No, I haven't looked at it.   Johnny Pesky. . .who by the way could talk a good bit himself once you got him started, since we are on that topic. . . but Pesky had read that article and asked me about it years later.   I could go back and look at it.   I always mean to write a book about all the stuff I was wrong about years ago. . . .

 Thanks.   I'm old enough to remember Cardinal fans who were upset that the Cardinals traded 18-game winner Ernie Broglio for an outfielder who hit .260-something.  

 Whatever happens within a marriage or within a family is probably not relevant to the syndrome I was trying to understand there.   It probably just confuses the issue to mix them up, and thus leads us away from understanding rather than toward understanding.  

 

I have a sister to whom I was very close as a child, so much so that many people thought we were twins; she's actually 18 months older than I am.  It's family lore that when I was a little boy people often couldn't understand what I was saying, so they would ask Nell what I was saying because Nell could always understand me.  

 

I have another relative. . ..by the way, it is odd to remember people when they were 18 and see them now when they are 80.   But anyway, I have another relative who was a compulsive talker as a young woman, and married a man who was ALSO a compulsive talker; we used to joke that when they had a kid he would never be able to get a word in edgewise.  But over the course of the 60 years they have been married, she entirely took over, and he largely stopped talking.  By the time they were 70, which was 10 years ago, you had to get him alone and ask him direct questions to get him to say anything.   Again. . .none of this relevant to the question I was asking.  

 Going to arrange an inquisition, are you?  

 Well. . .(a) I don't remember such an article.   Does anybody?   (b) I don't think we are close to understanding how to maximize pitcher effectiveness by usage patterns.   I think we're still sort of wandering around without a compass.   

 No idea. 

 That would be the way that some very different sportswriter would address the subject.  

 Thanks for asking. . .reminds me that I need to send a follow-up e-mail to somebody.

 I have heard of Pesapallo, but I have not seen it.   I don't quite understand the logic by which people trace the foul pitch issue back to the three true outcomes mindset, but I do agree that there is an issue there that needs to be addressed.  

 Perhaps they need a Minor adjustment? 

 I actually polled that exact question in the off-season, before this season.  At that time the vote went to Acuna, although I would have chosen Soto.    It may be too close to call.  Intuitively, I guess I like Soto better.  

 ???   Anybody else seen this? 

 

I don't know, but I'm glad they don't.   You're second-guessing a decision that was made probably in the early 1870s.   It's difficult to guess exactly how the logic went at the time.   But counting a walk as a Total Base would basically just deprive of evidence, thus making the analysis of value more difficult, it would seem to me.  

 I hadn't noticed it.   Maybe.   I dunno.  

 There is zero evidence, in my view, that BBWAA voters are influenced by personal likes or dislikes of players.  There are many cases in baseball history of votes going to complete jerks who were no better than nice guys who finished third in the voting.  

 

Before you threw in the unsupported assumption about the voters, it was an interesting question.  There must have been something about Vaughn's that we don't see now, studying the record. But I don't know what it was.