After reading my piece on baseball’s mythical-but-somehow-real Fourth Out, my former Baseball Prospectus colleague Brendan Gawlowski wrote in to tell his story of the Fourth Out situation he was actually involved in, back in Little League. I’m so grateful that this happened:
I’m on the Marlins. We’re up one run in the sixth, the bases are loaded and I’m on third with one out. There’s a fly ball hit to left field [for the second out], deep enough to tag but not so deep as to score comfortably; I had to sprint home.
In everyone’s estimation—my dad, my manager, the other manager, etc.—I left early. I beat the throw comfortably enough, but just after I score, our manager hears the manager telling his pitcher to get ready to appeal.
Wanting to protect the run, my manager had the runner on second base run into the third out. Just told him—yelled, really—to run and to keep going once he reached third and the other team was standing around confused. The catcher eventually tagged him out…
So, just to interrupt and clarify the situation: Brendan’s coach shennaniganned to distract the other team from appealing to third base for the third out, which would have erased Brendan’s run. Instead, his teammate got himself to be the third out, ending the inning after the run had apparently scored. But the logic of the fourth out still applied. The opposing team could have still appealed to third for the fourth out, but to do so they’d have to have read the Fourth Out Wikipedia page. Had they read that Wikipedia page???
The answers to that question, and more, coming up, in this reader-engagement issue. Today, we discuss:
1. Brendan’s Coach’s Bet On Ignorance
2. Statues To The Living/Still Active
3. The Efficacy Of A Targeted Home Run Pursuit
4. Real Runs
5. Are We Meant To Believe Derek Jeter Travels With A Spare Automobile?
1. BRENDAN CONTINUES!
…and the other manager was either too perplexed to appeal my run or just didn’t know about the fourth-out rule and his team jogged off the field.
In the end, there were consequences. The kid who ran into the third out started crying out of embarrassment, the other manager thought it was bush league, and my manager nearly got suspended for embarrassing the kid; the board of the league didn’t really buy the whole fourth out explanation.
What *didn’t* happen was any kind of appeal. My run counted. Marlins won 5-3.
Thank you, Brendan.
2. JUSTIN ASKS!
[Starts by telling a story that isn’t necessary preamble for this question…]
… and the next day the almighty algorithm asked if I wanted to watch a YouTube video about some new statues being put up outside Tropicana Field. I click the link and ... wow, it's an Evan Longoria statue they put up recently.
Evan Longoria deserves a statue—but it struck me as a little weird. He's still in the league and playing for a different team. Obviously Tampa's relatively small history plays a factor, but how often does a team put up a statue of a former player who is still playing elsewhere?
SM: There’s a saying, traced back to an online comic strip from 2006, that goes: “Do not make monuments to the living, for they can still disgrace the stone.” Longoria seems extremely unlikely to disgrace any stone. Even if he were to be caught up in, say, a cheating scandal, it probably wouldn’t be the Rays’ concern. If he were to re-sign with the Rays and cost them a playoff spot with a humiliating blooper, it wouldn’t hurt the image of young Longoria bringing the upstart Rays their first credibility. Even something like re-signing with the Rays and loafing would only scuff his legacy a little, not tear it down. Ken Griffey Jr. taking that nap feels, appropriately, so unimportant now.
Still, I agree that a monument to a still-active player is a little weird. Putting up a statue feels almost like turning a player into a deity. I would agree that you don't want to make gods of players who still come back a couple times a year to try to beat you. It confuses things.
I was mollified by the context of the statue, though. It’s of Longoria, arms raised around first base during his Game 162 homer in 2011. The Rays unveiled it the same day they unveiled a second statue, of Akinori Iwamura, with his arms raised at second base after he recorded the final out of the 2008 ALCS. Clearly, Iwamura isn’t getting a Rays-Hall-of-Fame type of statue for his three years and 7 WAR on the club. He's just the guy who happens to be in the photo of the Rays' biggest franchise moment. Longoria is a Rays' HOF type guy, but I think that's just a coincidence. His statue is, like Iwamura's, about the franchise’s other biggest moment, not about the player’s overall greatness in the uniform. In a perfect world, maybe the statue—which was timed to the club’s 25th anniversary—would have been unveiled after he’d retired and was no longer a potential adversary, but the Rays were stuck with Longoria’s career longevity.
If they intend to have a garden of statues exclusively made up of players with their arms raised in celebration, I wholeheartedly endorse. Let it be known among Rays players that, if they want to be in a statue, they’d better raise their arms high. I’m not sure Brett Phillips’ arms got high enough in 2020:
3. JAMIESON ASKS!
I emailed the same question to Effectively Wild the other day, but reading today’s newsletter made me think that though I am very curious to hear Ben and Meg’s answers (should they choose to), I am truly fascinated to hear your take on it.
My question is: if Aaron Judge (or Ohtani or Mookie or one of MLB’s other top sluggers) decided that their only goal for the 2024 season was to break Barry Bonds’ single season home run record, team success and a well-rounded approach to hitting be damned, could they do it?
SM: There's two questions here. One is, can players hit more home runs if they really, really try, which we can further break down into a) within reason and b) without reason. The second is, can the player's work environment be arranged to dramatically increase his chances? It would have to be dramatically, because nobody since Bonds has gotten within one month of Bonds’ home run total.
1a. Can a player reasonably hit more home runs at the expense of all other considerations, within reason? I'm pretty skeptical.
There already are situations where power hitters are strongly incentivized to hit home runs at the expense of other outcomes. One such situation is: Two outs and nobody on. With two outs and nobody on, a walk or non-HR hit doesn't change the team's run expectancy much. Nor does an out. Compare the run-expectancy swing between an out and a single in bases-empty situations, depending on how many outs there are:
None out, bases empty: A single or walk is worth 0.6 more runs than an out
Out out, bases empty: 0.4 runs
Two outs, bases empty: 0.2 runs
Meanwhile, a solo home run is worth exactly one run in all three cases. So, relative to the alternatives, a home run is MUCH more significant with two outs and nobody on than with none out or one out and nobody on. Home run hitters can rationally sell out for homers with two outs and nobody on, if such selling out actually provides home run benefits.
I took a dozen of the most prolific home run hitters of the past 30 years1, limiting it to hitters who were also very poor baserunners and thus wouldn't have been a threat to steal second base after a two-out walk. If they could hit more homers by trying—at the expense of other parts of hitting—you'd think you'd see it in those splits. But, no. The splits show nothing interesting. On average, those players actually hit their fewest HRs in the two-out, incentivized-HR scenario:
None out, none on: 6.1 percent HR rate
One out, none on: 5.6 percent HR rate
Two out, none on: 5.4 percent HR rate
Now, that's not a perfectly pure comparison. The pitchers in the two-out, none on situations are slightly superior pitchers (it takes skill to get the first two outs without allowing a baserunner), and the pitchers have the opposite incentives (try to avoid home run, don't worry as much about walks), which would affect how they pitch. So I'm not saying trying to hit homers makes sluggers worse home run hitter—there are complicating factors—but only that it's not so easy to turn up the bass that it shows up in the collective stats.
1b. What about without reason? What could a hitter do?
He could spend several months changing his swing to be more homer-friendly, for instance. I can't speak to how much potential can be unlocked here, except that many/most hitters already changed their swings to prioritize launch angle and power in the past eight years. That’s because home runs are already so heavily incentivized. The goal we're going for here is not really very different from the goal players already have. There’s probably not that much more meat on the bone.
The main main main thing he could do is change his plate discipline dramatically. He could flat-out guess on every pitch and sell-out swing three times per at-bat, damn the consequences. Three tries at a home run. The problem with that is that every swing he doesn't homer on makes it less likely that the next pitch he gets will be in his wheelhouse (because after the first pitch he'd practically never have any count other than 0-1 or 0-2).
No, he would probably have to try the opposite and treat every pitch like the count is 3-0, only swing if it's directly down the middle. That would be unreasonable—he’d strike out looking constantly, and trade away a lot of good contact for home runs. But we’re assuming that reason is no consideration?
The game's 25 best home run hitters since 1998 homered about 13 percent of the time they put a ball in play on 3-0. Thirteen percent of 550 at-bats is 74. So maybe he'd just have to get a hittable pitch—by this unrealistically extreme definition of "hittable"—550 times.
But I don't think he would, even if we don’t grant the other team the most basic ability to observe what's going on and adjust to it. As it is, only somewhere between 7 percent and 26 percent of pitches (depending on your definition) are "down the middle," and if we limit it to fastballs—since this batter would presumably be sitting on one pitch—it drops to somewhere between 4 and 14 percent. Even using the broadest definition of “down the middle," only about one-fifth of pitches in the strike zone would be swingable fastballs.
So pitchers would strike him out about half the time without a swing. He'd have to hit every down-the-middle pitch he ever saw, homer at the 13 percent rate, and still end up with... something like 50 homers and 375 strikeouts and almost no walks. His slash line, by my rough calculations and assumptions, ends up somewhere around .200/.230/.470, which definitely isn’t worth a roster spot. And I started by assuming one of the greatest sluggers of the era.
So, then, to—
Question 2: How much could we change his circumstances? I'm afraid the answer is limited. It's not like he could sign with a single-A team and count those home runs. The band of possibilities in the majors is too limited. His meagerish options:
Bat leadoff for a great offense, which would get him more plate appearances, and maybe (through the murky concept of lineup protection) fewer walks.
Play in a great hitter's park, which would boost his home runs AND get him more plate appearances because park-boosted teammates would turn the lineup over more often.
Colorado sounds like a fun idea, but it's not extreme enough for home runs specifically, nor are the Rockies good enough to support such a player by providing lineup protection and five at-bats per game. I'd put him on the Reds, with a somewhat above-average offense and the league's friendliest home run environment (over each of the past three years) for 81 home games. If our guy is a 50-HR hitter on a normal team in a normal park, then the Reds' ballpark adjustments and extra plate appearances are worth another eight or 10 homers. Still not nearly enough to get to 74 under normal expectations.
What else is there? I can't test the effects of, say, using a much heavier bat in a sell-out-for-power approach. Maybe that helps. But I doubt it.
In 1910, a guy named Frank Schulte led the majors with 10 homers. The next year, he hit a staggering (for the time) 21 homers, the most anybody had hit in the 20th century to that point. Before the 1913 season, he vowed to hit 30, which would have broken the major league record. This was, obviously, before Babe Ruth, and part of the Babe Ruth legend is that he was the first guy to try to hit homers, to see the value in that approach. But before him there was Schulte, an MVP winner, a home run champ, and somebody who also saw the value in hitting for home runs. He was trying really hard to homer. "Believe me," he said that spring, "I am going to try more than hard to get them."
He ended up with nine. You hear home run hitters say all the time that trying to hit home runs is the worst way to hit home runs. They just want to hit the ball hard somewhere, they say. It's one cliche I basically believe.
(Ben and Meg also answered this one.)
4. HENRY ASKS!
In my gut, the [zombie runner] run doesn't feel "real," and I don't love that it will be included in season totals. On the other hand, all runs are created differently, and trying to distinguish between "real" and "not real" runs is how we ended up with earned and unearned runs, ugh. On the third hand, while all runs are created differently, they all began with someone getting on base until recently, and this type of run is categorically different from all others. I'm still not sure what I think.
How do the designated runner runs feel to you? And has it changed at all now that they've been around for a minute?
SM: Does it bother me that a runner gets credit for scoring, when he didn't do anything particularly meritorious—and, indeed, by definition they got on base only by making an out the previous inning? It would, if we didn't already credit runners who score after reaching base on a force-out fielder’s choice. It seems obvious to me that the batter who hits into a fielder's choice and then scores should have to "transfer" the run to the runner who was wiped out by his stupid bad hitting. (We already make this mental adjustment for pitchers. If a reliever comes in with a runner on first, and gets a fielder's choice, and the fielder's choice hitter comes around to score, the run is charged to the pitcher who allowed the not-actually-scoring original runner to reach base.) But we don't do that, never have, and therefore we already have a century of the Runs stat choosing simple accounting over precise credit-assigning. Given that, the one or two runs per year that a batter might "earn" by being the runner on second in extra innings irk me none.
5. SAM ASKS!
Are we really meant to believe that Derek Jeter travels with a spare automobile?
SM: Once again, nobody asked me about the logic of the Derek Jeter commercial-endorsement universe, so I had to send this one in to myself. This question is about Derek Jeter’s second Jeep Wagoneer commercial. In the sequel, Jeter is informed by a despairing private-jet pilot that, because of the rain, Jeter won’t be able to fly home to see his family that night. (In a nice visual pun, we cut from Jeter standing outside his PJ to Jeter’s family, at home, in their PJs.) Jeter, like a shortstop who sees a throw from the outfield fading off-line, makes a snap decision: He hops into a Jeep Wagoneer and drives home. Based on the time of the drive—the sunset is visible in one background shot, and then he crosses the Miami2 skyline around dawn and gets home just as his kids are leaving for school—he probably drove from Raleigh, Nashville or Atlanta, or (less likely) another city (Baton Rouge, Little Rock, etc) that’s around 600 to 900 miles from Miami. At one point, he goes through a spooky forest, and must stop for a wolf (??) (seriously, though, ?????), but he does get home as two of his kids leave for school.
This commercial presents that a car was available to him. Where’d the car come from? Is it, as Sam asks, that Derek Jeter travels with a spare car?
In normal life you’d guess that he’d rented the car after the flight was grounded. But the car is already with him when the pilot tells him the news. Indeed, he’s standing at the plane with his carry-on bag and a Jeep Wagoneer sitting in the place that a normal person’s luggage would be sitting. It’s possible, by the logic of this commercial, that the Jeep Wagoneer is his luggage. He travels with the car, within which are all his clothes and stuff. The car was going to be loaded onto the plane and delivered with him to Miami, where he’d probably drive it the short distance to his house.
Stupid, you say. That still is a rental car. It’s the rental car that he drove around Raleigh/Nashville/Atlanta, then to the private jet, and when his flight was grounded he simply extended the rental so he could drive home. Except that this car has no license plate, front or back. Rental cars all have license plates. That’s the most obvious sentence I’ve ever typed.
And before you say “cars in commercials never have license plates,” pal, I checked, and most of them do have rear license plates, especially if they’re shown driving on roads and not just sand dunes and rockfaces. That includes Jeeps in Jeep commercials. There’s an exception to this rule: The Jeep Wagoneer that Derek Jeter drove in his other Jeep Wagoneer commercial doesn’t appear (at 0:49) to have a rear license plate, either. So that Wagoneer on the tarmac is clearly Derek Jeter’s own car. No plates is an established characteristic of cars owned in commercials by Derek Jeter.
Now, I will concede: More logical than “Derek Jeter travels with a car on his plane” is “Derek Jeter has a car in the city he was working in, and after the private jet was to take off some employee was going to drive it back to wherever he stores that car.” But does Jeter keep a spare car in Nashville, Atlanta, Raleigh, or anywhere else that’s approximately 600 to 900 miles from Miami? That seems unlikely, too. New York, sure, but how often does he have drive-around business in one of those cities? Maybe that’s still more likely than the idea that he always flies with an extra car in case it rains. In fact, I’d say the most likely read on this commercial is:
Commercial Derek Jeter rented a Jeep Wagoneer just like his own and unscrewed the rear license plate so it would feel even more like his Jeep Wagoneer at home
Commercial Derek Jeter has an extra Jeep Wagoneer that he keeps in Nashville, and probably an Atlanta Jeep Wagoneer, a Raleigh Jeep Wagoneer, a Little Rock Jeep Wagoneer, that’s how strongly he feels about Jeep Wagoneer and its available features
Commercial Derek Jeter flies with a car
But I’ve bumped up against the limits of my knowledge, or even imagination, of what it’s like to have hundreds of millions of dollars and a lifestyle that is mostly cloistered from the rest of social travel. After 27 years of following Derek Jeter, spending hundreds of hours watching him, I actually have no idea what his life is like. It’s wolfy, apparently.
J. Thome M. Ramirez D. Ortiz M. McGwire F. Thomas M. Cabrera C. Delgado F. McGriff A. Dunn J. Giambi P. Konerko G. Stanton
Miami, correct? Commercial on left, control picture on right:
Yes, Miami. Though, it adds one more wrinkle to the timing. Mr. Jeter is driving west on the William M. Powell Bridge from Virginia Key or Key Biscayne back to the mainland. He somehow took a wrong turn or had an errand to run at 5:30 am before going home.
Jeter drove his own Wagoneer to Atlanta on business (he could have flown, of course, but he just loves that vehicle). His wife calls one evening to say oh my gosh we forgot that tomorrow is career day at the girls' school and everyone was so looking forward to hearing about Arena Club! His plan was to fly back home, spend the night, take the girls to school in the morning, and fly back to Atlanta to resume his fun car trip.