Everything's Gonna Be Alright
Named Within: Mookie Betts, Miguel Cabrera, Kyle Harrison, Cody Bellinger, Aaron Judge, Nomar Garciaparra, Jim Thome, For Love Of The Game, Alex Cobb, Ty.
When I was a kid I had a friend named Ty and I had an old horse named Lady. Our horse was slow and bored, but for a few weeks in sixth grade Ty and I spent our afternoons after school trying to ride that horse. No saddle or reins or bit or anything. We were just trying to coax an old horse to buck us off, more or less.
One day, though, there had been some tension between me and Ty. Angrily, I blurted out a weird sentence I’ve never forgotten. I said:
“You’re just using me for my horse!”
Maybe all friendships are transactions. Maybe we’re all using each other for affirmation or stimulation or to build our sense of identity. Maybe we all know this and ignore it so that the useful institution of friendship can survive. But at a certain point, one draws the line, and I drew that line at horse access.
That’s just background information for something I’m going to say later in this piece that otherwise won’t make any sense. This issue is for engaging with readers. Thank you for your emails, and in advance for the next wave of emails. Today:
A Boring Theory
What if Cody Bellinger is going to hit 763 home runs and we just don't know it yet?
The Second Mention Of The Horse
Running Is Prettier Than Picking Up A Baseball In The Corner And Throwing It In The General Vicinity Of A Cutoff Man
Laps Lapsed
Rooting For No-Hitters Is Volunteering For Disappointment
1. JASON ASKS!
I'm watching the Giants/Reds game on TV, as none of the teams I have a rooting interest in are currently playing. Is this a matchup between the most boring and the most exciting team in MLB right now? I don't have a particular axe to grind against San Francisco. But how would you evaluate boringness? For me, I tried to imagine how a diehard fan of the Giants would appeal to a casual fan to watch their team. LaMonte Wade? Patrick Bailey? I'm not sure what the draw would be, but maybe I'm missing something.
SM: Look, any measure of boringness HAS to take into account that those two teams are in playoff contention, and in direct competition for a playoff spot with each other. The most boring motivated ballplayer has to be more interesting than the least boring unmotivated ballplayer, so, some premise quibbling there.
But, yes, I get what you’re saying. I’ve simplified my thinking on this question since we did the Fun Draft on Effectively Wild in 2019. I now think that, for the most part—with a small few temporary exceptions for record chases, skill-set novelties, etc.—a player’s unboringness is simply two variables:
1. How good were they at their peak (including, for exceptional prospects, as a prospect)?
2. How long ago was that?
The first variable is the most important. The second is an adjustment to it. So: At the player’s peak, where would you have ranked his baseball skill, on a scale of 1 to 10? Mike Trout and Albert Pujols and Mookie Betts were 10s at peak (as Betts still is); Manny Machado was a peak 9, Carlos Correa a peak 8, Justin Turner a peak 7, Eric Hosmer a peak 6, Eddie Rosario a peak 5, Adam Frazier a peak 4, etc.
Then, for each year that has passed since that peak, knock off one point, up to a maximum of probably five deducted points. And that’s about 96 percent of how unbored you are by a player!
The idea here being that, out of 780 active major league players—and, again, with some exceptions in any specific time and place—the ones that are most interesting to watch aren’t primarily the fastest, strongest, funniest-named or most-stylishly-coiffed. Those are only minor details that we quickly grow complacent about. The most interesting are the ones whose stories we’re already invested in. That’s what pulls a player out of the anonymous commons bin and plants them in our consciousness, and gives added significance to whatever they’re doing now and whatever they do next.
You don't have to be actively exciting to be interesting; but you have to have at some point established yourself as a storyline to follow. So, Miguel Cabrera is pretty boring now. He’s unlikely to do anything good when he’s on the screen, and his stats this year are basically replicas of James McCann’s or Pavin Smith’s. But he used to be a 9 or a 10, and enough of that recognition still exists in our neural pathways to make him far more interesting than McCann and Smith. He’s still like a 4 in non-boringness. You still look up and notice when he comes up to bat. You always will.
This question was about the Giants. The Giants are the ultimate low-peak team—honorable mention prospects and 2-WAR players who, in a few cases, topped out as All-Star reserves. The only Giants who have ever led the league in any offensive category are Brandon Crawford and Mike Yastrzemski, who once each led the league in… yeesh, triples, and that’s only because of their home ballpark. Of all the position players on their team, the one with the highest peak was… maybe Mitch Haniger? I mean, this entire roster (hitters AND pitchers) has three players who have ever had a 5-WAR season, which isn’t even that lofty of an achievement. (The Braves have eight players with a 5-WAR season in their career, and two more with 4.9-WAR seasons.) And the Giants’ three players with 5-WAR seasons are Haniger, who was hurt for the past three months; Paul DeJong, who was just picked up off waivers last week; and Crawford, who is currently injured. All of their peaks were eons ago.
(Logan Webb and Kyle Harrison are genuinely nonboring—Webb’s like a 7 or 8 and still at his peak, while Harrison is like a 6, as a prospect. They’re pitchers, though, and usually off-screen.)
Anyway, that’s why the Giants strike you as so boring: It’s not that the team isn’t good, it’s that none of their players were ever really great. You never trained yourself to watch any of these Giants players. I think it’s that simple. Didn’t I tell you this would be simple?
2. MATT ASKS!
One of your articles that has stuck with me the most is "What if Cody Bellinger is going to hit 763 home runs?" As a Boston transplant living in LA, I've had a lot of chances to watch Bellinger, and that article inspired me to pay a little extra attention to him than I would have. For the first three years, it was pure fun ("This guy might pass Bonds!"); for the next three years it was so confounding that it became fascinating ("*This* guy might've passed Bonds?"). But for all six years, his career was more enjoyable for me because of the context of that article, and the juxtaposition of his career with Aaron Judge's.
So all these years later, it doesn't seem super likely that he's gonna hit 763....and yet, he already has more home runs in his 20s (172) than Aaron Judge did in his 20s (158). Which means, by some measures, he's on pace to have more career home runs than Judge! At what point does Judge pass him for "most home runs through age XX"? It's like this weird race where we won't know the result until 4 years after it happens. And more broadly, what do you think about these two parallel careers we've been watching? Somehow Bellinger's top similarity score on BRef is Reggie Jackson [a Hall of Famer], while Judge's is Brian Giles [not a Hall of Famer].
SM: First, I just want to say, Yessssssssssss! The explicit goal of that article, and probably the implicit goal of most of my articles, is to give myself/you a reason to pay attention to things so that we can grow to care for them. Not attending to things is how our lives get cluttered with useless garbage. Also, Cody Bellinger is the proof of my answer to the previous question. Only a player like him could be so compelling while putting up a 44 OPS+.
Secondly: Not only does Bellinger already have more homers in his 20s (and he’s only 27!) than Aaron Judge did, but if he hits four more homers this season he’ll have as many homers through age 27 as… all-time home run king Barry Bonds did!
MATT: Yes! Now I'm rooting for him to hit exactly four over the final month, so we can start referring to him as "on pace for 762 career homers."
SM: So, the premise of your question is, of course, that these juxtapositions are very surprising. Judge and Bellinger were rookies the same year. They both set their league’s rookie home run record. They both have had one year since then that was ahead of all their others. But, otherwise, Judge has been steadily fantastic while Bellinger has often been awful for entire seasons. Judge’s worst season, by OPS+, is tied for Bellinger’s second-best. Judge is one of the half-dozen biggest stars in the game; Bellinger went undrafted in your 12-team fantasy league this year, before his shocking resurgence with the Cubs. It’s weird to find that their careers have, in a sense, averaged out to something close to each other thus far.
Consider, for example, this:
Bellinger is likely to finish this season with around 22.5 career WAR, through age 27. In AL/NL history, about 27 percent of position players who were within three WAR of Bellinger at the same age went on to make the Hall of Fame. (Larry Walker and Jim Thome and Fred McGriff and Paul Molitor, plus 34 others.) A handful of others will soon make the Hall of Fame (Buster Posey, Todd Helton, maybe Robinson Cano) and a handful of still others would have if not for betting/steroids (Manny Ramirez, Pete Rose, Rafael Palmeiro, maybe Robinson Cano). But even if we limit ourselves to players who definitely are in the Hall, Bellinger’s cohort is about 27 percent HOFers.
Judge will finish this season with around 40.5 WAR. Doing the same +/- 3 WAR adjustments, we get 67 players in history in Judge’s WAR-through-31 cohort. Of those, 23 are in the Hall and 44 aren’t—34 percent in the Hall. That’s more than 27 percent, obviously, but not much. Bellinger is almost as likely to reach Hall of Fame standards in his career as Judge!
The big distorting factor here is age, as Bellinger was much younger when they each debuted. They have played the same number of seasons, and Judge has produced twice as many WAR and hit 75 home runs, and these supposedly comparable careers haven’t really been comparable at all. The reason we can make them seem comparable by doing these on-pace-for and through-age-X tricks is that we act like we can project something kind of typical for Bellinger in the extra years that he has in his career. (If he hits just 20 homers per season over the next four years he’ll have as many homers by 31 as Judge has at 31; if he just produces 3 WAR per year for the next decade he’s on the Hall of Fame bubble; etc.) But, of course, Bellinger has been the least typical player we’ve seen… ever?
Arguably no Hall of Famer has ever had a worse mid-career season than Bellinger’s 2021. (The arguable exception is Ted Simmons, who had an even more disastrous season at age 34 and bounced back some.) And, at the same time, very few non-Hall of Famers have had a better season than Bellinger’s 2019. About three-quarters of players who produce an 8.5-WAR season—As Bellinger did—make the Hall of Fame, or would if not for scandals.
In fact, the article of mine that Bellinger’s 2023 season makes me think about isn’t the one about him perhaps hitting 763 home runs. It’s the one about trying to identify baseball’s craziest career arc. The answer to that question now has to be Bellinger. I will attempt to predict absolutely nothing for what comes next in his life.
3. HENRY ASKS!
I was shocked to read that Immaculate Grid is apparently very popular in MLB clubhouses. Not because it “shouldn’t” appeal to players, but because a passion shared by both active players and fans seems very uncommon, given how different their respective relationships to MLB are. Can you think of anything else that would qualify?
SM: Passion overlaps between players and fans are more common than you'd think. Players and fans both seem to be passionate about getting autographs of other players, for example, which is totally wild to me. Players and fans both seem to love accounts that tweet GIFs of nasty pitches. The home run derby—not just a weird off-day fake-baseball sideshow for fans to enjoy, but clearly something that players love to watch and comment on and post about and hoot and holler over. Baseball video games! Ballplayers like to play the same electronic simulacrum of the sport that we do, even though they get to/have to play the very real thing every day. The movie For Love Of The Game is exactly as popular among players as it is among fans. At this point, the median player is probably about where the median fan is on analytics and bat flips, and the median fan is getting close to the median player on labor issues in the sport.
The main area where they depart is fantasy baseball. Baseball players generally treat fantasy baseball with disdain. So maybe the more complicated question is why fantasy baseball is the one passion that isn’t shared between us and them—why do they hate it? Baseball players love fantasy football, so they're not not like us. But they're just maybe sensitive about being turned into instruments for another person’s project? They maybe find it distasteful to see their decontextualized statistics elevated over winning? They’re maybe offended by something that provokes all the passion of fandom but with no underlying loyalty or vulnerability or emotional reciprocity? To use a very specific analogy that would only occur to somebody with my very specific sixth grade after-school activties—I wonder if fantasy baseball makes players feel like we’re only using them for their horse?
But, anyway, when we’re not just using them for their horse, baseball players, it seems to me, actually are a lot like us. They love flashy GIFs, home run contests, and rememberin’ some guys.
4. MARCUS DECLARES A SHAME ABOUT!
Alek Thomas just scored from first on a line drive to left field and Nomar Garciaparra remarked on how viewers at home can't fully appreciate how impressive he was on the basepaths just then. Well, Nomar, if you all had kept the camera fixed we could have. What a shame!
SM: Garciaparra’s exact words:
“I tell you, Alek Thomas — sometimes TV really doesn’t do it justice. Here we get to watch it. When you see speed like that go get three bases that way—I mean, he was really moving around those bases.”
Since writing about the way TV broadcasts refuse to show us full-field cams on live plays, I’ve come up with a theory: Broadcasts prioritize showing the players’ faces. They think that’s what we want. That’s why they zoom in on the outfielder who is fielding a line drive single on a hop—so we can see the outfielder’s concentrating face. That’s why they insert of a shot of the baserunner halfway between second and third—so we can see the baserunner’s effortful face. That’s why they don’t pick a full-field view and just let us see the things moving relatively. They prioritize face over a sense of space; they prioritize face over the race.
For the Alek Thomas sprint, the Diamondbacks broadcast did show a replay, which—because it ignores the bouncing baseball and the left fielder altogether—is obviously impractical for a live shot:
And yet, I’d argue that even that single-camera shot is better than the way they shot it live, the back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth-and-back. Tweak it slightly: Just hold the camera on Alek Thomas, but instead of zooming in when he’s approaching second base, pull back; let us see the third base coach, let us see which fielders are setting up for cut-offs, let us see which base the pitcher is running to back up, and we’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s happening with the ball, especially if we also have the sound on and hear a broadcaster saying "…past Muncy, down the line, scoots into the left field corner, Peralta's over to grab it.” Plus here, we get that glorious shot of an athlete at full speed cutting corners and adjusting the tilt of his body and sending the batting glove in his back pocket into hysterics. That’s how serious I am about getting rid of excessive edits; I believe even just a continuous shot of the baserunner that never shows the primary fielder would give me more information about the play than what we get now.
5. AARON ASKS!
After you discussed walking around your house in-between pitches on EW, I too began doing that on a regular basis, finding a perfect path from the TV, through the kitchen and family room and back to the TV. A typical nine-inning game would yield about three miles of extra walking if I did it the whole game. But now, the pitch clock seems to have ended that practice. Is that something you still were doing and if so, how will the pitch clock affect your practice?
SM: I can get around the house just in time if there’s a runner on base. If I really book it I can get around the house juuuuuuust in time if there’s nobody on base but there was just a foul ball. But it’s tight, and I’m late getting back for more pitches than I used to be, and if I try it for a whole game my knee starts hurting from making all those tight turns at such a hurried pace. So, for the most part, my practice has ended.
6. GEOFF ASKS!
Have you ever seen a chart showing how many outs into a game no-hitters have been lost, for instance a bar chart, preferably with no-hitters and perfect games included as the 28th bar? It would be interesting to see if there are peaks and valleys. Are there more lost in the fourth inning than the third? More in the seventh than the sixth? Is there a little spike in the ninth as the pitcher's arm tires or the pressure gets to him or the opposing team finds the resolve to avoid the indignity of being no-hit (and as the top of the order comes up for the fourth time)? Once a pitcher reaches the ninth, are they more likely to give up a hit or not? Or is the change of slope perfectly regular, curving from the first out to the 27th until just crossing the X-axis?
SM: This old FanGraphs post has it, not by out but by inning:
(The Rich Hill column refers to a start in which Hill’s no-hit bid was broken up in the 10th.)
See anything interesting there?
GEOFF: That's awfully regular, with one notable exception. Small things: There's less of a drop from 3 to 4 and 6 to 7. Most innings drop by a bit less than a third and those two drop by a bit less than half (eyeballing it). But the big exception is that there are more no-hitters than ninth-inning no-hitters lost! The graph reverses direction! Do pitchers find a reserve tank? Do batters give up? Are batters in fact secretly rooting for the no-hitter too? Do umps relax the zone (unlike last night, at least according to Jon Miller)?
SM: Yes, as I think you alluded to in your original email, the 3->4 and 6->7 differences are easy to explain: Unless there are lots of walks, a pitcher throwing a no-hitter is probably facing mostly the bottom of the order in the third and sixth innings, and mostly the top or middle of the order in the fourth and seventh. So 47 percent of no-hit bids that reach the third inning reach the fourth; but only 40 percent of no-hit bids that reach the fourth inning reach the fifth. Better hitters.
The big exception in the ninth—well, could be small sample. My sense from experience is that umpires do relax the zone. In small instances, fielders might sell out more to catch a ball, as Austin Slater did for Alex Cobb’s no-hit bid Tuesday (albeit in the eight inning, not the ninth). But I’d mostly speculate that pitchers are more likely to pitch away from contact the later in the game that a no-hit bid gets. More likely to cautiously go deep into counts, more likely even to willingly walk a batter, rather than give in to any hitters.
Craig Edwards wrote the FanGraphs piece that the graph comes from. The headline was “When Should You Start Paying Attention To A No-Hitter.” Generally, I (and Craig) have come at the question from the angle of, when is it worth my time to pay attention? But Craig has an interesting way of phrasing it: He refers to “one’s tolerance for watching failed no-hitters.” That’s really what you’re signing up for when you turn on a no-hit bid in anything short of the ninth inning: You’re going to put yourself through the disappointment of failure and the broadcast of sadness.
This makes me reconsider the answer I gave last month to the question of the most satisfying winning percentage for one’s favorite team. I picked a high number, naturally. But the fact that we so enthusiastically tune in to no-hit bids, even though we know that they’re almost all going to end in disappointment suggests we’re more resilient as rooters than I thought. (As does our predilection for underdogs.) Tune in to a no-hit bid at the start of the seventh, Craig wrote, and there’s an 85 percent chance you’re going to be bummed out by the result. To which we all reply, Ah! Well. Nevertheless.
this might be hyper-online brain talking, but it's funny that the last line of this reads like (and possibly/probably _is_) a reference to maybe the most famous political tweet of the last decade, a tweet that itself reads like sort of a baseball pitcher commentary. "i wonder if he'll be able to wriggle out of this jam!" is something you'd think while watching your team at least 200 times per season.
The "increase from 15 to 18" on the chart is mostly just because the game stops after 9 innings (unless you're Rich Hill). If games continued indefinitely, you'd see like 10 of those games end in the 10th, 5 end in the 11th, 2 in the 12th and 1 on the 13th or something - continuing the "declining" pattern.
There's still a better success rate in the 9th inning:
- of no-hitters that made it into the 3rd inning, 2458/5243 (47%) got through the 3rd inning
- of no-hitters that made it into the 6th inning, 196/434 (45%) got through the 6th inning
- of no-hitters that made it into the 9th inning, 19/34 (56%) got through the 9th inning
...which might be interesting, especially because you'd probably expect a decline (TTO/FTO penalty + more aggressive pinch-hitting at the end of games, perhaps outweighed by the fact that no-hitters are likely to have the top of the order up in the 9th). But you're dealing with a really small sample there.