Ben Lindbergh (98:24)
All right, well, thanks to Brent and Vinnie. Those guys are great. Thanks also to their agency for facilitating. That's the Bledsoe agency, which they alluded to at the start of the conversation. Apologies for some minor audio issues there. There were some missing headphones, a bit of audio bleed. I'm sure that'll all get ironed out when they start their own podcast, though. Something Meg and I are toying around with is the idea of having a regular rotation of players appear on the podcast this season. Maybe once a week or every other week. Just kind of incorporate a player perspective as almost a third quasi co host. Nothing set in stone, just an idea. Haven't talked to any of the potential participants about it, but since we have plenty of smart, engaging players in our orbit now, those two and Declan Cronin and John Brebia and beyond. Could be a fun feature. We shall see. Not sure Tommy Pham would want to do that though. Then we'd really be fam graphs. But listener Zach in our Patreon Discord group drew my attention to an Instagram post at the Big League Impact account. That's a charitable organization started by Adam Wainwright, and this week they posted. In addition to our signature fantasy football league for fans, we also host a players only fantasy football league, giving pro athletes a chance to compete against one another while raising money for causes close to their hearts. In 2025, 26 MLB players and one NHL player took part, supporting more than two dozen charities along the way. You'll never guess who won this league. Well, you wouldn't have if I hadn't just mentioned Tommy Fam. Yeah, it was Tommy Fam. He finished in first. He won $40,000 for the National Keratoconus Foundation. That's an eye condition that Pham has. So good. Great for the National Keratoconus foundation, but great to see that Tommy Pham is still entering and even winning Players Only fantasy football leagues years after his suspension for slapping Jock Peterson over a fantasy football dispute. That did not discourage Tommy Pham from continuing to play fantasy football with his fellow players who at this point might just decide to let him win because it's probably safer for them before we finish our conversation, last episode about Andrew Jones and diving by outfielders prompted much discussion many responses. For those who missed it, we talked about the widespread belief that Andrew Jones never dove in the outfield and how that allegedly illustrates his skill because supposedly he never needed to dive because he got to everything easily. So we examined that and we concluded that he did dive, at least on occasion. There are documented dives out there. We couldn't compare his rate of diving to other outfielders, but we did get data from Sports Info Solutions that suggested that for outfielders and center fielders especially, good defenders tend to dive more often. If anything. Well, I heard from Joe Sheehan, one of the people we cited for saying that Jones didn't dive. Joe says two notes. One and you basically got there at the end is if you think of outfielders as having non diving range and then a diving range outside that. Jones's non diving range was so large that his diving range diving range, not driving range, that's a different sport was largely F7s and F9s, that is flies to the left fielder and right fielder. He really was that that good. 2. Referring to the SIS stats at the end, I wonder how much of the numbers are affected by modern positioning and outfielders having to dive on shallow fly balls more than they did when they were 20 to 30ft closer to the infield. To bring it back to Jones, he played more shallow than most outfielders in his era. So that would be a category of batted balls that he likely dove less for than his peers and surely less than a modern outfielder. Other responses 1. From Oliver Subject line Mathematically proving better fielders dive less I was listening to your segment on whether Andrew Jones dove less because he had such good reason range and was surprised by your skepticism. To me this is theoretically provable to be true if we make some assumptions. Let's assume that a given fielder's range is a Circle of radius R. It's the old simplified scientific model, the spherical cow. The size of the circle for better fielders is bigger than for worse fielders. Dives in this scenario would be balls hit to the edge of the circle. All catches, non dives and dives would be contained within the circle. We can calculate the dive percentage based on the ratio of the circumference of the circle to the area. Area dive percentage equals 2 PI r divided by PI r squared equals 2 over r based on this, the higher a fielder's range, the lower the chance they have to dive for a ball on any given play. This intuitively makes sense, as if you imagine a fielder who cannot run, they would dive on basically 100% of place. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but one that I think illustrates the point, so that's interesting. I asked Oliver how he would square that circle with the SIS research and he says, unfortunately theory and practice are different in principle practice, I would guess guys with higher range are expected to take plays from their corner outfielders more and thus are taking a greater proportion of plays at the edges relative to less rangy center fielders. Essentially, balls at the edge of the circle make up a greater proportion of their place. Not so different from what Joe was suggesting. Other responses Mulder Bat flip in the Patreon discord group I agree that even with Jones's range, there are still balls at the edge that are divable. But I can see that those edges have a lower percentage of balls hit to them compared to the divable range of the average outfield fielder, and thus Jones had fewer diving opportunities than the average fielder. Raymond Chen Patreon supporter, says, I came to a similar conclusion. By different logic, the edges of Jones's range are closer to the ranges of the corner outfielders, so he might not even need to make those plays in the first place. At an extreme, imagine an outfield of players with enormous range. You would get no dives at all because they collectively could cover the entire outfield comfortably. That's if you have three Denzel Clarks out there. There was also some discussion about whether diving is even good. Is it more like running through first base as opposed to diving into first space, which tends to be counterproductive, but I think it can be helpful to approach the ball at a different angle. Plus, you're airborne, you're not sliding, so you're not slowing yourself down. Just kind of gives you better body control. Another Patreon supporter, Zach, says the Jones defense discussion had me thinking of Jim Edmonds as a contrast, he would find a way to dive for balls that were hit right at him. And he was pretty great too. Listener Andrew M. Duck up a Willie Bloomquist quote about Ichiro he never made a bad route to a base. Baseball he covered a lot of ground. He never dove head first for a ball in all the years I saw him play. That frustrated some teammates every once in a while, but his philosophy was that he was faster running through than he was diving or sliding. So same question I asked him once, why don't you dive? And he said, do you ever see a sprinter diving through the finish line? When you heard him, it made sense. I'm sure some divers overdo it. Scott says. Grady Sizemore was always diving. Maybe you should have stayed on his feet. Perhaps it could have kept him healthy. Michael Mountain says, My hypothesis on center fielder specifically if you have great range and assuming well positioned to start with, a greater percentage of your dives will be on balls hit to the left or right compared to a center fielder with less range because you have enough range to cover more of the distance forward or backward in your narrow arc of the field. And those balls hit to left center or right center are more likely to have another outfielder backing you up or ready to make a quick pickup and relay throw if your dive is unsuccessful. So you may feel more emboldened to dive on a ball that is at the edge of your range compared to a center fielder with less range, knowing that the risk side of that equation is lower for you. That's an interesting explanation. Paul on Blue sky says, I think the reason Jones dove less than other center fielders is that he played much shallower than most. Most of his best diving catches were in front, which many center fielders did not attempt. His first step was left or right and going back on deeper balls, he leapt or reached up. John on Blue sky says, Listening to your discussion about Andrew Jones's defense and lack of diving and I'm reminded of my childhood center fielder Devon White. White was such a good defender that watching him often looked like he was simply snagging batting practice, always camped right under the ball. He links me to a 2015 Toronto St. Star piece in which White said he was impressed by then Blue Jays outfielder Kevin Pilar's work in center field and a diving catch. But it says White did contrast his style of play with the headlong flat out body launches which are typical of many of Pilar's catches. I didn't dive, white said. And finally, Patreon supporter Brett says, I suspect that Ben is probably right about elite fielders having just as many opportunities to dive as average ones, but I did come up with two possible caveats for center fielders that I think are at least somewhat plain plausible. First, if you assume that outfielders are more likely to dive when they're charging in than when they're running back toward the wall, consider the case of a center fielder who consistently has shallow positioning. This is what others said about Jones. He'd generally be less likely to dive because there'd be fewer balls hit in front of him, but if he had top tier range, he might still be able to track down balls hit over his head. Second, I can imagine that a good center fielder might have fewer opportunities to dive side to side because his range might overlap with the right and left fielders, particularly if the players on either side of him are also good defensive defenders. If you're a bad center fielder and or you have a bad corner outfielder alongside you, you might need to dive for a ball hit into the gap. But if you know you have another outfielder who can cover ground as well, maybe you don't need to dive because you know there's another glove waiting. This strikes me as distinct from infielders. And remember, we learned that good infield defense is not positively correlated with dive rate. Infielders, Brett says, are never going to be able to make up the gap to the next fielder on a sharply hit ball, and even corner outfielders who have all of foul territory to potentially dive or spread slide into. It also occurs to me that a fielder who is good at positioning himself based on each hitter's tendencies might also end up diving less because he's consistently in a better position to reach the ball. Thanks for all the thoughts. Really interesting topic, at least to me, and clearly some of you you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com effectively wild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners Tony C. Mitchell, Crawl, Emily Ross, Reggie Deal, and Steve Smeaton. 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You can find the effectively wild subreddit at r effectivelywild and you can check the show notes in the podcast, posted fan graphs or the episode description in your podcast for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. That'll do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. We hope you have a wonderful weekend weather the winter weather and we will be back to talk to you next week.
