October 8, 2025 • 47 mins
In both this week’s new remarks and in the reissue segment we revisit our obligation to think critically and how the concept of WAR can help us frame the abstract concepts of “better” and “worse,” and that comes to baseball players, politics, and, yes, chain and independent-bakery coffee rolls—that is, WADD (Wins Above Dunkin Donuts). How many more apples is Aaron Judge than the number of apples you need or want? We even find Luke Skywalker utilizing the replacement-level concept in “Star Wars.” We also find time for some tales of Josh Gibson! Mostly, though, we’re here for the donuts and the wins—or the lack thereof.
The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?
The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, hello there, and welcome to another reissue episode of
The Infinite Inning. As always, I am Stephen Goldman, York
convivial host for this not just a trip to the past,
but a trip to our collective Infinite Inning past, for
a revisit of a long ago episode of the show
that I hope still has some relevance and stories that
(00:47):
I hope still have the power to entertain and edify.
This week's reissue goes back to episode sixty seven of
the show, so early in year two. It begins with
a story of neg League's great and future Hall of
Famer Josh Gibson, the power hitting catcher, the only player,
it seems like now that we've been through twenty twenty five,
(01:08):
who might have possessed the capability to have put up
home run numbers in his own time comparable to those
which cal Rally totaled this year. Then I got into
a discussion of the winds above replacement stat and at
the risk of repeating some talking points that I expressed,
then I'm stimulated to get into it again. Now I've
(01:30):
talked before on this show about the winds above replacement
stat and how it can be a useful framework for
thinking about things outside of baseball, simply because it's a
very simple concept at heart. It establishes a baseline, and
it gives you the opportunity to measure the performance of
players by how far they are from that baseline. Where
(01:54):
the baseline is is really up to you. The statistics
sets it with a hypothetical replace basement player, and the
value of that player depends on the system. By hypothetical player,
we mean a freely available triple A veteran type who
you might turn to in desperation. The Marlins provided a
(02:14):
pretty good example of that player this year, in that
everyone they tried at first base tended to well fail,
and so eventually they kind of punted and turned to
a twenty seven year old former thirteenth round pick of
the Yankees named Eric Wagoman. And Wagaman hit two point
(02:34):
fifty with a two to ninety six on base percentage
and a three seventy eight slugging percentage, which, even in
this year of low averages, was not good and maybe
maybe you could have tolerated it if he were a
shortstop playing ridiculous defense, but he wasn't. He was a
first baseman playing first Basemanish defense, by which I mean
not Peak Keith Hernandez, who will always be the standard
(02:57):
for me, he and Don Mattingley. And so if I
wanted to judge the performance of every other first baseman
in the league by his distance from Eric Wagman, that
would be a legitimate thing to do. There's a line
that Mark Hamill has in Star Wars A New Hope.
I think he says it to three PO who is
expressing some confusion as to what planet he and R
(03:19):
two D two have crashed landed on, and hammil As
Luke Skywalker replies, you're on Tattooin. If you've ever heard
of the bright shining center of the galaxy, Tattooin is
the planet farthest from there. He is doing a planet's
above replacement level riff. That's what I mean about how
useful a winds above replacement framing can be in areas
(03:40):
outside of baseball. Let me give you an example from
my own life. I had a rough day this Monday,
about two days ago. Now, a family member underwent a
voluntary surgery. Voluntary in the sense that it was scheduled,
not that it wasn't required. As with so many procedures
of that nature, including one that I underwent back in August.
It wasn't supposed to be too trying, not too debilitating.
(04:01):
You'd go to sleep, they'd wake you up. You could
spring right out of bed and get back to your
life and well for the person who underwent the procedure
that turned out to be completely inaccurate, everyone is different,
and so this person, this loved one my wife and
I were responsible for, had a very tough time of
it for a while, and it was very difficult to watch,
(04:22):
and it was stressful and exhausting. Worse, in the middle
of that, I had a doctor's appointment of my own.
I couldn't miss, having rescheduled it once already for my
own surgery. So I left our patient in charge of
my wife and went to my second waiting room of
the day, my second bout of forced HGTV, my second
(04:43):
set of white coats, and so on. If you happen
to be following me on Blue Sky on Monday, Stephen
Goldman at Bisky does Social, you would have seen me
say that the hardest part of going to the doctor
is the HGTV. I've learned to tolerate needles. I've learned
to tolerate having a shrimp work stuck in my at regular intervals,
but the constant ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
(05:04):
bat flipper flop, flipper flop. I like the location, but
not the tusk and style kitchen. And I want you
to understand I don't watch this stuff. I've picked up
those words because it's force fed into your mind via
waiting room Ludovico technique. Listening to a stranger tell you
about their kitchen preferences or the progress of their home
(05:24):
reconstruction project is like being strapped into a dentist's chair
and having a stranger tell you about the content of
their dreams or their fantasy team. Ba ba bab b
about when you think, well, I'm going to be in
this waiting room for ninety freaking minutes or more. At
least I can get some work done. But the room
is only seven and a half feet by seven and
a half feet, and they have the TV set at
(05:44):
sufficient decibels to entertain a sold out Madison Square garden,
and to compensate for that, every grandma in the room
is watching her YouTube videos at a similar volume sons headset.
So how the hell am I on deadline to figure
out the grand unified field theory of physics. Finally supposed
(06:04):
to get that done in that kind of environment, when
I can no longer think clearly enough even to know
to carry the two. We were finally going to get
flying cars, folks, But not now, not after that, because
some lady couldn't handle a Tuscan style kit What is
a Tuscan style kitchen? Does it have a sink, does
it have a stove? Does it have a fridge? Be
at peace, God go with you. People are ridiculous. I
(06:27):
have no doubt that Back in the Neolithic there was
some family of cave men fleeing an incoming blizzard or hurricane,
and they climb into some hole in the rocks, and
one member of the party said, I don't know. I'm
not sure about this Tuscan style cave. I think I'm
going out there into the gale force eleven wins. Okay,
I must brave volleyball sized chunks of hail because my
(06:49):
backsplash is in subway tile. So I go through this
second appointment, and as I was driving back, I passed bakery.
We needed to get our patient to eat. They were
resist to doing so because they felt so ill. It
was totally understandable, I've been there. It was also, though counterintuitive,
what they needed to do to begin feeling better. So
(07:10):
I thought I might bribe them with some kind of
sweet So I pull over, I go in, and as
I'm standing at the counter, I start thinking, today has
really sucked. I deserve a treat, too, don't I. Now,
normally I'm pretty good at resisting that kind of thinking
because I have to watch what I eat due to
my own health issues, and the consequences are so bad
(07:31):
that it becomes easier to say no in the same
way you might say no to crack cocaine if you've
never tried it before, but you're aware of all the
cautionary tales of where that slippery slope leads. Plus, if
you've been listening to the show long enough, you know,
because I've talked about this many times, that I've been
fighting my weight basically my whole life. So when confronted
(07:53):
with this sort of choice, if someone walks up to
me and says slice of cake, sir, I attempt to saving.
This is, as with winds above, replacement, a metaphor for
having resistance to the temptation. Now I haven't played a
tabletop role playing game in one hundred years. But I
find the saving throw, that's where it comes from, to
(08:14):
be a good metaphor for the process of resisting temptation.
The ochre jelly is gushing at you with its sword.
He attacks. He can a jelly be a heat I
don't know. They attack and you are about to be
run through. But you try to make a saving throw
a you dodge, and that's what I try to do.
Thinking of it in those terms somehow makes it easier
(08:35):
for me to say no to that sort of thing. Well,
this time, I didn't make the saving throw. I don't
every time. Obviously, if I did, I'd be as thin
as a politician's promise. I don't think though I even
attempted it. I just said, yes, give me. I need
sucker succo R. You understand, not suck er. Well, earlier
(08:56):
that day I had been in a breakfast place and
they had a plate, oh cinnamon rolls listed as one
of their appetizers. Now I am a sucker for a
good cinnamon roll sucker, sucker this time, not succo R.
I made my saving throw that time in part because
it seemed like a good dish for four people to share,
(09:18):
but there were only two of us, and calorically going
fifty to fifty was going to be really punishing. I
also had my doubts, given the overall quality of the
small chain that I was in, that said cinnamon rolls
would actually meet that good qualifier, and so I successfully demurred.
In the bakery, though, I looked past the cakes and cookies,
(09:39):
and I saw it there on a shelf the grail,
a cinnamon roll, glazed and not a plastic dunkin Donuts
factory manufactured coffee roll either, but the real deal, a
bespoke cinnamon roll. And I said, this has been a
miserable day and I need, nay, I deserve a cinnamon roll. Listener,
(10:05):
I bought it. I successfully resisted the urge to gobble
it furtively in the car, because that seemed unhealthy. I
wasn't ashamed, so I act like it. No. I calmly
got it back to where my wife and patient were waiting.
I gave them what I had bought for them. And
then came the moment, the big moment, the best part
of the day, and you know what, it wasn't very good.
(10:27):
I was so disappointed. It was just bland with the
flavor of lightly sweetened cardboard. How do I characterize how
bad it was? How do I concretize for you what
was a subjective experience. I'll do it like this. That
cinnamon roll was one point five wins above dunkin Donuts,
(10:48):
and even that I'm not so sure about, but still
point five wadd or maybe sad sweets above dunkin Donuts.
If I could think of an acronym for war that
spelled out just don't well, I would give it to you.
But you get it now right. There are three major
versions of war, Baseball Reference, baseball perspectives, and fangrafts. I
(11:09):
tend to gravitate towards the Baseball reference version because it
covers all of history and ours. A baseball perspectus uses
a formulation that requires information that doesn't exist for ye
olden days. As you know from listening to this show,
I spend a lot of time in ye olden days,
and having access to the entire continuum of history matters
(11:30):
very much to me. Outside of that, the differences don't
matter to me that much, because broadly these statistics tend
to agree. I find a fraction of a win to
be insignificant since the stat is an approximation anyway, as
are all defensive statistics which feed into wins above replacement.
Let's say in a given year, Aaron Judge has an
(11:52):
eight war season and Bobby Witt Junior has a seven
point five war season. I don't think that saying Judge
was the better player based solely on one system's half
wind differential is a very strong argument. In general, I
don't like abdicating one's responsibility to think to some system
(12:13):
or another. I find statistics like that, as I've been
saying throughout this segment, very valuable for framing a discussion,
but they should not be the end of a discussion.
It's lazy. My grandfather used to have a quote from
the British painter Sir Joshua Reynolds framed above his desk.
There is no expedient to which a man will not
(12:34):
resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. He never
discussed that quote with me specifically, but it was very
consistent with his personal ethic, which he did discuss many times.
I reserve the right to think, he would say. Sometimes
he would add, if you want an incorrect answer, then
I will reply quickly, or some variant on that essentially
(12:56):
compel me to speak before I'm ready to speak, and
my response may not be accurate. I might reply before
I've correctly weighed all the information. He was an engineer,
so that kind of precision was important to him. I
strongly agreed with that old man. It was the best
thing he ever taught me. I reserve the right to think,
(13:17):
and as with many rights, it's not only a right
but an obligation, and that means you have to question everything,
especially tradition, received wisdom, dogma, and ideology. The correct first
response to each of those things is as follows. To
(13:37):
received wisdom, you say, just because people have felt that
way for a long time doesn't mean it's accurate. Tradition
is similar, Just because things have been done that way
for a long time doesn't mean that it's correct. Dogma
is pretty easy, and so is ideology, because both insist
you do according to what has been put forth by
(13:59):
an authority figure who you are not supposed to argue
with or disagree with, because circularly they are the authority
figure and therefore they're always right. We may be talking
about some ancient or current prophet who may have lived
in the sky or the White House or both. It
doesn't really matter which they're increasingly the same thing. And
if you don't believe in being bossed around by an
(14:21):
invisible sky guy who claims divine right literally or figuratively,
then you're safe from that kind of intimidation. And well
if you do. I gave up arguing with folks like
that about twenty five years ago, when I realized it
wasn't getting me anywhere or in conversation anyway. As Hans
Solo once said. Last week, there was a very good
(14:41):
essay by the sociologist and political economist William Davies at
N plus one, which was also published in abbreviated form
at The Guardian. Both versions were free. It's called a
critique of Pure Stupidity Understanding Trump two point zero. Mister
Davies runs through some definitions of stupidity in the political sense,
including formulations by Immanuel Kant and Hannah A. Rent, the
(15:04):
latter of whom was responding to fascism. Davis writes another
way of expressing CONT's and or Rents points would be
that stupidity is an inability to compare like with like,
or to measure things. Instead, stupidity merely mouths platitudes or
obeys orders. But what are the social and political conditions
(15:25):
that normalize this One is a society where people wait
for instruction on how to think, the condition of immaturity,
as Kant saw it, or of totalitarianism for a rent.
And this is precisely what I mean when I talk
about abdicating your responsibility to think critically. Whether we're talking
about the system or the ideology, or the dogma, or
(15:47):
the man in the big tie or the big beard.
And if you're into the man with the big beard,
I would never try to take that away from you.
I would only say that he gave you the faculty
of reason for a reason, and he expects you to
use it. The opposite would be perverse, at the risk
of being gross. He also gave you the ability to
urinate and the requirement to do it. But imagine if
(16:10):
one of the commandments said thou shalt not pee, thou
wilst hold it forever. So we have the obligation to think,
we have the ability to think, and we must use it.
But we've been taught in a number of ways not to,
and so we require frameworks to regiment our thinking to
organize it and wins above replacement is one of them.
Like I said, it's just a baseline, and it's as
(16:32):
simple as is this quantity larger than that quantity? This year,
Aaron Judge gave me six apples. He is kind of
tree sized after all. But is that as many apples
as is optimal? Is that as many apples as I
want or need? In a few minutes, you'll hear me
talking back in episode sixty seven about some discussion on
television I saw involving I think Brian Kenny, who I
(16:53):
would later guest with maybe three or four times. I
don't think I had to that point. I'll mention a
different show now now, similar theme one. I don't recall
it was so long ago, who was involved. I just
know that it was so early that it must have
been the late nineties or circa the turn of the century.
And they were talking about one player versus another, and
(17:15):
one of the panelists said, well, war says, and some crotchety,
gray haired old time sports writer blew up and said,
I do not accept that it's not real. It's an
imaginary stats dude. So much of math is imaginary, you
know how long it took mankind to come up with
the idea of zero. You can imagine one apple in
(17:36):
your hand, but zero was a huge leap for the
primitive mind. It's not there. We need a quantity that
describes not there. But it's not there. How is that
a quantity? It just is. It has to be. And
the idea of the replacement level and a player's performance
relative to that baseline is actually very similar. The baseline
(17:57):
is higher than zero, but you could set it to
zero and it would work out roughly the same way.
The scale would just be higher. I felt both annoyed
and sad at the time for that sports writer because
his mind wasn't plastic enough to get there somewhere that's
actually pretty simple. As time went on, though, enough people
did do the thinking and held off the chains that
(18:19):
held them down, and war became an accepted stat We
see it more, I think in pitching, because win loss
records have decayed so much in the era of the
five inning start and the opener in the bullpen, And
maybe that kind of evolution can happen again when it
comes to conceptualizing our wider world. But I'm not real
sanguine about that. This reissue episode, as I said before,
(18:43):
contains a discussion of Negro leagues great Josh Gibson. Why
was he a Negro League's great as opposed to an
American or National League great? Due to tradition, received wisdom,
dogma and ideology, and that brings us full circle. That's
all for me for this reissue episode. You may hear
me patch over a break, or we might just skip
(19:05):
right to the end and you'll hear me then too.
Thank you as always for listening to this reissue episode.
I will now turn the rostrum over to my younger self.
Please be gentle with it, he's tender. Many years ago,
(19:38):
walking through Boston, this was probably circa two thousand, Let's
say I was walking down Newberry Street, and if you've
ever been there, you know it's kind of a touristy
street on a warm summer night. There are also a
lot of locals, so it can be quite crowded, and
traffic flow, which is not Boston's strong suit anywhere, is
(19:59):
especially problem there because the average block is about three
feet long, so there's a traffic light every yard or so.
Cars by necessity have to move slowly, but they're anxious.
The drivers are anxious, not the cars themselves, this is
not a Pixar film, are anxious to get out of
that mess where they're going start stop, start stop, start stop,
(20:21):
and they're having tons of pedestrians flow in front of
them on the rare occasions that they have a green
light and can get clear. So it's a huge fraud mess.
And on this particular warm summer evening, I don't remember exactly,
I was going to or from someplace and thinking maybe
of the gourmet ice cream shop that was there then
(20:43):
and is probably still there. And there was a wonderful
used bookstore that, alas is no longer there was called
I think Rue Victor Hugo or something like that, and
it had the traditional used bookstore cat and actually I
believe the great short story writer Kelly Link worked there
(21:04):
for a while, and for all I know, I picked
up the Odd Book from her. But anyway, I was
walking down the street very much minding my own business,
and there was a guy in a baseball cap on
a bicycle, weaving in and out of traffic, as those
bicycle riders are want to do in any city in
(21:24):
this great land of ours, and I didn't quite see
what happened. All I know is that a light changed,
a car kind of jumped forward at the same time
that the bike was crossing in front of him, and
I don't think there was an actual car versus bicycle collision,
but the cyclist did end up on the ground. Both
(21:47):
the driver and the front seat passenger of that car
got out immediately and rushed to the side of the cyclist,
who was slowly pulling himself up to his feet. He
didn't seem to be harmed, more like in a state
of shock, and I thought they were going to his aid,
that they would say things like, are you all right, bro?
(22:07):
That was a wicked fall, bro, But no they didn't.
They started berating him for cutting them off on his
bicycle in the most profane terms, And I thought, Okay,
this is familiar to me from countless scenes in New
York City. And if you have spent any time as
a pedestrian in New York, you have seen this. Someone
(22:31):
steps into the crosswalk with the light, and a cab
comes swinging around the corner, not paying the slightest attention
to who's in the crosswalk, and nearly squishes the guy,
at which point things tend to get rather heated between
the pedestrian who just saw his life flash in front
(22:52):
of his eyes and is not altogether happy about having
had the experience, and the cab driver, who well is
one thousand percent in the wrong but has a living
to make. But this experience was a little different because
it varied from the New York version in this way.
As they were yelling at the cyclist, he straightened himself
(23:14):
up completely, and his baseball camp came into the light.
And what was on that baseball cap and interlocking Yankees?
And why I saw it? The driver of the car
saw it, his passenger saw it, And whereas they had
been angry and upset before, now they were enraged. One
(23:38):
of them said, oh, you're a Yankees fan, and they
actually started swinging at the guy. And my last memory
of it, as a crowd closed in and I could
no longer see what was happening, was that they were
kicking the hell out of the guy, And I thought, ah, yes,
this is wholesome baseball fandom at its finest. So I
(24:00):
need to chase those thoughts away, and I will tell
you an extremely brief baseball story. You most likely have
heard it before if you have spent any time at
all with the players that I'm about to talk about.
I don't mean in person, but in terms of reading
or following the history of the game if you haven't,
it's kind of a classic baseball tall tale, and I
(24:21):
kind of wish it was true, because just thinking about
it makes me feel good. Josh Gibson was, as far
as we can tell from this great distance, one of
the best hitters ever to play baseball, a right handed
slugger who could hit three hundred and literally knock balls
over buildings. He is supposedly the only fellow to ever
(24:42):
knock a fair ball out of the old Yankee Stadium,
where it was approximately the distance from wherever you are
sitting right now to Helena, Montana. To get the ball out,
and that's just referring to the fences. To get it
out of the physical building, the ball actually had to pause,
take could deep breath, recollect itself and watch again. And parenthetically,
(25:04):
if you're listening from Helena, Montana, I've been there. Lovely town,
beautiful state, and for all I know, Josh Gibson actually
played there because during his lifetime, African Americans played everywhere
that was not the white major leagues. During his lifetime
is not quite accurate. That color line extended from the
(25:26):
late eighteen eighties until nineteen forty seven, and then fell
gradually team by team, depending on how desperately they clung
to their racism. Through nineteen fifty nine, and even after that,
the number of players of color you could use at
one time was informally limited. As I'm saying these words,
it occurs to me that we typically call that the
color line or segregation. These are not necessarily instructive terms,
(25:49):
and I wonder if it might be more vivid for
people if we just called it affirmative action for mediocre
white baseball players. How was it that Tommy Thieveno had
a fifteen high hundred game career in the majors as
a shortstop, but Pop Lloyd, who was referred to as
the Black Wagner, had none, well, because there was a
(26:10):
spot reserved for Thieveno. Simply put, there was a quota,
and the quota was one hundred percent white guys. Gibson
was a catcher and, as I said, a great power hitter.
His Hall of Fame plaque says he hit almost eight
hundred home runs. But we really don't know what that
means as it includes all levels of competition, from Negro
(26:31):
league regulation games to barnstorming trips to places like Helena,
Montana or the Mexican League, which briefly had aspirations of
flourishing as a rival to the American major leagues. That's
a story for another time. But the tragic aspect of
it failing was that many African American players like Gibson,
(26:55):
like Satchel Page had gone down there and never mind
the playing conditions or the level of competition or anything
like that, but what they found was that they could
play with dignity without anybody questioning them or putting them
down on a racial basis. As an American, that's a
very sad thing for me to have to report to you. Anyway,
(27:18):
he was a very good power hitter. We just don't
know exactly what that would have meant had he played
with major league players. I don't think it's unrealistic to
say he was one of the best hitting catchers ever
and might have landed somewhere between Gary Carter and Peake
Mike Piazza. I mean, that's a very wide range, but
it's impossible to know for sure. All we really know
(27:40):
is he was deprived of the chance of showing us
what he was capable of, and while that's often framed
as his loss, it's really our loss. Gibson was born
in nineteen eleven, and so by the time integration was
even a realistic possibility, he was heading into his late thirties.
He was already in decline too, not because his baseball
(28:04):
skills had necessarily eroded a great deal, because by all accounts,
bouncing between the Homestead Grades and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, he
was still playing quite well into the mid forties. But
he also had some other issues. He had some emotional maladies.
He drank too much, he might have been on drugs.
(28:26):
That's a controversial thing to say, and there's no real
way to know, but we do know that somewhere around
nineteen forty three he had something that's characterized as a
nervous breakdown. He was institutionalized for a week. Ten days,
they'd let him out on a day pass to play baseball,
and at that time he may have been diagnosed with
(28:47):
a brain tumor, and for reasons that again we can't
really know, he decided to just let it go. And
so as the War years passed by and integration became
a possibility. His skills did degrade, his comportment degraded, and
(29:07):
add to that some understandable bitterness that Jackie Robinson did
get to go ahead of him, and he wasn't in
a place either physically or emotionally that he could have
come up to the majors. In any case, he would
never get the chance because in January nineteen forty seven,
(29:29):
this is just after Jackie Robinson had played a full
season with Montreal, Gibson suffered a fatal stroke. But it's
not the frustration and sadness that I choose to remember.
It's a player who was so talented that he was
capable of inspiring this story, which again did not happen,
(29:52):
but is so wonderful to think about. The story goes
that the Crawfords were playing in Pittsburgh and it was
the bottom of the ninth. Gibson was up, the pitcher
dealt the ball went sailing towards the outfield and kept
climbing and climbing and climbing, and it never did come down.
(30:15):
The umpire signaled a home run. The Crawfords walk off,
the game is over. Everybody's happy. Flash forward about twenty
four hours, the same two teams are playing, except now
they've moved on to Philadelphia. The locations in these stories vary,
it doesn't really matter, but the two teams take the field.
The Crawfords are once again at bat when out of nowhere,
(30:39):
a ball comes sailing down from a great height in
the sky. The outfielder settles beneath it and makes the catch,
and the umpire as if this kind of thing happened
every day, pointed to Josh Gibson and said, you're out
yesterday in Pittsburgh. I'm Stephen Goldman, and this is the
(31:03):
infinite inning. Well, hello there, I'm going to get right
(31:44):
into it today because I'm kind of exercised. I made
the mistake of listening to a Colin radio show on
Sirius XM's MLB Network Radio, which I greatly enjoy listening to.
Had a program on as part of the Baseball Perspectives
renting the channel for a few years back when I
(32:07):
was part of that outfit. Wasn't just me. It was
me and Kevin Goldstein and Mike Farron, and we had
a great time for a couple of years until I
broke up the band. Well wait, hang on pause a
second before I get into that. Back to what I
was saying about this call in show, they were debating
the National League MVP race, and I guess this is
(32:27):
a complicated issue because there's not a slam dunk candidate
for the award among the position players. The leading players
in the National League in terms of wins above replacement,
and I'm talking about the Baseball Reference version. Now are
all pitchers. Max Scherzer has seven point two, Jacob de
(32:48):
Gram has seven point one, Aaron Nola has six point eight,
and you have to go down a bit until you
get to the first position players, which as of Friday's games,
was a tie between Lorenzo Caine and Matt Carpenter at
five point two each. At the time that I tuned
in in the middle of the discussion, they weren't batting
(33:10):
about whether a pitcher should win the award or not.
And when I say they, I'm not trying to be
cute or anything. I didn't catch who the announcers were.
Given that I joined the program already in progress, and
SiriusXM moves their hosts around quite a bit with one
pinch hitting for the other and normally it doesn't make
(33:31):
a big difference, but in this case, it wasn't anybody
who I immediately recognized, So I'm afraid I have to
go with the non specific pronoun. They so they weren't
talking about whether you could just give it to Scherzer
and say, forget the position players for this year or
de Gram, who, for all intents and purposes, is tied
with him, but things like whether you can hold Matt
(33:51):
Carpenter's April against him, because you'll recall that as great
as Matt Carpenter has been, he was kind of o
for April. Now that Matt Carpenter's career is over, it
seems sort of odd to talk about him as a
potential MVP candidate, and yet he had two top ten
MVP Award finishes, including fourth place in twenty thirteen. Please
forgive a quick break here. And on the other side,
(34:14):
the phone call that so set me off back in
the yesterdays. In the midst of this, a fellow called
in and he said, I would like to posit a hypothetical,
And the hypothetical is that he wanted to pretend first
(34:36):
that Brian Kenny was a mute and that second of all,
the war statistic had never been invented, and that the
MVP candidate should be considered in light only of the
information that you would have if wins above replacement did
not exist, and that therefore Lorenzo Caine, who has eight
(34:56):
home runs and thirtythter RBIs, would be out right disqualified.
Nobody would say anything as ludicrous as Lorenzo Caine winning
an MVP award, and the hosts entertained this possibility, and
I was extremely disappointed with that because to my mind,
that caller was everything that is wrong with a hard
(35:19):
world today, with specifically America today. And I promise you
for this one time, I'm not going to make a
big political analogy out of this. But what exactly is
the benefit of saying, let's pretend we don't know what
we know and then make a decision on that basis.
(35:40):
There are a couple of purposes behind war. For one thing,
you can compare all players to a baseline, and that
concept comparing a player to a baseline works throughout time,
so you can understand how far above his league's Babe
Ruth was in a given year, and how far above
his league Mike Trout is in a given year, and
(36:01):
you can have an understanding that is something like and
I'm not going to look this up, but to utilize
a player I mentioned earlier in the show, you can say,
Babe Ruth is to Tommy Thieveno as Mike Trout is
to Chris Davis. That's one. It's very simple. And then
the second aspect of it is to be able to
(36:23):
take the sum total of a player's contributions hitting, base running,
fielding and lump them all together into one value so
that you can have a sense of the totality of
the player. Also kind of basic, and I've seen for
people who are not hip to this, the idea of
(36:44):
replacement level, that the replacement level player being a hypothetical
really just blows their train of thought straight off the tracks.
They can't conceptualize that for some reason. And to them,
we could say, well, we could do wins above average,
which we do. We have it. It's just not as
good a number because major league players are so good
(37:07):
and the average player is so unusual that you're really
not giving the good guys enough credit for what it
is that they're able to achieve over the kind of
player who would sub for them if they say, as
Mike Trout just did injured wrist and had to go
on the DL, it's a long fall from there, and
the fall as well past average. But you know, if
(37:27):
you can't comprehend the idea of a hypothetical fringe player,
then then fine, we can do average. It's really whatever
makes you happy, as long as you understand you have
a baseline and we're comparing you to the baseline. Just
about everything we do in this world works this way.
(37:48):
We don't understand. We can't understand how to value something
in isolation. We only know how to value it in
relation to other things. Say that, pursuing the same fantastic
amnesia that our call in show caller wanted us to pursue.
We pretend that we don't know the scale on which
money operates. So I say to you, I have a
(38:09):
diamond and it's worth ten thousand dollars. Well, is that
a lot? Is it a little? I won't know until
you tell me that you just went to Taco Bell
and I do pray for your soul and got something
like six mystery meat tacos for a buck fifty. Well,
then I'll get a sense that my diamond is worth
(38:29):
a lot of mystery meat. But I wouldn't have known
to that point. For like the fourth time in this
last fifteen minutes, I will say again that these concepts
are not complicated. I last took math in the eleventh grade,
and I promise you I was not paying attention. And
yet these concepts are less about math for the end
user anyway. For the person who's putting the stats together,
(38:51):
they are sure are a heck of a lot about math.
But for you and I at the end of it,
if we are willing to trust that the elements that
go into it are correctly and as long as the
system is internally consistent with itself, I don't have a
reason to think that they are not weighted correctly. Then
it's just a handy tool for putting a whole bunch
(39:13):
of players who do a lot of different things in
many different contexts and sticking them on the same continuum.
The bigger problem here, and this is why I say
that that call symbolized almost everything wrong with our society today,
is that if the knowledge that we have acquired tells
you something that disturbs you in some way that you
(39:33):
don't like, that you don't want to know. You can't
just pretend that it doesn't exist. You can instruct a
couple of client talk show hosts to go along with
your little hypothetical, but it doesn't do anything to add
to the truth of your argument. If anything, it subtracts
from it. You can't say you don't know how to
(39:55):
assemble Lorenzo Kine's complete performance or any player's complete performance,
and then say you don't like what it shows you
about that player's performance or how it relates to all players,
any more than I can say, Hey, Brad, let's take
your mother up on the roof of this tall building
and pretend the law of gravity doesn't exist. What do
(40:15):
you say, since your anti law of gravity or anti
global warming or anti cats or whatever the hell you
want to pretend doesn't exist because it's inconvenient for you, you
might want to go along with me for a few minutes,
but to borrow from Randy Newman, as soon as we
give mom a good shove, she will go sailing no more.
And then what do you have? You have street pizza
(40:36):
where you used to have a mother. And I'm not
trying to beat this analogy totally to death or totally
into the street. And I'm also not saying that Lorenzo
Caine should be the National League Most Valuable Player. I
don't know who that should be. I don't have a
strongly formed opinion on that. I still have an open mind,
and there's enough season left for me to take my
(40:57):
time in figuring it out. Not that I have a vote,
having long though turned in my BBWAA card. The point is,
in my lifetime, I have seen players like Ozzie Smith
and Alan Trammel lose MVP Awards to guys like George Bell,
where Derek Jeter lose a couple to Wan freaking Gonzalez
(41:17):
and Justin Morenau because the shape of their contribution on
the season did not match esthetically to someone else's preconceived
notion of what an MVP Award winner look like, which
largely consisted of a bunch of home runs and a
bunch of RBIs for most of the history of that award,
(41:39):
nothing correlates to an MVP Award win like piling up
a whole bunch of RBIs and RBIs, I'm sorry, are
just a context based creation. They're not a bad thing
to have a lot of. I'm not saying that, but
you can't drive in base runners who aren't there. For
that matter, I saw Don Mattingly whin the nineteen eighty
five MVP Award over Ricky Henderson, and Mattingley was great
(42:03):
that season, and I loved him, don't get me wrong.
But and again, I'm just doing the stats off the
top of my head, so I'm going to be off
by one or two here, But if you boil it down, essentially,
Ricky Henderson scored one hundred and forty five runs and
Don Mattingley spent half the season batting behind him in
the number two hole, and he drove in one hundred
and forty five runs. And no, it wasn't an exact
(42:24):
one to one ratio. But I am not exactly clear
why Ricky Henderson getting on base often enough for Mattingly
to drive him in was a vastly inferior act to
Mattinglee driving him in. We know better now, and I
am sorry if it displeases you that Lorenzo Caine does
a whole lot of different things well on the baseball
(42:47):
field and hasn't put together a baseball card where the
back looks like Juan Gonzalez's baseball card Why can you
not accept that just because he has not put up
big numbers in two categories home runs in RBIs that
he might not be doing something just as valuable in
(43:10):
all those other categories. You have a very limited imagination,
and you cannot conceive of a world that does not
conform to your received wisdom of the way it's shaped.
And so you are folding your arms, holding your breath,
stamping your feet and saying no, no, no, no, there
are no rules about this, you know. In nineteen forty four,
(43:32):
Marty Marion, who was the shortstop for the Saint Louis Cardinals,
won the National League MVP Award. And he hit two
sixty seven and slug three sixty two. He had six
home runs, and he drove in sixty three runs on
the season and scored fifty. And I am not saying
that he was necessarily the best choice for an MVP
Award that year, not in the league with Stan Muzial
(43:55):
in it. But if the voters decided that his glove
work was good enough, and it certainly seems as if
it was, that he was extraordinarily valuable to his team
that year, I don't see how that's any less legitimate
a criterion for giving out an award than any other
damn thing you might think of. I've read my Bible,
(44:16):
and there's no chapter in Genesis or anywhere else where
some great voice from on high says the MVP award
winner must have more than eight thirty army. It's just
what someone wants. And that's why I hear a call
like that. And then I flip over two channels and
(44:38):
listen to the regular news and hear that California is
on fire and the rest of the world is too,
And I say, well, why can't people accept global warming.
It's not that they're resisting it. It's not that they
really believe it's a Chinese hoax or whatever they're being
told by the politicians. It's just that they say, let's
pretend that I don't know the things that I do know,
(44:59):
and we'll go go forward on that basis. And you
can get away with that for a while until all
about you is ash and the leaves on every tree
lie curled and blackened at your feet. Yes, folks, it's armageddon.
Just because somebody didn't want Lorenzo Caine to be an MVP.
I've made a mountain out of Molehill as usual by
(45:23):
Aunt Petunia's polydactyl piano playing Pussycat. We have come to
the end of an here is where in the olden
days I used to tell you how to follow the
guest on social media, but that social media is now
verboting off limits in a downward spiral, and if it's not,
I don't care to hear information to the contrary. That
is one place in which I will contradict everything I
(45:43):
said to you about thinking earlier. For now, suffice it
to say that, as I remarked earlier in the episode,
you can follow me at Stephen Gooldman dot b sky,
email dot social I mean me at Infinite Inning at
gmail dot com. And there's a Facebook group. Go to
Facebook search on Infinite Inning. Knock. I will let you in.
I haven't said no to anybody yet. You can bring
(46:06):
a friend, bring a positively vociferous friend, by which I
mean not that he's very vociferous, but that he's vociferous
in a positive way. And of course, if you have
a spare moment, please drop by Apple iTunes or the
podcast of your choice and rate, review, and subscribe. Every
single one of those steps helps more people find the
(46:26):
show and helps this hardened criminal find a measure of
redemption in a cold world that has turned its back
on it. We have a sponsor now, but nevertheless, this
episode is brought to you by the Number twenty two.
Our producer is Monty the Bear, who loved board games.
Our theme song, The Infinite Man was a co composition
of myself and doctor Rick Moring, who reminds you that
(46:48):
you're not quite as quick as you think you are. Well, well,
that's in from the Infinite Inning Gang for another reissue episode.
I'll be back this weekend with a brand new episode
number three. I believe enjoy all the playoff baseball between
now and then. Okay,
Well, hello there, and welcome to another reissue episode of
The Infinite Inning. As always, I am Stephen Goldman, York
convivial host for this not just a trip to the past,
but a trip to our collective Infinite Inning past, for
a revisit of a long ago episode of the show
that I hope still has some relevance and stories that
(00:47):
I hope still have the power to entertain and edify.
This week's reissue goes back to episode sixty seven of
the show, so early in year two. It begins with
a story of neg League's great and future Hall of
Famer Josh Gibson, the power hitting catcher, the only player,
it seems like now that we've been through twenty twenty five,
(01:08):
who might have possessed the capability to have put up
home run numbers in his own time comparable to those
which cal Rally totaled this year. Then I got into
a discussion of the winds above replacement stat and at
the risk of repeating some talking points that I expressed,
then I'm stimulated to get into it again. Now I've
(01:30):
talked before on this show about the winds above replacement
stat and how it can be a useful framework for
thinking about things outside of baseball, simply because it's a
very simple concept at heart. It establishes a baseline, and
it gives you the opportunity to measure the performance of
players by how far they are from that baseline. Where
(01:54):
the baseline is is really up to you. The statistics
sets it with a hypothetical replace basement player, and the
value of that player depends on the system. By hypothetical player,
we mean a freely available triple A veteran type who
you might turn to in desperation. The Marlins provided a
(02:14):
pretty good example of that player this year, in that
everyone they tried at first base tended to well fail,
and so eventually they kind of punted and turned to
a twenty seven year old former thirteenth round pick of
the Yankees named Eric Wagoman. And Wagaman hit two point
(02:34):
fifty with a two to ninety six on base percentage
and a three seventy eight slugging percentage, which, even in
this year of low averages, was not good and maybe
maybe you could have tolerated it if he were a
shortstop playing ridiculous defense, but he wasn't. He was a
first baseman playing first Basemanish defense, by which I mean
not Peak Keith Hernandez, who will always be the standard
(02:57):
for me, he and Don Mattingley. And so if I
wanted to judge the performance of every other first baseman
in the league by his distance from Eric Wagman, that
would be a legitimate thing to do. There's a line
that Mark Hamill has in Star Wars A New Hope.
I think he says it to three PO who is
expressing some confusion as to what planet he and R
(03:19):
two D two have crashed landed on, and hammil As
Luke Skywalker replies, you're on Tattooin. If you've ever heard
of the bright shining center of the galaxy, Tattooin is
the planet farthest from there. He is doing a planet's
above replacement level riff. That's what I mean about how
useful a winds above replacement framing can be in areas
(03:40):
outside of baseball. Let me give you an example from
my own life. I had a rough day this Monday,
about two days ago. Now, a family member underwent a
voluntary surgery. Voluntary in the sense that it was scheduled,
not that it wasn't required. As with so many procedures
of that nature, including one that I underwent back in August.
It wasn't supposed to be too trying, not too debilitating.
(04:01):
You'd go to sleep, they'd wake you up. You could
spring right out of bed and get back to your
life and well for the person who underwent the procedure
that turned out to be completely inaccurate, everyone is different,
and so this person, this loved one my wife and
I were responsible for, had a very tough time of
it for a while, and it was very difficult to watch,
(04:22):
and it was stressful and exhausting. Worse, in the middle
of that, I had a doctor's appointment of my own.
I couldn't miss, having rescheduled it once already for my
own surgery. So I left our patient in charge of
my wife and went to my second waiting room of
the day, my second bout of forced HGTV, my second
(04:43):
set of white coats, and so on. If you happen
to be following me on Blue Sky on Monday, Stephen
Goldman at Bisky does Social, you would have seen me
say that the hardest part of going to the doctor
is the HGTV. I've learned to tolerate needles. I've learned
to tolerate having a shrimp work stuck in my at regular intervals,
but the constant ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
(05:04):
bat flipper flop, flipper flop. I like the location, but
not the tusk and style kitchen. And I want you
to understand I don't watch this stuff. I've picked up
those words because it's force fed into your mind via
waiting room Ludovico technique. Listening to a stranger tell you
about their kitchen preferences or the progress of their home
(05:24):
reconstruction project is like being strapped into a dentist's chair
and having a stranger tell you about the content of
their dreams or their fantasy team. Ba ba bab b
about when you think, well, I'm going to be in
this waiting room for ninety freaking minutes or more. At
least I can get some work done. But the room
is only seven and a half feet by seven and
a half feet, and they have the TV set at
(05:44):
sufficient decibels to entertain a sold out Madison Square garden,
and to compensate for that, every grandma in the room
is watching her YouTube videos at a similar volume sons headset.
So how the hell am I on deadline to figure
out the grand unified field theory of physics. Finally supposed
(06:04):
to get that done in that kind of environment, when
I can no longer think clearly enough even to know
to carry the two. We were finally going to get
flying cars, folks, But not now, not after that, because
some lady couldn't handle a Tuscan style kit What is
a Tuscan style kitchen? Does it have a sink, does
it have a stove? Does it have a fridge? Be
at peace, God go with you. People are ridiculous. I
(06:27):
have no doubt that Back in the Neolithic there was
some family of cave men fleeing an incoming blizzard or hurricane,
and they climb into some hole in the rocks, and
one member of the party said, I don't know. I'm
not sure about this Tuscan style cave. I think I'm
going out there into the gale force eleven wins. Okay,
I must brave volleyball sized chunks of hail because my
(06:49):
backsplash is in subway tile. So I go through this
second appointment, and as I was driving back, I passed bakery.
We needed to get our patient to eat. They were
resist to doing so because they felt so ill. It
was totally understandable, I've been there. It was also, though counterintuitive,
what they needed to do to begin feeling better. So
(07:10):
I thought I might bribe them with some kind of
sweet So I pull over, I go in, and as
I'm standing at the counter, I start thinking, today has
really sucked. I deserve a treat, too, don't I. Now,
normally I'm pretty good at resisting that kind of thinking
because I have to watch what I eat due to
my own health issues, and the consequences are so bad
(07:31):
that it becomes easier to say no in the same
way you might say no to crack cocaine if you've
never tried it before, but you're aware of all the
cautionary tales of where that slippery slope leads. Plus, if
you've been listening to the show long enough, you know,
because I've talked about this many times, that I've been
fighting my weight basically my whole life. So when confronted
(07:53):
with this sort of choice, if someone walks up to
me and says slice of cake, sir, I attempt to saving.
This is, as with winds above, replacement, a metaphor for
having resistance to the temptation. Now I haven't played a
tabletop role playing game in one hundred years. But I
find the saving throw, that's where it comes from, to
(08:14):
be a good metaphor for the process of resisting temptation.
The ochre jelly is gushing at you with its sword.
He attacks. He can a jelly be a heat I
don't know. They attack and you are about to be
run through. But you try to make a saving throw
a you dodge, and that's what I try to do.
Thinking of it in those terms somehow makes it easier
(08:35):
for me to say no to that sort of thing. Well,
this time, I didn't make the saving throw. I don't
every time. Obviously, if I did, I'd be as thin
as a politician's promise. I don't think though I even
attempted it. I just said, yes, give me. I need
sucker succo R. You understand, not suck er. Well, earlier
(08:56):
that day I had been in a breakfast place and
they had a plate, oh cinnamon rolls listed as one
of their appetizers. Now I am a sucker for a
good cinnamon roll sucker, sucker this time, not succo R.
I made my saving throw that time in part because
it seemed like a good dish for four people to share,
(09:18):
but there were only two of us, and calorically going
fifty to fifty was going to be really punishing. I
also had my doubts, given the overall quality of the
small chain that I was in, that said cinnamon rolls
would actually meet that good qualifier, and so I successfully demurred.
In the bakery, though, I looked past the cakes and cookies,
(09:39):
and I saw it there on a shelf the grail,
a cinnamon roll, glazed and not a plastic dunkin Donuts
factory manufactured coffee roll either, but the real deal, a
bespoke cinnamon roll. And I said, this has been a
miserable day and I need, nay, I deserve a cinnamon roll. Listener,
(10:05):
I bought it. I successfully resisted the urge to gobble
it furtively in the car, because that seemed unhealthy. I
wasn't ashamed, so I act like it. No. I calmly
got it back to where my wife and patient were waiting.
I gave them what I had bought for them. And
then came the moment, the big moment, the best part
of the day, and you know what, it wasn't very good.
(10:27):
I was so disappointed. It was just bland with the
flavor of lightly sweetened cardboard. How do I characterize how
bad it was? How do I concretize for you what
was a subjective experience. I'll do it like this. That
cinnamon roll was one point five wins above dunkin Donuts,
(10:48):
and even that I'm not so sure about, but still
point five wadd or maybe sad sweets above dunkin Donuts.
If I could think of an acronym for war that
spelled out just don't well, I would give it to you.
But you get it now right. There are three major
versions of war, Baseball Reference, baseball perspectives, and fangrafts. I
(11:09):
tend to gravitate towards the Baseball reference version because it
covers all of history and ours. A baseball perspectus uses
a formulation that requires information that doesn't exist for ye
olden days. As you know from listening to this show,
I spend a lot of time in ye olden days,
and having access to the entire continuum of history matters
(11:30):
very much to me. Outside of that, the differences don't
matter to me that much, because broadly these statistics tend
to agree. I find a fraction of a win to
be insignificant since the stat is an approximation anyway, as
are all defensive statistics which feed into wins above replacement.
Let's say in a given year, Aaron Judge has an
(11:52):
eight war season and Bobby Witt Junior has a seven
point five war season. I don't think that saying Judge
was the better player based solely on one system's half
wind differential is a very strong argument. In general, I
don't like abdicating one's responsibility to think to some system
(12:13):
or another. I find statistics like that, as I've been
saying throughout this segment, very valuable for framing a discussion,
but they should not be the end of a discussion.
It's lazy. My grandfather used to have a quote from
the British painter Sir Joshua Reynolds framed above his desk.
There is no expedient to which a man will not
(12:34):
resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. He never
discussed that quote with me specifically, but it was very
consistent with his personal ethic, which he did discuss many times.
I reserve the right to think, he would say. Sometimes
he would add, if you want an incorrect answer, then
I will reply quickly, or some variant on that essentially
(12:56):
compel me to speak before I'm ready to speak, and
my response may not be accurate. I might reply before
I've correctly weighed all the information. He was an engineer,
so that kind of precision was important to him. I
strongly agreed with that old man. It was the best
thing he ever taught me. I reserve the right to think,
(13:17):
and as with many rights, it's not only a right
but an obligation, and that means you have to question everything,
especially tradition, received wisdom, dogma, and ideology. The correct first
response to each of those things is as follows. To
(13:37):
received wisdom, you say, just because people have felt that
way for a long time doesn't mean it's accurate. Tradition
is similar, Just because things have been done that way
for a long time doesn't mean that it's correct. Dogma
is pretty easy, and so is ideology, because both insist
you do according to what has been put forth by
(13:59):
an authority figure who you are not supposed to argue
with or disagree with, because circularly they are the authority
figure and therefore they're always right. We may be talking
about some ancient or current prophet who may have lived
in the sky or the White House or both. It
doesn't really matter which they're increasingly the same thing. And
if you don't believe in being bossed around by an
(14:21):
invisible sky guy who claims divine right literally or figuratively,
then you're safe from that kind of intimidation. And well
if you do. I gave up arguing with folks like
that about twenty five years ago, when I realized it
wasn't getting me anywhere or in conversation anyway. As Hans
Solo once said. Last week, there was a very good
(14:41):
essay by the sociologist and political economist William Davies at
N plus one, which was also published in abbreviated form
at The Guardian. Both versions were free. It's called a
critique of Pure Stupidity Understanding Trump two point zero. Mister
Davies runs through some definitions of stupidity in the political sense,
including formulations by Immanuel Kant and Hannah A. Rent, the
(15:04):
latter of whom was responding to fascism. Davis writes another
way of expressing CONT's and or Rents points would be
that stupidity is an inability to compare like with like,
or to measure things. Instead, stupidity merely mouths platitudes or
obeys orders. But what are the social and political conditions
(15:25):
that normalize this One is a society where people wait
for instruction on how to think, the condition of immaturity,
as Kant saw it, or of totalitarianism for a rent.
And this is precisely what I mean when I talk
about abdicating your responsibility to think critically. Whether we're talking
about the system or the ideology, or the dogma, or
(15:47):
the man in the big tie or the big beard.
And if you're into the man with the big beard,
I would never try to take that away from you.
I would only say that he gave you the faculty
of reason for a reason, and he expects you to
use it. The opposite would be perverse, at the risk
of being gross. He also gave you the ability to
urinate and the requirement to do it. But imagine if
(16:10):
one of the commandments said thou shalt not pee, thou
wilst hold it forever. So we have the obligation to think,
we have the ability to think, and we must use it.
But we've been taught in a number of ways not to,
and so we require frameworks to regiment our thinking to
organize it and wins above replacement is one of them.
Like I said, it's just a baseline, and it's as
(16:32):
simple as is this quantity larger than that quantity? This year,
Aaron Judge gave me six apples. He is kind of
tree sized after all. But is that as many apples
as is optimal? Is that as many apples as I
want or need? In a few minutes, you'll hear me
talking back in episode sixty seven about some discussion on
television I saw involving I think Brian Kenny, who I
(16:53):
would later guest with maybe three or four times. I
don't think I had to that point. I'll mention a
different show now now, similar theme one. I don't recall
it was so long ago, who was involved. I just
know that it was so early that it must have
been the late nineties or circa the turn of the century.
And they were talking about one player versus another, and
(17:15):
one of the panelists said, well, war says, and some crotchety,
gray haired old time sports writer blew up and said,
I do not accept that it's not real. It's an
imaginary stats dude. So much of math is imaginary, you
know how long it took mankind to come up with
the idea of zero. You can imagine one apple in
(17:36):
your hand, but zero was a huge leap for the
primitive mind. It's not there. We need a quantity that
describes not there. But it's not there. How is that
a quantity? It just is. It has to be. And
the idea of the replacement level and a player's performance
relative to that baseline is actually very similar. The baseline
(17:57):
is higher than zero, but you could set it to
zero and it would work out roughly the same way.
The scale would just be higher. I felt both annoyed
and sad at the time for that sports writer because
his mind wasn't plastic enough to get there somewhere that's
actually pretty simple. As time went on, though, enough people
did do the thinking and held off the chains that
(18:19):
held them down, and war became an accepted stat We
see it more, I think in pitching, because win loss
records have decayed so much in the era of the
five inning start and the opener in the bullpen, And
maybe that kind of evolution can happen again when it
comes to conceptualizing our wider world. But I'm not real
sanguine about that. This reissue episode, as I said before,
(18:43):
contains a discussion of Negro leagues great Josh Gibson. Why
was he a Negro League's great as opposed to an
American or National League great? Due to tradition, received wisdom,
dogma and ideology, and that brings us full circle. That's
all for me for this reissue episode. You may hear
me patch over a break, or we might just skip
(19:05):
right to the end and you'll hear me then too.
Thank you as always for listening to this reissue episode.
I will now turn the rostrum over to my younger self.
Please be gentle with it, he's tender. Many years ago,
(19:38):
walking through Boston, this was probably circa two thousand, Let's
say I was walking down Newberry Street, and if you've
ever been there, you know it's kind of a touristy
street on a warm summer night. There are also a
lot of locals, so it can be quite crowded, and
traffic flow, which is not Boston's strong suit anywhere, is
(19:59):
especially problem there because the average block is about three
feet long, so there's a traffic light every yard or so.
Cars by necessity have to move slowly, but they're anxious.
The drivers are anxious, not the cars themselves, this is
not a Pixar film, are anxious to get out of
that mess where they're going start stop, start stop, start stop,
(20:21):
and they're having tons of pedestrians flow in front of
them on the rare occasions that they have a green
light and can get clear. So it's a huge fraud mess.
And on this particular warm summer evening, I don't remember exactly,
I was going to or from someplace and thinking maybe
of the gourmet ice cream shop that was there then
(20:43):
and is probably still there. And there was a wonderful
used bookstore that, alas is no longer there was called
I think Rue Victor Hugo or something like that, and
it had the traditional used bookstore cat and actually I
believe the great short story writer Kelly Link worked there
(21:04):
for a while, and for all I know, I picked
up the Odd Book from her. But anyway, I was
walking down the street very much minding my own business,
and there was a guy in a baseball cap on
a bicycle, weaving in and out of traffic, as those
bicycle riders are want to do in any city in
(21:24):
this great land of ours, and I didn't quite see
what happened. All I know is that a light changed,
a car kind of jumped forward at the same time
that the bike was crossing in front of him, and
I don't think there was an actual car versus bicycle collision,
but the cyclist did end up on the ground. Both
(21:47):
the driver and the front seat passenger of that car
got out immediately and rushed to the side of the cyclist,
who was slowly pulling himself up to his feet. He
didn't seem to be harmed, more like in a state
of shock, and I thought they were going to his aid,
that they would say things like, are you all right, bro?
(22:07):
That was a wicked fall, bro, But no they didn't.
They started berating him for cutting them off on his
bicycle in the most profane terms, And I thought, Okay,
this is familiar to me from countless scenes in New
York City. And if you have spent any time as
a pedestrian in New York, you have seen this. Someone
(22:31):
steps into the crosswalk with the light, and a cab
comes swinging around the corner, not paying the slightest attention
to who's in the crosswalk, and nearly squishes the guy,
at which point things tend to get rather heated between
the pedestrian who just saw his life flash in front
(22:52):
of his eyes and is not altogether happy about having
had the experience, and the cab driver, who well is
one thousand percent in the wrong but has a living
to make. But this experience was a little different because
it varied from the New York version in this way.
As they were yelling at the cyclist, he straightened himself
(23:14):
up completely, and his baseball camp came into the light.
And what was on that baseball cap and interlocking Yankees?
And why I saw it? The driver of the car
saw it, his passenger saw it, And whereas they had
been angry and upset before, now they were enraged. One
(23:38):
of them said, oh, you're a Yankees fan, and they
actually started swinging at the guy. And my last memory
of it, as a crowd closed in and I could
no longer see what was happening, was that they were
kicking the hell out of the guy, And I thought, ah, yes,
this is wholesome baseball fandom at its finest. So I
(24:00):
need to chase those thoughts away, and I will tell
you an extremely brief baseball story. You most likely have
heard it before if you have spent any time at
all with the players that I'm about to talk about.
I don't mean in person, but in terms of reading
or following the history of the game if you haven't,
it's kind of a classic baseball tall tale, and I
(24:21):
kind of wish it was true, because just thinking about
it makes me feel good. Josh Gibson was, as far
as we can tell from this great distance, one of
the best hitters ever to play baseball, a right handed
slugger who could hit three hundred and literally knock balls
over buildings. He is supposedly the only fellow to ever
(24:42):
knock a fair ball out of the old Yankee Stadium,
where it was approximately the distance from wherever you are
sitting right now to Helena, Montana. To get the ball out,
and that's just referring to the fences. To get it
out of the physical building, the ball actually had to pause,
take could deep breath, recollect itself and watch again. And parenthetically,
(25:04):
if you're listening from Helena, Montana, I've been there. Lovely town,
beautiful state, and for all I know, Josh Gibson actually
played there because during his lifetime, African Americans played everywhere
that was not the white major leagues. During his lifetime
is not quite accurate. That color line extended from the
(25:26):
late eighteen eighties until nineteen forty seven, and then fell
gradually team by team, depending on how desperately they clung
to their racism. Through nineteen fifty nine, and even after that,
the number of players of color you could use at
one time was informally limited. As I'm saying these words,
it occurs to me that we typically call that the
color line or segregation. These are not necessarily instructive terms,
(25:49):
and I wonder if it might be more vivid for
people if we just called it affirmative action for mediocre
white baseball players. How was it that Tommy Thieveno had
a fifteen high hundred game career in the majors as
a shortstop, but Pop Lloyd, who was referred to as
the Black Wagner, had none, well, because there was a
(26:10):
spot reserved for Thieveno. Simply put, there was a quota,
and the quota was one hundred percent white guys. Gibson
was a catcher and, as I said, a great power hitter.
His Hall of Fame plaque says he hit almost eight
hundred home runs. But we really don't know what that
means as it includes all levels of competition, from Negro
(26:31):
league regulation games to barnstorming trips to places like Helena,
Montana or the Mexican League, which briefly had aspirations of
flourishing as a rival to the American major leagues. That's
a story for another time. But the tragic aspect of
it failing was that many African American players like Gibson,
(26:55):
like Satchel Page had gone down there and never mind
the playing conditions or the level of competition or anything
like that, but what they found was that they could
play with dignity without anybody questioning them or putting them
down on a racial basis. As an American, that's a
very sad thing for me to have to report to you. Anyway,
(27:18):
he was a very good power hitter. We just don't
know exactly what that would have meant had he played
with major league players. I don't think it's unrealistic to
say he was one of the best hitting catchers ever
and might have landed somewhere between Gary Carter and Peake
Mike Piazza. I mean, that's a very wide range, but
it's impossible to know for sure. All we really know
(27:40):
is he was deprived of the chance of showing us
what he was capable of, and while that's often framed
as his loss, it's really our loss. Gibson was born
in nineteen eleven, and so by the time integration was
even a realistic possibility, he was heading into his late thirties.
He was already in decline too, not because his baseball
(28:04):
skills had necessarily eroded a great deal, because by all accounts,
bouncing between the Homestead Grades and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, he
was still playing quite well into the mid forties. But
he also had some other issues. He had some emotional maladies.
He drank too much, he might have been on drugs.
(28:26):
That's a controversial thing to say, and there's no real
way to know, but we do know that somewhere around
nineteen forty three he had something that's characterized as a
nervous breakdown. He was institutionalized for a week. Ten days,
they'd let him out on a day pass to play baseball,
and at that time he may have been diagnosed with
(28:47):
a brain tumor, and for reasons that again we can't
really know, he decided to just let it go. And
so as the War years passed by and integration became
a possibility. His skills did degrade, his comportment degraded, and
(29:07):
add to that some understandable bitterness that Jackie Robinson did
get to go ahead of him, and he wasn't in
a place either physically or emotionally that he could have
come up to the majors. In any case, he would
never get the chance because in January nineteen forty seven,
(29:29):
this is just after Jackie Robinson had played a full
season with Montreal, Gibson suffered a fatal stroke. But it's
not the frustration and sadness that I choose to remember.
It's a player who was so talented that he was
capable of inspiring this story, which again did not happen,
(29:52):
but is so wonderful to think about. The story goes
that the Crawfords were playing in Pittsburgh and it was
the bottom of the ninth. Gibson was up, the pitcher
dealt the ball went sailing towards the outfield and kept
climbing and climbing and climbing, and it never did come down.
(30:15):
The umpire signaled a home run. The Crawfords walk off,
the game is over. Everybody's happy. Flash forward about twenty
four hours, the same two teams are playing, except now
they've moved on to Philadelphia. The locations in these stories vary,
it doesn't really matter, but the two teams take the field.
The Crawfords are once again at bat when out of nowhere,
(30:39):
a ball comes sailing down from a great height in
the sky. The outfielder settles beneath it and makes the catch,
and the umpire as if this kind of thing happened
every day, pointed to Josh Gibson and said, you're out
yesterday in Pittsburgh. I'm Stephen Goldman, and this is the
(31:03):
infinite inning. Well, hello there, I'm going to get right
(31:44):
into it today because I'm kind of exercised. I made
the mistake of listening to a Colin radio show on
Sirius XM's MLB Network Radio, which I greatly enjoy listening to.
Had a program on as part of the Baseball Perspectives
renting the channel for a few years back when I
(32:07):
was part of that outfit. Wasn't just me. It was
me and Kevin Goldstein and Mike Farron, and we had
a great time for a couple of years until I
broke up the band. Well wait, hang on pause a
second before I get into that. Back to what I
was saying about this call in show, they were debating
the National League MVP race, and I guess this is
(32:27):
a complicated issue because there's not a slam dunk candidate
for the award among the position players. The leading players
in the National League in terms of wins above replacement,
and I'm talking about the Baseball Reference version. Now are
all pitchers. Max Scherzer has seven point two, Jacob de
(32:48):
Gram has seven point one, Aaron Nola has six point eight,
and you have to go down a bit until you
get to the first position players, which as of Friday's games,
was a tie between Lorenzo Caine and Matt Carpenter at
five point two each. At the time that I tuned
in in the middle of the discussion, they weren't batting
(33:10):
about whether a pitcher should win the award or not.
And when I say they, I'm not trying to be
cute or anything. I didn't catch who the announcers were.
Given that I joined the program already in progress, and
SiriusXM moves their hosts around quite a bit with one
pinch hitting for the other and normally it doesn't make
(33:31):
a big difference, but in this case, it wasn't anybody
who I immediately recognized, So I'm afraid I have to
go with the non specific pronoun. They so they weren't
talking about whether you could just give it to Scherzer
and say, forget the position players for this year or
de Gram, who, for all intents and purposes, is tied
with him, but things like whether you can hold Matt
(33:51):
Carpenter's April against him, because you'll recall that as great
as Matt Carpenter has been, he was kind of o
for April. Now that Matt Carpenter's career is over, it
seems sort of odd to talk about him as a
potential MVP candidate, and yet he had two top ten
MVP Award finishes, including fourth place in twenty thirteen. Please
forgive a quick break here. And on the other side,
(34:14):
the phone call that so set me off back in
the yesterdays. In the midst of this, a fellow called
in and he said, I would like to posit a hypothetical,
And the hypothetical is that he wanted to pretend first
(34:36):
that Brian Kenny was a mute and that second of all,
the war statistic had never been invented, and that the
MVP candidate should be considered in light only of the
information that you would have if wins above replacement did
not exist, and that therefore Lorenzo Caine, who has eight
(34:56):
home runs and thirtythter RBIs, would be out right disqualified.
Nobody would say anything as ludicrous as Lorenzo Caine winning
an MVP award, and the hosts entertained this possibility, and
I was extremely disappointed with that because to my mind,
that caller was everything that is wrong with a hard
(35:19):
world today, with specifically America today. And I promise you
for this one time, I'm not going to make a
big political analogy out of this. But what exactly is
the benefit of saying, let's pretend we don't know what
we know and then make a decision on that basis.
(35:40):
There are a couple of purposes behind war. For one thing,
you can compare all players to a baseline, and that
concept comparing a player to a baseline works throughout time,
so you can understand how far above his league's Babe
Ruth was in a given year, and how far above
his league Mike Trout is in a given year, and
(36:01):
you can have an understanding that is something like and
I'm not going to look this up, but to utilize
a player I mentioned earlier in the show, you can say,
Babe Ruth is to Tommy Thieveno as Mike Trout is
to Chris Davis. That's one. It's very simple. And then
the second aspect of it is to be able to
(36:23):
take the sum total of a player's contributions hitting, base running,
fielding and lump them all together into one value so
that you can have a sense of the totality of
the player. Also kind of basic, and I've seen for
people who are not hip to this, the idea of
(36:44):
replacement level, that the replacement level player being a hypothetical
really just blows their train of thought straight off the tracks.
They can't conceptualize that for some reason. And to them,
we could say, well, we could do wins above average,
which we do. We have it. It's just not as
good a number because major league players are so good
(37:07):
and the average player is so unusual that you're really
not giving the good guys enough credit for what it
is that they're able to achieve over the kind of
player who would sub for them if they say, as
Mike Trout just did injured wrist and had to go
on the DL, it's a long fall from there, and
the fall as well past average. But you know, if
(37:27):
you can't comprehend the idea of a hypothetical fringe player,
then then fine, we can do average. It's really whatever
makes you happy, as long as you understand you have
a baseline and we're comparing you to the baseline. Just
about everything we do in this world works this way.
(37:48):
We don't understand. We can't understand how to value something
in isolation. We only know how to value it in
relation to other things. Say that, pursuing the same fantastic
amnesia that our call in show caller wanted us to pursue.
We pretend that we don't know the scale on which
money operates. So I say to you, I have a
(38:09):
diamond and it's worth ten thousand dollars. Well, is that
a lot? Is it a little? I won't know until
you tell me that you just went to Taco Bell
and I do pray for your soul and got something
like six mystery meat tacos for a buck fifty. Well,
then I'll get a sense that my diamond is worth
(38:29):
a lot of mystery meat. But I wouldn't have known
to that point. For like the fourth time in this
last fifteen minutes, I will say again that these concepts
are not complicated. I last took math in the eleventh grade,
and I promise you I was not paying attention. And
yet these concepts are less about math for the end
user anyway. For the person who's putting the stats together,
(38:51):
they are sure are a heck of a lot about math.
But for you and I at the end of it,
if we are willing to trust that the elements that
go into it are correctly and as long as the
system is internally consistent with itself, I don't have a
reason to think that they are not weighted correctly. Then
it's just a handy tool for putting a whole bunch
(39:13):
of players who do a lot of different things in
many different contexts and sticking them on the same continuum.
The bigger problem here, and this is why I say
that that call symbolized almost everything wrong with our society today,
is that if the knowledge that we have acquired tells
you something that disturbs you in some way that you
(39:33):
don't like, that you don't want to know. You can't
just pretend that it doesn't exist. You can instruct a
couple of client talk show hosts to go along with
your little hypothetical, but it doesn't do anything to add
to the truth of your argument. If anything, it subtracts
from it. You can't say you don't know how to
(39:55):
assemble Lorenzo Kine's complete performance or any player's complete performance,
and then say you don't like what it shows you
about that player's performance or how it relates to all players,
any more than I can say, Hey, Brad, let's take
your mother up on the roof of this tall building
and pretend the law of gravity doesn't exist. What do
(40:15):
you say, since your anti law of gravity or anti
global warming or anti cats or whatever the hell you
want to pretend doesn't exist because it's inconvenient for you, you
might want to go along with me for a few minutes,
but to borrow from Randy Newman, as soon as we
give mom a good shove, she will go sailing no more.
And then what do you have? You have street pizza
(40:36):
where you used to have a mother. And I'm not
trying to beat this analogy totally to death or totally
into the street. And I'm also not saying that Lorenzo
Caine should be the National League Most Valuable Player. I
don't know who that should be. I don't have a
strongly formed opinion on that. I still have an open mind,
and there's enough season left for me to take my
(40:57):
time in figuring it out. Not that I have a vote,
having long though turned in my BBWAA card. The point is,
in my lifetime, I have seen players like Ozzie Smith
and Alan Trammel lose MVP Awards to guys like George Bell,
where Derek Jeter lose a couple to Wan freaking Gonzalez
(41:17):
and Justin Morenau because the shape of their contribution on
the season did not match esthetically to someone else's preconceived
notion of what an MVP Award winner look like, which
largely consisted of a bunch of home runs and a
bunch of RBIs for most of the history of that award,
(41:39):
nothing correlates to an MVP Award win like piling up
a whole bunch of RBIs and RBIs, I'm sorry, are
just a context based creation. They're not a bad thing
to have a lot of. I'm not saying that, but
you can't drive in base runners who aren't there. For
that matter, I saw Don Mattingly whin the nineteen eighty
five MVP Award over Ricky Henderson, and Mattingley was great
(42:03):
that season, and I loved him, don't get me wrong.
But and again, I'm just doing the stats off the
top of my head, so I'm going to be off
by one or two here, But if you boil it down, essentially,
Ricky Henderson scored one hundred and forty five runs and
Don Mattingley spent half the season batting behind him in
the number two hole, and he drove in one hundred
and forty five runs. And no, it wasn't an exact
(42:24):
one to one ratio. But I am not exactly clear
why Ricky Henderson getting on base often enough for Mattingly
to drive him in was a vastly inferior act to
Mattinglee driving him in. We know better now, and I
am sorry if it displeases you that Lorenzo Caine does
a whole lot of different things well on the baseball
(42:47):
field and hasn't put together a baseball card where the
back looks like Juan Gonzalez's baseball card Why can you
not accept that just because he has not put up
big numbers in two categories home runs in RBIs that
he might not be doing something just as valuable in
(43:10):
all those other categories. You have a very limited imagination,
and you cannot conceive of a world that does not
conform to your received wisdom of the way it's shaped.
And so you are folding your arms, holding your breath,
stamping your feet and saying no, no, no, no, there
are no rules about this, you know. In nineteen forty four,
(43:32):
Marty Marion, who was the shortstop for the Saint Louis Cardinals,
won the National League MVP Award. And he hit two
sixty seven and slug three sixty two. He had six
home runs, and he drove in sixty three runs on
the season and scored fifty. And I am not saying
that he was necessarily the best choice for an MVP
Award that year, not in the league with Stan Muzial
(43:55):
in it. But if the voters decided that his glove
work was good enough, and it certainly seems as if
it was, that he was extraordinarily valuable to his team
that year, I don't see how that's any less legitimate
a criterion for giving out an award than any other
damn thing you might think of. I've read my Bible,
(44:16):
and there's no chapter in Genesis or anywhere else where
some great voice from on high says the MVP award
winner must have more than eight thirty army. It's just
what someone wants. And that's why I hear a call
like that. And then I flip over two channels and
(44:38):
listen to the regular news and hear that California is
on fire and the rest of the world is too,
And I say, well, why can't people accept global warming.
It's not that they're resisting it. It's not that they
really believe it's a Chinese hoax or whatever they're being
told by the politicians. It's just that they say, let's
pretend that I don't know the things that I do know,
(44:59):
and we'll go go forward on that basis. And you
can get away with that for a while until all
about you is ash and the leaves on every tree
lie curled and blackened at your feet. Yes, folks, it's armageddon.
Just because somebody didn't want Lorenzo Caine to be an MVP.
I've made a mountain out of Molehill as usual by
(45:23):
Aunt Petunia's polydactyl piano playing Pussycat. We have come to
the end of an here is where in the olden
days I used to tell you how to follow the
guest on social media, but that social media is now
verboting off limits in a downward spiral, and if it's not,
I don't care to hear information to the contrary. That
is one place in which I will contradict everything I
(45:43):
said to you about thinking earlier. For now, suffice it
to say that, as I remarked earlier in the episode,
you can follow me at Stephen Gooldman dot b sky,
email dot social I mean me at Infinite Inning at
gmail dot com. And there's a Facebook group. Go to
Facebook search on Infinite Inning. Knock. I will let you in.
I haven't said no to anybody yet. You can bring
(46:06):
a friend, bring a positively vociferous friend, by which I
mean not that he's very vociferous, but that he's vociferous
in a positive way. And of course, if you have
a spare moment, please drop by Apple iTunes or the
podcast of your choice and rate, review, and subscribe. Every
single one of those steps helps more people find the
(46:26):
show and helps this hardened criminal find a measure of
redemption in a cold world that has turned its back
on it. We have a sponsor now, but nevertheless, this
episode is brought to you by the Number twenty two.
Our producer is Monty the Bear, who loved board games.
Our theme song, The Infinite Man was a co composition
of myself and doctor Rick Moring, who reminds you that
(46:48):
you're not quite as quick as you think you are. Well, well,
that's in from the Infinite Inning Gang for another reissue episode.
I'll be back this weekend with a brand new episode
number three. I believe enjoy all the playoff baseball between
now and then. Okay,
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