"MLB Milestones: Jen Powell, Roman Anthony, & Savannah Bananas.Stat of week RBIs" Ep. 622 TWIB 08.11.25

This week in baseball we're gonna talk about the fact that Jen Powell becomes the first female umpire in the history of Major League Baseball to umpire a Major League game, regular season. Roman Anthony gets paid. And is baseball going bananas? Yeah, we're gonna talk about the Savannah Bananas. And this week's Stat of the Week is When You Know Well, RBI's.

So here on Sunday, I don't know if the game is going on right now as we're doing this, but Jen Powell, who umpired the bases in the doubleheader yesterday between the Braves and the Marlins, is the home plate umpire. doing the home plate. She's the home plate. That will be a much discussed umpire chart tomorrow. am Well, that's interesting. Do you think so? am sure people will just be interested to see how she does. So when she went out yesterday, she did the bases and Clayton McCullough, the manager of the Marlins, went out and was very...

warm and welcoming her and everybody was really cool towards her, making her feel like, OK, this is this is good. Football was able to have female line judges years ago. Basketball did it 25 years ago. don't understand why it took baseball so long to get here. Well, it's interesting, Vin, you say, because one of the things I heard the some of the men that umpire this, she's got the physical strength to do that. And so the first thing you joke is like, how hard is it to be an umpire, the physical strength? But when you think about it, and I didn't really read up on this, I just thought about it.

It's 95 degrees. You're standing up for two to three hours. You've got to be in position and ready to do something to move. So there's a certain amount of physicality you need to be able to do that, particularly when you're on prior 150 games. There's no way that I could look at that and say that's something that the average man or woman could. Like, I would be worried about a man. They are worried about the physical aspects of a guy doing that. physical aspects of anybody doing that. I would not suggest that there's some kind of uniquely.

female disposition that would make them unable to do that. And of course you go back and all of us can remember if you think about some of the larger umpires that were around in the past that managed to do that now. So is umpiring a more physical sport today than it was? No.

Almost Cooperstown (02:58.35)
I don't think so. Let's be honest, it's probably easier. So good for Jen Powell. hopefully she's the start of a bunch of them because she got in. Until they bring in the Robo-Ums and displace half the umpire. It's interesting because you have an extra umpire when you have a double header like that in the crew because the umpire who does the home plate doesn't have to do the next game. I didn't realize that. It's too draining. It's too draining so that you get the game, you get the next game off and so she's part of that crew.

for that reason. good on her. And yes, Roman Anthony, who I keep talking about the fact that I met this kid six months ago. Right. He was a rookie looking to maybe make the team. I know. signs an eight year, 130 million dollar deal. Roman, come on the podcast. Come on. We saw you first. He was talking you up before anybody came. Yeah. What's thought of that? Everybody was talking that guy up. And that's what I said that day going, Roman, you're the next guy. You're the guy that made me pick the Red Sox to win the American League East, which doesn't.

so bad right now. more and more like a thing that could happen. So good on him. And when he's 21 years old and he gets an eight year deal, the hope on his part is that he's going to get another big deal when he turns 29 years Either he signs a big extension with the Red Sox when he's like 26, 27, or he hits free agency when he's 29 and signs a mega deal with somebody. No matter what, he's going to be very comfortable for the rest of his life.

now at this point pretty much independent of how well he plays baseball, which is amazing in and of itself. Before we talk about banana ball, I wanted to talk about a couple of things this week that went on and one of them that players and stats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You obviously saw that Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer.

cursor for the dot is insured for the blue jays faced off in a game on friday treated jurors they treated jersey so both of these guys have pitched the same out of years in the major leagues support pitch more than six innings in the both of them because what the six innings with a lot of kids a very met picture by the way hello thank you very much any major league starter these days and and so they first faced each other interestingly enough in two thousand eight

Almost Cooperstown (05:06.926)
the starting pitchers in a game where they replaced two hall of famers. Very good. That's right. So Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux were supposed to pitch and both of them were scratched. And who are these two guys, these two kids that nobody knew anything about and ended up being also hall of famers. Now that's a coincidence. So they've only faced each other. saw four times, which I find hard to believe how that could have happened. kind of makes sense though, just because Verlander went to the AL for so

So he was in the A.L. and then Scherzer came over to the end and was mostly in the end. Right. Right. And we had our friend John Negowski on the podcast and his book Diamond Duelist was about people. So I would think worth 50 years ago, those guys might have faced each other again, fewer teams and all that stuff. And you only play in your own league. They could have faced each other 15 times or 20 times in their career. Rare treat like that of them pitching against each other. So but that was something memorable. And obviously both of them will. Well, I don't know if though.

going to Coopers down the same year because they'd have to retire the same year. It's very possible. It'd be kind of cool though. But then again, know, Verlander still out there throwing 97 at 42. He doesn't look like he wants to retire. He was bad as season he's at. At this point, no, he's still got the velocity there. So but that was kind of a fun thing there. We almost got to see a no hitter this week.

We've had none, though, this year so far. that interesting? Yeah, yeah. No, no, no hitters this year. Last year they had several six by this time. So Gavin Williams and of course I was I was trying to get some work done the other day and I had the game. I was a Wednesday afternoon game at at City Field. all the way to the ninth inning. He gets two out. No, no, it was one out. One out. One out in the ninth inning and Juan Soto hits a ball that, you know, I thought the center fielder was going to catch and he did too.

but it just went over his glove and then it bounced back on the field. And so Soto was like running around second. said, is it a double? Is it a, it was a home run. And that ended the shutout, the no hitter, you know. He was removed from the game and then they Cardinals, or they still won that game. Well, yeah, cause the Mets don't win any games. So yeah, the, you know, that was the closest we've come this year at this point. And Gavin Williams looked pretty good that day, although anybody who's pitching against our Mets these days is kind of looking like they could, you know, the Cy Young award.

Almost Cooperstown (07:17.101)
What else do we see last week? saw Shay Langoliers, the catcher for the A's. It just feels like every other week the A's are having some play with unbelievable offensive performance. Yeah, Kurtz and Jacob Wilson doing all kinds of things. And who's the guy making the catches early in the year? The outfielder. The center fielder. Yeah, yeah. I'm forgetting his name off the of my head. But Langoliers hit two home runs in a game, excuse me, three home runs in a game for the second time in his career, which is

OK, catcher hitting catchers probably don't do that. Well, as a matter of fact, it's only been four and two of the Mermets, Travis Darnoe and Gary Carter would not have guessed our now. Yeah. What's wrong with this picture? Gary Carter, Johnny Bench, Travis Darnoe and Shay Langley or is either going to be up to 50 or he's in very good company. And for good measure, he had another home run yesterday. Did Langley or so he's been he's been pumping him. And yeah, for a a bad team, the A's have a lot of exciting players.

They just need some pictures. They did not play in Sacramento. Exactly. And Spencer Strider, I was noticing just watching him, you know, watching his stats the other day. He's got 14 decisions in his 15 starts, which is weird to begin with. That just doesn't happen. You don't get that many decisions normally. He's five and nine, though, in those decisions. Right. This is Spencer Strider, the guy who was going to. Cy Young. Cy Young candidate and a 1-3-0 whip, which I.

I guess it's pretty bad for a guy who's as good as his strider at this point. just one of those snake bit years for the Braves where like, you know, and we know that now is met fans going when it goes bad, sometimes it just goes rotten. Right. Nothing works and nothing works. And we've talked about the Mets a couple of times. So they are on the way to losing their 11th at a 12 game. The flip side is your Brewers and everything works. You trade for Andrew Vaughn and he turns into Superman.

I think the Brewers are something like 33 and 16 or something like that. And they're crazy good. They're heading towards 30 games or 500. They have a five game lead over the Cubs when they were neck and neck a couple of weeks ago, just like the Mets were in first place over the Phillies. And now we're looking up at four and a half games or more between them and the There's still time to change, but there's rapidly less. So, yeah, it just was just an amazing stretch of

Almost Cooperstown (09:35.286)
futility from a few teams and for those same teams they're playing the Brewers this weekend who are the hottest team in baseball. They're on an eight game winning streak and they come home and they're going to face after the Braves come in for three games they play the Mariners who have won seven in a row or the second hottest team in baseball. So whoever they're playing right now is playing good and that makes it hard to win. makes it very hard to win. get anything done. now today on Sunday and we'll hear about this later your sister, my daughter Haley is

at the Savannah Bananas game at Coors Field in Denver. They sold out whole weekend, by the way. And she gave me the whole rundown on buying tickets. How much were they? So not all the tickets are $35, which is what I mistakenly thought. are $35 tickets, but of course you can pay up and get. think she got a $60 ticket and it was only by lottery. So somebody that she knows didn't get the lottery, but she got the lottery and allowed her to buy five tickets.

which she did and then there are $75. think that's the highest level ticket that they have for an event that is expected to take about two hours. The banana games take nothing more than two hours longer than that. They not only just selling out Coors Field, they out everywhere. They sold out Camden Yards. They're going to play Yankee Stadium in September, not at City Field, interestingly enough this year. And they're sold out completely for those games.

And so it's started me thinking as I want to do going, okay, this banana thing is bananas. And I, I, I originally commented on banana ball, this sort of like deep dish pit pizza in Chicago, know, Chicago deep dish pizza, which is good in and of itself, but it shouldn't be called pizza because it's really not pizza the way pizza is its own thing. And that's what banana ball is to me is its own thing. It's not baseball, major league style. It's right, right. It's not major league baseball. And so I'm not, I think it's a fun thing to do and to go to as an event.

But as a replacement for baseball and the reason I say that is we've got a collective bargaining agreement that is going to come up at the end of the 26 season. And if the owners do go through with a lock on the players fighting for a salary cap, I hope they don't do this. But that is a distinct possibility. There will be no baseball in twenty twenty seven unless you like banana ball. And how big could the bananas get? Right. Top bananas. Right. Right. They're the only ones around. So is any major league park going to rent its its

Almost Cooperstown (11:53.198)
You know, we're to want to do that. Exactly. Yes. The answer is to put people in there. And the other thing is that Major League Baseball apparently has made outreaches to try to buy the bananas. Right. Because they would love to fold them in. And Jesse's on. I'm not selling it. I'm like, yeah, don't sell. Right. Like, like make them barrel these guys. You're like, don't just make them think that they got something to worry about here so that maybe they do something smart, like not have a players lockout and they keep playing baseball because people on the fringe. Right. That that they're not.

super big baseball fans. People that are not, you they're not following the game day to day. They're not paying attention to the, you know, they're not major league baseball fans. They're not going to know how their team is doing outside of maybe if they're making the playoff run, they'll hear about it. Right. Right. And so these people be happy to come to a bananas game.

You know, once a year for 40 bucks and you watch a baseball game. You're only going to one game a year anyway for one in an off season. won't really seem that different to you if you're a casual fan. Right. It'll be like, yeah, I go and I to a game like this year with the banana game and yeah, I'll go again next year. was fun. They did a lot of, you know, goofy stuff and it's, it's, it's, it's fun. It's a fun event, but it's not baseball. It's not, it's not a contest. talked about this. Right. It's not, you're not watching a Savannah banana game because you were interested in the outcome of the game.

Whereas when I'm watching a baseball game, that is primarily what I'm interested in. you're a fan of a particular team. wins the game? Even when I'm not watching, even if I'm watching a Sunday night baseball game and the Mets aren't playing, I'm still interested in who wins that game. There's a stake there. The Savannah Bay games are inherently steakless. It's closer to like a pro wrestling match.

Which is fine. Pro wrestling is fun. That's fixed though. I don't think the banana games are fixed. I don't think they're fixed either. But more what I'm saying is it's about the spectacle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is a show. Right. In terms of a guy playing baseball on stilts. That's a show. Whereas in pro wrestling, who wins and loses matters for the narrative. And Savannah bananas who wins and loses doesn't matter because that's not what it's about. So it's not like, you know, for older.

Almost Cooperstown (13:50.094)
fans like like me, you know, this is not the Globetrotters version in baseball where the Globetrotters beat the heck out of the Washington generals, you know, a million to one. Right. They never they never win. No, they they don't lose. Right. Because they're playing like they're bringing a team that comes along. not like a team made up of people local to the area. know, they're seeking out really good players that have personalities. And some of these guys that are on the teams that play the bananas, firefighters or some guys have guys that have two million Instagram followers.

for a guy who's not even on the main team. There's a YouTuber that I watch. just he did like sketch baseball comedy all the time. He was doing little little skits about baseball. He got picked up by the Bananas and now he's playing for the Bananas because he was a college baseball player and he was and he had a YouTube following. So now he merges it in and plays on the Bananas. So I think I think the major league players are watching all this with a raised eyebrow going, wow, it would be kind of fun to do some of the things that they do because these guys like to have a good time. But.

The stakes they're playing for the game they're playing is not banana ball. It'd be good all-star game. Tell me. Think about it. That's the set of it. But that should be the all-star game. The all-star game. OK, maybe you have two all-star games. You can have one for the pomp and circumstance of the all-star game. Just because, I can understand if some people would be annoyed if the all-star game had a part where all of the pitchers and the infielder started doing a synchronized dance before throwing the pitch.

Like I could understand there'd be some baseball fans that would not be down with that. But like I could also imagine do away, do away with the home run and play a banana game instead. And I guarantee you that would get a bigger viewership than the home run derby. Well, it's funny when you we don't want to get off on an all star game tangent. But I also think the all star game could be milled into Cooperstown weekend. I'm not sure why the Cooperstown weekend is like 10 days after the all star game. Everybody's already thinking about baseball. You've got this break of days.

Why not figure out how to do it together? So baseball sort of has the stage for everything for that week. they've never done it and the pomp and circumstance of doing the Hall of Fame ceremony doesn't necessarily meld well with the all-star game. now with banana ball. No doubt about that. So let's talk about this week's stat of the week. stat you hate and you like to sort of come back at going, it's overvalued.

Almost Cooperstown (16:13.473)
think is what you said. I'm let you, I'm going to let you take that. Well, I think we're talking about RBI's. When the batter's action results in the run being scored. So that's a hit, a walk, a sack, fly, ground out, anything that isn't an error or a run not scoring. Right. The problem with RBI's and this is where most people look at it and they go, are they are core component to offensive evaluation. That's what they are traditionally.

Batting average at home runs in RBI's. If you were looking at a player, that was the determination on whether or not he was good. And I think in some respects, we've maybe gone a little too far the other way in saying RBI's are bad. Thank you. But RBI's are largely a product of team success, not individual. You can't have a lot of RBI's, as many RBI's driving in guys that never get on base in the first place. Right. Exactly. Francis and a guy like Francisco Lindor could

if he's when he was batting well out of the leadoff slot, it would inherently get more RB eyes if he was hitting second or third in the lineup, but it was best for the team for him to be hitting in the leadoff spot. So where you are in the lineup also dictates the number of RBI attempts you get essentially. you know, there's a reason why the guys that, know, are the greatest RBI people in the history of baseball are.

all Hall of Famers or should all be Hall of Famers. Because guess what? You still have to be good enough to drive them in. So of the top 12 guys I noticed, there's only three guys that aren't in the Hall of Fame in the all time list of RBI's and that would be Albert Pujols, who's only not in the Hall of Fame because his vote hasn't come up yet. He's going to be. Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, right? The same guys we talk about all the time. know, so those guys, you know, are certainly had Hall of Fame playing careers, know, despite all the other stuff.

And so it rewards the guys that, basically they're, hitting in positions of stress and delivering. And that's why I think the RBI got undervalued the same way that we talked about recently, the saves were becoming undervalued a little bit closer. You're still pitting, you're hitting and pitching in the most clutch situations in the game. There's a guy on base, he's in scoring position and you get a hit to knock them in. Yeah. That's a big deal. Yeah.

Almost Cooperstown (18:24.397)
Now granted, argument that you can make is that that's just a function of you were the guy at the plate with the ability to do so. you did it. did it. You did it. And that's that's that's what I'm So here's the other thing that crossed my mind about this going. So we know we talk about how runners in scoring position is such an important statistic. Right. And again, back to the mess for a second. Maybe the worst team in all of baseball. So it seems with runners in scoring position. So how?

Can RBI's not be an important stat? And then how can we complain about runners in the scoring position being bad at that? How do you have both? I think the issue is that when we're talking about RBI's being a bad stat, we're not finishing that sentence. RBI's are a bad stat for comparing players against one another. If you have one player and he got 100 RBI's and you have another player that got 75 RBI's, you can't use that as a metric to determine which one He was better than the other Right, right, because that's not something you could look at.

So that's where it's a bad statistic because I can't look at, know, I can't, would you say Stan Musial was a better hitter than Ty Cobb because he had seven more careers RBI's than Ty Cobb? Like, but doesn't really, I would- No, as a sole evaluator, I would never say that. And it's a derivative stat as you said before. and so I think that's where the whole RBI's are a bad stat for comparing, because you're not being honest if you don't finish that, for comparing players. Because-

As we talk about, RBI's are largely a thing of looking at a team player. They're good at looking to explain the events of a game. They're not good for comparing the events of a season between two players. No, but between the player and himself, by the way. So if you have one year where you drive in 75 runs, and then the next year you have a good year and you drive in 104 runs. So now you have this difference going, okay, so which guy are you?

Are you the 75 RBI guy or the 104 guy? that drives in 100 plus runs every year does say something about the type of player you are. That means you're constantly up with guys on base and you're delivering. And to be fair, that chances are if you're driving in 100 runs a year every year,

Almost Cooperstown (20:21.613)
your team is pretty good. That's another big part of it. Your team is pretty Let's put it this way, you're playing for the Colorado Rockies, the Chicago There's nobody getting 100 RBI's. Right, because you might not have 100 plate appearances with a guy in scoring position. Right, right. So I think that's why you have to be careful about it, but it does honor consistency. And basically, if you compare runners in scoring position statistics, they will match up well with guys that have lots of RBI's.

Unsurprisingly. In the same way, because you can even go deeper, this is the same reason we have devalued RBIs. We don't really keep track of game winning RBIs. Well, so that was a stat and I wrote about this the most, I think I called my post from two years ago, the most useless baseball statistic of all time.

and that was game winning RBI's, which started in 1980. So in all the history of baseball, it took them over 100 years to say, okay, let's have this game winning RBI stat. So in the game winning RBI, the guy that gets the RBI that gave his team the lead, they never relinquished. Right there, I'm already bored of it.

OK, so they did this. So so a guy would come up in the first inning and he'd hit a solo home run and they won the game seven to three and he got the game winning RBI. Right. Stupid. That's right. So and there were other situations where, it was it was that silly. Game winning RBI should only count if the hit gave your team the lead in the eighth inning or later. Well, that, it's a much more interesting statistics. they did it for nine seasons. Right. And they ended it after the 1988 season.

And here's why Keith Hernandez should be in the Hall of Fame. Just another reason. So the all time leader in game winning RBI's for a career is Keith Hernandez with 129. He also has the all time single season record in 1985. Well, as a member of the New York Mets where he drove in 20, he had 24 game winning RBI's. We got it. We got the silver bullet for his Hall of Fame. So he is, he has these two things that nobody else has.

Almost Cooperstown (22:15.629)
or will ever have. Because we're not tracking it anymore. Again, so that RBI, so they got rid of that. They didn't actually start counting RBIs for real until 1920, which is interesting. So the dead ball era ends and really. It would have been lot easier to count in the dead ball era. Although, well, they didn't have that. They did go back. So somebody went back retroactively because I started thinking, well, wait, Babe Booth started playing like in 1915. So how about all his notes?

they went retroactively back to 1907 and counted on. So what happened before 1907, they don't have as much, you know, surety in the data. So you go to Retro Sheet and all these places that sort of recreate the games from, you know, newspaper articles and try to decipher, they get it right? Even because, you know, even official scoring and all that Sometimes they just get things wrong. They get things wrong. So and then so by 1920, they called RBI's a stat. And then shortly after that, the Triple Crown came around.

Right. that incorporates RBI's home runs and batting average. Batting average and home runs are much more clear delineations of individual success. Your team can't influence how many home runs you hit. Your team can't influence how good your average is. But your team does influence how many RBI's you have. Right. Right. And the greatest offensive season in the history of Major League Baseball, arguably, 1930.

Hack Wilson of the Chicago Cubs at the time hit 56 home runs. Wow, that little fire plug. And he drove in 190 runs.

That's pretty good. a hundred and ninety. Lou Gehrig has the American League record with a hundred and eighty four. It great to be the guys in front of Harkwellsson that season. They don't get any credit for that. They had to be on enough to drive in a hundred and ninety times. The Cubs lost the World Series that year. We knew that. Because that's what the Cubs did for a long time in 2016. yeah, I love the stat. I as an older fan, it was really bugging me that people were trying to divide. And I understood the idea.

Almost Cooperstown (24:09.325)
of why it's a derivative stat and why it's so dependent on what else happens on your And I think as long as you're not using it to compare players, you're fine. think that's really the area where it becomes problematic because you can't look at that. Especially because like what if they're batting in different places in the order? Are you going to knock the leadoff hitter in the lineup because he had less RBIs than Jose Ramirez? That doesn't make any sense. I mean, when you have a list that starts with Hank Aaron and you've got, you know,

A-Rod and Ty Cobb and Musial and Garry and Cap Anson and Jimmy Fox and Willie Mays, Mel Ott, Ted, I mean, come on. Right. If it was a bad statistic, it wouldn't be only Hall of Famers on the list. Right. Right. And the guys that there'd be guys on there that don't make any sense. Babe Ruth is second, by the way. Hank Aaron won that one, too. You know, so I know when he he got him for the home run record, people he was sneaking up on the on the RBI side and nobody even noticed. yeah, he went past Babe Ruth. People didn't even make as big a deal about him getting the all time RBI record.

certainly as the home run record. that kind of also gives another RBI's are never as important as home runs because a home run was like you were the home run. Nobody's the RBI king. Yeah. Well, Hank Aaron is. But anyway, it's a stat that I think we should pay more attention to. And that's going to use a guy that gets a lot of RBI's. They could use anybody.