Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1039: Is Defense Still Winning the Analysis War?

Episode Date: April 1, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the end of the offseason, a Canada-only Clayton Kershaw, and Drew Smyly’s health status, then discuss whether the advancement of technology and the latest sabermetric insights still favor defense over offense, or whether hitters have started to even the score. Audio intro: The Mountain Goats, "Balance" Audio outro: Pete Townshend […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1039 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs Baseball podcast brought to you by Fangraphs Baseball and most importantly by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs.com talking as usual with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you doing? Doing okay. End of the week.

Yeah. End of the week. And this is our last podcast of the off season. That's true. We have our first podcast of the, I guess, on season or as it's more commonly referred to the season. How was your off season? Well, it was whirlwind.

I picked up a podcast that I started to do very regularly. You went on a trip, did some hiking. Definitely did all of those things, joined the mountaineering class that is taking me away. Yeah. How do you think the baseball off season was, if you had to grade this off season as far as, I don't know how you would grade an offseason but intrigue transactions interesting stories was this good or bad uh well i'm not gonna lie to you it's been so long since actual offseason activity i sort of forgot what happened

i know the free agent market was bad so we know that. There was no Shohei Otani coming over. There was a CBA, but nobody actually cares about that. Yeah, not very dramatic changes either, or at least not all that interesting in the short term. And I guess there was speculation about whether there would be more trades because there was a weak free agent market, and I guess there were a couple interesting trades. Certainly the White Sox trades were interesting,

but it was an okay offseason. Yeah, it was fine. Not the most exciting. It wasn't, I don't think, relative to what we thought the standings would be toward the end of last year, I don't think it must have shifted around. There's the same favorites, generally speaking.

The White Sox finally got off the pot, I guess. Or maybe they did the other one. It was more realistic. Probably. So the White Sox made themselves worse, which then opens up the al central more to other teams but you know the red socks picked up an ace to try to replace david ortiz but maybe they're down an ace because we don't know if we can expect anything from david price so that's not really clear what's going to happen there yeah i guess what there wasn't was a team that, quote-unquote, won the winter, like a team that just went totally all-in more so than before or a team that no one had expected to be big buyers,

but then they were like the Diamondbacks in the cranky offseason. I don't know. What were the other teams? The Padres. Yeah, the Padres, right, when Preller took over. There's a theme here. Yeah, right, exactly. Those teams don't always

Actually win anything but at least they make things more interesting and I guess there's no team that Really fit into that category this year or that moved our expectations dramatically no nobody did Anything Andrew McCutcheon is still where he is Jose Quintana still where he is there's of course Sale and Eaton but even even pitching the Adam Eaton trade as a blockbuster is kind of a stretch as much as I know what the deal was. People aren't actually excited to talk about Adam Eaton. It seems like there's just a bunch of

waiting on young teams to get less young and better. Overall, I give this offseason a D+. I think. D plus is offseason's go. Well, it's over. So that's nice. Yeah. Couple quick follow-ups just to one topic we talked about on the last email show.

The last question we talked about, I think, was whether it would be worth it to a team to employ a Clayton Kershaw slash Mike Caliber player. If he couldn't get into the U.S. and he could only play in Canada, would it be worth it to the Blue Jays to have him just part-time? And we said, yes, it would. And we got a couple of responses to that. So one was from Adam, who actually kind of crunched the numbers and tried to figure out how much Kershaw could pitch. So he said, since the pitcher would not be able to pitch in the States and would not need to travel, the Blue Jays could start Kershaw on short rest during long homestands to squeeze out extra innings. I looked at their 2017 schedule, and I think the Blue Jays could get 24 starts out of Kershaw. He would start the first game of every homestand.

On a six-game homestand, he starts the first and last game. On longer homestands, he starts the first game, the fifth game on short rest, and the ninth or tenth game on short rest. longer homestands he starts the first game the fifth game on short rest in the ninth or tenth game on short rest he gets extra rest during road trips and just stays in toronto with a trainer and a bullpen catcher for his side days on this system in 2017 kershaw starts on april 11th 15th 20th then he actually goes through like every day that kershaw starts in this season just like if any blue jays front office members are listening and need to know exactly when kershaw would start in this scenario

I can forward this email But he says it's more than half a season of Kershaw Of course it only works with starting pitchers And he'd have to agree to pitch multiple games on three days rest During the long homestands So it would be like alternating between a playoff schedule almost And just taking two weeks off And Justin from the Isotopes the baseball punk band i had

on the ringer mlb show recently they have a new album coming out check them out he says that the scenario that the listener described happened in hockey this was enforcer bob pro bear i guess i'm guessing that's how he went really okay when you said Mark Belanger and it was Belanger, this is the same problem. I figured with a hockey player, it'd be more likely. All right. Enforcer Bob Probert got caught with cocaine in his underpants and consequently couldn't play games in Canada. He just stayed home for those games, which at the time would have represented about one-third of the league by teams. Hockey has extra players up and the opportunity to have a different healthy scratch every

game, but it's a similar case to the hypothetical Blue Jays player who can't go to America. So I guess it worked out okay for Bob Probert. Yeah, and I guess sort of the funny thing about that is that teams have moved away from having enforcers on their rosters because those players are generally useless and

fighting is bad. So the team was probably better in the games where bob probert couldn't participate so yeah down with fighters but oh man he was one of the he was one of the famous ones okay so uh any other follow-ups nope okay well i don't know i don't think there's too much to banter about of interest before we get into our topic but i will note one of the new stories that's come out is that drew smiley has a flexor bundle strain which is one of those just think of it as a general arm problem that could conceivably lead to surgery down the road it's sort of the way most of these things go he's had shoulder problems before he's got a flexor bundle thing now he's going to seek

out a third and before that a second opinion which will presumably confirm the first so he is not going to pitch for a while which might be this year's most prominent example of world baseball classic participant who comes back hurt which is always the fear of particular note is that when smiley was pitching in the world baseball classic he was showing such markedly improved velocity that a certain someone might have written an article about it and how promising it was and how exciting his season upcoming could be below that article somebody left a comment that was aggressively thumb thumb down thumbs down i don't know how to put it it was aggressively disliked thumbed down by fangraphs readers and the comment read something to the effect of tick tick tick tommy john clock and that was funny because i guess that's sort of the downside of pitchers who are gaining

velocity or i think yeah everyone go vote up that comment yeah right retrospect nailed it can't really add velocity i guess without adding stress to your body so that's kind of the ugly downside that we don't talk about very often when we get so excited about someone who's adding velocity because, hey, by the way, your elbow is going to be aware of that. And I guess this is something we've talked about before. We've all talked about it before. But where do you stand on believing whether or not the World Baseball Classic actually causes more injuries than just participating in ordinary spring training? Well, it stands to reason, I suppose, that there'd be maybe a slightly different and elevated risk of injury. I don't think we could show that necessarily based on the small sample of WBCs that we have so far. But you'd think, I mean, it just depends on whether the players take those games more seriously than spring training games.

And I don't know whether that's the case for all players. I would think that players from some countries certainly seem to, particularly if their job is assured in camp. Like most players, I think, who are kind of on the bubble probably just wouldn't even play in the WBC because they want to be with their team. There are probably exceptions to that, but that's your top priority. So I would think that the players who go to the WBC tend to be guys who have earned starting jobs already, and therefore they might take things a little bit easier in spring training if they were to stay with their team. So it's possible they get caught up in the nationalism and the jingoism and they want to win. Maybe they throw a little harder. Maybe they run a little faster. Maybe they dive a little riskier. So I could buy it, but it's probably not so

significant that I would put my foot down and say, no, you can't go if I were a team because I wouldn't want to anger a player. It's probably not worth annoying the player. It's good for the sport, which by extension is good for teams. So there are definitely situations like where something happens in the WBC and it almost certainly wouldn't have happened exactly the same way. Like if it's some kind of impact injury, like a collision, or you get hit by a pitch or whatever, like if you change the circumstances, probably the exact same outcome wouldn't have occurred, but that doesn't mean that the risk was any higher. So I guess a little bit, but nothing worth worrying about.

I wonder if outfield collisions are more common in the world baseball classic or spring training, because in theory, in the WBC, you're flanked by outfielders you don't normally play with but the same would apply in spring training at least in the early part right where you have all these deep roster players who you've probably you probably don't even know their names based on the eduardo escobar example that the twins published but yeah i guess yeah later in well whatever whatever yeah i i would agree that there's probably like a i don't know five percent injury increase injury probability increase in the world baseball classic and as far as i'm concerned that would come from higher adrenaline for pitchers basically yeah throwing a little bit harder and that's it and do we know what the

risk is for a velocity spike as compared to a velocity loss like a velocity loss always a bad thing i guess both from a performance perspective and an injury indicator perspective whereas a velocity increase can often be a very good thing from a performance perspective but there are also these cases where it seems like someone's velocity will here we are saying velocity over and over again right after our last evil show about, oh, you should probably say speed. So if someone's speed spikes very suddenly, that can be bad at times, right?

So you don't know necessarily which it is. Yeah, I don't have that off the top of my head. I'm certain that people like Jeff Zimmerman have studied this and I'm sure have shown results. And I would assume that when you have players with a velocity increase, you are looking at a heightened injury risk relative to people who stay the same and much smaller than people who lose velocity because that's sort of a symptom of an injury already having taken place most of the time. So when I look at players who

have velocity spikes like Smiley showed i always think of the the perfect circumstances which are 2016 james paxton i will seek out any opportunity to discuss james paxton or keon broxton and paxton experienced a velocity spike of more than two miles per hour on his average fastball and that came as a consequence of him changing his mechanics to a throwing motion that just visibly looks a lot more smooth. He lowered his arm angle. He also lowered his front arm angle, which is under-discussed. But in any case, he throws sort of more around his shoulders. Instead of on top of them, it just looks better.

I think it allows him to better channel his energy, and so he found some more velocity in there, which is great. I don't think Drew Smiley changed anything. I think maybe he got stronger. It's one of those more unexplained velocity increases. So, you know, maybe he worked out a little differently. Maybe he just was experiencing adrenaline in the World Baseball Classic. It's probably both. But I guess I would feel more comfortable with a mechanics-based velocity increase than just a regular velocity increase because that one makes me worry a little bit more yeah okay okay well moving on let's have a topic sure i guess i could just do some team previews if you want just to go back over them yeah we should go back to the early ones that have had

changes like injuries or something and we'll just do a a correction segment we'll redo them all so that they'll be up to date speaking of which actually like this spring didn't change things that much either right we were just telling you about how the offseason didn't shift our expectations that much there weren't any catastrophic injuries with the possible exception of alex reyes on the cardinals like trevor may hurts the twins for sure but for the most part like there wasn't some superstar who was going to be one of the best players in baseball and was going to swing a division race and is not now because he hurt himself right like not much changed no i can't think of anything brutal so reyes would be the worst and then i guess now smiley that's a pretty big deal because the mariners do not have

very good rotation depth and given the american league wildcard picture that's going to be very bunched up and if i had to tell you teams right now that i think could very conceivably be in on the wildcard mix i would say the blue jays the rays the orioles the yankees the tigers the angels the mariners the rangers and the athletics who i like more than most teams i deliberately left out the royals you can take that i don't think they're very good i'm sticking to that one yeah so i think smiley is a pretty big deal but still a smaller deal than reyes since the cardinals will also be fighting for the national league wild card which has a number of teams competing for it okay topic time topic okay so a few years ago for the hardball times annual

i wrote about whether the pitchers and defense basically the run prevention side of the game was given an advantage in i guess what we can refer to as the information era which has sort of been ushered in by pitch effects that's when i think things really took off and we got to understand the game on its most granular level so i thought it was a really interesting topic i didn't fun fact i didn't come up with it i was desperate for topics somebody gave it to me that was thank you a lot paul swiden you saved my ass so wrote about that topic talked a bunch of players and people with teams and etc and there was no unanimous agreement but nobody nobody thought hitters had the advantage which i think that made sense since

hitting was going down and down and down everybody argued that run prevention was benefiting from all of the information and now fast forward it is 2017, that's what year it is. It's only been three months of it. And there has been a litany, a bevy, you pick them. There's been a lot of coverage of hitters who have been learning from StatCast, if not directly, then indirectly, or through people who work for teams, talking about exit velocities and launch angles. I mean, we can, Daniel Murphy is one very prominent example, and Murphy is trying to pass that along

to Ryan Zimmerman, basically just trying to get Ryan Zimmerman to elevate the ball more because he still hit the ball hard. So we have some evidence now of hitters trying to benefit from this information age in ways that I think are fairly intuitive

and we're seeing play out, at least anecdotally, if not yet league-wide. So I guess it's sort of time for an update it is 2017 going into the regular season we've had about a decade of pitch fx we are going on year three of stat cast information there are assorted other things there's like what the the swing trainers and zep and all the the wearables you've done more research and writing about that stuff than i have because my content has been zero.

So we'll just kind of do a summary position. Where is the advantage based on the information that we have today? I think maybe there's been kind of a counter reaction by the offense. And maybe you could look at that as it relates to the shift and as it relates to launch angles and i'm still not totally clear on what the effect of either of those things has been i know that we can point to certain players who seemingly undoubtedly benefited from changing their swings using stat cast information so i mean you look at those players and you think that, okay, well, these are guys who went from not good to good or okay to great. And so potentially, like if every player can copy that and make that same kind of improvement, then there'd be potential for a huge response.

And I just am still not totally clear on, first of all, how many guys could stand to benefit from that. Like you've written about some candidates for swing changes or more uppercut swings, just guys who hit the ball on the ground a lot, like Christian Jelic. I don't know what percentage of guys could benefit significantly from that and what percentage are already pursuing a pretty optimal approach. And I still can't tell exactly how much of the boost in offense and particularly home runs is related to that because the timeline to me, hopefully I'm not coming off as a crank who's

railing about the ball being juiced all the time, but like, I just still don't understand how it could have been the swing changes explaining the home run spike because it happens so suddenly and in the middle of a season and i just can't really concoct a scenario where everyone changed their swings overnight at the all-star break in 2015 and just raise the home run rate from regular or low to the highest ever just doesn't seem to compute for me so i still am kind of clinging to the ball thing while acknowledging that it's probably a multitude of factors including swing changes so does seem like there's been a response but maybe there's already been a response to the response, right? Because didn't you write something about how pitchers could possibly counter the swing changes that are themselves a response to pitchers pitching low in

the zone, for instance, because of the strike zone expansion? Why, yes. Yes, I did. That's convenient. Okay. Would you like to summarize? A few years ago, I think 80 to 82% of my articles were about how pitchers should attack Mike Trout in the upper third of the strike zone. I wrote about three of these a day for about five months of the season, and it was great. It was a lot of fun, and the Royals did it, and then the Angels were swept. It was a fantastic time for everybody except for Mike Trout and the Angels. Pretty good for Mike Trout, too. Yeah, yeah, pretty good for Mike Trout.

Mike Trout. So the issue back then, just anecdotally for Mike Trout, was that Mike Trout hit a lot of fly balls and he was essentially maiming every other pitch that was thrown to him in the middle of the zone or low. He was killing balls that were even down below the zone. I remember a grand slam, I think it was off Chris Sale in particular, that was basically just an impossible home run or at least impossible for anyone. He was not the greatest anything in the history of anyone. So Mike Trout was killing the ball, couldn't hit anything up. He had an uppercut swing, which is not too uncommon, but being the best player in baseball, it was interesting to analyze where his flaws were. And his happened to be very conspicuous. He couldn't hit anything, especially fastballs

that were thrown in the upper third of the zone or above that. So I kept calling attention to that. And while Trout has been good enough to somewhat resolve that issue, which by the way, that's amazing. He is amazing and still only what, 25, 26 years old. Unbelievable. Oh my God. Where was I when I was 26? I was stressed out because I was baseball blogging. Anyway, so that is sort of a small example of what I think would or could become a league wide issue. When I was writing that same Hardball Times article about the run prevention side having the advantage, that was just before the Royals played the A's. I was doing an interview with Pitcher. And so the A's that

year, I believe it was that year, that the A's had a super fly ball hitting lineup i think it was a particularly fly ball heavy lineup and they were going up against the royals and what i got to talking about with i think it was brandon mccarthy this particular interview was how you could get away with pitching the a's up because again fly ball hitting lineup and while you are trained i think you're conditioned to think that fly balls come from pitches that are left elevated. And while that can be true, what the A's did and what a lot of hitters have been increasingly learning to do is to get fly balls or at least line drives off pitches that are down. Because, as you know, pitchers have been targeting the lower part of the zone more and more and more. They've been rewarded for that because the zone has been sinking lower and lower.

So you had this interplay. There's always a complicated interplay where the A's could be exposed up top because they were so good at hitting the ball down low. This is back when the A's had an offense and were worth talking about even a little bit at all. So I think that the response to this would be that if hitters are training themselves to hit the ball in the air more and they're trying to get those optimal launch angles more well the probability is that doing that will require swinging up because otherwise i don't know what you do when you are swinging up it's basically easier to get the to the pitch that's down than it is to get to the pitch that's up because your bat has to travel a considerable distance to get to the pitch up if you're not expecting a pitch up blah blah blah this gets into sort of i guess the next part of the question which is will the advantage if we if we choose to believe that the advantage rests on the run prevention

side even with the hitters deriving an advantage from stat cast will the run prevention side always have the greater benefit of more information? It seems to me that it would, I think, because I'm trying to formulate exactly why. I mean, I don't know whether the scouting information is more useful, like knowing a hitter's weaknesses, and like it would be harder to counter for a hitter like the the hitter is sort of reactive in a way like the pitcher is the one who is choosing where the ball goes and he can exploit the hitter's weaknesses right in a way that the hitter really can't the hitter just has to wait for the pitcher to do something and then react to it and hopefully his skills will match up with the pitcher but he's just sort of waiting there for the ball to come to him and you know he can study

the pitcher too and he can see what pitches the pitcher tends to throw on certain counts or where he tends to throw them or familiarize himself with the movement and watch video and everything so it's not as if he's going in blind but it just seems as if in a weird way the offense is on the defensive all the time in baseball yeah i think that is exactly right that's sort of where where i sit now where hitting by its very nature and existence is always going to be reactionary and pitchers if they want you can be a pitcher and you can customize a game plan for every individual hitter and to a certain extent pitchers do do that there are certain hitters where they won't bother like i'm sure pitchers don't worry about what sequence they need to use against alexi amarisa when he's up at the plate and maybe alexi amarisa gets to benefit from that the

evidence would suggest he does not benefit very much yeah but i know one of the one of the problems that came up when i was writing so much about mike Trout and being exploitable up in the zone, I would wonder why there would be certain teams who weren't doing that. Because the Astros would pitch him up all the time. And the Mariners started doing it all the time. I think it was divisional teams who would do that. But there would still be teams who were like, no, no, we're just going to pitch to Trout like we want.

And that's fine. And then Mike Trout would just have a Mike Trout season. And then the teams would shrug and say, well, he beat us that's what the best players do right and one of the explanations that was given was that pitchers uh certain pitchers didn't want to try to pitch mike trout up because it wasn't something that they would do they were like sinker ball pitchers or they were pitchers who wanted to pitch down in zone so they didn't basically know how to pitch up and i do not have enough pitching know-how and experience to tell you what it's like to try to pitch down versus up because i was just trying to get the ball to the catcher full stop i didn't really care where the ball went as long as it was somewhere in the vicinity

of the strike zone i was never to the point where i was actually aiming a ball. So I don't know. If you're like Dallas Keuchel and you know that you live down and away and that's where your sinker and changeup are the best, can you throw the pitch up? If you have a good command or an average command pitcher who's used to throwing low, how is his command up? And I don't know the answer to that. And what pitchers would say is that, well, if you try to throw up and you miss, well, then you're just going to miss into the middle of the plate. But I mean, if you try to pitch low and you miss, aren't you just as likely to miss in the middle of the plate?

Yeah. And I don't know the answer to that, but I feel like missed spots are random in any direction. Like you miss within a circle that we can envision, right? If you're aiming for the center of a target and you miss, then you're going to miss somewhere in a circle with a certain radius around that target. And I don't think that you'd be any more likely to miss over the heart if you're aiming up than if you're aiming down. So I wonder to what extent pitchers are reluctant just because they're stubborn and if they are working sub optimally. I know that Mitchell Lichtman, NGL, would argue that baseball players are forever working optimally. It's one of his core beliefs that he will argue with exhaustively,

seemingly without rest. I don't know how he does it. I will never get involved in one of those arguments anymore. And to a large extent, I think he's right. I think players do work optimally, but there's no way that they're actually working at 100 relative to what they could do just based on game theory and plans of attack there's no way players are not that smart not even subconsciously there are mistakes

being made and i wonder if what we're going to see is that there will be hitters getting better and better and better at hitting pitches down and then pitchers will be reluctant to go up in the zone more just because they don't want to. Yeah. And it seems like hitters have been stubborn in their own way with responding to the shift. And it seems to me that it's very difficult to just become a different kind of hitter and to spray the ball over the field or hit the ball the other way if that's not what you're used to and that's not your natural inclination. We have seen some hitters have some success doing that, but I don't know if it's something that you could blame a hitter who's at the major league level for not doing.

But the seeming reluctance refusal to bunt is another case where it seems like that would be a really easy thing to counter. And we talked about this on the podcast before so people probably know the argument but you know when hitters do drop a bunt down against an unguarded third baseline they get on base very often and you know not everyone is a good bunter of course but if you can just do that a few times, you can not only get some free hits out of it potentially, but also ensure future hits by getting the other team to take the shift off or change the shift. And if the shift hurts you, which it seems to for at least some players who pull the ball on the ground a lot, then that seems like it would be a smart idea. And there just

aren't a whole lot of hitters who've done it with any great regularity. So that's another case where it seems like there's some stubbornness, some ego playing a part and that players aren't always doing things optimally. And I wonder also whether defense gets a benefit because you can kind of involve your front office and your people who can crunch numbers and just have all the time in the world to game plan these things a little bit better for instance if you're talking about defensive positioning you can look at the spray charts and you can look at the stat casts horizontal launch angles and speeds and you can figure out the optimal positioning and that's not something that a player has to do in the heat of the moment just reacting to

what he sees or going by gut or whatever like that can be practiced that can be drilled the front office can deliver a printout to the field staff that says this is where this guy should stand for this guy and this count and you can see some fielders who have cheat sheets about where to stand for certain batters and that kind of thing. So you can plan that out in advance and it's always easier if you can prepare in advance. Whereas how do you counter that other than the bunting, which is one possibility, you can't really just have the front office people print out a page that says stop pulling the ball it's just like that doesn't

it doesn't work as well i don't think it's hard to either pull the ball or not so that's another case where i think you can bring more resources to bear potentially in helping the defensive side than you could on the offensive side yeah i'd agree with that the funny thing of course is we've observed before is that batting average on balls in play refuses to drop despite all of the defensive alignments i think there's a multitude of factors that go into that and one of them that was suggested via email recently was i was talking about how short stops just had their best hitting season, I think, ever. And I was arguing, well, maybe teams are more reluctant to move good offensive shortstops to other positions because of all the shifting. And then second baseman just had the best offensive season ever, I think, as well. And I wonder if there are just worse defenders,

at least in the infield, and better hitters. And then maybe that's sort of balancing out some of the effects of the shifting because, you know, know again intuitively shifting should work and i'm not even sure that it doesn't work but it definitely isn't working league wide like one would expect you're right that the front office can manufacture a plan for any individual hitter and as a hitter you can't really do much. Aside, like you said, from bunting, I don't think that it is easy at all for a hitter to alter his directionality. I think it is much easier to just try to hit the ball in the air, sort of instead of hitting against the shift, hitting over the shift, as hitters would like to say. I think that was sort of David Ortiz's plan and Daniel Murphy's plan.

And I think that is a lot easier. I know there was a lot of attention paid to Mike Moustakis two years ago, I think it was. And you wrote about him, I wrote about him, everybody wrote about him because it was interesting because he was a bad hitter who became a good hitter. And he basically learned to hit to the opposite field, which is very difficult to do. But as I think you also examined, other players who learned to hit to the opposite field didn't really get better. They just were different production didn't improve they just spread it around and so i think that the idea of hitting against the shift when you're being shifted is generally a bad idea it's important to try to learn to bunt and players

should do that more than they do that's kind of stupid like you said example of stubbornness but again here's an example where you should just instead of trying to hit the ball at the left field if if you are lefty you should just try to hit the ball in the air somewhere to right or center field which i think players are more willing to do and again maybe this would be some sort of hitter benefit from having all of this information but once again i keep having to come back to the idea of hitting being reactionary and i think just because of that they will always be at a relative disadvantage, even if they are now deriving some benefit of the information, it's still not enough. It just makes up, I don't know, 30, 50% of the difference, but I don't think that it could ever get past that. And probably the same applies to in-game managing and substitutions and bullpen decisions and that

sort of thing, because often the front office will supply the manager, the bench coach, or whoever looks at those things, either in a binder or on an iPad, something that indicates which pitcher would be the best matchup for the opposing team's hitters. So if you're making a bullpen decision and, you know, it might go based on velocity, handedness and stuff, your repertoire, your arsenal, all kinds of factors. And we'll say compare. I don't know exactly how it's done, but probably looking at similar pitchers who have faced that hitter and how they've performed in a more sophisticated way than I think has been done publicly. And so you can look at a sheet and say, well, I've got to make this decision. I've got to put a guy in. Here's who's coming up.

And here are the projections for every possible matchup for pitcher and hitter. And I have this choice of five, six relievers. And here's the best one for this situation. And again, not much you can do to counter that if you are the other team you could pinch hit but you have maybe two options or something at this point now that teams have 13 relievers or whatever it is on their roster so and then you burn a player and you don't have many players and and you're replacing a starter and so you know you're probably not getting better anyway like if you bring in a reliever he's probably more effective than the pitcher you're replacing a starter. And so, you know, you're probably not getting better anyway. Like if you bring in a reliever,

he's probably more effective than the pitcher you're taking out. If you pinch hit, he might be, but why isn't he starting in the first place? And there's the pinch hit penalty and all of those things. So it's not usually like you have a really, really great bench hitter who's just sitting around waiting to pinch hit. So again, like if teams get smarter about making in-game decisions too that seems like yet another case or like if teams say there's been some speculation like

there was a report a few years ago about a team having a supercomputer and like no one knows which team has the supercomputer what it was doing with it but there's speculation that maybe you could look at real-time pitch data and say, well, his arm angle's dropping or his velocity or his spin rate or whatever, and get a good sense of whether you should take him out and what his outlook is for the rest of the game. I don't know how you would communicate that to the coaching staff exactly. I guess you could always just have some intermediary running down there, but basically you could get a more intelligent sense of how much a guy has left and whether you should pull him or not. And again, no equivalent to that for hitters. It's not like you could look

at a swing and say his bat speed was a little lower on that swing, so we should take him out or something. There's just nothing to counter that kind of information yeah i'm pretty sure in retrospect that the supercomputer was purchased by the astros for the specific purpose of just trying to figure out what happened to richard hidalgo so i think that's just a side project they've been running so one thing that i think is that fans don't really get to hear about is not every single team, but there are teams out there who have specific projections for every matchup you could imagine. And of course, these are estimates, approximations no one can actually know, but it goes down to specific pitcher-hitter matchups. Like I know a team that has, you know, it's got its entire 40-man roster or whatever,

and whatever players have pitched in the major leagues, or I guess probably even the minor leagues, you can say, oh, how would Manny Machado, or how would this pitcher do against Manny Machado? And they'll have a projection for every single pitcher on the roster based on not only his performance in like platoon splits, but also his stuff and how Machado hits against that kind of stuff. And again, the error bars on these things are probably enormous, but this is a readout you can give to a manager and just be like,

hey, look, if you're in a tough spot and M man in Machado is coming up, here's what you got. Here are probably the best statistical ideas for who you should bring in and in this situation. And of course, you need to use that human information of who's looking good, who's sick, who's hurt, who's whatever. But that's that's just where where teams are. And like you said, there's really nothing you can do if you are the Orioles and you're going into that game and the other team brings in whoever to face Manny Machado, you're not going to be like, well, this is a bad matchup, but I'm going to bring in Anthony Santander

or whoever is on the Orioles bench. It's not going to work out. So I guess you've got a situation where the information is there. We've had at least pitch-by-pitch information for nine years, a little bit more. That's not going to go away. Run scoring is up, but only because of the home runs, which could be for a variety of reasons. But to whatever extent these swing changes are responsible for that, there will still be more home runs as long as hitters are still trying to hit more fly balls

because ground balls never did anything for anyone so that's always going to be there but it seems like it should be mitigated some if pitchers do start countering that if you look at famous swing changes you're justin turner or jd martinez or marlon bird who sort of inspired justin turner what a lot of these guys josh jonathan too what a lot of these guys have in common is that their slugging percentages are way way better against pitches down than against pitches up in terms of guys who are better against pitches up relative to pitches down it's uncommon for power hitters but like nelson cruz is far better against pitches up john carlos tantin is i believe better against pitches up and those guys don't have those

uppercut swings they just have like herculean, literally Herculean strength when they swing their gigantic baseball bats. And so the ball sort of goes a long way on a line. I think one of the reasons John Carlos Stanton has the exit velocities that he does is that a lot of people, when they hit the ball in the air for a home run, they're not actually making optimal contact. They're just getting the optimal angle and they're sacrificing some of their like ceiling exit velocity. the optimal angle and they're sacrificing some of their like ceiling exit velocity but i think that stan is frequently hitting at his peak exit velocity and he still hits home runs because he just is capable of hitting the ball like 10 miles per hour faster than everybody else and he has this line drive swing this very level swing that allows him to attack pitches up and be a little more vulnerable against pitches down but in any case the uh the swing changer hitters seem almost uniformly to be worse against pitches up so as we've already

discussed in this podcast as long as pitchers recognize that identify who's trying to hit the ball in the air and then go after them up it seems like there's just i don't know what you can do about that aside from depend on the pitchers being too stubborn to actually work up in the zone. Somehow we've gotten through this whole podcast without mentioning pitch framing, which is another example of the defense getting an advantage from the data. And seems like that's a greater and greater advantage for defense as a whole, even if it's less of an advantage for individual teams now that every team is good at it just about. So another notable example that falls into this category. That's right. So I guess if I had to conclude, I'd say that Rob Manfred, you want run scoring to be there. You want more action in the game. You want baseball to be more interesting, less

strikeout dependent. And I'd say that maybe the easiest thing you could do is just shut off all the tracking systems. No more information for anybody. That's probably true. Yeah. All right. Plunge us back into the dark ages. Run scoring will improve.

I will have to look for a job. All right. So we can stop there. So thanks for spending another off-season with Effectively Wild. It was a winter of change for this podcast, if not necessarily for the league. And we hope that you will continue to support the podcast into the 2017 season. You can do so by pledging a small monthly amount at patreon.com slash effectively wild. And five people who have done that recently include Brendan O'Connor, Jacob Carl, Tyson Bohannon, Cole Sheeks, and Sanjay Markin. So thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. If anything, it's an even better place to be when there's actual baseball going on. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. You can follow us on Twitter at EWPod. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Enjoy

actual baseball, and we will talk to you next week. It'll be a long, long go.