Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild 434: An Awful Lot of Listener Emails

Episode Date: April 23, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about must-watch players, breaking news, uniform numbers, Billy Hamilton, Mike Trout, and more.

Good morning and welcome to episode 434 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined once more in the flesh, the prodigal podcaster, Sam Miller. Howdy. Welcome back. Thanks, Ben. We've missed you.

Yeah, apparently it took a lot of people to fill my seat. A lot of very distinguished people to fill my seat. It did. Up to four at one time. Sometimes it feels like I'm doing four-fifths of the work on this podcast. That's not true. It never feels that way. You're the one who's always doing the work. There were some updates in ongoing effectively wild stories that we have been tracking that you may have missed while you were on your trip oh yeah

oh i'm eager to hear i hope that there's some albers web news that is the first item on the agenda i was reading all the foreign newspapers trying to get my albers web news mix but they were all talking about ukraine so we did have a game finished by ryan webb and there were no games finished by matt albers so webb has now narrowed his lead or webb has now narrowed albers's lead to it's now 83 to 77 in the race to have the most games finished ever without a save. So that was exciting. The other news is that Oscar Tavares changed agencies again. Did we? I don't even remember this.

We talked about Oscar. He changed agencies so many times last year. I think it was he changed agents four times between last January and last September. So this is now a fifth agency change since last January. For a player who has no negotiations to do. I mean, he legally can't negotiate, basically. Unless he wants to sign a long-term extension. Or get that lucrative, I don't know, what is it?

Classic baseball card? Is Classic the company that did minor league cards? I don't know. Anyway. like is classic the company that did minor league cards no anyway but yeah it's one of one of my favorite ongoing stories in baseball and one of the most who is his who is it now who's he with so so he many of his changes were leaving and then returning to the same agency but this one i think is a completely new one he is is now represented by Dan Lozano. Oh, so that's a step up. I mean, I was imagining that Oscar Tavares is basically doing the red paper clip

and he keeps ending up with the red paper clip. Do you have to do that if you're a top prospect in baseball? I feel like if you want to go to the biggest agency, you could. It's not like you need to earn it. So I don't know what the story is, but I continue to follow it with great interest. Can you think of a reason why a player would change agencies five times in 15 months? You know, I can't really think of a reason why he wouldn't is the thing. It feels like at this point in his career, there's no real tension in leaving an agent, I wouldn't think. This is the time to do it, right?

So if we weren't paying attention, it would seem totally normal to be sort of shopping around and trying new things. sort of shopping around and, you know, trying new things. I mean, he's basically like, okay, so basically we're like old married people and we're like, can you believe he's gone on four dates in the last year and a half? And, you know, that's just because we're old. But to a college kid, which is what he essentially is. He's just dating. Sort of. It's not just a series of first dates, though. It's a series of what would be long-term relationships for many players. I guess the more you leave, the easier it becomes to leave, because the agent that you're leaving doesn't really have much time or effort invested in you.

It's probably hard to leave an agent who has been representing you since you were 16 or something and represented you when you were drafted and has been with you his whole career and then you leave him for a bigger agency. That's got to be difficult. But if you have changed agents four times and none of them has been with you for very long, then it's probably pretty easy. The other story involves Jeff at Amador. Yes, I saw this one. I like this one. You like this one.

So he is heading back to Mexico. He played in seven games for AAA Oklahoma City in the Astros system. And then he hit the disabled list with something, and now he is being loaned back to Mexico for the rest of the season because he wasn't going to play first base for the Astros. If anyone does that, if anyone is called up to do that, it will be Jonathan Singleton, who's off to a great start.

So Amador is now going back to Mexico City, and he can't play, I guess, for another major league team for this year. He could come back and play in the AFL, or I don't know if the Astros could give up his rights somehow, but this may bring an end to his career in American professional baseball. May not. He might be back next year for a new team or even with the Astros, but sorry to see him go. Apparently he didn't work out over the off season and I guess he had a legitimate excuse. His wife was pregnant and it was a difficult pregnancy, I gather, and so there were some health concerns there. And so he was expected to lose weight over the winter, but instead he showed up weighing

between 320 and 330. So now he takes that weight back to Mexico. Are we 100% sure that he's not pregnant? And so that brings a sad end to that saga at least for now and i think that was i think that was all i wanted to get to there was a there was a there was a brief item in ken rosenthal's latest notes piece that i thought was curious and wanted to bring up before we get to listener emails which is going to be the bulk of the show. And Rosenthal said, one executive, this was just like a bullet pointed note at the bottom of the column.

He said, one executive notes that the trend towards signing young players long term is partly due to the lack of overall talent in the game. Teams need to keep the few quality players they do have. Case in point, according to the executive, North Carolina State's Trey Turner might be the only college shortstop in the top 250 picks. So this seems like the opposite of what we talked about, how the talent level is continually rising over the years. Yeah, it does. But neither Ken nor I knows really what we're talking about in this case, I would say. I mean, Ken knows what he's talking about. And I would like to think I know what I'm talking about. But this is just spitballing, right? Well, this isn't even Ken. This is him passing on something an unnamed executive said. Some of those unnamed executives say some strange things strange things sometimes i wonder whether they believe them or whether they would want to put their name on them all right so we have questions so this one comes from tyson he says long time listener first time caller i purchased an mlb tv subscription

this year and i've been enjoying the player tracker feature it's limited to 30 players and most of the slots are filled with my fantasy baseball players. With my remaining spots, I have selected must-see players. Billy Hamilton, for example. After watching Bartol Cologne batting gifts all weekend, I may add him to my list. If you could only select five players for the player tracker, which five would you pick? Would you be tilted towards selecting players who might demonstrate greatness, or would you prefer the potential of silliness occurring? Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

That's a good question. So Hamilton is probably on both of our lists, right? Or he'd be on my list? I guess. I'm going to talk about Hamilton a little later in the play index segment. And I'm not ready to give one of my spots to Hamilton. Yeah, I'd probably put him on there just because he gives you the highest chance of seeing something that no one else in baseball can do, probably.

So he'd be one of my choices. I mean, probably just Trout'd be one of my choices. I mean, I don't know, probably just Trout would be one of my choices. It's kind of boring and obvious, but if I had to watch only five, he would be on that list. Maybe Jose Fernandez would be on that list. Yu Darvish would probably be on that list. And I don't know, if I could set up the player tracker to alert me when a ground ball was headed toward Andrelton Simmons so that I could switch over in time to see him field it, he'd be on my list.

Yeah, I think Jose Fernandez is the only one that has kind of the power to be a constant on my list. I mean, this list would change every couple days. I mean, so much of it is, you know, kind of tracking whatever interesting narrative is going on in that three or four or five day period. And also just, like, you fall in and out of love with various people.

Like, right now I'm really into Willy Peralta and I'm really into Willy Peralta and I'm really into Starling Marte. And so like right now over the past week and a half and maybe over the next week and a half, those guys would both be on my list, but they probably won't be in July probably. Fernandez is a constant. I don't know that I have a hard constant um i don't know that i have a hard time uh i have a hard time um you know there's so much baseball going on at all times that i have a really hard time filtering what i what i'm going to watch uh for any any reason or or using any filter other than um uh self-interest, which is to say some sort of, say, relievers-only fantasy league, or article interest, the topic that I'm interested in that I either have recently wrote about or

am writing about or plan to write about. am writing about or plan to write about. And so in both cases, there's a profit element to it that makes my answer impure. And so I kind of feel ashamed to put any particular answer out there right now. But I mean, I usually decide what game to watch. I don't know if this answers the question, but I usually decide what game to watch based on either the pitching matchup or the teams. It's very rare that I'll pick a matchup for a player, and it's very rare that I'll switch over to see one player bat, unless, you know, again, unless there's some sort of self-interest in it. So right now, I think that, like I'm interested in watching the AL West a lot right now, just in general, all the AL West games.

I find the top four teams to all be kind of interestingly intertwined in this race. So that's kind of where I've been going. So, like, at the moment I have had interest in John Jaso and Jed Lowry. And those aren't great answers. But those are guys who I feel like I've been watching a lot lately and paying attention when they're up. I've been consuming baseball almost entirely through highlight shows this year. I set my TV to be on MLB Network when it turns on.

So since it's so easy, I just turn it on pretty much all the time. And it's just so much more efficient for someone who ostensibly has to know what's going on with every team or at least would benefit from knowing what's going on with every team and seeing at least some of every game and seeing all the notable plays.

It's just so much easier for me to do that because if i sit down and devote three hours to a game then that's all the time i had to watch baseball and then i don't know anything else kimbrough kimbrough's one of my five i have two two certainties so fernandez and kimbrough are two locks and right now right now tanaka is definitely tanaka might be a lock for the year yeah i i'm i'm so far i've been fairly shocked uh by him and and it's not quite obvious uh watching him so there's this sort of uh like it's not you you see the numbers at the end of each start and they're amazing and he manages to just never ever issue ball four um and that's for the same reason sort of uhara was for a long time is it and cliff lee was for a long time i really like pitchers who

don't issue walks um like uh because because you know that i i'm fascinated by how hard it is not to issue walks that how hard it is to throw a strike in in the best of circumstances and in particular in the worst of circumstances. When you fall behind a guy and you cannot walk him and you have to throw three or four straight pitches in this small strike zone, I don't know how these guys do it. And so when there's a person who just seems to have completely defeated the strike zone like Cliff Lee and Ohara did, I'm interested. So Tanaka right now would be a top five. Kimbrough almost feels too predictable to me.

His outings are often just flawless. Doesn't that get a little boring after a while? No. No. It doesn't. Because he's still only thrown like 180 innings in his career or something like that. He's basically in the middle of the greatest season of all time.

Let's see, he's thrown 234 innings. So basically it would be like would you be bored of 1999 Pedro by September? Probably not. Right. All right, next question comes from Pell in Sweden. He says, I've been meaning to write about this podcast I heard you fellows do about four months ago. Can't exactly remember when it was. The topic was that some news broke from a source within a team,

and Ben stated that he didn't like these stories breaking with anonymous sources and that he preferred to get all his news as press releases from teams. I was really surprised by this point of view, as many of the biggest stories wouldn't have been known if it weren't for the investigative journalism done by many reporters with anonymous sources, etc, etc. And so I wanted to just respond to that because I don't think that was quite what I said. I don't remember exactly what I said, but my point at the time was I was limiting it to just pure transaction news breaking, not investigative journalism, which is how a lot of the best stories in baseball come out. And of course, I'm completely in favor of that. And baseball would be a lot more boring if if we didn't have reporters digging into things it's just the purely the the transaction just the the signing the trade

i don't need to have that broken basically before the team is ready to announce it if they wanted to be the ones to announce it and just put it out there that's fine. I don't think I personally, as a reader, as a consumer of baseball, would lose all that much if we just didn't have that race to be the first to break a signing or a trade. And everyone races to report it on Twitter, and then two minutes later someone else reports it, and then someone else confirms the original report, and it goes on and on for a while. and someone gets the credit for that news breaking but no one ever

really remembers who it is except probably the the few people who are breaking these stories so that's really all i was talking about and that's all i think uh yeah i i think that you're not you're not opposed to getting the news five minutes earlier. You just place a much lower value on it than society seems to award or that these reporters seem to think they're getting out of it. I think that the problem most people have with this type of journalism is that it becomes an end or kind of like it becomes valued even though there is no actual intrinsic value. There is no value to us getting it five minutes earlier. And so we become sort of frustrated seeing it treated as a valuable thing. However, I will give you a counter argument and I will declare here that you are wrong and you have not thought this through.

And the reason is that where this has taken us is that no longer are these moves simply reported five minutes earlier or 15 minutes earlier, but they are reported earlier in the process. And so we are getting a lot – like you and I have both written transaction analyses for moves that were – it's like Heyman will report that something is imminent. Like Heyman will report that something is imminent, and so we have really no choice but to write up a transaction analysis of it because other people are and everybody's talking about it and four days from now it's going to seem anticlimactic, and yet it will take four days before it's done and it might not even get done. Yes, we've both written- You and I have both written transaction analyses for transactions that don't exist. I would say that while by normal journalistic standards, this would

be seen as a bug. And, you know, if this were real world, real life stuff that mattered, it'd be like, wow, we're spending a lot of oxygen on things that didn't happen or that we didn't know the actual story. But the whole point of baseball is to be interesting and to give us things to talk about and to give us things to be entertained by and to discuss and to learn about the sport from. And so with this reporting, this kind of like hyper-aggressive rumors reporting having developed, we get like much more to talk about than we ever would have. We get – not only do we get the moves that happen uh but we get the moves that we think are going to happen and i would say that it's good for the sport and it's good for us probably probably is yeah i mean the off season would probably be more

boring otherwise which it can be frustrating too to hear rumors about moves that never happen and to hear them over and over again. Frustrating how? Because, I mean, you mean it's frustrating when you've invested some of your kind of emotions in a move that didn't end up happening and you feel betrayed? Or frustrating knowing that all the things that happen are devalued somewhat because you don't have the certainty of knowing that they're going to stick. The latter for me, maybe the former for someone who has more of a rooting interest in a team that is rumored to be making a big move. Yeah, I have no sympathy for the former argument. The latter is correct, though. You're right. There is a way that the unreliability of things makes everything cheaper and less enjoyable.

So I think that you can make the case that that's a fair argument. And maybe there's a risk that if we didn't have the Buster Olneys and Ken Rosenthal's digging all the time and trying to be first, teams would have no incentive to tell us before opening day really what they were doing. So they wouldn't necessarily tell us on the same timeframe that they do right now. Maybe they'd drag their feet even more and, and they'd all announce the moves on the same day right before spring training starts or something like that. So maybe it ensures that there's more of a steady stream of, of breaking stuff. And,

and I definitely don't mean to minimize the difficulty of doing that job because it's immensely difficult and I'm impressed that people are able to do it. I just, I'm not sure how much different my life would be if they didn't do it. The other thing, Ben, is that last year, Chris Carter would have been on my list

from day one to the final day. I was obsessed with watching Chris Carter all year last year Chris Carter would have been on my list from day one to the to the final day I was obsessed with watching Chris Carter all year last year and this year I just don't care at all and so there's like a there's definitely something arbitrary going on in my brain that makes people either interesting or not interesting for no reason that would be interesting to anybody else maybe you just overwatched Chris Carter. Could be, but I mean... You should have rationed out his plate appearances. But why was I into him on day 162, but not...

I mean, what changed between days? Although I will say, have you ever had... I mean, I'm sure you have, but you know how sometimes you're really into a song, like some sort of pop song or a rock song, and you listen to it on repeat? And you can listen to it on repeat forever you can listen to it thousands of times in a row without losing the rush but if you take like three days off and you go back to it it's never the same yeah right so maybe that was chris carter chris carter was like uh for me in eighth grade i listened to cornflake girl uh by tori amos on

repeat uh every single day of eighth grade because my parents and my sister were all out of the house by the time I woke up because I was in middle school and we started later. So I would just immediately press play on repeat and listen to it. So I listened to that song probably 25 times a day for an entire year. And now I just don't really like it. a day for an entire year. And now I just don't really like it. I have an enormous tolerance for songs that I like. I don't know that I've really played out a song that I used to love to the point that I don't ever want to listen to it anymore.

I might have to take a break, come back to it. But after a while, it has the same impact. The only song that has maintained the same impact for me is uh is the sign by ace of base which i have spent multiple days of my life i one time i uh went from uh from as soon as i logged onto my computer at the beginning of a work day until the end of the day for a week and i still i get a rush every time i know that song song's so good maybe that'll be our intro sound today you'll never stop listening um okay andy asks why is a change up more effective to an opposite handed hitter and the the explanation for that is just the way that it breaks.

If a pitcher throws a changeup and it's pretty much the same changeup, all else being equal, and he just aims it at the middle of the strike zone, the pitch will go down and away or it'll tend to go down and away to an opposite-handed hitter and down and in to a same-handed hitter and you would generally prefer the down and away pitch or the down and away pitch is usually more successful. So that's the basic reason. I, yeah, sorry, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I wrote about the, the raise last year and their change up revolution and how they had started to throw change-ups

to same-handed hitters much more often. And partially it was because they just have really good change-up pitchers. They have emphasized it as an important pitch, and so all their pitchers have good change-ups, and so they can use it in times when other pitchers wouldn't want to. And it's partially the element of surprise,

and batters don't expect to see it, so they can throw it, and it's partially the element of surprise, and batters don't expect to see it, so they can throw it, and it works better. And Matt Moore told me, when you think of lefties, they like to drop the head. It's more of a sweepy swing. The bottom of the zone for lefties, it's such a sweet spot for me. Typically, where the changeup is going to go is down and into a lefty, down and into a righty. And Jose Lobaton said that the only problem people say with the changeup is that righties against righties, if you hang it, they're going to hit it pretty good. With some lefties, when they hang it, they can hit a pop-up. Righties can hit it better. They say the ball moves inside to them. And they don't just say that. It's actually true.

What were you going to say? I was just going to say that if it if it moves inside the same handed hitters um there's uh you batters are sort of slower to to pitches that are inside i mean that's why an inside fastball is so effective right and so if you throw an inside change up in a way you're sort of speeding up the bat in a location where you're you should be able to bust them inside you're you're sort of almost throwing them the pitch that they that they wish that you had thrown them in that location that they can't catch up to otherwise. Right. All right. Do you want to do play index segment? Yeah, sure.

So on Hang Up and Listen, which is my favorite sports podcast, Mike Peska this week talked about Billy Hamilton, and he talked about Billy Hamilton's stolen base numbers compared to his on-base deficiencies. And both of these things are well-known among people who listen to this podcast. And he went looking for sort of the greatest examples of high stolen base, low on base percentage guys. I'm just basically totally ripping that off but taking a play index stab at it.

And Mike Peska's approach was really more to look at guys who stole 60 bases or more, which is a pretty good baseline for an elite base stealer, and then looked for the guys who had the lowest on-base percentage, lowest walk rates, lowest hit rates. And I'm looking, I'm using Play Index slightly differently. I'm using the ratio of one stat to another. And so I'm looking at individual seasons that all players have had and using the ratio tool to find guys, well, a couple of different searches, but Billy Hamilton, after stealing a base today and reaching, I should say Tuesday and reaching twice has now stolen 42% as many bases as times reached base.

So if he reached base 100 times at this rate, he would have stolen 42 bases. And that's very high, obviously. That's what we know about Billy Hamilton is he steals every single time. So I wanted to put in perspective how high that was. high that was so um i looked first for uh batters who have uh stolen 42 as many bases as times reached and i excluded reached on airs to try to get consistency throughout eras um and this doesn't well yeah i'll give caveats later but uh so% as many stolen bases as times reached and a minimum of 15 stolen bases. There are 42 of those guys throughout history. So that gives you some sense of what Billy Hamilton is doing.

It is not unique. It is not unprecedented. It is on the higher end. But we already knew Billy Hamilton was on the higher end, but we already knew Billy Hamilton was on the higher end. To put it in perspective, Eric Davis at age 23 was stealing about as often as Billy Hamilton has this year. And maybe sort of interestingly, Ricky Henderson, well, I guess it's not that interesting that Ricky Henderson, when he stole 130 bases, obviously topped this mark. But two of the eight players who stole 100 bases in history actually did not manage to do it,

which is kind of impressive that you could steal 100 bases without stealing at this rate that's been not that rare. So Maury Wills stole 100 bases without doing this. Ricky Henderson stole 100 bases one year while only stealing 33% as many as times reached, which, to put that in perspective, because this is all about putting things in perspective, is the same rate that Gerard Dyson and Rajai Davis stole at last year. So basically the difference between Ricky Henderson and Rajai Davis,

you could argue if you wanted, and you only had one number in front of you, and you didn't have to go through any of the extra work of finding other numbers to support or dispute this, you could argue that Rajai Davis and Gerard Dyson are as good at stealing bases as Ricky Henderson. They are just not as good at getting on base as Ricky Henderson. That would be a bad argument, but you could do it. So then, of course, as these things go, I raise the bar. I go to 50%, and there are 18 players who have stolen 50% as many... There's not a really good way to say this, to describe this formula that I'm using, but who have stolen half as many

bases as times reached. But of the 18, really eight of them are ringers. And there's something interesting about the ringers. By ringer, I mean they really were just basically designated pinch runners. And when you think of a designated pinch runner, you think of Herb Washington, who we've talked about on this podcast, who I wrote about at length in relation to Billy Hamilton not that long ago, the world-class sprinter who Charlie Finley tried to use as a pinch runner and never let him do anything other than pinch run, never let him hold a clubber or a bat. But what I didn't really appreciate when I was writing about Herb Washington, what old-timers I'm sure will know, is that this was sort of an obsession with Finley. And in a five-year period,

he basically had eight guys who were designated pinch runners uh eight got eight of the 18 guys on our list are a's in that five-year period and they're all they're all heavily heavily tilted because they were pinch running all the time um so of course eight in five years means that in some years he had two they were carrying two guys who were doing nothing but pinch front on their roster. So these guys, besides Herb Washington for one year, are Larry Lentz, Miguel Delon, who did this twice, Matt Alexander, who did it three times, and Dan Hopkins. In one year, in 1976, Lentz and Alexander stole 51 bases for the A's and reached base a total of three times. stole 51 bases for the A's and reached base a total of three times. And Alexander that year actually did bat 30 times,

and he had an 0-33, 0-33, 0-33 slash line with 20 stolen bases. And so I didn't really realize that Finley's Herb Washington experiment failed. I think by pretty much all opinions failed. But rather than give it up completely, he tried it with baseball players because a big part of the Washington problem was that nobody in the clubhouse considered him a baseball player and it created a lot of tension. And when he failed, he was a very easy scapegoat and the reporters would rip him and everything because he wasn't a ball player. So Finley basically tried doing the exact same thing with ball players, and it was really no more successful. Those eight guys in those five years who were all essentially designated speedsters stole 215 bases and were caught 100 times,

which is basically a round league average for the era. Anyway, so we're basically talking about there's 10 guys who had real seasons and topped the 50 mark so now i go up to 60 and it's basically down to to like three and willie wilson is on there and willie wilson is the king of this he crushes all comers he's uh i he's he's at 60 he's at 65 he's at 70, and then he, even at 75, in his most steel-heavy season, he stole bases, he stole 46 bases and reached base 61 times, which is a 75% ratio. Crushes everybody who had any season. And so, of course, the problem with this is that there are all sorts of other

factors that are not showing up in this play index. For instance, if you reach on a fielder's choice, it doesn't count as reaching base, right? Right. And if you, if you go in as a pinch runner, it doesn't count as reaching base. And Wilson did go in as a pinch runner sometimes. So I went through a month of his, of that season. I just picked May and went through every game he played

and looked at um at how often he stole when he had the chance uh realistically so uh because the other thing is that if you single but there's a guy in front of you you can't steal then either so it goes both ways there's all sorts of things that skew things and if you you hit a single in the ninth inning and you're up 16 runs, you can't really steal that either. So I went through and looked at all the times he was on first base and all the times he was on second base and looked at how often he stole second and how often he stole third

when he could possibly, including all the pinch running appearances, all the fielder's choices, all the times when he couldn't run because there was a guy in front of him, et cetera. all the pinch running appearances, all the fielder's choices, all the times when he couldn't run because there was a guy in front of him, etc. And 11 times he could have stolen second base, eight times he tried, and the three he didn't,

twice it was when they were down multiple runs in the eighth, and once it was when he was down three runs in the fifth. Now I would argue that in that case he probably should have gone by his standard of stealing bases. So essentially you can say that there was one clear case where he didn't steal when it would have maybe made some sense to. But basically he was going every time there was any real possibility of it. And then when he was on second, four out of eight times he was on second with a chance to steal third, he attempted. So he, I mentioned that I was kind of still on the fence with Billy Hamilton. When you look at what Willie Wilson was doing, it was actually every bit as aggressive as what we think of Billy Hamilton doing, and probably more aggressive.

And then similarly, to change the subject slightly, if you look at Tim Raines' stolen base rates when he was coming up, he was stealing bases basically just as efficiently and almost as frequently in the majors as Billy Hamilton was in the minors, unquestionably a better base stealer, a more dominating base stealer, more intimidating base stealer. And so while Hamilton is very fast and it's interesting to see him run, he is not yet, in my opinion, historic. And that's why John Jaso is in your five.

That's why John Jaso. John Jaso's fun to watch. All right. Well, thank you for play indexing you can do all the fun things that Sam just did and many others at baseballreference.com if you subscribe to the play index using the coupon code BP

to get the discounted price of $30 on a one year subscription we recommend that you do that you can try it, there's a money back guarantee but we don't think you'll need it so let me segue subscription. We recommend that you do that. You can try it. There's a money back guarantee, but we don't think you'll need it. So let me segue into a Billy Hamilton question that we got, which is from Christopher in Tennessee, who asks, when talking about players like Billy Hamilton, people always say you can't steal first base, but what if you could? What if when the pitcher started his windup, the batter could throw his bat down and run to first?

How often, practically speaking, would a player like Hamilton be safe? It seems to me that a left-handed batter might actually be fairly successful, especially when it comes to pass balls and such. How much would a rule like this help the Hamiltons and Dee Gordons of the world? And would you want to use this instead of a bunt? So I guess, I mean, thinking about the times involved, the average pitcher delivery is something like 1.4 seconds. And the average catcher pop time to second base is 1.95. And so this is a shorter throw distance, but maybe also a more difficult throw angle. So if you just, I mean,

if you just add those times together, it seems like even Billy Hamilton would be hard pressed to do this often. Yeah, you'd have to, you and I would have to know how much harder the angle is, because it's the only way that it would make sense is if uh in clearing a lane catcher had to uh you know expend 0.3 or 0.4 seconds uh and was more likely to make an error uh i do wonder whether in this potential world where this happened whether it would be to the left-handed catcher which is what i think a lot of people uh want to see. Yeah, that's a possible byproduct of this. All right. Well, that doesn't seem like a solution to Billy Hamilton's on-base problems. But Christopher also asks, if you could reduce the likelihood of Tommy John surgery on a pitcher by 99%,

but you were forced to accept a certain performance hit in order to prevent that injury, how much of a hit would be acceptable in return? Let's assume he has possible star potential and he's not guaranteed Tommy John surgery if you don't take this deal. Let's also assume that you have six years of control and that you expect your team to be in contention in each of these seasons. Huh. Well, so what a third of major leaguers have had tommy john surgery but um you know a lot of them had it in the minors yeah college uh or college and a lot of them have it after the six-year window and so that's certainly not a 33 chance that you're going to get that guy's tommy john no uh in your six-year window. What would you guess it is?

Just off the top of your head, what, one in 15? One in 12? That if you have a rookie pitcher and you know you're going to have him for the next six years, what would you think the odds are that he's having a TJ? Probably, I don't know know if the rate is rising i don't know maybe one in one in 11 or 12 something like that all right so say one in 12 and you're going to lose one year but you feel like with about 90 certainty that he's going to come back at full strength so

you're going to have you're going to lose uh you know 1 sixth of his production, say 1 twelfth of the time. So you're going to lose 1 72nd of his value, plus the 10% possibility that his Tommy John won't take for whatever years are remaining. But basically that's a small, that's a rounding here. So let's say you're going to gonna lose 160th of his production um so i would i would not take a very big hit i would rather have i would just rather have the good pitcher take my chances makes sense to me all right matt sussman of baseball prospectus asks everyone wore

number 42 on jackie robinson day and nobody was confused with who was who because everyone has fixed positions. In most sports, this would cause chaos. Maybe it's me, but I don't remember player numbers, so if the game got rid of jersey numbers, would we be missing that much? And actually... Well, the other thing is that the other thing is that not only

do they have fixed positions, but in no case is the number relevant. There's no like, no way to be to need to know who that guy is, right? Even if for some reason you had face blindness, right, at no point would you need to know, certainly as a fan, who that guy is that made that play, right? He made the play or he didn't make the play. There's not a certain number of fouls to give,

and there's no eligibility for anybody to play anywhere other than the pitcher. You might want to know. You'd want to know. Curiosity. Yeah, but you'd have to be very face-blind for this to be effective. But yeah, so go ahead. Well, I feel much the same as Matt. I'm not a number guy.

I've never really committed these things to memory. It's not really something I associate with most players. Of course, there are some iconic numbers, but for the most part, I will not remember what a player's number is. And I don't find much utility in it, certainly at the major league level, where even if you're at a game, you can now just open your phone and look at a box score and look at a live box score and look at game day and see who's playing what position. And so it doesn't really help me to see a jersey number at that level. The only reason that you really need jersey numbers is, you know, spring training games. If you're at a complex league game, something like that,

where you can't look up who's playing what position on your phone, and you might not even have an accurate roster that you can look up who's who. In that case, it's definitely beneficial to be able to associate a number with a guy. But at the major league level, eh, I don't know. Maybe it adds some, some depth to the fandom. I mean, it, it seems to be important to, to some people, but I wouldn't miss it much if it were gone. I just noticed the baseball reference just added FIP. Yes. Uh, while I was gone. Yeah, I think so. There was a post about it um yeah even i mean you're saying that you might not even have even in the even in the even in the situation you just described where you might not have the uh the an accurate roster available the numbers wouldn't

help you right if you didn't know but in many you would, and you might have no idea who this guy is because you've never seen him before. I think I probably know six uniform numbers and five of them only because they're in the guy's Twitter name, Twitter account. I basically know Jeter, and I think that's it. I don't think I know another uniform number. So you would not miss them either? No, I would not miss them. All right.

All right. Well, we didn't get our Mike Trout question in yet. So here's our Mike Trout question of the week, which comes from Tyler Stafford. Mike Trout is both the best player in the major leagues in Major League Baseball today and also extremely young. At 22 years old, he theoretically would be a senior in college had he chosen that route instead of signing out of high school. My question is, given how successful Mike Trout is facing major league pitching,

what would his numbers look like right now if he had chosen to go to a four-year university? Would he shatter every hitting record ever? Or do you think his development really took off somewhere in the Angels minor league system to the point where Trout might only be an above-average college hitter, waiting for the right coach to tweak something in his game in the minor leagues? I think that with Trout specifically, I talked to people about this when I was doing the story

about the Angels player development system, and there was a real reluctance for anybody to give the Angels particular credit for trout even among the angels uh... not because they don't have good players to a good good staff doing good work and you know that obviously doing a lot of work which route because they drafted trout

and he went into the you know he went to arizona to the to unit the a Arizona league, to the rookie ball league, and was immediately amazing. He was the best player in that league. And there's sort of a general principle, I would say that's consistent with all 30 major league teams, but definitely with the Angels, that you don't touch the guy in the first couple months. You don't touch his swing. You don't really do anything. You just get to know him. You find out about his girlfriend. You watch him. You talk to each other about him and you might start talking about a plan that you're going to present to him next year,

but you don't tell him anything. You just want him to get out there and play. He was already at that point a revelation. Everybody realized that he had been under-drafted. Already at that point. I talked to Kevin Goldstein that winter because I interviewed for an Orange County Register piece. And already it was like, yeah, he was a super hot prospect. Already GMs were regretting that they hadn't drafted him so i think the angels would be very hesitant to take credit for that because it just happened immediately and then he showed up at cedar rapids which is a ball and was a phenom immediately like the first

week he like had he had like nine infield hits in the first four games or something insane you know just crazy crazy things immediately before they touched him. So for Trout specifically, I would say he would be the best college player in history, yes. Probably wouldn't be as good a player. Like if you had left Trout in college until he was 22 and then brought him up to the majors immediately, probably wouldn't be as good as he is right now, right? Because he wouldn't have faced the higher level competition,

and maybe he wouldn't be as familiar with pitches that move like that, and maybe he wouldn't have ironed out some weaknesses, and maybe he wouldn't have had the benefit of professional training programs and that sort of thing. But he would probably be crushing college pitchers. So the second lowest FIP ever in the modern era is Dwight Gooden. I'm doing a bonus play index here. Is Dwight Gooden at 1.69?

So 1.69, that's very good. It's the second lowest ever. Pedro in 1999 is the lowest at 1.39. And that's in one of the most extreme offensive seasons in history. Yeah. Pedro's seasons are... That's crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. I'm going to do this for relievers.

I think I might like Pedro's seasons as much as Bond's seasons on baseball reference. I did. I would agree with that until i did the head-to-head matchup you know the uh the log five and you realize how much better the i i that i i'm still trying to figure out what that meant i would thought about that being a topic one day because do you really believe that bonds for people who didn't read that piece, basically the math suggests that if 2003 Bonds, which is the greatest hitter of all time, faced 1999 Pedro, who is the greatest pitcher of all time, Bonds would have had an 1,100 OPS. Which means basically that Bonds would turn Pedro into the worst pitcher in the league,

and Pedro would turn Bonds into merely an MVP candidate instead of a unanimous MVP and and and the the empirical data as I mean I've been looking at a lot of matchup numbers since then and because there's a lot of great hitters who have faced a lot of great pitchers for you know in some cases hundreds of times and the the data seems to support that like stan musial faced warren spawn 350 times and he had like a 960 ops against him and so it really does seem to be the case that the best hitters are significantly better than the best pitchers if i think that might be true but anyway uh since i since since that article i am a little bit cool to pedro and i feel bad about that yeah those those seasons i mean you have to mentally adjust for the offensive era and the ballpark and all of that and once you do it it's just it's crazy that he was able to do that absolutely insane only four relievers have

ever had a lower fit than pedro did as a starter that year kimbrough gagne eckersley holland and no other reliever no other reliever ben what what innings minimums were you using there 50 i used 50 for for relievers and I used qualified for ERA for the starters. All right. We are just about done here. Let me ask you one more from David in Bloomington, Indiana, who asks, if teams, if rosters expand to 26 or 27, do you think that it will reintroduce old ideas like platooning, defensive replacements, pinch runners, and third catchers, all of which are basically obsolete in 2014?

Or do you think that given more roster spots, teams would just carry more specialized relievers going with 9- or 10-man bullpens? And when we talked about this briefly on Friday's podcast, and I was saying to Rob Nyer that it seems like the future of strikeout rate is partially dependent on the future of reliever usage. And if relievers keep being used to face fewer and fewer batters, then the strikeout rate will keep rising as a result of that. And he pointed out that if rosters do expand to 26 and teams add new relievers, then that would sustain or accelerate that trend. So if rosters expanded to 26 tomorrow or opening day 2015, how many teams do you think would use that roster spot on a pitcher? 11? Huh. I think it would be the majority. Because we have seen some teams, at least for a time during the season,

sort of treat their roster as if they had that extra spot and give it to a reliever. I mean, we've seen teams go with eight-man bullpens for a while. So I don't know. I feel like in the current climate, if you gave them that option, a majority of them would probably go for the arm. Maybe. I mean, when you talk about, for instance, having a pinch runner, a pinch running specialist, if a team has an extra roster spot say for you know a three-week period in april because they get to skip us a spot in the rotation or something like that they don't have necessarily the the pinch running specialist candidate in triple a um because this isn't like really a long-term plan that they can they can I mean, they're certainly going to have a lot of pitchers,

and so sure, bring up the pitcher. The other thing is if you're skipping a spot in the rotation for some reason, you might consider that you need extra bullpen help. But I feel, I mean, I don't think that it would be none, and it might be a majority, but I don't think it would be all. No, I don't think that it would be none and it might be a majority, but I don't think it would be all. No, I don't think it would be all. Um,

and last thing I wanted to address, you can feel free to, to address also, but this one comes from Dominic and he asks, assume that major league baseball adopted a rule that every time a batter grounded into a double play, he would have to play the remainder of the game without pants. Do you think that the fear of humiliation, running around in front of 30,000 fans with

nothing between the waist and socks except tighty-whities and a jock, would cause batters to be extra conscientious about putting the ball in the air or otherwise avoiding one of the more frustrating and annoying outcomes in all of baseball? So this question more or less comes down to, do you think batters can control where they hit the ball, either in the air as opposed to on the ground or directionally? And this reminded me. Partly that's what it comes down to. It comes down to that, partly.

It also comes down to the question of whether you think that baseball players are improperly incentivized. If you think that tens of millions of dollars are not enough to incentivize them but something else would be so anyway go ahead and also whether they're self-conscious enough to mind playing in their underpants um so this reminded me because i think we talked about adam dunn seeming to have the ability to start hitting the ball the other way when he got frustrated about the shift. And Mike Petriello wrote something about how Matt Adams seems to have done the same sort of thing. So it seems like maybe individual hitters have that ability, possibly. But this reminded me of an article that John Walsh wrote for the Hardball Times in 2008 called Hit Them Where They Ain't If You Can. And he looked at a few situations where it's generally acknowledged that hitters would prefer to hit the ball in a certain area or on a line in the air as opposed to on the ground. He looked for the situation where guys want to hit the ball to the right side

to advance the runner. And he found that in this case, so when you have a guy on and you've got a runner on second and first base open with zero outs, so this is when you want to hit the ground ball to the right side to advance the runner, batters hit the ball to the right side 41% of the time. Whereas if you have one or more outs, and at this point you don't have that incentive to hit the ball to the right side, they hit it to the right side 36% of the time. So an increase of 5 percentage points in the situation where they would want to hit it to the right side. And you have to figure that maybe pitchers are also pitching in a way that would make batters not be able to do that.

So they are overcoming that by a bit. But it's not a huge effect if they're all trying to do that. And they're probably not all trying to do that. We don't know what percentage are actually trying to do this. But it's not a huge increase. And then maybe the more persuasive thing is he also looked at sack fly situations. And he looked to see whether guys actually hit the ball in the air more often when it's a sack fly situation, when they want to get that run in. And what he found is,

was that they don't at all. They put the ball in play more often. They strike out less and they walk less. So more balls in play, but the breakdown of batted ball type in the balls that they put in play is exactly the same. No difference in ground ball and fly ball rate in the sack fly situation. So that leads me to believe that it would be difficult for a hitter to do that. I agree. I mean, he could certainly strike out, though. He could choose to strike out. Yes, that's true. And I would. You would just strike out to avoid the underpants situation? Yeah, I would. You would just strike out to avoid the underpants situation?

Yeah, I would. You could also bunt, which is a situation that Dominic brings up. Not foolproof. You'd still, a couple times a year, you'd still be running around in your undies. Wouldn't do it. I'd strike out. Uh-huh. I'd strike out anyway.

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