Anyone watch this at bat last night? Hard to believe that people like Tom Tango and Bill James think the game would be better without these kinds of battles. I sometimes wonder what they love about baseball if it’s not the potentially endless battles. Let them play!
On the day you published this column about how terrible the Mariners defense has been, I attended the Red Sox-Mariners game at Fenway and watched Mickey Gasper get thrown out at home plate by the Mariners. Mickey Gasper will never be confused with Usain Bolt, but I assume our (interim!) third base coach waved him home because he knew that Mariner outfielders were terrible and it would take an unlikely strong, accurate throw to get even Mickey Gasper out at home. And that’s what happened. The Sox got a bunch of hits but not enough runs and lost.
I love people pushing the envelope on rules proposals but the foul ball strikeout is an awful idea. Offense is stagnant enough we don't need yet another rule that favors pitchers. If anything, reward a walk for not giving in. Mostly, I just disagree with the premise. There's incredible drama in watching a drawn out at bat as the pitcher has to dig deeper and deeper to find a way to get the out and the hitter has to keep guessing along.
So hold on, I have a wild idea as requested. Batting average on balls in play has gone down, right? Triples and inside-the-park homers have become ever rarer? And there's too many foul balls? Well...
How about enlarging fair territory? Instead of pointing directly to the bases, the revised foul lines could be flanking 1st- and 3rd-base at a modest distance that increases the play space, making fair territory, I dunno, 5-10% bigger? The dirt already extends off to the side of the bases; maybe the new foul lines mark the edge of the dirt.
Then deaden the ball some, and make the bats a little heavier, so the change doesn't totally tip the balance of the game in favor of scoring. But overall we get more base hits, particularly including ones that rattle around in the corners for a bit. And therefore, more incentive for batters to put the ball in play.
I have never understood the annual pity party on here for the Mariners. Joe isn't from Seattle or anything. Maybe just some leftover stuff from having the best team in the 90s and falling short?
Yeah they had 5 winning records and only made the playoffs twice. So what? Most people want less playoff teams and we are still whining about the Mariners not finishing in the top 40% of the league? I don't know why on the one hand we complain about too many playoff teams while crying into a tissue in the other hand about the Mariners.
They play in a weak division (Since the league went to a balanced schedule the AL West is the worst division in Baseball (.464 winning percentage outside the division) The competition is low. They can't take advantage.
As far as the defense goes, Seattle is a below average defensive team, but not nearly as bad as the very limited range based only OOA has them. OOA is also based initially on x hitting stats, which have been proven to be worth very little and inaccurate. They are on the low side, sure, but they are 23rd in DRS. Not ideal, but but not nearly the worst.
The articles I've read are far less down on the x hitting stats (presumably xwOBA). For pitching, xwOBA is only a touch worse than FIP, xFIP, and SIERA for predicting next year results (K%-BB% beats them all for ranking performance). For hitting, xwOBA is definitely better than wOBA, wRC+and more traditional stats for predicting next year's results. Fielding is tougher to judge, and xwOBA doesn't begin to capture throwing and fielding throws so I'll grant you that. It also doesn't have park effects like wall distance included (yet, anyway). Launch angle and velocity doesn't factor in Fenway's Green Monster, for example. It also doesn't use spray direction, but other stats don't either. That is more random. xwOBA still has predictive quality equal or better than most metrics.
The statcast stuff is from expected chances of a hit on there. Your stat is not a part of it. OOA is by intention a range based only stat on batted balls only and comes from their expected chances of a hit as it's base. That is basically just launch angle and and velocity.
I should have been more specific in what I was talking about. However, even if a metric is good to predict future performance, as some of the pitching stats are, it shouldn't be used (as FG does) as a substitute for actual performance. When they are, we are just playing fantasy baseball and ignoring what is actually happening.
Perhaps. The problem is that stats that show “actual performance” are noisy due to things like fielding and sequencing of events, so they aren’t representative of truth either. The predictive stats try to remove some of the sources of noise for a more fair valuation. It’s not just fantasy baseball.
Back in the day, when Family Guy was at its best, some of the best jokes on the show were the ones that managed to go from funny to annoying to memorable by going on so much longer than you expected (Think, Peter tripping and hitting his shin or the early Chicken fights). I view foul balls the same way: one or two is part of the game, three or four start getting annoying, and then when you have one of those at-bats where the batter fouls off like 10 pitches, that becomes amazing again
For the same reason, I’m annoyed that MLB kept 10-12 inning games but effectively killed games of 13+. Around the 13th inning is where the extra game length stops being annoying and starts being weird and magical.
Interesting! So, to play this out a bit, foul balls are never strikes, they're just foul balls. To get a K, a pitcher would have to hit the zone or get a whiff. Strikeouts would drop.
Let's also say that the maximum # of FBs in a PA is 3. A full count would then be 3-2-2: three balls, two strikes, two fouls. The next pitch is either put in play, a walk, a strikeout, or a stalemate. Thus, the maximum number of pitches per PA is 8. I like it!
Downsides: it would slow down the game, as a number of PAs end in stalemates, which are essentially wasted time. Pitches per inning would rise, as there would be pitches eaten up by stalemates. Thus, starters would get pulled even earlier.
Ah, and I just thought of the most devious way to exploit this rule. Let's say a team is facing its opponent's ace: Skubal, Skenes, Miz, whoever. The manager would tell his players to go up and hit as many foul balls as possible. Drive up the pitch count, get the starter out of there by the second inning.
Huh! I never knew that players could hit foul balls on purpose. My definition, most foul balls hit along the edges of the bat rather than in the center, which means your margin for error of missing the ball completely is higher. Trying to hit a foul ball to me would increase your chances of missing the ball completely significantly.
Ross Barnes lived in vain! Forgotten so soon, a mere 111 years after his death. One of the greatest players of the National Association, Barnes was the first player to homer in the National League but was best known as the master of the fair-foul hit. He'd strike the ball with spin to cause it to land fair, then drift foul often far out of the reach of the fielders leading to league leading doubles and triples totals.
Sounds like he was kind of a magician with the bat. Which in context is totally appropriate that you shared his story this week.
The guy I associate with being able to hit foul balls almost at will was Luke Appling, the White Sox Hall of Fame shortstop before Luis Aparicio. But that’s just based on stories I’ve heard. I’m old, but not nearly enough to have seen him play.
That may well be true of Appling but what I remember of him is from years later ... when at age 75, he homered off Warren Spahn in an Old Timers Game played at RFK in the (IIRC) early 1980s.
The foul ball thing can go both ways. Instead of giving a strikeout after a couple of foul balls, let’s penalize the pitcher who is unable to get the strikeout and give the batter an automatic walk.
Depends on your definition of "worst," I suppose. I'd vote for the Nationals, who play in a huge market but never sign any significant free agents (including their own), charge just about the highest ticket and concession prices in MLB, and never have sufficient staff at the ballpark to get you that overpriced food in a reasonable amount of time. Also, their mascot stinks, their uniforms are dull, and the official team name has no connection to the region in which they play.
They're traded some of their best players (Trea Turner and Juan Soto) years before free agency. They shut down a perfectly healthy Steven Strasburg in a year they might have made and won the World Series in order to protect his long-term prospects, which didn't work either.
It's not surprising they haven't sniffed the playoffs since winning the World Series. Preseason projections rarely have them with even a scant chance of making the playoffs at all, and then they don't.
I'd say that calling Strasburg "perfectly healthy" in 2012 is a bit of a stretch. He had Tommy John surgery in 2011. He was rocked in two of his last three games. He had already notched about 50% more innings than he had in any prior professional season.
I don't know that it was a good call to shut him down. But I do think it was defensible.
As far as protecting *his* long term interests? Yes, it did. He stayed healthy long enough to sign a contract paying him well over $300m, a contract that but for the negotiated buyout, would still be paying him today. Compare that, for example, to the career earnings of Matt Harvey who was - arguably - pushed unreasonably long for the Mets' attempt to win the Series in '15 and was never really healthy again. Harvey ended up being paid less than 1/10th as much.
1. His shutdown didn't cost them anything in the playoffs since they won Games 1 and 4, which would have been his and only got bounced because of a blown save in Game 5
2. It did pay off for them because he carried the Nats to a title in 2019
"They shut down a perfectly healthy Steven Strasburg in a year they might have made and won the World Series in order to protect his long-term prospects, which didn't work either"
Any team that does this while the player is in his first 6 years (I think the year you are referring to was Strasburg's rookie year) is confused about whose interests (the teams' and the team's fans) should come first. Why save a pitcher's arm so the Dodgers or Yankees can take him away after 6 years? Use it up as much as you can while he cannot do anything about it. That may sound harsh, but it is absolutely the correct thing to do from the teams' standpoint.
I hear what you're saying (and, yes, it's very harsh). The thing is, Strasburg was a few years away from free agency in 2012 , so his short-term health was a concern for the Nationals, too. That was his third year in the majors, and his first (kinda) full season. The Nationals absolutely were right to keep an eye on his workload.
However, if they were going to limit him to 160 innings, then they should have allocated those innings for April through October. His last start was September 12, the Nationals' 138th game of the season.
If the Nationals believed Strasburg's innings should have been limited, there were a lot of options. The one they picked was to surrender the season. (Imagine if the Brewers decided Jacob Misiorowski's season should end next week. They'd still make the playoffs, but that's a white flag.)
They took their best club ever and quit trying to win. They lost in the first round, 3-2, thanks (in part) to using an inferior starting pitcher. (Edwin Jackson started game three and got shelled.)
Colorado and Miami are historically dismal, although there are World Series titles and appearances sprinkled in there. And the Phillies were actually pretty bad for a pretty long time, with bottom-feeders prevalent from the 1920s through the 1970s.
Rather than trudging back to the dugout with nothing resolved, they should settle the tie like in soccer - with penalty kicks, or in this case, the batter gets to hit one off a tee (which periscopes out of the ground once the umpire pushes a button). The fielding team can put the tee at any height, so long as it's in the strikezone, and a foul is an out. Boom - more balls in play.
Joe, I’m curious if this season has made you reevaluate your 2025 AL MVP vote at all. The 2026 season is basically an AB test relative to 2025 wherein Cal Raleigh and Aaron Judge are in effect removed from their respective teams. The Yankees (of course) are 19 over without Judge. The Mariners without a functioning Raleigh are as you’ve just described.
I was fortunate to be at Dodgers Stadium for Alex Cora's epic 18 pitch at bat against Matt Clement, which ended with Cora taking Clement deep. As a Cubs fan I wasn't happy about the outcome but it is one of my favorite in person baseball memories. So, no to the stalemate.
Similarly -- Game 5 NLDS 2012 Jayson Werth on pitch 13 off Lance Lynn. Which had actually been foreshadowed a couple weeks prior when he did the same thing off Heath Bell on pitch 12 and tied the game to send it to extras.
MLB batting average has already decreased from ~.260 to ~.245 these past 20 years. Strikeouts have increased by 1.5 Ks per team per game in that same time frame.
Hitters need a new advantage, not a disadvantage such as X foul balls finally striking out the batter.
I want more balls in play, fewer three true outcomes.
So ... Four strikes for a strikeout! Yes, 100+ year tradition says four balls, three strikes. Unfair to the batter. Four balls, four strikes! If batting averages increase considerably, then, sure, all foul balls can be strikes.
Isn't the surprising thing that there are ONLY as many foul balls as balls in play? A plate appearance can have, at most, one ball put in play, but there's no limit to the number of foul balls it can have. I would've guessed there are more foul balls than balls in play.
That was my intuition, too, for the reason you mentioned and my unscientific observation that it *seems* like I'm seeing more of them over time. Specifically, fouling off four-seamers at the top of the zone feels feels more common.
Apparently, foul balls surpassed balls in play in 2017 and have been continuing to do so ever since:
Anyone watch this at bat last night? Hard to believe that people like Tom Tango and Bill James think the game would be better without these kinds of battles. I sometimes wonder what they love about baseball if it’s not the potentially endless battles. Let them play!
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/49946398/tristan-peters-18-pitch-walk-keys-white-sox-win-vs-guards
On the day you published this column about how terrible the Mariners defense has been, I attended the Red Sox-Mariners game at Fenway and watched Mickey Gasper get thrown out at home plate by the Mariners. Mickey Gasper will never be confused with Usain Bolt, but I assume our (interim!) third base coach waved him home because he knew that Mariner outfielders were terrible and it would take an unlikely strong, accurate throw to get even Mickey Gasper out at home. And that’s what happened. The Sox got a bunch of hits but not enough runs and lost.
I love people pushing the envelope on rules proposals but the foul ball strikeout is an awful idea. Offense is stagnant enough we don't need yet another rule that favors pitchers. If anything, reward a walk for not giving in. Mostly, I just disagree with the premise. There's incredible drama in watching a drawn out at bat as the pitcher has to dig deeper and deeper to find a way to get the out and the hitter has to keep guessing along.
So hold on, I have a wild idea as requested. Batting average on balls in play has gone down, right? Triples and inside-the-park homers have become ever rarer? And there's too many foul balls? Well...
How about enlarging fair territory? Instead of pointing directly to the bases, the revised foul lines could be flanking 1st- and 3rd-base at a modest distance that increases the play space, making fair territory, I dunno, 5-10% bigger? The dirt already extends off to the side of the bases; maybe the new foul lines mark the edge of the dirt.
Then deaden the ball some, and make the bats a little heavier, so the change doesn't totally tip the balance of the game in favor of scoring. But overall we get more base hits, particularly including ones that rattle around in the corners for a bit. And therefore, more incentive for batters to put the ball in play.
I have never understood the annual pity party on here for the Mariners. Joe isn't from Seattle or anything. Maybe just some leftover stuff from having the best team in the 90s and falling short?
Yeah they had 5 winning records and only made the playoffs twice. So what? Most people want less playoff teams and we are still whining about the Mariners not finishing in the top 40% of the league? I don't know why on the one hand we complain about too many playoff teams while crying into a tissue in the other hand about the Mariners.
They play in a weak division (Since the league went to a balanced schedule the AL West is the worst division in Baseball (.464 winning percentage outside the division) The competition is low. They can't take advantage.
As far as the defense goes, Seattle is a below average defensive team, but not nearly as bad as the very limited range based only OOA has them. OOA is also based initially on x hitting stats, which have been proven to be worth very little and inaccurate. They are on the low side, sure, but they are 23rd in DRS. Not ideal, but but not nearly the worst.
The articles I've read are far less down on the x hitting stats (presumably xwOBA). For pitching, xwOBA is only a touch worse than FIP, xFIP, and SIERA for predicting next year results (K%-BB% beats them all for ranking performance). For hitting, xwOBA is definitely better than wOBA, wRC+and more traditional stats for predicting next year's results. Fielding is tougher to judge, and xwOBA doesn't begin to capture throwing and fielding throws so I'll grant you that. It also doesn't have park effects like wall distance included (yet, anyway). Launch angle and velocity doesn't factor in Fenway's Green Monster, for example. It also doesn't use spray direction, but other stats don't either. That is more random. xwOBA still has predictive quality equal or better than most metrics.
The statcast stuff is from expected chances of a hit on there. Your stat is not a part of it. OOA is by intention a range based only stat on batted balls only and comes from their expected chances of a hit as it's base. That is basically just launch angle and and velocity.
I should have been more specific in what I was talking about. However, even if a metric is good to predict future performance, as some of the pitching stats are, it shouldn't be used (as FG does) as a substitute for actual performance. When they are, we are just playing fantasy baseball and ignoring what is actually happening.
Perhaps. The problem is that stats that show “actual performance” are noisy due to things like fielding and sequencing of events, so they aren’t representative of truth either. The predictive stats try to remove some of the sources of noise for a more fair valuation. It’s not just fantasy baseball.
Back in the day, when Family Guy was at its best, some of the best jokes on the show were the ones that managed to go from funny to annoying to memorable by going on so much longer than you expected (Think, Peter tripping and hitting his shin or the early Chicken fights). I view foul balls the same way: one or two is part of the game, three or four start getting annoying, and then when you have one of those at-bats where the batter fouls off like 10 pitches, that becomes amazing again
For the same reason, I’m annoyed that MLB kept 10-12 inning games but effectively killed games of 13+. Around the 13th inning is where the extra game length stops being annoying and starts being weird and magical.
Speaking of the Mariners... CBS sports listed DiPoto on the hot seat list of GM's. Not surprised if Dan Wilson gets the gas first!
Possibly the Blue Jays might be the biggest flop.
Interesting! So, to play this out a bit, foul balls are never strikes, they're just foul balls. To get a K, a pitcher would have to hit the zone or get a whiff. Strikeouts would drop.
Let's also say that the maximum # of FBs in a PA is 3. A full count would then be 3-2-2: three balls, two strikes, two fouls. The next pitch is either put in play, a walk, a strikeout, or a stalemate. Thus, the maximum number of pitches per PA is 8. I like it!
Downsides: it would slow down the game, as a number of PAs end in stalemates, which are essentially wasted time. Pitches per inning would rise, as there would be pitches eaten up by stalemates. Thus, starters would get pulled even earlier.
Ah, and I just thought of the most devious way to exploit this rule. Let's say a team is facing its opponent's ace: Skubal, Skenes, Miz, whoever. The manager would tell his players to go up and hit as many foul balls as possible. Drive up the pitch count, get the starter out of there by the second inning.
Huh! I never knew that players could hit foul balls on purpose. My definition, most foul balls hit along the edges of the bat rather than in the center, which means your margin for error of missing the ball completely is higher. Trying to hit a foul ball to me would increase your chances of missing the ball completely significantly.
Ross Barnes lived in vain! Forgotten so soon, a mere 111 years after his death. One of the greatest players of the National Association, Barnes was the first player to homer in the National League but was best known as the master of the fair-foul hit. He'd strike the ball with spin to cause it to land fair, then drift foul often far out of the reach of the fielders leading to league leading doubles and triples totals.
You go Ross! Thanks for the story.
Sounds like he was kind of a magician with the bat. Which in context is totally appropriate that you shared his story this week.
The guy I associate with being able to hit foul balls almost at will was Luke Appling, the White Sox Hall of Fame shortstop before Luis Aparicio. But that’s just based on stories I’ve heard. I’m old, but not nearly enough to have seen him play.
That may well be true of Appling but what I remember of him is from years later ... when at age 75, he homered off Warren Spahn in an Old Timers Game played at RFK in the (IIRC) early 1980s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQMQB3tiUfg&t=29s
The foul ball thing can go both ways. Instead of giving a strikeout after a couple of foul balls, let’s penalize the pitcher who is unable to get the strikeout and give the batter an automatic walk.
Is Seattle the worst franchise in MLB?
Depends on your definition of "worst," I suppose. I'd vote for the Nationals, who play in a huge market but never sign any significant free agents (including their own), charge just about the highest ticket and concession prices in MLB, and never have sufficient staff at the ballpark to get you that overpriced food in a reasonable amount of time. Also, their mascot stinks, their uniforms are dull, and the official team name has no connection to the region in which they play.
They're traded some of their best players (Trea Turner and Juan Soto) years before free agency. They shut down a perfectly healthy Steven Strasburg in a year they might have made and won the World Series in order to protect his long-term prospects, which didn't work either.
It's not surprising they haven't sniffed the playoffs since winning the World Series. Preseason projections rarely have them with even a scant chance of making the playoffs at all, and then they don't.
I'd call that the worst one.
I'd say that calling Strasburg "perfectly healthy" in 2012 is a bit of a stretch. He had Tommy John surgery in 2011. He was rocked in two of his last three games. He had already notched about 50% more innings than he had in any prior professional season.
I don't know that it was a good call to shut him down. But I do think it was defensible.
As far as protecting *his* long term interests? Yes, it did. He stayed healthy long enough to sign a contract paying him well over $300m, a contract that but for the negotiated buyout, would still be paying him today. Compare that, for example, to the career earnings of Matt Harvey who was - arguably - pushed unreasonably long for the Mets' attempt to win the Series in '15 and was never really healthy again. Harvey ended up being paid less than 1/10th as much.
I'd push back on the Strasburg criticism because
1. His shutdown didn't cost them anything in the playoffs since they won Games 1 and 4, which would have been his and only got bounced because of a blown save in Game 5
2. It did pay off for them because he carried the Nats to a title in 2019
"They shut down a perfectly healthy Steven Strasburg in a year they might have made and won the World Series in order to protect his long-term prospects, which didn't work either"
Any team that does this while the player is in his first 6 years (I think the year you are referring to was Strasburg's rookie year) is confused about whose interests (the teams' and the team's fans) should come first. Why save a pitcher's arm so the Dodgers or Yankees can take him away after 6 years? Use it up as much as you can while he cannot do anything about it. That may sound harsh, but it is absolutely the correct thing to do from the teams' standpoint.
I hear what you're saying (and, yes, it's very harsh). The thing is, Strasburg was a few years away from free agency in 2012 , so his short-term health was a concern for the Nationals, too. That was his third year in the majors, and his first (kinda) full season. The Nationals absolutely were right to keep an eye on his workload.
However, if they were going to limit him to 160 innings, then they should have allocated those innings for April through October. His last start was September 12, the Nationals' 138th game of the season.
If the Nationals believed Strasburg's innings should have been limited, there were a lot of options. The one they picked was to surrender the season. (Imagine if the Brewers decided Jacob Misiorowski's season should end next week. They'd still make the playoffs, but that's a white flag.)
They took their best club ever and quit trying to win. They lost in the first round, 3-2, thanks (in part) to using an inferior starting pitcher. (Edwin Jackson started game three and got shelled.)
Simply the worst franchise in baseball.
Yeah but they’ve won a WS while Seattle has never even won a Pennant
Winning isn't everything. It's the main thing, but it's not everything.
No, it’s the only thing.
All time, maybe so
Colorado and Miami are historically dismal, although there are World Series titles and appearances sprinkled in there. And the Phillies were actually pretty bad for a pretty long time, with bottom-feeders prevalent from the 1920s through the 1970s.
The invisible coin purse trick was insane. Highly recommend watching it.
Rather than trudging back to the dugout with nothing resolved, they should settle the tie like in soccer - with penalty kicks, or in this case, the batter gets to hit one off a tee (which periscopes out of the ground once the umpire pushes a button). The fielding team can put the tee at any height, so long as it's in the strikezone, and a foul is an out. Boom - more balls in play.
Joe, I’m curious if this season has made you reevaluate your 2025 AL MVP vote at all. The 2026 season is basically an AB test relative to 2025 wherein Cal Raleigh and Aaron Judge are in effect removed from their respective teams. The Yankees (of course) are 19 over without Judge. The Mariners without a functioning Raleigh are as you’ve just described.
Unfortunately Raleigh has been crushing the ball for the last couple of weeks, and the Mariners still stink.
I was fortunate to be at Dodgers Stadium for Alex Cora's epic 18 pitch at bat against Matt Clement, which ended with Cora taking Clement deep. As a Cubs fan I wasn't happy about the outcome but it is one of my favorite in person baseball memories. So, no to the stalemate.
Insiders always say that the longer the at bat goes, the advantage goes to the batter, anyone ever shown that to be true or not?
Similarly -- Game 5 NLDS 2012 Jayson Werth on pitch 13 off Lance Lynn. Which had actually been foreshadowed a couple weeks prior when he did the same thing off Heath Bell on pitch 12 and tied the game to send it to extras.
I love those battles. Stalemate? Absolutely not!
That home run still haunts me.
Ha! In another reality, we're still there and Cora is still fouling off sliders.
MLB batting average has already decreased from ~.260 to ~.245 these past 20 years. Strikeouts have increased by 1.5 Ks per team per game in that same time frame.
Hitters need a new advantage, not a disadvantage such as X foul balls finally striking out the batter.
I want more balls in play, fewer three true outcomes.
So ... Four strikes for a strikeout! Yes, 100+ year tradition says four balls, three strikes. Unfair to the batter. Four balls, four strikes! If batting averages increase considerably, then, sure, all foul balls can be strikes.
Isn't the surprising thing that there are ONLY as many foul balls as balls in play? A plate appearance can have, at most, one ball put in play, but there's no limit to the number of foul balls it can have. I would've guessed there are more foul balls than balls in play.
That was my intuition, too, for the reason you mentioned and my unscientific observation that it *seems* like I'm seeing more of them over time. Specifically, fouling off four-seamers at the top of the zone feels feels more common.
Apparently, foul balls surpassed balls in play in 2017 and have been continuing to do so ever since:
https://www.thescore.com/mlb/news/3197557/the-quiet-scourge-of-the-foul-ball