As an inveterately unhappy middle-aged man, I don’t like pointing out when things get better. So when I say that the 2023 MLB rule changes massively improved baseball as a spectator experience, you can rest assured that I’m not making that assertion lightly.

You know what I’m talking about: The shift ban, the pitch clock, and the pizza box bases. Back in the olden days, a sufficiently daring and athletic ballplayer could rack up 50, 60, or even 100 steals in a season. But the response to that era has been a gradual tightening up of baserunning tactics.

First, the roided-up giants of the 1990s got too stiff and meaty to run and slide. Even those athletes who maintained their springiness didn’t want to run into an out when the guy at the plate could use his 25-inch forearms to drive them in from anywhere. In the 2000s, an army of Theo Epstein wannabes took over baseball operations en masse. These men, with their locust-like commitment to efficiency, discouraged risky baserunning behavior even further. While their Harvard MBA classmates were killing the American housing market, they killed the stolen base. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Detroit Tigers pulled off a truly delightful 1-5-4 double play. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and a video even more, so I’ll save everyone a lot of work and show it to you.

If you’re reading this, and you’re old enough to have lived through the war between small ball and sabermetrics in the early part of this century, you’re probably delighted to see a sacrifice bunt go awry like this. I lived through college baseball in the early-to-mid-2010s — if there was a war over sabermetrics, college ball at this time was its Stalingrad — so that was definitely my first reaction as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking about Rob Refsnyder recently for two reasons. First, I think about Rob Refsnyder a lot. I try to be professional in this forum, but everyone has their own sports fan nemeses, and Refsnyder is one of mine.

Back in 2012, Refsnyder — then a University of Arizona Wildcat — was the Most Outstanding Player of the College World Series, in part because he went berserk in the two-game final against South Carolina: 4-for-6 with two walks and a home run. He drove in the winning run in Game 1 and scored the winning run in Game 2. My beloved Gamecocks were denied a third straight national championship and haven’t been back to Omaha since. I’ll die mad about this series, and I’ll never forgive Refsnyder in particular.

I did not, however, expect to still be writing about Refsnyder — then a punchy, athletically unremarkable second baseman — in 2026. The previous year’s College World Series MOP, Scott Wingo, was an 11th-round pick; he never came close to making the majors and has spent the past decade as a college assistant coach. (He was most recently in the news in 2024 as the Home Run Derby pitcher for Alec Bohm.) Read the rest of this entry »

I try not to be a stick in the mud. I really do. But I was poking around in RosterResource recently, and I saw something that gave me a headache. Edwin Díaz, who wore no. 39 with the Mariners and Mets, had to pick a new number with his new team, as the Dodgers had retired no. 39 for Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella.

He’s choosing no. 3. Díaz actually made his new number public back in December, but I’d missed the news. Good thing; it would’ve ruined my Christmas. Too many pitchers are wearing single-digit numbers these days, and it has to stop. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday was a big day for baseball’s old-heads. Ken Rosenthal published a piece in The Athletic in which 41-year-old Max Scherzer declared his intention to keep pitching. Justin Turner’s agent told Jon Morosi that the soon-to-be-41-year-old plans on playing in 2026. Kyle Hendricks, 35, has had enough, however. The man who started Game 7 of the 2016 World Series for the Cubs is hanging ‘em up after 12 seasons in The Show.

As a geriatric Millennial myself, these decisions got me thinking. Clayton Kershaw has retired, Kenta Maeda is going back to Japan, and Adam Ottavino was just trying to talk his way into the Rockies’ president of baseball ops job. My generation is going extinct, at least on the baseball diamond. Read the rest of this entry »

Those of you who listened to Episode 2351 of Effectively Wild can skip this preamble. You already know where I’m going.

Ben Lindbergh is on vacation, so Meg asked me to keep his seat warm for one episode of the podcast. And she was even kind enough to pick out a listener email that would give us something to talk about. I’ll skip over some extraneous context; if you want to hear the whole question go listen to the episode. The question comes down to this: If I were given the power to negotiate on the MLBPA’s behalf in the next CBA negotiation, what would it take for me to agree to a salary cap? Read the rest of this entry »

The last week of the regular season isn’t quite as fun as the first week of the playoffs, but it’s close. Everyone’s scoreboard-watching, doing back-of-the-napkin math to track who can clinch when and under what circumstances, and also wondering how on Earth the Mariners are still technically alive. It’s the time of year when Jay Jaffe turns a warm, rich copper color and transforms into a glowing orb.

Since 2022, the last week of the season has been a little less interesting. Up until that point (with one or two exceptions), MLB had taken a unique view toward ties in the standings. Where other leagues in other sports would settle a deadlock by going down a list of tiebreakers, MLB teams would settle ties on the field, with a (usually one-game, sometimes three-game) playoff before the actual playoffs.

For generations, this system made sense. In a league with either two or four divisions and only one or two playoff rounds, the stakes were incredibly high, and time was abundant. And it produced some incredible moments: the Bucky Dent homer, the Giants soaking the infield to slow down Maury Wills, the Matt Holliday slide… oh, and the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, probably the most famous non-World Series play in baseball history. Read the rest of this entry »

This all started because I hate losing. Especially to Ben Lindbergh.

Just before the season started, I took part in the annual Effectively Wild preseason predictions game, in which Meg Rowley, the Bens (Lindbergh and Clemens), and I each made 10 bold predictions about the 2024 campaign. The listeners voted on which ones they thought would come true, and we’d be awarded points accordingly — the more outlandish the prediction, the greater the reward if it happened.

One of my 10 predictions was that Spencer Strider would strike out 300 batters in 2024. As my predictions go, this one felt pretty conservative. Strider had struck out an absurd (and league-leading) 281 batters in only 186 2/3 innings last season. I attended Strider’s Opening Day start in which he debuted a new breaking ball and punched out eight Phillies in just five innings. I was feeling good.

Then Strider’s elbow started barking in his next start, and by mid-April it was announced that he’d need Tommy John surgery and would take no further part in the 2024 season. Scorekeeper Chris Hanel marked that prediction down as incorrect, and took 42 points from my score. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 7, Randy Arozarena slashed a double to right. He came into second base at a trot, so evidently safe that he didn’t need to sweat it. As the camera focused on him, he turned and hyped up the dugout. There was nowhere else to look; there had been no runners on base and thus no other action to follow.

Things weren’t so sunny 10 days later. Arozarena batted with two on and two out, and a double would have been absolutely glorious. The runners would be off on contact, which meant the difference between a double and an out was two-plus runs — the two that would actually score, plus some chance of Arozarena himself scoring. But Arozarena struck out on a 1-2 slider from Bailey Falter, and the inning ended.

Advanced statistics don’t assess the value of a play in just one way. You can think about these two moments extremely differently depending on which metric you’d prefer to use. Our main offensive statistic, wRC+, ignores context on purpose. It works out the average value of a home run across all home runs hit in the majors in a given year, and uses that as the value for every home run. It does the same for every offensive outcome, in fact. Read the rest of this entry »

Programming note: I’m taking a break from my Five Things column this week, as I’m traveling to Chicago for Saberseminar. Five Things will return next week with events from the last two weeks. In the meantime, please enjoy a ridiculous hypothetical.

This week, someone in my chat asked me an interesting hypothetical: How different would baseball be if the fences were the same distance from home plate all the way around? It would obviously be wildly different from how the sport currently works. Center field is the deepest part of the park by far, of course, and it’s hard to picture exactly what an equidistant fence would look like. You might think it’s a triangle, but that’s not right – it looks more or less like an arc, which is what an actual stadium looks like, only with a much sharper curvature.

That sounds so darn weird that I wanted to see what it would mean for offense. I don’t have any strong analytical reason for doing so. We aren’t plumbing the depths of smart baseball analysis here; we’re making up a dumb world and wondering what kinds of dumb things would happen in it.

First things first: There would be more home runs. I picked 370 feet as the distance because it feels reasonably close to the real world average of fence depths. I picked a 10-foot tall wall for similar reasons; if we’re getting weird in some ways, I’d prefer to standardize the others. There’s an easy math trick you can use here; baseballs tend to fall at roughly a 45 degree angle by the time they’re descending, their forward momentum getting slowly blunted by air resistance. That means that a ball that clears the wall by a millimeter would travel 10 more feet before hitting ground that was at field level – in an outfield bullpen, say. In other words, every ball that travels 380 or more feet in the air is going to be a home run now. Read the rest of this entry »