Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1017: The Ryan Raburn is Due Edition

Episode Date: February 9, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the anticlimactic approach of spring training and answer listener emails about baseball reductionism, investing in Little League, the Cardinals’ effect on the Cubs, transplanting Trout and Kershaw, and wearing out starters, with a statistical detour to talk about history’s most volatile hitters. Audio intro: Thrush Hermit, "We Are Being […]

Above the earth we receive the news We are being reduced Above the earth we receive the news. We are free. We are free. We are free. Hello and welcome to episode 1017 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangrass. Hello, Jeff. Hi. ringer joined by jeff sullivan of fan graphs hello jeff hi couldn't help but notice that the day after we did our dodgers and padres preview you did a post on the dodgers and a post on the padres was that coincidence uh yes and no so talking about the two teams obviously gets them sort of

locked at least into your subconscious i've wanted to write about Brock Stewart almost all offseason long just because he's very interesting and I love people who have insane minor league stats. Go James Hoyt. So Stewart has been on my mind for a while. I think the podcast kind of gave me a reason. And also it's February. There is nothing. There's nothing. Chris Carter signed, but I don't care. Brock Stewart's more interesting. And as for the Padres, I think, yeah, it was talking to Dennis Lind that got me looking at the Padres depth chart and looking at the Padres depth chart got me thinking about, okay, who are the people on the team who aren't awful and dreadfully boring? Oh, look at these relievers. And I've seen so many tweets over the last several months that I think a lot of them would come from

like Buster Olney talking about how so many teams would call the Padres about Ryan Buchter or Brad Hand. And I'd be like, OK, whatever. Teams are looking for mediocre lefties. No, no, they're actually really good lefties. And Brad Hand in particular is really interesting. And so looking at Brad Hand and noticing this guy kind of has a lot in common with Andrew Miller, that's really interesting. So then that got me thinking about a post. Again, it's February.

Not much to write, but it's maybe not additionally a coincidence that this podcast right now is interrupting some research I'm doing on Austin Hedges, who, by the way, is another potential breakout player. So Austin Hedges is coming next. These podcasts are serving a dual purpose for me as an author. Good. I'm glad we're saving you some time. And people think the It's February thing is going to change next week when pitchers and catchers report, but not really. No, not at all. Pitchers and catchers report nothing. And then there's some stories about who's fat and who's not. And that's about it for another month. Some guys get hurt and you can write about guys

getting hurt, but otherwise it doesn't really help a whole lot when people are in camp. So no, it's nice for one day when you see them there, but that's about it. The neat thing about spring training getting closer for us is that at least on Fangraphs, we're going to have the Zips projections folded into the Steamer projections, which is such a dorky thing to say out loud. But I at least it's when I feel most comfortable with the projections. It's when we can talk about them. And as their most concrete, Pocota just came out yesterday or the day before. But like spring training for analysts serves, I think maybe one purpose where we basically look at pitchers who are either throwing harder or softer and say, okay, that's the thing now that we're going to write about. But then here's the problem with that.

Last year, I remember I wrote a post about Doug Pfister because his velocity was up in spring training. I was like, oh, what a good bounce back candidate. Nope, velocity got worse. Orioles released, the Orioles released decent starting pitcher Miguel Gonzalez. And in his starts in spring training, his velocity was way down. And I wrote about that being like, Miguel Gonzalez looks like the Orioles know something nope his fastball was fine and then with the White Sox who had horrible defensive catchers in a horrible

pitchers ballpark he had an ERA under four so spring training it's not only useless for analysts it's almost worse than useless because it is deceptive and I hate it I have learned one thing one thing, one thing from spring training ever. And that was the year Michael Saunders started hitting to the opposite field. And I was like, okay, that could be a thing. And then he learned that and he stopped being a terrible baseball player. But that was like seven years ago. And since then, realistically, it should just always be hands off. Yeah. You can find things out about maybe playing time or who's where on the depth chart, perhaps at some point in spring

training and and there has been some recent research that's shown that spring training stats do matter if you look at the right stats and you caveat it a lot and they they only matter a little bit but you know you can't totally write it off but for the most part yeah probably easier to be misled than led in the right direction so we we're doing emails. Just quickly, can we talk about Ryan Rayburn for a second? Because you wrote about Ryan Rayburn. Yeah, I would love to. Although, why don't we hold that off until the research part of this? Ah, okay.

That's going to be related. Oh, good. All right, sure. Okay, so let's do some emails. Let's start with, well, Justin responded to the Dodgers preview. He said, having just listened to the Dodgers preview episode, I was marveling yet again at the injury risks carried in their revolving door rotation. Like everyone else, I've been intrigued and impressed at their willingness to sign the walking wounded

and see who shows up for work and who doesn't. One thing I suddenly remembered that I had totally forgotten and that I hadn't heard brought up in a year was the fact that they totally signed his Sashi Iwakuma and then rejected him for health concerns. Firstly, they signed all sorts of guys with huge injury risks. Secondly,

after being sent back to Seattle, Iwakuma made 33 starts, the greatest number one can make in a regular five man setup. So we didn't talk about that the other day, but that's another data point, I guess, to show that teams don't exactly know what they're doing injury-wise and that they can rule out a guy for injury concerns and then he can be the one guy who doesn't have injuries. career but he was the only uh qualified mariners pitcher which is that's an odd threshold to set but the dodgers had only one qualified pitcher and that was kenta maeda who of course signed and the at least the consensus within the industry is that his his medicals are this is a quote but

it's not a direct quote but basically a quote paraphrasing the baseball industry his medicals are the worst that people have ever seen like kenta maeda according to people who have looked at his physicals his arm is basically hanging on by a thread that's why he signed such an odd like incentive-based multi-year contract with the dodgers he was the only dodgers pitcher last year to clear 150 innings he actually cleared 175 iwakuma with the mariners through 199 innings no one else through more than 153.1 I should not have used that stat as a cutoff but you uh you have an interesting case where the maybe maybe the two worst medicals the Dodgers looked at last year were the two guys who wound up pitching the most you can look at the Orioles where of course they're known for their rigorous physicals and

then they wound up renegotiating the contract with Giovanni Gallardo, but still signing him to a multi-year deal. And then he kind of sucked and broke down. So he passed the physical in a sense, but still got hurt. And I think that I've never looked at a player's medicals. And even if I did, guess what? I wouldn't know what I'm looking at because I'm not a doctor uh and the people who do look at these things are doctors but i think maybe people have a misunderstanding or poor understanding that so much of that stuff is guesswork guess trying to figure out which arm is actually going to break in the season ahead that's you might have like a

five or ten percent advantage and knowledge from looking at it it, but it's a roll of the dice. And there is no better demonstration than the Dodgers pitching staff. Yeah. All right. Eric from Plainview says, I view the world through a reductionist point of view, and so that is how I view baseball too. That is to say, in explaining nature, a reductionist view would state that nature is made of matter, which is made of compounds, which are made of elements, which are composed of atoms, then nucleons, then quarks, and so forth and so on. Baseball by way of analogy is determined by runs, which are composed of series of hits, which are made up of swings, then muscle contractions, then neural pathways that react to pitches, and so forth and

so on. Each of these events in both the realms of science and baseball can be measured, and such measurements are increasingly becoming more precise. Examples include stat-cast data, heart rate monitors, whatever the pirates are having their players do. This trend of measuring everything reflects the reductionist rationality, but do you see a point where the reduction stops? In other words, for hitting, is measuring bat speed and swing path enough to measure a hitter's performance?

Or should we go further and measure the physics of their muscle contractions or measure the neural networks in the brain? How far down the reductionist pipeline should baseball analysts or writers strive to go? Well, I think there's a difference between baseball analysts slash writers and baseball teams where I think if you are a scout or a team, you want to know as much as you possibly can. Scientific researchers would want to know as much as they possibly can to try to figure out where a hitter's skill is actually coming from and whether that means investigating their muscles or investigating the way their brains work even. I mean, we know there's neural scouting that's taking place within the industry. That is something that is not going to go away. It's fascinating if nothing else. And if you get past the, I don't know, certain privacy concerns or whatnot, I think that

it's very interesting to try to figure out what actually makes a good hitter or an adaptive hitter versus someone who is, I don't know, Ken Harvey, who I don't know why I brought him up, but he was bad, kind of. He never got better. But if you are an analyst or a writer, I think that the public interest stops at the limits of actual on-field baseball, where people will be interested in knowing who has the fastest bat or who has the highest or the lowest exit velocity, because these are known and applicable baseball skills. And these are things that you just know about. Even when you're in middle school,

you know what bat speed is and you know how much it matters. But if you start talking about someone who, I don't know, has synapses that fire faster than somebody else, I don't think people would have a great public interest in reading that because it feels like it's far removed from a baseball skill. And I think mostly people just want to know about actual on-field baseball skills because if you go beyond that then it feels less like a sports article which people like and more like a scientific article which far fewer people like which is not to say that they aren't valid but we already kind of feel like science writers with all the analysis that we do in baseball and the further removed you get from the game itself i think the the more you lose the collective interest yeah i think you and i would

still be interested like you know people have written alex spear wrote about mookie bets and neuro scouting and how he graded out really well based on whatever tests the red socks were doing and that sort of thing is interesting because if a player is getting sort of bumped up or bumped down based on how his brain works before he's even proved that he can play, that's interesting to me. I would want to know about that. And I don't know that most people would want down to a player's quarks level, but I think you could definitely go down to like their muscle fibers and their neurons, how quickly they fire and how does that affect reaction time and pitch recognition or their genetic code? What does that say about their likelihood of getting injured or aging well? or aging well. So I think you could go pretty far along the reductionist path

if you were a team or if you were a dorky writer like us. But if you are doing a newspaper column or something, then probably you don't need to go that deep. Yeah. You know, the most accurate way that you can actually investigate

the way someone is put together is by examining a cadaver. So you can just kind of play around with all the parts. So I wonder if at this point, Randy Johnson would like be interested in sacrificing his left arm and shoulder just so we can kind of see how it's all put together. Because, you know, Randy Johnson's sort of the model of durability and early overuse turning into one of the greatest pictures of all time. So if we could just kind of like poke around in his body, which would be easiest for us if that part of his body were removed, then that would be super.

He still needs it to take photos in his second career as a photographer. Does he? Well, I don't know. I guess you can operate a camera one-handed. But Nolan Ryan, yeah, Nolan Ryan would be a good one because he pitched forever and never really got seriously hurt.

So someone like that, sure, donate your UCL to science. All right. Question from Brent, who is a Patreon supporter. If you were Rob Manfred and you were tasked with making baseball interesting to younger demographics, what would you do? I find the pace of play arguments a bit ridiculous. Yes, it's annoying to watch some of these guys redress themselves after every pitch, but a few seconds adding up to a few minutes isn't going to make the game more interesting. I'd guessed most fans were ones who played as a kid. Plus dollars per season on making Little league free for all kids For a 10 billion dollar industry Spending 2% of your revenue on Nurturing the future seems like a

Decent investment and I have Heard Rob Manfred say that Some study that MLB Has done has shown that The most predictive thing about Whether you're going to be a baseball fan Is whether you played baseball As a kid. So there

is some research that MLB believes in that supports that idea. Yeah. Uh, so I, I don't think that there's anything you can do to baseball to keep it recognizable as baseball and make it as gripping as the most frenetic moments of a football game or a basketball game. Baseball just doesn't move like that and i this might be wrong because i only really follow baseball and sometimes hockey but i my sense is that to really appreciate a baseball game you usually need a little more working knowledge of all of the variables than maybe another sport because seldom do you get just like a really incredible football play impossible catch like we saw a few in the fourth quarter of the super bowl i'm told or

or like a really i don't know really exciting other place we know that there are have been super exciting baseball events and games we can just look at game seven of the most recent world series or i always think about game six of the Cardinals and Rangers World Series in 2011. But of course, that is not the average game. The average game is going to be three hours long, and it's going to be between the Padres and the Twins, apparently. And it's going to be like Jason Vargas, who I'm going to put on one of those teams against Colin Ray, who's hurt. And then it's going to be kind of boring, but recognizable baseball. There's nothing you can do to a game like that to make it appealing to kids. And there's no amount of young baseball superstars that you can train to be interesting and funny,

which would take untold amounts of money. So you can't, you know, if Mike Trout had a personality and a sense of humor, he wouldn't be every kid's favorite player. It's just not going to happen like that. You basically need, as you just mentioned, you basically need people to play baseball, be involved with baseball at a young age in order for them to have an understanding of baseball, in order for them to then generate an appreciation of baseball. So maybe it sounds super communist and Bernie Sanders-y to be like Little League should be free and travel teams should be free, but you should at least substantially reduce the costs of participating

to whatever extent that's possible. I can't speak to what baseball is doing with its money. I can guess that they have some money to some excess, some expendable revenue. I don't know how much, but Andrew McCutcheon has written about how that's one of the major stumbling blocks for African Americans to get into the game from a young age that is just so expensive that of course, it's just like so many other parts of the baseball industry and greater industry at large. It is an obstacle for lower and lower middle class families to get their sons and daughters involved. So if you could make little league cheaper and the higher level little league

teams cheaper to participate in then i would think that long term that would have the greatest effect and trying to make the actual game at the major leagues move faster it's noble i get it and there are certain things that you can cut out i like having the clock for inning breaks and all but you know it's still going to be Pedro Baez out there and he's working the deep count against Jason Worth and it's six to one in the sixth inning and it's just that's going to be baseball forever and you can't make it like I don't know remember Blitz the the arcade game or what was it MLB Slugfest with a baseball oh yeah equivalent uh yeah you're never going to have MLB Slugfest uh You're not going to have an X MLB,

I guess, with a he hate me equivalent. Right. Yeah, I guess the difficulty is that if you talk about investing in Little League, then you're going to see the benefits of that in what, two decades or something like that. I mean, I don't know. I guess if a kid's in Little League, he'll start watching baseball more and going to games more immediately, maybe. But the lasting impact of that is going to be some years down the road. And so you have to talk owners

into giving up some of their profit right now to ensure the game's continued profitability at a point when they might no longer be alive or owning a baseball team. So I guess that's always a tough sell to get people to give up instant gratification for delayed or no personal gratification. But I agree that it would be in the best interest of the sport yeah that's why I always Take my IRA money and just invest it In lottery tickets and bubble gum because you Know what do I care about what I'm going to have when I'm 70 I could be dead when I'm 70 There's political themes here but I guess we should Stray away from them okay the Planet's going to kill us before we kill it

Right all right question from Ron so I'm unlucky enough to be Outnumbered by Cardinals fans where I live In North Carolina these insufferable People have insisted that a big reason The Cubs won the World Series is because They had so many recent ex-Cardinals Players on the World Series roster

What say you? Were recent ex-Cardinals disproportionately Represented on the Cubs World Series roster? If so did they contribute Disproportionately to the World Series? This is a strange argument I don't even know How much validity there is in the story. If this is second or third hand or what,

I can't speak for these people he's been talking to. But just this question makes me hate Cardinals fans even more. Okay, let me do a quick little survey here of the Cubs. I'm not thinking of that many off the top of my head. I'm going to go by baseball reference war, descending order. Chris Bryant, nope, Cubs. I'm not thinking of that many off the top of my head. I'm going to go by Baseball Reference War, Descending Order, Chris Bryant, nope, Cubs, Anthony Rizzo, ex-Padre, okay, that could be something,

John Lester, ex-Red Sox, like Rizzo, interesting, getting a theme here, Kyle Hendricks, ex-nothing, basically Rangers, I guess, Addison Russell, Dexter Fowler, Cardinal Now, a little switcheroo, JK Arrieta, former Oriole Ben Zobrist, former terrible minor leaguer

Actually great minor leaguer Terrible major leaguer, Javier Baez Okay, so we've got John Lackey We've got Hayward Who sabotaged the team Who was bad, but good But I guess overall average, but you know Not well loved

And what are we missing here? That seems like it, right? I mean, among the prominent players. There almost has to be. I have to assume there's more, but there's not, right? It's not a terrible argument. That's stupid. So we've got one starter who was not close to their best starter.

He was good, but not the standout. And then we've got one hitter who was maybe their worst hitter. There's no way. No, there's no way. Did they mean like former Reds? But that wouldn't even, I mean, that's like, no, this is stupid. This is a bad argument. This is a bad argument.

Even if there were a lot of ex-Cardinals, I don't know that this would be a bad argument cardinal this is a bad argument even if there were a lot of ex-cardinals i don't know that this would be a good argument because if you take the ex-cardinals away from the cardinals and they do well for your team then that makes the cardinals look worse but take the cardinals away from last year's cubs and they have a better right fielder and basically the same playoff rotation so this this is, I can't imagine being a Cardinals fan who's talked himself or herself into believing this to be true, but whatever, man, believe what you want, but this is stupid. Yeah, I agree. All right. Do you want to do the Rayburn related stat segment? Sure. Okay. So you said you wanted to talk about Rayburn. So

why don't I'll, I'll do some background. So so Ryan Rayburn last year I did a little study uh because it was also this time of year and there was nothing to do so I thought hey Ryan Rayburn post why not I identified that he was the most volatile hitter in the history of baseball and what that meant was that I looked at his previous four years leading up to I guess last year and I looked at all players in baseball history who had four-year stretches where they batted at least 200 times in each year. I know the minimums are arbitrary, but whatever. Rayburn, between 2012 and 2015, had cleared 200 plate appearances in every year. And these are his WRC Plus marks.

This is, again, just like O like ops plus it is 100 is average and above is better etc 2012 28 then 149 then 50 then 154 ryan rayburn the average of those by the way that was like a league average player or about that's the thing that fascinates me over his entire 11 year career he has a 100 ops plus and a 100 WRC plus. He has been exactly a league average hitter and also the most volatile hitter. It's outstanding. So I kind of forgot about the post because whatever, it's a Ryan Rayburn post in the middle of February. So most volatile hitter over a four year span. And then so in 2015, he was a 154 WRC plus hitter, one of the best hitters in the game.

And then Mike Petriello last week brought to my attention that, oh, by the way, last year, Rayburn with the Rockies had a 73 WRC Plus. So he did it again. He went from horrible to great to horrible to great to horrible again. So he remains the most volatile hitter in baseball history, this time over a five-year span, setting a minimum of 200 plate appearances. So I actually set a minimum to 150 plate appearances just to give other people more of a chance, I guess. And the way I wanted to look at this, this is going to be difficult to say out loud, but instead of taking like a standard deviation of all those numbers, because standard deviations don't really care about the order in which you have seasons,

I decided what I would do is look at the total change. So for example, Rayburn between 2012 and 2013, he went from a 28 to a 149 WRC+. That is a change of 121 points. Then the next year, he went down to 50. That is a change of negative 99 points. So what I decided to do is I would take the absolute value of all the year to year changes and then add them up. So Rayburn over the last five years, he's had a total change year to year of 405 points of WRC plus. That's an average change of basically 100 points a season, 100 points a season. So I set a table. Rayburn, with this minimum, he is the leader over any five-year stretch, baseball history, again, minimum 150 play appearances. Total change over the last five years, 405 points. In second place, Ryan Rayburn, moving back a year. In third place,

Ryan Rayburn, moving back another year. So Rayburn actually extremely volatile over the last seven years. The nearest non-Rayburn player is Danny Valencia, who between 2011 and 2015 had a total change of 277 points. So Rayburn's average change, about 100 points a season. Valencia's average change over that stretch, 69 points a season. Okay. So that covers ground that has already been covered. I put that post up on Monday, Rayburn super volatile, but I figured something out. So I told you that for this study, I set a minimum of 150 plate appearances because Rayburn has not exceeded 300 trips with plate in any of these years. And he's only barely cleared 200 a few times. So I thought, well, okay, why don't we set a minimum of 100 plate appearances?

That's what I did first. And I kind of tweaked the study because I wanted to get to Rayburn, but I figured something out. So remember, Ryan Rayburn over that five-year stretch had a total change of, what was it? 405 points, 405, far and away the leader. That's with a minimum of 150 plate appearances a year.

I first looked at a minimum of 100 plate appearances a year, and I had a different leader. I had a different leader I'd never heard of before. Tigers fans, I believe, maybe have heard of this player, but only the older generation of Tigers fans. Gates Brown. Ever heard the name Gates Brown before? Yes, but I couldn't tell you a thing about him. and tell you a thing about him. Okay. Gates Brown, between 1967 and 1971, had a total change of 472 points,

which beats Rayburn by 67. I will read to you his WRC Plus marks over that span, beginning in 1967. In only one of these years did Brown exceed 150 play-doh appearances. He was basically a pinch hitter and a role player. But anyway, 1967 to 1971. Here are Gates Brown's season to season WRC plus marks. 72, 237, 50, 84, 170. I looked at it throughout baseball history. Every single season, I set a minimum of 100 plate appearances. And I just wanted to look at the best offensive years setting an embarrassingly low minimum of 100 plate appearances. Best season ever.

Ted Williams. Second best. Barry Bonds. Third best. Babe Ruth. Fourth best. Gates Brown. Fifth best.

Barry Bonds. Barry Bonds. Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth. Ted Williams. Rogers Hornsby. Ted Williams. Mickey Mantle.

Babe Ruth. Ted Williams, etc. Rogers Hornsby, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, etc. Gates Brown, out of frickin' nowhere, comes in with a 237. He batted 104 times in 1968. By the way, the year of the goddamn pitcher. The hardest year to hit in recent history. And Gates Brown comes out of nowhere and slugs 685. He is worth two wins, over 100

plate appearances. That's like a Mike Trout performance. And it gets better because I looked up what was or who was Gates Brown. And there's a little anecdote here. This is coming from the baseball reference bullpen section. I was just reading this myself. A version of Wikipedia.

So here's a blah blah blah. Although seldom used as a regular brown was a great fan favorite during his 13 year career all spent as a member of the detroit tigers he once stated to this writer the writer of the century that during the 1968 world series he was secretly eating two hot dogs on the bench when manager mayo smith suddenly and unexpectedly called him to pinch hit with one hot dog stuffed in his jersey after getting a base hit the ketchup from the hot dog bled through his jersey as he stood on base this story apparently it didn't happen during the world series because he went over one in the world series but it did occur on august 7th 1968 as documented in other sources so gates brown

incredible hitter but also terrible hitter overall fine hitter kind of i guess the lenny harris of his day but better than that uh had one of the best offensive seasons of all time setting a super low minimum uh in that season again the toughest season to hit basically ever uh gates brown had uh six home runs and four strikeouts, which is unbelievable. This is in 104 plate appearances. He is actually the most volatile hitter of all time if you set a lower minimum. The top eight entries in my list here of the most volatile five-year stretches, they go through the following order. Gates Brown, Gates Brown, Ryan Rayburn, Gates Brown, Ryan Rayburn,

Gates Brown, and Ryan Rayburn. So Ryan Rayburn is a free agent right now. Yes. So you could sign him not knowing which Rayburn you're going to get. So my question is, do you believe this? Do you think that there is some inherent volatility in Ryan Rayburn? Because I don't know how much our projection systems would account for this. I guess there are guys who have smaller error bars around their projections because they do the same thing every year, but no one's going to project Ryan Rayburn to be one of the best hitters or one

of the worst hitters. He's going to be projected to be somewhere in the middle with aging built in and all of that. But for the last several years years he has not been in the middle and you could construct some reason for that maybe when ryan rayburn is in a slump he really really gets in a slump and it gets in his head maybe i don't know maybe he lets how he's doing affect him more than most players or something or maybe his mechanics are more prone to getting screwed up so if they're in good shape then he's a great hitter and if go south, then he would, I suppose, expect by chance alone to get one guy who looks like this. I don't know if exactly like this would, I don't know what the odds of that would be, probably pretty remote, but you'd get someone

who had this sort of pattern. So do you believe it? If you were signing Ryan Rayburn now for some reason, you had a need for Ryan Rayburn, would you, I don't know, price him any differently because of this history? Okay, so the unfun answer is no, that's stupid to do. He's going to be 36 years old. The fun answer is, of course, he's got this five-year pattern and it gets a little better too

because the last five years, he's been a part-time player. But the two years before that, he was kind of a regular. He batted more than 400 times in both 2010 and 2011. I'm just going to read a couple of numbers to you here. Some more WRC Plus marks. First half, Ryan Rayburn, 2010, 72. Second half, 144. Okay, fast forward. We're moving to 2011. First half, Ryan Rayburn, 59. Second half, 162.

What are you supposed to do with this? So in and in 2009, when he was a part time player, 129. 2008, 74. 2007, part time player, 118. So if I could just kind of give you halves, he's gone good to bad to good to bad to good to bad to good to to good to bad, to good to bad, to good to bad. So now he's coming up on 2017. And if you look at the pattern in that way, which I know is kind of like basically numerology, he's so due for another really good offensive year for absolutely no reason. And it's not like you can rule it out. It's not like we're saying, oh, Ryan Rayburn is

due for this because he's got this track record of like a few good halves. No, it's just we never know who's actually going to be good. Anybody, as evidenced by Ryan Rayburn, who is a completely average hitter for his entire career, anybody can do this over 200 plate appearances. So Rayburn or anyone else, this can this can just happen. But what's interesting to me is that Rayburn signed a two year contract with the Indians during 2013 when he was having one of his really good years. And then with the Indians, he had a horrible year and then a really good year. And then his contract ended and Rayburn actually wound up having to sign a minor league contract last year with the Rockies, even though he was coming off a really good year. He made the roster and then he was bad. Now he's a free agent.

But if he couldn't get a good contract coming off a good year, do you think he could get a better contract coming off a bad one because of this pattern? And I know that's just me asking you the same question in reverse. But if you had these numbers brought to your attention, which as I'm sure many front office executives don't know or couldn't care, it's Ryan Rayburn. He's in his mid-30s and whatever. But if you earnestly looked at him and thought, and maybe you had space for a player like this on your roster, would you do anything differently? Or would you just care about his projection? Yeah, well, the fact that he remains a free agent,

I guess, argues against the idea that anyone is buying this. So probably it would be fun for me to say, sure, give him a minor league deal. Have an invite to spring training. See if he looks like good Rayburn or bad Rayburn. But if I actually had large sums of money numbers and, I don't know, look at something other than just the results. Like if you have hit FX stats going back for this whole period, which teams do, and they could identify, okay, when Ryan Rayburn is having a good Rayburn year, this is what he does. And he hits the ball this hard. Like I don't know whether his process level stats changed all that much. We haven't really considered that in this discussion so i don't know if you could look back and find a way to tell whether you have good rayburn or

bad rayburn and you could figure that out pretty quickly then sure then he'd be worth it i think that's maybe that's the lesson here is that teams can't tell because he's had all these bad stretches and the teams have kept him playing true you know he went from 200 well okay he's played a little less but actually so in in 2015 he was a good hitter he batted 201 times last year he was a bad hitter he batted 256 times now granted he was on a bad team but i think teams might tell themselves oh we can tell you can't tell you look at ryan rayburn and he's ryan rayburn whether he's a good version of the bad one all right well i hope someone gives him a shot just to see i and he's Ryan Rayburn, whether he's a good version of the bad one. All right. Well, I hope someone gives him a shot just to see.

I hope he's got a bad 200 times. Okay. Question from Zachariah, who says, my question is this. If you were to somehow force both Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw to another team, which teams, even with both of them on them, do you think still wouldn't have a chance Of making the playoffs in 2017 So if you could transplant Trout and Kershaw And I guess we have to assume that if we're Transplanting them to the worst teams

Then probably we can just Compare them to replacement level Because the worst teams have Replacement level players, right? And so you would have to project Trout and Kershaw combined for Conservatively speaking What 15 wins above

Replacement something like that so Yeah yeah we're talking about Adding at least 15 wins To a team's projection And if you look at the current Worst projections the Padres Are at 66 wins so Add 15 to that Still not a playoff team yeah pretty

much you you just kind of start from the bottom and work your way up right uh padres still bad white socks still bad braves mediocre reds still bad i mean in theory you'd say maybe the reds would benefit even less because they already have billy hamilton who's pretty good but you can just move yeah you can just kind of move him like the diamondbacks they have ad pollock who by the way people forgot about but he's super good but then you could just put him in left and make yosemite tomas disappear so that yeah right doesn't really matter that much but you basically just pull from the bottom of the standings and you go with those teams and if you gave if you made the padres 15 or 16 wins better then of course they would have a chance. They'd be about as good as,

I don't know, the Pirates or something. But in the National League, it's so difficult because you have a clear top three teams. And then I think the Giants and the Mets kind of stand out as well. And the Cardinals are up there too. So making the playoffs in the National League would be incredibly tough. In the American League, the picture is a little more muddled. I think you could add Trout and Kershaw to the White Sox, and then they'd have some kind of chance. They'd have a really interesting pitching staff, at least. And also they'd have Mike Trout.

So in the American League, I think any team could take those players and be in the race. In the National League, there's a few teams where even with them, they would be long shots. And yeah, we'll begin with the Padres. Okay. And last one, I guess you already sort of answered this one via email. So maybe this will be easy. Eric Hartman says, I feel as though the

topic comes up often enough without being addressed on its own is getting a starter out of a game due to high pitch counts. Good for an opposing team. Perhaps it isn't ideal for that game, but helps down the line. Maybe it's more important to do so against divisional opponents. So does having high pitch counters, does seeing a lot of pitches matter? Yeah, I have to think that the answer is basically no. If you are an opposing team, if you're driving up pitch counts, I think that it doesn't have no effect, but you're basically playing three or four game series and so the effect over such a series is pretty slim bullpens are super deep these days everybody is good for the most part in bullpens at least on contending teams and any effects that you have that would kind of add up

you wouldn't necessarily feel until maybe the next time you played a team but i think that there's a lot more danger if you're the team who's having their starters pitch counts driven up because then you are feeling the effect of going to the bullpen. And I am a pretty big believer in the effect of, I guess we can say, bullpen taxation, which would be taxation with representation, perhaps. But I think the bullpen fatigue is real. I think that anecdotally there's a history of teams with really good bullpens that get overused and then they kind of wear down in September. I think one of the advantages or one of the things that the Orioles have done well is that Buck Showalter does not overuse relievers by appearance. He's been pretty good about bringing in a relatively small number of relievers, still throwing a lot of innings, but at least not getting people up every single day, which is fatiguing. Contrast that with Bruce Bochy, who cycles through about five relievers,

a plate appearance, and they are on opposite sides of the spectrum. And maybe it's not a coincidence that the Giants bullpen wore down last year. I don't know. But I think that if you are having your starters pitch counts driven up, your bullpen will get tired and that will affect everyone. There's a cascading effect. But if you are driving up other teams pitch counts driven up your bullpen will get tired and that will affect everyone there's a cascading effect but if you are driving up other teams pitch counts i think they'll be a little annoyed at you and maybe in the last game of a four-game series you could stand to benefit but it would be pretty small you'd mostly just be doing the league a benefit at large i agree all right so we can wrap up there i guess i just let you answer the question. Yeah, well, I mean, it definitely helps less than it once did, right? I think it's fair to say that because bullpens are bigger now and relievers are better relative to starters than they used to be because of how they're used. the fact that getting starters out of games early is not such a bad thing and even a beneficial thing at times. So in that sense, working the count can still be helpful because you might get on base. But in terms of some secondary value to making the starter fatigued, that seems to have

less value than ever, I would think. Yeah. I don't know where this is going to go, but I'm going to pull an average projected bullpen. So let's look at the Rangers. We have them projected for about an average bullpen this year. So top of the bullpen, whatever. We know they're all good. Who is their 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8th reliever on the Rangers depth chart is Dario Alvarez. Oh, this is a good coincidence. Last year, I actually wrote something about Dario Alvarez because Dario Alvarez in the

minors struck out 16 batters per nine innings. So that's the Rangers eighth reliever. Yeah, I don't think that there's a whole lot of benefit from getting into the Rangers bullpen because Dario Alvarez, I heard a an anecdote from from Joey Votto actually last year, where Votto said that he faced Dario Alvarez one or two times. And he said, again, paraphrase quote, I don't know how any lefty ever hits this guy ever at all. So there's that from one of the most incredible hitters of our generation about a guy who might not even make the Rangers opening day bullpen roster. Okay. That went somewhere good for just shot in the dark that you just took. Happy coincidence.

All right. So that will do it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support. Bobby Cotevaliel, Dustin McDonald, Ryan Kutchin, Gregory Zagorski, and Will Hickman. Thank 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. You can contact me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs dot com or by messaging us through

Patreon. And we'll be back later this week with our next team preview episode, which will focus on the Cubs and the Brewers. Talk to you then. At times I think there are no words but these to tell what's true. There are no words but these to tell what's true And there are no truths outside the gates of Eden