Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1042: Several Premature Pronouncements

Episode Date: April 8, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Keon Broxton and batting helmets, statistical soothsaying, and the two-way-player attempts of Michael Lorenzen and Christian Bethancourt, then discuss the early results of several preseason players and teams of interest. Audio intro: Son Volt, "Too Early" Audio outro: Parliament, "I Misjudged You"  iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)  Sponsor Us on Patreon […]

On and on that road winds, God knows you don't need it. Too early you might be the one. Find yourself somewhere else, too early in the sun. Too early in the sun with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. Did you suffer a spontaneous sympathetic nasal fracture yesterday when Keon Broxton was hit by a baseball? I assume you two are psychically linked in some sense now. I might have gotten as many get well messages after that as Keon Broxton did. I'm just going to guess. But I was relieved to read after the fact that he suffered a broken nose

and will not go on the disabled list. So, Keon Broxton, he is fantastic. And he is making a decision like a true experienced skateboarder who has probably banged himself up pretty good in the past. Yep. Good thing he was wearing that C-flap. Did it actually catch him on the flap? I think it did. Yeah.

It looked like it did. And he said afterward that everyone should wear it that he was deciding whether to use it or to just use the traditional padding helmet in spring training and he decided to go with the one with the flap and i guess it's a good thing that he did yeah still broke his nose though it could be the case though that there's a peltzman effect at work here are you familiar with the Peltzman effect? I think there are other names for it, but the idea that if you do something to increase your safety, you will subconsciously do something else to put yourself at risk so that there's kind of

an equilibrium so that, say, if a bike rider wears a helmet, he or she will feel safer and thus might be more willing to take a risk that he or she wouldn't if there was no helmet involved. I don't know whether that actually evens out. I would think that it's still safer to have a helmet probably for a bike rider, but I wonder whether if you have a more protective helmet at the plate, a pitcher might be subconsciously more likely to buzz you up and in. Yeah, I guess it would have to be that because I don't think a hitter would be more likely to put his head in the way of a pitcher to baseball. But yeah, we're learning. We're going over that a lot. I'm taking currently like a mountaineering class that stretches for a couple of months.

And we've been talking about that when discussing avalanche awareness and risk, where there have been a lot of improvements in backcountry gear and safety technology in the last few decades. And so as a result, more and more people are getting trapped in avalanches because they're just they think that they are safer. And so they just put themselves in more treacherous territory. And I guess it's the same with helmets or seatbelts in cars where all of a sudden people are driving 60, 70, 80 miles per hour or more. Sometimes people even go faster than that, if you can believe it. It's crazy.

We just have some inherent amount of death wish, I guess. And no matter what we do, we just have to fall back to that level. We all just want to feel. So I was just going to bring up, there have been a bunch of responses to our discussion yesterday on the email show about the hypothetical where the person can see a player's final stat line. And we talked about how quickly a person with that ability could get a job in baseball. And we were talking mostly about prospects and how you'd be great at projecting prospects. And maybe in a year or two, your prospect rankings would look really accurate

and you'd get hired. And a few people pointed out that an even better way to demonstrate that you had this ability maybe would be to predict the final career stat lines of players who are very close to retirement. So if you know, for instance, what David Ortiz had done through 2015, then you could predict his 2016 stats by looking at the difference between the through 2015 stats and the final stat line that you somehow magically mysteriously know. downside is that you would have to do it only for players who announce that they are retiring in that coming year and they don't always stick to that declaration either but i guess there are enough guys who are close to the end and you could pretty much wager that they're on their last legs that you could do it and maybe that would be quicker and more impressive yeah uh i guess if it's this year who

would you pick we don't have anyone right we don't have a no there's no retirement tour going on right now so who's who's old koji uehara says he wants to keep playing itro says he wants to play until he's 50 goddamn years old right the oldest player on the padres is is like 32. It's like Cologne and Dickey, but they haven't really shown much sign of falling off or wanting to stop. Right. And if you get to that age and you're still pitching successfully, well, you can tell that Cologne basically just throws one pitch at 88 miles per hour and it works. So he could go forever. And Dickey doesn't even do that. So he could go forever.

So I don't know who we could pick here unless you could find, I don't know. No, probably not Matt Holiday. I don't know if you could just find someone who you just maybe you find the difference between the known end of career numbers and the difference between current numbers. And then you just figure out, well, like this guy clearly isn't going to play more than one more year. And then you just try that. But yeah, failing that.

I don't know. You could just predict. I mean, if a guy's close enough to the end end you don't really even have to do the subtraction you could just say these are what his final career stats are going to be and hopefully it'll be only a year or two away and that should in theory be equally impressive that's true yeah i guess you could probably do that for each row and then no matter when he ends up then it's still going to be amazing uh-huh okay yeah a few people pointed that out so good point everyone so i don't know do you have anything else nope okay well the only thing i wanted to talk about before we talk about

more stuff is i wanted to point out that on thursday in a game between the phillies and the reds which is a game that was watched by people who did that intentionally there was a a very neat thing that happened you you might remember that last i think it was last august michael lorenzen uh reliever for the reds he was on the bereavement list uh his father passed away and then two days later he came back and he was uh he was a reliever at this point he started four but he was converted into the bullpen where he got good and he was in the bullpen and he pitched an inning and then his spot in the order came up and so they allowed him to hit and he hit a home run and it was very emotional and it was voted i believe by zach buchanan's readers or maybe just cincinnati.com

readers as the highlight of the reds entire season wow pretty powerful moment for michael lorenzen not a season full of many highlights, of course. Certainly not a great thing if your season highlight is a reliever hitting a home run in a game you're already winning by five. But in any case, so Michael Lorenzen was a pitcher and a hitter at Cal State Fullerton. He had a senior year in 2013. In that year, he was a very good pitcher. He had a sub-2 ERA, but he also was the best hitter on the team. He out-hit teammate Matt Chapman, who is an offense-first legitimate prospect for the Oakland A's.

So there was some talk, again, from Zach Buchanan this spring, or I guess maybe more importantly from Michael Lorenzen, relayed to Zach Buchanan this spring, that Michael Lorenzen wants to be something of a two-way player. He knows he can pitch he's a super good reliever i don't know if you've ever watched him he's a reds reliever so no but he throws hard he gets a bunch of ground balls strikes out a batter an inning he's really good really good fastball cutter whatever but he also has some hitting talent i think we already know he has some hitting talent on account of the fact that he does have a home run that he hit to

center field so he pitched in the reds first game he pitched in the red second game so he was unavailable to pitch in the reds third game so he was hanging around in the dugout and the reds also happened to be playing with a short bench they have a an eight-man bullpen or maybe more than that i guess i haven't done the math but they have a four-man bench and the bench is not good the best player on it is scooter jeanette and yesterday rookie davis started for the reds. He didn't last very long, so Scooter Jeanette pinch hit for a pitcher

in the fourth inning. So in the sixth inning, a pitcher spot comes up again, and Brian Price evaluates his options. He's got Tucker Barnhart. He's got Patrick Kivlahan. He's got Arizmendi Alcantara. I don't know how to pronounce that name.

He's got another player. It's a tie game, sixth inning, two outs, nobody on. It's not really a high leverage spot but whatever a dinger can make a difference so he calls for michael lorenzen to come up and pinch hit against adam morgan who's a real pitcher and then michael lorenzen takes a huge cut at two and oh fouls the ball back but it's an impressive looking cut count runs a three and and one. Michael Lorenzen hits a home run to straightaway center field. It leaves about at 108 miles per hour. It's a wonderful home run.

The box courses, the wind was blowing out strong to center field, but watching the highlight, it didn't matter. That ball was getting out of there. Michael Lorenzen has a pinch hit home run. It's the first pitcher pinch hit home run since 2009, which might seem more recent than you'd expect,

but all of the recent pitcher pinch hit home runs have been hit by brooks kishnick or uh or the other one michael owings michael owings right they have combined for five and the thing about those two is that i would say they were good at neither but they were capable at both like they could they could hit fine they were about average and they could pitch okay they were mop-up men for the most part. I guess Michael Owings is actually still floating around, so maybe he'll make a comeback. But Michael Lorenzen is presently trying to, I guess,

take his role in a sense, where he now has two home runs. His career WOBA, if you want to call it that. It's 311, which means he's hit about as well since he started hitting as Brandon Phillips in 2015. So Michael Lorenzen also a shutdown reliever. So this is going to be a lot of fun. The Reds clearly are never going to let him play a position, but this introduces some options where if he is unavailable to pitch,

then he could be called on as a pinch hitter, or maybe even more importantly, I don't know, you can now bring him in as a reliever, sort of independent of the spot in the order. You don't have to worry about that. If he comes up, you can now bring him in as a reliever sort of independent of the spot in the order you don't have to worry about that if he comes up you can just let him hit it seems like i don't want to make too much of the fact that he's gone deep twice in like 42 plate appearances but clearly he is a a pretty good hitter maybe on the madison bum garner level even if he's not quite on that level he's still as good as what Jeanette Kivlahan Barnhart Alcantara so uh it'll be fun because now Brian Price can use him without having to worry about like double switches or

anything and I know that they've talked about using Lorenzen and Price Aliglesias as multi-inning relievers out there anyway so now if Lorenzen is in there to throw two innings and a spot comes up in the middle well all the better he's going to probably get more chances to hit because he's earned them and uh and this is fun you don't often see pitchers getting well you almost never see pitchers getting used like this i think jason hamill did it a couple times for the cubs last year for some reason and bruce bocce has used pitchers alarmingly often to pinch hit sometimes because i think he had a short bench at times last year but yeah this is going to be a lot of fun there's also talk of lorenzen pinch running which is something that and Andrew Kashner has done for the Padres. So this is for

everyone who always asks who is going to be the next two-way player. Well, there probably isn't going to be a two-way player until Shohei Otani comes over, but Lorenzen at least will be able to pinch it or hit for himself, which is, I guess, kind of a two-way player. Is that a one and a half-way player? Yeah, I think so. But this is cool. I like it. And both of the worst teams in baseball this year, I guess you could say probably the two worst teams in baseball this year, have experimented, are experimenting with some sort of two-way player, and that is fun. We always sort of say that if you're going to lose anyway, you might as well do some fun stuff like this. But I would think that if anything, probably the opposite has been the case, that losing teams have been less likely to do fun experimental stuff.

And teams that are actively trying to win do those things because they have more of a motivation to do things that they think will help them win. So it is nice that this is happening based on Christian Bethencourt's early results. It might not be happening for that much longer in his case, but I like that someone's trying. There's the problem. Bethencourt has a career 569 LPS, which is bad, and he has a career limited sample 16.20 ERA, which is bad.

According to Baseball Reference, he's actually currently the league leader in walks, which I did not know, given that he's thrown 1.2 innings. I think he walked four straight guys in his second appearance of the season. He has faced 24 batters in his four pitching appearances in the majors last year and this year, and he has walked nine of them. He struck out one, and he's also hit one and allowed a home run. So Christian Bethencourt has one of the worst pitching lines I've seen ever.

Which makes sense because he is not a pitcher. And he never has been until officially, I guess, what? The winter? Yep. Yep. I got nothing else on two-way players. So we can skip ahead a little bit to, I guess, this week's topic. I know on your other podcast, you talked about trends from the

first week that might or might not continue, which is great. Related to that, I think it's almost unavoidable that this podcast also has to discuss the first week. So what I thought that we could do is to just give sort of one week updates on whatever strong opinions or moderately strong opinions we might have had about baseball players or teams before the year. So for example, let's say that you had a strong opinion that the Cubs were going to be super good. Maybe that's not an original opinion or anything that's particularly remarkable, but the Cubs have played three games. So have you seen anything from the Cubs in the first three games that would lead you to change your preseason belief by even one percentage point in either direction. And just as an idea, unless you have a point,

you have a point. Well, not really. I was going to repeat the point we talked about on the last show, right? When we talked about Jake Arrieta and his scarily decreasing velocity in his first start of the season so that's one thing but certainly nothing based on record or or results really yeah right no there's i think there's there are zero conclusions to be reached based on what's actually happened in the games where i mean who's who's the best team in the american league the twins i believe they're uh yes undefeated yeah the twins three and oh i believe so you can it's fun to sometimes go into the uh the calculated playoff odds and see how things have shifted in the first few days because of course these games don't not matter so it's always fun to sort of evaluate like who's already made a difference but i think that that's just going to lead you to to a troublesome

area so yeah with the cubs i think that i would say that they seem a couple percentage points more vulnerable just because jake arietta's velocity seems to be down and john lester's velocity also seems to be down not to the same extent as arietta but lester has been one of the bigger velocity losers in the early going so if you have the cubs who have the one perceived possible vulnerability of starting rotation depth well it's not good news to have their pitches throwing slower although you never know they've had two deep postseason runs in a row they could have just instructed their pitchers to chill or alternatively maybe they're all just going out there like what's

the point we just did it like why why are we still trying to do this? Okay, so what's a strong opinion that you had about a fascinating player, of course, because he was, if not the best player in baseball in 2015, certainly the second best. And then a multitude of things happened. He was walked by everyone. He seemed to be potentially hiding an injury that he never admitted and never directly refuted either. Reportedly he told the team That he didn't have one in his agent But there was something weird going on With Bryce Harper and Then at the same time that he was struggling

You and Rob Arthur Dug into the StatCast stats and Retroactively made him worse in 2015 which wasn't very nice And we had an Effectively Wild Episode about that too You found that he had been extremely Lucky on air balls

So a strong opinion I guess I had Coming into this year was that Bryce Harper was going to be a lot better At baseball this year There was a lot of positive buzz About his health and his preparation And his swing And his mechanics

And you never really know what that means. But the fact that he had eight homers in spring training lent some credence to that. And he hit a home run on opening day, which is something that he does every year. So it's hard to say what that means. But he has not changed my optimism about him being great again, which will make the Nationals even more great again because they are an excellent team, even with a mediocre Bryce Harper. So with almost best player in baseball Bryce Harper back again, I think they could probably not run away with things, but maybe build up a comfortable lead in the East. Would you classify Bryce Harper's 2017 as the most interesting season in the majors? It might be. When we did a staff group post at

The Ringer last week about things we were excited about in the season, that was the thing I picked, because it's almost like we're going to get an answer to a decade of wondering how good Bryce Harper's going to be this year. That's not really true. He's still, what, 24 or something. So it's not like what he does this season is going to settle anything for the rest of the course of his career. But if he has another big season this year, then I think that settles any remaining questions about his talent. Because right now he's had, what, five seasons and one of them has been extraordinary And the others have all just been

Kind of okay like in that Post I pointed out that basically he's Been the best player in baseball one Year and Cole Calhoun The other four years which is So impressive given his age and Everything but he was Just kind of a pretty good

Hitter who got banged up a lot and was a decent defender. And it just wasn't all that exciting if you hadn't known about his phenom status going back to his mid-teen years. So if he has a second big season, then I think we can dismiss any idea that it was a weird, fluky stat cast year or something and we can start projecting him as a hall of famer again but if he has a another middling year then well that's less decisive i guess because he'll still be young enough that people will continue to expect him to have another big year so it's not uh definitive but it has the potential, at least, if he has that big year to settle the mystery. Yeah, I guess how old was Brady Anderson when he did his thing?

32. Okay, that one's just bizarre. So I don't know what it was like to live through that. But now that Harper reached that level, I guess now this doesn't need to be a Bryce Harper podcast. But since he reached that level once at such a young age, i think that seems like one of those things that'll just never be forgotten i guess kind of like when adrian belcher had that like nine or ten win year when he was like 23 or 24 and then yeah the mariner signed him and then he never got close to that which just led to him being severely underrated for like an entire decade before he finally re-emerged as

basically a wonderful and universally beloved player and virtually certain hall of famer so those those early peaks are very very difficult for people to get out of their heads and i wonder what it would be like if we had stat cast information for belchers big breakout yeah so yasiel puig yes i was gonna bring him up to yasiel puig i did not have a strong opinion so maybe maybe i should say that points of interest, forget strong opinions, but players are teams of interest before the year and looking for early results. So encouragingly, Yasiel Puig, so far this year, he's walked one to three times. I think he's only struck out once or twice.

He's also hit three home runs. So if you look at the numbers, you think Yasiel Puig is off to a absolutely fantastic start. And if Puig is back to being a superstar, well, I don't know what could possibly stop the Dodgers. So, I will, of course, let you issue whatever statement you'd like to say, but what I will say is that when I click on

Yasiel Puig's play log, the top two lines are Yasiel Puig homered off Jared Weaver, and Yasiel Puig homered off Jared Weaver. He also has homered against Trevor Cahill. Good for him. But this is one of those situations where I believe that he homered off for basically 84 mile per hour fastballs at the belt. So I don't know if there's anything to be learned from this, except that Yasiel Puig hasn't lost the ability to hit a home

run. Yeah, because that was the critique of him or the thing that scouts would be reported to say right that he had slowed down and that he could hit triple a pitching still but just was vulnerable to major league pitching so jared weaver is triple a pitching if you're being charitable so that in itself doesn't necessarily tell you that much I suppose although not every other Dodgers hitter hit two home runs against Jared Weaver so relative to the other guys he's still doing well but I think I'm on record as being optimistic about Puig before he had a good start to the season so I guess I could say that it just always struck me as surprising that people would start saying that he was a fundamentally different guy at

25 or 26 than he had been a few years earlier. He was just young to get that kind of report, I thought. And I guess he had thickened up, but we've seen him drop weight and add weight and go up and down. And it didn't seem at all implausible to me that he could dedicate himself and get into better shape again and be a good player again. So like I remember last year, there were debates on sports writers blues between Andy McCullough and Pedro Moura. And as usual, Pedro was right. I love you, Andy, but Pedro's always right. And they were talking about, I think, basically like how many wins above replacement they expected Puig to have in the rest of his career. And they set the over under at like nine or something. And I think Andy was

under because he just didn't like what he had seen and what he'd heard from evaluators. And Pedro was over basically just because Puig had been so good early in his career and clearly had a lot of talent and it just seemed too young to give up on him. And I was more in that camp. So I suppose this start to the season has slightly strengthened my optimism about that, but, you know, only to a certain extent. And because I was always surprised, I think, I don't know, I wrote about it, maybe you wrote about it too, but there were real adjustments that Puig made, like in his second season or whatever, like he seemed to be an intelligent hitter who could counter pitchers approached against him. There was definitely a time when he was laying off pitches more and he was being more selective and he was walking a bunch. And it just seemed like he wasn't just the guy who is good when he comes up and then the league figures him out and he's bad. It seemed like there was more to him than that. So I was surprised and dismayed that he seemed to regress in that regard last year and the

last couple of years. Yeah. And then last year, there was just a very simple approach that Pidge's could take where they would just throw him an inside fastball, then a slider away, then an inside fastball, then a slider away. And he seemed pretty helpless. But I mean, he did end up with decent numbers at the end. So I think Puig lends himself to strong opinions on whether he's going

to be great or whether he's going to be terrible. I think that I guess kind of similar to Bryce Harper, people don't want to hear someone take the opinion that I think he's going to be a fine above average player because that's not interesting, but it's still very difficult to be a fine above average player. And you know who deserves a little more respect is Cole Calhoun. That's a fine, that's a fine outcome for many players. Byron Buxtonron Buxton Byron Buxton yeah if there's a player who is trying to have a season of as much interest as Bryce Harper I think this would be Buxton's yes I don't know he's not quite on the Harper level because Buxton is a little more of a baseball nerd name and not a household name but no matter what you thought about boxing coming into the year, how have your thoughts changed, if at all, based on three games?

Yeah, so I just wrote about him a couple weeks ago, and I talked to him and I did a deep dive into his September when he was tied for the Major League lead in wins above replacement. And it seemed like we were watching a breakout and I kind of hedged like I didn't say it was a mirage and I didn't say that was the beginning of the breakout and he's awesome now it wasn't clear to me that either of those things was true he was continuing to show great tools and talent and the thing that made him the consensus best prospect in baseball for years but even when he was hitting for power and playing good defense and doing well on the bases he was striking out very often and he told me that he

thought he could succeed while striking out that often but it's a tough thing to do unless you really do have great power and i wasn't convinced that he would so yeah through the first three games he has what is it now seven strikeouts in 15 play appearances yeah with one single yeah that's uh that's not good and he has some of those strikeouts just based on a couple clips I've seen have been pretty ugly like it doesn't seem like he necessarily knows what the strike zone is, and his O-swing rate, his rate of chasing pitches outside the strike zone right now is 39.3%, which is pretty abysmal. The league average is around 30%, and he was right around that,

maybe a little bit above that last year. But in this extremely small sample, he has shown even less discipline and sense of the strike zone's dimensions. So not good. These are things that stabilize quickly, swing rates and strikeout rates, but not so quickly that you can tell that much in three games probably, but still not much he could have done to dampen the preseason enthusiasm about himself that he hasn't done in these three games. And especially because in the spring he was striking out less often and it seemed like maybe there was a meaningful change there. It looks like from his play log that his one hit is an infield single to third base off of Chris Young. He has also struck out twice with the bases loaded against Peter Moylan, who is not a strikeout pitcher. So Byron Buxton, very rough three days.

You have a player or should I just keep giving players or teams? Yeah, keep going. I like this. Dylan Bundy. Dylan Bundy. Here's the reason why this, I guess this case is firstly interesting because hey last year Dylan Bundy finally emerged and he became a pitcher of notice again but the big story coming into this season is that Dylan Bundy was finally going to be able to throw his cutter or slider again which is a pitch that was considered I think one of if not the best pitch

in the minors when he was coming up or when he was drafted or something like that. In any case, really great cutter, but the Orioles don't like cutters. I don't know where they decide the line is between a cutter and a slider. I don't think anybody really quite knows where that line is, but they had Bundy stop throwing his best pitch when he was coming up the ladder. Last year, according to Brooks Baseball, he threw the slider or cutter looks like zero times and he had the success that he did. So he is now one start in. He faced the Blue Jays. According to, again, Brooks Baseball, he threw 31 sliders.

He threw them an average of about 86 miles per hour and the Blue Jays swung through. Do you have any guesses? 12. 14. 14 swings and misses at his slider alone they swung at about three quarters of them pitcher was barely ever a ball the movement looked incredible we are one start in has your opinion changed on dylan bundy at all i think so that's the one case where you can maybe feel comfortable actually allowing yourself to be swayed by a single game or week, right? If a pitcher adds a

new pitch or has some pitch that seems dramatically different. So yeah, I'll say so. We were talking about it in the Ringer's Slack channel and my editor, Mallory Rubin, who's a huge Orioles fan, was celebrating every pitch that he was throwing and she celebrated that he struck out the side in the first inning. And I had some cruel remark about one inning down 74 to go or something because like that's the even greater concern with him is can he stay healthy because he looked really good for a time last year but then seemed to succumb to fatigue and he's never pitched anywhere close to a full season, really. So question is, if he is that good, how long can he stay at that level before he breaks down or gets tired or has to be spelled for a while so that he could pitch later in the

season? But yeah, still reason for optimism, I think. So Dylan Bundy, potential ace of the Orioles for three months, which is something that I guess that's still three months better than what they had coming into the year. Yeah. James Baxton. James Baxton, my boy, had a big, big 2016 season. He reworked his mechanics very simply.

He just lowered his arm slot and all of a sudden he was throwing a lot harder and throwing a lot more strikes, which are two very good things for a pitcher to do he has started one game so far this year and if you look at his reported velocities he's still throwing really hard he's still similar to where he was last year it's of course his first start of the year he threw a bunch of curveballs he only walked i think one hitter out of 23 he missed missed some bats. And I think the most remarkable thing that Paxton did, as far as I'm concerned, is he actually missed a few bats with his curveball, which is a pitch that hasn't been a big swing and miss pitch before. So I think I was already way on board with Paxton. We'll see what you thought about Paxton coming in. But what this

has done is helped sort of support my position, and I now have even more, an increased level of confidence in the pitcher in whom I had the most confidence already on his team. Yeah, well, your confidence was inspiring, I think. I had already been largely convinced by your confidence, so he is kind of another guy, not to the extent that Bundy is, but he is another guy who doesn't have a very long record of pitching full seasons for less concerning reasons, I would say, than Bundy, more freakish type injuries than ones that you expect to be chronic. But still, another guy, maybe you worry about breaking down but you had uh basically already made me a complete believer so i remain one okay charlie morton this is a subtle one but

i liked the morton pickup that the astros made because even though he only started four games last year before he got injured which is a very charlie Morton thing to do. It was an injury to his leg, but most encouragingly, last year with the Phillies, when Morton did get the pitch, his fastball was faster than it had been the year before by two miles per hour. He also had a cutter. He was throwing around 90, and he missed a lot more bats. He was always a pitch-to-contact kind of ground ball guy, and this time he became a pitch-away-from-contact contact kind of grand ball guy and this time he became a pitch away from contact still kind of grand ball guy in an embarrassingly small sample of 17.1 innings so the astros signed that guy to a two-year contract worth i think 14 million that part doesn't matter he has started one game against the mariners in that game his fastball was between 94 and 94 five miles per hour and he was throwing a cutter in the high 80s.

So Charlie Morton, again, I think that this is a situation where he hasn't so much changed my opinion as he has improved my level of confidence in it. But I like Charlie Morton as one of the reasons why I think the Astros pitching staff at present is underrated. Yeah, right. And Chris Davinsky looked great in a four inning relief appearance. That is a sexy pitching style. Yeah. I mean, that's basically what he did all last year. So I don't know if it changes anything, but I think awareness of what he did last year has been building. So, I mean, if he can keep doing that, that is a unique type of pitcher really. and he has been almost uniquely effective in that role.

So that's pretty exciting. Dallas Keuchel was also good in his first start. I don't know whether there was as much reason for optimism in that start or not, but just the fact that he had a good one is a change from the way he started last season. So, yeah, good signs all around for the Astros in the one area where they seem to be vulnerable. Did Matt Harvey do anything at all to change your expectations in his first start, which was also fairly successful? His velocity, he averaged 94, which was about a mile per hour down from last year. Of course, it's April.

The difference you could say maybe is that he topped out at 95.8, which he used to top out at 99.100. So maybe he doesn't quite have the top end anymore, but he, as an average, hasn't fallen that far. Did he look to you if you saw him or studied him at all? Like close enough to the old matt harvey that mets fans should be cheered it's funny that you brought him up because he was going to be the next player i brought up too i just loaded his page as you said his first name so yeah so harvey has gotten one start in i know there was some amount of consternation regarding

his spring training his velocity was down and then it kind of built up and there were some questions whether he would ever be matt harvey. The encouraging thing to me is that he threw a ton of strikes. I don't know his exact rate. But I mean, this is easy enough to figure out 55 divided by 77. He threw 71% strikes. There are some issues right now still with like pitch tracking and location and all that. But what I can tell you is that just in this one start, he threw like nearly two thirds of his pitches in the strike zone, which is a crazy high rate. He was basically pounding the zone in a sort of Bartolo Cologne turned up to 11 sort of extreme. He didn't miss a lot of bats. But I mean, when you are facing the Braves, there's really you don't have to be that careful I know Matt Kemp I believe tagged

him a couple times so it's not like Harvey went unpunished but it was a very aggressive version of Matt Harvey and the velocity is I mean it's still not bad of course when you're throwing 93 94 that's pretty good stuff especially this early and you're still building up your arm strength so I think I have very slightly reduced confidence that Harvey can ever get back to his peak where he was when he had his like 2013 season but I have a great deal of confidence I guess I should have said 2015 season here it's good in both but I have a great deal of confidence after seeing Harvey be so aggressive that he will be better than he was last season right Right. Okay.

Anyone else on your list? I don't know if this one's fair, but Garrett Richards. Yeah. A fascinating 2016 and winter because he tore his UCL and then didn't have it cut open, or I guess have his arm cut open to get to his UCL. He had a platelet-rich plasma injection, also some stem cell treatment, and so he avoided Tommy John surgery, and it seemed like he was going to be a, I guess, pioneer, a potential pioneer of stem cell treatment for a specific type of torn UCL. He pitched in the fall, he pitched in

spring training, his velocity was way up, and so it seemed like there was there was real promise here. Garrett Richards potentially being able to skip Tommy John surgery and come back with an alternative treatment. When I say that, it sounds like he was hypnotized. But I mean, like just a non-surgical treatment. He comes back. He starts his first game for the Angels and he's throwing super hard. He actually let's see, according to the the fan graphs page he had his best ever career velocity which is insane his slider was over 90 his fastball was nearly 97 he didn't throw any change-ups but maybe that'll come back one day that was sort of my my big project for early 2016 was monitoring Garrett Richards change-ups and then he injured his arm so Garrett Richards comes out he's throwing super hard and after four innings and two thirds, he points to his arm and he comes out of the game. So where are we on Garrett

Richards? Yeah, so the Angels are saying that it's unrelated to his issues from last year, which could be the case. Of course, you always wonder whether maybe someone changes something as a result of prior issues, and then that causes a cascade that affects them in some other area. So it could be an injury to a different part of his body that is in some way related to the old injury. on its own if a biceps cramp or whatever it was is actually the problem then there's no reason to think that that's that serious an issue i mean i don't know like it just it's a it's an arm injury for a guy who had an arm injury and that's going to be scary obviously it's not like he pulled a muscle or something in some other part of his body, although even that kind of thing can be related to a change in your delivery. So I don't want to say, well, like the first tweet I saw in response to, I think it was a Jeff Fletcher tweet about the injury, just when he walked off the field, the first reply to that tweet was, well, he should have had the surgery. Which, you know, I don't want to have that kind of response to that because it's very premature to say something like that. But I think you'd

probably be fair to revise your estimate of how healthy he's likely to be this year, just slightly down. I mean, you do that with any pitcher who hurts himself in some way, but probably more so for a pitcher who missed almost all of last year with an arm injury, even if it's not the same part of the arm. So I would say that's kind of scary because the Angels whole season essentially is pinned on his hopes. I think you wrote that over the winter, right? He's like one of the most pivotal players because they're kind of, I mean, to come up with a scenario where the Angels compete, you really need him to be great again. And this, I would say, makes that slightly less likely. How less likely? I don't know exactly.

Well, I guess let's lightning around through a couple of these. We'll look at some teams in the western Division so Texas Rangers overall Any change in your opinion of the Texas Rangers Two things I will choose to point out Sam Dyson has pitched the equivalent Of one inning and allowed eight runs Which is bad that's worse

Actually than Kristen Bethencourt so Bad on you Sam Dyson He's their closer pitch to contact closer who's Pitched to too much contact. And the other thing that draws my attention, Hugh Darvish in his first start of the season, 6.1 innings, five walks, two wild pitches, four strikeouts, but a little bit wild. So any reason for you, also their 0-3, I should have mentioned that part, the wins are what also matter.

Any reason for you to have a different opinion about the Rangers? Go quick. I don't know what to make of the Darvish thing he was Basically his old self in the second Half of last season after he came back From Tommy John you'd expect His control or at least that's The common wisdom about

Tommy John that the control would Improve after that although I think Patrick Dubuque maybe did a study on that that Didn't really support it so much but anyway that's what you would expect another year removed from the surgery would be good for him so somewhat worrisome four wild pitches you say that's a lot of two wild pitches but four walks five walks five walks yeah that's a lot of walks so yeah i don't know yeah i probably wouldn't make too much of that as As for Dyson, I think the Rangers' bullpen is deep enough that I don't know how much that scares me. I mean, it's a little shorthanded because

Diekmann is out till midseason at least and someone else is hurt too, right? Was it Kiela? Oh, Kiela has been demoted because of some, let's say, maturity problems. bunch of those guys and using them for multiple innings or in high leverage roles. And it's weird because they had like one of the worst bullpen ERAs last year, or maybe the worst. And yet they had that great one-one record. And it seemed to be because they had a bunch of garbage relievers in the back who weren't pitching important innings or who were there at the beginning of the season. But by the time they got down to the wire they had a really good late inning combo so i would not change my expectations of the rangers that much but i was already probably somewhat down on the rangers relative to most people anyway so

maybe that's why yeah i'd bump them down a percentage point or two i think yeah one of the big problems last year is that in like april and may their bullpen is just awful because sean tollison forgot how to pitch and tom wilhelmsen forgot how to pitch too and so their era just took off and then they got better from there but anyway yeah down a little bit uh oakland athletics real quick they are two and two which whatever I don't care most of the coverage that we've all seen I think in the early going has relates to pitchers and that's because pitchers are fun and their stuff stabilizes pretty quickly what I like the most about the athletics I wrote two posts about him on the same day Kendall Graveman is suddenly his his velocity just

keeps getting better and better where he came up to the majors throwing 90 and now he's touching 97 to 98. I checked with the athletics themselves just to confirm that this is actually real. And they said that in his last three starts of the spring, they had their video guy. He was sitting behind home plate recording pitches because I guess they didn't have any other means of doing that. I guess they didn't have any other means of doing that. And they had Graveman not sitting at, but touching 97 to 98 in each of his last three spring training starts. So this is not a mirage. The A's already would talk about Kendall Graveman as an ace, which I thought was not quite deserved. But whatever. He had a low ERA in the second half. Throw strikes, gets grounders.

Anyway, he comes out. He's throwing 94, 95. All of a sudden, if he's a ground ball pitcher who throws strikes and misses a few more bats, then that is a very high quality starting pitcher. So sort of based on Graveman alone, and I like some of what I've seen from their bullpen, I've liked the A's as sort of a secret wildcard contender, which I know doesn't mean much in the American League where every team is a wildcard contender. But so far, I've seen a little more good than bad I only wish that Andrew Triggs had missed a few more bats in his first start right yeah I don't know you are probably paying more attention

to the A's than almost everyone else other than A's fans right now so I can't say I had done a whole lot of detailed study on them before that but uh sure those sound like good reasons to be excited about Kendallall graveman okay last thing actually well second to last thing i will point out real quick a hot breaking news update in a podcast that is not being published immediately espn's jerry krasnick reports that the braves have discussed ryan rayburn as they look to upgrade their bench it's happening you guys it's happening yeah yeah everyone we talked about getting released that week actually has been picked up again.

The Nationals released Matt Albers, but then resigned him almost immediately. And Ryan Webb was signed to a minor league contract by the Giants. So everyone's back in play. That's right. These players come back. So, okay. The last thing real quick. Colorado Rockies, Adam Adovino, he's been healthy.

So we know he's fine. Greg Holland, so far, he's faced nine batters. He struck out healthy, so we know he's fine. Greg Holland, so far he's faced nine batters. He struck out four, has not allowed a walk. And Carlos Estevez, I don't really know him that well, but hey, he throws super hard. He's gotten some strikeouts, but he's faced the Brewers. I don't know if that counts. Maybe most encouragingly, Jake McGee, he's only thrown five pitches. I don't know what the deal is with his usage pattern, but he has thrown his fastball at 96 miles per hour, which is way faster than last year when he was bad. It's faster than 2015 when he was good. It's back to the level of 2014 when he was great. So what I would say is that in the extremely early going, I already was

intrigued by the Rockies bullpen. But if if they have Jake McGee and Greg Holland actually pitching well and sort of close to where they were, this Rockies team is going to be a potential terror to face. That seemed to be the missing piece on that team, that they didn't really have a great bullpen. And now they have Archie Bradley, who looks good. He's probably a guy we could have talked about earlier in this episode. And I think, who's the other one? Jorge de la Rosa, I think, was the other one that Dave pointed out. So if the Rockies are picking up a couple of good relievers,

so are one of their division rivals. Yeah, let's see. Bradley, his fastball seems to be up about three miles per hour. That's a lot. Jorge de la Rosa, his fastball seems to be up four miles per hour. That's a lot. Okay, so this is all you need to do. Take starters, make them relievers.

Boom, you have great relievers. Now you just need starters. Yeah. All right. Last thing. I don't know if this is self-promotion or promotion of Mike Trout, but on Sunday there is a documentary on Mike Trout airing for the first time on MLB network at 8 PM Eastern. It's called Mike Trout Millville to MVP. I think it's an hour long documentary about Trout and I am in it. I don't know exactly to what extent, but someone who has seen it has told me that I'm in it a few times. I went out there to be a talking head who gets cut to in the documentary in the dark room with no background to say things about the player. So I did talk about weird Mike Trout hypotheticals

during the interview, and I brought up how everyone who listens to the podcast always wants to handicap Mike Trout somehow and ask if he'd still be good. No idea whether that made it into the documentary. Probably not, but you never know. I will find out along with you. So check it out, 8 p.m. Eastern MLB Network. Fantastic. Well, I guess if they cut out all that stuff, we could just release our own Mike Trout Effectively Wild documentary comprised entirely of Mike Trout hypotheticals in which he has been handicapped in some way. That is basically what this podcast already is. All right. So that's it for this week. I'd say that we should have a moment of silence for Rich Hill's blistered finger,

but we can all do that on our own time this weekend. Get well soon, Rich. We hope your blister won't last all season. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Sean Harada, Leif McIndewar, Dan Miller, Michael DePaola, and David McDonald. Thanks 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 Effectively Wild on iTunes. Keep your questions coming to me and Jeff at podcast at fangraphs.com or by contacting us through the Patreon messaging system. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. We hope you do have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy the documentary. We will talk to you next week. I miss just you. assistance. We hope you do have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy the documentary. We will talk to you next week. I miss just you, baby

I miss just you I miss just you, baby