Music

Good morning and welcome to episode 723 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from baseball

Prospectus presented by the play index at baseballreference.com. I am Ben Lindbergh of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of baseball

Prospectus Hello. Hi, how are you? Okay. Hey, in case you were getting your hopes up, the brewers in the pirates played a 13-in-game with expanded

rosters and on at least one side literally nothing at stake, but they only got to eight pitchers each. We did not add to the nine-pitcher game,

Tally. That's too bad because it's probably too late to call Ned Garver again, where we are right now, which is too bad. I don't know how we're going to follow him. Tough act. All right. Glad we can, I feel like I can say, Daily Podcast again with more legitimacy. I feel like a fraud.

We're on of two. We've got a run of two now. Yeah. We skipped that one day. All the intention was there. Yeah, we didn't skip it. Everyone else skipped it. Yeah. Yeah. So we're back on track. Yeah. All right. I've got a few things to say. Do you have anything to say? No. Okay. So one thing I wanted to say yesterday, I brought up Sean Chacon and his incredible 2004 season, because we were talking about it.

How long a pitcher could last with a high ERA if he kept getting wins or good results. And so I brought up Shacon's crazy 2004 season when he had a seven plus ERA and walked as many betters as he struck out and still saved 35 games and was the Rockies closer all year. So the one pitcher who got a save for the Rockies that season who was not Sean Chacon is.

Oh, let me guess what year you will not cast 2004 Armando Reno so no. The one pitcher is Gene Waysau who is a guy I have been wanting to bring up on the podcast for a while. And I was trying to figure out a connection. And this is an extremely tenuous one that I found. So I'm going to bring about now.

So this guy was called up by the Dodgers earlier this year, which you might have missed. I imagine most people missed. And I think he has the most interesting backstory of any big leader this year.

He definitely has the best Wikipedia page of any major league baseball player. So this guy he's 34. He's a right-handed reliever. He's from Taiwan. And he was a big time prospect.

He made the baseball America top 100 list four straight years 2001 through 2004. He peaked at number 15 on the list in 2001. And then he went down and then he went up again to 24 in 2004.

So serious prospect was signed out of a Taiwan after high school as an amateur. So it was sort of an unusual way that he got here.

And he made the majors. He pitched for the Rockies 2003, 2004, 2005. And then he's been this journeyman with just a crazy journey for the last several years.

When he was called up, I talked to the Dodgers and I asked if I could interview him. And they told me that he didn't really speak English. And I asked if they had a translator. And they said no. So that was the end of that.

And maybe they just didn't want him to do interviews, which I wouldn't blame them for.

I'm sure you could get a translator been by the way. I'm sure there's somebody who listens who could translate for you if you want to try again.

Yeah, probably. But email podcast at baseballperspector.com. Sure. That's Mandarin. Yes. My wife could do it for you.

No, I don't even have to have anyone email us then. I'd rather just wait till he's 89 years old and call him on Skype. That's the way that we interview ball players.

So he was out of baseball. He pitched for the Dodgers in 2007. And then he disappeared. He pitched for the Brother Elephants, which is an excellent name for a baseball team in the Chinese professional baseball league in 2008.

And then 2009, he got into trouble. So he after the Taiwan series, he'd been under investigation for game fixing allegations.

The prosecutors announced that he had been accepting unsuitable benefits, including wine and sex from the mafia. And therefore had allegedly agreed to throw two CPBL games in August 2009.

...