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Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Effectively Wild Episode 2475: The Telltale Heat
01:51:27
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- [00:00]
A
Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2475 of Effectively Wild Baseball podcast from FanGraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Rally of fangraphs. Hello, Meg.
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B
Hello.
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A
Well, this is the second straight episode I am leading by remarking on the death of an 87 year old. But this time it's Ted Turner, whose death was reported on Wednesday. The TV visionary, the raconteur, the eccentric showman, the creator of CNN and TNT and the TBS Superstation, and of course, sports owner. And so our world, there have been a lot of Turner obits about his time owning the Braves, which was pretty transformational from a broadcast perspective. And obviously he made a lot of news in his day. As Rob Manfred's little note about Turner's passing said, he led with a style uniquely his own, which is one way to put it. I guess probably not all commissioners were such a fan of that style at all times. But one thing that I keep seeing in some of these remembrances of Turner is something that he supposedly said after firing Bobby cox following the 1981 season, which reminded me of the discussion that we had last time about when to fire a manager and are you doing it just for show? Is this change for change sake? And we talked about Dan Zborski's piece about how teams tend to play to their projections after firing a manager. And we kind of quasi complimented the Mets on some level. It's hard to come by compliments for the Mets these days, but just for not doing the easy thing, which would have been to fire Carlos Mendoza, but to acknowledge that if there are problems, they probably go deeper than that. And maybe true accountability looks like holding yourself responsible or making some more sweeping change than just sacrificing the manager. So it has been widely reported that when Ted Turner fired Bobby Cox as manager of the braves after the 1981 season, Turner said when he was asked who was on his list of potential replacements, quote, it would be Bobby Cox if I hadn't just fired him. We need someone like him around here, which I, I think this is maybe partly apocryphal. I think this is a case of a quote being cleaned up and burnished a bit in the retelling. I'm not positive about that, but the actual formulation of that quote verbatim did not appear in the newspaper archives for decades after this firing. So I'm not sure that he actually said it that way or if he did, it wasn't reported in the papers at the time, but I did find the UPI piece on the firing, and this was from October 8, 1981, and it leads with this. The Atlanta Braves dumped Bobby Cox Thursday, with owner Ted Turner saying that it was done simply for the sake of change, that his success successor has not been picked, and that if Cox hadn't been the outgoing manager, he would be one of the leading candidates. So essentially, the substance is the same. The actual quote, though, is a fresh face. That's all it was. Turner said of the decision to fire Cox, who managed the Braves for four seasons and still has a year to go on his contract. If Bobby wasn't here, he'd be one of the leading candidates for the job. A new broom sweeps clean. That's all. So this is. May be just the most explicit acknowledgement of why these moves are often made. As we said last time, it's purely so that you can say you did something. And in this case, he didn't even dislike the manager. He didn't blame the manager. In fact, he ended up rehiring the manager later, and it was done purely because the team was not doing well and he felt like he had to do something. But usually you don't see it stated quite that plainly. And I guess this is what made Ted Turner. Ted Turner. He would just sort of speak his mind or whatever.
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B
This was one of the things anyway. Yeah.
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One of the things, yes. This was a few years after the infamous time that Turner installed himself as a manager for just one game.
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B
And how did that go, Ben? Did it go well?
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A
Did it go great? No, they didn't. They didn't win that one. And he had the wisdom to fire himself as Braves manager. But this is. This is kind of funny because if you acknowledge that that's why you're doing it, then doesn't that kind of undercut.
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B
Yeah. Negate the.
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A
Yeah. Like, you at least have to maintain the fiction that you're doing this. Not that you have to throw the outgoing skipper under the bus or anything, but you have to act like things will be different and. Or better because you did this. Right. Otherwise. Yeah. It's like totally defeating the purpose if you're just like, yeah, he was probably the best guy for the job, but we just had to do something.
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B
I guess it's very Ted Turner sort of thing to say and. And believe the man didn't lack confidence. You know, you could. You could say any number of things about him, but he. He sure didn't lack for confidence. I don't know, like, on Balance. All of our current billionaires were like Ted Turner. We'd be much better off.
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A
So I don't want to sound like I'm philanthropist.
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B
Yeah. Ragging on the guy too hard. Look, if you can manage to hold on to Jane Fonda for a little while, you have to have some redeeming qualities. I'd submit. It is kind of a funny thing because there was a. Well, a directness born of confidence, you know, maybe would be the way to put it with. With Turner. And it's funny because is he maybe not the original. Is he one of. One of the original process guys? Baby, I think you could make an argument, but, you know, everyone thought he was bad at a team. How did those Braves teams turn out?
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A
Some of them, yeah. Quite a run. Yeah.
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B
Had quite a run. So he's a fascinating figure in American life, and, you know, that extends to his approach to owning a pro sports franchise. Yeah.
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A
And in the same UPI piece, John Mullen, who was the Braves gm, he sort of seconded the sentiment that they certainly had nothing against Bobby Cox. And Turner said he was personally very friendly with Cox. And Mullen said, quote, it was the consensus of people in baseball that we needed to make a change, which I love people in baseball thought we needed to make a change. That's no knock on Bobby. We hope it works, maybe it won't. So I guess it's about the nicest way you could fire a guy. It's just like. Yeah, I don't know. Everyone was saying we needed to do something, so I guess this is what we did. Yeah, why not? I mean, nothing against Bobby. Bobby's great. Bobby's the best. But. Yeah, and. And Bobby Cox didn't complain either. And he kind of took it in stride and he understood. So everyone just kind of went through the motions, basically, of how these things have historically worked. So. And as for Moen's, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I guess it kind of did. So they hired Joe Torrey, and. And the. The Braves had been bad before Cox. They had finished last a couple times before Cox came in, and then they finished last a couple times with Cox, and then they improved a bit, but not enough. They were ish under him for a couple years, and then they got rid of him, and then they brought in Joe Torre, and they won the division the next year in 82, and they made it to the NLCS. So in that sense, maybe it worked. But then they didn't make the playoffs again under Torrey, and he got the X After four seasons and they rehired Bobby Cox as the GM for a few years because this was an era where roles were more amorphous. Yes, an owner could be a manager for a day at least, and managers could be GMs and GMs could be managers and Bobby Cox and Whitey Herzog and these guys could kind of be two way players in that sense. And, and in fact they were talking about making, according to this piece, Phil Negro, the 42 year old then knuckleballer for the Braves. They talked to him about being a player manager and yeah, so like, you know, back anything went, whatever. So Tory, the Braves sort of stagnated under him. They got rid of him. Then they brought Cox back as the gm and then Cox as the gm, eventually fired the manager and installed himself as the manager and the rest is history. And then of course, the Braves went on to decades of success. And it's hard to quantify the impact of a manager. But all the attempts that have been made have suggested that if anyone had any real perceptible impact, it was Bobby Cox. And yeah, people have shown that players have played better under him than under others and that the pitchers got more calls under him, which was maybe just because you had Maddox and Glavin and Smoltz and all these guys who could expand the zone. But also he had a way of really riding umpires and giving them a hard time. And some have suggested that he helps pitchers and catchers get more calls because of that. Anyway, this was I think the most explicit case of just firing someone because you were expected to fire someone with absolutely no conviction that that alone would improve your team and if anything, some regret.
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B
Yeah, like. Yeah, well, yep, let's see.
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So I've been hearing and seeing in recent days a lot of Mike Trout trade chatter that has reared its head again. I think maybe the instigator was Keith Law, who wrote a piece for the Athletic about how the Angels should trade Trout. And look, it's a fun, if perhaps far fetched hypothetical and scenario and it's worthy of discussing. My only gripe with Keith's piece is that it's framed very much as the Angels should do this. It's exclusively. There's one parenthetical sentence which mentions Trout has a no trait clause and has the right to veto any trade. That's it. And of course he's a 10 in 5 guy, so he can, he could doubly scuttle any attempt to trade him. But that's the only acknowledgment that that might be a potential sticking point to this deal and the rest of it is just trying to talk the Angels into doing it. I think probably the bigger barrier and, and steeper impediments to a deal getting done is Trout himself agreeing to be traded because to this point at least, he has shown no inclination to go elsewhere. And this has come up before. And of course he's had multiple chances to test free agency and he's signed multiple extensions, sometimes probably making less than he might have had he hit the open market. And the last time this came up a couple years ago or whenever it was, he very much cast cold water on the idea that he would want to go and he wanted to sort of stick it out and win in Anaheim and not take what he seemed to view as the easy way out or a shortcut or something. And so I don't know whether he feels any differently about that now. It's, it's been a couple years, things have changed, but he seems to be happy playing for that team in that area and not uprooting his family and all the rest. So this might all be moot because even if the Angels decided to try to do it and found a taker, Trout might say, no, thanks, but I would like this to happen. I don't think it will, but I would be happy if it did because at this point, I think it's safe to say that skills wise, at least, Trout is back. This is Trout. He's. He's the old young Trout again. And I don't think it's too small a sample to say that the skills are still in there and largely intact. And could he get hurt at any moment? Absolutely. But I'm relieved to find that that superstar level player still appears to be there because he is playing like, if not peak Trout, quite close to peak Trout. And the underlying numbers are all there and the quality of contact and the speed and, and all of it. I mean this, this is Trout. This is the Trout that we knew and loved and feared was gone forever. I mean, he has a 173 WRC plus. He is on pace for 7.6 WAR. He is, he is having his 2019 MVP season essentially. I mean, almost stat for stat. I was reading a Buster only piece about him and Buster quotes Brad Osmus who says that Trout looks very much like he did when I was with the Angels, which was in 2019. That was the last time Trout won an MVP award. And the numbers are eerily similar, really offensively at least. I mean, 173 this year. WRC plus 177 that year. The Wobas five points apart. The expected weighted on base 461 identical in both cases. He is on pace for 7.6 war this year. He had 7.6 war that year, and that was in one hundred and thirty four games. And he's on pace for more than that, amazingly this year. But he already has more plate appearances than he did in 2021 and 2024. And he is 1/10 of a win at fan graphs away from equaling his WAR from 2025, when he played 130 games and had 556 plate appearances. He's 36 games and 165 into the season. So. And you know, the strikeout rate has fallen significantly as we have discussed. So everything kind of looks like what he was the last time he won mvp. I'm not saying he's going to win MVP this year. For one thing, Aaron Judge is on pace for 63 homers and doing his usual thing. And I'm not taking it for granted that Trout is going to stay intact all season. Sure. But I now believe again that that guy is still in there as as long as he is healthy, I think he could continue to perform at roughly this level, which I did not at all take for granted after his pretty pedestrian performance last season.
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B
I think that I agree that I am at a place with his 2026 performance where the thing that is keeping a cap on my enthusiasm for his potential eventual war production has much more to do with health than skill. And the skill piece had crept in pretty profoundly in the last little while. And so that's very exciting. You know, I do not know the mind of the man who can know the the mind of a thumb, really, you know. Do you remember Spy Kids? You remember the thumb guys in Spy Kids Kids?
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A
Yeah.
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I think about them a lot when I watch Mike Trout play, which is surprising because they were famously not very dexterous. And he is quite skilled.
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A
Yeah. Although thumbs are pretty dexterous.
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B
I mean, I know. And so essential. Right. Where would we be without them?
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A
Yeah.
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Certainly in a less dexterous place. But I think, you know, I can imagine there being multiple forces sort of pushing and pulling a Trout. And I wonder if his reluctance to be traded, his sort of confidence in misguided though it may be, the Angels and their potential is being worn down. Not even so much because of anything the Angels have done. Although, you know, they do sit in last place in a soft division. A soft division. But like they sit in Last place in the west, but sort of, you know, one must reckon with one's own mortality and limitations. And I, I wonder how much Trout thinks of himself as being on, if not his last ride than one of the last rides. Right. That a season like this from a guy who has dealt with so much injury, bad luck in the last couple of years, probably maybe shouldn't be taken for granted. Now that reality is likely to factor into the enthusiasm that any club acquiring him might have. Yes. And then you have the push pole of contract versus prospects in any kind of trade. Right. Because who knows what enthusiasm the Angels would have in like, paying down his deal to move him and get a better prospect, et cetera. So, you know, there's the, like, the mechanics and reality of, of a trade just in terms of the values returned that one would have to grapple with if you were running the Angels front office and trying to find a fit. And then of course, you have to find a fit that he's willing to go to. And so this brings us to the second consideration, which is like, how committed is Mike Trout to playing center field? Because if he has flexibility in that notion and is willing to play in a corner, well, I think his trade market is, is much wider. That doesn't seem like a, you know, that's an obvious thing to say. It doesn't seem so controversial. But like, if you're willing to shift, well, then you're not just limited to the teams that are at the bottom of the center field, you know, hierarchy, but the teams that are dealing with outfield holes more generally. And your, your number of contenders might grow substantially because guess what? Like, there are some teams that are expected to be pretty good that are at the bottom of the left and right field depth charts, at least by our projections at fan graphs. And you know, that might be a different set of clubs than is at the bottom of the center field standings. And I would imagine if you're a team acquiring Mike Trout and your expectation is Mike Trout and his contract are gonna play out the rest of their careers gracefully in a corner, you're maybe more enthusiastic about it because like, him being in center just seems like a ticking time bomb to me. So then we consider, is there enough of a competitive pull for him somewhere else where the part of him that is concerned with playing in the postseason having a good conclusion to his career, is there enough interest from a team that really is on the edge of something and could use him for there to. To be? Basically, do we think the Phillies are good enough and Here we sat. Here we sat being like, you know, the real problem with the Phillies is that they're old. And so it's like, does Mike Trout fix that problem? Did you just sign Kyle Schwaber, who's dh? You sure did. So are you limiting him to. Right. And there are other clubs beyond Philly that. That could use reinforcement in, say, left field, in. You know. But you know where it would be exciting for him to go, Ben. And they'll never do it because they're never going to take on the money to do it. But you know what would be exciting? What if he was a Pittsburgh Pirate, though?
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A
That'd be fun.
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B
You know what would be so fun? What if he was a Seattle Mariner, though? You know what would be so fun? I hate to say this, because. Embarrassment of riches. Certainly. Embarrassment of riches. And they're gonna. They're gonna give friend of the pot whose name we've never said wrong. Carson bench some run here, especially because he's been playing better. But couldn't the Mets use him and. Right. You know what I mean? Like, it's just there are some options. There are some teams out there that could use the infusion. You know, where it's like. Or. And. And look, it's. It's appealing. I'm not even entertaining the notion of him going within the als, but to the Astros, because. No, no, you don't get to make him a villain thumb. Not a villain thumb. He could be a guardian. That would be great if he were a guardian. They don't want him to take on that payroll either. He could be an Oriole. You know, like, they're. There are any number of teams that have sort of paltry outfield projections at one or several of their spots that are at this moment, anyway, like contending clubs. So there are fits to be had. They are fits constrained by the fact that he is still owed. Boy, so much money for so many years. And while this is so exciting, and I don't want to take anything away from it, because I agree with you that he does seem to be, like, in a very good spot. See, I have a reluctance to even say more than that because I'm so afraid. He is signed for so long. He is signed through 2030.
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A
It's. Yeah, it's four more years after this at 37.1 million per. Which. Yeah, it's a lot. It. It looks a lot less intimidating today than it did a couple months ago, because if he has a season like this, well, he's a bargain at that salary, which doesn't mean that he will continue to be, but that changes the projections for the next few years significantly. So it's at least possible to conceive of a team taking on that contract. Obviously it depends. Do the Angels just want to dump the salary or do they want to send some significant cash so they can get prospects back, which it would probably behoove them to do. But it's now in at least more reasonable realistic salary dump territory just because he has made that salary a much less cringe inducing proposition by playing at this level. So even if it's just for a couple months or say he keeps it up through the trade deadline, well that does significantly change the expectations as far as the surplus value or lack thereof over the next few years, plus the marquee value of adding Mike Trout and all the other sort of soft factors that would come with that. He ranks 37th in MLB among qualifiers in sprint speed this year. In 2019 he was 34th in MLB, basically the same ordinal ranking and Baseball Reference has him at 2.2 WAR compared to 1.5 for all of last season. He is just 1/10 of a win off the American League lead at Baseball Reference. So yeah, it's really encouraging and exciting and you know, credit to him for believing that he still had this in him. Because we were doubting, everyone was doubting. We talked about this, I think it was last September episode 2374 and we were talking about, well, as the description puts it, the deepening twilight of Mike Trout and talked about how he seemed to believe that he was still the same guy and he was just one tweak away or mechanical fix away from being the same guy. And it was almost starting to seem sort of sad or delusional in a way, as if he was having trouble adjusting to the aging process that everyone confronts at some point. And and maybe it turns out that he actually just did know himself better and knew that he still had the capacity to be the best because he seemed to believe that for longer than anyone else did and in defiance of his actual on field performance. So even if he can't keep this up indefinitely, he's done enough already and just has shown the underlying skills to say that yeah, that was still in there, at least for this burst and hopefully he can sustain it. But it's really something. And sure, everyone has connected him to the Phillies for years just because of where he's from and the proximity to Millville and his Eagles fandom. And yeah, it would be a ton of fun to see him go there and team up with Bryce Harper, just like the old Phillies trying to make one more run. The old Mike Trout getting back to his old self or young self. The rejuvenated Trout, Trout and Harper, two of the defining players of their era. I have comped it in the past to when Ty Cobb and Tris speaker were teammates for a season at the very end of their careers, 1928 in Philadelphia for the Philadelphia A's. And it would be that kind of confluence of superstars who have been kind of rivals throughout their career and maybe could finish their career as teammates. It's almost too good to be true. So it probably won't happen, but if it did, that'd be a heck of a story. And The Phillies are 25th in outfield war this year and not so hot in center field war specifically. But of course you probably don't want to block Justin Crawford or harm his development. But when you're flanking Crawford with Brandon Marsh, Adoles, Garcia, I mean, there are spots out there if Trout would be at all flexible.
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B
Yes.
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And maybe he would be on that team or on another team. There are plenty of potential landing spots. It's. It's exciting because even just to contemplate the possibility. And maybe, maybe he has been humbled a bit by the struggles of the past several years, even though he did still have faith, faith in himself. Maybe he knows that that can be taken away. I mean, I don't know how he would not know that after the number of physical ailments he has had over the past several years. He has to know that even if he still has the skills, that doesn't mean he can continue to demonstrate them. And he would have to be delusional to believe at this point that he's ever going to get back to the playoffs with the Angels. I, I know that the AL is garbage. And I know that even though the Angels are especially garbage, they are not that far out their last place in the AL West. But they are a game behind the Astros, they're three games behind the Raiders, they're five games behind the A's, who are leading the AL west with an 18 and 17 record. So no one in the AL is far out of a playoff spot because just of the state of that league. Like they have the worst record in the league and they're three and a half games out of a playoff spot. But I don't know that even Trout could convince himself that the Angels are really going to make a run here. And their farm system continues to Rank at or towards the bottom? Yeah, I mean, he's seen this play before. I don't know how he could look around. Even if he's irrationally optimistic about this team, he's been there so long, they've struggled so long, even when he had stronger supporting casts than this. And it's not as if there's cavalry that's about to arrive. So I, you know, and, and given his age and given his recent harder times, even if he does have four seasons left after this, I know baseball's super unpredictable and anything can happen in, in four years, but who knows what he'll be in four years. And, and the Angels. Can you really realistically, confidently project that the Angels are going to make the playoffs again before the end of Trout's contract, which runs through 2030? I don't think so. So. And maybe that's not the top priority for him and maybe he just, he's comfortable there and maybe he values being a one franchise guy and he's got family and friends and all the rest of it and maybe ultimately that's more important to him. And if it is, fine. You know, we each have to have our own priorities. But I would sure love to see him get back to the playoffs. So it would be really nice to have that be. It's, it's maybe already kind of the defining narrative of his career. I guess it's, you know, he got off to the. The fastest, strongest start of any player ever. Basically had the most dominant run and then it looked like the second prevailing narrative of his career was going to be a kind of Ken Griffey Jr. Esque back half of the career where he was injured and not very productive and didn't fulfill the full promise. And well, maybe he's slowly but surely starting to change that here. Even if he did have one, one more outlier MVP caliber season, I think that would significantly change that idea that it was just, oh yeah, it was all downhill and he couldn't stay healthy and it just left him so early. Even one season would change that. And even one season just getting back to the playoffs, even if it's more of a mercenary thing, maybe it wouldn't be as satisfying to him as staying in one place and helping the Angels get back to October. But I just, I don't think he can do it by himself. No matter how good he is. He's certainly shown that. And so the Angels, we know what
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B
his priorities were as of like the last time he was. This question was really put to him, but I don't think that there were a lot of people, even, you know, last year, where he was sitting with like a 120 WRC plus, which isn't an unuseful player by any means, that we're like, so, hey, Mike, you want to be traded now? I was like, that wasn't the, The. The pressing concern as it pertained to Trout. And you're right. Maybe his prior precisely the same. And, you know, he is comfortable there. He's got the California resident, like, season pass to Disneyland, you know, Like, I think it's. It's fine for pro athletes to sort of pick their club and say, hey, I want to try to make a run with this one. But I also think that it's fine if those priorities change along with your perspective on your own career and the team's chances. I can't imagine there being an Angels fan who would accuse Trout of, like, not giving it his all and not giving the team sufficient chances to try to build a contender around him, you know? Yeah, he's. He's put in his time, he's put in his. His work, I think. And if he wanted to. To move on, I. I wouldn't blame him for that. I wouldn't think of him as, you know, like, disloyal or whatever. Now, finding a fit is gonna be. Is gonna be interesting and dictated, I would imagine, in part by, like, what are the Angels priorities to your point? Like, is it just offloading the contract, or is it getting guys back who might help them jump start the next era of contention? So, you know, that I, I think would have a lot to do with his ability to be moved. And he's not gonna, like, I don't know him, but he's not gonna consent to go to the White Sox, right?
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A
Like, the White Sox, they're making a run.
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B
I understand, but, like, you know, come on.
- [32:51]
A
Yeah, like, team on the rise.
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B
Let's be realistic here. It would be so fun to, like, could you put him on a roster with Connor Griffin? And then is it just, like, too much neck? You know? Is it like, whoa, all neck? Whoops. Oops, Whoops. I never remember.
- [33:09]
A
Yeah, oops.
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B
Yeah, oops. All neck. You're like, is he a neck or a thumb? He's both. He's a necky thumb.
- [33:16]
A
Basically. Any place you could potentially fantasy cast him would be fun. Keith talks about the Phillies. He also talks about the Rangers. Yeah, that's intra division. There are just so many. Look, if. If Raphael Devers could be traded, maybe Mike Trout could. Different ages, different stages But Mike Trout's playing a whole heck of a lot better than Rafael Des. Even though he's several years older, he doesn't look it, so you never know. Yankees, Tigers, Padres, I don't know. Look, this is fun. Regardless if he just stays put and continues to be an angel for life, this is still fun. This is still one of my favorite developments of this season, that we are getting the old mic trap back.
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B
So it's an incredible. It's an incredible thing. I mean, we. And. And again, I hesitate so much to even talk about it because, like, there's a gap of a couple of hours between when we record and when episodes drop and, you know, what happens in between. Baseball men take the field, and sometimes all they do is take BP and then they're out for the rest of the. Of the season. You know, that's about Carlos Correa goofing up his ankle, you know.
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A
Yeah, yeah, we could talk about that in a sec.
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B
We could talk about that. But I'm just saying that, like, when the injury history has been as protracted as this and some of the things aren't different. Right. He still has a degenerative back condition. You know, presumably that hasn't been the problem of late, but it is a problem that still looms. It would be so funny to put him on a Phillies team that is already just so old. Just. Ben, they are profoundly pretty old, so that's something. But he. He should be in a Phillies uniform before he retires. I'm sorry, I just. This is a thing. I believe.
- [35:06]
A
It just makes too much sense. He's.
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B
It just makes too much sense into
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A
the unusual medical devices phase of his career, which. Hey, who knows?
- [35:15]
B
Oh, I hadn't thought about that. I hadn't thought about him. Harper.
- [35:21]
A
Weird laser slab thing that cost. You never know. But if people are wondering, how is he doing this? Aside from alternative treatments of that kind now, part of it is just mechanics and swing changes and stuff, which. He had talked for a long time about how he felt like he just wasn't quite right mechanically, and he just. He didn't seem to have the same. Same stability and repeatability, and he just felt like he was one tweak away. And until he made those tweaks, it. It sounded sort of like he had convinced himself of that, but not everyone was buying it. But he did make some changes at the end of last season, after we had that conversation about the twilight of his career. He finished very strong, and he was kind of on a tear the last couple weeks of the season and then continued to work over the winter. But he also made some changes to his body to his fitness routine and I have to give a shout out to a listener who emailed us a couple years ago and his name is Josh Oakhurst and we actually read this email. This email came in on August 12, 2024 and we read it I believe on episode 2218 and entertained this possibility. But we were talking at the time about does he just lack the healing factor of Wolverine? Is there's just something in his genes that prevents him from returning from injuries that usually don't have such long recovery periods. And Josh wrote in and said before we send in spies to take his DNA, how about an old fashioned inquisition with either his trainer and or the Angels training staff? Are you aware of any reporting done over the last five years I. E. His injury history timeline that inquires about the changes to his exercise and fitness that have or haven't happened? TLDR an aging big guy with lower body injuries should very likely drop some weight. I'm saying Mike Trout needs to stop training like a linebacker. No one aged better than Tom Brady and though he and his trainer did some creepy branding stuff later on, building long lean muscles and specifically trying to move the body away from mass is what kept him in the league so long. Has Mike Trout not gotten this message from his people? Do the Angels just defer to his personal trainer? Has anyone asked him to show up to camp at 2:10 instead of 235 or 240? Trout and I have the same frame, though I have 10 years on him. Sure enough, after age 27 being 230 and swole was not in my knees. Best interests can someone please get Micah Pilates Reformer I bring this up because I was just reading a piece at ESPN by Buster only and he talks about the mechanical adjustments and how he felt like they were starting to take shape last year. But it reads as he moved into the off season, the Angels talked to him about reducing his weight with the theory that he would reduce the stress on his body, his legs in particular. And then there's a perrymanesean Angels GM quote about how great players tend to lean out over time, which is not my experience of that, but he's talking about Freddie Freeman, David Ortiz, a lot of guys. Maybe he means the ones who remain productive, but anyway, it continues. Trout changed his workout program, an adjustment that he has carried into the 2026 regular season in the past. He would do an upper body workout twice a week, a lower body regimen twice a week and then take Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday off instead. He's working out daily. But sometimes to activate his physiology, instead of lifting heavier weights, he might do as few as eight reps of the same exercise and call it a day. Trout hired a nutritionist and focused on eating less junk food on the couch before he goes to sleep. And along the way, his weight dropped to 230 pounds, which is about 8 to 10 pounds less than in previous seasons. He noticed an immediate difference late in the winter with how his legs and knees felt. So this is kind of what Josh was suggesting. It's not 210, and I don't know if he's into Pilates, but at least the idea of dropping some weight and maybe getting into slightly less intense lifting than he had been doing as a younger guy. And also, you know, a lot of people, you get into your 30s, maybe the metabolism slows down a bit, you find that the junk food, it accumulates a little more than it once did. So I think Josh was sort of spot on here. So I don't know what it says that the Angels were just talking to him about this late last season and an effectively wild emailer was suggesting this more than a year before. But who knows, Maybe it just took some time for them to work their way up to broaching the subject with him. Or maybe he just couldn't have been convinced until he kind of had to bottom out performance wise and really realized that he needed to do something different. But yeah, I think that suggestion was kind of on the right and maybe that has helped and has diminished the wear and tear somewhat. Now you raised the question of will he be willing to move out of center? Yeah, and I think probably not in the short term while things are going so well, because, and this piece sort of confirms, you know, he's talked in the past about how he's reluctant to move out of center. And then this spring when he moved back to center, there were some quotes where he was just saying like he didn't feel like playing in the corner actually led to less wear and tear on him. And it, it seemed that like sort of motivated reasoning maybe, and he just kind of didn't want to make that concession to age. But he says that it has made a difference for him to return to center just sort of emotionally because he wasn't having as much fun playing. He says, looking back when I was banged up, you say the word fun to go out there and not have full capability because something was holding you back. That was tough for me, the move back to center and the off season changes seem to have worked. His outward joy, which was long inherent in how Trout played, appears to be back. And so part of this, I guess, is feeling like he is not compromising or conceding anything. He can still be the same player he was because he's playing the same position he was. And even if he's not playing A plus center, which I don't think he is, he's not a terrible liability out there. And I don't know, when we talked to Sam Blum on the Angels preview, he was kind of of the opinion that, look, either he's gonna break or he isn't. And maybe playing center won't actually make that much difference. Like, sometimes he gets hurt just on the bases. Sometimes he gets hurt jogging in from the outfield. It's not as if you can tie it specifically to center. Now, you do cover more ground out there in theory and probably in practice, but nonetheless, maybe there's something to the idea that he just. He feels better. He feels more like his previous self when he is playing his previous self's position. I would guess that it's more of the cause and effect works in the other direction where he's like gotten his mechanics on track and. And maybe has made the physical changes and thus that has enabled him to play center successfully enough. So far more so than playing center sort of transformed other aspects of his game. But it's hard to disentangle those things. So he might be reluctant, is what I'm saying, to mess with the success that he's having, given that he was reluctant to make that move in the first place. But maybe, at least in the short term, if he decided to, that he wanted to move and his priority was making the playoffs and he had to do that to get that deal done, then maybe he'd be willing. But that's another reason why he might not.
- [43:06]
B
Well, what it. What if they fibbed and they were like, it's not that we don't think you should be in center field. You obviously should be. It's just that we have this guy and he's already so good there. Don't you want to team up and like Voltron together are really strong, stout outfield? You know, what if it. What if it's about roster fit and like, hey, we have to play you in a corner because we have a gold Glover out there.
- [43:35]
A
What?
- [43:35]
B
You know, make up a convincing fib, you know, like you can fib about it. Yeah, like convincingly, probably.
- [43:42]
A
Maybe. Maybe ultimately comes down to whether he's willing to relocate and Right. I kind of doubt that. But if he did, it would be fun and if he didn't, it would still be fun as long as he's playing like this. So kudos to him for proving the doubters wrong, at least so far. Yes. As for Carlos Correa, another player who has declined performance wise somewhat and also has had a spotty track record health wise of late, he's done for the year with an ankle injury. It's the other ankle. It's not the ankle that was identified as such a problem in the physicals that led to him ending up where he is or where he was before where he is. But it is an ankle nonetheless that is going to end his season. And oddly, he suffered this injury in batting practice somehow. Yeah, which I guess speaks to that idea of if there's some level of physical vulnerability, then maybe it's just gonna happen. Or it can happen regardless of what you're doing and how much stress you're putting on it. But yeah, you know, this stinks. And I always think Carlos Kre is older than he is, I guess because he came up so young and has been around for so long and also because his body's broken down a bit in recent years. But he was off to a decent start. And clearly he has sort of resumed a leadership role with the Astros. And it's another big blow to a team that really can't sustain many more of those because they're already pretty shorthanded, which is not new. Last year they were second in games missed to injury and first in wins above replacement player missed according to the Baseball Prospectus injured list ledger. This year they are first in games missed and second in warp missed behind the blue chase. So it's been more of the same for them. And last year they hung in there and managed to stay competitive until the very end of the season. And frankly, it was pretty impressive that they stayed that close to contention given all those injuries. This year they're off to a rougher start, even though there's not much ground to make up, as we just covered when we talked about the Angels. But still.
- [46:04]
B
Well, it's one way to solve the puzzle of where Isaac Paredes should play. Yeah, you know, I guess trade him. Yes, this was the point that Dan made when he wrote about the Korea injury for us today that things would be measurably worse if they were also down parades. But the depth wasn't a strength here, which is unfortunate cause their offense, despite this terrible start to the season that they're having. The offense was producing and producing pretty well. You know.
- [46:34]
A
Thank you, Jordan.
- [46:35]
B
Yeah, one of the better offenses in baseball thanks to Yordon and Cray was off to a reasonably good start. You know, he has always, he has a 121 WRC plus. So he was not what was holding them back and didn't look exactly like his old self, but looked like a version of his old self. You know, certainly an improvement on, on what we had seen at least during his Twins tenure last year. I know things started to pick up for him after the trade to Houston, but they're just, they're pretty well maxed out now because one of the, the great things about Paredes in this sort of super sub role was that you could like deploy him a lot of different places. Well, okay, now you're going to get solid production theoretically out of him at third base, but your ability to paper over gaps if anyone else goes down greatly diminished. And you know, as we were working through editing that piece, like their odds on the zip side, their playoff odds as, as it pertains to zips have taken a real nosedive after this injury. They're holding steady in the fan graphs, odds and some of that is just the way that playing time has gotten reallocated to guys like parades. And shifting the sort of waterfall effect that has had has allowed like Yordon to DH more, which ups his playing time. I am, you know, skeptical of that. Candidly. I think that the day has gotten very long, very fast for Houston.
- [47:59]
A
Even in the combined FanGraphs playoff odds, they're at 16%, which is half of what they started with.
- [48:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. But that's attributable to their bad start more than it is Korea's injury. Korea's injury didn't move their odds all that much, which might surprise people and did surprise us a bit. But I think that they really have no depth. And if we know that there's a place where there is some limitation to our odds said I don't know that we modeled the lack of depth all that well, which we've talked about previously. So they are just, they are sure stretched and talk about systems that aren't that good. You know, it's not like they have an obvious guy coming up for the Miners who can sub in and, and sort of fill those holes. So it's not the best. And you know, I think that Correa's. He's going to miss the rest of this year. Who knows what he's gonna look like when he returns. But the. The change in trajectory for him over the course of the last several years has just been pretty profound in terms of what our expectations might be of his end of career production. It's really a shame because you know who's hitting really well? Christian Walker. Yeah, I'm enjoying that as a Christian Walker appreciator and someone who was profoundly bummed out by his 2025 season. So that's good. But a. An offense Christian Walker and Jordan Alvarez do not solely make, so.
- [49:28]
A
Yeah, I know. And I. I wonder, this will affect some decisions that the Astros have to make as to whether they want to pack it in at some point this season. It's. It's too soon to make that call now. They have no need to make that call this early, but given the age of some of their guys and given how thin things are looking. Yeah, yeah, you could come back next year and you could say, we still have Pena, we still have Jordan, we still have Hunter Brown. But with Correa getting up there, Altuve getting up there, it's just. It's. How long do you want to try to keep this rolling, right? And they had this long, long period of contention, and then the development kind of petered out a little bit, the prospects and also the investments in the major league roster, and a lot of guys walked and weren't replaced, and so they've managed to kind of keep it going. But at some point, it gets really hard to keep it going, and you have to make some difficult decisions, because if you wait one year too long, sometimes that can sentence you to several years of waiting until you get good again. And so, I don't know, maybe it's already too late to kind of pull the plug and make a quick recovery, but they certainly have players who, if they do decide at some point that they're done for this year, and it's a long shot, that would be appealing to people and not just Isak Paradis, but also Walker, I suppose. Resurgence, Walker. And even if you're not talking about Jordan or. Or Brown or, you know, someone. Brown's been hurt. Pitchers have been hurt. Haters coming back seemingly finally. But there are a lot of guys on that roster who would be of interest to other contenders if the Astros decide that they're not one.
- [51:25]
B
Yeah, I think that that's right.
- [51:26]
A
They did have. On Tuesday, Peter Lambert out, dueled Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani pitched pretty well, but Peter Lambert was even better, and the Astros won a close one. And I was thinking about this because there was a wave of guys who came back from having pitched in Japan or Korea or both after having started their careers in the majors. And so they went over to Asia and they came back and were signed this past off season. I don't know if I'm forgetting anyone, but there was Peter Lambert, there was Ryan Weiss also in Houston. There was Cody Ponce, of course in Toronto, Anthony K. In Chicago, Drew Anderson with the Tigers, Foster Griffin with the Nationals. So at least six guys who fit that profile, which is not a unique profile. We've seen seen plenty of guys make that trek, but that was a lot in a single off season. And so in light of Lambert's gem, I wanted to just see how these guys doing. Let's take the temperature on how this is working out for those six guys. And it's a mixed bag. It hasn't been really great for any of them. Lambert has been the best, at least by FanGraphs, WAR by FIP, whatever. It's only four starts, 22 and a third innings, but collectively speaking, it has not gone particularly well. Not that these guys came over with super high expectations for the most part. They're all 29 or older and most of them didn't get big deals. It was kind of just, well, we'll take a flyer, we'll see. Did he really transform himself or was he working with lesser competition? And sometimes it's a bit of both. Both. But Lambert has been the best by war, 0.6 fan graphs. War. Weiss, his teammate, has been the worst by war, minus 0.6. So they cancel each other out war wise for Houston. And Weiss has worked mostly out of the bullpen. He's made a couple starts, actually he just got optioned to aaa. And then Anthony K. Has been replacement level or sub replacement level for the White Sox. He has a a near six ERA and his FIP is even worse. Drew Anderson has been pitching in relief for the Tigers and has been a bit better of late, but still replacement level WAR wise, not the greatest era. And of course Cody Ponce, well, he pitched two and a third solid innings and then he tore his acl and that was that for Cody Ponce this year. Of course he signed for a few years, but he was the guy with the biggest contract and the highest expectations and well, he finishes the year at 0.1 war. And then you have Foster Griffin, who's made seven starts for the Nats and superficially has been effective. He has a 2.27 ERA but a mid- fours fib. And you know, he's been he's been fine but decent serviceable back of the rotation arm and 0.4 war for him. So you add it all up and you have oh roughly replacement level slightly in positive territory. And of course if you include Tatsuya Imai, another Astro who was signed out of NPB but hadn't been in MLB before that, well, he has been disappointing so far too. He made three starts, 0.1 war, 7.27 ERA. He is making rehab starts, he's made a couple rehab starts so far, but he has had major control issues there, which is not an issue for him in Japan. And he's continued to seemingly have some difficulty acclimating and he was talking about how he's adjusting to the pitch clock and this and that, you know. So yeah, all told, those seven guys are six if you don't count Imai not so hot returns wise. Whereas the hitters we've talked plenty about Murakami who of course has been been great and then Kazuma Okamoto has also been quite good of late and he's he started slow but he's turned it on. He's up to a yeah, 129 WRC plus he is easily outplaying Bobaette, that's for sure. So the two hitters who came over, they have lived up to or exceeded expectations. So they've been good. The pitchers, not so much. It's been been kind of rough for them on the whole.
- [56:05]
B
It's a funny thing because I appreciate why demographically we group these guys together, but they don't necessarily fit together neatly. Right. Or maybe a better way of putting it, particularly as it pertains to the pictures, is what you hit on, which is like the the binding shared characteristic between them is more about their ages necessarily than like their actual perceived projectable strength in Major League Baseball. Which isn't to say that these are bad signings. So many of them are so low stakes.
- [56:41]
A
Yeah.
- [56:42]
B
Just from a, you know, from a contract perspective now they occupy a roster spot certainly. So it's not like there's no opportunity cost assigning them. But in general these guys are coming over for relatively little money even compared to prior years of international free agent signings where the guys are not amateurs. And and within that of course it's useful to differentiate the guys who are coming over who are bounce back guys who have had prior affiliated ball experience in the US versus guys like, you know, in my or Okamoto or Murakami where they are playing in the US for the first time and so it's just, just, it's an interesting group to sort of parse apart because I think that any, every one of these signings is, you know, defensible or even more than defensible in a vacuum. And pitching is hard and you know, like guys get hurt and some of these guys are older and, and so there's all of that to consider. But we do have this tendency, understandable as it is, to sort of group them all together even if we are slicing it up. Like here are the bounce back guys or the kickback guys or you know, whatever you want to call them versus the true free agents. You know, I, I, I don't think you're trying to say that this says anything about that kind of free agent in Major League Baseball, but it is interesting that they all get kind of grouped together. Whereas like, you know, I think that people were pretty clear eyed that in my was like a different kind of guy than like Yamamoto was when he was coming over. And even Yamamoto got dinged up in his first year and we didn't really, you know, he kind of had to mulligan and then it's like, actually he's amazing. Turns out really good, you know that guy pretty solid. But it's just a, it's an interesting group, this free agent class. I don't know, man. There's some real highs and lows. There are some real highs and lows also. I would just like to point out to anyone who listened to our last episode and that then is like, what is Meg talking about? I'm not making it up. Pete Alonzo's WRC plus jumped 10 points in a day. And that's what can happen to you this time of year. It was, you know, I mean, for what he is, it's still kind of underwhelming. But two doubles will in fact improve your lot quite a bit. And now it's up to a 118, which is not where he or the Orioles wanted, I'm sure, but it is better than the 108 he was sporting at time of last remaining recording. I'm not crazy. It wasn't that I was sick, although I was. But he was doing a lot worse before he got to. That was, did you. Sorry to take us off on a tangent, but did you watch any of that Marlin's Orioles game? What a wild, what a wild ride that was. That was a time.
- [59:29]
A
That was a. Came back a few times.
- [59:30]
B
They did. And you know, you know who really put them over the edge there? Adley Rutman Adley back, baby.
- [59:37]
A
I am, I'm hoping so. You know, I, I ag.
- [59:41]
B
I'm sorry. You're willing to be like Trout's the same guy not willing to say that for Adley?
- [59:46]
A
Yeah, not yet. I mean, I, I think I'm, I'm optimistic, certainly. But it's a smaller sample because he was on the IL for a while, so, you know, it's like 20 games for Adley and his expected weighted on base is lower than it was the last couple seasons.
- [60:03]
B
I looked at him.
- [60:04]
A
Yeah, the framing has been better after it was down for a couple years.
- [60:08]
B
I know that that's the biggest relief to me. Honestly. That to me is the surest sign that he's like back to being himself is that the defense has rebounded and it's like it all looks so quiet back there.
- [60:20]
A
Yeah, I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic. I'm just, just saying.
- [60:24]
B
Yeah, I know you're.
- [60:27]
A
Yeah. I, I'd like to think because it was totally mystifying to me that it was mystifying. Yeah. It was so weird. And I agonized over whether to put him on my top 10 catchers list this year. I remember I was agonizing because I do that for MLB Network and I left Patrick Bailey off this year, which I felt bad about. But it's like no matter how great you are at framing, you do have to hit a little bit. And he has not hit a little bit.
- [60:53]
B
It's a problem. He has a 19 WRC plus. Yeah, it's really nice including today's action because he has, you'll be shocked to learn. Oh, he. No, he didn't. I was looking at his 20, 26 line. He has. He is hitting a buck 50.
- [61:10]
A
Yeah, it's really bad. And probably the quality of contact is, is better than the actual numbers, but I mean, still not good.
- [61:19]
B
Has to be. It's like it, it's one of those things where the, the, the, the, the like I have been short circuited by Patrick bailey. Oh my God. 1-5218. 1-88. He's slugging 188.
- [61:35]
A
Ben could be lower by the time people hear this. Or higher. Maybe he'll have a Pete Alonzo esque end to that game. Who knows?
- [61:41]
B
How, how many home runs would Patrick Bailey have to hit over the course of the remainder of his game today to get to a 118 WRC plus the limit? You need new math. You need new math for that.
- [61:53]
A
Austin hedges has a 127 WRC plus.
- [61:57]
B
No, he does not.
- [61:57]
A
Yeah. Oh yeah.
- [61:58]
B
Does he really? How does he What?
- [62:01]
A
Well, it's 46 plate appearances, so don't get too excited.
- [62:05]
B
I mean, I'm, I'm still. When was the last time Austin Hedges had a 46 plate appearance stretch where he had a 127 WRC plus?
- [62:14]
A
You know, we can at least look up the, the stretch of 15 games and we can see when the last time he, he did that was. So I will, I will check on that for you.
- [62:24]
B
I am. But unwell. I am on. He has a.310 batting average.
- [62:29]
A
How about that?
- [62:30]
B
Yeah, how about that? How about that? Wait a minute. We're just gonna sit here in a cul de sac of Meg being shocked about catchers for a hot second because how about that? Ben?
- [62:40]
A
The last time he had. So let's see. He has had a stretch of 15 games where he had. Okay, so 127. The last time he had a 127 over a stretch of 15 games was ending August 4, 2022. He had a 15 game stretch that ended then when he had a 129 WRC plus. So it's not unprecedented, but it has been four years or so since he even had 15 games where he hit that. Well, I'm not buying it exactly, but probably Bailey will, will come up to closer to his usual range and Hedges will go down to his usual range and they'll both kind of meet in their usual area of offensive ineptitude or somewhere thereabouts. But yeah, this has been Megan Ben Reed's catcher offensive last year.
- [63:31]
B
I'm sorry, this is shocking. I made like, I made short circuiting sounds when confronted with Patrick Bailey and I wasn't much better with Austin Hedges. I just, I. What? What?
- [63:44]
A
Well, I didn't know what to do with Bailey or with Adley. Hopefully this is a sign of, of more good things to come for Adley, but we will see. But I don't, I don't really know. But yeah, I wasn't suggesting that all of those guys who came back over were the same or anything, but. No, I know we, yeah, we remarked on that trend. I mean it, you know, I don't know if it's a trend or if it was a one year influx, but we've certainly seen teams I think be more willing to take guys who go overseas and then they come back because there have been some guys who followed that path and, and were successful and kind of reinvented themselves and came back and were better than they had been the first time, whether it's, I don't know, Kobe Lewis or Miles Michaelis or Merrill Kelly or Eric Fetty. Right. And so.
- [64:30]
B
Right.
- [64:31]
A
You know, as the quality of play in those leagues has been appreciated and more and more players who started over there have come over, the same has been true where it's, it's not once you leave MLB to go to NPB or the KPO or wherever that, that, that's it for you. You could come back and have a second act if you'd care to. And some guys get better and find something over there with different instruction or whatever it is. So some of these guys were formerly prospects like Foster Griffin was a first round pick and others weren't really and some of them have, have dramatically reinvented themselves and have picked up new pitches and others haven't so much. So yeah, most of them were just, eh, let's see, let's see what he has. It's worth bringing him in to compete for a spot and maybe be our fifth starter or something. With the exception of Ponce, the other guys were kind of in that category even though they had taken different paths to that point and to this point I guess they have collectively performed about how you'd expect pitchers fitting that profile to perform, which is not great, but maybe playable pitchable in some cases. But Lambert, for at least one day he got the better of the Dodgers, so good for him. And and speaking of a former Astros pitcher, maybe we could just touch on Framber for a second because our timing was not ideal here either because we talked last time about Tarek Skubel and his injury. Turned out he did have have bone chips in the apple, the loose bodies or some of them at least. Yeah. So we said well good thing they have from her because gosh, things would be looking rough for them if they had not signed from her. And that's still true, obviously. But it was not the perfect time to point that out because from her had a disaster start and then sort of self destructed and he did not cover himself in glory in his outing on Tuesday. So what happened with Framber? And you know, we talked plenty about the character concerns about from Burr and whether that held up his market and did he intentionally cross up his catcher last year with the Astros and all the rest. Anyway, he struggled. He was facing the Red Sox on Tuesday and they were beaten up on him and he gave up five runs in the third inning and then he gave up back to back homers in the fourth and then Trevor Story came up and he plunked him from plunked story in the back. And I guess it's where you're quote, unquote, supposed to do it if you're gonna do it, you know, in the letters. But it is pretty ridiculous that you're supposed to do it anywhere when you think about it. So, of course, Fromber insisted that this was an accident, but really nobody was buying that. And he was ejected and he has since been suspended for six games. And I don't know if he'll appeal or it'll be reduced or whatever, but he was suspended and fined. And if he misses a start, well, that doesn't help the already shorthanded Tigers. But this appeared to be pretty petulant because it was a case of just like, well, they're crushing me and I'm mad about it, and so I'm just gonna hit a guy. And there was also a theory. Eric Hosmer, who is part of the Royals broadcast team now and is extremely online, he also was analyzing some video and suggesting that the Red Sox were picking up from bur signs and that they were stealing from bur signs legally, but, you know, the old fashioned way, just runners at second base picking something up about the grips and signaling it to the batter. And Trevor Story was one of the guys who had been on second base whom Hosmer suggested was signaling to the batter. So whether it was from ber being mad about giving up homers or from her being mad about sign stealing, it certainly appears that he intentionally plunked Trevor Story and the smoking gun. The giveaway, among others, is that that this was the 14 seam, the 14
- [68:45]
B
seamer he's thrown the entire year. It was the 14 seamer he has thrown all year. If you. It is the funniest pitch chart you have ever seen because it is directly on the guy. And that guy is Trevor Story.
- [69:00]
A
Yeah, it's. It hurts the plausible deniability. I will just say, you know, if you want to try to sell that this was an accident, then maybe don't make it it a unique pitch selection. Yeah, just, you know, 94 mile per hour forcing fastball is the only one that he has thrown all season. And amusingly, actually, and I think Trevor Story sort of alluded to this because he said, I think we all know what's what. It's pretty indisputable. You can kind of see just from the past things that have happened. He was seemingly, maybe referring to an incident last season when Framber then with the Astros, was pitching against the Red Sox and He hit Sadan Rafaela with a pitch at the end or near the end of a six run fourth inning. And it seemed to be. And Frober threw five four seam fastballs all last season and that was one of them. So. And in this case, Rafaela had hit a homer in this game too. It is pretty amusing if it's just like he has a specially designated pitch type for plugging people. It's like if you want to get away with this, don't just break out the four seam fastball only when you want to hit people. I guess the charitable interpretation would be, well, he wanted to make sure he didn't hurt them. And so maybe he throws the pitch that's, I don't know, easiest to control or command or something so that he did plunk them precisely where he wanted to. But yeah, it's. It's tough to sell that story when you just break out the force.
- [70:33]
B
Yeah.
- [70:33]
A
It's time to. Time to hit someone.
- [70:35]
B
Yeah. Like you. What do we mean though? What do we mean by that? Because he's throwing his son's first team fastball. Like, what do we. What. What's going on? You know what I mean?
- [70:45]
A
You know, it doesn't appear to be a coincidence. And no. And you know, you could have, I guess had the courtesy to hit someone with a slower pitch, maybe. I don't know if what batters would prefer, whether they would rather you throw the pitch that's softer or the pitch that you have the best command over. And maybe they'd say, you know, I'd prefer a 94 mile per hour four seamer at the letters than I would a slower, whatever breaking ball that maybe could get away or something and actually endanger me more. But they prefer neither, I think. But Chad Tracy, new manager of the Red Sox said, I do think it was intentional. I thought it was weak and I thought everybody saw it. Their side, our side. I think everybody saw it and yeah, it was weak. And the funny thing was A.J. hinch Tigers manager who obviously was familiar with Framber from their Astros days and he got kind of, you know, he got a one game suspension too. He didn't really do anything, I don't think, but it's just kind of a, hey, I guess get your guy under control sort of suspension, but hinge, because the bench is cleared. But then everyone just milled about and there were no punches exchanged or anything, which I.
- [71:57]
B
It was a hugging. A mutual hugging. Bench clearing. Yeah.
- [72:00]
A
Which I think was probably because even the Tigers couldn't really defend what Valtes did here and Hinge said as much. He said, I understand, I understand their frustration, the Red Sox and the optics. I understand the whole thing. We play a really good brand of baseball here. That didn't feel like it. It's not judging intent. I have no idea if Parentheses Valdez threw its story on purpose, but I know when you go out on the field and you're in those confrontations, you usually feel like you're in the right or you're in your right. It didn't feel good being out there. So without explicitly saying it, he basically copped to. Yeah, that was weak, as Tracy said, and that certainly seemed to be intentional. So more fuel for the fire, I guess, of fr. Behavioral issues, clubhouse issues. They still need him. And you know, he entered the game having pitched in a pretty Fromer Valdez esque way and that's pretty crucial for them in the absence of Skubal and all the other injured guys. But that's not going to endear him to anyone in that clubhouse, let alone other clubhouses.
- [73:10]
B
Look, I know that there has been a push and pull in his ability to emotionally regulate that he has been open to feedback and assistance on this count. You know, he's worked with a sports psychologist.
- [73:24]
A
Talk to Chandler Room about that.
- [73:26]
B
Yeah, right. But at a certain point it's like you can't, you can't be plunking guys on purpose because you're frustrated. You just, you can't be doing that, you know, And I think that it's appropriate that he serve a suspension for that. Like, come on, man, you can't. And to his own detriment. Right. Like, I think we struggled to know exactly how much it was going to matter in his free agency. And this, the deal he ended up signing, I think is one that I'm sure he and his representation hoped would be one that he wouldn't see through to completion. Right. That he would pitch very well this year and next and that he would opt out after 2027 and then go sign the, the contract that I'm sure they hoped he would be able to garner this offseason. And every time you do stuff like this, it interferes with your ability to do that. So, you know, he's going to suffer consequence for this, whether it's a, a six game suspension now or a diminished earning capacity later. But like, come on, dude, you're very talented. And, and I would say this, if you're gonna do this kind of crap, you need to be shiftier about it. Like, you are not a Good sneaker. You know, like, you are not being. Yeah, you are not being discreet. You are giving yourself no plausible deniability. Like, you simply, simply should stop this behavior. And also, if you're not going to. You must be a better. A better. And the thing about it is, of course, the ability to be crafty about it is if. If he possessed that ability, he would have the ability to emotionally regulate well enough to not do it in the first place. Right? Because if you can take the step back in the moment to be like, I'm really mad and I've got to plunk him, I got to do it in a way that won't get me caught. Surely there's. There's a short circuit in the disregulation, right? To be able to go, okay, I gotta take a beat. And. And I am frustrated and this is going badly. And you know what would make it go worse? Plunking him in with the 14 seamer. I'm throwing the whole gosh darn near. I'm trying to swear less, and it's just making me sound like I'm affecting something folksy. So everyone decide what they want. Okay. But any. Anyway, all of that to say from her, my guy. Come on, man.
- [75:56]
A
Like, if you must hit someone, hit someone with a sinker.
- [76:01]
B
Well, and it's just like. And now before, I was skeptical that he had actually, like, crossed up his own catcher. And. And now I think I maybe believe it. Like, this is. I want him to succeed because I enjoy his profile and think it's so, like, I want this to. To go well. Right. I want there to be a variety a guy. And so I want it to work. But you. You have to be able to emotionally regulate a little bit or, like, have a different way to let it out later. Yeah, I don't know.
- [76:41]
A
It is funny. It's like you catch a kid sneaking a cookie or something. And like, no, I didn't. When you see the crumbs around their mouth or something, that's what. Throwing a single four seamer.
- [76:53]
B
You have a moment. And I can say this as a former babysitter, you have a moment where. And I don't mean to we. We over utilize the word like psychopath and sociopath, and most people are just being little stinkers. That's the case with most children. When most children misbehave, it is not a sign of, like, future intractable pathology. It is just they're being a little stinker, you know, because they're still learning how to be a person. They are also learning emotional regulation and they're learning what they can get away with and like how to be in a society because they're children. And that's part of what childhood's about, is learning all that stuff. So most of the time they're just being little stinkers. But I do remember an incident very much like this where a kid. I was babysitting, you know, when we used to let 12 year olds babysit other children just like all the time. That was weird that we did that. But anyway, you know, I found that I. I like went to the restroom and then I couldn't find this child. And that was terror inducing. I was like, where are. They were on the counter, Ben. They had climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach the cookies they were not allowed to eat. And they were like, I was looking for something else. And I was like, what else were you looking for? And they were so young that they couldn't like read labels to be like the breadcrumbs or whatever the hell. And they were just like, something up here.
- [78:09]
A
Yep. That's why the saying says cut with your head in the cookie jar.
- [78:15]
B
Okay. And in that moment, I almost, I almost respected them, you know, because it was just like the only avenue I have out of this is to lie.
- [78:25]
A
Yeah.
- [78:25]
B
And so we're just gonna see how far I can go that pays off
- [78:28]
A
for people these days. So.
- [78:30]
B
And it's a bad precedent to set. And I didn't want to laugh because I wanted them to appreciate that they had made a bad mistake. And I did make them sit in time out. And then they had to tell their mom that they had done it when she got home. And she was disappointed. But then when she sent the little kid to bed, I. I told her about the, the circumstances and she also cracked up. She was just like, oh my God, I can't believe it. I was like, it was so funny, man. It was so funny.
- [78:58]
A
Anyway, it's. It's a little less adorable when a 32 year old man hits another man in with a 94 mile projectile. But.
- [79:06]
B
And yeah, I. I expect more from grown adults, you know, and I appreciate that. This stuff can be hard and the world is stressful. We're all dealing with a higher level of baseline anxiety these days, but we still are not allowed to throw things at other people.
- [79:22]
A
Yeah. So that's the story of Robert Valdez and the smoking for Seamer and the smoking.
- [79:28]
B
Emotional dysregulation.
- [79:29]
A
Yes. The Trevor story of Franfor Valdez.
- [79:33]
B
There you go. There you go.
- [79:34]
A
And also before we leave pitching behind entirely, it was pointed out in our discord group by Patreon supporter who goes by the username Peaberry, that there is an alternative term for loose bodies. Because we've all been a little bit grossed out by loose bodies, I think. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those terms that sounds sort of innocuous, maybe depending on the context, like turf toe or something. And then you realize, oh, this is actually a serious injury. Maybe.
- [80:02]
B
Yes.
- [80:02]
A
And. And we've been burned by loose bodies enough now that we know that this. This portends surgery and absence, etc. But there is a maybe older and more archaic term for loose bodies or free bodies, and it's joint mice. What? Joint mice. What? This is something that like, appears in medical papers.
- [80:27]
B
Joint mice.
- [80:29]
A
Yes. Here is a medical paper I'm reading called on loose bodies in the joint. And it starts by saying the history of loose osteochondral bodies. The free bodies in human joints. The joint mice, as they were called by our predecessors in a naive way due to their rapid movements, is in some way reminiscent of a mouse scurrying about inside the joint sacks. See, now you've ruined it. Nope, that. See?
- [80:56]
B
No.
- [80:56]
A
Joint mess. Joint base sounded cute, but now it's making me think of some sort of alien esque parasitic infestation. Like mice scurrying about inside joint sacks. Now that's not fun anymore.
- [81:10]
B
Ben, you can't. No, Ben, I'm mad at you. You can't tell me about joint mice in. In the what? Sex in the. In joint sacks? Is that what you said? That you can't tell me about that when we have just had hantavirus on a cruise? You. What are you. This is too much mice. Too many mouses. Too many me. Too much mouse, it says.
- [81:36]
A
This is from the Austin Orthopedic Institute. Loose bodies, often referred to as joint mice, occur when small fragments of boner cartilage break free and float within the joint fluid. Often referred to. I had never heard this.
- [81:49]
B
Often referred to.
- [81:51]
A
Not in a baseball context, clearly, but I am, so I prefer it, frankly. I'd like to see official injury updates. That Tarek Skouble is out with parentheses. Joint mice, I think.
- [82:04]
B
No, no, no. Because then it sounds like. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This was already too much of a David Cronenberg ass injury, and now it's somehow worse than. And sorry, joint mice. I also don't care for the phrase joint sack.
- [82:24]
A
Yeah, joint sack I don't love either.
- [82:25]
B
It's surprising you think Mice are cute. You live in New York in an apartment where, like, you. You just invariably are at some point. Not you personally, but the. The royal you, the collective you all. Everybody deals with, like, a little bit of rodentia every now and again. It's just a reality of living in an apartment building.
- [82:43]
A
Yeah. In isolation, though, mice are kind of cute. Even rats could be cute when they're not scurrying out of a garbage bag on your street. But.
- [82:51]
B
Okay. Anyway, so look, here's the thing. You're wrong about this.
- [82:54]
A
They're pets for people.
- [82:56]
B
We shouldn't do rodents as pets. This is a longstanding belief of mine. And. And look, you. Somewhere we have a listener. We might have many. And you might have a. You might have a loving relationship with your particular rodent. And you're bristling at me using the word rodent to describe them. And I want you to know that it's none of my business, but I do judge you for it. They shouldn't be in your house. They should only be outside your house.
- [83:24]
A
Wow.
- [83:25]
B
In your house is not where they belong. And we are extending this to gerbils and hamsters.
- [83:30]
A
I was just gonna ask. Guinea pigs. Blanket guinea pigs. Gerbil band. Rodent band.
- [83:35]
B
Rodent ban. I'm out on rodents as pets. I also don't think we should have snakes as pets. Definitely not in concert, because that just seems like you're setting up a weird Thunderdome sort of situation.
- [83:48]
A
But they don't all get along. But.
- [83:49]
B
But definitely. I. This is just. I don't care for it. I don't care for it. And I appreciate that this might be a minority opinion. I don't invite your emails about it. You should just sit in, whatever your truth is. And it's not for me to judge, except that I do. I don't need to know about it. If you've made your peace with your rodent friends, that's fine. Unless they're in a Pixar movie, I don't want to be around them. That's not for me.
- [84:15]
A
Okay.
- [84:15]
B
Okay. No rodents.
- [84:17]
A
Okay.
- [84:18]
B
No reptiles of any kind.
- [84:22]
A
This is personal preference. This is not official podcast policy. I'm pro rodent or not anti.
- [84:28]
B
At least I've had gerbils. Or. No, we had hamsters. Actually, we had both.
- [84:32]
A
Okay.
- [84:33]
B
At one point. Not at the same time. Different households. And guess what? We had one sweet one, and then the rest of them for the rest of time were mean as. And you know why? It's because they knew they didn't belong in there either. They're like, this is not where I am meant to be, in this little cage with the ball. You think the ball is enough? It's not. It's insufficient. They want a roam. You don't want to let them loose.
- [85:01]
A
Sorry that you had negative experiences with the mice, much like Terex Goble with his joint mice. Anyway, I will wrap up with a bit of blasting here, And then they'll
- [85:22]
B
tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways.
- [85:32]
A
Here's today's blast.
- [85:44]
B
I'm so mad at you. I'm so mad at you. I. I'm so angry. The only mice that should have been pets were in the Witches. And then I think that one of those.
- [85:55]
A
Well, that's one of the negative associations that I have. Because that movie, of course, terrified a generation. Yes, including me.
- [86:01]
B
But it rocks. That movie rocks.
- [86:04]
A
It does. But it scarred us all emotionally and psychologically, which is maybe why it rocks.
- [86:09]
B
Anyway, we all respect Angelica Houston Yes,
- [86:12]
A
Here's a question from AJ who says As a Pirates fan, I've noticed something odd about their schedule compared to the other NL Central teams to date, and this was sent on April 27, the only three divisional matchups have involved the Pirates on the road. This will change starting Monday, when the Pirates face the Cardinals for the first time, but at home. But the weirdness continues still, as the Pirates will be the first and only NL Central opponent for each of the other teams, even after they face the Cardinals and Reds this week, which has happened now, meaning the Pirates will have played five series totaling 16 games against the NL Central, while each of the other teams has faced no one else in the division. So AJ says, I find this to be an odd piece of scheduling, especially this far into the season, so I pass it along to you both. Is this more common than I think, or is this a more noteworthy scheduling quirk? So Michael Mountain, frequent Stat Blast consultant, says to state the observation more succinctly, the Pirates will have played against every other team in their division before any other NL Central team plays a divisional game which does not involve Pittsburgh. And Michael found four other such occurrences on record in a five team division in 1998, every team in the NL west had played at least 12 games by April 13, and every divisional game up to that point involved the Diamondbacks. In 2000, every team in the NL east had played at least 26 games by May 4, and every divisional game up to that point involved the Phillies. In 2024, every team in the NL Central had played at least 37 games by May 9, and every divisional game up to that point involved the Brewers. So same division a couple years ago, maybe even more extreme, with another team. And in 1998, every team in the NL east had played at least 46 games by May 25, and every divisional game up to that point involved the Phillies. So, as Michael says, American League schedule makers from 1998 to present why can't you be normal? National League schedule makers from 1998 to present screaming so yes, strange things have happened like this before, but it is unusual. It is just not quite unprecedented. Another question in that vein comes to us from Jan, who says Looking at the box score for the Rockies Reds game on April 29, I noticed that Mickey Moniac was batting ninth in the lineup for the Rockies, even though he had the highest OPS on the team. This seemed like a very uncommon occurrence. How often does it happen that the batter with the highest OPS hit last in the order? MickeyMoniac is doing his best to make Bauman's prediction about home runs by a former number one look good because he's up to 11. He's. He's a 192 WRC plus Mickeymoniac.
- [89:03]
B
I know Jay's gonna write about him later in the week, so he better keep hitting, at least for a little while longer.
- [89:10]
A
Fun. Let Jay right bat ninth a bit and Michael says, yeah, I'm going to slightly cheat. I'll allow it and answer this by players OPS at the end of the game instead of their OPS coming into the game. This makes the lookups a lot easier and also avoids the problem of undefined OPS for players who are making their first start of the season. So using OPS at the end of the game, this happens more often than you might think. 100 to 200 times a season, although a lot of that is in March or April, which makes sense because maybe you're buying it a little less then, and maybe it's smaller sample so 67% of all occurrences dating back to 1898 have happened in June or earlier. Some of the instances later in the season are due to pitchers batting with extremely small plate appearance totals. So yeah, if it's just a fluke, then that's that's one thing. But it did happen 23 times in September 2025 alone, mostly from the Rangers batting quadruple A outfielder Michael hellman in the nine hole 13 times, while his ops fluctuated between. 760 and 961. And I guess given that Michael Hellman has not been in the big leagues this year and just hasn't gotten another chance and is kind of in that quadruple A mold. It, it speaks to some lack of confidence in that being the true talent of Michael Hellman. And maybe a little bit of that is going on with the Rockies and mickeymoniac too. So maybe they are also saying that Jay better hurry and get that blog up because maybe Mickey Maniac will not sustain this performance. But, but also they're the Rockies. So it's, it's, you know, even the resurgent Rockies, it's not exactly the Blake Street Bombers over there these days. So, you know, you'd think that maybe you would want that kind of pop a little bit higher in the order. Right?
- [91:08]
B
Right. Yeah, you would think so.
- [91:10]
A
Yeah. I'm gonna going to check to see where he has been batting in recent days since this email was sent. And so he batted ninth on one day. He, he started in the nine spot on April 29th in that game against the Reds, but that was the only time that he had batted ninth this season. He has most frequently in fact batted second, which these days might be reserved for your best hitter potentially. So yeah, he's, he's hit leadoff a couple times. He's batted second predominantly and he's batted third several times and he batted fifth one. So yeah, mostly mickeymoniac has been batting where you would expect mickeymoniac to bat for the Rockies. That was just a one day departure. Okay, here is a question that comes to us from Preston Patreon supporter who wrote ildemaro Vargas has hit in 23 consecutive games, or so he had when this email was sent eight days ago. Prior to his current run, his longest streak had been 10 games. That got me thinking. What's the longest hitting streak by a player who had no previous hitting streak longer than five games, ten games, et cetera? Also, what's the longest streak by a player who never had another streak longer than five, 10 or 15 games? And Michael reports Ildemaro Vargas streak ended. And right after this, at 24 consecutive games for a player who had never before had a hitting streak of more than 10 games. That's 10 shy of Benito Santiago's 34 game hitting streak which started on August 25, 1987, which tied a mark set by George McQuinn, first baseman for the 1938St. Louis Browns. Their longest hitting streaks prior to those occasions were seven and eight games respectively. The record for most consecutive games with a hit to start A career is 17, set by Reds third baseman Chuck Eleno or Eleno in 1941 and tied by Rockies outfielder David Dahl in 2016. Maglio or Donez ended his career with an active 18 game hitting streak. And I have spreadsheets for some of these things for people to peruse, but the Ildemaro Vargas streak and just generally his start to the season has been quite enjoyable, I would say. And, and has already been the subject of a fan graphs post by Jay Jaffe. So if he now cools off, that's okay because Jay, Jay got his post up but he's still hitting.374.396.645. That's a.189 almost Mickeymoniac WRC plus and 1.5 War which is already his single season high in his career. Yes.
- [93:54]
B
So RBI double last night as we are recording this on Wednesday.
- [93:59]
A
Yeah, it's completely, it's out of nowhere. He has already tied his single season high in homers. He has a.378 Babip look, I mean a case like this, it's, it's Ildemaro Vargas and I don't think anyone is making too much of this, but we can all marvel at it and enjoy it while it lasts. And it's not, not purely all babipping everyone to death. I mean he's, he's put a charge into the ball, he's hit some balls hard, he's hit six stingers, he has a near.300 isolated power. So I mean it's, it's the outlier of all outliers and perhaps it's sort of fluky, but it's fun, you know, for a 34 year old who's been bouncing around and you know, kind of a utility guy to have this sort of start to a season. I mean, mean that's just the, the pure random fun of baseball. So long may he BABIP everyone is what I'm saying here.
- [94:54]
B
Yeah, I agree.
- [94:55]
A
And we also have a question from Sam Patreon supporter who says what's the highest number of repeating events to happen in both halves of an inning I. E Grounded out to pitcher flied out to center field strike out looking I was curious if there's been a particular long streak and if so what sequence and and when and we did a step less along these lines at at one point years ago but this might be slightly different. And Michael looks it up and says retrosheet event text doesn't include a hit trajectory code so it wouldn't distinguish between a pop up and a fly out as long as they were hit to the same fielder, although that information is in a separate field and it could be included. But the difference between a pop up and a fly ball is somewhat arbitrary anyway, so let's not bother. On the other hand, it does describe hit locations where data is available. For instance, a 4:3 put out on a diving stop up the middle gets a different notation than a grounder hit directly at the second baseman. So this is both more precise and less precise than the examples Sam gave. But let's go with what we have for a game with full play by play record available. The record for most consecutive matching events to start both halves of an inning is four. This has happened only once. Baltimore at Atlanta July 5, 2025 Last year, both halves of the eighth inning were strikeout, strikeout, walk, strikeout. I guess that's a little less fun maybe than if there had been batted balls involved. There was a Reds Cubs game in 2021 where both halves of the sixth innings started walk, walk, strikeout, walk. But one of the strikeouts was swinging and the other was a foul bunt attempt. So I'm not going to count that. If you require at least one ball in play, the record is three matching events, and that happens a couple times a decade. The most recent occurrence was Tigers at Rockies on May 8, 2025 in game one of a doubleheader. Both halves of the fourth inning started with a 53 put out on a ball hit toward the hole on the left side, followed by two swinging strikeouts. So yeah, you'd think that maybe with all the innings and all the games and all the teams that have ever played the that maybe there would be longer identical sequences. But they're just there's so many potential outcomes, I suppose, especially if you're getting as specific as where it was hit on the field and that sort of thing. So then all the options just you can only get 3 or 4 place I guess before things diverge. So it's hard to have everything be the same. I wonder if anyone noticed that that was happening in the cases where where three or four happened at once. Did anyone think they were stuck in some sort of Groundhog Day loop? Or did they not even notice? I wouldn't be surprised either way. Also, Sean Patreon supporter says on a Phillies broadcast they noted that Kyle Stowers of The Marlins had zero homers despite having hit 25 the previous season. He appears to be hitting much worse in general. Yeah, the the Stower surprise has not extended into this season. My question is what's the most played appearances that it has taken for someone to hit their first homer of the season who hit 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 homers the previous season? I imagine it's possible for someone to achieve the lower values and then have zero homers for the following season. Michael reports. Coming off a 25 homer season in 2013, J.J. hardy didn't homer until his 265th plate appearance of the 2014 campaign. So that is I guess the longest at that threshold. There's a spreadsheet attached for every prior season home run total from 0 to 73. But 2004 to 2005, Scott Petsednik is the only player on record to hint 10 plus homers and then follow that up with a full season of playing time in which he hit zero. So no one else has gotten skunked after being in double digits. Von Hayes also did this in 1990-91, but he had only 323 plate appearances in the follow up year. It's got to be jarring, right? To, to go from thinking of yourself as a power hitter to just goose egg just being completely off the board. And in fact, I mean you look at Kyle Stowers, but what about Fernando Tatis Jr. Right. He also hit 25 homers last year and he is also at zero. He's in the middle of a game as we're speaking, but he's 150, 151 plate appearances into this year and he has not gone deep yet. That is, that's pretty shocking. I mean 80 WRC plus but no pop.
- [99:21]
B
It's especially shocking because he's scorching the ball.
- [99:26]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And he's striking out a lot.
- [99:28]
B
Yeah, he's striking out a lot. But it's not like he's not hitting the ball hard.
- [99:33]
A
Right.
- [99:33]
B
Which I, I say to highlight the fact that it, it is shocking that he doesn't have a single one. Like he, he's a single like a 60 hard hit rate. He's. He's barreling the ball. His. He has almost a hundred point difference between his slug and his ex log. Like it's, it's, it's weird. Bonkers. It's like it's. And he, like he's hitting some more ground balls than he has previously, but not a lot. His infield hit percentages and crazy like it's, it's not like his infield fly ball rate is pretty much exactly the same as.
- [100:14]
A
Yeah, Ben. Yeah, Ben. It's weird.
- [100:17]
B
When will he hit one?
- [100:19]
A
I don't Pretty soon, but.
- [100:22]
B
Well, but, but shouldn't it be now?
- [100:25]
A
It should be. It should have been a while ago.
- [100:27]
B
It would be so funny if he hit one right as we were recording.
- [100:30]
A
Yeah. Yeah, it could happen. If it does, I'll update in the outro. But I did enjoy this. This quote I saw on ildamari 109
- [100:39]
B
EV90 like, yeah, Ben, okay.
- [100:45]
A
Poor Fernando.
- [100:46]
B
Doesn't make any sense. I don't know what to make of it. Maybe he's been. Maybe he's been ensorceled.
- [100:51]
A
Maybe it was he was flummoxed by playing second base or something. I don't know. It's odd anyway, that that won't continue, but it's weird that it continued this long. I enjoyed this quote I saw about ILD Tomorrow Vargas the other day when he ran his hitting streak to 23 games. From brewers manager Pat Murphy, who said, he's always been a baseball player, which I, I, I love when people call people baseball player. It's like, you don't want to be too flowery in your language. You want to show some respect, but you don't want to say the guy's been a superstar or something. Clearly he hasn't. So what do you say? Say he's always been a baseball player. Yeah. Okay. Accurate. True. And then he went on to say he's always been a winning player. That's a little bit better than just being a baseball player. He's a winning baseball player. And then a lot of this is like, it's backhanded compliments or it's, he's always been a little less tools than. His performance is better than his tools. Okay. He's playing with a freedom. He's finding the barrel. He knows himself. As you mature as a player and get more time, you can find pockets like this, which I, I enjoyed that, too. Not a pocket pancake. He's. He's off of those, but you can find pockets. I love how even in the quote praising him, he's acknowledging that it's not going to continue. I mean, not that anyone, like, hits.400 and has a hitting streak indefinitely, but he's always been a baseball player. That's a good one. All right. And then lastly, question from Patreon supporter Clay, Clay Dresslow of baseball mogul fame, who says which events cause a manager to pull a starting pitcher from a game. So Clay says, we've all seen a struggling starter get pulled after walking a batter, and we know this is much less likely after a strikeout for starting pitchers. Removed in the middle of an inning? What is the breakdown for their last batter faced? How often is it a walk that convinces the manager to make a call to the bullpen 10? Or a hit or home run? What about a wild pitch or a batter reaching on an error? I'm also curious about how these stats have changed over the years and what it says about changes in managerial philosophy. At one end of the spectrum you have a pure pitch count manager the pitcher gets pulled after X pitches and their performance is irrelevant. At the other end you have a manager who completely ignores the pitch count and goes entirely by performance. We saw this a lot way back in the 20th century. The manager would let the starter pitch the ninth and only take them out if they walked someone or gave up a hit. So Michael looked into this. Maybe this will be helpful Helpful for Clay to model pitcher usage in baseball mogul but Michael says I found almost 160,000 cases what a brag of starting pitchers being removed in the middle of an inning. In the retro sheet era, 1910 to present, this excludes starting pitchers on the road who gave up walk off hits and thus did not complete the inning when the game ended. Unsurprisingly, the rate has risen over time. However, it's not currently at its peak. In the late 70s and early 80s, a little more than half of all starts resulted in a pitcher being pulled mid inning and now it is down to just over 40%. That's interesting. So guys are obviously getting pulled earlier, but they're not getting pulled mid inning. They're often not even getting to start that inning. And Michael says, I suspect this is at least partially driven by pitch count becoming a more prevalent part of workload management, resulting in pitchers not being allowed to start an inner inning that they are considered unlikely to be able to finish. And then he breaks it down by decade and inning. I will share his little color coded bar chart. Up until the 1960s, the distribution of when a pitcher was yanked was pretty even. The expectation was that you would go nine innings, and if you were taken out in the middle of any inning, it basically meant the same thing. You just don't have it. Today's sun the absence of modern bullpen rules also meant that any relief pitcher you had coming in was basically a swingman, long reliever, failed starter harder. So the downstream impact on your next few games of taking out a pitcher in the first or second was less severe than it is today. In the 1950s, it was four times as common as in the 2000s to see a pitcher removed in the middle of his first inning of work. So sometimes there was a very quick hook, even if that's counting openers. I don't know. But yeah, sometimes, you know, the rotations were a little more malleable back then and guys would get rearranged and now it's just much more set from 1960 to 2009, as bullpens develop, the rate of starters being yanked in the middle of innings one to four decreases steadily from 13 in the 60s to about 7.5% in the 2000s. At the same time, the rate of starters being yanked in the middle of the sixth or seventh goes up even more dramatically from 13.5% in the 60s to over 21% in the 2000s. That's even though the total percentage of starts that end in a mid inning hook decreased between 1980, 80 and 2009. In the 50s, 27% of all mid inning hooks happen in the six or seventh innings. In the 2000s it was more than 50%. The trends for the 2000 and tens and 2000 and twenties incomplete tell a slightly different story. While the overall rate of mid inning hooks has not really changed, the distribution has, and it's shifting back earlier. Getting pulled in the middle of the fifth now happens in over 10% of all starts. Hooks in the middle of the the first five innings, which had represented about a third of all mid inning hooks from 1980 to 2019, are nearly 50% of all mid inning hooks. In the 2000s, seventh inning hooks are down to 6.2% of all starts, which is basically what they were in the 50s, ninth inning or later. Hooks, already an endangered species by the 2000s, are now practically extinct. 2% and 8th inning hooks are now as rare as 9th inning hooks were in the 2000s. There are almost as many pitchers but being pulled in the middle of the fourth through sixth innings in the 2000s as there were being pulled in the middle of any inning combined in the 40s. The 13.2% rate of pitchers being pulled in the middle of the sixth in the 2000s is the highest rate of occurrence for any decade or inning combo in this data set. And lastly, to see not how often it happens, but what kind of events prompt it to happen. As Clay inquired about, he excluded a few fringe event types that have never represented an appreciable number of mid inning hooks like stolen bases, box pickoffs, et cetera. What we can see is that walks have always been a common reason to pull a starter mid inning, but they've Been pretty consistently about 20% regardless of era. What has changed dramatically is the number of hooks that come after an out was made. Before the 1960s, only about 2 to 3% of mid inning hooks came after an out was recorded in the 2020s. So far it's up to almost 2025%, including 7.5% of mid inning hooks coming after a strikeout. Even so now it's pretty common to pull a guy even after really the best thing he could do happens. So I'll include another chart here that shows how common everything is. But that's the big change I guess is that in the past you would often go kind of batter by batter and okay, he got that guy, I guess I'll give him another guy. Whereas now, I guess this is largely pitch count related. Even if you got an out, even if you got a strikeout, you're at your number and so you're done. But yeah, this is, this is interesting. I guess I would have guessed that but hadn't really thought about it. But walks, that's always a big driver of it because it, you know, it implies or suggests to some managers that you're feeling fatigued, you're losing control and then you can get in trouble. And you know, some of the events are just rarer than walks anyway. Like yeah, you know, probably there's a higher percentage of hooks that come immediately after homers or something, but homers are rarer than walks, so they don't make up as high a percentage of, of the hooks overall. But yeah, not enough to just keep getting outs. Now you, you have to have the right pitch count too. And Michael notes that the increase in outs preceding a hook hook has basically just reduced how often a single results in a hook. Extra base hits of any kind are still about as frequent a reason for removing a starting pitcher mid inning as they have ever been. So now we know.
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Now we know.
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Well, I won't keep you in suspense. Ronber Valdez's suspension was reduced to five games and Fernando Tatis Jr. Still homerless. Maybe our reverse jinxing powers will apply to his next game because that game was already in progress. He had only one plate appearance to go. That was a lot to ask. And as always, we ask you and invite you to support the podcast on Patreon, which you can 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 have the following five listeners Matt Sivertson, Haley Thompson, Eric Nays, Shannon Ferguson and Ray RH. Thanks to all of you Patreon Perks include access to the full unrestricted third episode of this week and just about every week, plus our monthly bonus episode Extra special some thoughts about parenthood on the most recent episode that seemed to resonate with some folks. Plus exclusive live streams and membership in our Patrons Only Discord Group and personalized messages and prioritized email answers and shout outs at the end of episodes. Potential podcast appearances, fan graphs, memberships and more. Check out all the offerings@patreon.com effectively wild if you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastangraphts.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 group@facebook.com group effectivelywild. You can find the effectively wild subreddit at r effectivelywild and you can check the show notes in the podcast posted fan graphs or Patreon or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his episode editing and production assistants. We'll be back with that third and final episode of the week soon. Talk to you then.
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Can you effectively sort through
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all of
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the stats and players in your head? Isn't it wild to complete them
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to
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all of your indifferent family and friends? They'll keep you company. They'll keep you sane on a long bike ride or a slow work day. Megan Van Wax in Battle Playoff Race Bad side It's Effectively Wild.