2022 MLB General Season Chatter: Ghost Runners On The Half-Billion Dollar Infield

BREAKING: The Seattle Mariners are finalizing a deal to acquire right-hander Luis Castillo from the Cincinnati Reds, sources tell ESPN.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 30, 2022

Good for Seattle

didnt expect that, tbh

Reds and Mariners have traded a few times in the past few seasons. I think it is reparations for signing away Junior (which in the end really did not work for anyone).

Christian Yelich hasn't been hitting a lot of HRs but he's been pretty good since he got moved to leadoff

Cano DFA’d from his third team this year.

looking at that list of un-vaxxed players and that's a hell of a lot of melanin

*hell of a **lack** of melanin, obv

not necessarily. vaccine uptake among minorities was famously tardy although tbf i think it's pretty much evened out now in most places

Man, I didn't realize how much Cano had fully stopped hitting.

xp true, but i look at that list and see dumb white guy after dumb white guy

I know Spencer Strider's stache is what most people talk about but I can't get over those massive Earl Campbell thighs.

sheesh, what a disaster series for the Brewers, they blew 3 late leads vs. the last place Pirates and got walked off twice

The Angels hit 7 home runs today and still lost to the A’s 8-7.

The @Angels are the first team in MLB history to hit 7 solo home runs and score no other runs in a game.

They are also just the 6th team all-time to hit 7 homers in a game and lose.

— Stats By STATS (@StatsBySTATS) August 4, 2022

ohtani needs to get to a real team asap they are so embarrassing

mike trout zero career playoff wins. shohei ohtani zero career playoff appearances. the angels are a crisis of a franchise

you gotta hand it to matt carpenter. his OPS is above 1.200!

unless something goes haywire, he's a shoo-in for Comeback player of the year, I think?

Unlikeliest comeback player, considering how he bad he fared the last two years.

Which team would win a seven-game series?

A. 26-man roster of only MLB pitchers
B. 26-man roster of only MLB position players

(for these purposes Madison Bumgarner and Shohei Ohtani are ineligible)

— Justin Wick (@justwick) August 6, 2022

just thinking this through a bit. one side of the equation is easy to figure out. if it's a team full of pitchers vs a team full of position players, then half of the innings are going to go as usual - the pitchers will throw to the position players, and let's say the position players put up an average of 5 runs per game.

it's the other side that's more difficult. how well will the team of pitchers hit against a team of position players throwing? can the pitchers score more than 5 runs per game?

i don't know if it's possible in baseball-ref (no longer have a sub), but i wonder if there's a way to get the stats for position players throwing to pitchers, prior to the DH

That's a great question...It might not make a difference, but would it be worth knocking that down a full run to four runs a game, since presumably it wouldn't be hard to trot out one guy after another airing it out like Josh Hader for an inning? You could send out eight fresh arms every game.

here's a fun list of all the stats of position players pitching: https://www.baseball-reference.com/friv/fieldPitch.shtml

if i make very basic calcs are right, in the post-integration era the ERA of position players is 6.29. but that was position players throwing to other position players, overwhelmingly. if they were throwing to pitchers, their ERA would be better. but how much better?

also, you have to figure out how to get a 7-game series of innings (if it goes that far) from your position players.

i'm starting to think Pitchers is the correct answer

but would it be worth knocking that down a full run to four runs a game

oh for sure! Yeah, 4 seems like a better assumption. i figured somewhere between 4 and 5, but yeah, if you're facing a team with 26 pitchers, their pitching is probably going to be above average!

oh shit, though, something i didn't think about -- the defense of the team of pitchers is going to be awful. there are going to be tons of errors, possibly a lot of injuries. it's gonna be awkward out there. that might raise the runs per game back up to 5 (or even higher) for the position players

Yeah, I think defense would probably sink the pitchers in the end. There'd be no such thing as a routine grounder/fly ball.

I farmed the question out to a, ah, higher authority...don't give me grief!

apart from the fact that very few of today's pitchers can hit at all, imagine the chaos that would result from making one of them play catcher

The higher authority answered immediately:

Bill -- Question someone on my message board passed along from Twitter this morning:

Which team would win a seven-game series?

A. 26-man roster of only MLB pitchers
B. 26-man roster of only MLB position players

(for these purposes Madison Bumgarner and Shohei Ohtani are ineligible)

Does the answer seem obvious to you, or do you find it as intriguing as I do? I wonder if defense--the team of pitchers also has to man the other eight positions in the field--would tip the scales towards the position players?
Asked by: Phil Dellio
Answered: 8/7/2022

That could be a good point. An infield of four relief pitchers could be ugly.

Your query excluded Shohei Ohtani and Madison Bumgarner, but there are a lot of good-hitting pithers in every era--Zack Greinke, whose career OPS is 75 points higher than Bumgarner's, Jacob deGrom Grom, Noah Syndergaard, Adam Wainwright. It might come down to which pitchers you chose. On the other hand, there are also a lot of position players who were pitchers (and good pitchers) in college--ie Bobby Dalbec, Jon Papelbon, Mark McGwire. So I don't know.

In re your argument...baseball is not 50% pitching; it is less than that. It is 50% offense, 50% defense, but defense includes fielding, so the pitching is just 40-42%. So the batters/fielders might win, 58-42.

(Why does he include Jonathan Papelbon as one of the position players who was a good pitcher in college?)

Stroman was also a pretty solid middle infield in college. He’d definitely be an exception to the terrible defence assumption.

when hunter greene was drafted, there was some question of whether the reds would let him also play short

unfortunately (for us) if you can consistently throw triple-digit fastballs you get that choice taken away from you

I think the position players would win. I know pitchers maybe aren’t horrible at fielding but I suspect every grounder to 3rd would be a base hit. Plus a team of pitchers would probably be the slowest guys on the field.

The more I think about this, the players win in no more than five games. Maybe the pitchers get one lights-out start, scratch out a run, and manage to win one.

As KM says, half the game proceeds as normal, except a) the pitchers' side has a surplus of fresh arms (an advantage, but probably not a huge one), and b) they've got a defense that's sub-Bad New Bears. If you think about how many good pitchers don't succeed because they're stuck on a team with lousy defense, and then compare what "lousy defense" means for even the worst defensive teams and what it might mean for a defense solely consisting of pitchers, I suspect the pitchers would be hard-pressed to hold the everyday players to single digits.

On the other side, you'd have a) a normal defense, b) position players who can probably at least throw mediocre fastballs for strikes, and c) a lineup of mostly terrible hitters trying to hit those mediocre fastballs. Maybe they get a run or two a game, but I think that'd be it.

I suppose I could plug this into OOTP baseball and get a good idea of how this might play out.

Ok. So someone did think of this back in 2015.

https://baseballcontinuum.com/2015/09/19/breaking-ootp-episode-1-pitchers-vs-hitters/"> https://baseballcontinuum.com/2015/09/19/breaking-ootp-episode-1-pitchers-vs-hitters/

A lot of the post is dealing with bugs caused by this weird set up.
But. Played out to 162 game season, the position player team would come out on too 97-65

Interesting! If you put any credence in that, James was almost dead on (.599 vs. .580).

i think every single pitcher would become injured. the last half of the season would all be losses via forfeit for the pitchers. Dr. James Andrews would be cackling maniacally

I haven't read the accompanying text, so maybe this is explained--otherwise, looking at the box score, there's the very obviously unrealistic simulation of both teams making exactly one error.

He notes after the full season that Greinke was a god awful shortstop

i've mentioned this before and i will surely keep on mentioning it, but -- while there are obvious exceptions -- major league ballplayers are *incredible* fielders

for the most part we fixate on how they're hitting, because in most cases that is what makes them stars. and over the course of an endless season it's not like they get too much time to practice defense. but they are so fucking good and we largely take it for granted

also: tremendous work by jordan montgomery and the cardinals this weekend

Mets and Yankees now have identical records of 70-39. Going to be a fun stretch run.

I was certain that 26 pitchers was the clear answer, but there are a lot of good posts here and now I'm on the fence. I'm still leaning toward the pitchers because 1) most pitchers are great athletes were were also great hitters in high school and perhaps also college. Most of the hitters that will be pitching to them won't be better than high school/college level. 2) Pitchers take a lot of fielding drills, not only related to their position but also e.g. shagging fly balls, making long throws. Whereas I don't think hitters don't do any pitching drills. 3) Even the hitters with pitching experience from HS/college, or who can simply throw hard, aren't conditioned (or are no longer conditioned) to do it for multiple innings or on a daily basis without getting hurt.

Matt Carpenter left tonight's game with a left foot fracture.

— New York Yankees (@Yankees) August 9, 2022

That makes me sad more than most baseball injuries.

they are so fucking good and we largely take it for granted

yeah. any given ground-ball play would, if you yourself had made it, be one of the most memorable ahletic achievements of your life

Chris Sale broke his wrist riding his bike and had surgery. He will miss the rest of the season.

— Chris Cotillo (@ChrisCotillo) August 9, 2022

um

chris u all right dawg