Music

Good morning and welcome to episode 552 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from Baseball

Perspectus presented by the play index at baseballreference.com. I am Ben Lindbergh of

Grantland.com joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Hello. So we had a day

without baseball. We have another day without baseball coming up. So we are, as we've

promised for a while, going to get to some listener emails on a day when we don't have

new baseball to talk about and we will preview the championship series tomorrow with a guest

should be good. But for today, we will catch up on some of the listener email backlog.

We will do mostly playoff themed and playoff team themed emails. Some of you have been

sending non-playoff themed emails that will probably help us once the playoffs are over

and we will revisit them. But for now, playoffs, playoffs all the time.

Also, you can ask the Kirshah one, by the way, because you wanted to know whether you

should ask the Kirshah one. Go ahead. Ask the Kirshah one. But also, I just wanted to

say it's a fun play index. Oh, good. I don't know. Maybe it won't be a fun play index,

but it is a heck of a play index. Right. Okay. Well, let me start with this observation

then before we get into the playoffs from Scott who noticed something that once you,

once Scott brought it to our attention, it's interesting and it's hard to stop thinking

about it. So he says, why do most pitchers lean in to get the sign from the catcher when

they're in the stretch? Surely they're capable of seeing the signs from a standing position.

In fact, most pitchers take sign standing up when out of the wind up, only to hunch over

awkwardly once a runner reaches base. If it is to help them pick to first, wouldn't they

have the ball in their throwing hand? If they're actually stretching to relieve back tension

...