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Welcome to Raised in Barrels at its Friday, June 21st. Derek Benreibert, Loseras, Trevor May all here with you. It's a live one. Thanks for the live time for joining us on our YouTube channel. We're live most Fridays at one o'clock eastern. I've been awake too long today, fellas. I have been awake for about seven hours already, which is about three hours too many before a noon local recording, so I've had time to let a lot of things marinate. I've had time to drink way too much coffee, which could be good for the show. Could be a disaster. We're going to find out over the course of the next hour. On today's episode, we'll discuss Thursday night's game at Rickwood Field between the giants and Cardinals. We'll dig into the 2024 Major League Baseball run environment. People have been asking us about this in the discord for a little while. What's going on? Is it the ball? Is it something else? We're going to dig into that a little bit more. We're going to go all the way back to 1888 for a split second too, so we can look forward to that trip in the time machine promise. We're going to be there for three seconds. We're going to come right back. We're going to dig into some situational stats for pitchers that Trevor was digging up and things I hadn't really thought about a lot before, but Trevor thinks about them all the time. I think we should bring those to light because they're going to be really fun to discuss and we'll take some questions along the way as well. If you've got questions, fire away on stream. We'll get to those here in just a little while. Gentlemen, we had a great game on Thursday night at Rickwood Field. I think it delivered in terms of broad expectations that I had just in terms of learning about history, seeing a beautiful park that I'd never actually seen before, had an entertaining game as well, six, five game. I had a little bit of everything across the board. I want to start with you, Trevor, what were some of your takeaways from Thursday night? Interestingly enough, I was only able to catch a couple pitches of the actual game because of a bunch of random things that kept happening all afternoon, but I was able to catch a lot of the desk and I had a really good time. A lot of those conversations. I've actually had the pleasure of speaking to Reggie Jackson a bunch of times. He's one of those guys who is maybe one of the best better storytellers, I think, of ex-players. His story about the stuff he had to deal with. That was super powerful. It was super powerful. Really, really awesome. The fact that they had jeter and a rod and Barry buns all just sitting together was kind of jarring because I grew up watching those guys like they were the prime. Then I got caught up a little bit in the discourse around Barry buns, saying he'd take a set of page deep, which was a lot of fun as well. So I'll be honest, that's the rabbit hole I fell into. And then I was in that one for a while. But the Reggie Jackson story was one of my favorite parts about the entire presentation. I'm glad I was able to see that in its entirety. It's incredibly powerful because I think it's easy for us in the present day to romanticize parts of the past that we are excited about, but to kind of extricate them from the truth, the complete context in which those things happen. So extremely powerful. You could hear it in Reggie's voice. You could see it in his face as he recounted that clip. If you didn't even see the game, that clip was making the rounds on social all night as well. Definitely go back and watch it if you haven't seen it already. How about you? You know some takeaways that you had Thursday? Yeah, just the emotions. Barry crying about Willie. And you know all the the tributes to Willie Mays. You could hear the anger in Reggie Jackson's voice when he when he told those stories. I just thought I thought it's just really powerful. Some weird slip ups like it couldn't help but mention Smoltz mentioning they Americanized the dimensions at the park. What? Did I hear that right? But overall, I thought it was great. Another weird thing for me was, did you see the light stanchions? The original ones? Is that the original ones? So there were two things that come down. The original lights they took the bulbs out, they said, because they were worried about like a foul ball breaking them. They had to install different lighting for this game. So I'm talking about the installed lighting because they had the stuff. The original lights. Yeah. That was like reaching over that just looked really like rickety. And I was like, you know, some parts of this, like it's an old stadium. Like that you also look at the seating behind home plate. Like a lot of it's not flush with home plate weirdly. They did a lot of like, if you're sitting just like 10 feet left to the left of home but at home base, like home, the home plate, you're facing the lines. So there's a lot of people like sort of looking in certain directions. And there were so many people involved in this, and it was such a small park that I was like, you know, I bet you maybe half the people here that are sitting in the stands are actually linked to like events at this and like former players and like, you know, like it was, it looked like it could hold like 5,000 people. It was really small. I just love the history lesson, you know, talking to Gleason who is, has been a pastor and was a Marine, you know, and then he's out there in the in the leagues. Like I thought it was awesome. Like, you know, just to learn so much. I didn't know a lot of those players names. Bill Greason is the oldest living player to have played in Negro leagues, played for the Cardinals, grew up across the street from Martin Luther King, Jr. and has been a pastor in Birmingham for 50 years. Like his life story, it's an incredible life. He threw out the first pitch. He looked pretty good. I mean, just the endless amount of information you could dig into coming off of a game like this is really exciting, right? They're still gonna be great stories coming out of this event. And I think that's more than worth our time. I'm excited for all of that. Clint Yates had a really good series of pieces called Letters from Birmingham that I thought was pretty cool. Yeah, and I know that Clinton worked with Roy Wood, Jr. on an episode of the ESPN Daily Podcast earlier this week, previewing this game. They also had another podcast that Roy Wood, Jr. was a part of the road to Rickwood. I got to go back and listen to that. I didn't know that was out there. That was produced a couple episodes a little while back. So tons of great stuff out there. Just a great night for baseball. I think there was one question sort of at the end of the game. People were floating out there was, can we make this an annual tradition? I'll for it here. Like no reservations from me whatsoever. I'd be 100% supportive of this being an annual trip on MLB schedule. Yeah, I wonder what the facilities were like for the players. I mean, since it's such an old park, you know, they'd look good from where we were. Anya and the Live High vouching for listen to listen to Road to Rickwood. I'm guessing it's amazing. Clinton Yates does fantastic work and the episode of the Daily that I heard was outstanding with those two guys. So yeah, a really great all event event all around on Thursday night and just great night for baseball. A lot of people were also hearing Bob Kendrick for the first time. He's the president of the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City. I saw the link from pitching ninja day. They are taking donations and bm.com/donations. It's on the screen. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to drop in there. Make a donation if you can support the great work that Bob and the team do in Kansas City. That's on my list. I've never even been to Kansas City. I'm more excited to go to the museum than I am to go to the ballpark itself. Normally, I'm a got to go to the city, got to go to the ballpark, but that's a must stop for me. Hopefully, if not this summer by next summer, it'll be something I'll get a chance to do. Let's move on to the 2024 MLB run environment, a source of frustration for managers and baseball writers and all sorts of folks out there looking at this, say, Hey, what's going on? What's going on? Is the ball? Why is run production down? And when you pull back and you just look at what's happening on the field right now, 2024 looks a lot like 2022, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's weird because we just had rules implemented last season that were designed to boost offense, right? Specifically, limitations on shifting on the infield were supposed to bring batting averages up, increase hits, do all those things that make people like Trevor very frustrated. And, you know, it hasn't quite played out that way. Like we're at 4.35 runs per team game. It's the sixth lowest since 2000, but not like off the charts bad. We're just over a home run per team game similar two years ago. We haven't been under a home run per team game since 2014. So we haven't completely leveled offense, but the slash line is the thing that gets everybody. The league is hitting 241, 311, 391, entering play on Friday. There are three seasons on baseball reference, three ever, where the league average was under 240, 1968, 1888, and 1908. And you know what 1968 was, right? That was the mound got raised that year, right? That was the year of the pitcher. So they raised the mountain in 69. So they raised them on 60. That was one of the major rule changes of our time happened after that season. I clicked on 1888, just because I was like, come on, what was going on? 1888. Cap Anson was a 36-year-old who hit 344 that season. The league's average was still that bad. So I don't know what Cap Anson was doing or eating in 1888, but clearly a superhuman relative to his peers at the time based on that production. But what is happening right now? What is happening this year that is causing the run environment to shift right back to our pre-2023 rules? How do we explain this? I have some theories. You know, if you'd like to go first, though, I'll pop in. I'll just throw out what's basically the premise of our article, which is just that there are long-term trends in data analytics pitching. There are long-term trends where basically it's better for run prevention. A lot of the things that we've discovered are better for run prevention. And so if you look at something like shifts, outfield shifts have been more effective at reducing batting average to that location than infield shifts ever were. So we didn't do anything about outfield shifts and we're just getting better and better at outfield shifts. And you see those cards that they have in the outfield. And those are very sort of detailed, take three steps in this direction, take four steps in this direction. You know, it's like that positioning is stealing a lot of production to the outfield. Now you have, we showed that stuff plus is now perpetrating through the league. And so what you see is the leagues, we forced league average and stuff plus to be 100 every year. But if you didn't do that, what you'd see is that stuff was up every year. And so, you know, pitchers are designing their pitches. They're not throwing bad pitches anymore. They're making their bad pitches better. The last wrinkle that we have is that pitches with multiple fast balls now is up to up 40% over the last two years. And two years ago, a hitting coach told me pictures with multiple fast balls as a cheat code. I tried to sit on that. If you've been listening to this pod, you've heard me talk about it a fair amount. And finally, Donnie Eckers said I could, I could, I could out him as the person who did it. So he told me that two years ago. And in the last two years, pitchers with three fast balls up 40%. So, you know, you just, what that does is a pitcher never has to throw the wrong fastball to the wrong hand. He always has a cutter or a sinker or a foreseem. He knows what pitch to throw to what hand. And so basically, as these things have gone, what you've seen, I think what you see is like, when they change the sound, soul and bass rules, you know, we didn't go back to the 70s. We went back to like the late, the early 90s in terms of stolen bases. And so when you see the shift rules, we didn't go back many years. We just sort of stemmed the tide a little bit against this long term trend, which has been towards run suppression in terms of analytics that may be changing with some of the bat tracking stuff. There may be some new stuff, but hitters to me generally say, you know, I don't know how much analytics can help me to a certain extent, because I have to react and the pitchers in control. There's certain things like in biomechanics, we've learned that the hip shoulder separation is really big for pitchers for Vilo, right? And so you could take that to a hitter and say you need more hip shoulder separation, except the pitcher decides when to release the ball. The hitter can't have such a huge swing to create more bad speed with a huge, huge shoulder, hip to shoulder separation. What is that? That's a long swing. That has to start going a lot earlier. So that's just one little example. But just generally, what we found was that the ball is only slightly different than it's been in the past. It's basically the same ball that you've had in the last three years, and that in terms of drag, and that the trend has just been towards run suppression. And we tried to do one year of changes, and we stemmed the tide a little bit, but we're just back on that train. So here's the overall idea you got to remember that baseball players by their nature or baseball is they call it a game of adjustments. You are you are creating different environments for people whose job it is to adjust to those environments quickly. And so you're going to see a jet guys are going to adjust. We talk a lot about like there's the player poll came out recently, and everyone says, would our guys from the 80s pitching or could they pitch now? The way I explained this was, we are now better at we have more guys in the league fulfilling their potential. So everyone is is in terms of the the ceiling of talent. It's probably not changed in a big way. Like the talent was probably very similar. Very best at the top. Yeah. But the guys who aren't probably as talented are better that those versions, the middle guys are better than the middle guys were then. If you could tell that story with Vlo, right? The max Vlo is staying the same, but sitting Vlo is going up. So you're getting more out of everybody. But the very top is say the same. Here's a theory I have one one. So also we need to remember is a year over year, I believe since 2020, strikeout rates are slightly going down. So the ball is being put in the play more. They're not hits yet. So there is an adjustment a little bit that needs to have it takes some time for some of this stuff to shake out. And of course, and it's also early in the season, we're just now getting into warm weather and historically batting averages go up in June anyway. So that's also a fact. Well, we were comparing made a man a lot of stuff made a man. Okay. So it is slightly down. And I did check that out. That was but it's also just if you're thinking holistically, guys, people at home, just remember that that's usually a factor as well. I went to the I went to a Mariners game the other day with the where they played the White Sox. You know, these are two not good, not very good hitting teams. It was I think believe it was canon versus Miller. Basically, these guys were throwing strike one like crazy. And I had this realization. I was watching like four or five hitters in a row call their timeout 02. So they were 02 and it's happening so fast that I was like, Oh, they're too constantly. So I think that getting ahead now that the data I went and looked and it hasn't shaken out a lot, it's a slightly, it's a slightly worse 02 counts. But of course, there's so many different variables in there. But I think that pitchers are figuring it out enough to where it's starting to level out and they're getting an advantage from it when they're throwing the ball and using the clock to kind of go downhill on the pitcher on the hitter. There's snowballing on hitters more than their snowballing on pitchers. Last year, though, the walk rate was a percent up, right? So it was snowballing on pitchers. Now we're seeing that less and less people are getting used to it. And now it's snowballing on hitters because again, they have to react. So if a pitcher feels good, you're even in the dining throw, then you would have got boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And not only that your, your defensive swing is happening earlier, faster, because you don't even have enough time to, if you go up and just swing really hard, swing really hard, swing really hard, and then you swing really hard, take 30 seconds, swing really hard to your, your bat speed is going to be faster the second time. And so there's a little bit of that. So there's a lot of like softly hit ground balls that maybe a guy was trying to juice 02 and every once while you get a double. And now it's just a roll over to second or short. There's something in there also about the incentives the ball creates. So the ball in 2019 was the rabbit ball. And what do you do when you have a rabbit ball, you take your A swing every single time, you strike out, it's cool, next guy's going to try and hit a homer, right? But the more that they deaden the ball, and this, this is where you're talking about, it might take a little bit of time to filter through, right? But if the ball is deaden, the incentives change a little bit. It's a little bit more like, ah, I may use my A swing a bunch of times and not get the homer because the ball is not flying as well. And that, and that might lead to lower strikeout rates and may lead us to somewhere that we like in terms of fandom. But it may take a couple of years of not looking that great in the meantime. I think the adjustment is going to take time. I think it is a positive change in terms of, I think the, the things that they're looking for in terms of how offense is created is actually happening. I think those shifts are happening. It's just going to continue to need low. What do the Mariners say before this offseason? We need to cut strikeouts. We need to cut strikeouts. It didn't work. You just got to put the ball in play. It didn't work, but that's what they wanted. It's getting better, but it still not great. And then one last thing on the stolen bases, and this is the one thing with the stolen base rule that the people who talk about it and made the decision were in that room when the, when the commissioner's office is working on it, I feel like they have a distinct misunderstanding of how teams make decisions, whether or not to steal. And at the end of the day, you are chanting, giving an out for one base. And that value proposition, no matter how easy you make it to steal, that will always still be the trade off. Unless it's automatic, you have to have like a 95% chance to make that valuable. It going from 77% to 81%. It wasn't enough big enough jump. So don't be surprised. They're like, Oh, pick offs are just banned now. That's like the way that's, that's what you would have to do in order to get it to a level where teams would be like, this is just we got to take these free bases. My nephew's little league team. This is a hilarious to me, but they just, they run every pitch. They just steal and then steal a lot of rules about it. Like you're not allowed to run before the pitch that goes down, you know, like, and when the guy gets back on the, on the mound. So like he throws a pitch, he gets the ball back from the catcher and he's sprinting to the mound to get there before the kick can take off. Yeah, because, because he knows you can't throw it to second. And when I played and all I was 10, that was like, no, no stealing. That's not that's bad sportsmanship. And now they're just like, get on third, get on third. And you need it to be like that in order for it to be like for a big league team to say, we want everyone to steal all the time. You still only have your couple guys that you want to go all the time. We had 85% success rates on third base last year, and yet teams weren't really spicy. Still not doing it, because it's just if you go through a little bit of a, if you go for a week where you're getting caught every time, you could be, you could lose two or three games because of that. The Nationals have been the most aggressive on stolen bases this year, and they have been running into outs like pretty crazy style in the last couple of games. I heard their announcers was watching the game yesterday and their announcers were like, and they run into another out that's been happening. And they were like talking about, and they, and I think they lost their game by like a couple, like the one I was watching off is yesterday, the day before they didn't, they've won the last by like a, a runner to, you know, and they, and they, and I saw them run into like three outs. And you're just like, dude, that would have, that would have been a base runner. What do you just erase that guy? And that's what it comes down to. So teams make decisions somehow. Sometimes I think the rules committee doesn't know that. And that's why it hasn't manifested into more runs specifically. But, but I think that I think it eventually will. It's more, but it's not as much. But again, we talk about all this stuff. I don't know if there is a perfect sweet spot. I don't know when we're going to be like, okay, we're good. I don't know if that even exists either. Well, with the sitting Vila going from 91 to 94, since we've been tracking it, I'm becoming a little bit more open to changing the mound dimensions. I don't know if it's making it, you know, like shorter, like the not as tall like they did last time or pushing it back. It just does seem like we're running up against the strikeout rate, the Vila, we're running up against some tension between the dimensions of our field and the dimensions of our players. You know, we love talking stats here at The Athletic. Here's one that's super simple to remember. 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We've got everything from cleats to sombas, dunks and more, plus the hottest looks from Nike, Jordan and Adidas. Find your first day fits in store or online at Dick.com. There were a couple things that I was starting to think about in the last day or so, especially looking at the old dimensions from Rick Wood and watching the catch at the polo grounds and thinking maybe we just need to make the parks bigger because then there'll be more balls in play that the outfield defense can't catch. At a certain point, there's too much space. Or you have to have a lot more athletic guys in the corners, not to say that all corner outfielders are lacking athleticism, but you need basically three center fielders if you made the outfield big enough. That changed the dynamics of the game a little bit, but then maybe that drags offense down because those guys don't hit as much as your corner guys. There's always this extra effect, secondary effect that comes from making a change like that. If outfield defense has improved, positioning of outfielders and the league already made its rules for where infielders can stand with the changes last year, what are we doing in the outfield? If we don't make parks bigger because we make parks bigger, we're putting people further away, fans away, further away, that's not what anybody wants. That's probably not going to happen. In these meetings, you know, that he's talking about, you're going to throw all sorts of ideas around. So I'm sure that at least at some point, the idea has been thrown around that you're going to throw, draw some circles on the field. We know that they, that they were talking about the pie slice where you basically take the base pass from first and third and you extend them past second base and you create like a little sort of a pie slice behind second base and that they were, they were thinking about, and they tried this in the mile leagues. We documented that they were thinking about making that no, no fly zone for infielders. So that it's not even like right now with the shift rules, they can kind of inch up right next to second base and not be that far from where they were in the past, you know, but with the pie slice rule, they wouldn't be able to do that and they wouldn't be able to like, you know, basically stand behind second base by the time the ball's in play. So, you know, circles in the outfield, man, I like, I just, I understand how you get to that and why you would discuss it. But I don't want to be, I want to be like forward thinking and be like, yes, let's be like other sports and make drastic changes and let's have a four point line, you know, like, I know basketball is going to consider that I bet you, you know, but like circles in the outfield will just look so Jackie, it's gonna look so bad. I just, I don't know, like just think of like how you when you look out at the outfield, you look out of the field, it looks so beautiful, the green grass, you know, there's limited lines, the lines are in and out, you know, and then inside, it's, it's clean and beautiful and just have these little circles in the outfield with it. Think about the ads though, we could place ads, we could put quick creep out there, be out there, stand on the creep auto parts. Can you imagine, you know, like, Steve Vod is like a challenge. That outfielder is not on the quick creep logo out there. What is, and what would you get like a strike, a ball, a free runner? Yeah, what would the, what would the, yeah, that's funny. Runner on second, he gets a double double. He's a jet. We do need more extreme in game rules. We need ways to have players eliminated from the game, the red card effect. Everything I want in baseball comes from soccer. Like I want people sent off, like play the game with eight defenders. Yeah, that's good luck. But we need a yellow card first. Like, yeah, you need something that's yellow card, like you skip in a bat, you get, you get skipped in the lineup. That'd be cool. I was skipped. Oh my God. Yeah. Anything you can do to, to juice it up, I'm on board. Hilarious to you behind the scenes are producer of Brian saying it'll be like MTV rock and jock softball. Yeah, I was thinking about that or NBA jam turbo tournament edition, where you had the spots on the floor, the hotspots, you get more points for shooting from the hotspots and they'd pop up. That'd be cool. So yeah, you've got all these different ways you can try and tweak it. And I'm sure this is something the league spends a lot of time worrying about because it is a product that is supposed to entertain. And if people are not entertained, they're going to keep changing it and changing it and changing it again. It's just after all of the adjustments that just happened, it's has to be a little frustrating, even though it's imagine this. Without the changes we had last year, the offensive environment right now could be even more stringent. It could be worse than what we see right now. It could be historically bad instead of like at a lower end of a normal range. If we hadn't paid the adjustments from last year and then people would be losing their minds, I don't have a problem with it. I think you could make small adjustments along the way. I think you watch it and you just keep tweaking along the way. You don't have to be radical about the on field adjustments. I think you can make those change around radical. That's a big adjustment. Well, I don't have to do it anymore. So I'm all for it. Let's go for it. So what would your adjustment be though? As imagine if you still had to make the changes, what do you think a reasonable amount of adjustment would actually be that wouldn't cause unnecessarily unnecessary added risk to picture health? Because that's an ongoing concern too. Honestly, if you just added a couple feet, if you moved it back a couple feet, the interesting thing though, the interesting thing, yeah, that'd help you hit fastballs, but suddenly it makes breaking balls break more. So likes to break for sure. And changeups just get better. And we already have a trend in baseball, fewer fastballs. Yeah, it could turn into the thing where you throw fastballs like you used to throw sliders, you throw fastballs 20% of the time. And you throw all these bendy pitches, you know, and like a nightmare scenario would be move the mound back and do ABS because then you'd have this machine that's like, you know, you're basically trying to, have you seen like the warehouse games or wiffle ball? You know, when you watch a wiffle ball, like wiffle or basketball, yeah, you know, what it would be like would be like that where you'd be trying to move the pitch so much and just catch, make the machine turn green, you know, like just catch the tiniest part of that zone. You'd have people, you'd have catchers catching balls on the ground or like two feet out of the strike zone, but they nipped it, you know, on the way, you know. So it'd be a lot of frisbees. I mean, that could be kind of a nightmare scenario, too. Yeah, I don't know if there is an easy way. Trinking the zone is probably your best solution to help hitters. Trinking the zone, which is just sounds so awful. Well, it's kind of what they're doing triple A. It's smaller, ABS is smaller. They didn't have no one said anything officially about that. It's that's why the walks are up, huh? Yeah, yeah, it's like the top of the zone is two inches lower, two inches, like I got to the point where I thrown it and they're like, Hey, do you want to challenge it? But I don't know where the strike zone is. I don't know how big it is. So I don't know what you tell me. I've been here for one day. It looks like a big league strike, but it's not a minor league strike. Yeah, I mean, you look at Jared Jones, how much he struggled against AVS and he comes up and he's shoving. Yeah, it's not crazy. It's just a hard adjustment. Like people can adjust. He's just going to take some time and that sucks. But yeah, I think striking the strike, shrinking the strike zone is probably your only surefire way to really benefit hitters because they can stand there when it went in doubt, stand there. Yeah, but that also does not make the product doesn't make no exciting though. Yeah, so they would definitely don't want to introduce walks. I do not think that anybody likes to watch a walk. I don't know if there is a is a way, maybe it's a combination. Yeah, walks need to be more exciting somehow. Banana ball made a run at it. You can run as long as they what is it that everyone has to touch the ball. And even that even watching them do that is actually fun to watch because if it's well orchestrated, everyone moves and does what they're supposed to do, they can get the ball around pretty quickly. My buddy, Louis Paulus, who used to work for the Phillies had an idea that hit by pitches should be more penalized. So more bases hit by pitches could be double could be a double. The general long term thinking is that you would be prioritizing command over stuff a little bit, maybe you'd be incentivizing command over stuff by penalizing hit by pitches more. One of his ideas was immediate ejection. Guys would definitely be leaning into pitches or not getting out of the way of pitches more often. With an arm and throw in ever again. Right with that. And then with the elbow armor, you wouldn't just be like, I'm standing on top of the damn plate like Anthony Rizzo and I have my hand. I'm gonna have my arm on and I'm gonna get you ejected out of this game. Like when comforter got hit with that strike and won the game in 2021. Yeah. See what happens. Let's move on to some situational stats for pitchers. Trevor went down a few rabbit holes recently. And one thing that I had not thought a lot about is what types of pitchers battle back most often going down three oh an account. And what does that say about mindset, right? Like Trevor, what got you to start digging into this again? Because it's one of those things where, you know, I just think about all your down three, oh, you're probably screwed. I don't think about how often some pitchers get back out of that situation and how often others completely cave. It's interesting because it's like there's so many mindset dynamics from a hitter and a pitcher. And when you're thinking about playing the game that way, like, what is this guy intending to do? Or what is he thinking right now? If you're good at figuring that out and knowing where you're at, that's a pretty holistic understanding of like what's happening right now and then how to be successful in it. Like you can, it's like social engineering to its finest. So I was like, what, I've always thought when it's real, I'm like, I'm not you're not going to you're not going for you're not going to first for free. Like you're at least going to have to see some strikes and figure that out first. You're going to have to do something. I'm not letting you go for free because foro is just for free. Like you didn't have to do anything. I had a while I had four and a half walks per nine in the minors and I adopted a mindset and started to get better. And then I walked seven of my debut in the Bayleys. I was like, you know what, I'm going to take this mindset because that's one thing I full control over. And then it just kind of stayed with me as a reliever. And historically, I had really good stats against guys three, too, because of that, like they had to go from kind of checked out to back in the at bat. And that's not easy to do. And they're reacting to us. You're forcing them to change their mindset in a way. Because they're making them a strike. I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay. I'm not going to swing really. And then he's like, they're locked into maybe checked out to back locked in. So you you have an advantage there. If you're always locked in. So I was like, okay, then I watched Edwin Diaz and Edwin Diaz was a guy. I was like, he goes three on. He's just like, I don't, it's not worth wasting the pitches here. That's a different mindset. Still valid in some ways, but I would never be okay with throwing. I'll throw more pitches and not give up runners and vice versa. But he strung out two of every three guys he faced. So like, that's a little bit of a different situation. So I was like, Oh, who does this the best? Who doesn't? And what I looked at was three O counts that the one of the next pitch. Okay, so I took I got shot at the guys at true media who put this together for me because I don't know how they made these stats, but they filtered them perfectly for me where it shows your total three O counts over a certain amount of time for the guys. And then what percentage of those went for Oh, they walk for pitch walk. And then what percentage of those did they get back to three to before whatever happened? They might still walk them, but it didn't just happen. Right. So they buckled down. I just called it buckle down. And I just did one for a minimum of 100 innings. So there's a there's some relievers in here over the last five years since 2019. I feel like that's a good line. And the guy with the highest four pitch walk he had he didn't go three out a lot. But when he did, Sean do little went for went went three or 14 times and a four pitch walk 10 times. And he threw 90% fastball. So if you think about him, he didn't go three out a lot. But when he did, he was all like he was just erratic because he's only throwing his fastball. So like that probably was mechanical was probably also like a given thing where he's like, I'm not gonna go middle middle with my fastball. And I only have one pitch he knows what's coming no matter what it needs to be high zone. He can't afford to just lay fastballs over and after talking to him a couple of times that tracks he just definitely he thought that he was smart with that because then I have one good pitch. But I know that I have to be smart about it. Mark Malanson, 67% of his, he had a little bit more 33 four pitch or three O's and 22 of them four pitch walks closer. Now there's an interesting thing. Closers do this more than like fireman eighth inning guys. Probably because you come in to an empty base pass situation. You're always in with no end. I can create one base runner or two or maybe but like I can definitely walk one guy if I'm going to, you know, get out of this and be okay. Pete Fairbanks is on here. He's tied in second, 60, 67% of the time, 26 to 39. And the interesting thing is the inverse of this, they go three, two, he only goes three, two, 13% of the time. I wonder if there's some sometimes maybe also an interaction between the pitcher and the umpire where he wants to throw it in a certain place and he's just not getting the calls. Because Malanson's not that similar to the rest of the guys except that he like threw a cutter a lot. And if he just wasn't getting one corner or one area of the strike zone. And he was like, I'm just going to keep throwing it there because that's where I throw my pitch. And if I'm not getting calls on strikes, then this is going to be a bad day. Now I kind of want to go look at Houston Street. Same thing. He's like, I'm just going to keep doing the thing. I'm not trying like I'm just going to keep trying to throw it there. And if it's not called strike today, then it's then it's walks. One interesting one though, if you go look at guys who are good at it guy right now who is good at it. Griffin Jax, he's three or 21% of the time, but he gets back to 302 42% three, 242% of the time. But he's a firemen guy who might throw one plus innings and it'll come in the seventh or eighth inning. There will be people on the runner sometimes. Yeah, exactly. So he can he can't afford to just go walk a guy in four pitches. He has to find a way out even if it costs him 30. Can't make it first and second with one out or first or bases loaded. Like he needs to he needs to keep pushing it. Yeah. He also has good breaking balls. He can throw in the zone. Exactly. I think you guys love like Griffin's job guys who do Griffin's job on other teams tend to have really good breaking balls and tend to do those same things well. And then you have to have that mindset combined with the stuff. And he that's why he's had so much success in the last few years is because I think he's he's he knows what I'm talking about whether or not whether or not he's you know consciously thought it or not. He has had that mindset closures don't. And it was just really interesting to notice because you can see closures get kind of comfortable in that way. And then when they're put in situations where they have to go do the other thing i.e. Ryan Presley play offs or or yeah or just or they're moved and they then enroll and suddenly it's way different. This is one of the this is one of the ways that manifested. It's different which is which was really eye opening. I didn't anticipate it being this this clear on like how high like a manual class a 59 percent which is funny because he doesn't walk people he doesn't have bad command. But when he does he walks in four bitches and he's just like fine whatever next and then I'm going to throw I'm going to throw in the next guy 98 mile an hour cutter he's going to pound it in the ground I got a double play done. It's really interesting too though the difference even between Class A and Edwin Diaz both very good closers for recent years like Diaz misses so many more bats like he can reliably strike the next guy out at a much higher level with Class A it's like hey man like you're you're tough to hit but yeah it's not a zero it's not 40 or 50 percent k-rates it's not absurd it's mid to high 20s most years from Class A last year was on a 21.2 percent so it's like not quite fully being on board with how dominant you are but if you don't end up in those situations that often I get it also manual Class A doesn't give up homers yeah it's a 60 percent ground ball right you know yeah it doesn't give up homers so I think that's the other part of it is like that's all right run around first no big deal I'll get a ground ball that's probably the other huge part of it for him versus Diaz that makes his mindset and approach a little different a couple other quick quick ones just to know that are over 50 percent in the last five years we got Jose Leclerc David Bednar Kenley Jensen like it's like all of them Jake McGee like Gregory Soto they're all over 50 they've all closed that's fine and it's it's crazy it's crazy it's a lot of them here's an idea you know pitchers have A swings and B swings and C swings so pitchers have like their money maker they have they have their pitches ranked in their head right and and and even sort of pitch and location like like you know do little slow fastball is not rated highly even in his own head right so he's like number one high fastball number two you know slide on the corner whatever you know like you have these things rated those are your A swings your B swings your C swings the closer is just like I'm going to take my A swing over and over again and I feel like maybe the middle reliever mentality is more like hey sometimes I need to throw my third pitch because I need to get it in the zone or you know what I mean like it's a little bit more of a wide variety of pitches maybe not the same strikeout rate maybe not the same level of dominance but more of a like battling mentality and maybe I throw my third best pitch here because I need a strike I need to steal a strike I need to get back in this as opposed to the closer being like you're never going to see my third best pitch I'm never going to use it. Closer also know this this is a thought that closures have and I can attest to this last year I cannot give up a homer. Guys in seventh inning like I don't want to but if I do at least we'll hit again and maybe make up for that idea that so like and a walk could be pretty bad for me in this situation where I already have a base runner you know yeah and they have one run leads a lot so do little's out there like I can't give up a solo shot even if it's 3-1 so I'm going to try to get him a swing at a pitch on the edge I have to and so sometimes it just turns into a walk. This episode is brought to you by Honda when you test drive the all new prologue EV there's a lot that can impress you about it there's the class leading passenger space the clean thoughtful design and the intuitive technology but out of everything what you'll really love most is that it's a Honda visit Honda.com/ev to see offers reporting live from under my blanket I'm Susan Curtis with Duncan at home breaking news pumpkin spice iced and hot coffees are back I'll pass it to mr. Curtis with his blanket for the full story out is so right Susan you know it's never too early to get in a spicy mood I'm talking cinematic goodness that's so tasty people don't want to leave their blankets either back to you no back to you all you the home with Duncan pumpkin spices where you want to be at bluenile.com you can find endless ways to make your moments sparkle from classic and timeless jewelry gifts to creating the custom engagement ring of her dreams all at prices you won't find at a traditional jeweler and right now you can save up to 40% on fine jewelry and 25% on engagement ring settings during the bluenile anniversary sale going on now go to bluenile.com to shop the bluenile anniversary sale and save up to 40% that's bluenile.com Trevor did you spot anything in the starters in these situations that stood out like guys that are aces that have excellent stuff being more willing to go to the next hitter or anything along those lines one thing was interesting and I'm gonna pull this up really quickly once again because I'm going by innings pitched here so I'll go to 250 so that'll pretty much take it down to 300 300 innings over the last five years I think that's a pretty good uh there might be a couple relievers in here but the the number one guy was Charlie Morton which was really interesting because you know we think of Charlie Morton having good command and I think this is probably most of the last couple years but again we've switched to breaking balls all the time and he throws he'll throw his curveball 3-0 he'll do it because he's another guy who you know his movements crazy and he knows what his best pitches are and he's he's definitely he's gotten away from the sinker like he used to throw and he was with the pirates and he does force him so again it's like avoiding that home run like avoiding just like the hitters are going for damage now pitchers are thinking I need to avoid damage even if it means a walk that's still better than a triple or the homer and those are the decisions being made really interesting here is like I got Josiah Gray is up here 46 exactly tells 46 percent but they also have kind of high like it tells 37 percent 3-2 so that just might be uh he does both it's one of the other which is interesting I don't really know what's going on there that with Morton I see a little bit of that smaller arsenal like right now he doesn't have a great fastball to use against he's like kind of become more of a sinker guy and so he doesn't have a really great fastball to use in the lefties his his walk rate is twice as high against lefties so with a starter you might have some of this like well uh this is Juan Soto and I don't really have a great fastball to throw Juan Soto I don't have a I'm a righty trying to pitch to Juan Soto maybe I just give him the the walk because I don't want to give up the homer and I don't want to I don't want to give in and throw him my second best fastball whatever it is part of the proliferation of multiple fastballs can help you out of this because how do you how do you climb back in account give him a fastball that you can command but not the fastball they expect yeah it's a wrinkle like if you throw a seam shift to two seam and a four seam you can throw the seam shift to two seam three three or two oh as opposed to the four seam and that's also probably might be hit on the ground uh so I the highest honestly in the last three years for starters 47 percent Charlie Morton so these numbers are much lower than relievers in general that's the highest and there's a bunch of 20s and 30s and 40s percentage here on the uh with the same guys at the top three out of three two which tells me for starters it's very very there's way way more situational so like you said they're picking their spots it's we've got two outs Soto's up I'm just going to put them on first and go against Stan or whatever and they pitch around guys a lot more than really risky we just go like this well yeah there is like the managing your own workload your stamina and avoiding damage simultaneously I think that's a bigger part of the equation and I think it is something matchup specific could even be handedness when you're giving up the platoon advantage if you don't have that pitch you need then maybe you're more willing to give in in that circumstance and then if you're exactly still facing a righty maybe you're less likely to give in and continue working the count as much as you can because you think you can battle back in that situation like can I throw my slider for a strike in a two or three oh count yes can where does that slider for a strike go does that slider for a strike work against lefties from a righty maybe not maybe I don't want to throw that slider for a strike that might be right in their happy zone so here's a one for you this is a related concept in a lot of ways or at least the in ways of thinking about what's happening with guys on base why should we care about inherited runners Trevor I love this one this is a I always tell this joke to the especially new guys in the bullpen I'd go look up like they were a new guy from another team who's been in the big leagues for a while or we talk about guys pitching and I'd be like I was always interested in how well they handle inherited runners meaning who's on how many guys are on base when you come in the game and then bequeathed runners how many do you leave on base when you leave the game and someone else comes in after you how much of those score and basically my I always have a standard that if you give up more inherited runners than other guys are giving up your bequeathed runners then you're a bad teammate that was just a joke I just bet I look it up yeah you're a bad teammate and I just say it to the guys and we joke about it whatever but there is something to it when you go in and the guys on base aren't yours so if they score it's not going to be your ERA there's guys that just don't really care that much about it and that sounds like mean but it's true they're not they have enough worried on their mind they're worried about getting their job done and their own their own thing and if you're on a bad team that happens and so it comes down to like how well do you go in and strand the runners that you inherited and you want someone who comes in behind you to do your bequeathed so to like do a good job of getting taken care of your bequeathed runners so if you're like the eighth inning guy and you go out and you give up a runner but they bring in the closer you're like good the closer is coming in so the chances that guy in second stays there are high but if you're the starter we talked about this when we're going to the show like you give up seven and five innings and then you're going out in the six and you give up two runners they bring in the guy if the guy they're bringing in you're down seven two the guy bringing in is probably not great at leaving guys out there he's probably a he's probably a starter that's just like I don't know what I'm doing but if you're slightly better starter that pitches to an even game then you get the able pen you get the able pen and that's a big thing and that's something to pay attention to that's why remember Paul skeins his debut and he gave up one run but two of his bequeathed score and we're like well you give up three runs and four and a third innings I'm like he didn't give up those two the guy came in who threw 16 straight balls did so it's like and how do you how do you keep that so as relievers this hurts relievers a lot and this is always something that's so interesting to me if you have like one day where you come out of a game with two outs the bases were loaded and you were down by a runner where it's just not a great day the guy comes in behind you gives it all three of your runs up that can fundamentally change how your statistics at least your ERA and like how many runs you've given up on the year a lot it could add up if you have 45 50 innings that could add like almost a full run so it's like you always have to asterisk these things when you're leaving like well actually if my buddy would have just thrown a fastball there I would add a 2-9 but now I have a 3-6 so and no one cares about that and that's one of the crappy parts about being a reliever but when I look at relievers if they're really good at leaving inherited runners out there that's one indicator I look at for a guy you can throw in leverage that I don't think anyone looks at it's something that I would notice if I were in and if I were thinking about getting picking up a guy in a trade who maybe hasn't been used that well Denny Colum was a guy who I think he's he's he's inherited 13 guys zero zero of them score I want that guy going out there with guys on base because he's good at it and he doesn't on purpose it is a funny thing because in the one way this gets paid attention to I think in fantasy and in analytics is left on base percentage for mostly for stardie pitchers I haven't seen a lot of people think about it mostly in fantasy I only care about the closer right the middle relievers and let's see everywhere they only care about the closer well but there's a way around this that I've wondered about for a long time and it's the way games are scored but should inherited runners fully count against the pitcher who they reached base against or should they be divided based on which base they reached right so if you leave the game and the runner was on second base and then I come in and I let the run score maybe we should each take half of that run if that runner was on first you take a quarter I take three quarters of a run like it should maybe be accounted properly to each pitcher involved that would change a lot maybe in arbitration in some cases a handful of cases but it would change a lot in perception like we know ERA isn't a big deal in advanced stats communities but it's plastered all over the stadium so the people shredding relievers on twitter are probably still caring about ERA so maybe it would just be a little better if we made ERA a little more accurate because people are still mindful of it in in the mainstream for sure I also was thinking about this idea that Trevor was talking about that like if you're not that great of a pitcher and then you are handing the ball to the bebo pen then maybe your strand percentage won't regress to the same places as others so another way of saying this is the left-on base percentage LLB on fangarabs across the league is like 71 or 72 every year and so you can go and you can see that ryan feltner has allowed 57 percent 50 percent of the people that he's had on base he's so 43 percent of scored and normally it's 29 so you're like oh wow he's been really unlucky well you know there's a Colorado action there there's another guy on here Patrick Corbin that left on base would say he's been unlucky well he has a 6.6 expected ERA so he's not keeping his get he's one in seven on the record so he's not keeping his team in games and he's not getting the good reliever when he leaves the game he's not getting you know I don't I forget who it is like he's not getting Hunter Harvey no he's not getting to that that branch of the bull pen he's definitely getting the be relievers and by the way I was going to write about this for the recap this week the nationals really do have something cooking with pitching they have exceeded projection with several pitchers this year by k-minus be doing what up there's something going on there so do little and in the organization like they've got something working it's mckenzie gore we knew mckenzie gore could be really good but I don't think we had expectations he would exceed by this much this year it's fin again it's Harvey in the bull pen it's Jake Ervin it was Trevor Williams before he got hurt I mean they've had a whole bunch of guys come up with little fanfare now DJ hers is up kind of kind of curious where that goes so not a place I've traditionally looked at and said hmm their pitchers might be better than expected they also are one of those teams that if you look at babbip on the rolling one year leaderboard they are near the bottom they're bad their defense has not done our situation favors they're the 25th best defensive team right so for them to be exceeding projections on the pitching side is even more difficult because their defense is bad just to finish my thought on left on base real quick Pablo Lopez second worst left on base percentage he's a good pitcher I know his erase hive it's something like his xerase 3.5 and I would generally think that minnesota has a good bullpen so they have a deep bullpen even their big eyes are pretty good yeah yeah so I I think that you know there's something to this like you know thinking a little bit harder about strand rate and not necessarily just you know saying oh Corbin's gonna be better because of this but if you're looking at cease or Pablo Lopez even Kevin Gossman part of what's happened is just some of the relievers probably have led in some of their runs and made it look worse than that should be yeah it's not helping there I have one prime example that this is the first time I ever thought about this and this happened 2015 I'm about to drop a name a deep this is a deep cut Blaine Boyer whoa name yeah it's talking to speaking of twins uh bullpen so in 2015 he was three and six with a two five year array and 68 appearances by all accounts good year if you take a little bit he uh struck out 33 and 65 innings that's not ideal that's not many and he allowed 18 runs of his own runs how many inherited runners that he allowed a score also 18 18 at 38 he allowed to score and five of his 22 bequeat scored so I'm like whoa so the 18 he's he's with the bad team you're talking about a little bit I mean yeah it's being facetious and which is clear saying he's like Blaine Boyer's the nicest yeah like most honest and genuine person he is the best teammate I've ever had when he put 18 runs on other people's other people's matches bad teammate and he just couldn't miss any bats obviously so but he just he would always get out of it when his runs were on on on second but if there's someone else's they scored every single time so we we kind of had a running joke going about it and he was always really good good with it but because he inherited 38 guys in one year that's that's a lot so he was the guy he was that guy you're talking about he would come in in the sixth probably when they were losing losing or taught yeah like it's close but they weren't we weren't winning and I know this is hard to fix on the fly but what were teams expecting from Blaine Boyer exactly like he had a great ground ball rate for most of the first half I think probably they thought they were getting grounders they thought that was coming back and it just didn't Andrew Cashner he's just Andrew Cashner's twin brother they looked exactly the same oh just it beards and heavy sinker bowling ball sinkers and he threw 96 97 in his prime like he's through really hard so you think you could parlay that but he just never manifested into strikeouts he like he struck out 292 guys in 470 innings I wonder what he would look like in the age of pitch design yeah I thought I'm wondering if that's what it was like if there was just something he was just a little ahead of of his time in terms of when his ability would have been maximized because there was enough there for teams to keep bringing him back wanting to have a job I mean he threw at 87 on our slider like that was a pretty good pitch by all accounts I test he looks like good stuff it just didn't turn into misses per se there you go well that's I didn't think Blaine Boyer was gonna pop up on the show today so Kat Vanson to Blaine Boyer a complete history of baseball just in one one hour how how do we do it a couple of the things here you know one other question I had that kind of ties a couple topics together is how much are relievers going to have to adapt to the current stolen base environment you know because I think when I watch games it it seems like teams start to run even more when relievers get into the game and certain relievers and certain relievers that have a clear like there's the word has gotten out like you can run on these guys so if there's like a max effort slow to the plate but that's how you get your stuff to be nasty sort of approach how long will it take for relievers to also add some element of getting quicker to the plate to their to their overall profile and to eliminate that that weakness it may already be happening I had stats performed take this check this out one thing that was interesting is that starters give up more stolen bases in a given season that's mostly because they pitch more innings but we've actually come to almost an equilibrium between starter and reliever innings I think it actually has something to do with leverage index so I think that most often you want to steal when it's not necessarily the game on the line you steal when you're trying to put up crooked numbers you're steal when you're trying to like add like scoring at the beginning you don't always want to steal if you need one run and you've got your bopper at the plate and it's the eighth inning you know what I mean like that's not so there's I think there's more situational moments early in the game where you can steal versus late I think that's part of it but what we've also found is that starters are better at suppressing stolen bases so you know they've always had a better stolen base success rate than relievers in the sample that I was looking at and it's usually you know like 20 to 30 points as much as 50 points but in 2023 with the new rules base runners were 84% against relievers they were successful 84% of the time and 77 against starters it was one of the biggest it was the biggest difference in my in my thing this year 81% against relievers 77% against starters so already either teams are saying I'm not sure I want to give this reliever who can't control the running game that many opportunities you know again this new environment or relievers have already started to make the adjustment of being like I have to bear down and think about this and spend some time in the offseason figuring out my my move to second my move to first yeah interesting that we're already seeing a little bit of a shift there but uh we'll see we'll see what the rest of the season brings in that regard I mean our man out of out of you know came on here a friend of the podcast is you know it's kind of off to the track races I'm looking at it right now is going to use him as my benchmark he's only six six out of seven this year that's not yeah he's he's he's not alone or is that a lower pace than usual it's been 22 19 and 22 last three years how many stolen basic of oh I mean enough you try to think about throwing out a runner when he's throwing that sweeper though like what how are you how are you how are you gonna get a throw off that he'll be the person tell you like you just don't it's your you got it you just got a guess that I'm not gonna throw the sinker up on accident or something yeah that's pretty interesting got a question here from the live hives it's a pitch design question don't know if we have an answer to it but I think it's worth throwing out there's ones from Lars was reading about bob feller versus satchel page before rick wood what was the fuzz on bob feller's fastball insane arm side run I mean they said it was velo and you know one of the one I think the best calculation I've seen was that when he threw when bob feller threw the ball and they timed it and they had the motorcycle going everything the best best math I've seen I think on that suggested that that pitch went 98 so I think feller was a really hard thrower velo and uh one thing bob feller did and and this was kind of the mechanic way they taught mechanics too pretty much everyone was a commsever type drop and drive guy so extension everyone had like that's they thought extension meant hard throwing you had to have extension to do it so guys were just like jumping down the mountain scraping their back leg on the ground so like they were releasing the ball really low and he felt like they were closer to you so that gives you like perceived guys say it looks harder than it is he he definitely had that too and he threw hard so he had both those things that's why he was anecdotally that's why I think he was so dominant because he had both pages are really hard because a I don't think that we'd ever did these like sort of let's try to see how hard he throws I don't I don't I've seen fastball I've seen facing Nolan like I haven't seen like a thing on satchel page but I do know that my kid plays satchel page and m would be the show and they gave him a hundred mile an hour sitting fastball so that was the kind of like willy mays told a story that he got a single the first time he paged fast face page off of a slider and he heard page muttering something about being a boy because I think mays must have been like literally like 16 or something and then the next time he comes up satchel page says boy I'm gonna throw you three fast balls and you're gonna sit back down and willy mays is like he's gonna tell me what's happening and then he threw three fast balls and willy mays sat back down he just struck a lot of the stories you know and you know so I think that page was a really hard thrower what we saw in MLB was the end of his career he was the oldest debut at 41 I think he played again he like he actually went away for a little bit because he's lost his velo completely his arm was dead and then he came back and pitched a little bit 59 so he's the oldest pitcher to pitch in baseball too when some of the velo came back but we don't know how hard he threw but I would I would assume that part of the satchel page was was how hard he threw I also wonder too how many of those guys had ride and it was just something people didn't think about it was just that hey this is a good fastball right but it wasn't described the way we describe it now the ride is funny too versus sink if you throw a good sinker like I think you can see it easier as a pitcher and I think that the coach can see it easier because it like really it's like you know so I think for a long time when we weren't using machines it was like throw that thing that looks nasty you know that you know that the great man that moves is nasty the thing that doesn't yeah exactly straight fast balls now called ride yeah exactly so I would I would guess a lot of those guys back in the day through sinkers yeah I think keeping the ball in the ground was very very popular for a long time in baseball that was a big part of it you want it on the ground nothing bad can happen the main hitter is trying to hit the ball in the ground too which kind of kind of weird right we are going to go on our way out the door just a couple of quick reminders you can find us on Twitter Trevor is it I am Trevor May Eno is at Enos Harris I am at Derrick and Riper the pod is at rates and barrels if you want to join our discord the link is in the show description if you got a question for a future episode send them through discord or drop us an email rates and barrels at gmail.com you enjoyed the show sure to smash the like button on this video or leave us a nice rating review wherever you listen to podcasts have a great weekend everybody we're back with you on Monday thanks for listening and watching You
