Advertisement

The Year of the Pitcher 2, Dogecoin and Sign Stealing | The Bandwagon

This week, Hannah Keyser is bandwagoning the devastating lack of offensive production in MLB this season ... because the historically great performances on the mound are worth appreciating. If 1968 was The Year of the Pitcher, 2021 is the sequel.

Hannah is also joined by Sopan Deb, basketball and culture writer for the New York Times, who gives her his ‘Humble Proposal to Fix Baseball.’

Video transcript

HANNAH KEYSER: If you go to Jurassic Park, you deserve to be eaten by velociraptor. Like why didn't you see that coming? I mean, just saying, we got to worry about whether or not like algae is an invasive species. And yet they're like, what if we fought back? Massively extinct dinosaurs, not a good idea.

I'm Hannah Keyser, and this is The Bandwagon.

[CHEERS]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you've been paying attention to baseball so far this season, you may have noticed something a little bit disturbing. And I'm not just talking about the fact that we've still not gotten a substantive update about the Mickey Callaway investigation, seriously.

- [INAUDIBLE]

HANNAH KEYSER: I mean, on-field issues. And in 2021, there is no bigger existential crisis in baseball than the total lack of offensive production. No one can hit. Pick your favorite stat, and it probably amounts to saying just that. For instance, the league as a whole is currently batting 234. It's like they built the entire season out of Rod Barajas. Rod Baraji?

- Baraji.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

HANNAH KEYSER: We don't have time to get into all the reasons behind this. They told me if I didn't try to list them all, they'll put them on screen. But the general consensus is that this is very boring and probably bad for baseball. And thus, a number of possible rule changes are in the works at lower levels designed to get more action in the game, including possible alterations to the mound itself.

The last time baseball had to go to such extremes to get pitchers back on-- well, you know, close to level ground with batters, 1968.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

By 1969, the man would be lowered from 15 inches to 10 inches. The strike zone was shrunk. And MLB said it was going to crack down on pitchers using sticky substances to get an unfair advantage.

- Nice one, [INAUDIBLE].

[LAUGHTER]

HANNAH KEYSER: But rather than remember the season for the awful offense and necessitated such a move, they called it "The year of the pitcher." In 2010, Sports Illustrated article reminiscing about 1968 called it, quote, a magical summer when, quote, golden armed hurlers reigned over the game. And the point is they're doing so once again.

If this is one of the last years of the game is played in such a pitcher-friendly environment, we should celebrate the incredible outrageous performances that we may never see again, or at least not for another half-century. Welcome to 2021, the year, the pitcher, the SQL. Literally, "2 Fast 2 Furious" well, you know, at least too fast anyway.

[LAUGHTER]

If it is 1968 all over again, you can call Jacob deGrom, Bob Gibson. The latter one Cy Young and MVP that season for his live-ball era record low 1.12 ERA--

- Is that good?

HANNAH KEYSER: --with 13 complete game shutouts.

- Yeah.

HANNAH KEYSER: It is unlikely that the ground will get to 13 complete games at all because that's modern baseball for you, but his average fastball is literally 99 miles per hour because that's also modern baseball for you.

- That's fast.

HANNAH KEYSER: Or at least it is if you are fully a freak of nature. Through six starts this season, he has a 0.68 ERA, that's actually giving up fewer earned runs than he himself has scored because, in an innovative effort to keep things fair, no one else in the team is actually even allowed to have a successful at-bat, while deGrom is pitching.

[LAUGHTER]

- That's mad.

HANNAH KEYSER: And after carrying the other 25 guys for the past six weeks, is it any wonder that deGrom back is aching. deGrom's fastball is the fastest ball, but velocity is up basically everywhere else too. In 2008, there were 214 pitches thrown over 100 miles per hour the entire season.

And already this year through early May, there have been 377 triple-digit pitches. They're so fast that you could watch every single one of those pitches back to back in less time than it takes to listen to Blink-182 "All the small things," but we don't have the licensing to play that anyway. So we just picked some of our favorites.

(SINGING)

Of course, big-league players can hit any speed if they start swinging soon enough, which is why the movement pitchers get from optimizing spin these days is even nastier than pure [INAUDIBLE]. Shane Bieber has roughly 50% wiff rate on both his slider and his curveball, and also apparently great takes.

SHANE BIEBER: Jurassic Park used to scare me. It's kind of gnarly.

- Yeah.

SHANE BIEBER: I would never go.

HANNAH KEYSER: Animated marble statue escaped from the Acropolis Tyler Glasnow through his stuff that is even filthier than his praise for his teammates. He added a slider to his repertoire this offseason that is making his curveball even more unhittable than it already was. And now he is just devastating opposing teams. Although, perhaps, none as ruthlessly as his former club.

See Glasnow used to think about the morally bankrupt floating his former bro, Martin Zaccarelli, to get himself angry enough to take the mound, but since then, he's updating his inspiration to just the general vibe of his whole career when he was in Pittsburgh. You might think that in an environment so hostile to hits would make going through a whole game without giving up a single one a little less special, but no, seriously [BLEEP] that.

Joe Musgrove, Carlos Rodon, John Means, and Wade Miley all deserve their spot in history as guys who helped make 2021 "The year the pitcher 2, Pitch Harder." Also, Madison Bumgarner had a nice afternoon at one time.

- That's nice.

HANNAH KEYSER: They can't play baseball in a vacuum anyway, and we don't have to think that what these guys do on the mound is any less magical just because we can understand the context. So go ahead, root for Pitchers.

- Go, Pitchers.

HANNAH KEYSER: Someday, you'll be talking about the golden armed hurlers you got to see this summer. We can worry about what to do with them all later.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- Albert Pujols.

HANNAH KEYSER: Albert Pujols retired. No, he didn't. Sorry. Sorry. He should have retired.

[LAUGHTER]

That would have been significantly more dignified, less ignominious. You know how like sometimes people will be like, you're fired. And you be like, you can't fire me, I quit. The literally exact opposite happened. They were like. You're fired. And he was like, I refuse to quit. And they were like, that's not applicable.

[LAUGHTER]

Albert Pujols was very good. And then, he was not. It was a slow decline. There was a real harsh line between being good and being bad. I'm not a fan of the way that Albert Pujols is currently in the news. I see a lot of sort of like-- We'll never remember this. We'll just think about the good years. And that's not true.

[LAUGHTER]

- Mustaches.

HANNAH KEYSER: Mike Yastrzemski and Austin Slater have grown friendship mustaches, and the mustache look great. They look really good. Mike Yastrzemski also has the this thing, the this thing. What is this thing?

- Soul patch.

- Soul patch.

HANNAH KEYSER: That looks less good.

[LAUGHTER]

Lose that and keep the mustache. The mustache's look really good. Sort of like period piece drama costumes. In a way that like we're all conditioned to like because it makes us think that we're watching like a prestige HBO show, where we're just watching the Giant's.

[AIR HORN]

- Dogecoin.

HANNAH KEYSER: I have no idea what that is. Someone said that to me recently. And I was like,

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

[LOSING HORN]

- The return of Bennifer.

- Jennifer Lopez no longer dating Alex Rodriguez is now dating Ben Affleck again. I'm going to tell you guys about a tweet now because it's really funny, and I don't have a good joke of my own, so steal somebody else's. It was just like a side-by-side news headline, and it was like, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are back together after 17 years.

And then, like a totally separate news story that was like, cicadas are coming out from underground for the first time in 17 years. And somebody reply to this and just said we don't even need to tell the cicadas that they broke up. Which is the funniest.

[LAUGHTER]

Like I like the idea that the cicadas are like, what did we miss? And they were like-- we were like, oh, my god, so much. And they were like, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. And we're like, no, they're still together.

[LAUGHTER]

Here's the thing, no, not a fan. I actually really like JLo and A-Rod. You know that. You know that I like JLo and A-Rod Stan.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This week my guest is New York Times NBA and culture writer Sopan Deb, who writes some of my favorite stories about the sport that I otherwise wouldn't care that much about. And so we figured we'd have him on to see whether or not he can fix baseball. Sopan, take it away with your humble proposal to fix baseball.

SOPAN DEB: When I heard about the Astros cheating scandal with the trash cans, I thought it was one of the funniest things I've ever heard. Like the notion of like, trash cans. Like trash, that should just be the beginning. There should be like, you know, if you know that, you know, Kershaw's going to throw a curve ball, you should be able to like do a air horn, you know.

It would just be so-- it would just make the sport, I think a lot-- it would add another level of gamesmanship, but it also just be hilarious.

HANNAH KEYSER: Here's my question. Are you saying just get rid of all the rules around sign stealing and let chaos win?

SOPAN DEB: This would be a radical shift that I think could make the sport a lot more fun. And one of them like, yeah, make cameras part of the-- because even if you have a camera on the seat, you know, you still have a split second to get it there. That's really hard. You still had to-- you saw it. You don't lose the competitive nature of the sport. You still have it. It's just different.

Maybe you're having, hiring fans to hold up signs, or something, you know, on the third base line, or wherever.

HANNAH KEYSER: The fanatic. I want the fanatic holding up the sign.

SOPAN DEB: Yeah. That would be hilarious.

HANNAH KEYSER: So I think in conclusion, the reason this is a good rule is because everyone's already suspicious that everyone else is doing it. So why not just let teams do it openly in such a way that we can now factor it into the way we experience the sport. Yeah. I like it. Honestly, it's a good idea.

SOPAN DEB: Great. Well, I'll be expecting a royalty check from the MLB.

HANNAH KEYSER: Rob Manfred and Co.

[LAUGHTER]

So this week, we talked about the fact that a lot of people watching baseball, including my dad, are noticing that the batters are really bad. And they're like, what the hell is this [BLEEP]? Is it because the batters are so terrible or the pitchers good? And they mean that rhetorically. They need that in a [BLEEP] way. They [BLEEP] talking the batter.

But here's the thing, the pitchers are that good. And whether or not that's the style of baseball you want right now is a completely other conversation from whether or not you can just root for the Pitchers. And then, be rewarded for your rooting with the amazing pitching performances as long as none of the people we talked about today break because of the [INAUDIBLE].

- Go Pitchers.

[LAUGHTER]

[CHEERS]

[MUSIC PLAYING]