Effectively Wild Episode 1426: Fun or Foul

by
September 5, 2019

EWFI
Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller debate whether a fact about Michael Lorenzen’s multi-way play is fun, banter about Nelson Cruz’s unflagging offense, technology and the future of the knuckleball, and an ignominious achievement by Billy Hamilton, then answer listener emails about the lack of four-homer games, what would happen if foul balls caught in the stands counted as outs, and whether (and how) MLB should ask its audience what it wants to see, plus a Stat Blast about the most-ever talent on one team and another fun-fact debate (about Cody Bellinger).

Audio intro: The Stooges, "No Fun"
Audio outro: The Scruffs, "You’re No Fun"

Link to Lorenzen story
Link to Ben on Cruz
Link to Ben on the knuckleball
Link to Travis on foul balls
Link to Sam on the most talented teams
Link to order The MVP Machine

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Subscribe: RSS





 

2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
JCCfromDCMember since 2016
6 years ago

Of course it will never happen, but if you play with the “foul ball” concept, it goes to a very dangerous place. Where you get a game in a stadium where the visiting team has a decent number of fans in attendance, fans will fight over catches. Whichever team hits the ball, the opposing team’s fans would go for the ball and the batting team’s fans will attempt to interfere with the fans that are trying to catch the ball. All while a baseball is whistling towards them at dangerous speeds. That would be a recipe for disaster. In OPACY, assume that some O’s fans show up to an O’s/Yankees or O’s/Red Sox game. People would get hurt.

0