Effectively Wild Episode 2466: Turn Off the Tap?

Summary

Effectively Wild Episode 2466: Turn Off the Tap? FanGraphs Baseball Podcast with Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley April 16, 2026

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Episode Overview This episode of Effectively Wild dives into the evolving world of baseball contracts, specifically the trend of early-career, long-term extensions for top prospects. Ben and Meg analyze the implications of the Kevin McGonagall deal with the Tigers, discuss the baseball labor market, and trace the shifting balance of benefits between clubs and young players. They also tackle a potpourri of recent statistical oddities, roster trends, a quirky catcher's interference ruling, and the perennial rise in fastball velocity. Later, the duo discusses the challenges of NPB (Japanese) imports adjusting to MLB routines and ends with listener-driven stat blasts covering everything from pop-up fielding pitchers to obscure home run records.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Extension Spree and Kevin McGonagall’s Deal

• The Tigers signed top prospect Kevin McGonagall to an 8-year, $150 million extension, following a string of similar deals for young stars (e.g. Connor Griffin, Cooper Pratt, Colt Emerson).
• This deal is characterized by a $14m signing bonus, $10m in escalators, and begins next season, running through 2034.
• Speaker Tone: Analytical, cautiously optimistic, and thoughtful about broader market trends.

Notable Quotes:

• “I remain heartened that none of these deals feel like…you’re getting ripped off… I remain curious about what the long term impact on arbitration is likely to be.” – Ben Lindbergh (03:00)
• “It’s good for him. I think it’s fine. And the way I want to score it…remains TBD.” – Ben Lindbergh (06:31)

Labor Market Implications

• The growing trend prompts questions:
  • Will free agency for young stars become increasingly rare?
  • Are these deals still team-friendly, or has the pendulum swung toward player benefit?
• Big-market teams (Yankees, Dodgers) rarely offer such extensions, instead opting to spend in free agency.
• Smaller-market teams may use early extensions to keep elite talent away from "super teams."

Quote:

• “The more of these are signed, the less [it] is bound to be true… now you could almost frame it as: does this make sense for the team to do?” – Ben Lindbergh (09:45)

2. The Risk-Reward Calculation for Teams and Players

• Most early extensions have been offered to position players, not pitchers, due to the higher stability and lower injury risk.
• List of pre-arb/pre-debut extensions is overwhelmingly position players—pitchers present too much volatility.

Quote:

• “It is kind of funny... 19 of them are non-pitchers… seems like no teams have wanted to be in the business of signing young pitchers to long-term extensions.” – Meg Rowley (17:34)

Key Insight:

• For pitchers, teams would have to discount extension offers so much for risk that most would not accept, while for clubs, even with injury, some long deals provide enough useful service.

3. NPB Imports and Cultural Adjustments

• Discussion of Astros pitcher Tatsuya Imai, who is struggling with “arm fatigue” and cultural adaptation:
  • Routine changes (meal timing, travel, rotation schedules)
  • Language, interpreter turnover, and personal connection challenges

Quote:

• “It seems like it would be such a personal and close relationship…if you’re a big star...I would think you would want consistency [with your interpreter].” – Meg Rowley (29:44)

Key Insight:

• Even adult veterans face significant hurdles. Having previous NPB players helps franchises smooth transitions.

4. Stat Trends: Fastball Velocity, Catcher’s Interference, and More

• Fastball Velo: League-wide four-seamer velocity continues to rise, approaching 95 mph even for league average as the new norm. Velocity climbs year after year (e.g., righties now average 95).
• Debate over whether there’s a natural limit, or if rising velocities will force rule/roster reevaluations.
• Catcher’s Interference: Increase has recently plateaued, but the definition has broadened; Sam Miller’s work highlighted calls for “no swing” and even “foot-based” interference, such as when a catcher’s toe touches the batter’s foot.

Notable Moment:

• Discussion of a recent Rays/White Sox incident where catcher's toe-contact on the batter’s foot resulted in interference, even without a swing (49:00–54:00).
• “It’s almost tender when you watch it in slow motion... It’s like a little toe touch.” – Meg Rowley (55:00)
• Meg and Ben riff on “tender” vs “sibling rivalry” subtexts.

5. ABS (Automated Ball-Strike) Challenge Gestures: The Dilemma

• Several accidental ABS challenges have occurred (e.g. Shohei Ohtani adjusting his cap, Will Smith mistakenly signals for review).
• Listeners propose new, less ambiguous challenge signals, from throwing flags to hawk calls—a running bit ensues.

Notable Quotes:

• “You want baseball players to be up there going, CA-CAW? That is what I want.” – Meg Rowley (73:32)
• “Flipping the bird at blue is probably out, but, yeah, don’t flip the bird.” – Ben Lindbergh (68:08)

6. Listener Stat Blasts! (80:37 onward)

Historic Offensive Outbursts:

• April 13, 2026: 14.4 runs/game across MLB, highest since 1936 for a 10+ game slate.

Score and Inning Oddities:

• Longest streak where the tied score and the inning were the same is 4 innings. 15-15 in the 15th is the record for latest inning with a matching tie.
• Rockies-Reds (2018) and 1955 Dodgers–1955 White Sox cited for more such feats.

Unique Home Run Feats:

• Only a handful of players (Judge, Devers, Riley, Alonso, Ohtani) have homered against all other teams while playing for just one club.
• Ryan Christenson (ATH) hit 16 career homers vs. 16 different teams—never doubling up.

Other Fun Nuggets:

• Pitchers from each team catching a pop-up in the same game—a rare but not unheard-of feat (last in July 2025).
• Matt Walner’s all-solo homer streak; Tyler O’Neill holds MLB record with 6 solo HRs to open a season before driving in anyone else.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments – With Timestamps

• “I remain curious about what the long term impact on arbitration…is likely to be.” – Ben Lindbergh (03:00)
• “There’s got to be some natural limit [to fastball velocity]…but it seems like it’s just going to keep climbing indefinitely. And it is incredible.” – Meg Rowley (41:22)
• “Now we've just got catchers playing footsie with hitters. And that alone…the foot based contact can cause a catcher's interference call.” – Matt Swartz (45:30)
• “It's almost tender when you watch it in slow motion... If there were a heated rivalry for MLB... they just, you know, just inch that foot forward.” – Meg Rowley (56:33)
• “You want baseball players to be up there going, CA-CAW? That is what I want.” – Meg (73:32)
• “Flipping the bird at blue is probably out, but, yeah, don’t flip the bird.” – Ben (68:08)
• “I miss 18-inning games. Those were fun.” – Matt Swartz (86:57)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:36] – Contract extension trend, Kevin McGonagall’s deal analysis
• [03:00] – Concerns on impact for arbitration & labor market
• [09:02] – Are these still team-friendly or is pendulum swinging?
• [17:32] – Why all the early-career extensions are for position players
• [23:00] – Tatsuya Imai’s NPB-MLB adjustment challenges & interpreter talk
• [35:03] – Fastball velocity trends & discussion
• [43:24] – Catcher’s interference: Rules, examples, and the “foot-touch” play
• [58:06] – ABS challenge signal mishaps and debate over new gestures
• [80:37] – Listener Stat Blast segment (historic offense, inning/score quirks, home run oddities, pop-up catching pitchers)

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Summary Takeaway

This episode captures Effectively Wild at its best: a blend of sharp, up-to-the-moment statistical analysis, deep labor-side questions about the evolving baseball economy, earnest and sometimes hilarious tangents, and crowd-sourced curiosity about arcane baseball occurrences. On the surface, it’s about player contracts and strange occurrences, but it’s fundamentally a look at how baseball (and those who care for it) adapts, innovates, and obsesses.

For new listeners, the show’s strength is the hosts’ double play of insight and levity—their ability to treat arbitration, contract strategy, or even "catcher’s footsie" with equal seriousness. The episode flows naturally, jumping from big-market labor moves to a toe-touch, and ends with the delightful obscurities in the game’s record books.

Transcript

[Meg Rowley]

It's the zombie runner. Bobby Shands.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Bobby Shands. Bobby Shands. Effectively Wild.

[Meg Rowley]

Joey Menesis. No. Walk off three run digger.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Stop it.

[Meg Rowley]

Walk off three run shot.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, my God, Meg.

[Meg Rowley]

He's the best player in baseball. Effectively Wild.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Hello and welcome to episode 2466 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraph Spaceball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Relic fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the Ringer. Ben, how are you?

[Matt Swartz]

I'm doing well.

[Meg Rowley]

And the extension spree continues. Yeah, we've got another one. Another top prospect early in his big league life signing a long term deal.

[Matt Swartz]

Now it is Kevin McGonagal, who just barely beat Conor Griffin to the big leagues.

[Meg Rowley]

And Connor Griffin barely beat Kevin McGonagal to an extension. So the Tigers have signed McGonagall to an 8 year old $150 million deal.

[Matt Swartz]

This is slightly higher than the Griffin

[Meg Rowley]

deal, which was 140 million guaranteed and

[Matt Swartz]

that was nine years. Right. So the difference, I guess, with this one? Well, there are a few little differences. McGonagall is a couple years older than Griffin and this contract starts next season. So McGonagall is on league minimum salary for 2026 starts next season, runs through 2034. And as in the GRIF, there's $10 million in potential escalators and there's a

[Meg Rowley]

$14 million signing bonus.

[Matt Swartz]

And there are other additional details about the distribution of the salaries over the lifetime of the deal.

[Meg Rowley]

But this fits into the trend that we've been talking about with Cooper Pratt

[Matt Swartz]

and with Connor Griffin and others. Just lots of long term deals. So Colt Emerson of the Mariners, of course.

[Meg Rowley]

So what do you make of this one?

[Matt Swartz]

McGonagall's off to a fantastic start by the way he works. Yeah, completely like he belongs. Just great surface stats. He's walked more than he struck out. He appears to be ready fully.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, he's, he's the real deal. I think I'm trying not to over react or maybe overreact is the wrong way of characterizing it, sort of over index on any of these because there still aren't very many of them. You know, like I think because we've had this, this run of either early big league career extensions or pre debut extensions. You know, some like Emerson still at aaa, that it can feel like all of the best guys are, are doing this, that this is the approach that every team is taking to their top prospects. And it's still a, you know, vanishingly small percentage of, of Guys who are getting money. I remain heartened that none of these deals feel like, oh boy, your agent's doing a bad job, you're getting ripped off, you know, like that. That doesn't feel quite like what's going on here. I remain curious. Maybe that's a judgment free way of putting it. I remain curious about what the long term impact on arbitration is, is likely to be with all of these pre debut extensions, which will be difficult to tease out, you know, and gosh, who knows what arbitration will even look like, you know, a year from now. Hopefully settled. Hopefully a settled matter.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Decided matter. Because I would imply that we have a cba. You know, you, you have background anxiety and it just attaches to different things. And today that's what mine's working on. I think it'll be hard to disentangle and sort of parse, hey, this guy going through ARB is getting this amount because of the absence of middle, infield, high profile young players who should be ARB2 but are in year three or four of, of this extension that they signed. But I, I remain, I remain curious and a little nervous about that. And it sort of stands in sharp contrast to, I think an earlier story that we were interested this year where we were part of what we were happy about or what I was happy about. You hated it, famously. No, that's not what I mean. But like, I would characterize it that way for myself. Part of why I was glad that Terry Skubel had prevailed in his arbitration dispute with the Tigers was not only that he was setting this new standard, but that he had, he had gone through the process. Right. That he had been willing to risk losing in order to set that new standard. Um, and I do think that there's labor value in these guys participating in that system and sort of establishing high comps because, you know, these deals aren't really in the purview of those conversations in most cases. So that part of it sort of sits out a distance from this. But, you know, this makes a ton of sense. This is $150 million. That's more money than all ever see. Which doesn't mean that we aren't grateful for the patronage of our patrons, but we're realistic. Like that would be crazy to expect. So, you know, it's a lot of money. I think he's a very good player. I think when you have confidence that, you know, not only the caliber of player that a guy is likely to be, but have confidence in sort of his ability to contribute in a positive way to your franchise on the field, reputationally, if you can come to a deal that makes sense, that makes a ton of sense. And, you know, if you're Kevin McGonagall, well, hey, you're having, like, the best month of your life, right? You debut in the majors, it's going great. You look like you've been there your entire life. And now, you know, the third next year, you're gonna make $150 million over the course of your contract. And, you know, he's. So. He will turn 22 this August, and so he will be on the upper end of that. Like, hey, you can really get something in free agency, but it's not like he's going to hit free agency and be an old man unable to get another good contract, assuming the rest of his career unfolds the way that this contract suggests it will. So, like, I think it's. I think it's good for him. I think it's fine. And I think the way that I want to score it or grade it in terms of what it means for baseball as a labor market remains sort of incomplete in tbd, but something I'm keeping an eye on because, you know.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah. I've wondered about what this will mean for free agency. Right.

[Matt Swartz]

And you're right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

They're going to be so boring. Some of these years

[Meg Rowley]

are really going to be just bereft.

[Matt Swartz]

And so that's kind of.

[Meg Rowley]

I don't know if that's good or bad. You could say that that's bad in

[Matt Swartz]

terms of entertaining people in the off season. But it might be good in the sense that some of these teams just get to hang onto their guys for longer. But it does mean that maybe more and more of success will derive from developing and signing your own players rather than just spending, which on the whole,

[Meg Rowley]

maybe could depress spending, but just does kind of change team construction and how

[Matt Swartz]

one actually ends up with a winning team.

[Meg Rowley]

And then I think also because, as

[Matt Swartz]

you said, it's not as If Griffin and McConagle are off the open market for their careers. They are young enough that they can

[Meg Rowley]

still become free agents and still be young enough that they could cash in long term.

[Matt Swartz]

Of course, they could sign subsequent extensions. They might never become free agents, but

[Meg Rowley]

that path is still open to them. And it's always been fairly rare.

[Matt Swartz]

It's. It's fairly rare that you get the young free agent, the guy who hits the open market when he's, you know, 26 or something. It. It happens. You get your Juan Sotos and You get, you know, Ohtani and, and people

[Meg Rowley]

with somewhat unusual circumstances or they debut super young. Bryce Harper just right. Guys who are still in their physical

[Matt Swartz]

primes when they reach free agency. But that's never been the norm really. So if you're missing out on some

[Meg Rowley]

guys, and those are the guys who

[Matt Swartz]

would sign the super long term mega

[Meg Rowley]

deals or would have in the past again.

[Matt Swartz]

Now sometimes the elite free agents, they sign the high average annual value low years deals. But if they wanted to just have the highest number, then those are the guys who could really run up the, the price tag. But those guys might not. We might see even fewer of the say 26, 27 year old free agent superstars than we used to. But what really interests me here is yeah, you mentioned these are not the old style extensions.

[Meg Rowley]

Where you would say is this guy getting good advice? Is anyone looking out for this guy's interests extensions? We're kind of conditioned to think of the early career extension as almost invariably team friendly. But the more of these are signed, the less that is bound to be true. And there's been a bit of research and writing about this that I've linked to and mentioned in previous episodes.

[Matt Swartz]

Neil Payne wrote about this last year

[Meg Rowley]

when Roman Anthony signed his deal.

[Matt Swartz]

Andrew Ball, the former assistant GM for

[Meg Rowley]

the Astros, wrote about this recently. The idea that now we've kind of the pendulum has swung to the other side.

[Matt Swartz]

Where we used to talk about is

[Meg Rowley]

the player getting ripped off. Here is the team getting a sweet

[Matt Swartz]

deal and now you could almost frame

[Meg Rowley]

it as does this make sense for

[Matt Swartz]

the team to do.

[Meg Rowley]

Are teams even getting a discount anymore? Not that you have to get a

[Matt Swartz]

discount to sign a deal. You could just get the certainty of continuing to employ that player and build around that superstar and everything. But just from a pure surplus value standpoint, looking at production versus free agent

[Meg Rowley]

dollars per win or whatever, there's clearly been a change just because players have

[Matt Swartz]

wised up and their agents have wise

[Meg Rowley]

up and so they're not going to

[Matt Swartz]

just fork over a bunch of possible earnings to teams.

[Meg Rowley]

And you also have some mechanisms, you know, bigger bonuses and, and maybe just like the pre arbitration bonus pool and some ways for players to get paid a little bit earlier and prospect promotion incentive.

[Matt Swartz]

And so maybe there's a little less

[Meg Rowley]

incentive for some of these guys to

[Matt Swartz]

sign unless they really do get a good deal.

[Meg Rowley]

So Andrew Ball was arguing that he

[Matt Swartz]

thinks if anything, teams are maybe handing out more extensions that are in their own best interests. And he noted that some teams like big market teams, the Dodgers, the Yankees, they've never signed players to early career or pre debut or pre arb extensions like this.

[Ben Lindbergh]

They allocate that money in free agency. They don't do it pre free agency.

[Meg Rowley]

Yes.

[Matt Swartz]

And so they don't really need to

[Meg Rowley]

get that kind of cost certainty because although there's cost certainty, there's also the risk because you know you're getting three

[Matt Swartz]

free agent years here of what would have been free agent years for Kevin McGonagall. And if he is as good as

[Meg Rowley]

he seems to be, well, he would be making a ton of money in those years and you're going to get him for a little less than he would have signed then. But that's several years down the road. And so there is always risk and there's prospects who look great and even

[Matt Swartz]

come out of the gate fast and, and yet they slow down and they slump or they get hurt or whatever it is.

[Meg Rowley]

It just doesn't pan out. So even with a number one or number two overall prospect in baseball, there's still some uncertainty. And when you're talking about signing someone

[Matt Swartz]

six years or five years or whatever it is before they would reach free

[Meg Rowley]

agency, then you certainly are assuming some risk. So it's possible that we're all kind of anchored to this idea that, oh, the pre arb extension that's inher going to benefit the team. Maybe it doesn't, but I think and ball kind of touched on this. I think maybe for some teams at least, okay, the Yankees and the Dodgers,

[Matt Swartz]

maybe they can afford to wait because they can just wait and see which superstars reach free agency. Now, I guess if we do end

[Meg Rowley]

up at a point where superstars are rarely reaching free agency, then they might

[Matt Swartz]

be in a bit of hot water. Unless they continue to develop their own homegrown guys because they won't just be able to pluck the priciest players from other organizations, but they don't have to kind of lock in a potential discount. They can wait and survey the market and see who's good and see what their needs are and then go get those guys. They can just go sign Kyle Tucker when they need an outfielder, sign Edwin

[Meg Rowley]

Diaz when they need a closer. But if you are a smaller market team that might not be able to outbid any other club for a free agent, then maybe there continues to be

[Matt Swartz]

some benefit in just keeping that player off the open market. So maybe that's why we're seeing, okay, the Pirates, yeah, they want Connor Griffin. The brewers, yeah, they want Cooper Pratt. And now I don't know if you'd call the Tigers small mark.

[Meg Rowley]

I mean, you know, I guess on the smaller end.

[Matt Swartz]

And so, sure, they can lock up Kevin McGonagall and the Diamondbacks could keep Corbin Carroll or whoever. Right?

[Meg Rowley]

And so, yeah, I think even though we've seen the Red Sox sign some of these guys too, and Anthony and Campbell, which may or may not work out that well, and Raphaela and others,

[Matt Swartz]

that maybe we will just see this become kind of a smaller market team tactic to keep their players away from the Dodgers and Yankees of the world who would be ready to swoop in and sign them away.

[Ben Lindbergh]

You know, Boston is a fascinating example of this. Part of it is, is definitely the broader payroll circumstance at the club. And I think that, you know, if you pull up the, the Tigers payroll page on Roster Resource, you know, after, after next year, they don't really have very much committed payroll. I mean, they have some certainly, but it's less than you might expect. And so some of it, I am sure, is just, hey, we can afford to be paying Kevin McGonagall $2 million, $8 million. I know that the, the AAV hit for tax purposes is different, but like, you know, we can afford to be sort of structuring these deals out because we do have room in it. You know, are they really going to ex size Framber Valdez's $40 million mutual option? I don't know. He and and them might not like each other in 2029, who knows? But they probably want to be in the Kevin McGonagall business. But like, Boston is interesting because they, they did a number of these deals, but they're all sort of rational relative to one another in terms of their scale, right? Like Christian Campbell. You're right. That deal might end up not working out very well, but guess what? He got meaningfully less money than Roman Anthony got. And that though, you know, he was a top 100 prospects and people were enthusiastic about him. Even the people who were enthusiastic about him recognized, hey, this is kind of a weird swing. Like, the fact that this is working for him seems to indicate that it might keep working for him. But there's obvious risk involved in the profile. Just look at the way that his approach plays out, right? So I think that teams are pretty good and pretty smart about the way that they think about these extensions relative to one another. You have a similar example in the Tiger case, right? Cole Keith got a lot less money than Kevin McGonagall did. And that makes sense. Kevin McGonagall is a better player than Cole Keith. And like the fact that I feel comfortable saying that Even though Kevin McGonagall has been in the majors for three weeks is probably indicative of the gap. Right. I think that they are thinking about it rationally. I think that for teams that aren't necessarily going to be able to counter in the free agent market that might have a willingness to spend, you know, Detroit went out and got for Amber Valdez. Part of that was that, you know, he lingered on the market longer than people expected him to. But given the opportunity to get a guy who they thought could really help to reinforce their rotation, give him a true number two, a guy who'd be a number one for other clubs, they were willing to do that. They did it on a short deal. Right. So I think you're right that there's a, even for teams that are maybe smaller mid market but have a understanding of their competitive window as open and that they want to push in chips where it makes sense, they don't have an, an endless ability to counter. Like they might be able to make a competitive offer. But when you have the Dodgers or the Mets hanging around going like, no, but we really want Kyle Tucker though. I'm sorry, like we're just gonna go get us a Kyle Tucker. We're gonna do a weird contract so he can hit the market again. We're fine with that. We'll pay him a bunch of money up front, then we'll have a Kyle Tucker. It's like, okay, well what do I do with that? You can sign Kevin McGonagall because Kevin McGonagall has way more incentive to sign a deal right now. And you think he's going to be really good. And to your point, you know, you don't have to, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to go counter. You just get to have a Kevin McGonagall.

[Matt Swartz]

The other interesting thing, maybe it's not surprising, but it is kind of funny. In Andrew Ball's post which I will link to, he had a link of

[Meg Rowley]

all of the players who have signed

[Matt Swartz]

extensions when they had less than half a year of major league Service. And it's 20 guys going back to the trailblazing Evan Longoria extension and 19 of them are non pitchers.

[Meg Rowley]

So yeah, there's Matt Moore who was the second guy on this list also with the rays back in 2011. And that's.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah, exactly.

[Meg Rowley]

And that's, that's it. It's all just position players all the way down. Which I guess makes sense because they're just so much more stable, durable, predictable. Not that things can't go wrong with them. And have. And this list does include some. We have mentioned John Singleton and Scott Kingery and, and Evan White and others. Eloy Jimenez, who's back in the big leagues now. Congrats to him. I'm regretting.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, is he really?

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah, he's up with the Blue Jays who need all the help they can get. Just.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah.

[Matt Swartz]

Bring in Lenny Sosa from the White Sox. Bring in Elo Jimenez. I am ruing not drafting him in the minor league free agent draft because he was, I believe, eligible. And I saw the name, it jumped out at me.

[Meg Rowley]

Hey, Aloya Menes.

[Matt Swartz]

And I just.

[Ben Lindbergh]

You're like a name I know on this giant list.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah. Anyway, 19 guys, it's. It's all hitters. And I will be curious to see now that we see more and more of these, will we see any pitcher ones because.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right.

[Matt Swartz]

You could presumably price in the uncertainty and just have the dollar amount be commensurately low or have it be not as long term or something.

[Meg Rowley]

So you could, you could account for the fact that yeah, you just can't project them with as much confidence.

[Matt Swartz]

But seems like no teams have wanted to be in the business of signing

[Meg Rowley]

young pitchers to long term extensions. You'd think the pitchers though, if they're

[Matt Swartz]

conscious of the risk and arm injuries and everything, that they might be more

[Meg Rowley]

motivated to do this. So I wonder if there might even be.

[Matt Swartz]

If it turns out that position players are holding out for their fair value now maybe teams could pivot to pitchers and say, hey, if you want to get yourself some certainty, then we would sign you to an early extension. You'd have to maybe take a discount here. But yeah, maybe it's just there's so much uncertainty in the error bars are so big that no one feels confident

[Meg Rowley]

enough to project anything.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I think that probably what you might. Well, what you might find would be that the, the number where a team feels like they have adequately priced in the risk puts you at such a discount that pitchers would be like why would I do this? You know, and, and maybe there is an argument to be made that especially if it's something in the six to eight year range where what you're buying out is, you know, the pre free agency team control and then a year or two of free agency that you're still in better shape doing it if you're the pitcher. Just because you could catastrophically injure yourself in a way that just derails your entire Career. But I, but I suspect, knowing what we do about the mentality of baseball players, that it might just be too, it might be too low an offer for it to really resonate with them in their representation. But maybe not. I mean, it makes the risk piece of it is profound. But the benefit of these super long deals and you know, is six years super long, long deals. Right. These long deals is that you can like absorb a Tommy John in there. You know, if you have a guy signed for eight years and he's quite young and you feel confident that he would be able to bounce back from injury, even if you only end up getting him for six of the eight, well, you know, you got him for six of the eight years and he was great. And so. And you always need pitching, you know, someone smart. I know, told me that. Only guy who's ever said it. Yeah. So.

[Matt Swartz]

Well, some have since copied me, but yeah, it's true.

[Ben Lindbergh]

And never with sufficient attribution. Those scoundrels. But you know, I, I can, I think I understand that more from the team side even than the player side, but I really just don't think you'd be able to meet like a good equilibrium point between priced in risk on the team's end and it being sufficiently compelling on the player end. But I could be wrong. I didn't think that all of these like very highly regarded young guys would necessarily be in this extension business either. But I also didn't expect Kevin McGonagall to get $150 million. So maybe it was a lack of imagination on my part. Ben.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, yeah, I do feel like that. Even when an established big league pitcher

[Matt Swartz]

signs as a free agent for however many years, I always, I mentally discount it. I kind of think like, oh, he signed for eight years.

[Meg Rowley]

Well, if you could get, yeah, if you could get five or six out of him, you know, which is maybe how teams are thinking of it too.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I think this is how teams are thinking of it.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah. So. Jesus, mate. Leo Devries, JJ Weatherholt, you're next. Max Clark, I guess, you know, people are probably reaching out to them, if they haven't already, to see if they, they want to be the next to sign these sorts of extensions. You know, One pitcher who signed a

[Matt Swartz]

free agent deal, we talked about him recently, Tatsuya Imai.

[Meg Rowley]

He has made some headlines in recent days. Not for the best reasons health wise. He has some arm fatigue.

[Matt Swartz]

At least he's getting the arm checked out after that one out outing he

[Meg Rowley]

had against the Mariners. He also has talked pretty frankly, about

[Matt Swartz]

some difficulties that he's had in adjusting not just to the competition, to the baseball, but culturally.

[Meg Rowley]

And, and that's always been an issue. You know, whether it's the size of

[Matt Swartz]

the baseball, the baseball itself being different, the schedule for starting being a bit

[Meg Rowley]

different, probably less different than it used to be. In Japan there's usually a six man

[Matt Swartz]

rotation and you just start once a week. And now that's increasingly common in the majors. So he's making most of his starts now for the Astros when he does start on five days of rest.

[Meg Rowley]

So that's kind of equivalent, but there are all sorts of differences and potentially difficulties here.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah.

[Meg Rowley]

And it sounds as if he's been a bit out of sorts.

[Matt Swartz]

And you know, he or his interpreter was saying the travel's different from the way it is. Japan, sure, there's more travel, there's longer

[Meg Rowley]

travel, obviously bigger country. The, the timing when the players eat. So in Japan, when they get back to the hotel, they eat their dinner here, the players eat at the stadium before they go back to their hotel,

[Matt Swartz]

which doesn't sound like that big a deal.

[Meg Rowley]

But all of these things, routine can be pretty important to players. And so you change any aspect of that routine. And he seemed to be doing fine in spring training and he was getting along with everyone on the team. Chandler Rome just wrote about this for the Athletic and he was pitching okay,

[Matt Swartz]

though he did mention the difference with the baseballs, the slicker balls, those slick

[Meg Rowley]

MLB balls compared to the NPP balls. Anyway, it sounds as if this has kind of come to a head now

[Matt Swartz]

after he has had a couple rough starts.

[Meg Rowley]

He also had one good start.

[Ben Lindbergh]

But he did have one good start start.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah, that plus the fatigue.

[Meg Rowley]

And also Chandler noted that he's gone through three interpreters since the start of spring training. Or he's on his third interpreter. I don't know how much of that is his decision versus the team, providing different people. I always. It does sort of surprise me that

[Matt Swartz]

there isn't more turnover among interpreters just

[Ben Lindbergh]

because especially now, you're very nervous.

[Matt Swartz]

Well, yes, I don't mean to impugn

[Ben Lindbergh]

everyone who participates in the interpreter profession. As far as we know, only one fraudster amidst the.

[Matt Swartz]

And most interpreters are just pure interpreters and not like taking care of your

[Meg Rowley]

entire life and also possibly defrauding you in the process. But yeah, but it's such a personal

[Matt Swartz]

thing, like someone who is speaking for you.

[Meg Rowley]

Yes. And also, as we have relayed at times, interpreters, they differ in their style, of course, and IMAI'S current latest interpreter

[Matt Swartz]

was interpreting in a way where he was using third person pronouns.

[Meg Rowley]

He wasn't sort of directly interpreting for Imai and speaking as Imai in the first person, but saying he is not able to adjust to the American lifestyle,

[Matt Swartz]

baseball and outside of baseball. And the interpreter even said that's probably

[Meg Rowley]

the reason for his arm fatigue, so suggesting that those cultural differences might have impacted his on field performance. But yeah, I've just, I've heard from people who speak Japanese and they watch

[Matt Swartz]

Will Ireton with the Dodgers or any of these other interpreters and you know,

[Meg Rowley]

sometimes some of them are more verbatim

[Matt Swartz]

than others and some of them are just sort of.

[Meg Rowley]

It's a summary more so than a direct. Here's exactly what was said and some are just more painstaking and literal about it. And weren't you saying back when we were talking about Ippei all the time

[Matt Swartz]

just like they should get the best,

[Meg Rowley]

you know, like get the UN interpreters or something. You'd think just because it's fairly high

[Matt Swartz]

stakes and you know, maybe it's worthwhile

[Meg Rowley]

to the player to actually make sure

[Matt Swartz]

that your, your message is being conveyed accurately.

[Meg Rowley]

And I suppose the player might not

[Matt Swartz]

always be in the best position to assess that because if the player doesn't speak English then they might know really whether the interpreter is capturing their meaning or not. So they'd have to almost ask someone

[Meg Rowley]

else who's bilingual maybe, hey, is this, this interpreter doing a good job? But yeah, so it's been a lot of flux and, and change here and you can understand how that would be different. It's, it's not new for an NPB

[Matt Swartz]

player or anyone coming over from any different culture or country. And you know, it's probably even tougher when you're in the minors and especially back in the day when teams didn't provide as many services and didn't do much of anything to help their players kind of acculturate and you know, just basic life skills of I'm a teenager, how do I do anything?

[Meg Rowley]

So yeah, I think that has improved and teams usually have dedicated departments for that sort of thing now, which is

[Matt Swartz]

good, I think good on a humane level and also good from a development standpoint, probably in a, a self serving sort of cynical way.

[Meg Rowley]

But yeah, you know, it sometimes it doesn't seem to affect the guys and they're just successful from the get go and others seem to have more trouble with them.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It, I'm fine to be clear with. I think the folks who are Doing that work at the. They should stay at the U.N. yeah, I am mindful that that's more important than baseball, but like the next tier down, you know, it's like if they have an opening at the UN and they get like 50 applications and they only end up hiring like two people, you know, take the next four candidates and be like, have you ever considered a career in sports? You know, do you want to go help out? It seems like it would be such a personal and close relationship, even when it takes on the more typical form that I think most players with their interpreter and most. I would say that most teams, it's not like every guy has his own interpreter. Like, typically you will have someone on your staff who does that work and they might have a couple of guys that they speak for and they might have a couple. They don't. And I'm sure it depends on language and some amount of like, feel and fit. But if you're like a, a big star and you're commanding like dedicated resources there, if only because you're going to be speaking to the media with some amount of frequency, I would think you would want consistency. Now, it could be that there were. We don't know why. There has been some shuffling here and it might be that that's what they were searching for. Right? A good fit, someone who imai, like connected with and sort of gelled with. But yeah, it seems like it would be a very challenging thing to hire for and know was going to go well. I think. I would imagine that spring training is a good sort of proving ground for that. But I don't know, it doesn't seem all that strange to me. I think that we tend to associate that adjustment period, that necessary adjustment period with much younger players. Right. Like, it's something that you might think of when you're talking about like an international amateur who signs out of Latin America. Like, this is a kid, you know, of course there's going to be this huge, tremendous adjustment across. Hey, you were. Well, use the, the term semi professional just to try to describe the reality of what it is to be an, an yet signed amateur out of Latin America. But, you know, you're like, ostensibly still an amateur and then all of a sudden you're a professional and you're in a different country once you come to the States and who knows what your level of fluency is and you have to figure out like, all kinds of stuff that you have more life skills as an adult. But it's still a tremendous transition going from a place that You've lived and known your entire life where you're fluent in the language and completely comfortable to somewhere where you're navigating all of that anew. And even with resources, it doesn't shock me that that would require some amount of adjustment period. So hopefully this person he's working with now is a better fit for him and the arm fatigue sort of resolves itself and we get to see am I, like, doing my stuff? Because we've. We've already seen what the good version of that looks like here against big league competition, and it's quite impressive. But you can't have him only securing one out. That's a problem.

[Matt Swartz]

Yes. And I don't know that any of this is on the Astros, but perhaps it's relevant that Imai is the first player they have signed directly from npb, Right.

[Meg Rowley]

So maybe being the first is a little bit more challenging than being, you

[Matt Swartz]

know, the guy who comes along after

[Meg Rowley]

several previous players have made that leap

[Matt Swartz]

and your organization has already learned from

[Meg Rowley]

those experiences, or just maybe there's a

[Matt Swartz]

bigger cultural adjustment going to Texas than

[Meg Rowley]

there is going to Seattle or somewhere.

[Matt Swartz]

Right. Or, you know, if you're on the west coast and maybe there's a bigger Japanese community or you're less far from

[Meg Rowley]

home or whatever it is. So I don't know. It's not as if we've heard exactly

[Matt Swartz]

the same thing from Okamoto in Toronto or, or Murakami and Chicago. And, you know, the White Sox, I don't think had signed an NPP player before either. So I don't know that it's Astros specific. But, yeah, something that might be worth noting, at least just in case that comes into play.

[Meg Rowley]

Because, yeah, you know, if you've done this before and if Japanese players, if

[Matt Swartz]

you're following in the footsteps of countrymen who've made that leap for decades by this point with some organizations, then maybe

[Meg Rowley]

that makes it easier, or maybe they're around the team the way that Ichiro is always around the Mariners with his bat broken or intact in his statue and can just give you some pointers. Or you could call someone up.

[Matt Swartz]

Not that you can't do that, and it would still be relevant to hear from someone who went to a different team.

[Ben Lindbergh]

But nonetheless, and, you know, I think what we're really talking about on some level is like, both human adaptability and human connection. Like, Ichiro's such an interesting example because, like, one of the guys on the current, you know, Mariners team that Ichiro is reportedly closest with is Julio, right? So it doesn't have to be necessarily like. Like to like, but when we, you know, when people are like, why are all the NPB stars going to the Dodgers? And I was like, well, it feels nice to have people around who speak your language fluently, who aren't only the interpreter. And a number of the Japanese players on the Dodgers have made close friendships with players who speak English, who speak Spanish. Like, I don't mean to suggest a rigidity or what have you that doesn't exist, but, you know, it's got to be nice to be able to just have your work friend who knows what you're talking about. That seems very relatable to me. And it can take a lot of forms. And you're right. I don't think that it necessarily says anything specific about the Astros, but it might speak to how valuable it is to just have someone where you can. Like when you're exhausted at the end of the day and don't want to do the harder work of, like, trying to communicate with someone in a language you're not fluent in, to be able to just revert to what is familiar to you, that. That seems very relatable to me. It's like, you know, like when you. At the end of the day and you're talking to your person and you're like, oh, my God. I. I was. I was able to only say 15 words. That was so fantastic. Just exhausted and I don't have to say anything more. You know what I mean? Yeah. Dinner's in 15.

[Meg Rowley]

Yep. Well, Imai, despite the fatigue, he has

[Matt Swartz]

averaged 94.8 miles per hour on his four seamer this year. And that is now average velo in mlb.

[Meg Rowley]

Just a little fastball speed check in here.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, it's just.

[Meg Rowley]

It's nuts. It goes up year after year after year.

[Matt Swartz]

It's like clockwork. I mean, it's the most dependable uptick really, in baseball and sports in anything.

[Meg Rowley]

It's going back to 2008, the first year of Pitch FX when MLB has been providing these values. It is almost every single year the

[Matt Swartz]

league wide average fastball speed has increased. Four seamer speeds, that is. And there are a couple years there where maybe it. It went up a lot in one year and then the next year it went down a tenth of a mile per hour or something. But then the year after that it resumed its upward rise.

[Meg Rowley]

So, yeah, of the 19 seasons that

[Matt Swartz]

we have pitch tracking info for here, I think it's gone up at 16 or 17 of those times. And the only times when it didn't was immediately following a large leap.

[Meg Rowley]

So. So it's up yet again. And I keep thinking, well, maybe this will be the year that it will actually finally stall and plateau. And the rate of increase has slowed somewhat, but nonetheless it does just keep pushing higher and higher and higher. So in 2019 it was 93.4.

[Matt Swartz]

In 2021 it was 93.6.

[Meg Rowley]

In 2022 is 93.8. In 2023 it was 94.1. In 2024 it was 94.2. In 2025 it was 94.4. And this year thus far it's 94.5. Now that's using MLB's classifications, the baseball savant classifications.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Okay.

[Matt Swartz]

And on fan graphs you can easily look at different classifications and different data sources. And if you look at the pitch info classifications, so this is you might be familiar with the website Brooks Baseball,

[Meg Rowley]

Dan Brooks, Harry Potlitis, who also works at Baseball Prospectus, and they've been doing

[Matt Swartz]

their own pitch classifications for many years and in the past, at least I've

[Meg Rowley]

regarded them as more reliable than the mlb, mostly automated ones.

[Matt Swartz]

I don't know, I would guess that the gap has closed as the clustering algorithms and everything have probably improved over time. But yeah, if you, if you go by the pitch info settings, then it's even higher, slightly higher than the MLB values, which are at 94.5. And Pitch Info I think has it at 94.7 so far this year.

[Meg Rowley]

And the other thing to note is that pitch speeds generally do increase over the course of the season, right?

[Matt Swartz]

And guys get warmed up, the weather gets warmed up.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Warmed up.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah. Bradley Woodrum of Baseball Prospectus wrote about this just this week. Evidently the in season increase league wide is smaller than it used to be.

[Matt Swartz]

Which might be because guys are just always throwing max effort all the time,

[Meg Rowley]

even early in the year.

[Matt Swartz]

Or because maybe people are coming in conditioned and doing a better job, being fully ramped up when the season starts or other reasons.

[Meg Rowley]

But however you slice it and he did a delta method to control for survivor bias.

[Matt Swartz]

And you're looking comparing individual pitchers against each other, not just like the whole pitcher pool because obviously some guys get called up, some guys get hurt. Anyway, it looks like the difference now, you know, in May guys tend to add about a tenth of a mile per hour. In June they add another tenth of a mile per hour.

[Meg Rowley]

So it used to be about half a mile per hour the rest of the season that you would add and

[Matt Swartz]

now maybe it's about half that maybe it's 210 or 310 of a mile per hour or something.

[Meg Rowley]

But even if it's that latter smaller number that suggests if we are potentially at 94.7 or something now, at least depending on one data source, then by the end of the year we might really be at a point where the average forcing fastball in MLB is 95

[Matt Swartz]

mph, and that maybe even the full

[Meg Rowley]

season average could get there as soon as next year. If you look at right handers only, it's already there.

[Matt Swartz]

Right handers are already, even in this early young season, sitting 95 for the first time.

[Meg Rowley]

So it just keeps climbing.

[Matt Swartz]

It just keeps going up and up and up.

[Meg Rowley]

And even if you look at all pitches, one thing I was kind of interested in, and even though fastballs are

[Matt Swartz]

getting faster, there are fewer of them being thrown on the whole, because, you know, there's no such thing almost as a fastball count anymore. I guess there still is in a relative sense, but it's much less an ironclad rule than it used to be.

[Meg Rowley]

And generally it's just, it's harder to hit the bendy stuff.

[Matt Swartz]

And so pitchers, teams tend to be less fastball forward than they used to be.

[Meg Rowley]

So I was wondering, okay, so the average fastball speed is going up, but pitchers tend to throw more of what

[Matt Swartz]

we at least would have called secondary stuff, though for some guys now it's basically primary stuff.

[Meg Rowley]

So would those kind of counteract each other? And would the overall pitch speed that hitters are facing, would that maybe be down? Because even though the fastball speed is climbing, the fastball rate is decreasing. And it turns out that even though there are fewer fastballs, the fastballs are faster enough. And all the other pitch types are generally faster too.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It's not like, yeah, it's not like there has been, you know, steady state with everything else, and then you just have a steady climb of fastball. Velo. Everything is getting thrown harder.

[Meg Rowley]

Yes. Yes. So in 2008, all pitches put together,

[Matt Swartz]

the average pitch speed was 87.5. And this year thus far it's 89.4. So even that is up a couple ticks. And that is tied for the highest

[Meg Rowley]

on record with last year, which was also 89.4. And if we project that the speeds will increase a bit over the course of the season, then it looks like,

[Matt Swartz]

yes, this will be another new high just for average pitch speed and average fastball speed.

[Meg Rowley]

So how high can it go? I don't know. There's got to be some natural limit or maybe there will be changes to roster rules or pitcher usage or who knows?

[Matt Swartz]

And maybe that will bring this down a bit.

[Meg Rowley]

But it seems like it's just going

[Matt Swartz]

to keep climbing indefinitely. And it is incredible.

[Meg Rowley]

To put it into perspective, we've talked about the pitch Flames on the broadcast and how a lot of the broadcasts have raised the threshold for flames to 97, 98.

[Matt Swartz]

You know, we've talked about what it

[Meg Rowley]

should be because it used to be 95 and now that's just. That's table stakes. That's just your garden variety heat. It's not even heat. It's. It's room temperature in the majors now it's 95. It's nuts.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, it's. It's at a temperature where you could, like, water a plant with it and not worry about it. Or it suggests that for. Well, it suggests a number of things, but the one that I always find the most striking is that for all the consternation we have as an industry, and I use.

[Meg Rowley]

Use.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I'm using like the. The royal we here because it's something that writers worry about. It's obviously something that team people are concerned about. It's something the players are grappling with. For all our concern about pitcher injuries and the prevalence of pitcher injuries and the number of guys you need to get through a season, it is. It does not seem to be meaningfully impacting the way that they are training for the big league campaign in any given year.

[Meg Rowley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

You would think that we would at least be seeing like, a real plateauing and that it would have started sooner. But no, I think they're still mostly training for Velo. That's not the only thing that guys are doing. And I think that, you know, there's variation within the population depending on, like, what they throw and whether they've been injured previously and all kinds of stuff. So I don't want to say that it's one size fits all, but I, I do think that for all of our. Oh, we gotta keep them healthy and for all the panels and committees that the league might assemble, like, they're still really trying to throw very hard, and

[Meg Rowley]

hitters have adapted to that heat to some extent.

[Matt Swartz]

But, yeah, it's.

[Meg Rowley]

It's tough.

[Matt Swartz]

Velocity is still kind of king.

[Meg Rowley]

And one trend that I had not noticed actually has plateaued is the catcher's interference.

[Matt Swartz]

But. But there is a.

[Meg Rowley]

A notable development.

[Matt Swartz]

So, yeah, we've.

[Meg Rowley]

We've talked about this multiple times. It's funny, this has been a beat

[Matt Swartz]

that Jeff Sullivan sort of started. I Think he kind of originated the catcher's interference beat and wrote about it many times.

[Meg Rowley]

And we talked about it here on

[Matt Swartz]

Effectively wild and episode 2162.

[Meg Rowley]

We charted the increase over time and talked about the reasons for it it. And Sam has kind of picked up

[Matt Swartz]

the torch from Jeff and he writes about catcher's interference all the time at his newsletter, Pebble Hunting.

[Meg Rowley]

And what I had not noticed is that the seemingly inexorable rise of the catcher's interference has been halted. There were fewer catchers interference calls last

[Matt Swartz]

year than there had been the season

[Meg Rowley]

before, which has not been the case

[Matt Swartz]

for quite a while, I believe.

[Meg Rowley]

I just looking back, just kind of

[Matt Swartz]

picking a season like 2010, there were 28 instances of catcher's interference.

[Meg Rowley]

By 2022 there were 74.

[Matt Swartz]

And then in 2023 there were 96.

[Meg Rowley]

And in 2024 when we did our check in, there were a hundred. So more than the previous season, but barely. And then last year it was actually down, it went down from 100 to 88. So even though that rise has been halted, at least temporarily, there has been kind of a catcher's interference creep in terms of what is being called catcher's interference. And this is what Sam has exhaustively documented.

[Matt Swartz]

And there have been many cases of no swing catchers interference.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right.

[Meg Rowley]

So, and you might think, well, how could it even be catcher's interference if there's no swing? But umpires have seemingly decided and teams

[Matt Swartz]

are testing this now, that you can call it that way.

[Meg Rowley]

But now we have the ultimate.

[Matt Swartz]

And Sam was tickled, I think, because he had forecasted that this could be a possibility. There had been some close calls.

[Meg Rowley]

Now we've just got catchers playing footsie with hitters. And that alone the foot based contact

[Matt Swartz]

can cause a catcher's interference call.

[Meg Rowley]

So the reason why we've seen so much catchers interference in recent seasons, the

[Matt Swartz]

primary reason is that catchers have shifted

[Meg Rowley]

up in the box because, well, it's

[Matt Swartz]

better for framing seemingly to be able to present that pitch closer to the plate before it has a chance to drop and be further out of the strike zone.

[Meg Rowley]

And then also now the running game is more of a priority. And so every, every extra inch closer to second base can help. And maybe there are also batters who have taken my advice and have shifted

[Matt Swartz]

back a bit in the box thanks

[Meg Rowley]

to that increased pitch speed that we were just talking about. And so there's just much more proximity between the catcher and the hitter now. And so sometimes we've seen catcher's interference called when there's like a check swing

[Matt Swartz]

and the bat makes contact with the outstretched catcher's glove and it just kind of glances off the glove. And sometimes you could even get it

[Meg Rowley]

on a non swing when you're really

[Matt Swartz]

just trying to get out of the way of the pitch, but your bat

[Meg Rowley]

happens to make contact with the glove and it's really just incidental. And Sam has expressed the thought that that feels wrong really to him, that it's being over applied. Because the thing about this, it's.

[Matt Swartz]

It's almost like the check swing rules

[Meg Rowley]

where there's no real rule about what constitutes a swing. And so there's not much specificity when

[Matt Swartz]

it comes to catcher's interference.

[Meg Rowley]

The rulebook says the batter becomes a runner and is entitled to first base without liability to be put out when the catcher or any fielder interferes with him. And that's it. So what, what qualifies as interference is really left up to you. So you could interpret that to say

[Matt Swartz]

if it actually gets physically in the way of the swing or you could just say it's if it gets in the way of the batter's intent to

[Meg Rowley]

swing or to do whatever. And you know, Sam looked this up in the dictionary.

[Matt Swartz]

He just looked up interfering in his dictionary and it said to interpose in

[Meg Rowley]

a way that hinders or impedes.

[Matt Swartz]

Impedes. So there's a lot of leeway there

[Meg Rowley]

for what hinders or impedes. And that's what we've seen now. So we had a call and I don't know if this is the first

[Matt Swartz]

ever, but I'm confident that Sam would have documented it if it had happened recently. Chase, my droth, was hitting for the White Sox and he took a pitch

[Meg Rowley]

and he didn't even go around. He didn't even start to swing or anything. But he just took a pitch and it looks like a totally normal pitch. You would not notice anything amiss if

[Matt Swartz]

you were just to watch the video. But. But if you watch very closely, you

[Meg Rowley]

see that the catcher, the tip of the catcher's toe was touching the tip of my Drath's foot. So. So he's facing the Rays. It's Rays versus White Sox.

[Matt Swartz]

And the catcher here.

[Meg Rowley]

And it's funny because you could see there's like a eagle eyed. In this case, it's White Sox field coordinator Chris d', Onfia, former big leaguer. And he's looking.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah.

[Meg Rowley]

Who as Sam noted, never, never drew a catcher's interference.

[Matt Swartz]

So it's too busy yelling nor maybe so. But Nick Fortes was catching for the raise.

[Meg Rowley]

And he had shifted far enough forward that his toe was actually resting on the foot of my drath as the pitch was being delivered.

[Matt Swartz]

Like after the pitcher had, you know, Shane McClanahan had gone into his delivery and everything.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah.

[Meg Rowley]

And my droth didn't seem to be bothered by this, as far as we

[Ben Lindbergh]

can seem to notice that it's there. Candidly.

[Meg Rowley]

No. He didn't protest. He didn't say anything. He didn't turn around and jot the catcher. He took this pitch. It was more or less down the middle a little bit inside, on the inside corner. And my droth just stepped back and kind of nodded and okay, called strike. Seems to be business as usual.

[Matt Swartz]

But it wasn't because Denorfia was watching, and he got all excited because he

[Meg Rowley]

saw, this is it. This is the time we've been waiting for. We can actually challenge this. And. And there was a previous instance last

[Matt Swartz]

season that Sam wrote about in December

[Meg Rowley]

where Justin Turner was hitting for the Cubs and Austin Wells was catching. And the Cubs tried to have this

[Matt Swartz]

happen, but it was not upheld the challenge, and it was ruled that it

[Meg Rowley]

was not a catcher's interference because Wells's foot had made only fleeting contact, seemingly. I mean, and Sam was inferring, we

[Matt Swartz]

don't exactly know why the ruling was what it was, but Wells, his. His foot had not really rested on Turner's foot. It kind of made contact, and it

[Meg Rowley]

made contact, I think, prior to the pitcher going into his delivery. So you could argue that it couldn't

[Matt Swartz]

have really hindered or impeded Turner because this was prior to the pitch actually being delivered.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Got it. Okay.

[Meg Rowley]

Wells, you know, some catchers now, I

[Matt Swartz]

mean, you have the one knee down

[Meg Rowley]

is so prevalent, and some guys are

[Matt Swartz]

like one leg out.

[Meg Rowley]

And so that leg also is splayed out forward and splayed back there. So that one. That was a close call. And Sam sort of expected that we would get this.

[Matt Swartz]

And now that we have this, in

[Meg Rowley]

this case, it does appear to be pretty incontrovertible when you watch it from the side angle.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, yeah.

[Meg Rowley]

Fortes's toe.

[Matt Swartz]

It.

[Meg Rowley]

It is just like.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It's resting.

[Meg Rowley]

It is. It's just fully making contact, at least, and is maybe even like a little bit on top of the tip of my draft's foot here. And. And so my dress, you know, he

[Matt Swartz]

took his base and he was happy to have it, but he did not, like, gesture to the bench and say,

[Meg Rowley]

oh, this is the time. But he didn't appear to be confused

[Matt Swartz]

about what was Happening, because I guess he, like, he.

[Meg Rowley]

He confidently took his base because I

[Matt Swartz]

guess he was aware that the toe had been touching his foot. He must have felt it.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right. My. My theory is that he was probably coached by North.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah, North.

[Ben Lindbergh]

We didn't. We call him North? Didn't we call him, like, North Dog? I feel like people did. Was it me? I don't think so. I think it was other people.

[Meg Rowley]

Baseball Reference does have north as a nickname for him. There you go.

[Ben Lindbergh]

All right. Well, it's always nice to know that. Well, I was going to say that you're not crazy, but it's more that this is an evidence of that. We'll leave the other diagnosis to the professionals. But I. I imagine that what Christian Orphea told his guys in that moment was to not move too much because there's a possibility that, you know, Chase Madra feels the foot there, and he's like, if I wiggle, like, if I draw attention to it, he might move his foot, and he might do it in a way that escapes the notice of the umpire. So you got to be a little crafty. You gotta. You gotta trust your dugout. It's like, I've got eyes on this. Don't worry. You just stand there and try to concentrate on hitting. Take. Take your mind to the ball, not the base, and I will notice that you are being, you know, lightly played footsie with, and. And then you'll get to move on down. So I'm sure he. I. I'm not sure I would suspect that he felt it. He knew it was there, and he's like, I just got to be patient. I gotta be patient. And north has me. North's got me covered, much like this part of my foot with his foot.

[Meg Rowley]

Yes. Sam speculates that maybe he had not been coached just because he didn't. Like, he seemed sort of surprised that the challenge was being issued, but then

[Matt Swartz]

when the challenge was issued, he did

[Ben Lindbergh]

just what it was.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah, he knew, and I think he was.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Reminds my theory.

[Meg Rowley]

Well, yeah, I mean, the other thing is that you probably wouldn't want to

[Matt Swartz]

kind of coach the batter to do it.

[Meg Rowley]

Like, you might coach them to be aware of it or, hey, let us know.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, but.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, but you wouldn't want it because you could. The hypothetical is, well, could the batter

[Matt Swartz]

then just back up a bit and

[Meg Rowley]

intentionally make contact and then induce the catcher's interference call.

[Matt Swartz]

But maybe if it's transparent that that's what you're trying to do, they won't do it. They won't make the ball actually work. So if you keep my draft in the dark, then he's kind of blameless, maybe.

[Meg Rowley]

And I'm torn on this because I doubt that he would have swung at this otherwise, that he would have gotten a hit otherwise. Can you really say that it hindered or impeded him if he didn't. Didn't appear to have any desire to swing at this ball? But then again, we can't know, right, what's in the hitter's head. And maybe on some level, maybe even

[Matt Swartz]

subconsciously, he would have been less likely

[Meg Rowley]

to swing because the catcher's toe is

[Matt Swartz]

on his foot, and maybe that could

[Meg Rowley]

actually obstruct him somehow. So I'm torn between thinking this is kind of ticky tack and thinking, well, I guess by the spirit of the rule, maybe it's not against the letter of the rule, I guess because the letter of the law here is left so open to interpretation.

[Matt Swartz]

But I don't. I don't know. And.

[Meg Rowley]

And I guess I'm also sort of sympathetic just because, hey, catchers, you have your box and the batter has his box. And as long as the batter is in his box, then you got to stay in your lane, you know, you got to stay. Stay back there, right there. And it's probably for your own safety.

[Matt Swartz]

You should stay back because you don't want to get hit by a backswing or something.

[Meg Rowley]

But we'll see whether teams are now more aggressive about challenging when this happens, or could conceivably have happened, or whether catchers are told, hey, shift back an

[Matt Swartz]

inch at least, like, don't make it.

[Meg Rowley]

It's almost tender when you watch it in slow motion. It's like if there were a heated rivalry for mlb. I mean, there's plenty of fiction out

[Matt Swartz]

there, but I was going to say

[Ben Lindbergh]

this just hasn't been made into a TV show, right?

[Matt Swartz]

Like, yes, and there was a play.

[Meg Rowley]

If there's a big screen heated rivalry

[Matt Swartz]

equivalent for mlb, then you could imagine, you know, it's like Ilia and Shane, the baseball equivalents of them. You know, they're facing each other, but they can't openly. You can't have a. A public display of affection, but maybe one of them is catching and one of them is in the batter's box and they just, you know, just inch that foot forward.

[Meg Rowley]

Just make a little tender toe touch.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It's very tender. I like that interpretation more than the one I was going to go with. And this maybe speaks to our respective life experiences, because I was like, this recharacterizes the batter catcher interaction to me as one of, like, simmering sibling rivalry where you're like, not touching, can't get. Man, how close can I get to you before you have to yell at mom? And then you smack me and I'm like, why? I never did that. I never worked to get my sister in trouble. That would be psychotic. I would be a monster. We're best friends now. It's fine.

[Meg Rowley]

Anyway, something to watch. So I will link to Sam's piece. It's worth. Well, it's worth subscribing in general, but also just worth checking out this specific

[Matt Swartz]

edition for the videos here. But, yeah, this was a big day for Sam because obviously he's been tracking this very closely.

[Meg Rowley]

So we'll see.

[Matt Swartz]

I. I think probably they should all

[Meg Rowley]

just stay in their areas and not actually make contact unless they want to. But no, even if they want to, maybe it's against the rules and they shouldn't in this case. So, yeah, everyone spread out a bit. You know, stop invading each other's personal space.

[Matt Swartz]

But also, I don't know, I wonder whether MLB should issue some sort of

[Meg Rowley]

clarification here for this rule, like, what actually has to happen for.

[Matt Swartz]

For someone to have been interfered with.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right.

[Meg Rowley]

Does this count as interference? But I guess I'm open to the

[Matt Swartz]

interpretation that it did.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Matt Swartz]

Another interesting little wrinkle here that I think we should discuss.

[Meg Rowley]

This comes to us from Raymond Chen,

[Matt Swartz]

who was our guest on our most recent Patreon bonus pod because he is

[Meg Rowley]

a Patreon supporter and also is the. The primary caretaker of the effectively wild wiki. But he wrote in, in regular listener capacity here, to ask, should we change the ABS challenge signal? And Raymond notes that in the past week, there have been three accidental challenges, seemingly misinterpretations. So on April 8th, bottom of the first, after his first pitch to George Springer, and I was watching this one live, Shohei Ohtani adjusted his cap, which catcher Will Smith seemed to mistake as Ohtani wanting to issue a challenge. And so Will Smith echoed this gesture for the umpire. And. And this was a weird one because it was like the first pitch that Ohtani threw. And it.

[Matt Swartz]

It wasn't a really egregious call or anything, and it obviously was like super low leverage and everything. So I was thinking, why challenge here?

[Meg Rowley]

I think there was a weird one

[Matt Swartz]

like that the other day.

[Meg Rowley]

Maybe Zach Netto was involved. And so sometimes it's just players kind

[Matt Swartz]

of jumping the gun on issuing a

[Meg Rowley]

challenge at an inopportune time, but sometimes it might actually be an accident. So Ohtani adjust his cap. Will Smith thought, oh, sh is trying to call for a challenge. I will call for a challenge here.

[Matt Swartz]

And there was a challenge and it was wasted.

[Meg Rowley]

On April 12, bottom of the first, after his second pitch to Moises Ballesteros, Bubba Chandler adjusted his cap, which the

[Matt Swartz]

umpire interpreted as a challenge.

[Meg Rowley]

And April 12, same day, top of the fourth, Ben Rice of the Yankees takes a called third strike, tosses his bat and touches the brim of his helmet, which the umpire interprets as an ABS challenge. And it clearly wasn't one. It was an okay call. And Rice I think, had accepted it.

[Matt Swartz]

And he seemed taken aback. I, I watched both of these like

[Meg Rowley]

Bubba Chandler was confused.

[Matt Swartz]

He was like, I didn't, I didn't mean to. And Ben Rice, same thing.

[Meg Rowley]

So Raymond says, given that adjusting one's cap or helmet is common and touching one's head is often an unconscious gesture, do you think the signal for an ABS challenge should be changed? And if so, to what? And maybe, maybe this, it actually makes sense because this, yeah, this has happened a few times lately. And this made me recall it actually did happen last year too with Jung Hu Lee of the Giants. And I was aware of this because I had made the preseason prediction that someone would.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right, you were very invested.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah. And so I was tracking this and

[Matt Swartz]

Chris Hannell and the EW Stats team, they were tracking this.

[Meg Rowley]

And this seemed like, and it ultimately was a false alarm, but it was mid April. It seemed like maybe zhenghu Lee had,

[Matt Swartz]

you know, the challenge system was not actually in play, but it had been in effect in, in spring training.

[Meg Rowley]

And so I predicted that someone would

[Matt Swartz]

gesture for a challenge to mock the umpire, to question the umpire's call.

[Meg Rowley]

And ultimately that did happen. Taylor Walls did it. And my prediction paid off. But with Jung Hu Lee, it was just a miscommunication. And he said through an interpreter, everybody who watches Giants games probably knows that every pitch I go, I adjust my helmet. It's every pitch. And the umpire, Phil Cozy, misinterpreted this

[Matt Swartz]

and thought that he was being shown up and he said something to Lee and then they talked about it after the game and Lee had to clarify,

[Meg Rowley]

no, I wasn't trying to, to show you up. That's just the motion that I make all the time.

[Matt Swartz]

And so cuz he then said, I think he told Lee that he shouldn't tap his helmet because you're not allowed to do that. That was at the time interpreted as basically arguing balls and strikes. And so he said, you can't you can't do that.

[Meg Rowley]

So there is a bit of a language barrier and a miscommunication. So this does keep happening. And given that the challenge system is now in effect, should they consider switching

[Ben Lindbergh]

things up, I would be open to it. I have a sort of dastardly proposal that I, that I think should. I don't know what, what it should be, what the gesture should be for hitters and catchers, but I think that if you're a pitcher and you're trying to challenge, which doesn't happen very often, obviously. And there is sort of an interesting subplot that I think our friend Jake Mintz explored on his podcast of like, did. Why did Will Smith feel like he needed to challenge on sho his behalf? Right. Like he was interpreting that as oh, I should challenge Shohei thinks or something. Making a challenge. I'm going to do the thing. I was like, well, showing not only I'm challenges a picture, but then Will Smith thought, oh, I got to do it cuz my guy says that there's something wrong here. So like that's.

[Meg Rowley]

I thought it was just kind of

[Matt Swartz]

making sure, just you know, good battery meat, like making sure the umpire registered the challenge.

[Ben Lindbergh]

But you know, you know what the, the signal for challenging should be for pitchers?

[Meg Rowley]

What?

[Ben Lindbergh]

Digging into the belt.

[Matt Swartz]

Oh,

[Ben Lindbergh]

what you challenging? What other reason do you have to go in there?

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, I'm sure they'd like that. That would help them get away with.

[Ben Lindbergh]

They're still digging into their belts all the time, Ben. You know what's in there? They really need to tuck in their shirts that much? No, no, they're still, they're still loading. They're still loading up. Yep. So this is a two birds, one stone sort of situation because they're not really the ones who are challenging. And we've talked about the reasons why and so of folks on teams. But if the signal to challenge is that and your pitcher will. You just have to find a new spot to hide your gunk, I guess.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

But I think it, it's a tricky thing because in a world where no one is trying to manipulate world in a world where no one is trying to manipulate the challenge system, you could just say, oh, I didn't mean to challenge. And the umpire could say, cool, no sweat. But in the world we live in, you could conceive of a situation where a guy did mean to challenge and then receive some sort of signal from the dugout that would never happen. I'm sure that they're not going to find a way to Indicate to their guys that they should challenge. No. And, and then they realize, oh, that's bad, I shouldn't do it. And you take it. You do a take back seat. So I think you can't, you know, you can't employ the reasonable solution to this problem, which is just to have the guy say, oh, I'm sorry, that was a mistake. We didn't mean to challenge because they're all lying liars who we can't believe and trust. I mean, not all of them, but maybe, you know, like Will Smith has that youthful face.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

You don't think that, you don't think that a guy with a youthful face could be a liar. Have you ever seen Little Rascals?

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah. You know, yeah. So I, I think if this keeps happening, I think it's worth considering. Now, the players are encouraged to verbalize their challenge. That's what there's a mlp.com explainer.

[Matt Swartz]

How is a challenge issued? The player taps his cap or helmet

[Meg Rowley]

to alert the umpire to his desire to challenge the call. Players are also encouraged to verbalize their challenge to leave nothing to doubt.

[Matt Swartz]

But the cap, slash helmet tap represents the official challenge. So you could say that you have

[Meg Rowley]

to mandate the verbal challenge. But then, well, if you're a pitcher and granted maybe if you're a pitcher, you're not doing it, or not supposed

[Matt Swartz]

to do it that often anyway, but might be hard to hear for the umpire if it's loud and there's a

[Meg Rowley]

lot of crowd noise or something. So maybe you do need some sort of signal. And I'm thinking of, well, what could a different, you know, of course some,

[Matt Swartz]

some silly ones could occur to you.

[Meg Rowley]

I mean, you could do.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Well, it is, it is challenging because I didn't mean to do that. It's challenging because, you know, they're sending each other signals all the time. And so you need something that really is distinct and specific to, hey, I'm trying to challenge here.

[Meg Rowley]

Yes.

[Matt Swartz]

Yes. Yeah, right. So you could just flip the birds to the umpires.

[Meg Rowley]

Screw you, I'm challenging. I mean, Jaron Duran just did that

[Matt Swartz]

to a fan the other day.

[Meg Rowley]

Not the best.

[Matt Swartz]

But also that was maybe not unprovoked, maybe said something.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Can I say something about this? Because look, I get it's not the best, and we have had issues with Jaron Duran in the past based on fan interactions, but more because of what he said than what he did. But I'm here to tell you this. If you shout what that fan shouted to him, if you shout it to anyone, but particularly someone who has been open and vulnerable about their own mental health struggles, including incidents of attempted self harm. You're lucky he didn't go into the stands and beat you senseless. I'm sorry. Like, don't do that. It's a bad example. There are children present. But honestly, I think he was pretty restrained from what that fan said. Shame on you, fan. Ridiculous. Be a human being.

[Meg Rowley]

My God, that is bad.

[Matt Swartz]

And. And it's bad that Duran then subsequently said that he wishes that he had never divulged that, because the worst fans maybe are using that as ammunition against him.

[Meg Rowley]

And so that's bad because then it

[Matt Swartz]

discourages people from talking frank and open

[Meg Rowley]

about these things, which can help other people who have gone through the same thing.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So, yes, and I think there's value in professional athletes, particularly male professional athletes, speaking about this stuff, because I do think that they serve as role models to demographics of young men who are very interior and could benefit from being able to talk about these things and ask for help. So I was very steamed. Hardly the only one to be clear, but my goodness, be a person. Jesus. Squeeze.

[Meg Rowley]

So flipping the bird at blue is

[Matt Swartz]

probably out, but, yeah, don't flip the bird.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It would be so wild if the leaks, like, no, that's our preferred signal. That's our preferred sign, is for you to stand up there and go, yeah, and I'm. I'm doing it. Which everyone can see in this visual medium, that is by guessing the hat adjustment.

[Meg Rowley]

That is kind of problematic because if

[Ben Lindbergh]

you have to lift your batting helmet clean off your head. You know what if you have to

[Meg Rowley]

go like, okay, well, yeah, that's a terrible solution. It would take a little more time,

[Ben Lindbergh]

but it would take more time.

[Meg Rowley]

Less open to misinterpretation, because sometimes you have to adjust your. Your batting helmet because sometimes. Sometimes it's loose and you gotta tamp

[Matt Swartz]

it down or whatever. And.

[Meg Rowley]

And sometimes it's just a habitual move that you make. And maybe you could condition yourself not

[Matt Swartz]

to do that now.

[Meg Rowley]

But, yeah, sometimes you do want to just kind of tug on your cap or something. So, like some kind of Macarena move or something.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Like, what if you mimic throwing a flag?

[Matt Swartz]

Like, yeah, well, that would. I was thinking that, like, what if each player just had a flag and they could just toss a little.

[Meg Rowley]

That would be very funny.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Have little flags, Ben.

[Meg Rowley]

It would be very funny.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It would be delightful if they each had a little flag.

[Meg Rowley]

It would take more time. Yeah. Then they'd have to stoop down and pick up the flag, which also would

[Matt Swartz]

be kind of funny. But there's time for that, I guess.

[Ben Lindbergh]

There's time. There's a challenge going on.

[Matt Swartz]

They can.

[Ben Lindbergh]

They can pick up their litter while the challenge is. Is challenging.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah. Or you could. Now I'm. I'm anti scouting report card, but I

[Matt Swartz]

guess you could have some kind of

[Meg Rowley]

challenge card that you brandished maybe. Yeah, I think they had something like that in volleyball, I read. And. And also in volleyball, then like coaches can make a C shape with their hands instead of presenting the card to indicate a review. And that might be okay because it

[Matt Swartz]

wouldn't be misinterpreted as anything else, I suppose. So if you've just formed a C with your kind of corny looking.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, I guess it is. So something that looks okay and is not potentially offensive, but also could not be misinterpreted as anything else. You know, just kind of do some little shimmy, just like a little hippie, hippie shake. I don't know, just some sort of dance move would be kind of funny. A little hop. All these things could happen in the

[Matt Swartz]

course of normal events.

[Ben Lindbergh]

I think a challenge flag is the way to go because, you know, if it's like a card, like you're pulling, like you're a. Soccer. I think they refs. Are they umpires? What are they in soccer? What is the term for an official?

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, refs, I think refs.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Is it refs? Okay.

[Matt Swartz]

Or.

[Meg Rowley]

Or just.

[Ben Lindbergh]

What is it in hockey? Are they refs also?

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Okay, so it's really just baseball that's hanging out with umpires.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, judges.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It doesn't matter. So anyway, when they do their little thing, like sometimes they have to fumble around for it. You know, it can get kind of stuck in stuff. It could get stuck in your. Your pocket. A flag could just be hanging out the back. Like you could just have it hanging out of your back pocket. But then, you know, is there danger and you sliding on it, but you have your gloves back there. You know, like if you. And you slide on those, is it really worse? Because like an NFL challenge flag like that a coach would throw, you know, there's. There's like a little, like a little pocket of. Of heavy. I think it's probably sand so that when you throw it out it like florals and then it falls to the ground. So maybe that's a hazard, but I think that it would be the best solution. Maybe it might add too much time, but I don't think it would add that much time and it would Be funny.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, I guess. So is the, the tapping, is that sort of like a skeuomorph motion to

[Matt Swartz]

suggest like the headset?

[Meg Rowley]

Kind of.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Because you would do like, you do this, you do the two on the side of your head for the headset.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah. But sometimes you're, you're holding a bat or you got a glove or you've got a. So maybe you just use one hand. Like is there significance?

[Meg Rowley]

Is it.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, you could do side, you could do side head.

[Meg Rowley]

Side head.

[Ben Lindbergh]

The side head. You could, you do like, you know, a manager asking for a replay review will often do the like, you know, cans.

[Meg Rowley]

Yes.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Gesture on the sides of their heads.

[Meg Rowley]

Right.

[Ben Lindbergh]

So a player calling for a challenge could do like a one handed guy and go da da, da.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Or you could distinct action as opposed to just like jostling your cap or what or what have you.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah. Or you could do like a phone

[Meg Rowley]

call motion because it's sponsored by T Mobile.

[Matt Swartz]

T Mobile would like that, I'm sure.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah. That makes me not like it. I would guys be into it because I like the idea of them doing like the handset. Like, hey, but then there's like, you know, integration with a sponsor. Now I'm. Now I'm back out.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah. Or what if you did like because

[Meg Rowley]

it's the Hawkeye system.

[Matt Swartz]

What if you, you like put your arm out as if you were doing

[Meg Rowley]

some falconry or something like you were gonna have. Maybe that doesn't work or you make some sort of hawk call or I don't know. But there's got to be something.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Wait, I'm sorry. You want baseball players to be up there going, that is what I want.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Why wouldn't they just say challenge then? If it's a vote? Why wouldn't they just go challenge?

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah. Well, maybe this, the caca would be louder so it would break through.

[Ben Lindbergh]

You think that you could caca louder than you could yell challenge?

[Meg Rowley]

I think so, yeah. It's more of a piercing, just a different frequency.

[Ben Lindbergh]

But I think that it would be for some people. But some people aren't going to reach that register. I would, I would even venture to say most wouldn't. So I think that the batter should have to turn all the way around and show his back to the pitcher. And that's the sign. And the catcher can lay down

[Meg Rowley]

and

[Ben Lindbergh]

then, and then the pitchers at, as we've established, have to dig into their belts. What else would they be doing that for? Nothing. Yeah, Angels, everyone.

[Meg Rowley]

Instead of the flag that you throw,

[Matt Swartz]

you throw a Glove or you slap

[Meg Rowley]

someone with a glove, you know, like you're challenging them to a duel or something. Or it's throwing the gauntlet.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Be great for like batter, catcher, umpire relations. And then again, what does the pitcher do? Because you can't have the pitcher. I love the idea of like, like to indicate a challenge in a system. Part of, part of the appeal of which is that it happens so quickly. The pitcher has to walk to home plate and smack. And then a challenge has been issued. And I'm sure that the zone after that will be pristine. No bias, no issue. Yes, I do. I do wonder. I think you're right. That probably Will Smith just return to the baby face liar known as Will Smith. I don't have any reason to think that Will Smith is a dishonest person. I just want to make clear. But he is very youthful in his face. He looks like a comic whose name I can never remember. Anyway, I, I like the idea that I was talking about this with somebody that like, you know, a catcher. It was suggested to me that there might be an easier time for the pitching team not only in terms of the accuracy of the. The challenge, but in terms of sort of smoothing the way with the umpire to have the catcher do it because you know, the catcher's there all the time and can have chatter with the umpire and can make it obvious like hey, you're calling a great zone. You just happened to miss one, buddy. Like this is a. You weren't getting along smoothing the way easy time between us. Whereas like there's something more fundamentally aggressive about the pitcher calling for a challeng. And so I like the idea of there being some sort of pitcher to catcher relay system. The flaw of that being that like the pitchers probably shouldn't challenge much at all. But anyway.

[Meg Rowley]

Okay, well, okay right in. If you have, if you have. We're gonna get a lot or serious

[Ben Lindbergh]

well and I suggestions. I look forward to them because I think it's. I think Raymond, you know, hit on something real, which is. Now I don't think that this is a. It doesn't seem like it's a big problem. Right. Like we, we are able to readily identify some examples which suggests there's room for improvement. But it doesn't seem like there's like a rash of unintentional challenges going on, but maybe room to improve nonetheless.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, yeah, maybe like a spinning finger sign. Not with the finger. Kind of. Not the home run sign that the Empire does.

[Ben Lindbergh]

This is part of the problem.

[Matt Swartz]

I know there's so many Signals for everything.

[Meg Rowley]

Everything could be interpreted but kind of like a tape loop spinning, sort of like rewind, let's see the replay there. Maybe another sort of skew morph though. Maybe if you're doing that, holding it up to your head, that might be kind of like a cuckoo.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Oh, like you're trying to say that they're bonkers.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah. So that, that might be.

[Ben Lindbergh]

That would be good. Yeah, that's. That doesn't seem like it would. Would lend itself to good relations with.

[Meg Rowley]

Well, give us a solution. People Write in podcast Fangraphs.com something that would be clear and not misinterpreted but also easy to signal because you got

[Matt Swartz]

to do it quickly. And yeah, it's got to satisfy all these criteria.

[Meg Rowley]

Or if you want to suggest a

[Matt Swartz]

silly one, you can do that too. Also in hockey there are referees, but probably people usually say officials because some of the officials are referees and some of them are. Or linesman.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right, right.

[Matt Swartz]

Specifically monitoring the line.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

[Matt Swartz]

And also I mentioned the Astros earlier when we were talking about in my.

[Meg Rowley]

To be clear, they have had other Japanese players, Norio and.

[Matt Swartz]

And you say Gucci and Kazmatsui.

[Meg Rowley]

Etc.

[Matt Swartz]

It's just that they've never signed someone.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Someone directly out of.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah.

[Matt Swartz]

So they've never sort of had to help someone get a culturation to their.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah.

[Meg Rowley]

Okay.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Okay.

[Meg Rowley]

And also update on Cutter Crawford whom

[Matt Swartz]

we talked about last time cuz the mystery was revealed, the injury that he suffered last year.

[Meg Rowley]

He has now.

[Matt Swartz]

His, his rehab has been derailed. Unfortunately he was on a rehab assignment and now at least it's on hold

[Meg Rowley]

for the time being. But as far as we know, not because he had a relapse when it comes to gardening and cranking and yanking his hose, but just because he hurt his forearm.

[Matt Swartz]

And I, I think it's just the usual sort of pitcher having a forearm

[Meg Rowley]

injury, which is quite demoralizing for Crawford. But as far as we know, no

[Matt Swartz]

unusual circumstances, no gardening related mishaps.

[Ben Lindbergh]

How hurt does he have to be before he is allowed to just garden again?

[Matt Swartz]

You know, like as he said, I've got a guy now, so he's not taking.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, yeah. H. Ben, can I tell you something very exciting?

[Matt Swartz]

Okay.

[Ben Lindbergh]

It's gardening related, so it's relevant to our baseball podcast.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, totally.

[Ben Lindbergh]

You made it relevant. So I have a little mobile like elevated garden bed to do herbs because we got tired of buying herbs. You know, you buy, you buy herbs to cook with and then you end up tossing half of them particularly if they're very delicate herbs and it feels like a waste and they're so expensive and there's all this single use plastic involved a lot of the time. So we were like, oh, we'll get the little garden bed ahead and we'll have some herbs. And I, you know, it can be challenging to garden here in Arizona because it's so stinking hot so much of the time. And so I was just sort of like, okay, this round of herbs is a getting to know you exercise. And I'm sure that some of them will die. The English time is not doing well. The rest of them though, thriving. I have two little peppers. I have two little hot peppers on one of my pepper plants.

[Meg Rowley]

Oh, well, well done.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, they're not ripe yet.

[Matt Swartz]

I don't know.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Green.

[Matt Swartz]

Green peppers, but yeah, green peppers.

[Ben Lindbergh]

But they will ripen hopefully to little red hot peppers. I'm so excited.

[Meg Rowley]

Nice playing pepper. Brought it back to baseball.

[Matt Swartz]

There we go.

[Meg Rowley]

Okay, I will close with a little stat blasting.

[Matt Swartz]

Obs and then they'll tease out something

[Ben Lindbergh]

interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's today.

[Meg Rowley]

Okay, so last time we talked about the offensive stats to start this season

[Matt Swartz]

and how they looked a little bit

[Meg Rowley]

different and walks were up and home runs were down, even relative to previous Aprils and everything. That was on Monday when we had that discussion. And Monday was an absolute offensive outburst.

[Matt Swartz]

That was a hugely high scoring day.

[Meg Rowley]

The league as a whole hit.293.367.498. That's a 146 WRC plus 384 WOBA with 37 dingers on that day alone. And because it's still fairly early in the season, that big day, that changed the league wide offensive stats to an appreciable degree. So the league wide batting Average went up from.235 to.237. OBP went up from.318 to.320. Slug went up up five points from.375 to.380. Yeah, so Wobo went up three points.

[Matt Swartz]

And that's exciting.

[Meg Rowley]

But this was actually sort of historic. And there was a question about this in our Patreon discord group.

[Matt Swartz]

And it came from someone who went

[Meg Rowley]

by the username Ela de Monte Cristo and said Today's games average 14.4 runs per game. That's. That's a lot.

[Matt Swartz]

I mean, that's both teams combined.

[Meg Rowley]

I'll just read you the scores from

[Matt Swartz]

that day because there were 10 games.

[Meg Rowley]

And so there were a couple low scoring ones, but it was four nothing. 6, 2, 9 to 7, 16 to 5, 13 to 7, 11 to 10, 10 to 4, 13 to 6, 9 to 3, 8 to 1. There's some crooked numbers in there. So this supporter asked whether this was a lot, historically speaking, 14.4 runs per game. What is the highest average runs per game for a single day of baseball? Maybe specifying a day where at least half the teams in the league played.

[Matt Swartz]

If it was a day with very few games, skewing this. So Michael Mountain, Frequent Stat Blast correspondent, newly upgraded to frequent, is making good on that.

[Meg Rowley]

Matt answered this one and this was, it turns out, an Integration era record for the highest average run scoring on a day with at least 10 MLB games. There were 10 games on July 1, 1936. A lot of offensive records set in the 1930s. Rabbit ball. So on July 1, 1936 there was

[Matt Swartz]

an average of 15.3 runs per game and there were 10 games. Despite the AL, NB and NL only amounting to 16 active teams, the Cubs

[Meg Rowley]

and Reds were idle. Three teams hosted doubleheaders. So this is an integration era record.

[Matt Swartz]

It's the most in 90 years. So well spotted.

[Meg Rowley]

And I don't know what that means. If anything, maybe it was a blip, maybe it was an outlier. But I'm sort of surprised that a high scoring record, high scoring game came

[Matt Swartz]

in mid April because you would expect later in the year when it's hotter and the ball's flying farther and everything.

[Meg Rowley]

But no, this was notable. So we're certainly at the point in the season where one big day can

[Matt Swartz]

completely change a player's stats. But a day that big, that can

[Meg Rowley]

even have an impact on a league wide level. So good. One good eagle eye there and a few more. Here is a question from Jacob who says as I write the Angels Yankees game is 8 to 8 in the eighth inning.

[Matt Swartz]

And Jacob then had a footnote that

[Meg Rowley]

said, before I finished writing this, Mike trout hit a two run homer to give the Angels a 10 to 8 lead.

[Matt Swartz]

He still got it. That was a wild game.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Yeah, Judge hit a couple homers and then what happened?

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah, Trout hit two, Judge hit two.

[Matt Swartz]

And that was part of that Monday offensive outburst.

[Meg Rowley]

So Jacob says this inspired a thought cuz it was eight to eight in the eighth. What is the record for most consecutive innings where the score matched the inning? That is has a game ever been 1 to 1 in the first, 2 to 2 in the second, 3 to 3 in the third, et cetera. Then two similar questions how many consecutive innings has the combined score matched the inning count? So 1 to nothing, 2 to nothing, 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 3 to 2, etc. For both methods, what's the highest inning for which this has been true? Has a game ever been 14? 14 in the 14th? Has the total score ever been 18 in the 18th? I feel like all these should be relatively searchable for someone with better tools/ SQL knowledge than me.

[Matt Swartz]

And that is in fact Michael who

[Meg Rowley]

says most consecutive innings where the score matched the inning at some point during

[Matt Swartz]

the inning is four.

[Meg Rowley]

That has happened eight times on record, most recently in a Rangers Angels game

[Matt Swartz]

on July 9, 2025.

[Meg Rowley]

It was briefly three to three in the bottom of the third, briefly four to four in the top of the fourth, fourth, five to five through the top of the fifth, and six to six through the bottom of the sixth. If you require the streak to start in the first inning, there's one four

[Matt Swartz]

inning streak on record where it was one to one in the first, two

[Meg Rowley]

to two in the second, three to three in the third and four to four in the fourth. Milwaukee at Minnesota May 13, 1990 the latest in a game that the Tide score has equaled the inning number happened in Cleveland on July 10, 1932. The Philadelphia A's scored two runs in the top of the ninth to take the lead and Cleveland got one back

[Matt Swartz]

in the bottom of the ninth to

[Meg Rowley]

send the game to extras tied 15

[Matt Swartz]

to 15 and the game made it

[Meg Rowley]

to the 15th inning still tied 1515 and neither team scored in the 15th. Philly got two in the 16th to take a 17 to 15 lead, but Cleveland answered right back to send the game to the 17th inning. Tied 17 all and that's the record.

[Matt Swartz]

The A's won the game 18 to 17 in 18 innings. I miss 18 inning games.

[Meg Rowley]

Those were fun sometimes. Some times, sometimes Same questions. But looking at combined score instead of each team's run total individually equaling the

[Matt Swartz]

inning number, there's a clear standout here.

[Meg Rowley]

Rockies at Reds June 7, 2018 it was 1 to nothing in the first, 1 all in the second, 2 to 1 in the third, 3 to 1 in the fourth, 3 to 2 in the fifth, briefly 4 to 2 in the top of the sixth, 5 to 2 in the seventh, briefly 5 to 3 in the bottom of the eighth, 5 to 4 in the ninth and 5 to 5 in the tenth, and the Reds went on to win 7 to 5 in 13 innings. The brewers and Royals did play a game in 1998 where the combined score added up to the inning number in 11 different innings, but they weren't consecutive.

[Matt Swartz]

That was a 15 inning game.

[Meg Rowley]

Finally, the latest inning on record in which the combined score added up to

[Matt Swartz]

the inning number is the 18th inning. This has happened seven times, most recently and with the biggest score differential on

[Meg Rowley]

August 24, 2013 when the Diamondbacks scored five runs against the Phillies in the

[Matt Swartz]

top of the 18th to briefly make the score 11 to 7. They won 12 to 7.

[Meg Rowley]

Well, that was good. And kudos to Michael for looking not

[Matt Swartz]

just the end of inning results but also the the mid inning results. Particularly impressive going above and beyond okay, here's another one.

[Meg Rowley]

This one came in on Sunday from

[Matt Swartz]

Tom Patreon supporter who says Jose Ramirez

[Meg Rowley]

homered against his 29th team last night, April 11 against Atlanta. How many players have homered against all other teams while playing for only one team?

[Matt Swartz]

I assume this has happened only during

[Meg Rowley]

the interleague era and slightly less related Tom says I was wondering what the most homers a player has had in a career where all homers came against different teams. So not having two homers against the same team, not necessarily full career numbers, but up to a specific specific point is fine too. So Michael says as of the end of the 2025 season, only five players had homered against 29 other teams while representing a single club. Aaron Judge, Raphael Devers with Boston Austin Riley, Pete Alonzo with the Mets, and Shohei Ohtani with the Dodgers.

[Matt Swartz]

So wow, Shohei did that quickly.

[Meg Rowley]

He hasn't been a dodger that long. Attached is a spreadsheet showing the active players with at least one career home run in which teams they have have still not homered against. The question asked about that being all with a single franchise, I listed each player only once connected with the franchise for whom they had homered against the

[Matt Swartz]

most opponents, which is not necessarily their current team. I'll link to that spreadsheet for the second question.

[Meg Rowley]

One player in MLB history hit 16 total career home runs against 16 distinct clubs. I mean, this is this is good trivia question territory.

[Matt Swartz]

I mean, no one would ever get it. How would you ever possibly get it

[Meg Rowley]

it but Ryan Christensen, outfielder for the 1998-2001 A's, never hit more than five homers in a season and never repeated against any opposing team. No other player in the retro sheet era has hit as many home runs to start a career, all against different opponents, regardless of how many they went on to hit.

[Matt Swartz]

That's amazing, Michael editorializes.

[Meg Rowley]

But you know what? He's right that that the one guy who did that. Sixteen homers against 16 different clubs. That's also the most even to start a career by anyone who went on to hit plenty of other homers against other teams. I mean.

[Matt Swartz]

Yeah, that seems somewhat surprising, though. I guess if you're someone who maybe

[Meg Rowley]

has more staying power than Ryan Christensen proved to have, then you wouldn't even get to the point of. Of having 16 homers against 16 teams because you would have doubled up at some point. But still, that's.

[Matt Swartz]

I mean, that almost makes me want to get Ryan Christensen on the pod

[Meg Rowley]

and be like, were you aware of this?

[Matt Swartz]

Like, right, yeah.

[Meg Rowley]

Is this weird? Could your career have been sustained if you had played more opponents and different unique opponents because you could have kept hitting homers against them? Was it that, like, the book on Ryan Christensen was such that once you saw him one time, he was a solved science. Like, you know, but like, the first time you faced him, him, he was automatically going to homer or something. I mean, I guess he didn't homer in every game, but still, it probably means nothing. But it's so weird that it almost

[Matt Swartz]

makes me wonder whether there was something about Ryan Christensen that made it possible for teams to, like, figure him out

[Meg Rowley]

after they had faced him one time. Probably not. Do you think Ryan Christensen is aware that he hit his 16 homers against 16 different teams? Do you think he would care if he knew?

[Ben Lindbergh]

I don't know if he would care, but I bet he was made aware at a certain point. But it probably came later in that run than you would necessarily expect.

[Meg Rowley]

Yeah.

[Matt Swartz]

Or even after his career, maybe, potentially.

[Ben Lindbergh]

Maybe.

[Matt Swartz]

I wouldn't be surprised if that was breaking news to him, though.

[Meg Rowley]

Okay, maybe. Andrew Patreon supporter says, when is the last time pitchers from each team caught

[Matt Swartz]

a pop up in the same game?

[Meg Rowley]

Tanner Bybey and Michael Waka have done

[Matt Swartz]

so in the first four innings of the April 6 Kansas City Cleveland game.

[Meg Rowley]

And that does seem like it would

[Matt Swartz]

be kind of rare.

[Meg Rowley]

Right. Because, you know, pitchers are always pushed

[Matt Swartz]

out and every other infielder is rushing out to save the pitcher. The challenge of actually trying to catch

[Meg Rowley]

a pop up, which I think would

[Matt Swartz]

be a bit, I don't know, not emasculating, almost insulting, like, you don't think I can catch this pop up?

[Meg Rowley]

I'm a professional athlete, sir, but they don't often get the opportunity to. And I guess probably most pop ups are not. Not in the pitcher's range. Right.

[Matt Swartz]

Probably a lot of pop ups are in someone else's area anyway.

[Meg Rowley]

Michael says, looks like this happens once or twice a year on average, though it's slightly rarer recently. I might have guessed even a little rarer than that. The last time this happened was in Colorado on July 18, 2025. Kyle Freeland caught a pop up in the top of the first and Chris Paddock caught a pop up in the

[Matt Swartz]

bottom of the second. We hadn't seen it before that since

[Meg Rowley]

2022 when it happened twice. There are games where pitchers have combined for three or even four popups caught, but never where both teams had a

[Matt Swartz]

pitcher catch multiple popups.

[Meg Rowley]

So, okay, so yeah, maybe we've already

[Matt Swartz]

gotten this year's instance of the. Yeah, both pitchers in a game catching pop ups game out of the way. Maybe we've already seen the 2026 edition of that. Maybe, I guess it would be getting

[Meg Rowley]

a little rarer over time just because fewer batted balls, fewer balls in play

[Matt Swartz]

and I don't know, maybe pitchers are

[Meg Rowley]

just even more than they used to be, getting kind of pushed out of the way and. And other defenders are taking precedence there.

[Matt Swartz]

That could be. I don't know. Okay.

[Meg Rowley]

And Scott says Matt Walner, who in 2025 drove himself in 22 times, but drove in everyone else just 18 times, started 2026 with three solo homers for his only RBI of the year.

[Matt Swartz]

And Scott says, I was at the

[Meg Rowley]

game where he broke this streak and drove in a teammate.

[Matt Swartz]

And as of this email, which was five days ago, he's up to two teammates driven in.

[Meg Rowley]

What is the latest in a year

[Matt Swartz]

that a player has gone before he

[Meg Rowley]

drove in a teammate? That is what is the highest number of solo homers to start a season before getting some other kind of RBI

[Matt Swartz]

or a multi run home run. Okay, all right.

[Meg Rowley]

The record is six. Simple answer. The record is six set by Tyler O' Neill in 2024. And of course, Tyler O', Neill, famous

[Matt Swartz]

for his now snapped streak of opening day dingers. So I guess that tracks that he'd get that opening. Not that they have to be solo,

[Meg Rowley]

but the record is six set by Tyler O' Neill in 2024. He hit six solo home runs in the first 11 games for the Red Sox that year before driving in Jaron

[Matt Swartz]

Duran on April 10th for his seventh RBI of the season.

[Meg Rowley]

All right, and Scott's second question is the Tampa Bay Rays aren't off to a great start, but they had a lead at some point in each of their first 10 games, even though they were five and five in those games. What is the latest a team has gone in which they had a lead

[Matt Swartz]

in every game the obvious candidates are teams that won a lot of games at the beginning of the season, the 2023 Rays, the 1984 Tigers.

[Meg Rowley]

Or maybe it's a team that had one of the best regular seasons ever, the 2001 Mariners. But maybe there's a more surprising team that is also on this list. Or maybe the question can be tweaked to ask what's the latest that a

[Matt Swartz]

team with a.500 record or worse had a lead in every game to start a season? So Michael says, before we get into

[Meg Rowley]

the gory details, it's probably good to note up top that about 40% of games have a lead change. Also, if you win a ball game,

[Matt Swartz]

by definition you had a lead at some point. Winning by walk off counts as having

[Meg Rowley]

a lead during the game. For the purposes of this analysis, pedantry be damned. And I'm going to ignore the rare edge cases where a team was trailing from start to finish and then was awarded a victory by forfeit. This also this reminds me of a

[Matt Swartz]

recent SAM newsletter where he looked at just like what's the typical highest win

[Meg Rowley]

probability in a game that a a losing team has? Like, on average, how close to winning

[Matt Swartz]

is a that goes on to lose

[Meg Rowley]

at its height, and it's surprisingly high.

[Matt Swartz]

Like, you know, most most teams that lose like a high percentage at least were favored by win probability to win at at some point then.

[Meg Rowley]

Okay, since virtually every game, Michael says, is a loss for one of the

[Matt Swartz]

participating teams, it's more informative to say

[Meg Rowley]

that 40% of all losses involve blowing a lead.

[Matt Swartz]

What makes the raise start interesting is not that they led in each of their first 10 games, but that they led in each of their first five losses.

[Meg Rowley]

If we use this metric, we're implicitly

[Matt Swartz]

dealing with the problem of some teams

[Meg Rowley]

being better than others because we're considering only the games in which a team lost by pure luck, having a lead in each of your first five losses

[Matt Swartz]

has about a 1% chance of occurring.

[Meg Rowley]

However, there have been more than 2,500 team seasons on record in the retrosheet era, 1912 to present, so a 1% event happening at least once in that data set would be expected. Indeed, it would be orders of magnitude

[Matt Swartz]

more surprising if this hadn't happened before. And of course it has with even longer streaks.

[Meg Rowley]

There's a lot of baseball that's often the moral of the story in our stat blast there's been a lot of baseball. I'm going to refer to games with no lead changes as decisive I. E. A decisive win or a decisive loss and games with a lead change as competitive. We can answer the original question both in terms of most games played or most losses accumulated before a decisive loss, but they turn out to be the same answer. The team that started the season with the longest streak of games that were either decisive wins or competitive games, so they led in every game to start the season is the 2005 Chicago White Sox. And hey, they went on to win a World Series. Through May 14, they had played 37 games, 127 and their 10 losses were all competitive.

[Matt Swartz]

There had been a lead change.

[Meg Rowley]

That mark of 10 consecutive losses all being competitive is also the most to start a season. Returning to the figure cited earlier that about 40% of all losses are competitive. A 10 game streak of competitive losses

[Matt Swartz]

to start the season is about a

[Meg Rowley]

1 in 8,000 event, so pretty close

[Matt Swartz]

to being in line with the number of team seasons on record.

[Meg Rowley]

The team with the second longest streak of games played before a decisive loss is the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, another champion who made it only 25 games into

[Matt Swartz]

the season before suffering their first decisive

[Meg Rowley]

loss, but their record coming into the

[Matt Swartz]

decisive loss was 22 and three.

[Meg Rowley]

And that concludes today's stat blast and I suppose also today's episode. Good stat blasting. I like when listeners notice seemingly anomalous things and then they flag them for us and then Michael or someone else finds out that yeah, actually kind of unusual. Which is not always the case sometimes. If baseball were different, how different would it be? Not that different. Sometimes these things are not that unusual. But even then it's nice to know. It's nice to get a baseline of

[Matt Swartz]

something like what percentage of games feature a lead change. We learn a lot in the course of our stat blasting and podcasting, so thanks to everyone for keeping the questions coming.

[Meg Rowley]

That'll do it for today. Thanks as always for listening and special

[Matt Swartz]

thanks for supporting financially, which you can

[Meg Rowley]

do by going to patreon.com effectivelywild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks as well as this week's full Friday episode. The following five listeners have already signed up AJ Taylor, Matt McPhillips, Scott Mulling, Nathan Winder or Winder and Nick Tarpley. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include a fully unlocked weekly regular episode of the podcast, a monthly

[Matt Swartz]

bonus episode, our Patreon Discord Group exclusive

[Meg Rowley]

live streams, personalized messages, prioritized email answers,

[Matt Swartz]

shout out shoutouts at the end of

[Meg Rowley]

episodes, potential podcast appearances, fan graphs, memberships and more. Check out all the [e-mail] effectivelywild if you are a Patreon supporter, you can

[Matt Swartz]

message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email.

[Meg Rowley]

Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastamgraphs.com youm can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music and other podcast platforms. You can join our facebook [e-mail] Group V Effectively wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at R Effectively Wild and you can check the show notes in the podcast, posted fan graphs or Patreon if you're a supporter or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats recited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with one more episode a little later this week.

[Matt Swartz]

Talk to you then. Just a couple of Baseball night They'll still be speaking statistically rambling, romantically pontificating, pedantically bantering, bodily drafting, discerningly giggling, giddily equaling Effectively Wild.