Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1044: How Many Kemps to a Kiermaier?

Episode Date: April 13, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan drop the no-Reds rule to banter about Michael Lorenzen and Joey Votto, then answer listener emails about a player who’s always in the rain, stats on baseball broadcasts, a curious scoreboard fun fact, the wave, early closer meltdowns, two framing hypotheticals, how many Kemps equals a Kiermaier, an extended draft […]

Joey, Joey, king of the streets, child of play. Joey What made them want to come and blow you away? Hello and welcome to episode 1044 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hi. How are you? I'm well. How are you?inger, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hi. How are you?

I'm well. How are you? Okay. We're doing an email show. Anything you want to talk about before that? Well, I guess what I should have said was I'm doing better than Sam Dyson, but I don't want to skip ahead because that will be part of the stat segment. Are you doing better than Sam Dyson? I think so. I think we all are. Well, I guess there's the other side of it where Sam Dyson is making millions of dollars.

So I don't know to what extent that is of comfort to him at night on these evenings. He has, I don't know what to call it, like a meltdown face. You know, we all remember that he was on the other side of the Jose Bautista blast. And I don't know, he's having a rough start. I don't know quite how you recover from this. but again, I guess we can hold off on that. I brought this up too soon. I blew it. hopefully than Sam Dyson is right now although he has achieved quite a bit in his in the past so we're going to do emails but before then I'm about to say something that you will almost never hear us say on this podcast can we talk about the Reds let's do it let's do it I was just looking at Rysale Iglesias is not not allowed a single hard hit I know that's a very niche fact, but it's something I noticed about the Reds this morning.

Yeah, so follow up to our Michael Lorenzen banter from the other day, because Mike Lorenzen, even more interesting now, or maybe Brian Price more interesting now? I don't know. Both. in the third inning with the bases loaded and the Reds were already up by a few runs so it wasn't super high leverage but there was a good chance that it would be the highest leverage opportunity of that game and Lorenzen if he's not the closer he's close he's a setup man or something and Brian Price brought him in in the third inning and he thought it was the biggest situation of the game he brought him in and then he left him in there for three innings because he only needed 32 pitches to get through those three innings so this is I mean this is Andrew Miller but even more

this is super extreme and fun and interesting and the quotes from Lorenzen were pretty incredible. As reported by a friend of the podcast, Zach Buchanan, he said after the game, I work like the best. I have the stuff like the best. Why wouldn't I think that what I'm doing is the best? And he says it's not to brag, but just to explain why he was so good when he was called upon. And he says, I don't try to not give up any runs. I know I'm not going to give up any runs. And evidently he told the pitching coach that he wanted to finish the game. He didn't want to come out after three innings.

He wanted to stay in there and pitch five plus or whatever it was. And he said, there's no limit. I don't know why I would ever think there would be a limit on what I can do. It doesn't make any sense for me to do that. It handicaps me as someone who's trying to go out and perform with the best. So he sounds like a motivational speaker or some kind of cult-like figure. But he seems to be talking as if he thinks he is the best and the Reds are using him as if he is the best and it's the 70s again or

even more extreme. So I don't know exactly how this came about. We knew that the Reds were intending to try to be a bit more experimental this year. There were quotes from Price and quotes from Dick Williams saying that they were just going to try to use all their pitchers interchangeably, and they are doing it so far, at least in Lorenzen's case, so this is pretty cool. Yeah, in that Zach Buchanan article about Lorenzen being a two-way player from March, Lorenzen had similar quotes where he was talking along the lines of, well, I mean,

I know I can hit. Of course I can hit. Of course I can be a two-way player. Why wouldn't I be a two-way player? And it's just like, and so the transitions would be like, Brian Price doesn't necessarily share Lorenzen's opinion of himself. But yeah, I love that Lorenzen gets to share a clubhouse with Joey Votto, who's another player who talks a little like this although now granted Votto has earned the right to talk like that and be so self-confident but I mean from everything I can tell about Lorenzen at least as a relief pitcher he's basically right I mean he's he's not like Dillon Batances but who is I guess is one of those multi and well I guess Andrew Miller would have been the better comparison but I'm tired of comparing pitchers to andrew miller you know what that's that's an off-season thing to do so yeah lorenzen so now we uh you can love him for his pitching you can love him for his offensive utility you can love him for his pitching versatility i guess that he can go multiple

innings and now you can love him for his personality so that's four that's four legitimate reasons to love the hard throwing and hard hitting and hard-hitting Michael Lorenzen. Yeah, this is why we haven't talked about the Reds that much on this podcast, because they haven't had anyone doing this, and now they do. And as long as they do, we will talk about them. We are fair. like to say that last year, as many of the listeners might know, at least according to the Fangraphs version of war, the Reds pitching staff was the first pitching staff ever to finish with a war below zero, which is bad. That's a very bad pitching staff. This year, the Reds are second in baseball in ERA. The peripherals are also good. Of course, it's early. They've struck out a lot of hitters. They've had, you know, a little bit of a walk problem. But considering where the Reds have been and considering their opening day starter was Scott Feldman, Reds are doing great.

The only team with a better ERA than the Reds, Minnesota Twins. Right, yeah. So I'm going to advance away from that Reds topic into another, Joey Votto, who is the subject of every article over the last couple days. Sam wrote about him and Travis wrote about him And Zach Buchanan wrote about him and talked to him And everyone's curious about what Joey Votto Is doing because he has been a completely Different hitter this year so far

Instead of the ultra selective Votto that we know and love He is now among The most frequent swingers in baseball He has a top 20 Overall swing rate and he is leading Major League Baseball in zone swing rate. So he has swung at 86% of the pitches that he has seen in the strike zone this year. And just to compare last year, for example, that was 63%,

and he's usually around 60%. And this is really dramatic. It's, I mean, you don't usually see hitters and change in zone rate all that much or zone swing rate or whatever in a single season. Often there will be some guy who decides to be more aggressive or less aggressive early in the year, but this is a really big jump. And because it's Vado and because we know that he thinks deeply about everything he's doing, we wonder what the point is. And Zach couldn't get him to divulge exactly what he's doing, but it's clearly intentional. He is swinging more for a reason. And I am curious about why you think that is. We did get a question to tie this to the listener email episode. We got a question from Tom who says that he saw an article about Votto and in his head thought he's got them right where he wants them.

How great would it be if he was doing this just to get pitchers to adjust and pitch him out of the zone more, getting him into better counts early and getting more of those juicy walks? counts early and getting more of those juicy walks. And then he says, obviously this can't be the case, although I wish it were, but if there's anyone that would think this up, pull it off, it would be Votto. And it could very well be the case. Yeah. So I think the, the idea of doing this to make pitchers adjust and then get more walks, I don't know the extent to which I buy that because Joey Votto has never had trouble drawing walks, but of course, hitting and pitching is all sort of a back and forth where if you're really aggressive than the other, the pitchers will pitch around you. And then if they're pitching around you, then you swing less,

which means then they'll be aggressive again. And so it's all cyclical. And if you look at any hitters performance over small samples is sort of a rolling graph over the course of their careers, you'll see that unless they are Mike Troutout or I guess Ryan Goins, it's all up and down. It's usually not just all up or all down. With Votto in particular, he is someone who is known to sort of toy around. I think I remember like in the first half last year, he maybe it was the year before, he would just start trying to pull everything just to see if he could. That might be an over exaggeration but he just sort of thought i'm gonna do this i'm joey vato why not and then yeah he just tried it for a little bit and he decided no i don't really like it so then he changed it's worth noting that so far this year joey vato at least based on the very small

sample slash line has not been good he's been aggressive but he hasn't walked he's still struck out a decent amount for joey vato i finally got this graph to load okay this took a while but i was looking at a fan graphs graph which is a feature that still exists it's actually even better than it's ever been for those of you who don't know so i'm looking at joey vato's entire career as a visual a an eight game rolling average for his entire career covering basically a decade. Looking at swing rate, I wanted to know if Votto had ever surpassed. So his swing rate for the eight games so far this year, 56%. So let's look at this.

What are Joey Votto's highest ever swing rates? This is very uninteresting for anybody listening to me look at a graph. However, I see from the middle of last September, he had a stretch of 56%. So that's something, but that's the highest swing rate over eight games of his 2016. Nothing closer than 51% there. 2015, he topped out at 51%. 2014, he was hurt all the time, but he still didn't top 56 percent 2013 he never topped 54 percent 2012 never topped 50 percent 2011 he did get up to 55 percent but that's still short so we go back to 2010 where over an eight game stretch in i guess the end of may and early june he had a swing rate

of 58 percent so clearly joey Votto has been swinging far more than usual. I think because of the nature of it being eight games, and who knows what's going on in Votto's head. When you look at a plot like this, you can see that he has these swing rate spikes. So it's too early to say that Joey Votto has clearly made some sort of permanent shift. But I don't think anybody expects that Joey Votto has made a permanent shift There's no reason for him to do that He's the second best hitter in Major League Baseball Yeah, I mean that's what I was going to say He's coming off a second half last year

When he was by far The best hitter in baseball He was worth four wins He had a 201 weighted runs Created plus which was Way higher than Miguel Cabrera In second at 179 So he was way better than Miguel Cabrera in second at 179. So he was way better than everyone else.

I think he was slightly more aggressive down the stretch last year, but not dramatically, not so much that you'd write an article about it. And whatever he was doing was working incredibly well. So it wasn't like he ended last season on a slump or something and decided he had to do something different. So I don't know what the impetus was. Although you'd think that like, if you are Joey Votto and you are known for being ultra selective and not swinging at pitches outside the strike zone, or even in the strike zone, you could kind of use that to your advantage at times, maybe an ambush pitchers. Like if you

just wanted to, cause they know you're not going to swing they've seen the scouting report and then if you just decide to swing all of a sudden like that's something that maybe if he saved it for the playoffs or something if the reds ever made the playoffs while he was on them then that might be a valuable thing just to become like frequent swinging vato in oct October or something when everyone's throwing him strikes. I don't know if people actually throw him strikes though, because he has really good power and people are scared of him anyway. So it's not like they're constantly throwing him strikes. Like he's, I don't know, a bad hitter who sees a lot of strikes.

What I, uh, what I like about Votto is he's got this reputation of being sort of way too patient. Over his career, he's actually swung at more first pitches than the average. He swung at about a third of all first pitches ever seen. The league average is closer to a quarter. And also, last year, Joey Votto swung at 17 pitches on a 3-0 count. The year before, he swung at 12. Without any context, I guess people don't really realize that that's a lot, but hitters generally don't swing. So I think the league average swing rate in 3-0 counts is about like 8%. And Joey Votto over his career is at 17%. Over the last few years, it's been even higher than that. Because for example, in 2012, he swung at just three out of

40. So I don't want to mine too deep into Joey Votto's patience record, but he has gotten more sort of selectively aggressive, sort of ambushy, I guess, in the last few years. And you do wish that one day he'd be able to use that in a game that matters. All right. So we will move on from the Reds, regretfully, and we will answer some emails. This is a question from Charlie. Pretty sure this has been answered at some point in the podcast past, but a long time ago, and I don't know when.

He says, because it is the beginning of the season, most TV broadcasts show the previous year's batting stats and slash lines when a player comes up to bat. So my question is simple. How long into the season should they wait to make the switch to this year's stats? When does this year's slash line better represent the player's true talent compared to last year's? Yeah. Okay.

Those are two very different questions. Yeah. So to answer the second question first, when does this year's stat line become more representative? I'm not Russell Carlton, but I would think that the answer is not for a very long time. Yeah. Probably not at least until the all star break. And even there, it still might not be enough. But then of course, you have to consider the viewer and the average viewer and what the viewer is actually looking for out of those

numbers. And I don't think maybe I'm wrong. I don't think the average viewer is looking at those numbers and thinking this is going to inform my opinion of this at bat. I don't know how much the average viewer actually thinks about that. Or if you're watching, I guess, let's say a Reds game and Scott Shebler, that's a bad example. Nobody knows Scott Shebler. Adam Duvall comes up to the plate. The average person watching a Reds game probably already has some opinion of Adam Duvall that's sort of indirectly at least informed by what he's done. So maybe having the numbers on the broadcast isn't serving that great of a purpose. So I don't think you're looking for representation of a true talent, because if you are, you would just show rolling projections, which I think would drive people insane, even though I would love it. So I think for my taste, I think you have to go at least a week before you flip into the current season stats.

to go at least a week before you flip into the current season stats if i could have an actual cutoff i would say like 50 plate appearances for a hitter or maybe 10 innings for a pitcher but i know that that that's still probably too long because people would by now like if you tune into a reds game and you see scott felvin on the mound and they're still showing 2016 statistics that's weird because he started i think two games or maybe 12 games i don't know how many games are reds played maybe he started all of them him and bronson arroyo what a team so i would have a cutoff that is or a threshold i guess that's higher than where it presumably is but yeah i don't know what purpose those numbers actually serve even though a broadcast would feel naked without them yeah i mean it would be nice to see both for a while, but I know that that is difficult. There's a bunch of stuff on the screen already, but I'd be interested in seeing last season's

stats for a month or so. Not that I need them necessarily, because I generally know who's good and who isn't. And also, I could just look up the stats very easily. who's good and who isn't. And also I could just look up the stats very easily, but I think for convenience sake, I would probably say a month, but they don't actually do that. So, you know what they could do?

They could, they could show the last calendar year stats. Yeah. To sort of advance. I mean, still that might drive people crazy because you think the off season is six months and that is sort of like a clean break, but I could, I could get behind that. Yeah.

I'd like that too. All right. Lindell sent a picture, which you can't see, although I'll post it in the Facebook group. But he says, the White Sox just showed this on the scoreboard. This is either a terrible attempt at a joke or a terrible fun fact. I feel bad about it either way. And it's one of those stats that flashes when a player comes to the plate.

And it is a of those stats that flashes when a player comes to the plate. And it is a picture of Matt Davidson. And it says, owns the highest average 750 of any player in White Sox history with at least four at-bats. And I really like this. I don't know what the motivation here was, whether it was just desperation to have a stat or what, but if this was poking fun at the absurdity of stats on the scoreboard at baseball games, I think this is great. I love this. His average is down to 455 now, but presumably that's still pretty high. Maybe that's the highest for anyone with 11 at bats as a White Sox i don't know but i like this this is so many of the scoreboard stats are intended to be fun facts and they're not at all they're

just some crazy meaningless split and we mock them and if this is taking that to its extreme and setting a at bat minimum at four then i like that a lot because I've had the experience of having to prepare game notes. When I used to work at Bloomberg Sports, we would partner with broadcasters and we'd have to send them notes on every player for every game. And it was excruciating because you'd have to do so many of them and you'd have to change them every day in a series. So you'd have to do multiple notes for the same players, even though nothing had changed since your first note. And we were constantly scrambling to come up with fun facts or even just mildly interesting facts. And so I sympathize with scoreboard stat people across the country.

And this is a fun way of dealing with that. Yeah, I love it. If it is ironic, if it is not then whatever who cares i can tell you that matt davidson no longer has the highest batting average in white socks history with a minimum of anything uh with a minimum of four at bats the current leader and i guess leader for a while will be stan goletz who went three for five in 1941. Kudos to Stan Goletz. If the minimum is 25 at-bats, then the leader is Terry Forster at 480.

He beats out Matt Davidson at 455. If the minimum is 37 at-bats, we have Clint Courtney at 378. If the minimum is 45 at-bats, we have presumably not the Bruce Campbell, but a Bruce Campbell at 356. And if the minimum is 2,439 at bats, then the leader is Shoeless Joe Jackson at 340. So Matt Davidson has some work to do if he wants to get to Shoeless Joe Jackson,

but he is still on pace to top Bruce Campbell. So he's got that going for him. Yep. And he's not banned from baseball. So that's a plus also. All right. Question from Joe. I am a newish listener via Ben's book and Kaz Yamazaki's Twitter feed and initially wanted to ask about which player has suffered most in career terms from rainy ballparks.

However, I've come to realize this is far too boring for the podcast. So here's my ridiculous hypothetical. So here's my ridiculous hypothetical. The baseball gods take offense at Mike Trout's going against nominative determinism, distinct lack of water, and cause it to rain again, not enough to cancel the game every time he plays. How much closer to immortal does this make him? I ask these questions because I got rained on rather a lot at a game the other day. The players seemed pretty miserable, but played okay. Okay, well, let's break this down. Who's researched the effect of rain?

Because I know Retro Sheet i keep track of when it rains yeah i just googled and i found a bunch of like what's the effect of cold weather on baseball players articles but didn't immediately see something on precipitation so not sure we can answer this one via established research unless you're seeing something i wasn't okay well let's see first of all mike trout let's let's break this down go trout first of course so let's say so the idea is that it's not just like an angry cloud over trout but it's raining for all of trout's games i guess that's right i kind of like the angry cloud over the one player if we can do that yeah okay let's do the angry cloud so i don't i mean i don't

know how a game proceeds much less 162 of them where you have a very localized phenomenon but trout being what he is i guess maybe you'd figure out that he has the money and in his downtime maybe he created his own meteorology yeah i would love this climatology i mean this would be he'd he'd be fascinated by how this twist answer. Twist answer. Trout's better. He's more in his comfort zone. He probably doesn't like playing in Anaheim because it's too damn warm. Yeah. So yeah, Mike Trout, even better, I'll say, with the rain cloud.

Now, it would probably affect, I don't know how much it would affect his range in the outfield because if the cloud is just above him, then all the ground around him is still dry and easy to run on. And even when he takes a step and the cloud moves with him it still takes a certain amount of time for the ground to get saturated with the rain right so where he stands would get saturated presuming it's raining all the time but he would dissipate from there so he'd affect him on defense probably because he'd be standing in a puddle that would probably be bad for getting good jumps on balls yeah yeah and it would slow him down on the bases of course because it would

if he's taking a lead off first base then all of a sudden he's in mud and that's terrible his clothes would be dirty but trout would eat it up he'd be smiling the whole time he'd be very trouty about it so he'd be worse in the field he'd be slower on the bases he would probably hit roughly the same i mean the rain clearly can't be that bad if the game is proceeding. Because, you know, that would be the umpire's view if he's looking out to the pitcher and there's a cloud over Mike Trout. And the umpire would think, well, this rain is too hard or it's not too hard. And if it's just sprinkling, I think Trout would be okay. would be okay. As for who this would affect the most, I think the answer obviously has to be some sort of pitcher, but I don't know which pitcher.

So I don't know what pitchers are more difficult to control with a wet ball, but I'm thinking, maybe I'm too anchored on this idea, but I'm thinking now about pitchers who have really long hair. That might make it more annoying to have the hair sort of like flopping around and slapping you in the face. So then you get sort of like a John Gray or Noah Syndergaard or Jacob deGrom situation. The Mets would be in trouble, I guess, because you'd have all this wet, disgusting hair flying everywhere. I feel like that would be kind of a bummer. Would it be worse for someone with pinpoint command,

or would it be worse for someone who already has kind of Fernando Rodney-ish command, and this might push them over the edge. Yeah. We got a question once about whether rain would actually help a pitcher because the questioner was asking if it would be like a spitball, like you could doctor the ball with the moisture falling from the sky. And we asked David Ardsma that question at a live episode we did at Saber Seminar last year, and he said, no, definitely not. It's not the same as spit or any other substance. It just makes it slippery and harder to get a grip. So it would definitely make you worse. And I don't know, it seems like maybe someone who's just firing fastballs would still be okay, but I'm not totally sure about that. Like, it seems like it would make it harder to impart spin to the pitch and do subtle finger pressure and that kind of thing as opposed to pure speed, but I don't know exactly. Yeah, I guess fastballs would probably be okay. I think the idea, I might be wrong,

but I think the idea of the spitball is that you spit, but that's not where you grip the okay. I think the idea, I might be wrong, but I think the idea of the spit ball is that you, you spit, but that's not where you grip the ball. I think it's just supposed to sort of make it asymmetrical. So I think you spit on the side of the ball and then you throw it and then there's, well, I'm not a physicist, but I've read about this once, but I think that the idea is if you have spit on one side of the ball, as it rotates, then it will break in that direction or the other direction. I don't know which, I don't remember which one, but you don't, I don't think there's an advantage of actually spitting on the ball and then putting your fingers on the spit because that doesn't help the pitcher at all. I think it's, you're just supposed to try to knock it off the usual flight path. So if it's raining on the ball,

then there's water on every side. It's still to some extent asymmetrical, I guess. But yeah, I can see how that would be a problem. Ard's mode would be fine because he threw like 100% fastballs. Yeah. I don't know how this affects hitters really either i don't know whether the rain drops are distracting if the pitch is coming from clear skies to the rain cloud above trout is that distracting like going from sunlight to shadow shadows i have no idea and uh i don't know what else it deals does it hurt your grip on the bat probably not that much you've got batting gloves you've got pine tar whatever you want so i would think it would affect a hitter less but you never know he might develop some sort of seasonal affective disorder just from being in rain at all times although again it

might work in the opposite way for him specifically. So I think he would still be excellent. He'd be worse, but I think he'd still be an all-star level player. And I guess Lance McCullers and Rich Hill could conceivably suffer the most if it was raining out because they throw so few fastballs. Right. Okay, question from Nick. Imagine that for some reason MLB has several awful drafts in a row. Drafts consisting of prospects that don't even have AA or AAA potential. How many years of these drafts would it take for the major leagues to be noticeably different? What would the league look like at that point? What would likely stay the same?

So this reminded me of, I don't know how many of you know John Boyes, but John Boyes, or I guess John Bois, probably John Boyes, wrote an article some years ago for SB Nation where he was simulating an NBA video game. And for the draft class, he created the worst players possible because he was trying to basically ruin the NBA and see how long it would take. So after a short number of years, although still a decent number of years, but after I don't remember exactly, but I don't know, call it five or seven years, the play of the games became markedly worse and the scores started to get embarrassing and noticeably horrible. So in baseball, I think it would take a little longer than that. And especially if you're talking about a horrible draft class, one or two or even three draft classes, I don't think would make a huge effect on the game. You don't really notice, say for like 2015 or 20, yeah, 2015, you don't really notice the change made by the rookie class that much. I think though that teams would become acutely aware of how little they're getting from the draft. And so the advantage for teams then would be that they would look for alternative means.

They would go look for international players to try to bring in. They would scout the indie leagues more often and more vociferously. So you'd still have a drain on talent. But I think it would take, I don don't know like maybe even eight to ten years before you're like whoa the league has gotten worse but I don't even know where where would you notice it in the numbers if all of the players got 10% worse where would it show up or would you notice it just from watching I don't actually know the answer yeah I don't know you'd you'd get steroid era-like aging curves for a

while. All the old players would continue to be better than you'd expect. And I mean, I guess you'd just notice that there were no rookies anymore because no one would be getting called up at all. You'd have the same players year after year. You'd have no rookie of the year. I don't know who your rookie of the year would be. It would just, you wouldn't have any rookies because none of them is major league ready. So that would be noticeable like in a single season, right? I mean, when we had that crazy crop of young players, what, two years ago, everyone noticed immediately that prospects were getting called up very early and they were doing really well and the league as a whole seemed to be slanted more toward young players. So that was

something we picked up on very early and presumably we would pick up on this very early. And I don't know if, I mean, I guess it would be, it'd be good in that players would last longer and age less dramatically and the guys that we know would remain productive. And so in a sense, it might not be the worst thing from a marketing perspective there. But on the other hand, you like to promote your young players and get some new blood in the game. And that's been really beneficial to baseball lately. So yeah, eventually it would get scary.

I'd say probably like a couple of years into this, you'd start getting questions about the future of baseball and what it means, basically the question that we are currently answering, but in real life. And you'd get a whole lot of explorations of, I mean, this couldn't really happen without, I don't know, some kind of dramatic change to amateur baseball. Like why are there no good baseball players anymore? Is it because no one's playing amateur baseball anymore? Was it a rash of injuries? Was it some kind of Titanic screw up of player development? I don't know, but this would be probably the biggest story in baseball pretty quickly. Oh yeah. Yeah Yeah, so you would see right now you see more played appearances and more war coming from the youngest players in baseball. So, yeah, you would look at the splits and you'd notice how old players are doing the best now all of a sudden.

I don't think that you would have no good rookies because, again, we're just talking about the draft here, right? So you could still assign people internationally and teams would do that even more than they already do. And that's where a lot of the talent already comes from. You would have more players coming over from Japan, South Korea, even Cuba. So you would still have, I think, fractions of strong rookie classes, but they just wouldn't be very deep. So you'd still have, I don't know. I haven't pulled up. I don't know how many international signings are on the average top 100 prospect list, but it's a pretty high number, I would assume.

I think that's nearly the entire Padres farm system right now. The Rangers have gone through phases like that as well. So it would really put a premium on teams that do well internationally. But it would be a funny story to try to examine why does everybody from america suck at baseball all of a sudden yeah it'd probably be bad for parity because of the way that baseball's pay structure works you'd have the rich teams able to afford the older players who make more money free agents would be a good investment at this point because you can't get any good pre-arbitration players.

So that would probably be bad for the game in the long run. So it'd be a dramatic difference, I think. Yeah. All right. Stat segment. Let's do it. Back to Sam Dyson. So for anyone who has not been paying too close attention to the Texas the texas rangers they have been bad but

realistically what's been bad is sam dyson their closer although at this publishing maybe not their closer anymore fun fact i just learned to sam dyson drafted three times okay who cares so sam dyson he uh the rangers played seven games they've won two of them they've nearly won i don't know let's call it five of them and the difference between between those is large, and it's all Sam Dyson's fault. So in his first game, he pitched two-thirds of an inning, allowed four hits, three runs. That's bad. The Rangers lost to the Indians. In his second game, the Rangers' third game, he pitched one-third of an inning, allowed three hits, two walks, five runs. Rangers lost to the Indians.

Sam Dyson's third game, the the ranger sixth game he pitched a harmless inning in a blowout and he allowed no runs kudos on his timing cut his era in half from 72 to 36 sam dyson pitched again on april 11th which was yesterday the good news is he lowered his season era from 36 to 33 the bad news is you can still allow three runs in an inning and do that so he allowed three runs in the ninth inning to allow the angels to tie the rangers and the angels eventually won on a walk-off bunt which is a fun thing to observe yeah so sam dyson four games pitched in the rangers for seven games he's thrown three innings he's allowed 11 hits and 11 runs, all of them earned. So at this point, if you are familiar with the win probability added, which you, I guess, probably are,

the current WPA leaderboard, or reverse leaderboard, I guess, for pitchers, Sam Dyson, out of 380 pitchers, he is, of course, in last place with a WPA of negative 1.8, which is terrible. That means that he's effectively already cost the Rangers 1.8 wins, which is the difference between them and being above 500. Second place, Chase DeYoung, who is a pitcher who cares. He is at negative 0.8 so there's a difference already of a full win between sam dyson and chase de young who was only on the mariners roster because the pitcher who was supposed to be on the mariners roster got his wife pregnant nine months ago he went on paternity leave chase de young comes in to relieve to try to lock down a save in the bottom of the 13th or 14th inning or whatever this isn't about jc young

it doesn't matter sam dyson last place chase place. Chase DeYoung, second to last. Brett Cecil and Mark Melanson come after Chase DeYoung, so at least Dyson has some company, although DeYoung plus Cecil plus Melanson still is barely worse than Sam Dyson. I was curious. It's not real easy to search for the

worst beginnings to seasons in the team's first however many games. I tried to use the play index as best i could again we're not sponsored by baseball reference at present but let's just say with it we are fangraphs does have a stat it adopted a few years ago it's called shutdowns and meltdowns and that's based on a win probability added as well and a meltdown is classified as any game in which a pitcher a relief pitcher guess, makes a team's chances of winning worse by at least 6%, I think is the cutoff. So far this year, for example, Sam Dyson has been tagged with three so-called meltdowns.

I was curious who has had the most meltdowns in baseball history in the team's first seven games, which is such a silly cutoff. But in any case, Sam Dyson, he has three. Interestingly, Pedro Strop this year also has three, although his meltdowns have been, let's say, less dramatic than Dyson's have been. So Jan, John, Marines, I should know how to pronounce this, but maybe I shouldn't. I don't know. He's a brewer. He also has three meltdown meltdowns in any case there have been five cases in baseball history for at least as long as we have wpa where a pitcher has had four meltdowns in the team's first seven games we've got kent to colby in 1979 we've got dave smith in 1983 ray narleski 1959 bob miller in 1969, and Wayne Granger, which is a wonderful name to say. Wayne Granger. Oh, I love it. And he wasn't even that bad. In 4.2 innings in his four meltdowns,

he had a 3.86 ERA. So hey, whatever for Wayne Granger. But still, I went through all these games, all these pitches to figure out who's actually had the lowest combined WPA in a team's first seven games. This took some manual labor. Because I couldn't find a good way to search it. And so I did end up with Sam Dyson being the worst. He has the worst WPA through a team's first seven games. At least on record. At negative 1.8.

We've got 1999 Greg Olson in second to last place, I guess, at negative 1.58. So not even all that close. He's followed by Dan Maselli in 1997. And also, Dave, I'm just gonna say justy 1974, negative 1.47. And then Scott Doman 2005, negative 1.33. 1.47 and then Scott Doman 2005 negative 1.33 what is sort of fun maybe not so fun for the Rangers fans is that last year's season opening closer Sean Tolleson shows up near the top or bottom of this list as well we talked I think on it was a very recent podcast about how the Rangers bullpen was terrible at the start of last year and it kind of ruined their season-long numbers but in the second half their bullpen was quite good yeah and Sam Dyson was one of the reasons for that because he took over and became a fairly effective closer but he has now had kind of a similar start but even worse uh

compared to last year's Sean Tolleson so Sam Dyson the worst WPA in a team's first seven games in recorded baseball history kudos to Dyson He has left his mark on the Rangers record and on baseball records. I don't know if he's going to continue to close. His stuff seems like it's mostly still there. These things are always tricky. I was watching highlights from yesterday's meltdown and it included an RBI double by Mike Trout hit into the right field corner on a sinker that it looked like Dyson located perfectly low and away. I don't know what you're supposed to do in that situation because you're facing the best hitter in the world who didn't even have a storm cloud overhead. But nevertheless,

Sam Dyson has been awful. The results have been awful. He's only got two strikeouts to go three walks. Everything looks bad, but he's still throwing hard. Baseball is weird. He's already allowed more than half as many runs as he allowed all of last season. All right. Rangers regressing hard. Okay. Let's take a question from Dan, who says, I put up a poll in the Facebook group about the wave.

Not sure if you voted or saw it, but I'm curious if either or both of you have an official position on the wave. And then he sends the results, which are overwhelmingly in favor of the wave And then he sends the Results which are overwhelmingly In favor of the wave is Dumb and bad and I know That Noah Syndergaard was Tweeting something derogatory about the

Wave recently so there seems to be a lot of Anti-wave sentiment Going around right now Do you have a position on the wave? I feel like I'm not supposed to express it because I know The opinion I'm supposed to have and The I know the opinion I'm supposed to have and the magnitude of the opinion I'm supposed to have. My take?

Yeah, it's fine. I think so. The issue, I think, is there's been a long push against the wave in Internet circles, right? I mean, this dates back 10, 15 years. This guy, Connor Glassie, who I think his Twitter handle or online avatar is StopTheWave. And he works in baseball now. He used to be like a prospect guy.

Scout for the Indians, I think. And effectively a wild listener. Yeah, true. Hi, Connor. So in the internet baseball circles, there is a strong opinion against The Wave. And that makes sense because these are circles comprised of very dedicated uh focused baseball fans and so they are at a game and they want to pay attention to the baseball game they are already sufficiently entertained but this seems like it's sort of

a little bit of i guess i don't know how to put it but like super fan snobbery where it's a push against the casual fan who makes up the majority of all teams attendance and viewership which i get because you you think that if you are the more dedicated fan that you've earned the right to have things going your way but the the reality is that if you go to a baseball game there are 30 000 people there there are maybe know, 10, 20% of them are really, really interested in the game. But just think of all the times Sam Miller has posted screenshots of home plate and people aren't even paying attention to what's going on on the field two rows in front of them. Most people are there because they're just like, hey, I'm at a baseball game with friends or family and I have this beer or these nachos and I have my phone. I'm going to take a selfie, blah, blah, blah.

And baseball does not engage the fans often or very effectively. There are, of course, exciting moments, but there are sort of few hopefully mounting drama in a game sometimes yeah on mounting drama then you can kind of want something to to keep you feeling like you're part of something that you're actually you've paid for an in-person experience so i kind of get it i think it's silly but just from a human psychology perspective i think it's also neat when you can have some like 15 year old in the upper deck actually compel 20,000 people to do what they want, which is kind of neat. Yeah. So I wouldn't miss it if it was gone, but I totally get why it's a thing. And I have never been at a game and thought my experience would be a lot better if this wave didn't circle three times.

Yeah. If you could get like the average leverage index of wave situations, I'm sure it would be extremely low. I could see how it'd be frustrating if there is a moment when there's a lot of suspense and the game is hanging in the balance and people are doing the wave while you're trying to pay attention to the actual game.

I don't know how often that happens, really. It tends to be blowouts and situations where people are bored when this starts. I don't mind other people doing the wave. I don't want to participate in the wave. I'm not a participator in public generally. I don't know. There's an episode of the show Difficult People on Hulu, which I like a lot, where Billy Eichner is dating this guy and he thinks he's great and he's perfect.

But then he discovers that he's a participator. He'll want to do interactive theater and, I don't know, shout stuff out at comedy shows. Or when people ask for a volunteer to come to the stage, he'll be the one who raises his hand. And I am the opposite of that, as Billy Eichner was in that episode. I don't want to be brought up to the stage. I don't want to do anything. And so that's sort of how I feel about the wave at a baseball game. I don't really want to be compelled to do it.

I don't care if other people do it. I don't care if other people do it. I even enjoy it in a way because visually it's arresting. It's interesting to see an entire ballpark full of people do something in unison. It's kind of cool looking. So I don't mind that. But if I'm like in a group of people who are pressuring me to join the wave, then I don't I don't like it. I'm fine with everyone else doing it, but I don't really want to go along with it. I don't really like, I don't boo at baseball games either. I don't, I don't cheer at baseball games. I just sort of sit there and watch the baseball and that's kind of all I want to do. So anything that makes me want to have to take part in a group activity, I'm generally against. So don't like the wave as a participant. Don't mind it if other people are doing it and i'm not being pressured to join yeah there's a there's a woo that goes with the wave that that i don't love but i guess it might be kind of weird if it was silent you know yeah i mean maybe that would be trippy in its own way but if you just see people standing in a very quiet sort of like that i go deaf kind of wave but yeah i don, I don't like to participate in the wave either.

But I don't think I've ever seen like a wave in the playoffs, at least when the game has been within like five runs. Yeah. It doesn't exist. Right. All right. Couple framing related questions. Maybe I've answered this at some point, but we'll answer it again.

This is from Marcus who says, let's say baseball's commissioner one day pulls the trigger and decides that all balls and strikes will be decided by real-time computers. How would this change the role of the catcher? If a computer could automatically call the balls and strikes, then pitch framing would not matter and no longer need to exist. You're answering your own question, Marcus. Would this cause the catcher to become a glorified DH? So if this happens, and odds are it probably will at some point, then yes, the catcher has to be capable of catching the ball so that it doesn't go to the backstop every time and let the runners advance. But other than that, it shouldn't really matter if he's Ryan Domet or Jose Molina as far as receiving the pitch. It won't affect the call either way.

There's still a lot that a catcher does aside from that. So I wouldn't say glorified DH. That seems extreme. Like he still has to be able to block balls and throw balls to second base and call the game. So there are pretty important things that the catcher has to do. This is maybe the most important thing that a catcher does he suddenly will not have to do, so you'd think that there would be a lot less variation between catchers in defensive ability, although that is already decreasing as you have chronicled as teams get better at framing across the board. So it does change things, and that's one reason why I've kind of decided that I don't care if there are computer-called balls and strikes or not, because I like this element of the game. But is that it? Did I cover all the ramifications? Are there others?

exact answer but if you take framing off the table so that it stops mattering how a catcher actually catches the pitch you're of course right there's still game calling effects and and like managing a pitching staff that you have to take into consideration and this is why even bad framing catchers have been hailed as really good defensive catchers i i remember well i don't need to go into rob johnson he sucks it's over it's fine but i wonder if you take the way that you catch uh the ball off the table is there a way that catchers could catch that would make them that would effectively reduce their pop times? I don't know the answer to that, but would it make base stealing that much more difficult if a catcher could sort of adjust his pose or change the way he catches? Because of course, already a catcher doesn't try to like frame pitches when a

runner takes off. The priority is getting rid of the ball. But if there's a stance that a catcher could get into first, then it would be interesting. I don't know how much you could shave off, but I would assume that we would have a slight reduction in stolen base attempts or stolen base success rate. Yeah, that's a good point. You'd still have to be in good enough position to block a ball if it comes to that. But yeah, I bet you could kind of cut corners there. So that's a good point. of extended discourse about things that sometimes relate to baseball, i.e. Fangraphs Audio, Carson and Eric Longenhagen kind of talked about the difference between a pitcher placing a pitch and a pitcher throwing a strike generally. That is, the catcher sets up outside and it's a strike outside, or the catcher sets up in the middle and it's a strike on the outside. My question is this,

say you had two catchers, one was an average framer. One was a good framer. The good framer can only position himself directly in the middle of home plate, whereas the average framer can position himself wherever he and the pitcher want. Which catcher is more effective at framing? While the latter will have the ability to move around in the zone and thus provide some reference for the pitcher, the former will have the ability to take more pitches that are off the plate and frame them so they're just on the plate. So he's saying that the good framer in this scenario just has to squat in the middle of the plate. He can't move around. And so if a

pitch is on the corners, he's going to have to reach for it, which generally seems like something that affects your framing negatively or your ability to get called strikes. Whereas the other guy is not as good at framing innately, but he can set up where he wants so he can be on the corner and not have to reach for a pitch that's out there. Yeah, I will take the average framer in this circumstance. You probably would as well. Already the difference between a good framer and an average framer, like an average big league framer is still still good they still know what they're doing it's not like you or me trying to catch uh in which case i would definitely take the good framer yeah i would take i would take the average framer here uh when you have a good framer who's

setting up the middle of the plate of course you want no pitches in the middle of the plate and so any good pitch is going to be caught off to the catcher's side or high or low which means there's going to be a decent amount of motion that the catcher has to do i guess i don't know the the right verb yeah there would be motion that would take place involving the catcher and that would be more likely to compel the umpire to call the pitch ball and the average ramer would still be fine it's like i don't know throwing to james mccann who gets the setup on a corner or throwing to buster posey who is setting up in the middle and i'll take mccann in this circumstance exclusively in this circumstance i would take james mccann behind the plate over so what if we make it more

extreme and say it's domit who gets to move around and Molina who has to stay in the center of the zone? Let's make it even more extreme and say it's Ryan Domet today, however old he is. Okay. So I think the A problem with this is I wasn't aware of Domet sufficiently at the time to watch a lot of video to see what he was doing to be so bad. But, okay, I feel like i would still have to take now no here i would take melina because doma was bad compared to the average then yeah and if the average has gotten even better doma i mean you're coughing up dozens and dozens of runs yeah in that case i would take melina and i would assume that melina is good enough catching pitches off to his side i don't know to what extent having a target in the middle influences whether pitches actually end up in the middle. That would be an interesting thing that would be impossible to study. But yeah, I would take Molina in that circumstance. And I don't know what the threshold is for Domet or better than that. But oh my God, I just anything, anything to avoid D be behind a blade. Yeah. All right. Question from Jacob. How many Matt Kemps playing center field would it take to have equal defensive value to Kevin Kiermaier?

What about Miguel Cabrera's or Jeff Sullivan's? And I guess we can pretend that Kemp is not currently on the DL with an injury, but he's just his usual ineffective fielding self. Like it's an outfield with just one Kiermaier? They're regular left fielders and right fielders. So it's just a question about the center fielder specifically. So you have Kiermaier. I think we're trying to just replicate Kiermaier's fly ball catching ability with some number of Matt Kemps. And the question is, how many Kemps would you need to equal a Kiermaier?

Right. Okay. So I think the answer is two. That two Kemps playing center field equals a Kiermaier? Right. Okay. So I think the answer is two. Two Kemps playing center field equals one Kiermaier. Which, by the way, that's still crazy. Right. Because that's one person having to be twice the people to be one person. Which is insane.

But you'd cover everything if you had a four-person outfield. Buster Olney has actually been writing recently about teams thinking about adopting four-man outfields. He just had an article come out today about four-man outfields. No reference to his colleague Sam Miller's best-selling baseball book about using four-man outfielders. Disappointing. Yeah, which is interesting because Olney used to be a prolific linker. But in any case, I don't know how you link to a book. I also don't know what the validity is of having a four-man outfield at this point. I don't know what you would take away book i don't i also don't know what the validity is of having a four-man outfield at this point i don't know what you would take away i guess it would be like the third

baseman when you have a left-handed hitter at the plate i uh hot tip i haven't yet read only's article but you can't take away like the first baseman with a righty batter but the first baseman in the outfield because you need a first baseman i don't know how many circumstances actually call for four-man outfield but i guess this is something you and sam have already talked about so you can take that but yeah i think two matt kemps would equal one kevin kiermeier with miguel cabrera god i guess i guess it's got to be more than two because he's not an outfielder but he has played the outfield before but in that case i guess three seems like more than enough yeah it depends on whether we can have fractional humans here right because well yeah so two and a half miguel cabrera's is really no better than

two and it's actually more distressing because you'd have the two who would be in a panic wondering what happened to the third uh it would probably take oh god i'm bad so uh four i don't know how many jeff sullivans because i don't think i could even it would take me a while to even be able to get comfortable with a routine fly ball yeah so like you could you could crowd the outfield with like infinite just sullivans and they would they would still drop a lot of fly balls yeah even if they didn't have to move at all because it's like a sea of people yeah it'd be like at the home run derby or something when they have all those kids out there shagging fly balls and most of them seem to drop anyway so yeah but like if you take what we talked to rob about with michael jordan you know like michael jordan went into it and he didn't really have much of even

the fundamentals at the start of the season and by the end he was able to be a competent outfielder so if you gave jeff or Ben Lindbergh, presuming we have similar baseball skills, if you gave us like a full off season to get comfortable catching routine fly balls, then I would say the answer is probably three, maybe four, but probably three. What do you think?

For us, yeah, I don't know. Because like just in terms of range, I think certainly three of either of us could cover the ground that Kiermaier can cover. I mean, he's fast, but I don't think the difference is so dramatic in terms of just being able to run a good route and catch balls that you're barely even looking at. And there's no way we would ever come close to Kiermaier in that sense. So I don't know, I guess three, I guess I think three, maybe. Although, yeah, like when it comes to the actual catching of it, you'd have to have so many that every fly ball would be a routine catch basically, because like you wouldn't have to run that much. You wouldn't have to turn around that much because you could have a shallow Jeff Sullivan and a deep Jeff Sullivan and, you know,

a shading to the left Jeff Sullivan and a shading to the right Jeff Sullivan. And then none of them would really have to run that far. And the degree of difficulty would be a lot lower so definitely four i'm gonna say and you know we'd probably never be able to make like a home run robbery or anything like even if we were standing at the fence when the ball was hit there's just no way we would be able to jump high enough or coordinated enough although you are very tall so maybe that would help but i think uh i'll say four how many in a in a full season let's let's say you have even just three three ben lindberghs handling sort of the center field general area you've got these these two league average left and right fielders who are like what's going on in center field but whatever that's happening we've come to accept it we had spring training to get used to this how many collisions would there be between the three ben lindberghs yeah probably a lot we'd probably

we'd be on the deal a lot probably yes you'd need a bench full of more ben lindberghs yeah we wouldn't ever be running that fast and so so that would help, I think, because we'd be smaller than Kevin Kiermaier and we'd be running a lot less fast. So there'd be a lot less momentum with any given Ben Lindbergh. So maybe the collisions would be less damaging. But I think, yeah, we'd probably still hurt ourselves quite often. You run. Have you ever run into anything? I mean, just jogging? jogging no no probably not but uh and i do run like on the streets of new york where there are a lot of potential obstacles and ways i could die and i

haven't yet so i guess that's that's good i have had some practice sort of threading in and out of crowds and pedestrians so maybe that would serve me well here. I have run into a no parking sign while just jogging, so I would think maybe I would have more collisions than three Jeff Selvins might collide more than three Ben Lindberghs. Yeah. When I go running, I still think of, what was it, a tweet you sent about how you're afraid of things falling on you? Oh, the fire escapes.

Yeah, fire escapes, right. I still think of that whenever I pass one. It's horrifying. Oh, you know what? Oh, disadvantage. Yeah. like uh the fire escapes yeah fire escapes right i still think of that whenever i pass one it's horrifying oh you know what oh disadvantage yeah you bent three ben lindberghs might have trouble communicating with one another because you have a quiet voice that's true you would have to be comfortable participating yeah and being allowed to call off another ben lindbergh yeah my voice doesn't carry well in crowds like i have trouble being heard in bars and that sort of thing so that would probably be also the case in outfields with fans so although if we're in tropicana field

it's probably not that loud so but you know that thing fans do when the ball is dropping they get loud to try to like distract the outfield yeah you're right yeah all right and last one from peter in the seinfeld episode the caddy seven, episode 12, aired January of 1996. George is excited at the prospect of becoming the assistant GM of the Yankees. In one bit of unbridled enthusiasm, he tells Susan, I think I got it. How about this? How about this? We trade Jim Larritz and Bernie Williams for Barry Bonds. Huh? What do you think? That way you have Griffey and Bonds in the same outfield. Now you got a team. And Peter wants to know, do you think the Giants take this deal for Bonds?

Yeah, first of all, I don't know how they got Ken Griffey Jr. in the first place in this circumstance. I don't recall the episode off the top of my head. Maybe you do? I don't remember that, no. have acquired prime Ken Griffey Jr. somehow. That's fine. And they did that without losing Jim Leyritz or Bernie Willems. So looking at the trade, I think one thing that's difficult about this is trying to put ourselves in the mindset of a baseball executive 20 years ago, because I don't really remember how they operated. If they operated like they did today, then the Reds don't trade Mike Cameron for Ken Griffey Jr. because that was a disaster for them. So the best I can do is to try to think, well, just generally jim leiritz was sort of a catcher but he wasn't really valuable i think even at the time people knew hey this guy can't defend

he's not even that good of a hitter so leiritz also was already into his 30s by this point maybe he was 30 or 31 so i don't think leiritz is worth worth much of anything aside from his presumed ped connections but every team had PED connections, including every team with Barry Bonds on it. So, really, the core of the trade is Bernie Williams, a younger Bernie Williams for a slightly older Barry Bonds. Bonds had three years left on

his free agent deal with the Giants, over which he was being paid something like $25 million, or thereabouts, which is crazy to say now. Bernie Williams,s i believe was entering his three years of arbitration over which he earned something like 14 i think million dollars roughly maybe more important than that over the three previous years going into this time of the hypothetical trade bernie williams had been worth 12 war which is quite good except not so good when

compared to barry bonds's 24 so to whatever extent teams would be aware of how much better Bonds was in Bernie Williams who was not much of a defensive player and clearly not a hitter on Bonds's level this would be a terrible trade for the Giants to make the savings would not be worth the downgrade in the field I don't know what the Yankees would have had to throw in but this is going into 1996 so interestingly would they have traded Mariano Rivera because he was not yet and established anything right yeah and he was often mentioned in trade rumors at the time nearly was traded I don't know whether this changes the way that Bonds's future plays out maybe with the attention of playing in New York he doesn't feel Like he has to take Steroids he's in an outfield with

Griffey somehow who Was you know the other player who was Known for being great And clean and maybe that would Be an influence on Bond so who knows maybe he Turns out to be a worse less valuable Player if he gets traded at This point but yeah still pretty

Lopsided because he was amazing Even before which way Does the influence go on a team that has Griffey Bonds and Derek Jeter yeah Like does bonds corrupt them All because they realize how much better they can be It's possible All right so we will end there

By the way we answered a question Maybe last week not too long ago about the World Baseball Classic and whether we Thought it increased injuries. I wrote an article about that at The Ringer, looked into it, crunched the numbers, so you can find a more definitive answer there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com

slash effectivelywild. Got several new supporters. I'm going to read six today instead of my usual five. So thanks to Ryan Quans, Noam Neusner, Casey Zachary, Hugh Hansen, Bing Zhu, and Ryan Patterson. Thanks to all of you. You can join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Keep your questions coming via email at podcast at famegraphs.com or by messaging us through Patreon. We'll be back tomorrow, so we'll talk to you then. So here is a quick rundown

We've been here before It's best not to wander far Cause we've been here before And we couldn't find a way out When we were here the first time Now it's minds to leave in behind. Mine to leave in behind. Mine to leave in behind.

Now it's mine to leave in behind. Mine to leave in behind. Mine to leave in behind. Mine to leave in behind.