, the Bill James Rob Nye or Guide to Pitchers, the drop ball is an overhand curve or a 12 to 6 curve. Okay. Not a change up, but good guess. The inshoot. overhand curve or a 12 to 6 curve okay not a change up but good guy the in shoot in shoot is tricky because at different times a shoot was used i'll just read in fact no i won't yeah yeah i would

well anyway the the shoot uh was a very common word to describe pitches, but not consistently. Sometimes it was a fastball, and sometimes it was a curveball. So as James and Naya write, it would be nice if curves and chutes, two popular terms in the 19th century, were clearly differentiated, but they're not. So that said, we suspect that the term chute generally referred to some variety of fastball. So the inshoot was simply a fastball so the in shoot was a simply a fastball with movement in the opposite direction of a curveball so you're right a two seamer it is a two seamer you got that one right the out curve is basically a fancy name for a curveball that's not thrown overhand so a curveball with three quarters movement that moves outside to a same-handed

batter uh which somewhat describes a slider uh or describes uh you know a curveball that is not a 12 to 6 overhand curveball i will give that to you uh and then and then a uh a speedy shoot i think based that is not in the dot the glossary, but if we're assuming that the term shoot generally referred to some variety of fastball, a speedy shoot would be somewhat redundant, but maybe we would consider that just a four seamer. All right, I went three for four. Yeah, you did pretty well. Speedy was kind of a giveaway there. Yeah, although like a hard slider is not a fastball. True, true.

So, yeah, so that's all the banter I got. The new Bill James historical baseball abstract does not have an audio book. So you could just do that. You got part of the way in a recent episode. It doesn't exist. You could just keep reading. You love reading the thing. Yeah, although I'm not reading the new one.

I'm reading the old one. Okay. All right. Some feedback from things that we've talked about lately I just want to mention. Aaron says some quick comments on our discussion of teams lowering ticket prices. He says, while teams could do that to reward fans, it's highly unlikely that they will, as the people most rewarded by lowered prices are ticket scalpers. The difference between vacuum cleaners and baseball tickets isn't just the monopoly teams have, but also the finite number of tickets a baseball team has to sell. You can always make and sell more vacuums, but you can't make and sell more baseball tickets because you only have so many seats available.

If a team takes a bunch of tickets that could be sold at $50 a piece and instead sells them at $20 a piece, it's probably true that some of that will result in fans saving money and or some people attending a game who otherwise wouldn't. But for the vast majority of those tickets, scalpers will buy them at $20 knowing they can turn a profit and then resell them at $50 each because that's the rate the market will bear. So overall, a team has no incentive to cut prices below the rate the market will bear, as they're by and large not saving fans money, but rather turning potential profits into scalper profits. Certainly true for parks and games that sell out. Would that be true, though, for a game that doesn't sell out? Yeah, maybe not. You know, we mentioned that we're out of touch on this because you and I rarely pay to go to a baseball game. So in that sense, we're out of touch on this because we, you and I rarely pay to go to a baseball game. So in that sense, we're out of touch. But I also think that in a sense, there are a lot of different habits that

individuals or families have as regards baseball games attendance. So even when I, like when I was growing up, we were a family that went to, I don't know, maybe two games a year. It was way up in the city. And so we would, it would be like kind of a big deal to go to a game. We would probably sort of map out one game that we would definitely go to. And then maybe another game would be like a birthday present or something like that. And so I imagine that the whole conversation would sound very different to somebody who maybe goes to 15 or 20 or 40 games like a lot of people do or even seven games like a lot of people do and that was just never my real experience with baseball so that the extra eight dollars for a ticket or whatever the extra would be is similarly

seems sort of non-daunting to me just because i mean it was like a once or twice a year purchase. Yeah. Somebody also talked about how the cost is actually quite high and cited, you know, if you take a family of four and the cost of getting, you know, beer and pop for everybody. And I have never in my entire life bought a drink in a ballpark. And so that's another way that I'm out of touch. I've never ever bought a drink in a baseball ballpark. So I don't think I have either. So the math is just going to be different for everybody. And the proportions are all different for everybody too. So don't take me, anything I say as representing your lived experience. I don't mean it that way. All right. And Steve writes in with more of a comment than a question, really. He says, I was wondering if you were going to pay a quick homage to what is likely to be the last season in which Albert Pujols leads Mike Trout in career OPS. Save the uptick in an injury-shortened 2013, Albert has seen a year-over-year decrease in OPS in every season since 2008 and hasn't posted an 800 OPS since 2012.

and hasn't posted an 800 OPS since 2012. Given this trend, which we're all well aware of, isn't it neat that he's maintained a lead over a player who has been one of, if not the best, player in the game since his arrival? I think that it's neat. He mentioned another thing that I think is neat that I just recently rediscovered in an old tweet that Albert Pujols has, as he notes, his OPS has gone down every year since 2008, with the exception of the injury shortened 2013 when it went down a little lower. So it goes

192, 189, 173, 148, 138, and then you have the injury shortened season. We're going to throw that one out. And then 126, 118, 114. So that is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven declines. And he still, he still has a 114 OPS plus, which is like good. Like there are Hall of Famers who like, let's see what Ryan Sandberg's OPS plus was. 114. Good guess, Sam. what ryan sandberg's ops plus was 114 good guess sam he so in in after seven years of decline he is still hitting like ryan sandberg which is not to say that he is as valuable he doesn't play second base or anything like that he's he's not but i mean what a hitter he was that he has that much room to just go straight down and still be well above average, well above average as a hitter. Yeah, there's nothing he could do even to, I mean, he's been, his decline phase is going to be so

long because he started so young and not only because he debuted so young, but he was instantly amazing. So his peak started basically at age 21. I mean, he got a little bit better later, but he was great from the start. And because of that, he's going to end up having like half of his career is going to be sort of like this post-prime Pujols who wasn't that great and was hobbling around and was getting worse and worse every year and was getting overpaid. That's sort of been the story of Pujols since his age 32 or so season. And his contract carries him through what his age 41 season or something. And there's still nothing that he can do to jeopardize his Hall of Fame chances. Like he couldn't possibly be

bad enough in the time remaining to him that he wouldn't be an extremely deserving Hall of Famer. It's just he built up so much value early on that he can't fritter it away, no matter how poorly he plays from here on out. Yeah, he just cleared 100 war this year on baseball reference, which is inner circle, obviously. But just to put in perspective how inner circle it is, there's only two players who've played, I guess, three players who played even a single game this millennium who are over 100, Bonds, A-Rod, and Ricky Henderson. And to get somebody else, I mean, Beltre is closing in, which is amazing. But you know, like he's well ahead of like, he's 20 wins ahead of Ken Griffey Jr. And he's 20 wins ahead of Jeff Bagwell. And he's probably not going to add a ton to it. But he also has five more

years. He's almost 30 wins ahead of Frank Thomas, and Jim Tomey and Larry Walker. So one thing that is, we've talked about how, I forget who we talked about this with, maybe each row or somebody, but whether you could damage your legacy with a bad decline. And I don't think that you, I think you said that you couldn't. And I think I agreed because you made a persuasive argument, but we do, I think we do remember declines much uglier than they were as much uglier than they were for certain players. And I'm surprised when I look at Ken Griffey Jr., who I think of as being great as a Mariner and then just a disaster as a Red. And he was a horrible acquisition and he wasn't a particularly valuable player, horrible acquisition and he wasn't a particularly valuable player, but he really did keep on hitting. He had some like really good seasons that I just have forgotten about entirely in my mind.

And not just for like, these are years that weren't that long ago. Like his in 2007, he hit 30 home runs. He was 37 years old. He had 30 home runs. He had a 870 OPS. He was an all-star. And I started writing about baseball the year after that. And I just don't remember ever writing about baseball when Ken Griffey Jr. was a going concern. And I guess he wasn't. The next year he, well, the next year, actually the next year, he played a full season, had a 102 OPS plus, not a valuable player, but was a contributing major leaguer. And I just do not remember Ken Griffey Jr.'s 30s as being anything better than pure misery. And he hit 232 home runs.

Yeah. Or what about Willie Mays, who is like the person that people always talk about him stumbling in the outfield, which may or may not have actually happened, but he's like the quintessential case of the player who stayed too long or he's often cited as that but then he was so good he led the league in on base percentage when he was 40 yeah when he was 40 he was like a six win player and then

when he was 41 he only played part-time but he had a 145 OPS plus. So like the terrible decline phase that people remember, I mean, sure, he had a last final season that was not good. He played 66 games and he didn't hit very well. And that's it, really. I mean, before that, he was a productive player. I mean, even at age 41, he was still a good hitter. even at age 41 he was still a good hitter at age 40 he was still a superstar and age 42 he you know he wasn't good but i mean it was just the the briefest little tail end to his career that people are remembering him by and so maybe that's an example that you can tarnish someone sort of except that that Willie Mays is also kind of the counter example to that in that people remember that, but they also remember that he was one of the best players of all time.

So it doesn't really do any lasting damage to his reputation except for his reputation at age 42. It's very interesting you say that because Roger Angel writes about Willie Mays in 1971, which was his age 40 season and the last one that he was entirely a San Francisco Giant. And so he writes first about him in one of his midseason dispatches. And he writes, Candlestick's classic pastime and the best entertainment in baseball this year is watching Willie Mays, now just turned 40, beginning his 21st year in the majors. He's hitting better than he has hit at any time in the past six or seven seasons and playing the game with enormous visible pleasure. Veteran curators in the press box like to expound upon various Maysian specialties, the defensive gem, the basket catch, the looped throw, the hitched swing, and so forth. My favorite is his base running.

He may have lost a half second or so in getting down to first base, but I doubt whether Willie Davis or Ralph Garr or any of the other new flashes can beat Mays from first to third or can accelerate just as he does, with his whole body suddenly seeming to sink lower when, taking his turn at first and intently following the distant ball on outfielder, he suddenly sees his chance. Watching him this year, seeing him drift across a base and then sink into full speed, I noticed all at once how much he resembles a marvelous skier in mid-turn down some steep pitch of fast powder. Nobody like him.

Okay, later in the year, Giants are in the playoffs. And same season, same year. Writing about the postseason, a missing name in this account, it may be noticed, is that of Willie Mays. He played in all four games and did not exactly or entirely fail. Two doubles, a homer, stolen base, four hits. But these totals do not suggest the true level of his contribution, and by this, for once, I mean that he was less of a player than the statistics suggest. A much older player, who looked every year and month of his 40 years, a player gone quite gray-faced with exhaustion and pain and the pressures of leadership,

Willie had seen all his splendid early season triumphs worn away to bare competence. In the late going, he had managed but four hits and 40 at-bats, had gone a whole month without a homer, had been striking out almost half the time. He apologized to his fans at the end of the regular season. apologized to his fans at the end of the regular season. During the playoffs, after I'd seen Mays taking called third strikes or trying to bunt his way aboard or slicing a weak little pop hit on a fastball he can no longer get around on, I began, for the first time in my life and with enormous sadness, not to want him to come up to the plate. I dreaded it, in fact, and I was embarrassed by the feeling and ashamed of myself, but I still feel the same way and I think it should be said, and ashamed of myself, but I still feel the same way. And I think it should be said,

hang them up, Willie, please retire. Wow. Second half, he had an 848 OPS. And the next year he, no, that was, that was the next year. What? 71? Seven, 72. He had, oh. Which year are you talking about? This was, this was 71. Yeah. Yeah. So 71, he had an 848 OPS in the second half. He had a 910 OPS in August. And in 72, after the trade to the Mets, he had an 848 OPS in the second half. He had a 910 OPS in August. And in 72, after the trade to the Mets, he had an 848 OPS as well, which was a 145 OPS plus at the time.

Yeah, not bad. Yeah, pretty good. For someone who should hang him up. Yeah. All right. He was 1.8 wins above replacement in basically a half a season's worth of games The next year Since we started talking John Coplella with the Braves is doing one of those

Twitter live chats That he does where he Answers questions from fans And someone asked him With the league moving to 8-man bullpens Do you foresee hybrid players who can hit Off the bench and pitch in relief And Coplella says it's a possibility to it will happen in future in the span of 140 characters.

Good. All right. Question from Brent. I love math. I love baseball and baseball math is the best. I've asked for the Bill James abstract for my 10th birthday in 1985. But is baseball any less fun for you both knowing what you know? I'm not a back in my day guy, but not knowing anything really meant that my team always had a chance next year. Now I know loosely what the standings should be by April and root for health and luck. It's a different kind of fun, but it feels far less suspenseful.

I guess that the experience he describes is very familiar to me, but I don't ever, I don't know that I find it less fun. I think even if, even if they were still rooting for one team the way I used to, I don't think that sabermetrics or knowing third order standings or projected standings would really affect anything. I mean, there's still so much variance and there's always surprise teams and teams that disappoint. It hasn't, I don't think, gotten close to the point where it feels too predictable. It hasn't, I don't think, gotten close to the point where it feels too predictable. I mean, there is a certain amount of unpredictability that is just built into it. Even if you were perfectly able to peg the true talent level of every team, you'd still be off by several wins on average just because of how much randomness is in baseball, but we're nowhere close to getting a perfect estimate of true talent level. So I don't feel as if the uncertainty has been reduced even close to the point where it would start to hamper my enjoyment of the sport. I, so I have two responses to this one. I think that, and I did, I cheered devotedly for a single team before it was my job for a number of years in which I years of my adult baseball fandom, maybe not quite like

it was when I was 11. But more than I enjoyed it during college, for instance, when I did not have any interest in that stuff or nor access to that stuff. However, I would say that I was much less fun for everybody else. Like I remember having a lot of conversations with people when they'd tell me like, oh, looks good for my cubbies, doesn't it? And I'd go, 8% playoff odds. I mean, no. And like, there's a way in which having these very seemingly precise answers for every question seems to imply a lot of certainty and that shuts off the conversation, or at least it

did the way that I would have conversations. So I could definitely see how somebody who was around me would enjoy baseball less during that time. But I did not enjoy baseball any less during that time. And I think that the second thing I was going to say is that as long as you understand that there is uncertainty, then there's really no additional certainty. Okay. Let me, let me put it this way. Say, you know, that a pitcher throws his fastball 88% of the time. Well, you're going to sit fastball on that guy. It's, it's going to be very different than the experience of going up and facing, you know, Jeff Supan and knowing that, well, there's a 50-50 chance he's going to throw his fastball or his curveball, for instance, maybe hypothetically, or Ginny Baker, 50% chance fastball, 50% screwball. So in that sense, you are always surprised because

you can't sit on anything, but you're also not ever surprised because you're kind of, you're open-minded to the screwball and you're open-minded to the fastball. And whichever one it is, you've kind of half planned for that and half planned for not that. If you throw 88% fastballs and you only throw, you know, two screwballs a game, those two screwballs are going to blow your mind because you've, you're not looking for them. You're not even thinking about them. The more certain you get, the more surprising the deviations from that certainty are. And so if you believe that the playoff odds are fate and that a team that has 65% chance of making the division, if somehow that deludes you into thinking, oh, well, they're going to get it, then all the 35% of the other times when it doesn't happen are going to be even more shocking to you and maybe arguably even more enjoyable and even more shake your sense of control over this game.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I think it has maybe made baseball debates less enjoyable. Not that I was ever someone who would just like, you know, banter about baseball all day when I wasn't doing a podcast. But if you have a ready-made answer and if you believe in the answer, if you subscribe to the playoff odds or you think that the playoff odds are smarter than you are, then you always just say, well, those are what the odds are. And it's not very fun to talk about. You could maybe come up with reasons why they're underrating or overrating a team, but then you also have to be suspicious of your own inclination to think that that's true because you know that much of the time you will be wrong and you'll be seeing something that isn't actually there. a radio show or something, or someone asks me to answer some questions about baseball or something, and they'll ask me like your standard pennant race questions or, you know, who do you like in this division or whatever, then it is just kind of, well, this is the

most likely team to win. So that's that. That's who I like in this division, yeah. Yeah. It's not very interesting. All right. Play index? Sure. You, I assume, probably 10 years ago or so, read Outliers, the Malcolm Gladwell book.

Yes. And you remember the thing about the hockey players, right? The birth date thing? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this was some study that had found that a disproportionate number of hockey players have been born in like January, February, and March. Because the way that youth leagues and youth teams were structured, those players would have a big advantage over their peers born in later months. Because at a time when a few months makes a big difference, they were consistently older.

Because they were better, they got more playing time, they got named to more travel teams, etc., and developed and became NHL players. And I wanted to use the Play Index to see whether anything similar was apparent in baseball. Do you know the answer yet? Nope. Okay. All right. So when I was growing up, the cutoff for a league, for our youth league in town, Pony League, was July 31st. For most of Little League's history, that was the same, although they have since moved it twice, I believe. They moved it to April for a little bit. And then I believe now it's December, but that's pretty recent. That would not apply to current major leaguers. So July 31st was the cutoff. And so I was always among the youngest players. So was Craig Goldstein. And I

believe that my hypothesis is that Craig and I would have made the majors, but for this phenomenon that I'm going to discover in the numbers. So I just looked at 2016 players, all players in the major leagues in 2016 to see how many of them were born in each month. And of course they have, they have different lengths, months have different lengths. So I adjusted for that. And then I expressed each month as a percentage of how many players they should have if this was perfectly distributed among every day of the year. And remember, our hypothesis is that August will have more, July will have fewer. So in 2016, for the players that we have, this hypothesis does okay. this hypothesis does okay. August is the most common month at 28% more players than would be expected from perfectly normal distribution. September, which comes right after August, is the second highest month at 8%. October, the third highest month at 5%, and July is below

average. So that seems compelling. It's not perfectly clean though. July is actually almost average. It's 98% of what should be expected. There are more players born in July than born in November, for instance, or December or January. There is a huge drop off in June. June is the worst month at 88% and we might expect that. So it's pretty good. It's pretty clean, but it's not a perfectly smooth curve or anything like that. So to expand further then, I figured I could go in one of two directions. I could either try this again for another year, another time period. So I went to 1996 and 1997, both years to get a little bit of a more robust sample from that time, and looked at the same thing. And this time, more or less supports the hypothesis. Again, this time,

August is the most at 20% more than expected. September is actually just right average at expected. And so September does not show this effect, but then it goes back up for October, average at expected. And so September does not show this effect, but then it goes back up for October, 20%. November is 15%. Again, December is strangely low. And July is the second lowest month. It's now down to 85% of what would be expected. So just looking at the difference between July and August, we're talking about like a 30 or 40% better chance of making the majors if you're born in August than July. June is also low, but not as low. So again, supporting it, but not perfectly smooth.

The fact that there's these weird month-to-month fluctuations, like February being like crazy low, lower than any other month, just points to how much noise is possible, even in something like this, which is basically, yeah, whatever. So then I went to the other way of testing this, which is to, if my hypothesis is that the American sports calendar is affecting this, I should expect to see a greater effect when I look only at American players. So I took out all countries as country of birth except for America. This time I went from 2010 to 2016 to get even larger sample. And I looked at how many players in each month. And here again, we see that August is 25% more. September is 30% more. July is only 84% and June is only 85%. We have now come close to the line that we are looking for,

where the two highest months are, in fact, the two months we hypothesize would be highest. The two lowest months are, in fact, the two months we hypothesize would be lowest. It is a pretty straight line down, although really those four months that butt up against the deadline are the most strongly affected. This feels to me like pretty strong evidence. And so then I went to the final way of testing this, which is to Google and see if anybody else has already written this. And it turns out that they have. I just Googled baseball birth date age effect. Yeah. So Baseball America. Oh, Slate did it? Okay. Baseball America did age effect Yeah so Baseball America Oh Slate did it? Okay Baseball America

Did it in 2005 Alan Simpson Wrote this for Baseball America As USA Baseball was Thinking about changing the dates At that time and Baseball America research has shown That a majority of players on youth league

All star teams of all age groups are Born in the four months immediately after July 31st. The advantage carried forward to the major league level as more 2004 big leaguers were born in August than any other month, and the fewest were born in July. And Greg Spira in 2008 wrote, since 1950, a baby born in the United States in August has had a 50% to 60% better chance of making the big leagues than a baby born in the United States in August has had a 50% to 60% better chance of making the big leagues than a baby born in July. The lesson, if you want your child to be a pro ball player, you should start planning early, very early, as in before conception. So I hope this makes Craig feel better. I think that we have an answer. So there you go.

So how does this affect Charlie Kershaw's chances? When was he born? It was recent, right? It was after these months. November 18th. So a little boost and certainly not a penalty. I would say that it boosts his chances a little bit. Did I ever circle back to that, by the way?

I decided that afternoon that I shouldn't have talked you down, that the numbers should be much higher and uh and that i think that you were i think you were right all right i had decided i wasn't by the end of it but maybe that's your fault ben jedlovec also did this study for bill james online in 2009 this was uh the matthew effect is what Gladwell called it. Not that he coined that term, but okay. Interesting. I've always wondered whether there's a similar effect for baseball age with like free agents. Like if you are, you know, baseball age is June 30th, at least that's sort of the standard on baseball reference. If you, it's your age as of June 30th is your age for that year. So I've always kind of wondered whether, you know, if you could compare guys born just before that date and just after that date so that one is, you know, an age 32 player and one is an age 31 player, but really they're separated by three days or something.

Would you be able to find a significant Difference in how much They get paid per win or something Do guys get discounted more if their Baseball age is a year older But they are actually only a few days Older maybe someday I'll try to Figure that out

Alright question from Michael who says he was Watching a broadcast and Ken Rosenthal mentioned a text he received From quote a former player About the Chase Utley suspension reduction This was a while ago obviously We hear similar humble Humble brags slash reports

I don't think it was a humble brag in Ken's case But reports about text From unnamed players often Does the reporter initiate the conversation or does the player? If the reporter initiates, how does he decide who and when to ask? How many players do you imagine Rosenthal or the local beat writer have in their contacts? Oh, well, that last question is a fun one. Yeah, I don't know.

I don't have that greatest sense. I will say that in baseball, I feel like PR people are more forthcoming with player phone numbers than in other fields. Like if I'm doing a story on a musician or an actor or something and I contact their PR person, almost inevitably I will not get the artist's number. I will get patched in. It will be a conference call. I'll call the PR person and then they'll loop in the person I want to talk to. Whereas in baseball, often, usually, I would say when I want to contact a player or do a phone interview or something, I will just get the number my phone just from times that I've done that and figured, well, I guess I'll save this player's number. You never know when I might need to contact them again about some other story, but I never really do. So it's not like I ever text with players regularly,

but someone of Rosenthal's stature and newsbreaker-ness or a beat writer who is with a team every day, I imagine, has many such contacts. So this would be a good question to ask Andy or someone maybe, unless you have a good sense. No, no sense at all. I'm curious. I've always been curious of how they ask for the number because I've had to ask for some player numbers before, like from the player. Like, you know, can we talk another time? You know, like you want to have a more substantial conversation than the moment allows or you can't go back to the park the next day and they're going out of town or something like that. And that is it's very awkward because it's like it really looks like you've got a scheme.

And so I always wonder. Yeah. And and yet it's very important if you're a reporter. I mean, I, it was much, much more common when I was a reporter covering other topics that I would need to ask. I had to ask phone numbers constantly. You need, you need to get everybody's phone number. I had, you know, thousands of phone numbers and it, even then it always felt weird. Like, like there'd just be this moment where it's like, why? I mean, you're talking to me now. Why do you need my phone number? Right. So, I wonder how they do it. But I don't have any idea. Just guessing. I would guess that in most cases, I would guess, just to guess, total guess that in most cases, the reporter initiates those texts for reaction. And I would guess that among the, what, 700 and, well, there's 750 players on active rosters

at any given time. I would guess that Rosenthal has 95, 85, 85 personal phone numbers. 95, 85, 85 personal phone numbers. I mean, all of their agents, like 100% of their agents' phone numbers. But it's just a guess, 85% or 85 total player numbers at any given time, not counting retired players. Yeah, and then, of course, if you've been covering baseball for as long as he has, then you accumulate retired players' numbers. And so there must be hundreds or thousands of those.

And that's more kind of just based on thinking about a major league clubhouse and mentally guessing how many players would happily give a number. And then adding a few extra because Rosenthal's great uh and can probably talk them into more i would guess that something like you know 10 of players are really gregarious and it wouldn't be an awkward thing at all and so i would guess that it's either in that range or he has almost everybody uh-huh that it's like part of his part of his beat is to get the numbers and that he uh you know it's just it's a's an automatic. But I don't know. We should ask him. All right.

Be interesting to find out. It'd be an interesting question to ask somebody. Who knows? And yet they asked us. Yeah. One more. This is from Scott and it's a more than two-year-old question, but I think we're better equipped to answer it now than we were when he asked it.

And I've heard you talk about this since the Stompers experience, but I'm not sure if you've talked about it on the podcast. Maybe. But Scott asked, how hard is it to manage a bullpen? Not in terms of who actually goes in the game when, but in regard to the time it takes to get each guy warm, what happens when you warm up a guy who isn't needed, etc. To me, this is an underrated component when we judge managers for their use of relievers, though maybe it's fully delegated to pitching coaches. I also think it's a key part of pace of play initiatives because

excessive pitching changes and real mound warm-up tosses generally are an absolute buzzkill in regular season games. If MLB limits warm-up pitch numbers even more stringently, is it going to be that much harder to get players ready on time? I don't know how much our experience can be overlaid on the major league manager's experience for a lot of reasons. One important one is they have more than one bullpen catcher. And a huge problem we faced was only having one bullpen catcher and therefore only being able to get one guy warm at a time. And I don't know how to answer this. I have talked about this, but I don't exactly know how to talk about it now. Ask me something more specific, Ben. Well, I recall you saying that

it was really hard to do and it wasn't just, it was partially because of the limitations that we had with the stompers, but it was also just because things happen really quickly when you're there and you have to figure out whether you can say something and when you should say something. And by the time you decide to say something, then something has happened. Someone's given up a hit or there's a hitter who hits from the other side of the plate coming up or something like that. And, you know, you can't have guys warming up forever and you can't have them get ready instantly. So it does take a lot of planning and forethought and, and maybe it's easier also when you have

13 man bullpens, which we didn't have either. I don't know if that makes it easier. I guess that makes it easier. You have more choices, but also you just know that you can rely on having some other guys left if you use this guy, whereas with us, it was often that there was only one guy we wanted to use. And so we had to save him for just the right time. So it's hard though. I think Scott's inclination that it was hard, I think was reinforced by our experience. Even though there weren't all that many people to choose from, it was still hard to tell

when the right moment was and then to time it well. So yeah, I've I found the speed of the game to be an extraordinary challenge in making decisions. And it gave me a much greater appreciation for major league managers. And it made it less surprising to me that all these new managers without managing experience, without minor league managing experience, seem to have as a cohort struggled, partly because they're maybe not used to it, but partly because it is quite possibly a skill that some people have and that some people don't have.

And players who have not been or managers who have not been tested at that skill, it might be a very difficult skill to develop. But yes, I mean, it really things change very quickly. And yeah, I just found that to be really hard. And also, you don't want to get hung up on a plan and then not be willing to adjust as things change. You don't want to get hung up on a plan and then not be willing to adjust as things change. You don't want to get your heart set on a particular strategy or particular pitcher and then not be able to adjust as the next pitch comes in. And the next pitch is always coming in. They really do come fast. All right.

So that'll do it for today. Today's five listeners who have supported the podcast on Patreon at patreon.com slash effectively wild are Chris Wicke, Simon Pincus, Jesse Schwartz, Michael Garrett, and Michael Farrar. Thanks to all of you. You can buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Check it out at theonlyruleisithastowork.com. I've heard that it might make a good holiday gift. If you're in the market, 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. Keep the questions coming to me and Sam at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon and we will talk to you soon. I'm going to stop riding the brakes.

No, no more, no more riding the brakes. Oh, no more riding the brakes.