Baseball, Wally Moon, Los Angeles Coliseum discussed on Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast

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And I think there are many examples of that type, like moonshot, for example, a moonshot, which is I guess it's meaning has morphed in a sense, but it was originally inspired by Wally moon and the fact that before Dodger Stadium opened and the Dodgers had moved out to the West Coast that the team needed a temporary ballpark and it used the Los Angeles coliseum, but that had not been designed for baseball. And so you had a left field foul pole that was 250 feet away from home plate and because pitchers hated that. Naturally, they put up a big fence and therefore, while moon, Dodgers left handed hitter, changed his swing so that he could hit these high fly balls to the opposite field, which were then called moonshots because they would maybe go over that fence. And now I guess we say moonshot mostly just like for any kind of towering fly ball. I don't know that it's meaning has shifted completely, but sometimes it's just like, oh, that was a bomb. That was a moon shot. Like, I don't know if people even think about the arc of it as being so specific, but I don't think most people think that's why we call it moon shots or remember while he moon necessarily. Maybe they think like, oh, he hit that to the moon. It's a moon shot, right? So those meanings can change or like the etymologies that we have in our heads if we have any etymology in our heads at all. Those shift over time. But I think there are a lot of remnants and fragments like that in baseball. So yeah. Yeah, we're going to get emails done. We're going to get we're going to get a bunch of emails. And that's fine. Because I'm sure that there are things that we're not thinking of and will go, ah, that, yes. Yeah, I'll link to this cut for peace because it includes some other candidates like that. On deck and in the whole, which was probably originally in the hold, I mean, these are not terms. You used to have to stand in a hole. Yeah. You should be playing. There used to be a hole, and then they were like, that's dangerous. We should cover that up. Just make them stand there. This is one of these cases where people aren't even necessarily sure how these migrating to baseball and I guess Scott Boris would be happy with the nautical terminology here and then like bullpen, the origins of bullpen are disputed and what else banjo hit her bush league like all these band box. I mean, the people think of an actual physical bandbox when they say the word band box probably not. No one really uses band boxes anymore, or like around the horn. Yeah. No one really thinks about why they say around the horn or maybe they think about it and just don't know why, but that was like, you know, another nautical term probably like cape corn. Rounding cape horn, and so we say around the horn, in you don't even think about these things for the most part. And I like that. I like that they're just these remnants of earlier times that we all just take for granted, and you learn them if you're someone who's growing up as a baseball fan. Yeah. You're exposed to them very early on and you just accept, sure, that's what that's called. I'll never question that until you turn 35 and you realize, hello. I don't know why that was called that. Why was that called that? So that's always a fun little process. I'm still back on thinking about how wild it is that people don't know what the same icon is for anymore. Yeah, can't say I miss floppy disks, particularly. I like having a lot of storage space, but yeah, floppy just were terrible. And they broke all the time. They were very temperature sensitive. Remember how much more temperature sensitive the computing experience used to be. I mean, I know it's not good for them to be hot still, but you really had to I was like taking care of a very particular plant, you know? Yeah. Like the floppy disks that we grew up with, we're no longer floppy, right? By our time, originally they were floppy. It's really floppy. I guess maybe my aunt when I was very young had archaic computer that really did have the big old actually floppy, floppy disks. But by the time we got computers, we're talking about the three and a half inch ones that were not floppy at all. And we were still calling them floppy because that was the term that was just so in use. Anyway, if you want to hear more of our ramblings about technology and how it's changed, we did a whole bonus pod for our Patreon supporters about that couple months ago. So that's out there for you. Yeah, where I sung the praises of no longer having to defrag your hard drive. What a good thing. How about that? All right. Question from Matt hall Patreon supporter who writes in response to Miguel Cabrera getting intentionally walked after his 2999th hit should batters be allowed to reject and automatic intentional walk. You made a comment about how Mickey wasn't able to try and reach for one off the plate because of the new intentional walk rule. What if a batter could refuse this and force the pitcher to throw four balls anyway? I believe there is maybe a joke askey proposal out there that the batter should be able to reject the intentional walk and then if the intentional walk is done over the batter's objection, it's like there's a steeper penalty that I think you get an extra base or something. You get two bases instead. So what do you think? Should there be either steeper penalties or just the option to say? Nope, I do not accept that declined the intentional walk and I will swing away. I'm struggling to know what my answer would be because I think in modern baseball how many guys do you think would really take advantage of being able to say no thank you, please throw to me rather than give me a base. I mean, first of all, I think that that would be a decision that would probably be made in conjunction not just with the player, but with the staff, right? Because if you're issuing an intentional walk you are doing it because you think that the batter behind that guy often you're thinking the batter behind that guy has a less favorable matchup as a less good hitter, some combination of those things. And so I guess it would probably be on the one hand it would be dismissed fairly often because you're like, no, throw to me, the better guy, but you still have the advantage of being on base, so I guess, I don't know, how often do we think this would happen because I do think that there's something about there is something cowardly about it, but there's also obviously like good strategy in play there, and we like strategy. We're not huge fans of cowardice. Though we are all subject to cowardice at points in our lives. So we're not especially judgmental about cowardice, but we don't want to promote it. As a base state. So I don't know, maybe I'm just saying words while I try to decide what I think about this. I don't think it would happen often. I don't think it would happen very often. I think they'd be like, yeah, I'll just take my base. Right. And they probably should just take to take a risk. As we often discuss the intentional walk is usually not decision, right? And so it follows, then, that declining, the intentional work would not usually be the sounds they were metric decision. And so probably teams would just have a policy or maybe there would be a hurried consultation, you know? And you could slide rules out. Right. So I think you would usually have it declined and this would not make any meaningful difference. I love the idea of defining it because how much fun would that be? Oh my God. No. The body language fight me. Yeah. The body language alone. That would be awesome. I mean, what would be cooler than that, saying, no, I am not taking my base or I will take it by force. You will not give me this base..

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