This Is For Everyone

Your questions answered: Indecisive Hall of Fame voters, unpopular-opinion havers, walk-off re-celebrators and more.

So, hey, real quick. Last year, my family went through a prolonged medical crisis. It’s over now. But for several months, we were this tiny group isolated in a dark cave. Then followed several months of recovering from those several months, during which I started writing as a way of being healthily alone. That was helpful, and then suddenly it wasn’t. I got very anxious and very lonely.

I’m telling you for two reasons. One is that it might seem like I’m frequently alluding to something, or kind of glancing over there, over to the left at something you can’t see. So, mostly to keep me from feeling awkward about it, now you’ll know what that’s about: A tough season, the subsequent swell of anxiety, a decision to restart.

The second is to let you know that I love getting emails now. When I thought about launching an ’ack, what made me most excited was thinking how nice it would be to get emails from friendly people who have interesting things to offer or just want to say hi. Anxiety and loneliness, for me, didn’t go well together, and I found myself longing to be extroverted.

So keep sending me emails, pebblehunting @ gmail. Please! Please? I reply to all of them, and if you ask me questions there’s a great chance I’ll engage with those questions in a newsletter.

And now here is a Reader Engagement Issue of this newsletter. It’s for everybody!

Topics:

1. My first(/last?) Hall of Fame ballot
2. The loneliness of a Manfred Man Stan
3. The exuberance of a third walk-off celebration
4. The shift era’s preeminent victim
5. Foggyball

1. RYAN ASKS!

Back in January after the results of the 2023 Baseball Hall of Fame election were announced, we learned from the published list of voters that you cast a ballot for the first time. Congratulations! We also got to see who you voted for a couple of weeks later in the BBWAA ballot drop.

“What we didn't get, since you were out of the public eye during Hall of Fame season, was you writing or talking about that ballot. What was the experience like? What was your process? Were there any particularly difficult omissions from your six-player ballot? Thanks in advance for the extremely rare March BBHOF ballot explainer!

SM: I had six names I considered easy yeses—Beltran, Rolen, ARod, Manny, Andruw Jones and especially Andy Pettitte, the fifth or sixth best player on my ballot but the one I’d most excitedly travel to an Iowa gymnasium in January to caucus for. But after those six I also had four borderline players. I considered these four more or less equally borderline, and equally but not identically borderline, and depending on the day I would prioritize different parts of their different cases and come up with reasons to vote for, say, one of them each day, but never the same one. They were Gary Sheffield, Todd Helton, Bob Abreu and Mark Buehrle.

Six names on a ballot didn't seem like enough to me. But, ultimately, on the borderline four, I decided that: a) I leaned slightly against all four, and b) if I didn't want to vote for all four, and if I couldn't make a case for lifting one out of the group, I'd vote for none. I just had to accept that my bar was slightly higher than the four.  And then I gave myself a long "You're a small Hall voter at heart" pep talk, began to fashion an argument that the Hall actually should get harder to get into as time passes, and so forth. I sent the ballot away—

—and immediately regretted it. Why was I so ungenerous with my vote? Who was I trying to prove myself to?? I felt shrunken, and I vowed to vote for some of them next year if I get the chance¹. 

Ryan, you are Ryan Thibodaux, famous Hall of Fame ballot tracker and the world’s preeminent expert on writers changing their ballots from one year to the next. Having seen hundreds of voters stay perfectly consistent from year to year, and having seen hundreds of other voters abruptly change their minds about players who've been retired for a decade or more, do you consider my indecision weird, normal, healthy, suspicious? Does a voter changing their mind a lot strike you as growth or capriciousness? Do you think my experience was just beginner's jitters, and will I formulate a cohesive Hall of Fame worldview that makes these decisions easy, or from what you can tell is it never all that easy? 

Ryan:  Before answering, I'll admit an obvious bias: if voters (and a lot of voters at that) didn't change their minds and make changes to their ballots from year to year, I wouldn't have any meaningful ballot tracking to do.

Your specific dilemma is quite common, I think. Joe Posnanski wrote in December specifically about the generosity question. He ended up submitting a 10-player ballot that included Bobby Abreu, Andruw Jones and Jimmy Rollins, none of whom he had voted for previously. In the 2019 cycle, David Lennon of Newsday wrote that Harold Baines' election by the Era committee made him re-evaluate his process. He intended to become a more small hall-minded voter. He dropped three players he previously supported (including Edgar Martinez in his tenth and final chance and Mike Mussina the year he was elected) and submitted a Bonds, Clemens, Mariano ballot. The next year he voted Bonds, Clemens, Jeter. The next year, just Bonds and Clemens. Then in the 2022 cycle, he reversed course again and submitted a full, 10-player ballot. He wrote, "The Hall of Fame is a museum meant to celebrate players’ careers and accomplishments, and upon further review, more celebration (within reason) should overrule less."

Most "changed mind" examples are less dramatic than that of course. Most ballots that have adds or drops have only one or two. Sometimes the rationale for the changes is as simple as "I had room this year and didn't have room before." Sometimes it's "I talked to my baseball writer friend and they convinced me." Sometimes it's "I think I was being too stingy." Sometimes voters say that if they had mailed the ballot the day before it would have been different, and if the day after, even more different.

"Will I formulate a cohesive Hall of Fame worldview that makes these decisions easy?" I believe that you likely will formulate such a worldview, but that it still won't make it much easier. Perhaps you'll hit a groove and it'll be easier for a stretch, but never easy. And then I think it's very possible that your worldview will shift at some point in the future, probably subtly, but perhaps dramatically! Then it becomes not easy at all again. I'm sure you've read or at least skimmed enough ballot columns over the years to know that for so many voters, the struggle is real. And persistent. 

SM: You asked me what the experience was like, and the simplest answer is that observing my own reaction to my sent-away ballot was more persuasive than all the research, comparisons and deliberation I did before sending it away. I felt a bit paralyzed by choice while I was filling out my ballot. But once it was out of my hands and I could only observe it, I came to see its flaws more clearly. There’s a line from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wizard Of Earthsea: “…as a man’s knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.” I’d like to think that through a few cycles of my own internal vote-and-response, I’ll come to know wholly what I must do.

I will say, I was relieved to check your ballot tracker and find one other writer submit the exact same ballot.

2. RICH ASKS!

As I recall you were one of a handful of columnists that supported the addition of the Manfred Man during extra-inning games.  I also recall a conversation on Effectively Wild during which you argued, very persuasively, that the Manfred Man imparts immediate excitement, intrigue and strategy to the beginnings of innings that would otherwise be largely missing those things.

My initial support for the Manfred Man has only grown with time.  The conventional wisdom amongst the baseball literati, however, seems to be moving in the other direction.  Calcaterra, Sheehan, Lindbergh, Baumann, Jaffe, and the like, have largely unified behind the position that the Manfred Man is a bastardization of the game worthy of scorn.  I can't think of a single member of the baseball commentariat that is currently agnostic on the issue, let alone willing to argue in favor of the Manfred Man.

SM: Yes, I hated the idea of forcing resolutions, then loved it in practice, and I do still love it. I’m a bit sad that you and I are so alone on this, though I’m also incredibly grateful to enjoy it. Whether it’s awful or it’s great, it’s life now, and the best we can hope for sometimes is for our tastes to align with things we can’t change anyway. 

I have a theory on why so many people hate it: I think many brains don’t welcome catharsis, but like to live in the state of tension. The whole point of drama is that tension is fun and thrilling, and so some of us perceive any ending—even a fun and thrilling one!—as a threat to a happy state. The meditation teacher Sayadaw U Pandita said that “we mistake excitement of the mind for happiness.” The corollary to that could be that we mistake a lack of excitement of the mind for unhappiness, and when we sense that tension—the drama—is about to resolve, we actively resist it. We dread the series finales, the final disappearing speck of a beautiful sunset, the conclusion of physical intimacy.

Rich: The idea that someone might actively resist resolution is foreign to me.  I crave resolution, even when it necessarily means a pleasurable experience is brought to an end.  I suppose I'm confident there will be another pleasurable experience before too long, and I'll always have the memory of the completed pleasurable experience, which itself is a pleasure.

SM: I’m definitely in the no-resolution group, generally! I never developed endgame strategies when I was a kid because I knew that would simply end the game and everybody would move on to other things and leave me all alone. I could make a game of Monopoly last three more hours after I’d already sewn it up. So I relate to the anti-climaxers who hate the automatic runner. Just not on the automatic runner. Like you, I find it has turned many a dreadful late-game decision (“should I continue to invest in this open-ended commitment?”) into one in which I do only and wholly what I must: I keep watching!

3. ANDREW ASKS!

You didn't ask, but your double walk-off scenario on EW made me realize what I want to see sometime. Mine goes like this:

[Detailed description of a scenario where a home team has walk-off hits in successive innings, both overturned by replay review after the walk-off celebrations have occurred, and then in a later inning gets a third walk-off hit]

So do you get a third walk-off celebration? What happens here? Do we still get bedlam and excitement? Is it extra, extra heightened? How many walk-offs do you need before the celebration is purely perfunctory?

SM: Somehow my YouTube algo has become dominated by a guy who posts videos that are all, like, "NBA 3-pointers but they get increasingly farther back" or "NBA loose balls but they get increasingly more like a greased-up hog at the county fair." That's how I imagine your walk-offs: increasingly ecstatic, never a point where it gets perfunctory. The weirdness would only add to the sense that it's all come unhinged, that if ever you were going to climb to the top of the stadium and try to fly well guess what folks today's the day. We had an outdoor dog when I was growing up—she never went inside the house except to take a bath—and one time she escaped the bath. So she was both soaking wet AND in this absurdly civilized place she'd never been to before AND three people of varying sizes were chasing her frantically, and let me tell you: That dog is how I imagine the third walk-off celebration would go. 

4. ADAM ASKS!

Who in baseball history would have most benefited from the most recent rule changes (especially banning the shift)? 

SM: There’s this sense that MLB rules changes come seldom and conservatively and that this rush of new rules is therefore quite radical. Rob Manfred seems temperamentally quite conservative, though, and (besides the automatic runner) most of the recent rules changes are trying to send baseball back in time. Nobody steals bases anymore, lets get ‘em stealing again. Relievers are too many, lets force teams back to how relievers were used in 1992. And, most especially, with the shift: MLB isn’t trying to create change so much as undo it.

I mention that just because these rules, especially the one outlawing the shift, are reacting to changes that have been happening incrementally. Just 12 years ago the shift was practically never, then incrementally it became constant, but nobody really had an entire long career with the omnishift. It exploded for the end of Chris Davis’s career and the middle of Corey Seager’s and the start of Kyle Tucker’s, and all of them were affected by it, but they also all got/will get long careers to define themselves without it.

You had somebody in mind when you asked this, right?

Adam: I have recently moved out to Philadelphia and with the addition of this shift ban, I wondered specifically about Ryan Howard. On a cursory Google, I see in 2016 (his last season), he saw the shift in 94.1 percent of his PA. His wOBA was .280 in these PA, compared to .557 in non-shift PA. Granted, I am judging based on a 21 PA sample of non-shifted plate appearances, but I wonder if the end of his career may have been more graceful or if he could've persisted as a DH type for longer.

SM: Interesting! I actually wrote once about how Ryan Howard’s “clutch” reputation was, in a weird way, totally deserved, because he was so much more effective when runners were on base and the defense wasn’t able to shift against him. Quaint, remembering a time when defenses hadn’t figured out how to shift with runners on base.

Thinking about a player for whom a marginal change in batted ball outcomes could literally end a career is a good tack. That’s more satisfying, I think, than simply counting up who “lost” the most hits. The answer to that, according to Sports Info Solutions, is Anthony Rizzo. According to SIS, Rizzo “lost” 105 hits to the shift. But does Anthony Rizzo’s career seem like it was really affected here? Did he lose any MVP awards, any World Series rings, any money or any sleep over those 105 hits? Probably not!

My answer, after cycling through several angles on this, is actually Albert Pujols. He lost 89 hits to the shift, according to SIS, all but two of them after he joined the Angels. (SIS data goes back to 2009; Pujols was a Cardinal through 2011.) Various ways his biography/legacy/Hall of Fame plaque were affected by those 89 disappeared hits:

• His career batting average would have been .304, not .296, which is an important first digit.

• As an Angel, he would have hit .274/.328/.466 (if the new hits were all singles), which I’d consider a legacy-shifting difference from .256/.311/.447. He’d have the same OPS as an Angel as Garrett Anderson, rather than the same OPS as Jack Howell.

• Over his final five full years with the Angels, when he actually hit .249/.299/.419 and his career really began to slide and he lost playing time (and, eventually, his job entirely), he would have instead hit .274/.322/.444, which isn’t great but isn’t career-ruining, especially for a veteran already under contract in a pitcher’s park and a DH league.

• At his late-career rate of RBIs per single, he’d have had something like 27 more RBIs. That doesn’t close the 79-RBI gap between him and all-time leader Henry Aaron, but maybe a .274/.322/.444 version of Albert Pujols gets the extra 300 plate appearances in Anaheim to do it.

But then, sometimes losing your job is just what you need to put a button on things. I can’t say whether that’s true for Ryan Howard, but all this wing-flapping might well have kept Pujols from ever landing back in St. Louis for his perfect final season. Probably best to be grateful for the shifts that were.

5. WILLIAM ASKS!

Check out this fog game. It's so thick you can't see the outfielder on the broadcast:  

SM: “Foggy baseball catches but they’re increasingly foggy!” I was so smug at the beginning of that video, “pft that’s barely even fog,” like a fog snob at a buzzy new fog pop-up. But by the third play in that clip, yes I did cackle. A second William also wrote in:

I saw a game played in outrageous fog, here in Portland Maine. The Portland Sea Dogs have downward pointing lights to reduce light pollution. Every fly ball above the lights was an absolute nightmare for the outfield. Several fly balls dropped in, a few routine ones became very un-routine, and it was just a delightful, absurd time, heightened by the fact that as the second half of a doubleheader it was virtually empty.

That’s his photo at the top of this page, and I love it, but! I want to say this in all seriousness so that nobody misunderstands what I was saying last week:

We can go foggier.

1. I’m not sure if I’ll get the chance. My BBWAA status move from active to “lifetime honorary” this year.