Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1048: Such is This Game, and Such is Life

Episode Date: April 22, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Ichiro’s home run in his return to Seattle, the feasibility of intentionally allowing dingers, a John Jaso quote, and manager bobbleheads, then discuss the present and future use, abuse, and presentation of Statcast data. Audio intro: Prince, "Get Yo Groove On" Audio outro: The Jam, "Away from the Numbers"  iTunes […]

One out, bases empty in the top of the ninth, and Nick Ahmed at the plate for the first time tonight, leans back from an inside fastball, delivered by Christian Bethencourt, one ball, no strikes. Christian's throwing strikes, he's effectively wild. It's time to get my groove on. Been working hard, now it's time to play. I got to get my groove on. Come on! Oh! Everybody get your groove on! Oh baby!

Oh! Hello and welcome to episode 1048 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs all of the time. I am talking here with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer all of the time, as of whenever he joined The Ringer. How are you? Hello. Doing well. Hi. Hi. So, I don't know. This is Friday episode, but do you have any banter before we move on to the banter that I guess I do have? Well, I don't know if it's the same as your banter, but we got an email from Justin Banal, who is a member of the baseball punk band The Isotopes, a former Ringer MLB show guest. He wanted to ask about Itro, and I figured we could just talk about this now instead of waiting for next week.

Figured we could just talk about this now instead of waiting for next week. So he says, okay, so you guys know and have mentioned before that there is that meme slash rumor slash factoid that has always circulated that Ichiro could have been a slugger had he chosen to. As you likely know, Ichiro homered to write on what is very likely to be his last ever appearance in Seattle, barring any unexpected trade to the AL or his continuing to play for like six more years and making another interleague appearance. Did he do it on purpose? Did he prove that he could have been based on a quote that he had once about how he could have hit, I forget what exactly he said, but he could have hit lots of homers if he'd been okay with hitting 220 or something instead of 320 or whatever. And so I tried to run some math and see whether he actually would have been better under those parameters. And the way it came out, it seemed like Itro is probably just better as he is if the alternative would have been a low batting average slugger. But I'm not sure I know your thoughts on the plausibility of it and whether you believed

it when he used to say it. So what do you think? You have written the most exhaustively about it. I'm sure I've written more by volume about It row given the whole marriage blogging days but i it was always kind of one of those myths that i didn't want to see checked i could have taken you know a home run derby because then i think that he could have turned it on but i don't know i guess you could think of it as one of those like instant swing change guys right where they can sacrifice contact for power and here's the thing with each row and it was a very dramatic home run that he hit in Seattle. It was outstanding. There are very few circumstances in which a road player can hit a home run and receive a standing ovation from everybody in attendance.

That was a good one because the Mariners had a big lead at the time, right? So it wasn't. And it was just a solo shot. It wasn't jeopardizing the game. And he was, you know, a beloved player. So, yeah, as soon as that went out, there was like a huge tear, which is the opposite of what you usually hear. But that was cool. It was outstanding. When Kenny Griffey Jr. had his first game back in Seattle after he joined

the Reds, which was back in, I don't know, 2008, 2010. I don't remember exactly when it was. But in that game, which the Reds won like 14 to nothing or something absurd, Ryan Roland Smith made his major league debut. And in his debut as a reliever, the first batter he faced was Ken Griffey Jr. And he struck him out and the fans booed. So it was a similar circumstance in a way. But anyway, the reason I am skeptical that Ichiro did anything on purpose, as much as I would love to believe that he did, or maybe I wouldn't.

I don't know which one is better. So this year he hit that home run. Last year he hit one home run. The year before that, he hit one home run. The year before that, though, he hit one home run. Last year, he hit one home run. The year before that, he hit one home run. The year before that, though, he hit one home run. So that's a total of three home runs playing semi-regularly, like batting about more than a thousand times between 2014 and 2016. Itro had three home runs. I'm certain there were circumstances where Itro was up and he thought, we could really use a home run here. But he was going for the all-time hits record,

so he just wanted singles. He was going for the high probability play. Yeah, I just wanted 3,000, I guess. But I do believe that he has had the skills to turn on and hit for more power. He's hit 115 home runs in his career. I bet if he really tried, he could have doubled that, but he would have lost a lot else. I think it was just a wonderful turn of events that he hit the home run. I like that he remains so almost mythological that even though he hasn't been a good hitter for seven years, people still hold to the belief that he's a wizard because I also continue to believe that he's a wizard, even though he's coming up on as many below average hitting seasons as he had above average hitting seasons. But I guess that's what happens when you continue to play when you're 65 years old. Yeah. Should we answer a related question? It's not like we have a shortage

of emails for the actual email show. So we got another question about this from Adam, who said, Itro's emotional home run in Seattle got me thinking, what if the opposing team wanted you to hit a home run? It was obviously a great moment for Mariners fans to see a hero hit a homer. Really seemed perfect. Almost too perfect. If you're an opposing pitcher and you want the batter to hit a home run, how easy could you make it? Could you essentially guarantee a homer over the course of his four at-bats? Could you guarantee multiple homers? What if the batter knew you were working together in this way?

How different would it be for a replacement-level batter versus a star? And he has the caveat, let's assume that you have to at least make an effort to disguise what you're doing here. As the pitcher, you can't obviously be tossing home run derby balls to the plate. But other than that, anything goes. Yeah, so I don't think so. I was thinking about the home run derby approach. But just to run another quick search, according to Baseball Savant, this season, there have been 2,090 fastballs, that's four-seamers, two-seamers, or sinkers, which are the same thing, throwing down the middle of the plate. So in the middle third in both dimensions, I guess. So 2,090 of those pitches, and do you have a guess how many of those have been hit for home runs?

2,090 pitches, 25? 45. So 45 home runs on fastballs right down the middle. That works out to a rate of 2.2%, which is not very many. Now, that is very high still. You don't want to give up 2.2 home runs for every 100 pitches you throw. You would not be in the major leagues, probably. Let me take that back. Definitely, you would not be in the major leagues.

But I think that it reminds me of there is the controversy. Adam Wainwright was alleged to have grooved a pitch to Derek Jeter. But of course, in his later days, Derek Jeter couldn't hit home runs anyway. So he just like slashed a single or something. And going back way further, like a decade and a half ago, there was talk that Shanho Park grooved a fastball to Cal Ripken that he hit out in an all-star game. And that sort of predated actual baseball analysis. So i think that that myth continues to exist almost exclusively in old archived message boards but it's there and people still talk about it as evidenced by me talking about it right now so i think if you

could go out there and throw home run derby pitches then clearly as shown by the home run derby you could definitely get a lot of home runs however However, if you are throwing close to your usual speed and you're just trying to groove the ball, well, for one thing, home runs against pitches that hard are very hard, even if the hitter knows what to look for. And for another thing, pitchers can't aim that well. You've looked at this, and the fact I always recall that I think you pulled out when looking at command effects

is that the average pitch misses the implied target by like 11 or 12 inches which is yeah crazy yeah but also maybe not so crazy considering the pitchers are throwing really hard from 60 and a half feet away from the plate so maybe that's really accurate but in any case i think you could against the best hitters maybe you could average like one home run a game but i'm not real confident in asserting that and it would never happen any way other than the all-star game exhibition game scenario because i don't think any pitcher wants to see that moment enough for it to hurt his stats because even if you do it on purpose to provide a nice moment for the hometown crowd, it still shows up in your FIP. I don't think there is any adjustment for intentionality there. So given, and if the ball's right down the middle of the plate, that's what they are don't have to protect other parts of the plate or look outside the strike zone or worry about breaking balls or something then they can give their hardest possible swing and time it right so that would help quite a bit yes agreed all right do you have

anything else nope okay so i have two somewhat quick things we got an email from oh i wish i would have practiced this let's just call him bobby We got an email from Bobby, who also has a last name, and he sent in what looked like a mistake made during an MLB.com recap. There are different sections of the MLB.com recaps you might be familiar with. There's the regular recap. There are sections like sound smart with your friends, a section called optional section, which probably isn't actually titled that, and a section called quotable. So there is a story published on MLB.com that I think was only up for a brief amount of time, but it looked like the story was published without someone having deleted the existing template. So maybe you go into the editorial page and then there are a bunch of words there that you just have to

clear out. So there's boldface quotable and then underneath, this is a story published, underneath quotable were these words. Use a quote here. Make it something that's fun or interesting on its own. You can also use quotes in other parts of the recap where relevant. This section is optional. Don't empty your notebook for a boring quote. If there's a good quote from the other team, use it here.

Or a great additional quote from the first team, go for it. Okay, so whatever. It's an easy mistake to make. It's a game recap. I don't know how many people read these things so this is not this is not the poke fun at mlb.com they do a lot of good work and whatever we've all made simple editorial mistakes but then that got me curious i'll read again quotable use a quote here make it something that's fun or interesting on its own

so i went searching and i didn't have to search very far because i found a quote from the previous days. So I guess that would be what Wednesday's Pirates Cardinals, Pirates Cardinals. It doesn't matter. Pirates, somebody quotable. There was a quotable section. You might remember that the quotable section is optional. You don't need to have a quote unless it is interesting or fun or as they put it, fun or interesting. And I found a quote in there from John Jaso. The quotable session exists in the recap and john jay says quote on the pirates sweep or be swept streak which is one of those things that's weird to notice quote john jay so it's bizarre such as this game and such as life john jay so quote it's bizarre such is this game and such as life done

that sealed the deal that was considered a fun and or interesting enough to include in the game recap and yeah i don't think anybody would have emptied their notebook to get that quote and i didn't even include the other one which was just there were two quotes included in the quotable section two like the writer couldn't i'm not going to name the writer because whatever but like the writer couldn't decide i don't know which of these quotes is better so there's john jay so saying literally nothing and then there's also michael waka who was asked about the cardinals turnaround after being swept by the yankees and his quote i'm not going to read it because it's a paragraph but the quote basically says we weren't worried we just have to play well neither fun nor interesting i don't know who decides these

things but these are all like veteran report whatever it's just bad bad quotes but the the other thing i wanted to move on to my last piece of banter banter will occupy the majority of this podcast duration this is something i've seen on the background watching some ace games i don't know why i didn't think to talk about it until now. Maybe if you've watched any A's games, which you probably haven't, because why would you except for Andrew Triggs? This year, A's home games. There's been an advertisement behind Home Plate where there are common advertisements. It's an advertisement for an upcoming promotional giveaway. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I think I've seen this on Twitter.

Okay. So the A's have an upcoming bobblehead giveaway on May 6th. I believe they have three or four bobblehead giveaways this year. One is like Chris Davis. One of them has, I think, Barry Zito and somebody else because I guess who else are you going to market on the team? So actually, I can, this is easy enough to look up. The A's promotional schedule. Here are the bobbleheads for this A's team. Not bo bobblehead that's a typo bobblehead chris davis may be the ace best player certainly the most electrifying offensive player they have chris davis current athletic in july they have a miguel tejada and a barry zito bobblehead because why not market the good players from 12 years ago yeah in later july there's a g easy bobblehead

so not even a baseball player but coming up oh well there i'm sorry there is a dennis eckersley bobblehead so why not go back even more decades into a's lore but the first bobblehead of the season is one bob melvin and this is interesting for a few reasons one i get okay three reasons one how many marketable managers are there in baseball two is bob melvin actually a marketable manager in baseball i think they know they refer to it in the advertisement as bow mal bow mal bobblehead so bob melvin apparently has a nickname where bob is too long of a name so they had to hurt it by 33 so i disagree with the idea that bob melvin is one of the marketable managers. But I think

what's even more fun about it is I have a, let's see, a Hillsborough Hops bobblehead above my desk. It's Ben Petrick, an assistant coach with the team. And it's a bobblehead of Ben Petrick swinging. He looks to be completing at least a fly ball swing, maybe a home run swing. Ben Petrick, who came up on our last episode for having a four RBI game without a hit. That's the one. I haven't checked the current staff, but he's at least had a recent job with the Hillsborough Hops, a local minor league affiliate. Anyway, so most bobbleheads, including this Ben Petrick bobblehead, but also most major league bobbleheads will feature a player and the player will be doing something. He'll be holding a bat or he'll be swinging or I don't know, maybe

making a play or posing or, you know, just something that's sort of particular to the player in question. Correct? Yep. Right. The Bob Melvin bobblehead. I don't know what you're supposed to do with a manager bobblehead, but all it is, it's Bob Melvin standing. He's wearing sunglasses as I guess he commonly does. I don't know. His eyebrows are a little bit raised, but it's just Bob Melvin standing with his hands on his hips. And I guess I don't know what pose you put a manager in, but this pose seems to imply that Bob Melvin is just, just standing and his hands are on his hips. And these, is this, is that, is that the manager pose? I don't know. What would you do with a manager bobblehead? I'd have him like, I don't know if you're allowed to have a prop or something, but like looking at a lineup card maybe or signaling to the bullpen, something like that, or standing on the top step of a dugout or, yeah, some sort of active pose that you'd find a manager in or just sitting on the bench with a windbreaker on or something like

that yeah yeah not not that yeah he just looks vaguely impatient whether like the a's the game's going too long or like his starters already throwing 30 pitches in the inning or like the reliever is he's waiting for the reliever to come in from the bullpen and maybe this is as active as a manager is because they don't even really argue anymore with umpires and you probably can't release the bobblehead of Bob Melvin getting in like Joe West's face. Yeah. So anyway, there's no picture here on the A's website of what the Chris Davis bobblehead is going to look like. I'm going to guess it's Chris Davis hitting a massive donger because that's what he does.

And maybe this is just Bob Melvin watching Chris Davis hit said donger because it turns out that when you're a manager, the actual nine innings of baseball do not require you to do very much. Yeah. See here, I just Googled MLB manager bobbleheads to see what the precedents were. And there's a Ned Yost bobblehead from what I think this is just last season. He's sitting on the bench with his legs crossed and his arm on the bench, kind of just a casual pose. He is smiling quite widely. But yeah, this is a very managerial pose here. Yeah, I like this too.

I like that pose for Nedios. I think that's how he commonly gives interviews, I think. People will interview him in the dugout and he's just going to be doing that. I think the alternate would have been the bobblehead of him riding LCD's Escobar Into the lead off spot but that might have been a little Too specific for a bobblehead doll Let's see there's Bobby Valentine There's a bobblehead There's a previous Yoast bobblehead evidently

That was when he was in Milwaukee And he says it didn't look anything Like him he says the Royals one Has his hair way too grey And it has him way too skinny. I'm just looking. There's Ozzie Guillen bobblehead on Amazon that I just found. And that's one that you would expect.

Like he was a colorful character. He had interesting quotes and a personality more so than Bob Melvin does. And he is smiling widely and has his arms crossed, at least, folded. So that looks a little more managerial. The twins evidently in 2012 announced a 1,000 limited edition bobblehead doll set showcasing all 12 managers of the Minnesota Twins. So every manager of the twins has a bobblehead for 210 for the set wow uh yeah here there's a dave roberts one here his arms are crossed okay here's a tommy lasorda bobblehead of him like holding a plaque of something that it's probably tommy lasorda this gets really

detailed and meta uh there's let's see joe madden bobblehead gnome. That's not interesting. There's Robin Ventura is here holding a baseball and a bat, which again that's also not something a manager does, but whatever. At least it's more interesting than hands on hips. Yeah, there's apparently like an old Bob Brenly

bobblehead doll where he has his thumbs tucked. His hands look like they're sort of on his hips but his Thumbs look like maybe they're kind of like Tucked into the top of his pants you know and that Like cowboy walking pose So the Bob Brenly one Is vaguely sexual

Okay there appears To be a Mike Socia bobblehead I'm not Going to just keep doing this Mike Socia Is leaning on a baseball bat it looks Nothing like Mike Socha at all. And then I'll just end with a Joe Madden bobblehead that appears to be him at some sort of podium, which is appropriate. So there's a few hands on hips ish or arms crossed bobbleheads. And then there's Joe Madden at a podium, which is something that managers do.

When I wrote down this note to talk about this a little bit, I realized I can't recall the last time I actually wrote the name of a manager in a post. I know you talk about managers more often because you are a better and more thorough writer than I am. However, yeah, I honestly can't remember the last time I even paid a manager any attention. Yeah, a lot of our posts about managers tend to be how difficult it is to evaluate managers and how little we know about managers and that sort of thing. So that gets old after a while. I will just stand up for the John Jaso quote. I don't know if it's fun or interesting, but it sounds philosophical, at least. It's such is the game and such is life. That's a sentence you could append to almost any quote about baseball, right?

You could stick that on any post-game quote and it would apply generally So I'd like to see JSO keep breaking that out and see if it is deemed to be fun or interesting Just use that as his go-to cliche Yep When I worked at SB Nation and rob nyer was my editor he had a rule i think this is when uh grant brisby and i were both basically the staff under rob and all three of us would write constant articles but rob before too long to pass a i would say a soft but strongly enforced rule that we weren't allowed to write articles where the whole thesis was just baseball is weird.

And we weren't allowed to explicitly say, hey, baseball is weird because I think he just got tired of everything being, well, baseball is weird. But it works kind of the same way as that's the game and that's life. Or it's just kind of everything you write about. Well, everything you could write about baseball would just be, hey, this game is weird. Look how consistently weird and therefore maybe not weird it is. But it'll get you. That's how Kyle Hendricks walks Tommy Malone on four pitches just the other day. Yeah, that's right.

You got to post out of that. Loved it. Love easy posts. All right. Okay. So we have, I don't know, like three minutes left. Might as well do a topic. I thought about having somebody on to interview for this,

but I thought that it would be more interesting to have a StatCast episode where we talk about StatCast without getting official word because I think we've had roughly two years of having access to the information, two years since StatCast was folded in and became sort of, I don't know, omnipresent. And I think we could have a little conversation about our impressions of StatCast and where things stand if we already take it for granted, if there are certain things that are overused, etc.

Open-ended StatCast conversation. So this has come up. There's obviously a lot of good work going into it. The first conflict I'm having is whether we, as a general public, are appreciating it enough or if it's overappreciated to the point where it's annoying. I know there's been a lot of griping that I've come across about people just using exit philosophies all the time or reporting exit philosophies for everything, which I agree I have found a little bit irritating, except that I also self-select for people who are most likely to be interested in that stuff.

So I can't really say anything. I'm one of them as well. And if you watch any baseball game or watch anything on game day, any sort of baseball presentation, you're going to see a reported pitch velocity for every pitch that's thrown unless the tracking system is broken, and people want that. It would feel weird when the tracking technology is down and the broadcast doesn't have a pitch speed reported it feels a little naked it's like what what was that was that a fastball a change up etc and so it's just

there uh except i think one of the differences is that you don't say the release velocity of that pitch was 83 miles per hour after every single 83 mile per hour pitch. So I don't know, do you think exit velocity is in a good place? Do you think it's in a bad place? Do you think it has a branding or presentation problem? How do you feel about exit velocity being everywhere now? Yeah, I mean, I understand the backlash when there's a cool home run, you just kind of want to watch it and admire it. And when someone then tweets out that home run was 111.3 miles per hour and had a launch angle of 27.2 degrees or whatever it it doesn't add that much to my appreciation of the home run like if it's if it's an outlier home run in some way like it was one of the hardest hits or

one of the highest launched or lowest launched or one of the slowest and weakest hit, then that's interesting if it's an exception in some way. But the vast majority of home runs are hit hard with an angle, you know, somewhere between whatever it is, 25 or 35 degrees, or it's in some fairly narrow range. And so for the most part, I just blank that out, basically. I just, yeah, well, it was a home run. We knew it was hit hard. We knew it was hit at a fairly optimal angle. It went over the fence.

So we could have concluded that much. So I think it's a very valuable tool. And when used in large samples or to compare a player to his previous self or something like that, it's great. It's amazing that we have this. It's wonderful. On any individual ball in play, you know, it can still be useful if it's an outlier. And if you want to show that this ball is usually not a hit or no one else hits the ball this hard, that's great. But, you know, otherwise, if it's just overused, if it's just a standard response to a home run, then I find it a little bit tiresome. And there's like a wider range, I think, than there is in,

well, I don't know if that's true, but is there a wider range in exit velocity than there is in pitch velocity? Like pitch velocity, like one mile per hour makes a big difference. If you're throwing 97 or something, that's significantly more impressive than 96. And your expected outcome is significantly better. If your exit speed on a batted ball is whatever, 105 instead of 104 or something. There are really good outcomes on a much wider scale. So you can have a good batted ball that is 90-something miles per hour or 110-something miles per hour. So it's not as fun to parse it kind of on a mile per hour per. I mean, you know, it was exactly this hard. And we know that that means

X, like I'm, I'm sure that the harder you hit it, the better your expected outcome is given a certain launch angle, but the range isn't so narrow that it's as much fun to just look at. And maybe that's partially that we haven't internalized the scale as well as we have with pitch velocity, but you know, like every pitch is going to be, every fastball is going to be between 90 and 100 generally. And then there are a few exceptions to that. And those are interesting. And we know those guys who can throw harder than 100 or who throw really soft, but for the most part, narrow range. And so when you move up a tick or two on that range, it means more than it would for exit velocity. So I think those are the two obstacles to appreciating it on a ball-per-ball basis.

Yeah, I think it's crucial. It's a great analytical tool to have when you're doing bulk research. I love analyzing exit velocity. I think when you have a big enough sample, exit velocity feels a lot like the hitter's version of pitch velocity. And you need to know that information for it, where I guess you don't need to. But you'd love to know that information for a pitcher. It helps you evaluate him. And exit velocity is how we know that Aaron Judge is a freak or that he could be a come free. You got to know where your standard is. It's one way we could know, right? I mean,

you could also just look at Aaronaron judge you and your scout school background are just like yeah you can just look at him and realize he's a freak i guess you could say the same for eric thames look at the six seven guy who hits balls 450 feet yeah he's kind of a freak how tall is eric thames i'm gonna pull this up right now he's a eric thames is listed at six feet but i think eric thames is basically like Aaron Judge's body, except you just compress it. You know, it's just like you put him on a high gravity planet. And then that's Eric Thames, except he's hitting on a low gravity planet. I don't know.

It's hard. Anyway, with home runs, I think something we've seen this year and it's folded into MLB game day. But now pretty much every single home run shows up in the feed with the exit velocity, the launch angle and the distance. And so then people love to copy and paste that, put it on Twitter. I realized this is such a first world. This is beyond a first world complaint, but anyway, it still shows up. And most of the time it turns out, it turns out most home runs are just regular home runs. Like if I do a search on baseball savant this year, there have been almost 500 home runs and the average home run has been hit about 104 miles per hour. Well, yeah,

great. We know that. We know that home runs are hit well because they're home runs. Yeah. Is it because we're used to the pitch speed scale? And so anything over a hundred is like, whoa, Hey, I should tweet about that. Whereas in baseball, like all of the hardest hit balls are that fast. So it's not as impressive. Maybe, I don't know, like all of the hardest hit balls are that fast. So it's not as impressive. Maybe, I don't know, maybe 110 is the equivalent of 100 for a pitch speed. But when we see the triple digits, it's like, whoa, hey, triple digits. Yeah, right.

It's yeah. And I don't I think maybe maybe one of the issues with pitch velocity, you watch a pitch and you it's really hard for me to see visually the difference between 92 and 98 with hitters. You know, you know, when a hitter has made good contact, you can tell we have, I mean, I assume we've all watched enough baseball to know either that ball was well hit or that ball was not well hit. Obviously there's going to be a border somewhere. And this is how baseball info solutions calculates like soft hit, medium hit, and hard hit that shows up on fan graphs.'s also by the way really useful data and i sometimes i like that even more than exit velocity just because it's easier to say like there's no clean

barrier between a medium hit ball and a hard hit ball but still you know that a ball like a home run yeah under nearly all circumstances a home run is hit well it's interesting when they're not when they are like fly balls they just carry and i like to see those like you said the exceptions are great but like if you have if you have a blooper you don't need to know well that ball was hit 68 miles per hour off the bat at a launch angle of 43 degrees and had a catch probability of 93 that's great i guess but it doesn't it doesn't actually add anything to my understanding of the play i already know that was a blooper the batter got lucky it caught a void in in the defense yeah so here the the fault is i think maybe more in the user's case like i don't

have any problem with mlb making that information available i guess they could set it up so that it only displays if it's interesting, but I'm fine with them just putting it out there and whatever. It's more information and we have it if we want it. So maybe it's just that we have to get used to this stuff. It's this shiny new toy still, and we're thrilled that we have this information. So we're kind of over- exuberant about disseminating it and maybe a few years from now no one will be interested in this anymore and we'll we'll stop

tweeting out every bad at balls details but right there's no problem here on the side of mlb am i don't think or the or the stat cast team if you look at game day it's not like we complained that they show all the information for every pitch by ricky nolasco that's not interesting but it's still there and if you ever want to make use of it it's there it's just nobody nobody scrambles to say ricky nolasco just had a release velocity of 90 point whatever the hell he does who cares yeah he's still pitching he's still pitching he's not even that old it's incredible he's on a competitive team yeah so i i don't even feel right complaining because it's not worth complaining on a competitive team yeah so i i don't even feel right complaining because it's not worth complaining about but just in terms the stat cast is is so new to all of us

but i guess we just need to feel out the best way to present it and it seems like there are very few play specific circumstances where it adds to what you can already see visually. Yeah, I think that's true. And as for the defense stuff, which is what we were all most excited about, which seemed to have the most potential to tell us things that we didn't already know, I think it's great the way that they have rolled it out. I think Tom Tango and maybe the team even before he was there have kind of taken this approach that we'll just put what we have out there and it won't be perfect and final and we're still tweaking it and we're finding ways to improve it and become more comprehensive. But it's interesting and we'll put it out there and we'll get feedback from the

community and then we will apply that feedback. And so in year one, for instance, I think there was sort of a failure to provide context for stats often. So there would be numbers put out there and it was the first year we had this and we didn't know if this was a good number or a bad number. And there was no real attempt to say, well, the average is this. And so this is whatever, this is something standard deviations from the mean or whatever, because the way to make something easily accessible is to start quoting standard deviations. But I don't know, there was like, it was hard to say, was this a good spin rate? Is that a good root efficiency or whatever? And something like root efficiency or even the current five-star catch probability system,

you know, they've been upfront about it not accounting for certain things such as wall balls or whether the player is running in or running back. And we know those things are going to make a difference. And so they don't always match up with our eyes. And that can be a good thing at times because one of the nice things about this data is that in theory, it will tell us whether that diving catch that appeared to be amazing was really amazing or was just a diving catch because the guy was too slow to get there and catch it on the run. So that's going to be a big difference. But I think there have been cases probably where the numbers have oversold or undersold a play and maybe that erodes people's

confidence in the data. I remember, do you remember the first year of SACS where you would see player acceleration? What the hell was that about? Yeah, right. I don't think anybody ever made heads or tails of that measure yeah they were confusing scales and metrics and it wasn't clear what the units were so yeah there were there were some missteps there early on yeah i quite enjoy the catch probability stuff i think when it comes to like if you have a diving play and it turns out that the play was like relatively easy for another player to make i think there's another thing there where the fans who are watching the play can recognize it's never easy to make a diving catch.

And if a player maybe didn't take a perfect route to a ball, you still want to be able to appreciate the effort that allowed the player to make the play, even if he sort of made a mistake earlier. So a player can introduce a certain degree of difficulty into a player that doesn't have a high degree of difficulty. And so there are sort of two ways you can look at that. You can say, well, did the player do everything perfectly or did the player do something exceptional to sort of salvage his own mistake, which is, I guess we can call that the Oduble Herrera if you want. Yeah. So again, that's, it's not even a complaint. I don't know what that is, but a, a niche observation. But I think that there's a reason people love diving catches. And I don't

think it's always because people think the player made the perfect play or the best play possible. I think that people just think diving catches are very hard and they are. And I think that when you look at maybe an inefficient route, it sort of it misses a little bit of the mark. So I guess this is sort of a larger question of what does and doesn't StatCast information do to enhance the entertainment value of a baseball broadcast, which is probably its main point. I don't know its main point, whether it's for team analysis or just for basically adding to visual displays of the game. I don't know where the real money is made. Seems like it's probably an easy question for me to answer, but I don't have the answer because I'm a moron.

If I wanted to, I could have had something like Darren Willman or Mike Petriello or maybe Tango on this podcast, but I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to just do a stat guest Q&A. I kind of felt like it would be worth issuing some feedback. So I don't know. We have another 10 minutes if we want. We've had two years. StatCast is introduced clearly.

There's all the information you could want for hitters, except for some missing plays that still aren't calculated. There's basically everything you need for pitchers, and they're working on defense. They're working on speed is something they've just started to hone in on the best way to calculate that and hey it turns out billy hamilton's really fast i don't know how much we're going to learn from speed but there was at least an interesting data point in a recent mike petriello article they're calculating like top sprint speed i think is yeah basically what

they're looking at and they're looking at the ground covered uh within one second for players at their top speeds which i think is a clever way not the only way but a clever way're looking at the ground covered within one second for players at their top speeds, which I think is a clever way, not the only way, but a clever way of looking at speed. And one interesting thing I did notice, or that I should say I noticed that Mike Petriello noticed, is that not only is Jose Batista quite low compared to other players or outfielders, but also he got his top speed was significantly slower last year than the year before, which that's really interesting and that's something that we could have maybe guessed or assumed but to see it actually there on paper in what i assume is verifiable fact that's that's great that's

really interesting to see that jose batista is slower than most players and also he got slower still yeah that's great he's like the proverbial guy who you would say has lost a step right that's something and now you can actually quantify that see whether he has see whether it was more than one step so yeah as we have a bigger sample and we can cover a player's entire career with this stuff and we can find out what it means. Like, what does it mean if a player loses a step? If his sprint speed is a little lower, what does that mean for his base running and his fielding? And does that tell us anything about what's going to happen next year?

If a player loses a step, does he then start losing more steps more quickly? Or, you know, so there's all types of applications of that that we can't really do yet, but we'll be able to in the future. Yeah. So I have maybe a two-part question. We'll see how this goes. One, what is your usual response when you see the average display of some sort of StatCast measure? And I guess that would usually be on Twitter, maybe in an article. How do you typically respond to seeing stack-ass information now? I don't know.

I always feel like I'm not really an infographic guy, like the way that I tend to think or respond to data. I always just sort of like seeing a table and just being able to sort it more so than seeing a fancy graphic. There are exceptions to that. And Darren does some really cool displays. So, and especially when you're doing broadcast stuff, you want visual information. So, I mean, every time I see it, I'm still sort of wowed by the fact that this information exists,

and maybe it's not perfect. Not everything is tracked or recorded. But the fact that it exists is still really cool. And it can be frustrating at times as a writer because I want it all right now. And I want it all to be accessible to me so that I can do any idea that I have. And MLB sort of controls this data and has released it publicly in limited form. I mean, they didn't have to release it in any form. So it's nice that we have it. And I know teams would probably prefer that we didn't have it. But it's sort of like, I don't know, for the last decade or so, I've had access to the state-of-the-art baseball information, whether through Baseball Perspectives or whatever.

We had all the PitchFX information. Anything that was available publicly, I could see and use in articles. And now that's not always the case because MLB gets it first. And MLB has really good people covering this stuff. Mike is great. And he kind of gets the first crack at the data and does really interesting things with it. And so there are times when I wish that we could dig into it in a little more depth and that it were accessible in different ways. Or, you know, partially it's just impatience in that they're still refining these things.

impatience in that they're still refining these things and there is a bit of a growth period with pitch fx where it wasn't in every park and it wasn't totally accurate and there were calibration errors and that lasted for a little while and it's only natural that that period would last longer with stat cast because it's vastly more complicated so we're going to get to a point where it's all useful and we've arrived at a great way to present it. And it's out there, hopefully in a more granular way that we can all sift through as we want, but not quite there yet. And that's understandable. So as it is now, I tend to, I guess, see it more as fun facts and interesting little kind of observations about players who do things maybe and stand out from other players in ways that I wouldn't have realized. But I'm usually not like rocked back on my heels by a stat cast stat. Like it usually

confirms something that I already would have thought. And I like having the numbers to confirm something I would have already thought, but I could understand why someone else would say, I already thought that, and thus I'm deriving no value from the numbers. Yeah. I think this started with a little bit of StatCast complaining or offending, but realistically, this should be a StatCast appreciation episode, sort of. You might remember that two or three years ago, there was a great deal of, I think, very legitimate concern that none of this information would be public. And by the way, we have almost everything. They've hired very outstanding communicators and builders and thinkers in Tango and Darren Willman and Mike

Patriello and so many more that baseball didn't need to do this for for us for you for the whole community this could exist just for them just for the broadcast just for teams uh we get everything that's amazing i remember years ago opening like a bill james annual or something and i saw this is right around when the mariners signed adrian beltray so this is like 12 years ago or something and and his manual had like the top 10 hitters against different pitch types for the previous season like in terms of batting average and slugging and I was like look at Adrian Beltre against sliders look what he did or then look at what he didn't do I thought that was groundbreaking information I remember a few years later when Fangraphs incorporated batted

ball data like ground ball rate. And I thought this is going to change everything. We have speeds and spins and launch angles and release points and everything, almost everything. Everything you could want for like 88% of baseball pitches and hits. More pitches than that, roughly that number of hits. There are still missing plays and like weak grounders and pop-ups and whatnot but whatever there are adjustments that smarter people can make to those and and that's outstanding i think it is incredible it does if i sit back it does blow my mind that we have this information now and i i know i take it for granted in the same

way that i i take everything good about baseball for granted uh when you are immersed in baseball every day and you have to produce content, you can't really pause and think to yourself too often. This is amazing. Look how blessed I am. I'm just going to sit back and appreciate my blessing. If there is a problem, I guess that maybe the problem is on us or just the sort of the outside who maybe over communicate the new information in a way that is not necessary to always have. And I guess that's just sort of a feeling out process where realistically, you don't need to report the average results, the average stuff. And maybe, maybe other people will just take a longer amount of time to get used to knowing what is and what isn't normal.

It doesn't help that exit velocity has six syllables in it and it's just an annoying thing to keep saying over and over. Yeah. So maybe that's kind of a marketing problem, but we've talked about that before and why velocity instead of speed, why exit at all? Why not just have like a very quick word word just like that ball left the bat with the speed of 110 miles per hour it becomes a lot easier more consumable but that's such a minor thing to even point out whatever we say velocity for pitch speed and that's four syllables right

there so whatever yeah i guess there is a maybe oversaturation of stack guest information i can't speak for the average fan because i of course curate the people that I pay attention to. Those people happen to pay a lot of attention to StatCast. But yeah, I guess it's a lot better to have sort of too much StatCast than too little information. And I guess if we were complaining that we know too much about baseball, that's a good place for us to be. Yeah. And if you follow a bunch of stat people on Twitter, which both of us probably do, there's been carping this year about the switch over from PitchFX to TrackMan, which has changed things a little bit in that velocity baselines are different now from what they were. And evidently there's some bugginess going on with the break stats and on pitches. So there are little issues like that that 0.1% of the baseball population is aware of and bothered about, but probably not any sort of permanent issue or something that impacts a lot of people. So those things can maybe get blown out of proportion a little bit. Not that they couldn't have been communicated more clearly, maybe,

but it's not something that impacts a whole lot of the baseball following population. Yeah, if there's anything about velocity, it's not that hard to adjust for. And anyone who's a fan of Hisashi Iwakuma should be, I think, greatly concerned. Okay. Are we done? I think we're done.

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and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Reviews are always welcome. They help push us up the charts. Keep your questions and comments coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. And that is it for this week. So have a wonderful weekend and we will talk to you soon. away from the numbers away from the numbers

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