Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1015: You Need to Know Nakashima

Episode Date: February 4, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan fixate on their new baseball obsession, NPB shortstop (and offensive outlier) Takuya Nakashima. Then they discuss prospect terminology and the nebulous significance of the “ceiling.” Audio intro: Destroyer, "Strike" Audio outro: Wilco, "Taste the Ceiling" Link to Ben’s Nakashima article  iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)  Sponsor Us on Patreon  Get Our Merch!  Facebook Group […]

And strike And strike Strike Strike Strike Hello and welcome to episode 1015 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you and us by our Patreon supporters and also by our Fangraphs Overlords. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs and I am here with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer and also of the internationally renowned Takuro Nakashima article that has just been published on this Friday morning. And oh, I am excited. I am so excited. I got a sneak peek into this article and I can't wait to talk about him immediately. How are you? How are you?

Let's do that. I'm good. I have a new favorite player, so that's fun. I got the name right, right? Takura Nakashima? Takuya? Takuya? Yeah. This is embarrassing. Should have prepped this a little. Nakashima. You know, we never really use first names anyway. Yeah, right. Nakashima-san. So, Ben, if you would do us the pleasure of explaining in, I don't know, 500 words or less, why Nakashima is your new favorite player in the

world. I'll try because I wrote a lot more than that. So this came to our attention via a listener email from friend of the show, Kaz Yamazaki. He emailed us because there is a player on the Hokkaido Nipponham fighters, which is Shohei Otani's team. And this player is essentially the guy that we have talked about, we talked about not long ago, I think maybe multiple times has been talked about on this podcast, but the hypothetical player who can just keep fouling off pitches indefinitely until the pitcher just can't throw strikes anymore, inevitably misses, and then he walks and people keep asking us, how much would that guy be worth? And we answer. And then it turns out that he's real. And his

name is Nakashima. And on this podcast last year, we talked a lot about Shohei Otani. And of course, he's fascinating for, you know, he's, I mean, he's the best titter in Japan. He's the best pitcher in Japan. Everyone's interested in Otani. And so now you have to have a hipster Hokkaido Nippon him fighter favorite. And Nakashima fits the bill because he's like the most effectively wild player ever in 10 different ways. And he's incredible. Like, we like outliers. We like people who are unusual, I guess, just because it grabs our attention or because we talk and write about baseball players and most of them are close to the average and they don't really stand out in any way. And so when someone does, when he's on some extreme end of the scale, then we write about him and we talk about him and maybe we have some affection for him.

And he doesn't really even have to be good at baseball. And even the thing that he's an outlier in doesn't really have to be good like Seth Lugo for instance you you wrote about him once last summer and he's like Mike Petriello's favorite player because he has this curveball that has a spin rate that is much higher than anyone else's curveball and it's not clear that Seth Lugo is good. It's not even clear that Seth Lugo's curveball is good for that matter, but it does spin a lot more than other curveballs. And so we like him and we pay attention to him and we think that must mean something. So Nakashima is just, I like fouling off pitches is the thing that Kaz emailed us about specifically. So basically he has fouled off something like 250 more pitches in the last NPB season than any other NPB player.

759 fouls. It was a whole thing. There was a lady in the stands at the games that would have like a board she would hold up every time he would foul. She'd add one to the counter. And I linked to videos in the article. He topped out at 14 pitch plate appearances twice in the regular season. But I linked to a video with an 18 pitch one that he had in spring training last year. And it's like 18 pitches, 13 fouls, and I don't know, like seven or eight minutes.

And by the time he gets to the end of this plate appearance, everyone is laughing. And like all the players in the dugout are laughing and the pitcher is laughing and he's laughing. And it's just this sort of preternatural foul ball ability. And it is what seems to make him a viable player. I should also mention he's like a 26-year-old shortstop. He's a very good shortstop. He's a very good shortstop. He might be the best defensive shortstop in Japan currently. So that is what accounts for most of his value. But his offensive value, such as it is, is really based around this

ability to keep spoiling strikes. He's a conflict in a few ways. He's bad because he's never hit a home run and he has a career slugging percentage of 273. At's bad because he's never hit a home run, and he has a career slugging percentage of 273. At any level. He's never hit a home run over the fence at any level, high school, whatever they call grammar school in Japan. He's never done it. Yeah, and I assume he's never done it because it's literally never once even entered his mind

to try to hit the ball more than 100 feet. So he's bad because he can't hit at all, but he's good because he draws walks, and he's apparently, by the metrics that they have in Japan, like the best or the second best defensive shortstop in the league. So he's pretty good. And he's extremely unwatchable and annoying because he just keeps fouling things off,

and he makes no bones about the fact that he's not going up there to try to hit. He's just trying to slap the ball on the ground maybe or draw a walk, but he's not annoying because he's beloved and people just lose their minds over him. Because of course, in Japanese baseball, it's more of an interactive spectator event. And you have a few supporting quotes in there, but fans of the team, when Nakashima comes up to bat, he gives them more time to organize and to do their chants and to go through the whole routine. And because he's so bizarre, like you said, they have a foul counter

and the players in the dugout put on their batting helmets for protection because he's just going to spray the ball everywhere but into the field of play. You have a stat in your article that I forgot what the exact numbers are with zero and one strike in terms of there's a stat that no one ever thinks about. It's like fouls per swing. You've heard of,

you've all heard of like contact per swing or in play per swing, fouls per swing. It's a thing. Ben, please, please enlighten the listeners. Well, the thing is that people will talk about old timey players who had this ability, who could just foul off pitches and they'd get to two strikes and they could just foul and foul and foul. And eventually the pitcher would make a mistake, whether it was a ball or a hittable pitch. And we don't have pitch by pitch data for those years. It might well be true. Luke Appling, the hall of famer is famous for having had this ability, but today no one seems to have this ability And people will occasionally claim that they do They'll claim that there is some player who can do this Or even a player will make the claim

Like Jason Kendall in his autobiography or memoir He said that he did this And you look at the stats And whether for Kendall or Ichiro Who's another guy who had this reputation Or just the league as a whole It really doesn't happen so the fouls per swing rate with zero and one strike is almost indistinguishable from the

fouls per swing rate with two strikes so it's like you know one extra foul per hundred pitches when you get to two strikes so as much as players say that they bear down when it's two strikes and maybe you choke up and you try to just make contact and spoil the pitch, doesn't happen on any kind of widespread basis in the major leagues or with any even individual player that I have looked up in my years of looking into this obscure stat. Nakashima of course is the exception As he is in everything So with Zero strikes he Fouls off 44% Of the pitches that he swings at With one strike 52% With two strikes 75% So

Three quarters of his two strike swings He hits foul balls on Which is just amazing It's incredible Here's why I'm skeptical of the luke appling fact if you look at nakashima you think about someone who's able to just foul the ball off over and over and over and you think okay he can put the bat on the ball but what that also means is he's running a lot of deep counts which means that he's taking a lot of balls taking a

lot of strikes ending up in a lot of i don't know two two three two counts so nakashima he drew 63 walk he walks walked in 10% of his plate appearances, even though, let's repeat, he's like never hit a home run, ever. Not even in Little League. But he also struck out 117 times, which is not a ton, but it's just a natural consequence

of having gotten into so many deep counts. Luke Appling, over his career, he struck out I didn't, there's a leaderboard wrong, but he struck out in only 5% or thereabouts of his plate appearances, which was lower, I think substantially lower than the league average during his playing time. And you could argue, I guess that means he had even better bat control, maybe, but I get the sense that people are like, oh, Luke Appling is good at hitting the ball. Therefore, let's make up this thing about him because, you know, 80 years from now,

no one's going to have the data to prove us wrong. Yeah. And I don't know that it even makes sense. If you have the ability to foul off pitches on two strikes or whatever count, then don't you also have the ability to make good contact? It doesn't really make sense that there would be an ability to make contact with a pitch but to intentionally not hit it well and to hit it out of play like it seems like if you have that ability then you may as well just put it in play instead but nakashima evidently

has that ability and yeah i think we're underselling his lack of power possibly because not only has he never hit a home run but he hardly ever hits an extra base hit he had a 25 isolated power last year and basically the same for his career that is bartolo cologne's career isolated power so he is essentially as likely to hit an extra base hit as bartolo cologne and it's no wonder that he doesn't hit extra base hits because he never hits the ball in the air. And he has like almost a 75% ground ball rate. So three quarters of the balls he puts in play are grounders, which is unheard of in Japan or in the majors. Like the top ground ball guys in the majors are like in the mid 60s ben revere and luis castillo and derrick

jeter those guys no one comes close to this and he doesn't pull the ball ever really he has the lowest pull rate of anyone i could find in major league baseball or japanese baseball so all he does is he goes up there and he slaps the ball the other way on the ground, or he sacrifices because he had 62 sacrifice punts, which led all Japanese players by like 25. So, and sacrifice punts are still like a very prized thing in Japan. And, you know, people value that kind of contribution to the team or what they think is a contribution to the team. to the team or what they think is a contribution to the team. So it's not quite as much of an outlier as it would be here, but it's still, I mean, he was way, way, way above anyone else. And I guess that makes sense because again, he's not going to drive the ball, so he might

as well sacrifice. He's listed, Nakashima is listed at 151 pounds, which is, as you you pointed out very specific and unusual in that regard but you know he's little maybe he's not actually five foot nine like he's listed apparently i just learned this but sean figgins according to baseball reference was listed at 5 8 and 180 which i think both of those are at least double what he actually was so you think okay nakashima can't hit a home run because he's so small. Well, you know, first of all, Figgins, he hit 35 home runs. Second of all, we've got Jose Altuve, who hit, I think, 20 or 25 home runs just last year. I'm looking over a list of somewhat recent players

who were very light. Damian Easley, 155 pounds. Apparently he hit 163 home runs in the major leagues. Jose Cardinal, who I don't know who that is, but he played for 18 years. He hit 138 home runs. Dave Martinez hit 91. Zoilo Versailles. First, I guess I shouldn't, I shouldn't Frenchify names if I'm, I don't need to do Belanger again. Versailles, let's just call him Versailles. He hit 94.

There's a lot of home runs here for, for really little dudes. Bip Roberts left the yard 30 times. Well, yeah yeah I don't need to go on you you pointed out in your article the only current player listed under Nakashima in the majors is Ronald Torres Torres yeah I guess that's how that would be he hit home run uh he hit a home run he has eight doubles four triples and he's only batted 177 times yeah so it's clearly it's not just because he's little we know he he's little, but you probably remember when the internet, at least the Twitter internet, lost its mind when Ben Revere finally hit a home run.

Munanori Kawasaki, I believe, hit a home run. Jason Tyner before that. He had a home run with the Blue Jays back in 2013. If you watched Kawasaki, like I did, being a Mariners fan, I watched Kawasaki's entire rookie season. By entire rookie season, I mean he batted 115 times because his manager realized he's terrible at hitting. But if you watched him, he was one of those players where you genuinely could not imagine

that he ever could even possess the capability of going yard. And he did it, right? And he did it the next year with the Blue Jays. And it was like a legitimate home run, as I recall. So you wonder, you wonder about Nakashima. You know, there's that mythology that Ichiro could just like win the home run derby if he ever participated and tried. There might be a similar mythology here where it's like Nakashima, I bet he could hit one home run if he really tried. Like you put him in

the home run derby. I wonder if he could, if he could yank it or if he's just so ill trained to try to pull the ball in the air that he just doesn't know how. Yeah. I don't know that we can come to any conclusion about that because he's not making any attempt to hit the home run to drive the ball. Like it's not even, it's not even really a possible outcome of his plate appearance because it's just so far into his approach. plate appearance because it's just so far into his approach. And I just, I mean, I have a spray chart in there of all the balls that he hit last year. And, you know, I mean, I guess he hit some,

some fairly deep fly balls. There's a deep fly ball to center. Maybe that was close to the fence, hard to say. But the interesting thing about his spray chart is that as you could maybe tell from the ground ball rate and the pull rate he is a perfect candidate for the five-man infield that sam and i tried with the stompers against a hitter who hit tons of ground balls and didn't really pull fly balls and we had august fagerstrom on the podcast last year because he wrote a couple posts at fangrass looking for candidates for that sort of thing. And he found that maybe Howie Kendrick could be a candidate for a five-minute field. But Nakashima is just the perfect candidate because he never hits the ball in the air to right

field. And so you are totally wasting the right fielder having him stand out there. He hit one line drive out there all year. I talked to writer in japan and he's been tracking batted balls for nakashima's whole career he's had six seasons in npv and in those six seasons this writer jim allen has recorded 14 air outs to right field so basically like two two balls a season you're you're getting an out on by having the right fielder there instead of not having him there and i don't know maybe even if you had two outfielders out there maybe he'd catch it anyway so you're getting almost no benefit from having a right fielder out there whereas this guy is hitting ground balls constantly and he's bunting constantly and he is the perfect person to have an extra infielder.

And that's the interesting thing is that in Japan, teams don't really shift and it's kind of a cultural thing. But you don't see dramatic overshifts there except maybe against a few like lefty sluggers, foreign players. There's one team that's managed by a foreign import former major leaguer, and they shift a little bit in the outfield. But for the most part, it's just not done. It's kind of a cultural thing. It's being slow to adopt American practices. And Japan has always kind of lagged behind a little bit, whether it's the DH or interleague player or whatever it is. So the shift hasn't really caught on there. And you wonder if the shift did catch on there, would he be able to keep doing what he's doing? Or would he actually have to maybe hit a fly ball every now and then or pull a ball even?

Maybe that's how it's going to happen. They're going to bring in the right fielder to make a five man infield. And then Nakashima is going to yank a ball into the corner. And that's who is going to get his first home run. It's going to be inside the park because there's going to yank a ball into the corner and that's what he's going to get his first home run it's going to be inside the park because there's going to be no one in the area yeah i mean he's he's pretty fast he's like three nine something down the line and so that helps him beat out some of his many grounders but he's just totally overpowered by fastballs like his his pitch type linear weights against fastballs would be almost the worst on record in the majors if he were an American player. And that's partially because he's bunting so much probably, but not entirely that. I talked to teammates of his and I talked to opposing pitchers,

and I wanted to talk to guys who've pitched in the majors and in other leagues about him just to see if they could come up with any comps. And the interesting thing was that the couple of opposing pitchers I talked to were just very frank, very candid about how annoying he is. Maybe it's just because they figure that he is not reading an English language article at the ringer, most likely, but they said he's like incredibly irritating incredibly annoying not as a person everyone likes him a lot as a person but as a hitter because he is not even going up there trying to hit which is uh something i talked to jason standridge who is a former first round pick long ago he is uh he's pitched in the majors. He pitched in the minors. He's 38 years old. He's pitched

for 20 professional seasons and almost 2,500 innings. So he has seen everyone. He's been in Japan. He's been in the Dominican. He's seen all sorts of players. And I asked him if he's ever seen anyone who hit like Nakashima and Stenridge said, no, he's unique. I can't remember anybody else that does or did that. I am kind of curious about whether there is any sort of secondary effect because players are getting fatigued pitching to him. They're getting frustrated when they throw him, you know, 14 pitches and then he walks. That has to be a frustrating thing. So I wonder whether there is any kind of hangover effect where you face him and he annoys you and then maybe that gets you out of your your game a little bit so if there are any japanese sabermetricians out there

who want to do some follow-up research that would be an interesting line of inquiry i you wonder he's he's clearly a fan favorite in japan where the game is played differently for example so many more sacrifices than in north america just like three or four times as many yeah sacrifice bunts like i think the the way that you described in the article is essentially if a guy like this comes up and there's a runner on he's going he has to sacrifice basically it's almost like what the expectation is so nakashima his beloved clearly clearly annoying you've got the jason standridge quotes in there and also just you know all the numbers that portray how annoying he is and it makes me wonder i know we've talked

about this in the hypothetical but if he if he came over if he were the exact same player in the the major leagues would his own fans like him and i don't i don't know if there is a cultural thing here where he goes up and i think i think it was sandridge maybe it was uh the other player that you were talking to who said that it's almost as if he goes up and he his intention is not to get a hit his intention is just to to wear you down and and draw a walk and that is so at odds with the american ideal of going up and and as a hitter you're on the offensive and nakashima is not ever it's frustrating to even talk about in in that he just goes up and he he is the he does the opposite of

what you think a hitter is trained to do in north america from when he's in little league and so i wonder if if there would be enough cultural understanding to put up with him or if people would just get furious because he's he's just flying in the face of american baseball norms yeah i had a joke about rob manford banning him from baseball just for delaying the game because yeah the fighters fans i i talked to said that it's fun when he comes up and there's this whole sort of circus like atmosphere when he is fouling off all these pitches. But I don't know whether that would transfer to here

where you don't have sort of coordinated cheers and cheering sections and that sort of festive atmosphere in the ballpark all the time. But, I mean, it's really impressive what he's done, I think. Really impressive what he's done, I think. He has no power and he's not a super tooled up kind of skilled guy. He was like scouted by only one scout in high school who happened to be a fighters scout who signed him. And he has made this work. Despite having no power, I mean, usually there's a relationship between power and patience or power and walks because pitchers will be scared of you. If you can hit home runs or hit extra base hits, they'll stay away from the heart of the plate against you. And so it's rare for someone with zero power to walk this much.

And he does see the most strikes of any Japanese player and the most fastballs of any Japanese player. And even so, he has an above average walk rate, and Nakashima just, on offense at least, has one that isn't really even considered a tool usually but he has just turned it into one somehow yeah i'm i'm running some quick math on last year's major league leader i guess among qualified hitters and like fouls per swing and uh and i'm getting oh maybe unsurprising joey vato 44.5 fouls per swing and i have have heard Vardar described as a player who is maybe one of the modern day versions of similar to Itra where he's talked about in a way where he could just stand up there and foul balls off all day long if he wanted to of course he cannot it's really really difficult to do that against major league pitching that's another angle here where Nakashima arguably can only exist in this form in japan

because in the majors there are let's just say way faster and better pitches and you even had it in the article where nakashima especially this year really struggled against fastballs and i'll tell you if there's one thing the majors has that japan only barely has it's really good fastballs everybody has one and uh you figured Nakashima could not bring this over. He's only fun to discuss in the hypothetical. It is interesting, given all of the oddness to his batting line, that he only averaged 4.54 pitches per plate appearance in the majors last year. That would have actually just ranked him third highest,

slightly behind Jason Wirth and Mike Napoli, neither of whom I think is described as an annoying player. I guess Worth might be annoying for very different reasons and more annoying to his own team. But I guess to have that many long plate appearances and that foul ball skill, and apparently this is our main topic for the conversation, just so everybody knows,

but to have that many foul balls and that many long plate appearances, but still that relatively relatively normal range average of pitches per play appearance it also makes it seem like there are certain plate appearances where he just goes up there and he just wants a hack of the first pitch and immediately hit a ground ball so you know there's some versatility there which is interesting yeah or sacrifice i guess yeah sacrifices also just immediate sacrifices i yeah i love yesterday when we were talking about nakashima a little bit

via email, he would express some measure of maybe genuine concern that no one would read this article besides me and beloved listener Kaz Yamazaki. I was going to call him Kazuto Yamazaki, but you shortened it. So perhaps you are more familiar. I think, and I don't have access to your live or archived traffic logs. I think this is going to be a big one. And I think it's going to be a big one for two reasons. One, it's full of legitimate fun facts, which we all love. It's what we all strive to write about. It's full of legitimate fun facts.

And also, nobody else in English is or has written about this. is or has written about this. Like we had to be tipped off and by Kaz Yamazaki, by email about this player who is like widely known for doing these very things in Japan, which is not like some weird, mythical, far out there country

that we don't have access to. It's a league that's better than AAA and he plays on a team with Otani, who is one of the most famous players in the world at this point, probably. And even so, I had no idea that he existed and was weird in all of these ways. I guarantee you, I've looked over the Japanese baseball sacrifice hit logs, because I've laughed about that to myself before. Like, what are they doing? I guarantee you,

I've seen his sacrifices and I just missed it. Nothing ever clicked. We had to be tipped off about this incredible, fanciful, also kind of terrible offensive baseball player. And the fact that you got to do it and there's no other coverage, I think it's going to be a hit. I don't even know if there's that much Japanese coverage in this style because sabermetric stats are not nearly as pervasive there. They're not nearly as publicly available there. And so it's funny because when I talk to people like scouts or even a couple fans of the team, people who liked him, a lot of them said like, well, every team has a guy like this. Like he's just kind of in this archetype of you

know in in japan like there's just a player like this on every team who sacrifices and you know like just kind of slaps the ball and tries to run to first and that sort of thing and yes broadly i guess that's true but like he takes every element of that to such an extreme that i don't really think he's like any player, like just vaguely. I mean, if you saw a plate appearance here or there, you might say that he looks like Kawasaki or someone that's, you know, one of the scouts I talked to said he's a Kawasaki style player. And I guess that's true, but he is just off the charts in every respect. So, and that was the original question that we got. And I guess this

article is just like the longest listener email answer ever, but he wanted to know how likely is it that the skillset would translate to the majors? And if he became available now, how many major league teams would try to get him? And I don't think this would translate very well at all. I think even in talking to his teammates, they sort of, without trying to denigrate him, they sort of said that, the guys who had been in the big leagues. Like, for one thing, there's a lot of turf there. And so balls kind of skip over the infield more quickly. And the ground ball babbit tends to be higher in nakashima's league and and probably even despite the fact that the players don't hit

the ball as hard so i think probably the playing surfaces and defenses in the states would conspire against him that's been a problem even for infielders who've made the transition from Japan to the majors. Like there've been gold glove infielders who came over to the US and just had too many errors to stick at the position because it's a big adjustment if you've been playing your whole career under different conditions. And so I think he'd probably lose something defensively. I think with the better pitching and the better defenses and the playing surfaces and everything, I think this probably just wouldn't work anymore. But I'd love to see him try.

The sad thing is that neither he nor Otani will be on the WBC roster, unfortunately. So we won't get to see them up close next month, which is sad. so we won't get to see them up close next month, which is sad, but I will be following him very closely because he is aiming for 800 fouls this season, which is like the weirdest. God, I love that as a personal goal. I know. You always get that.

Like players before spring training, they'll say, you know, I want to hit whatever, 280 this year. I want to hit 30 home runs. Or often it's like I want to be more aggressive on the bases or something. And nope, he wants to hit more foul balls. Yeah, it's no different than if Justin Verlander were like, this year, 200 pickoffs. I just want to pick off attempts, I should say.

200 pickoffs would be amazing. But 200 pickoff attempts, just for the hell of it. We get so swept up as fans. I hate the way I started this. People, other people get so swept up as baseball fans in the wins and losses. The pursuit is always you want your team to be as good as possible as often as possible. You want to win the vision. You want to make the playoffs. You want to win the World Series. And that's it. Obviously, there are other things that we care about. I would go so far as to suggest that winning is surprisingly unimportant to us as baseball fans. It's the thing we talk about is what we want, when in reality, we really just want to have a conversation and to have the distraction

that we've all talked about before. So winning is, in theory, the goal. I think in reality, it's what we tell ourselves the goal is, when really it is not. I think there should be room for a player like this. I think that a player like this would be one of those people who is loved, so loved when you are not watching baseball. I think that you would be really annoyed. Like if your team loads the bases and then Nakashima comes up, you'd be like, well, of course, that's just our luck. This is the guy that we have to try to win the game or drive in the runs.

And it would be annoying because you think, oh, we got to get that win, got to get the win. But like when the season's over or maybe even after his career is over, presuming he's not like the worst player of all time, if he can just kind of translate his skills and be a decent, like maybe one win shortstop, depending on his defense. a decent like maybe one win shortstop depending on his defense i don't know i think especially people like us would just love the fact that he exists or existed in his bizarre unprecedented state and as fans when you're not watching the actual game of baseball you get to romanticize it a little bit and just just kind of tell stories of it I think then that's where Nakashima would really be the most exceptional because I don't want to say that his batting style is art any more than Miguel Cabrera's batting style is art, but it's just it changes every time he comes to the plate

or would come to the plate in this hypothetical. He would change the way that you think about what baseball is, where really it is just there. It is art like any other form of entertainment, and he is completely his own. I'm sure there are major leaguers who have tried to be what he is, and as you said, every Japanese team thinks it has a player that's like this. They don't because your foul ball leaderboard says that just on its own.

The fact that he cleared second place by like 30 percent yeah is absurd so in the same way where i think each row was sort of underrated on a day-to-day basis because people didn't appreciate his skills he played a style of baseball and i guess continues to play a style of baseball in North America that is extremely uncommon and very much his and I think that people will love him for a long time for that I think it would be the same way with with Nakashima who really makes you question what you are watching a game for yeah and I would encourage everyone to go look at this not just to to make it look like people read the article but also because I linked to and embedded a lot of videos and you have to see it to drive it home, I think, to believe it. And it's just a lot of fun to watch him do this over and over again, at least in highlight form. There

are a bunch of clips I linked to that just kind of show a montage, like a quick succession of him fouling off pitch after pitch. And it's just a lot of fun. So I'll link to it in the Facebook group and the blog post at FanGraphs. Yeah. So we came in with the idea to have a main topic on this Friday and we would banter about Nakashima. I think at least I had a sense last evening that Nakashima was going to be the main topic of this podcast. He's just so fascinating. But now we have about 12 minutes left, so we can talk a little bit. I wanted to have a brief, I guess, conversation with you about a different subject, still baseball. It's about the way that we talk about prospects.

Every offseason, I get particularly interested in looking at players who are good in the major leagues now and who were not ever considered really good prospects. And a really obvious case would be Corey Kluber, who's arguably the best pitcher in the American League, and he was nothing. In the minor leagues, he was a nothing, and then he became a something, and then he became a Cy Young winner and a pitcher in the World Series. So the thing that stands out to me in particular, in my Friday chats or in, you know, almost any baseball chat, people will ask about a young player or prospect, and then they will ask about that player's ceiling as if it is a thing that could ever be known or measured or estimated. And I think everybody knows what you mean by ceiling. It's like,

what could this player be when he is at his uh at his best if he achieves his full potential but to what extent is that a nothing term because it's used so often with prospects what what is this player's future what's his his best outcome what's his best realistic outcome and increasingly it seems to me like that's just that's crap we could never we could never who would have ever known that jose altuve who was never on houston astros organizational top 10 list let alone a top 100 list who could have known that he would become one of the best players in baseball paul goldschmidt maybe the best first baseman in baseball jose cantana ace number two dropped by two teams, both New York teams.

Justin Turner, really good third baseman. Corey Kluber, ace starting pitcher. They were nothing. And I'm going to call upon your experiences at scouting school where you had at least a little bit of training. I have gotten none. But are these labels used among actual scouts or what is the function and substance behind these sorts of labels attached to people? Yeah, I think they're used kind of casually. I don't know whether you would write it on a report where you would have actual numbers applied to everything. So you'd just have a overall future potential or whatever, and that would say the same thing. That would basically say what you expect his ceiling to be or his realistic ceiling to be i don't i don't know that there is any point

really in saying that someone has a like a level of ability that he's not likely to reach like it suggests that he is capable of reaching it, like it's in him somewhere. Or I guess it's just meant to convey that there is some like percentile outcome where he could be this good. Like the Pakoda projections have the 90th percentile outcome where, you know, your average guy is like an MVP candidate. And obviously he's not likely to get there, but it suggests that there is at least a chance for him to get there. And if you're talking about Nakashima or someone, there is probably not a chance that he's going to get there. So you could say that he has a low ceiling. And in his case, I think it would be true and appropriate given his fly ball rate.

So I think that it's kind of just like casual, like you kind of know what someone means when they say it, like he could be great. And maybe you want to convey some volatility at times. If you say high floor, low ceiling, then that suggests that there is a wide range of outcomes, which, of course, also suggests that any of us has any idea what the outcome for anyone is, which is an open question. big error bar associated with every prospect that it's almost pointless to say. And we should just say, well, this is a good prospect and this is a bad prospect. And you can just assume that the good prospect has a chance to have a high ceiling and maybe he has like a smaller, narrower range of outcomes because it's more likely that he's at least going to be playable. It's like what everyone said about Byron Buxton when scouts were telling Jason Parks that he had, what, I think it was like a Torrey Hunter floor and a Willie Mays ceiling or something. And obviously it hasn't looked like that for the last couple of years except for the most recent month.

And it might well turn out to be true. And every scout who said something like that might look smart as soon as a few months from now. But it is really just such an imprecise art slash science that I don't know if it is even all that helpful a term. And it's certainly wrongly applied in some players cases, at least in retrospect. I guess this kind of discusses prospecting in general. And maybe this is an appropriate time because Keith Law is running through all his prospect lists. It's a prospect list kind of time of year. With pitchers in particular, it seems like it's quite difficult. But in reality, I think so much of prospecting comes down to here is how we evaluate this given player by the skills that he has today. If he follows an ordinary path based on these skills, here are the outcomes we think he could have. But I can't tell if there is an increasing number of players who are sort of adding skills, but you've got a guy like Jose Altuve. He's clearly good bat to ball skills. You could look at someone like him or Matt Carpenter, similar where you think, well,

what did they do? They added power. I don't think anyone would have ever looked at Altuve or Carpenter and thought, these people will hit for power one day, but they just kind of figured it out. Brian Dozer would be another guy who could hit the ball, and then he decided, well, I'm going to hit the ball over here to left field, and then it's going to go a little further. You've got pitchers who can forever be one new pitch, like Corey Kluber, he swears by the fact that by adding this two-seam fastball, that kind of unlocked his full potential.

And since then, he's been absolutely outstanding. Or Paul Goldschmidt, he still kind of strikes out a little bit, but at some point, there were questions about his body and his athleticism, and now he's literally one stolen base, I think, away from 100 in the major leagues. And he's like a really good defensive first baseman. And I guess so much of prospecting seems to presuppose that you know what this guy's major skills are

and then it feels like there is a large number of players who just kind of add skills almost out of nowhere. And if you can't foresee, like a player who adds a leg kick and drops his hands and becomes Josh Donaldson, or Jose Bautista, then how much can we really know? And I wonder if maybe in this day and age with so much more information than ever players one might be more willing to make somewhat significant tweaks to the way that they play. one might be more willing to make somewhat significant tweaks to the way that they play and two there might be more information informing those tweaks or maybe you can identify players who might benefit from a different grip or a high leg kick or maybe even you just identify players

who are really good at defense who maybe were underappreciated before example kevin kiermeier one of the most valuable players in baseball never that much of a prospect because no one was that interested in his bet. I wonder if now prospect lists will feel more imprecise in terms of their effectiveness, because on the one hand, you'd think prospect evaluation should be getting better. But on the other hand, it seems, and this is an unproven hypothesis, but it seems like there are more players who are changing and changing quickly because of how much new information we have that you can have a player almost change his baseballing identity in a season. Yeah, that's right. And I think also if you talk to people in the game who actually make prospect lists for a team or that sort of thing,

I think the way in which they usually differ from the public prospect lists is in sealing or perceived sealing. Prospect people on the internet are often very enamored of guys who have that sort of superstar potential, or at least they seem to, even if they are unlikely to reach it. And they will acknowledge that and they'll say, oh, he's not likely to become this, but he has this ceiling. It's within the range of possibilities for him. And that's easy to say if you are a prospect ranker who doesn't really have that much skin in the game. And by the time these players get good or bad, most people aren't going to remember where you rank them. It's not really going to stick to you

so much. And it just doesn't matter. You can put the list out there and whatever. It's mostly for entertainment value. And of course you want to be right and people want you to be right, but no one really holds you accountable. And so's uh not much risk to just putting the fun possible superstar who also is likely to flame out close to the top of your list whereas if you are a baseball team and you have millions of dollars at stake in every player and every transaction you're gonna put a higher value in the boring middle of the rotation guy who is major league ready and can eat some innings and know he's never going to be an ace. He doesn't throw that hard, whatever.

He doesn't have all that impressive stuff, but he's ready and you can slot him in there and he's safe. Or like I've talked on the podcast before about Adam Eaton, the hitter who was not on Baseball Prospectus' top 100 list the year after he debuted in the majors and hit well like Adam Eaton in the majors for 100-something plate appearance, which I thought was crazy at the time because he had already demonstrated that he was major league ready and he seemed to have a broad range of skills and maybe he wasn't going to be a potential superstar. And even I probably didn't think that he would become as valuable as he has. But like he was there. He's ready. There's no development left that he has to do to make the majors. He could be an average player now.

And that is very valuable if you're a baseball team. But probably on the internet, no one's going to remember that you had Adam Eaton ranked higher than some other side in some other list. So you just don't pay that much attention to it. But I think that is the danger of ceiling or being seduced by ceiling or perceived ceiling. And I guess we'll pick this up in another podcast when we have a little more time. We basically have to wrap up in a minute so I can go answer more questions. But I did want to include just at the end for the audience consideration that after our previous show where we were

talking about stuff we would want to hack from other organizations, like the information we would seek out, someone sent me a couple text messages where he was saying that one of the things that's opened his eyes since joining this baseball team that might play in North America or might play in Japan, I don't know, that he's been surprised or maybe not surprised by the correlation between prospects who bust or prospects who make it and players with good, let's say, makeup. I don't know what kind of information he has access to. I don't think, but maybe.

Maybe players do get like a makeup score. I don't know. But he provided a few examples I probably shouldn't, I guess, name on air. But let's say there was a player recently traded to the Cubs. And we can call him, I don't know, Eddie B, or maybe E. Butler. But we don't have to name him. And this player has apparently been discussed,

also, I think publicly, as he's maybe a little lacking in that department. And E. Butler, also, relative to his prospect ranking, has dramatically underachieved and clearly the cubs think that they can get him turned around he he has good stuff and you know you can kind of change your personality according to 50 of the people in america the other 50 would say that people never change those are the people who are like dr gregory house who argue that no people never change and you will

remain a tool for as long as you are a grown person. But more specifically, he indicated that there is a very strong correlation between really good prospects who don't make it and really good prospects who, let's say, are lacking in the intangibles. And in order for him to say that, he must have access to some sort of somewhat objective and coherent organized information about these prospects. So that would be maybe the best prospects are to be considered. Here are the players who have like decent skills, some major league skill, and also they work hard and they're committed. And, and maybe that's all we need to know. Maybe instead of prospect rankings,

we just need like groupings where here are the guys who have the best skills now. Here are like five groups of players in order of skill. And here are also those players grouped by whether or not they are tools or bright

and driven young men. We're basically out of time now. So maybe we'll talk about this another time. But most importantly, Nakashima, awesome. Awesome article, awesome player. Thank you, Kaz Yamazaki, for dipping us off. And by the way, if what you just said is true, that is unfortunate for people on the internet because that makeup is probably the thing that internet scouts and fans are least equipped to evaluate.

So that makes it even harder to tell what a guy's going to be. All right. See ya. So long. By the way, we'll be starting our season preview podcast series next week. It is returning. We'll have a different format than we have for the past four years, but we will be covering every team on Mondays and Fridays and sticking with the email shows on Wednesdays.

So we'll explain in detail on the next episode. But the start of the preview series, always a sign that the baseball season isn't too far away. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. And five listeners who have done that already, Larry Miller, Mike Thompson, Edward Colleton, Dan Shaddock, and Duncan Legetheny. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild.

And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Keep your questions coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or through the Patreon messaging system. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will talk to you next week. I swore it might be true. I could fight the feeling, but not quite as well as you.