Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 106: How Good is the Angels’ Offense?/What We Think About the Yips/Does Pitcher Pace Matter?

Episode Date: December 20, 2012

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the Angels’ offense, the dreaded mental block known as the yips, and the impact of the time pitchers take between pitches.

Not Mars. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Earth. Earth. Earth.

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Yep. Yep. Look. Oh. Good morning and welcome to episode 106 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. Ben Lindberg is in New York. New York. Ben, how are you doing?

I am in New York, New York. Good. Yeah. All right. Do you ever watch Girls? I have seen Girls. Is Girls back? I watched the first season. Girls, I don't believe, is back yet but it is uh currently playing in my household on dvd and uh we just watched the episode where she goes to her parents house in michigan right and then we just watched the episode after in which she is back in new york at a party in

bushwick yes and uh it is amazing how you can make any show good by putting it in New York. It's just fun to watch people in New York. Yeah, although I guess it provoked some controversy from people who felt like it wasn't an accurate depiction of Brooklyn. Or it wasn't their version of Brooklyn or something. I don't know. The show in general. Yes. Well, that's probably true.

But that doesn't change my experience. Yeah. All right. So we're back with emails today. And so we're going to read some of those and we're going to answer some of those. And then we're going to go on with our lives. So should I read one first? you should all right so i'm going to start with one from a gentleman named robert who says after the hamilton signing the angels lineup seems to

be pretty much set except possibly for the departure of one or two of the outfielders this was written before the news that they had traded Kendry's Morales for Jason Vargas today. That said, is it particularly likely to be a better offense than it was last year? And then he goes through a number of players trying to decide whether they were better last year than they should be or worse last year than they should be, and concludes the Angels have a decent chance of getting more health from Ioneta and another step forward from Trumbo, but it sounds to me as if it adds up to a better than even chance of fewer runs scored. We also had a question of whether we liked, whether we thought that the angels would have been better with Granke or Hamilton. So I suppose we can answer both of these just by talking

about the angels for a while. I just wonder though is a um a kind of classic way of analyzing a team is to uh sort of just say oh well he's going to be worse and he's going to be better and he's going to be worse and he's going to be better um and i always find that's a sort of dangerous way to evaluate a team um but with the angels it does seem seem like at almost every position, I think you can maybe make a case that they're going to be a little bit worse around the diamond. So I could see the argument. I mean, he's right that Ioneta was injured and Ioneta was replaced by pretty poor hitters and I think maybe you could say that Pujols has some growth left still in him since he is probably I don't know I think that last year is probably a little bit below his true talent but like he mentions that it's hard to imagine

Trout getting better a two-win drop-off is hardly inconceivable. I think actually a five-win drop-off is hardly inconceivable. I think probably a five-win season out of Trout would be a pretty fair estimate. So they had the best lineup in the American League last year. Do you think that they have an elite lineup? Yeah, sure. Okay. I think so.

I don't know that I would say it's better. It was the best, if I recall, it was the best true average-wise by a few points at least, by maybe several points. Probably wouldn't expect it to be better, I guess, even with the addition of Hamilton. I mean, you lose Hunter and Morales and presumably something from Trout. Yeah, I wouldn't expect it to be better, but I would still expect it to be the best or one of the, say, three best in the league, certainly. Yeah, there's not really going to be any controversy in this i guess because i think we mostly agree i there's also the fact that um uh social last year played um vernon wells down the stretch more than he i mean he basically put borges on the bench for the last couple months of the season and wells ended up getting about a half season's worth of plate appearances i think there's a reasonable chance that wells doesn't really make it even

out of spring training this year or if he does that he has an even smaller role um and that or just plays full-time or just the jury is out on his bat but yeah i don't know how much i would expect that to improve offensively i mean i believe in his bat so you don't have to a lot of people we don't but i do uh so i think there's and i mean you know and also vernon wells is really bad yes yes uh you think he will be traded or just cut? I don't know. One of those things, though. Yeah, I mean, I've been sort of surprised to see multiple teams kind of linked to him.

And so if teams are talking about him, then presumably they would take him if they don't have to take any of the money. I mean, if that's true, then the Angels would have no reason to cut him, right? They would have no reason to simply give him to some team willing to take on a million dollars. So I guess he'll get traded. I don't know. I guess, well, the Hamilton move was one of your three least favorite moves of the offseason, so I guess that probably means

you would be better you would you think the angels would be better off with cranky or does it i didn't like the cranky move all that much either yeah i i don't know i mean i do think that it would be better off uh well i don't know do i think they'd be better off with cranky i mean i think i if if it's cranky and morales with um like borges on the bench or vargas and hamilton i think i i don't know yeah they're projected for almost exactly the same number of wins. Hamilton has a projection of 3.9 warp, and Grinke's is 3.5. I think I'd rather have Hamilton do that for 13.

Yeah, that probably makes sense. And you have said before that it's not like the Angels have to replace, I mean, they have to replace Heron and Santana, but Heron and Santana weren't good last year. So that's not as daunting a task as it sounds. So do you think now that with Vargas and Blanton and the people they have now, how does their rotation stack up to last year's?

Probably not really. It's probably not that much better. But I don't know. The thing about the Angels is that they won, I think, 89 games last year. And I think if you played that season again a hundred times, I think they would win more than 89 games most of the time. I just think that they were better than 89 last year. So it's hard for me to say whether they've improved or not improved. I think that they've mostly held the line.

And some guys are going to do better and some guys are going to do worse. But I think that they are a true 90-plus win team team at their core and i think they were and i think they still will be um but i don't know i think the rotation is probably um worse even than it was last year i think that they have probably not replaced the innings um the heron, Santana, and Granky's share of the innings with same run prevention abilities. I actually think that they will get even worse. And once it gets to October, if they get to October, I think they probably will get to October.

I honestly can't imagine who starts game three. And so I imagine that July they're going to have to try to figure out a way to reach into their farm system, which is extremely weak. And we can even further by trading for a sort of more acceptable playoff starter. Because, I mean, I just can't imagine Blanton starting a postseason. I don't know if Hansen's going to be anything this year and Vargas. So, yeah, I mean, I think that the rotation is probably worse. Okay. That all sounds acceptable to me.

I don't necessarily mean that in a critical way of Odo. Right. So I think that, you know, I think that maybe there's some questionability to the Blanton signing but it's just they really – I mean their rotation, 60% of their rotation left in a year where they didn't have a ton of payroll flexibility because they've committed so much money to some of these long term deals. So they were in a tough spot and I just don't think they came out of it with a whole lot of strength. Okay.

Shall we move on? I just want to know real quick. I mean, Tommy Hansen, how many innings? And what's his ERA? How many innings? Man, I guess I'll say like 150 and uh i don't know maybe a 4.2 yeah i'll say 110 and 44 okay all. Okay. All right, next question. All right.

What do you got? I have, yeah, well, do you want to do the yips one if you have that one ready? Sure. All right. Okay, so this question is from Alan who says, I heard on a pod last year that one scout said Bauer had the yips. What's your thought on the yips? I like that Alan assumes that we have exactly one thought. Yes. So I never actually heard that Bauer did. Had you heard that?

Not heard that. Yeah. I mean, I'd heard that Bauer had problems with pitching efficiently and could improve his control, certainly, and that was clear in his brief time in the majors. I don't think it approached the level at which you start to wonder whether there's some sort of mental block. I do believe that that's a thing.

I mean, it seems to have happened to people in a way that was not easily fixable. So, yeah, I think it's real. I think the most amazing thing about baseball players is not how, like, what they do. Like, it's not exactly how fast they can run and how hard they can throw and all that,

but it is how rarely the yips happen to them. It seems to me that it would happen to me almost immediately if I faced a count in which I could absolutely not walk the batter. There is no chance that I would throw the ball over the plate. It's unlikely that I would throw the ball. I love my wind-up. It blows my mind. I remember watching Derek Hall in the 2010 World Series, and he came in to start his outing, and he was kind of getting progressively wilder.

It was the World Series. It was the biggest stage. The camera was focused on him. The pitching coach came out and yelled at him. The crowd was, you know, like taunting him. It was in San Francisco. He looked like he was going to cry. And then he just throws a strike.

Like, throws a strike. And, I mean, it just amazes me that it doesn't happen more often that a guy throws five balls in a row and goes, oh, whoops, that's it. Once you know that it's a possibility, once you know that it has afflicted guys, I would think that people would just be totally paranoid about it, always nervous about it. I wrote one time about how I had a period in my life where I was sort of irrationally scared of driving because of the brake. The truck in front of me stopped in the middle of the freeway, and I just had to brake, no big deal, and I missed the brake. I went veering off the road and had this really bumpy adventure kind of thing. For at least a year, maybe more, I was scared that I was going to miss the

brake again. These guys essentially don't ever have that fear they never worry that they're going to lose the ability to do a basic task and i actually when i was in tyler a couple days ago i actually did talk to josh tomlin which we did and i did talk about baseball and i asked and I asked him about the scenario that I described, where it's three balls, bases are loaded, you can't throw a ball. If you throw a ball, your team loses. How do you, and I mean, Tomlin is sort of famous for his control and for his ability to throw strikes,

and I just wondered how he does it when, you know, like a pitcher has to start from a stopped position, and I would think that staring at home plate, you would just think that there are a million ways to miss the target, and there's only one way to hit the target. How do you keep from getting intimidated by that fact? And he says, you know, it's just you've been doing it since you're four. It's your job.

You don't really think of it the same way that a fan thinks of the game. For him, it's just a professional task that he has to do. It's just his job. It's not quite so emotional. You just do it. You don't really consider the emotional part of it. You just do it because it's your job. You're a pro. You should have moved to Manhattan during your fear of missing the break period. I don't even have a driver's license. Yeah, you know, it actually spread to where I would be sitting in cars with other people driving. And when they were breaking, I would actually worry about it.

Because it's actually a real thing it's one of the problems is that when i was going through this i actually read uh malcolm gladwell about pedal air and it made it just seem so easy to have it happen and it seemed like such a problem in the world like i I think, do you remember that publicist in New York who like drove into a club, like Lizzie Grubman or whatever her name was? I think that was the, he wrote about that. He wrote about her and then he wrote about this sort of psychology and the brain science behind pedaling. And it just completely freaked me out. Yeah, well, there is a guy named Randy Consuegra, who, or Consuegra, who, when we were debugging Picota recently, showed up as, I think he was projected to make something like 200 starts and pitch 33 and a third innings, something like that. So that was an obvious bug. And it came from the fact that I think he had made

two starts for the Lowell Spinners in the New York Penn League in 2010 and recorded one out in total in those two starts and allowed 10 earned runs with 10 walks, no strikeouts, two hits by pitch or hit by pitches, and six wild pitches. So I was looking up what happened with him with Daniel Rathman the other day. And this guy, Consuegra, was apparently just offered a minor league deal with the Nats earlier this month. I don't think he pitched at all last year, at least in the U.S. But his game log for those last couple games he pitched in Lowell is just really, really ugly. It's like, okay, so he walks the leadoff batter,

then the next guy's up, he a wild pitch he walks the guy then another wild pitch then another wild pitch then a walk then a walk then a hit by pitch uh with the bases loaded and then he gets replaced so that was his whole outing um and there was a there was an article about it uh and uh the valley cats pitching coach which was the team he was facing, said he's part of the opposition, but it's still tough to watch. It breaks your heart. And then he declined to talk to the media after the game. And the Valley Cats manager said, it's obviously a mental thing. I try to relax him.

I've seen it before in my career, but I don't know the secret to fix it. And it was just a very sudden thing. He had been fine before that, really. The season before that, I guess he walked four guys per nine innings, but he didn't have any kind of crazy control problem. So it just seems to happen sometimes. And of course, there are famous examples of people it's happened to in the majors. So I don't know that it's possible to say that it's not a real thing. And clearly, it's not easily remedied in some cases. about the most, I think it's what makes baseball exciting in a lot of ways is just the possibility that a player will completely lose the ability to function. And it's not so much that you want it to happen because it's like that pitching coach said, it's sort of heartbreaking and everybody feels bad and nobody wants to watch it. But you need that kind of tension. You need the possibility. It's like, I don't know.

I mean, I've heard that people watch NASCAR because there's always a possibility that there's going to be a crash and somebody's going to die, which is kind of disgusting and macabre. But in a way, watching baseball, one of the things that keeps that tension going is knowing that somebody can just completely lose the ability to function at any given time. All right. I guess our last question for today comes from a gentleman named Donald.

He says, is there any comparative data on starting pitchers who are fast workers versus slow workers? Commentators will complement both styles. For example, he works so quickly he keeps the hitters off balance. Kirk Reeder and Mark Burley come to mind. He works so slowly he ruins the hitters' timing and interrupts their routines. Josh Beckett. I also wonder if there's data on batters stepping out and asking for time and whether or not that really does negatively impact pitcher results.

So there is data on this, and various people have looked into it. In 2007, Dan Fox wrote an article for Baseball Perspectives about this. I think he just polled the Baseball Perspectives staff to ask for notably slower or quick workers and then looked to see whether there was any kind of correlation with how those pitchers pitched, and he didn't find anything. But then the following year, the wider availability of PitchFX made it possible to do this in a more scientific way, because in the PitchFX data, every pitch comes with a timestamp. So you can see exactly when it was thrown, and you can see exactly how long it was

before the next pitch was thrown and how long and it back took and you can divide the at bat by the number of pitches and and throw out pick off throws and then you get an average time per pitch and the average time per pitch is is something like 22 seconds And this is a subject that Mike Fast has looked into and Jeremy Greenhouse and Dave Allen and Lucas Apostolaris. And basically it seems to be more of just a kind of curiosity than anything that we can use for analytical purposes. Based on their analysis, it seems as if pitchers control the pace more than batters do,

which probably makes sense, although certainly some batters are slower than others. I think Carlos Pena is the notably slowest batter, just in terms of stepping out between pitches and adjusting your batting gloves and all the other things that batters can do to slow the pace of the game down um and of course it depends on the situation so if there are runners on base that there's a longer time between pitches uh if there are two strikes there's a longer time between pitches as the at bat progresses like they're on average

there's a longer time between the 10th and 11th pitch of an at-bat than the first and the second, for example. But can I just say real quick, though, if there's a 10th or 11th pitch, then by definition it's a foul ball. And a foul ball requires you to get a new ball, requires you to rub the ball, et cetera. True. And so the only real, I think, study of it that I'm aware of is from Mike Fast, who at the Hardball Times in 2008 wrote an article called Short Work, where he not only looked to see which pitch efficiency and its relationship to the average time between pitches, because there is that way of thinking that a pitcher who works quickly keeps his defenders on their toes, and they'll be more likely to record outs on batted balls, whereas guys who work slowly, the fielders are just kind of drifting off and not paying attention, and they're not going to get a good jump on the ball. And he found that there is very little relationship between the

time between pitches and the defensive efficiency. He found on the whole, there's really no correlation. He found that relievers tend to take longer between pitches than starters do. But he did find that at the extremes, there does seem to be something. So that a pitch thrown within 10 seconds after the previous pitch has a 281 BABIP, but a pitch thrown more than 50 seconds after the previous pitch has a 366 BABIP. And then he found the same thing for at-bats. So an at-bat that takes 15 seconds or less has a BABIP of 3.14, whereas at-bats that take longer than two minutes have a BABIP of 3.34.

So he didn't make any real definitive conclusions, but he said basically that if you take a really, really long time or you're really, really quick, that can maybe help you. But that there doesn't seem to be any kind of real relationship just on a per-picture basis. The fact that Mark Burley is fast and Josh Beckett is slow doesn't seem to help or hinder each of them in an obvious way. But it is still fun to look at, and you can find that data at Fangraphs if you are interested.

What a delightful answer. Yes, thank you. All right, so that's the end of Email Thursday. We'll be back tomorrow with Episode 107. And I guess you could start sending emails for the next week's show at podcast at baseballperspectives.com Alright, talk to you tomorrow.