Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1011: The Up-and-Down Defense Edition

Episode Date: January 25, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan discuss their EclipseFest sellout and answer listener emails about Jae-gyun Hwang, Daniel Murphy, and power/contact reinventions; the most informative stats; the best way to split up seasons; drastic defensive changes; career cycles for pitchers; protecting the inside of the plate, and more. Audio intro: The Rolling Stones, "All Sold Out" Audio outro: […]

All sold out, well I felt so free, it was just like that, I was put down flat, I was sold out, just like that, oh man! Hello and welcome to episode 1011 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined as always by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Good morning. I'm going to do an email show today. Quick update on the August Volcanoes game, probably the last update for a few months. We did get a bunch of extra tickets yesterday, 50 more tickets, and they sold out almost instantly. So we are now out of tickets for that event at the group rate and in the same group package. And we probably won't be able to get more because they don't want to sell the entire ballpark to Effectively Wild fans, unfortunately, as fun as that would be. So if you did not get a ticket, sorry about that.

Wish we could accommodate everyone, but there was a ton of interest. We were surprised by how much interest there was. And even if we hadn't been surprised, there was nothing we could do about it so if you still want to go you can you can buy a single general admission ticket which is on sale now you can go to the volcanoes website and buy that i think it's 25 and that will get you in the park and you can still hang out with us before and after the game and you can probably visit us during the game and also you get to see a total eclipse at a ballpark.

So if you were planning to come or hoping to come anyway, especially if you're in the area, you should still do that. You can still come to the game and hang out with us. So go do that. If you did get a ticket and you find out that you can't go to the game or someone you bought A ticket for can't go to the game at some Point between now and then Let me know and we will try to

Get that ticket to another listener Who wants it and that is that It was a fun exciting week In which we went from not knowing about this to Selling 125 tickets to it so I am really looking forward to This in the way that you look forward to things that are far away and then because you're looking forward to them for so long you

stop looking forward to them and then you start looking forward to them again when it gets closer at least that's how it works for me yeah it's like a little surprise that you get when you flip your calendar you know your physical calendar like everybody has still in the year 2017 i think i was also i'm just floored i'm not surprised that these things sold out because i mean back in the year 2017 i think i was also i'm just floored i'm not surprised that these things sold out because i mean back in the day we would have like uss mariner look at landing blog events that would sell out just for people to get together and just talk about the mariners when they were bad all the time but those wouldn't sell out like in the blink of an eye and it's a on the one hand it's flattering on the other hand this let's be honest this has very little to do with us and mostly things to do with baseball and the eclipse

but i guess the way that i think about it is like clearly if you're an ew listener or a fan graphs reader or just someone who's aware of these events through social media you're a little bit of a dork like we're all we're all kind of nerds about baseball. And it's probably not a surprise that baseball nerds have other, let's just call it what it is, somewhat nerdy interests of also astronomy. But this is a super rare event. And yeah, I guess there's nothing we can do to restrict attendance at anything we do after the game. Because I would assume that we're going to do some sort of get together. The game will be over at, I don't know 12 30 or 1 and so I'm sure we'll do some sort of like after party and some local venue now I would think so clearly there's we can't have like

2,000 people buy tickets to the game not with us and then show up to whatever we do later so 2,000 of you please don't try to come organize among yourselves. But I would assume that clearly there will be room for other people. I can't imagine that whatever kind of place we go to in Salem, Kaiser, Oregon on a Monday afternoon is going to be that crowded at one or two, especially because the eclipse will already be over. So whatever reason people will have to be in that part of the state, that reason will be over within two minutes of its beginning so there will be an opportunity to hang out don't be too discouraged but also we've we've been tipped off that if you are not in the area there will be a number of other similar

minor league promotions taking place across the uh the country i don't have specific details on where all of those are going to be but you might be able to just follow the path of totality on your own map, identify where minor league teams are, and then kind of cross-check with their schedules. So there will be opportunities if you are somewhere else and you want to see any clips at a ballpark, you can still do that, just not with us, which is really not so bad because we're mostly introverted. Yeah. Ben Hill at minorleaguebaseball.com has been tracking this promotion and looking ahead at teams that might do something similar. So you can probably find it at his site if nowhere else. And I'm sure there's somewhere else too.

So, yeah, the capacity at Volcano Stadium is only like 4,500. So at minimum, we're going to have about 3% of the attendance, I think. But maybe more depending on how many of you buy individual tickets. And Dave told me yesterday that Volcano Stadium was just designated as one of five NASA-endorsed viewing locations in the country for this event. So there's going to be a NASA rep at the game to help narrate and explain what to look for, which I believe is the sun getting hidden by the moon. But I'm sure there's more to it than that. So this will be fun. So I don't want to keep talking about it because then people who aren't going to go will just feel bad.

So I guess we can move on. Emails. Do you have just straight to emails? Yeah, straight to emails. Your boy whose name I don't know how to pronounce got signed, right? Che Gun Hwang. Che Gun Hwang. Yeah, and I also can't really how to pronounce, got signed, right? Jae-gyung Hwang. Yeah, and I also can't really pronounce it. Let's be real.

I'm sure I'm doing it wrong. But closest I can do is Jae-gyung Hwang. And yeah, he signed. It's a split contract with the Giants where he technically it's a minor league contract, but he gets more money if he's in the majors. I think it's I guess a 1.5 million. I might be wrong. So it's another very talented Korean position player who's coming over for not

the league minimum, but it might as well be the league minimum. Like I think Park from the twins got something like 4 million a year. Gong from the pirates got even less. Thames got hardly anything, honestly, from the brewers. And he's not even a Korean player. He's just, well, I guess he was a Korean player, but you know what I mean? Yeah. And, uh, Daeho Lee got very little from the Mariners

and Kim got very little from the Orioles. So there's, I guess it's maybe too soon to call it a market inefficiency, but it sure looks like it would be a possible market inefficiency to take the best hitters from Korea. And I am very excited to see what Hwang does. It's complicated because the Giants infield

does not have a whole lot of openings. Obviously, Belt at first and Panic at second and Crawford at short and Nunez at third. That does not leave a lot of space for Huang because those are everyday pretty good players. But Nunez is coming off sort of a season that a lot, not a lot of people thought that he would have. So he could, you know, he could conceivably become bad or panic could get any of them could get hurt. I shouldn't just focus on panic. So I'm very much hoping that Hwang gets an opportunity. I think there's been a history of these Korean players kind of getting off to slow starts anyway. So maybe it makes sense for him to get his feet wet in the minor, so to speak. But I would, I would really like to see him make it to the majors and get a couple

hundred plate appearances because his, his recent track record in Korea is really interesting where he went from being a not power hitter who with strikeouts to a power hitter with strikeouts to a power hitter without strikeouts. I used to always find it funny the way that Doug Pfister progressed because when he was in the minor league system he was a nobody and then he's like I'm just gonna start throwing strikes all the time and then I'm going to start getting strikeouts too. I'm also going to start throwing faster. And now I'm going to improve my curveball. So he just got incrementally better all the time to the point where he was like a number

two pitcher for a couple of years there with the Tigers. And then, you know, he kind of fell off the map. But those guys who just kind of check off every box and get better everywhere, those are a lot of fun because usually they start near the bottom and then they end up near the top. And Hwang's kind of done that in korea so i i am very excited to see what he could do in uh in the most hitter unfriendly ballpark in uh in i guess at least the higher leagues in the world so that's too bad for him so we actually got a question from mike that was inspired by him

and he said i laughed listening to you talk talk about Huang who just decided to cut down on his strikeout rate while keeping the same power numbers. And that progression that you were just talking about, he went from about two and a half strikeouts per walk in 2015 to about 1.4 strikeouts per walk in 2016. And yeah, he hit well for power both years. And so Mike says, I laughed because it reminded me of a player whom I've marbled at for doing something similar, Daniel Murphy, except Daniel Murphy sort of did the opposite. Sometime toward the end of the 2015 season, he just decided to more than double his isolated slugging, isolated power while maintaining or actually lowering his historical strikeout percentage. it's not a perfect

Comparison but this leads to my question What's more inexplicable a slugger Who maintains the same isolated power While having his strikeout rate Or a contact hitter who maintains The same strikeout rate while doubling His isolated power Okay so with email shows

We don't historically Do research for the answers. It's mostly off the top of our heads, but Ben did kindly tip me off that he was going to ask me this about 10 minutes in advance of the podcast. So I threw together a little bit of research because I was also curious. So I just went back 20 years and I looked at hitters who batted at least 300 times in consecutive years. So that seems like a decent minimum. So I can tell you this much. It's extraordinarily rare to have your strikeout rate in that three players basically have done that in consecutive years. If you wanted to maybe be a little more charitable, you could say that there are 25 players, 25 players over 20 years who year to

year have cut at least 40% off of their strikeout rates from year to year. The leader here by far is Jeff Conine, who between 1998 and 1999 went from 20% strikeouts to 8% strikeouts, which is absurd. I had no idea that Jeff Conine did that. And his isolated power in each year was exactly the same at 162. So kudos, Jeff Conine, because his second year strikeout rate was 41% of his first year. I know this is very percentage based and ugly to listen to. But 41%, which means he cut his strikeout rate by 59%. Second place, cut his strikeout rate by 49%. So Conine wins this running away.

But it's clearly very rare to trim so much of your, off your striker rate. And I haven't even talked about what those players did with their power. Now, by way of comparison, there are 39 players who at least doubled their isolated power. And there are further nearly 300 players who added at least like 1.5 times their isolated power from the year before. And many of those players didn't see big increases in their strikeout rate. The name I did not expect to come across, but here we are. Jamie Carroll, he went from an isolated power of 33, or I should say 0.033 to 0.104. So it's not like Jamie Carroll became a power hitter, but he became a power hitter in the Jamie Carroll household. So he took off and he also trimmed his

strikeouts. But there's other names on here. Bryce Harper, clearly between 2014 and 2015, he doubled his power and trimmed his strikeouts. He did that by becoming God. He did that by becoming God. There's also one of my favorite names on this list is Javier Lopez, because Javier Lopez is at either end of this leaderboard. I'm not going to go through all the different sortings I've done, but Javier Lopez had a real up and down stretch there in his career where he became very bad and then extraordinarily good and bad again. Weird things happened in the aftermath of 2000 and 2001 for reasons that I think I don't need to get into. To get to maybe a better answer to the question, there are more players who add power than there are players who dramatically reduce their

strikeouts. And I don't think that's that unexpected because I think that at the end of the day, hitting for contact is a more difficult skill to acquire than hitting for power. We've seen guys recently who have sort of just increased their power without sacrificing very much. Matt Carpenter is a guy who always comes to mind. Brian Dozer is a better example of someone who just started hitting for power and didn't really become much worse. Daniel Murphy is taking things to the extreme because he's kind of done everything awesome. He's hit for more contact and a power, which I don't know. Now I feel inspired to write about Daniel Murphy very soon. One of the benefits of the show. But I think that if you are not a

contact hitter, it's possible to learn to hit for contact. But I think it's almost it's going to be almost obligatory that you end up taking something off your swing or sacrificing something because you're going to be making worse contact, probably not all the time. Clearly there's Murphy, but most of the time, whereas I think that if you are a decent contact hitter, I think it's conceivable to add power because you've already demonstrated that you have pretty good bat to ball skills and then it's a matter of selectivity and I think it's maybe easier to hone in or zone in on some certain type of pitch that you can hit for power like Brian Dozer has done and that way you can sort of maintain your contact and hit for a little more power. Now what we usually see is that people who hit for more power these days

are sacrificing a little bit of contact but really not that much so I'm going to go with that. I think it is easier to add power than it is to trim strikeouts. And Daniel Murphy is amazing for doing both and for doing both in his 30s. He's had an extraordinary career already. Yeah, that sounds right to me. Pretty thorough for 10 minutes of research. Good job. I will close that spreadsheet and never see it again. Until you write about Daniel Murphy, maybe. I should not have closed that spreadsheet. Whoops.

No. All right. Question from Sam. If you were a GM of a major league team, but you had to unlock statistics for scouting new players, much like in Madden or other similar games, which stats would you unlock first for batters and separately pitchers? You already get the basic biographical stats. You get age, height, weight, and most common position played last year, but nothing else. And he wants to know if we had to just go one by one.

I'm assuming you can't just like take war or something. It just tells you how good the player is or like his projection for the following season. I'm guessing you can't do that either. So I don't know how much you can cheat here. Like, can you take weighted runs created plus, which basically just takes all the other stats into account and tells you how good the hitter was overall?

It's probably not in the spirit of the question. It's probably not, no. So if you had to take other information that, I don't know, is not like a total value stat or like an all-in-one stat, I think speed might be something that I would take early. It doesn't tell you nearly everything you want to know about the player, but it tells you something about athleticism, probably tells you something about defense, tells you something about base running. Speed is a skill that comes into play in basically everything you do on a baseball field. You can be very fast and still not all that good at baseball, but it definitely helps in every area. So that seems like something that would be nice to know. in every area. So that seems like something that would be nice to know. I have, I haven't played Madden in a very long time, so I don't know exactly what it means by unlocking statistics, but I can guess based on the way that we've talked. And I think

if I were going to start very simple, I would want to unlock playing time. I would want to unlock playing time for position players and with pitchers. I don't know if it would be possible to unlock like playing time and also game started. Cause you you know i don't know how you'd find out if a guy was a reliever so i would i would begin with playing time because i i would suspect that of the very simple statistics playing time will have the strongest relationship to someone being overall pretty good or pretty bad it doesn't tell you that much about whether a guy's fine or a superstar. And it means that you are deferring to the ability of the coaching staff to know who's good or not so good, which can be more difficult at the lower levels. Because he said where this is for like drafting, is this scouting purposes?

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know how good college and high school coaches are at separating the wheat from the shaft, so to speak. But I would I would begin with playing time. And then, yeah, I think if you could go from there, well, I'd be happy to just unlock all further statistics from there. But assuming you can't do that, then I would want speed would be a good one for position players. And then I guess speed from the upper body for pitchers. So I guess that would be two statistics further unlocked. Because I think if you have playing time and then how hard a guy throws a fastball, that's going to get you pretty good ways along the way to knowing whether a guy's interesting. And plus, if you're scouting and you're bringing someone into your minor league system and not taking them straight to the majors, And I think you kind of build around a fastball

and go from there because you can't, most pitchers can't really learn a good fastball, but you can learn other stuff. And so yeah, I'll take playing time and arm strength and playing time and foot speed. Exit velocity, if you could get that. Yeah, probably can't, but I love it. Right. The hitter equivalent of pitch velocity. So yeah, I mean, I think those are the basics that you would want. Just, I mean, just knowing age, height, weight, and position played, which is something that we got from the start. That's a lot. That tells you something.

Question, a question for you real quick, because you just reminded me, you might've already talked about this in the previous podcast. I'm sure you did. You also wrote a book about it, but I was curious more about the exit velocities you were seeing with the stompers. Because when I was reading was reading the book of course the only exit velocities i've ever seen are the exit velocities for major leaguers who are extraordinarily good at hitting baseballs hard and clearly you have to adjust your expectations when you're dealing with players who weren't even in affiliated baseball but you were uh, I don't, it's been like a year, year and a half,

so I don't remember specific names, but you had, I think, one dude who you had occasionally, occasionally touching like 95 or 100 miles per hour exit velocity. Is that right? Yes. There were, not as an average, I don't think, but, I mean, there were definitely individual batted balls that were in triple digits. And the difference was that we were using HitFX,

which is the system that does similar tracking of batted ball velocity, but it's by SportVision, the company that does PitchFX instead of TrackMan, the company that does StatCast and tracks batted ball velocity for the major leagues now. And those systems, for whatever reason, they're calibrated differently or they measure things differently so that HitFX reports lower speeds across the board just on average than TrackMan does. So we had to adjust for that too. I forget exactly how much lower it was, but a significant amount. But even so, there were definitely guys who hit

the ball at a major league speed, even though there were not pitchers who really threw the ball at major league speeds. Or there were occasionally, there were guys who threw in the 90s, but it was pretty rare. We didn't really have anyone on our team who consistently threw in the 90s, but there were definitely hits that would not look out of place in the major leagues, which I guess just goes to show you that batted ball velocity has more to do with the hitter than the pitcher, which is something that people have found in their research.

So I have a, I have this spreadsheet of Jeff Zimmerman who does some writing and research for Fangraphs. He is, he's taken all of the exit velocity information from Baseball Savant, and then he's corrected them to include his estimates of batted ball velocity

for balls that aren't tracked, which is mostly bad contact. That's the way that StatCast has worked so far. So he reports numbers that are generally lower than all of the public averages that we get to look at, and the best players are close to what's publicly reported because they have the least bad contact. Anyway, I have this sheet of everyone who's hit at least 100 batted balls over the last two years. And the lowest average exit velocities for such players that

show up in this list, it's like Hanser, Alberta, when Jonathan Herrera, Shane Victorino, Billy Burns. These are guys at like 77, 78 miles per hour on average. That's bad when you consider that at the very top, there's Miguel Cabrera, who's at like 92 miles per hour with a full mile per hour lead over Miguel Sano. So these guys are like 14 miles per hour weaker. But if you can remember, what sort of averages were you seeing? Like, what were some of the best or some of the worst on your team? And you don't have to necessarily name players. I have an answer for you because Dan Brooks and Harry Pavlidis built a stat page for us with the Stompers. And they took all that data and they made it nice and sorted it for us because we couldn't do that ourselves.

So the best exit velocity in the Pacific Association in 2015. And again, this is a different measurement system. So adjust it upward by probably several miles per hour to get it onto the trackman scale. The best was 85.2, which was Matt Chavez, who was our nemesis in the league. He was like the Barry Bonds of the league. He literally had like a Barry Bonds weighted runs created plus in his prime against us and against everyone of the league. He literally had like a Barry Bonds weighted runs created plus in his prime against us and against everyone in the league. And he was signed by the Padres who moved him to high A at the end of the season. So he was really good. And he had an exit velocity

that was about three and a half, four miles per hour higher than anyone else we tracked in the samples that we had. We only had it in our home park and it wasn't that many games. But yeah, he was at 85. And then the minimum for someone with more than five batted balls, well, he had 45. So that's probably not fair. They were probably all grounders or something. But there was a guy with 12 batted balls who was at 58. There were a lot of people in the 50s and 60s.

And again, small sample, but there were definitely guys who were just not hitting the ball hard regularly. So I think the range was probably, I don't know if the range was wider because the highs were not as high as you'd see in the majors but the lows were definitely a lot lower yeah that that matt chavez figure is impressive because if you adjust that up by a few miles per hour he's he's among the best like i don't know cory seager last year averaged about 89 miles per hour you said chavez was around 85 86 and that's with a different system that came in low that's impressive i mean i don't know i can't speak to his other skills but at least he has clearly a at least one major league caliber skill well at least he does against far from major league caliber pitching so yeah okay that's fair but still bat speed is bat speed right yeah oh he's a great hitter i mean he hit he was playing for our rivals. He hit.383,.469 on base,.795 slugging. He hit 31 homers and 264 at-bats, which is insane. He hit most of those homers against us. It was

terrible. We were seeing him in our nightmares. And then the Padres signed him, and he only had like 15 games at the end of the 2015 season and he did fine 817 OPS he hit a few homers at high A and then 2016 he was back in Indy ball in the American Association which is a couple levels higher than the Stompers at least and he had a 1054 OPS plus there too also so So like he can hit anywhere in indie ball and low level minors. The problem is he is 27 and he's a first baseman who doesn't really do a whole lot of other stuff. So yeah. Yeah, I noticed this about Chavez. This is not a podcast about Matt Chavez,

but as long as you're here, I'm looking at his baseball reference page just like I'm sure you are. And he's had two very limited spurts with affiliated ball, one of the Giants and one of the Padres. As as you know this is down in like high a and single a and uh the upside is he has hit for a little bit of power but the downside is over 97 plate appearances he's got 34 strikeouts in one walk yeah so it's not good that's that's the one problem he can hit the ball

hard but the problem is he might know that a little too well uh and and he might continue to try to do that which yeah you know i guess if you're if you're really down there on the fringes you're probably just trying to show the best that you have every single time yeah and it did put the hierarchy into perspective for us because he really was just unbelievably good watching him from day to day like it's hard to tell the relative talent levels when you're watching players play against other players who are at roughly the same skill level. It looks more or less like a baseball game. I mean, there were definitely more errors at that level and pitchers threw softer and that sort of thing, but it looked like a baseball game. And so when you see a hitter being as dominant as

he was, you think this guy must be great. But then you realize that this guy who's Barry Bonds in a low level independent league where all the players are professionals and many of them have played or will play an affiliated ball, he can't even get picked up by a team. Or if he does, it will be in high A at best. And so he's like multiple levels away from even triple A and yet he is dominating at this level. And it just kind of reminds you how good Major League Baseball players are. Yeah. I wish that fans, it's an impossible ask, but I wish that fans could have some experience similar, but maybe not quite as exhaustive as yours with the Stompers. Just to be able to

understand that if you look at the worst player on your favorite major league team, and that player is unbelievable. He's better at baseball than you'll ever be at anything. Those people are just incredible. Nobody sucks. And I think that's one of the things that I appreciate about Sam's writing. Not the question, ask her, Sam, but Sam Miller. Previous podcast host, you might remember him. You did a whole book with him.

One of the things I appreciate about his writing is that he writes from the foundational understanding that everyone is incredible. And it's really a lot more pleasing to read when writers aren't mean, you know? And you can't be mean when you realize that you are in awe of everyone's skill. Yeah. And, you know, when you're a baseball writer, you have to insult players sometimes, or at least say things that are not positive about them. And it's hard to preface every one of those observations with, yes, we know he's amazing. He's playing against the best baseball players in the world. He's better than all but whatever, 750 or a thousand baseball players in the world.

And he's great. And he had to do a lot to get here. But occasionally you get that comment, you know, like if you're sort of flippant about a player being bad at Major League Baseball, you'll get the comment that reminds you that he's actually amazing at baseball. And we all know that, but we can't just say it every single time because you'd probably get sick of hearing that. So question from Troy, it's pretty common to split a player's performance up into the first and second halves of a season or to note that a player has had a strong second half. My question is this.

If you had three players who added an equal amount of value over their careers, but one did so at an even pace, one was only good during the first half, and one was only good during the second half, which of the three players would be thought of most positively? Would it be the consistent performer, the one who garnered all of the all-star appearances and hot starts, or the one who was quote-unquote clutch? Well, I guess first of all, I would disagree that the guy who's only good in the second half would be considered clutch because who knows how his teams are doing or what sort of stakes he's playing in. or what sort of stakes he's playing in. Okay, so this is difficult,

because you're asking about who's actually better versus who would be perceived to be better. And if you have a dude who's making All-Star games every single year, that guy's going to be perceived to be better, because you would remember that he's constantly on television, and you kind of forget about the second halves and the way that people are... To whatever extent people know who Adam Duvall is, and I know we're not supposed to talk about the Reds, but here we are.

To whatever extent people know who Adam Duvall is, and I know we're not supposed to talk about the Reds, but here we are. To whatever extent people know who Adam Duvall is, they'll be less aware of the fact that he kind of cratered in the second half because who was paying attention to Adam Duvall in the second half? You just remember like, oh, he was there in the All-Star festivities. I don't actually remember if he was in the game or just the home run derby, but whatever. He was present and then it got worse. But in terms of actually being valued better or being considered better by executives, I think baseball people fall all over themselves in search of quote unquote consistency. And if you can find a player who's actually consistent, which by the way, these players don't exist. Everyone is just a bunch of hot streaks and cold streaks.

But there are, I guess, extremes and less extremes. People would love the consistent player they would wonder what was going on with the other two players because if you actually had these splits where you were consistently bad and then good or consistently good then bad teams wouldn't love that because they'd figure that it's something you're doing and if you get off to slow starts they think maybe you're not doing great off-season prep. Or if you're getting off to hot starts and then getting worse, they think, well, you don't keep yourself in great shape. So teams would prefer the consistent player. Whether or not that player is actually more valuable, I don't really know. I don't think that player would be more valuable, but teams would

sure as heck like that player more. Yeah. The only other alternative argument I can think of is that if you are good down the stretch every year, on average, you're going to be in a playoff race a significant portion of those years. And so a lot of your good performance will come in games that have a higher, you know, championship win probability added and a perception that they are more important and more people paying attention and hanging on every pitch. So I think in general, there are those biases. There's a recency bias, which is to remember something that just happened.

And there's also a primacy bias, which is to remember the thing that happened first. So either way, I guess you could get some sort of bias where you remember the guy who has the hot streak in April when you're just paying attention to baseball for the first time that year and everyone's stats reflect only what they have done in the last week or two. So that's easy to remember. We all remember the weird examples of not very good hitters who had really great starts to the season. But you also kind of remember guys who were great for your team during the stretch run. I don't know if you remember those guys if you are not a fan of that team. And maybe you remember a strong second half better just because you have six months to

think about it after it's over and you remember what happened most recently and there's no new baseball going on. So that is the foremost thing in your mind as you're thinking about that player over the months when there's no baseball. So I could see the argument that the second half guy would be remembered more fondly. But I think you're right. If you're actually good enough to make all-star teams, then that probably outweighs everything else.

Oh, wait. I can weasel. Okay wait i can weasel okay i can weasel with this because okay because we split we split seasons into first half and second half but they're not actually first half and second half it's more like it's true when the all-star game happens in it seems like it happens like the middle of september so you've got like 150 games then you get the halfway point and then you play like a week and a half then it's the playoffs so there's i i don't know what the actual number is but it feels like the second half quote unquote is actually about like 70 or 75 games which makes sense because if the ulster break is in the middle of july then you

played three and a half months and then after that you have like two and a half months so it's it's lopsided so if you're really good in the first half relative to the second half well that's good because that's a bigger sample so my weasel answer is the first half guy is better unless unless it was explicit in the question that they're all the same, in which case, whoops. All right. Do you want to do your

fangraphs stats moment? Yeah, sure. Okay. So forget the name. Every week I'll say that we don't need a name and then eventually baseball reference will come through

and we don't have to do this anymore. So last week focused on the hot topic of Luis Cruz and we did touch on Lenny Harris. But this week we're going to focus on Gerardo Parra because this is how we say current with the baseball loving masses. I saw yesterday afternoon on Roto World, which is a wonderful website. There is a little blurb about Harada Parra, who says he's fully recovered from the high ankle sprain he had in 2016. I didn't know he had a high ankle sprain in 2016. I don't care that I have that information,

but it did at least put Harada Parra in my mind. And one of the things that is most interesting about Harada Parra is this is going to get a little bit into the weeds, but on Fangrafts, obviously we have wins above replacement, but that is split up. You can look at it being split up into two metrics that are called conveniently offense and defense. Offense measures a player's total value hitting, base running, all that stuff. And defense is a blend of fielding performance, which is based on UZR, which I know, but let's just live with it. And also it folds in a positional adjustment, which I know, but let's

live with it. So defense rating is not perfect, but it is pretty good. Probably the best we have, because if you want to know how valuable a guy is based on his defense, well, what you would want to know is his position and his performance. and defense gives you the best estimate of that that we probably have. Anyway, what is interesting about Hiroto Para is that at one point in his career, 2013, he had an extraordinarily good defense rating with Adama backs. He came in at plus 26 runs above average, implying he was a good defender at a valuable position. Plus 26 runs to put that in a frame of reference is, well, I guess I don't have a frame of reference. It's really good. So two years later, Gerardo Parra had a defense rating of negative 22.1 runs above average,

or to put it another way, plus 22.1 runs below average. So Parra, at one point in his career, was an extraordinarily valuable defensive player. And just two years later, he was one of the least valuable defensive players in the game. And I got curious to know what players have had, if anyone, what players have had a bigger swing in their careers between their best and their worst defensive performance. I know they're not perfect metrics, obviously, but this is capturing something because I can tell you in 2013, Herrera was playing mostly right field, a little bit of center field, but that year he had a UZR of plus 31.1 runs. If you don't love UZR, if you like defensive runs saved, he was at plus 37 runs. So even better, Parra, by all the

numbers, in part because of his arm, very good defensive season. And then in his bad year, he was also playing a corner outfield position, but a little bit of center field. And his UZR was negative 18.1, and his DRS was negative 10. Okay, so the numbers agree, great defender and also very bad defender. So anyway, we have these advanced numbers in theory going back all the way in baseball. And in reality, we have just UCR going back to 2002. So out of curiosity, I looked at every player who's ever played Major League Baseball. and based on our defense rating on Fangraphs, I looked at the biggest career swings previous to 2002. Fangraphs obviously does not have defensive run saved or ultimate zone rating. It uses, I believe, its total zone,

which is the same information that is used at Baseball Reference. So if you look at the entirety of baseball history, Gerardo Parra has the ninth biggest swing, his swing, the difference between plus 26 and negative 22.1. Easy math. That's 48.1 run difference between his best and worst, right? Okay. If you didn't listen to the last three minutes, that's fine because here we are. Gerardo Parra, 48 run difference between best and worst defensive values in his career. Ninth biggest swing in baseball history. He's very close to the sixth and fifth and fourth. So like third place on this list is, well, I guess it's not actually third place because

the person in third place is the same as the person in first place, which doesn't make sense. So let's just get right to first place. All time, based on this metric the the winner so to speak is Ken Griffey Jr. who at his best was at plus 33.5 runs of defensive value you might remember him as being a good defensive center fielder this happened in 1996 that's when he got that rating he was a very good apparently defensive center fielder and his worst rating was negative 35.4 I don't know because I was negative 35.4. I don't know,

because I don't have it pulled up. I don't know if that's when he was an awful defensive center fielder, or if that's when he was a designated hitter. But there you go. Ken Griffey Jr. is the winner with a difference in best and worst defensive value of 68.9 runs. Second place is 62.6. Third place is 50.1. So a huge lead for Ken Griffey Jr. between best and worst defensive value. Now, because Griffey did that in 1996, that's when he was at his best. That's before we had UZR. So maybe you just want to focus on the advanced metric era, which is defensible because the numbers before that are worse. So let's say you just want to think about the UZR era, which goes back to 2002. That still covers 15 years of baseball. It's a pretty good sample of baseball. I think we're

all agreed. Yes. Yeah. We're all nodding. We're all agreed. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So just looking from 2002 to 2016, the leader among all players in difference between best and worst defensive value is perotopara at 48.1 runs sure he is uh he's the winner with uh with the difference of 48.1 runs between best and worst second place is tory hunter uh maybe not a complete surprise at 42.8 and then in third place regrettably i think franklin gutierrez who went from being maybe the best defensive outfielder in baseball to a guy who has something called ankylosing spondylitis, which is a condition that allows him to not be the best defensive outfielder in baseball. To Gutierrez's credit, he still hits the crap out of the ball when he's able to play, but clearly he's playing not on his own terms. So Gutierrez gets a little bit of an asterisk.

playing not on his own terms. So Gutierrez gets a little bit of an asterisk. I guess you could say Hunter gets an asterisk in that he also got old, which is what happens to many of us. I don't know what the deal was with Gerardo Parra in 2015, because that was not the year that he played through a high ankle sprain in Colorado. He was actually a better defender last year than he was the year before. Explain that. I don't know how, but there you go. Gerardo Parra is the modern day, I guess, leader in the biggest difference between best and worst defensive value. So I don't know if that's an insult or a compliment or both, but it's probably both. So kudos to Gerardo Parra. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. So I guess it makes sense that Griffey would be at the top of that leaderboard just based on the perception of his career arc, which is best player in baseball to not very good player in his older days. It was a pretty precipitous decline. So maybe I wouldn't have guessed quite that precipitous, but makes sense that he'd be up there? I can tell you. So Griffey, as mentioned, he was at his best by this measure in 1996. He was an everyday center fielder for the Mariners and he was at his worst looking it up. It was in 2007

when he was with the Reds. So this is pre his DH days, but during what I would say should have been his DH days, because in 2007 with the Reds, he was a right fielder and his UZR for that year as a right fielder was negative 29.1 runs. Now, maybe you think that's crazy because that's just way too bad in the field. But if you do think that's crazy, the previous year in about three quarters, the playing time, he was at negative 21.4 runs the year before that negative 19 the year before that negative 20.7 ken griffey jr if you look at it if you have a somewhere that is easy for you as a listener to compare careers one place you can do this is on fangraphs.com where we do have a an easy way to compare two players but there is an incredible parallel between ken griffey jr's career and andrew jones's

griffey was the better hitter, of course, in his prime. Jones, the better defender. I think we all agree in his prime, but these are two players. Griffey had the better career overall and clearly the more memorable player. He was more of a cultural icon, but neither player really did anything after they were 29 or 30 years old. Griffey, you could argue because he broke down. Jones, you could argue because he got fat. But you know, the whole thing about Griffey breaking down, you could, I think, justifiably maybe criticize him for not taking the best care of himself that you could have. It will boggle my mind when we get to the voting. I believe Jones is on the ballot

next year for the Hall of Fame. And Griffey, of course, went into the Hall of Fame with what I believe was the highest vote percentage in history. And I'm not entirely convinced Jones will even last a season or two. I don't know how his voting is going to come out. So much of his value is based on his defense. But just from the wins above replacement perspective, that's not fair. Obviously, there's more that goes into it. A certain Sam Miller just wrote about this last week on ESPN, but you might be blown away by the comparison between Jones and Griffey. And it's something that I hope gets a little more attention over the next year because Jones is probably going to be underrated because I guess similar to the previous question we had, but over a career span, really good first half,

not so good second half. But which will he be remembered for more? I have a quick stat thing, too, in response to a reader's question. I'm actually going to use the play index, not because they sponsor us, but because it is useful for answering this question. So Marcus says, I looked up the pitcher Chris Young on Baseball Reference today and was looking through his stats when I noticed he's hit a triple and a home run in his career as a batter, both while a San Diego Padre. He's also had singles and doubles in his career. How many other pitchers have a career cycle? As a Dodgers fan, I thought maybe either Maeda or Ryu had it, but one is short a triple and the other is short a home run. Bumgarner and Granke are short a triple.

Kershaw has hit for a career cycle So this is easy to look up On Baseball References Batting Season Finder You can just put minimum of at least One of each of these types of hits There's no reason why you should know this But do you have any guess

About the number of active pitchers Who have the career cycle Oh no Chris Young Yeah Chris Young is on the list the number of active pitchers who have the career cycle? Oh, no. Chris Young. Yeah, Chris Young is on the list, but there are 15, 15 pitchers have the career cycle. This is active, you said?

Yes, 15 active pitchers, and it's Cole Hamels, Matt Cain, Adam Wainwright, Kershaw, Jake Peavy, Mike Leak, Kyle Kendrick, Ian Kennedy, Jaime Garcia, Travis Wood, Chris Young, Shelby Miller, Jake Arrieta, Andrew Kashner, and Tyson Ross. Tyson Ross has the career cycle with the fewest number of plate appearances. So he has only come to the plate 171 times, and he has the career cycle, which is good. Cole Hamels at the top of the list has over 700 plate appearances. So I don't know whether that told us anything, but that is the answer

To this question These are not necessarily the best hitting pitchers Some of the best hitting pitchers are on the list But as Marcus mentioned Granke and Bumgarner are not On the list, so this probably has Something to do with A certain sort of athleticism

If you looked at these pitchers' history, I don't know. I didn't, but if you did, you might see that they had passed as position players or track or who knows what, something other than pitchers. Perhaps they have the speed that you need to get a triple despite being a bad hitter. So that's the answer to this question. I'm going to add now onto your thing, because I was curious how many of the pitchers who have hit for the career cycle,

but also have stolen a base. So on my list of 15, there are four guys who also have a steal. Andrew Kashner, Cole Hamels, Clayton Kershaw, and Travis Wood. Kashner has two. And so what's interesting, because Hamels, one stolen base out of four opportunities.

I don't know what Cole Hamels thinks he's doing, but he's not stealing so good. Clayton Kershaw is one out of one. Stealing bases, Travis Wood at one out of one. Andrew Kaschner, two out of two. Andrew Kaschner is someone who the Padres used to use in an interesting fashion, because he would show up not just as a pitcher.

He would sometimes pinch it, and more often, I think he would even pinch defended ones. I might be making that up, but he definitely pinch ran. And you can see that because he has a triple and two stolen bases, which for a pitcher makes him God. So kudos, Andrew Kashner, you should not have gone to the American League. All right. Last question. Jason in Long Beach says, given the recent rule changes aimed at increased player safety, collisions at the plate and slides into second base, I have another suggestion in mind.

What if the batter was simply awarded first base any time a pitch crossed into the batter's box on the side where he's hitting? In my opinion, the pitch actually striking the batter is less important than the fact that it enters that space. Furthermore, I don't believe pitchers should be rewarded for the fact that agile hitters are able to dodge the throw. Essentially, throwing at or towards a batter would become the same as hitting a batter. I imagine pitchers wouldn't like this rule because it would limit their ability to throw inside, but that seems like a small price to pay in the name of batter safety. Well, I can understand the idea of maybe drawing a line somewhere beyond which you would get a free base.

But I don't think you would have to be careful with this one because if there is a lot of pitchers out there who like to throw sort of the back foot breaking ball to opposite handed hitters. And those pitches, if you're aiming sort of at the back foot, you're not actually aiming at the back foot, but you're aiming around there. I think you see this with Anthony Rizzo about four times a game, where you have a curveball or a slider that's coming in, and it's going to be low and inside, and then it's going to hit the dirt often, and then it's going to keep going in that direction. You're going to have a good number of pitches that end up beyond that inner boundary of the batter's box by the time they get to the catcher. Now, maybe you want to be careful and you can say that you're just going to be limiting things to pitches that cross the front plane of the batter's box at the front plane of home plate. So sort of where pitch effects and track

measure pitches. And then that one, I think, gives you a little more leeway with the rule. You would have far fewer pitchesers, pitches violating that. So you would have batters getting a base, uh, relatively infrequently. But if we're going to be honest, I think this is a rule that would never actually get past the players union. Pitchers would be furious. Batters would feel like they're not entitled to it. I'm not convinced as much as I think all batters know that a free base is a free base and that's good for the team. At the end of the day, batters want to hit. I think this is why you see like a lot of players have to be convinced that walking is good for them. And I think this is one of the reasons why a lot of players hate the intentional walk.

Sometimes people go up there, they get hit and they don't actually want their base. I know that we are all thinking about Brandon Geyer or Derek Dietrich. And these are people who are maybe only in the league because they get hit by pitches, but most people want to swing. And I think that it would be a really strange adjustment for them to just get a free base because nothing happened, but a pitch came a little bit close. So I get it i think that there is i don't i guess i don't i would like to see some rates on uh how frequently batters are actually hurt by getting hit and obviously they they all hurt uh trust me i i was just i was playing catch with matthew corey just in november just an ordinary game of catch between two non-athletic baseball players like we're not

we're not throwing very hard and I was wearing a glove as you do and I was reaching down for a low throw just an ordinary throw maybe 65 70 miles per hour for Matthew Corey I don't know what happened I think my glove must have slipped a little bit off my hand and the ball caught me flush in the palm and I didn't I didn't end up with a broken bone but I certainly wound up with a bone bruise that is still healing today, which is troublesome because there's a lot of things I still can't quite do at 100%. I broke my nose once just playing catch. I was just in Central Park just playing catch, and I was not that old. So this was a while ago, and the balls were definitely not being thrown hard.

But there was a tree branch that was placed in a oh no bad place and so the ball bounced off this tree branch and took a bad hop right into my nose and broke my nose so yeah catch can be dangerous it sucks and it's i guess maybe it's kind of like with the stompers where it gives you some valuable perspective when you see something that happens just playing ordinary baseball but like getting hit by a baseball sucks, even when it's weak. Like you laugh about somebody gets hit by a Jared Weaver fastball, but like, no, that person's not laughing. I tell you that much. So it all hurts. But in terms of like actual injury, in terms of like DL stints or even worse, I think the rates are very infrequent. There's really not that many headshots

that we see. So maybe what you would need to do, because you're mostly concerned about headshots, right, with this rule? Yeah, I was going to say, I think you need a height component to this also, because if you just have balls that are in the batter's box, but kind of in the dirt, that's, I think, probably easier to avoid and also not nearly as dangerous if you don't avoid it. So I could see something like this working for balls that are in a small danger area. And in that case, then it makes sense to punish the process instead of punishing the results. If you throw a pitch up at a batter's head and he manages to duck out of the way, that's good.

But it was still dangerous. And so I could see something like that happening. Pitchers, I'm sure, would still hate it. But yeah, those are the real danger opportunities. Yeah, you could probably push that along. It would take some years because you have to introduce the rule first and then people have to hate it for three or four years before they they come around but if you if you said that the boundary was like inside line of the batter's box and i don't know higher than four maybe even five but probably four people are crouching like four feet off the ground

or something like that and inside there's going to be so few pitches in there anyway it should in theory be easy to avoid and maybe that makes it hard if there's like a be so few pitches in there. Anyway, it should in theory be easy to avoid. And maybe that makes it hard if there's like a hitter who's really bad at high inside fastballs. But you know, you can still hopefully throw pitches up there. I think you could conceivably run into something that it reminds me of there's a delay of game penalty in hockey, where if you are if you have the puck in your defensive zone and you you shoot the puck over the glass and it doesn't hit the glass then you get a delay of game penalty because this rule started because teams would just kind of flip the puck into the crowd to try to get a face off

instead of clearing the puck down the ice so they they penalize that but now you get a lot of penalties called on guys who clearly didn't mean to do it, but the puck just goes into the crowd anyway because you just kind of like miss hit the puck. And so people then sit down. They know it's the rule and they take their penalties and so be it. But you would probably end up with, if you made this a rule in baseball, I would think that you would end up with a low percentage of pitchers violating the rule because they were trying to hit someone or throw near someone. And you'd end up with most pitchers being penalized because the ball slipped out of

their hand. And that's just something that would be one of the side effects. And if you can live with that because it's still pretty uncommon, then so be it. It's a pretty modest penalty. Also, it's certainly less dangerous than sitting for two minutes in a hockey game. So maybe, maybe I'm on board with this. I could, I could see this. I'm excited to see if this podcast just slowly transitions to being a hockey podcast over time. I really like hockey, but I don't know much about it. And I want to know more.

And you really like hockey and you do know some things about it. So maybe. Very, very little. Let's be clear. I, uh, I. Let's be clear. Do you watch any other sports? Not on a regular basis, no. Okay. Have you in the recent past watched other sports with any regularity? I used to watch hockey very regularly when I was young and the Rangers were good at that time. And that was kind of when I formed my attachment to it.

But basically, no, I haven't for a long time watched any sport regularly. Okay, so let's make this a Ben Lindbergh podcast. What for you, if anything, do you have an emotional outlet in terms of things that don't actually matter but that you get to feel like they matter? Like in a sort of fan relationship way? Yeah, I guess. I guess I don't really. There are a lot of fan relationship way? Yeah, I guess. I guess I don't really.

There are a lot of things I like and enjoy, but I don't know if there's anything that I'm rooting for in the way that a fan roots for a team. Okay. Okay. So maybe you're not missing anything because clearly you're a functional adult and you don't have this outlet. I mean, do you have enough diversionary outlets where you're getting your, your enjoyment anyway? But I, uh, I find that hockey serves that purpose for me. Cause as I'm sure you understand you, we all started as baseball fans and we had our favorites

and then you, you get into this line of work and you lose it, uh, just sort of by the nature of doing the job where you're not only covering every team, but also doing it in a cold, heartless, analytical fashion. And it changes your fandom almost out of necessity. And so with hockey, I didn't want that to happen. And so I sort of make a deliberate effort to not be smart about it in a way where it's like, oh, I just saw someone publish a really good hockey analytics article. I am definitely not going to read that. So it's there as sort of an emotional, like teenager level outlet for me in the way that no other sport can be. And I want to remain hockey stupid for as long as I can. Okay. All right. So we can end it there. There are a bunch of other good questions that I have starred here, but we will get to them next time.

You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support for the podcast include Steve Nikolikzak, Carl Despoto, Joseph Kappel, Zach Rau, and Reed DeWolf. Thank you. You can also join our Facebook group, which now includes over 5,200 members at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes, and you can contact me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or by messaging us through Patreon. That's it for today. We will be back later this week. I lips me and I'm thanking the Lord for blessing you with hockey team.