Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1060: The Other Best-in-Baseball Debate

Episode Date: May 20, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on a few topics from their previous episode, including allowing first career hits, defining jams and, naturally, bat-boning, then banter about the Mets and Kenley Jansen and discuss why we’re seeing fewer fastballs and Clayton Kershaw vs. Chris Sale. Audio intro: Robyn Hitchcock, "The Bones in the Ground" Audio outro: […]

It's so amazing because two so totally different styles of pitching, both really wildly effective here. It's kind of interesting how you can, baseball is so different. In the ground are all fine In the birds in the air Well, they sing a rattling air In the birds in the air Are all mine Hello and welcome to episode 1060 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters, of whom there are several.

Thank you to all of you. I jeff sullivan of fangraphs joined as always by ben lindberg of the ringer hello ben hello how are you doing this is my fourth podcast of the day of the day i'm doing all right my god other than that okay so how much are you dreading having to do a fourth podcast of the day or is this like the light at the end of the tunnel? I don't know how you view this. Yeah, this one feels like home to me. This one feels like I've been doing this for the longest time. This is my first podcast. This is the one where I feel like I can just relax and no one expects very much out of me. All right. Well, then why don't we relax and talk about some bat moaning? Yeah. Let's do a couple of quick follow-ups to two topics from our previous episode.

First, about allowing first career hits. We talked about it was prompted by a question about Bartolo Colon and how many first career hits he'd allowed. Only 11, as it turns out, which is not very remarkable. But what was remarkable is that Clayton Kershaw has 12, which seems to be the active leader in that category. And we were ruminating on that as we were recording and seemed odd that someone who is pretty young and also really great would have allowed the most. But as a few people pointed out, there are reasons why you would expect Clayton Kershaw to allow a lot of first career hits. Namely, he gets a lot of opening day starts,

and opening day starts seem like the most likely time to allow first career hits. So I don't know how many he's had, something like seven opening day starts already, I think. So that's a good opportunity to accumulate these. And also some people suggested that maybe teams sit tough lefties against him and might stick a righty in there who doesn't get to play these. And also some people suggested that maybe teams sit tough lefties against him and might stick a righty in there who doesn't get to play much. I don't know if that's a big factor, but maybe you get some lineup changes,

you get some bench guys in games against Kershaw to get the platoon advantage. So that could be another factor. So it is really a reflection of how good he is that he is allowed the most. Yeah, it's one of those where giving up a lot of something bad is a reflection of how good he is that he is allowed the most yeah it's one of those where like giving up a lot of something bad is a reflection of how good you are i wonder about the opening day thing i know enough people brought it up just in the first place it's kind of weird to

be analyzing something with such a small sample that we've never analyzed before so it's kind of weird but regarding the opening day thing i get it because it's like the first of the season people could be making their debuts but how often do we actually see rookies with zero experience make an opening day roster and yeah I think it's not that common obviously if with anyone good enough to stick in an opening day lineup that's usually going to be some sort of top prospect and teams have always been wary about starting those guys service times and service clocks right away so I don't know it would be interesting to have a breakdown of who the players have been and when those hits have occurred, but I don't know how much more appetite there is for further analyzing Clayton Kershaw's first career hits allowed.

Yeah. I don't have a list of Kershaw's, but I do have a list of Dan Heron's because Heron heard our conversation the other day. He tweeted at me and he said, I hated giving up players' first career hits. Can I get a list of mine? And he guessed that Brian McCann and Travis Shaw might be on that list, and they were. And Brian McCann, probably the best player he has allowed a first career hit to, although Kyle Seeger has a chance to be the best. So that's interesting to me because I'm trying to put myself in that place and imagine how I would feel if I allowed a first career hit. And I would think that I'd kind of like it in a way. I mean, you're never happy to allow a hit as a pitcher, but if you have to allow a hit, wouldn't it be kind of nice to be part of someone else's best memory ever to that point in their life? And you know that however long they live,

they will replay that moment and you'll make little cameos in their memory. And if they go on to be a great player, then someday the broadcast will be showing the flashback to that first hit and you'll get a little airtime long after you retired. So I think I'd kind of like it. Maybe there's a pride component to it where you don't want to allow the guy with zero experience to get a hit off you and be the first guy to kind of show that he can beat big league pitching. But still, there's kind of a nice aspect to it. Yeah, there's an upside. Would you believe me if I told you that Clayton Kershaw got his first career hit off Bartolo Colon?

Really? No, he didn't. Oh, okay. It was Cole Hamels. Cole Hamels back in 2008. But that would have been a great coincidence. I was really hopeful I was mining these old game logs, and Bartolo Colon did not get his first career hit off anyone whose name you need to remember.

Well, Mike Bates, the writer, tweeted at Heron in response to his tweet and said, imagine how bad Jason Schmidt feels about giving up your first career hit. And then Dan Heron replied with another tweet of just a picture of the ball that was his first career hit. And then Dan Heron replied with another tweet of just a picture of the ball that was his first career hit. It says the date and the pitcher and the opponent and what it was, a double. And so he's got that on his desk in a protective case. So case in point, no pun intended, that this is a special memory for many players. And obviously, Heron prizes this moment. I don't know how Jason Schmidt feels about it, but I don't know. I think I would be perversely pleased to have given up a lot of

first career hits. And that's probably why I'm not a professional athlete. I have no competitive drive in that way. So maybe Dan Heron would be the authority to answer this or any pitcher. But I wonder, so you have Dan Heron and he's preserved the ball he hit for his first career hit obviously dan heron's job was not primarily to be a hitter but a lot of pitchers quite enjoy the act of hitting and they think it's kind of fun and silly when they actually get a hit so what kind of achievement would a ball i guess need to represent to be a more valued personal pitching achievement than dan heron's first career hit. Like if he threw, if it's a ball that finishes off a no hitter, then that would be presumably more valuable, but like first game ball, first strikeout, first out, first what, what would it have to be?

I would think first game ball would be pretty special to me. If I were a pitcher, I think first game ball would matter more to me than first hit because pitching is my job. So probably that, but if you start getting down to first strikeout or I probably would prize the hit more than that. I guess it depends on the hit. If it's some cheap little dribbler, maybe I wouldn't be as proud of it or a bunt hit or something as I would be of a solid double. Okay. I can see that. But I also figure that by the end of the career where you've amassed so many baseballs that represent things in your career

that maybe you're more willing to go play catch with your first ever game ball and you just leave the first hit alone on the desk because you'll never have another first hit. And I know you'll never have another first game ball, but still, I don't know. Maybe I'm coming at this from the wrong perspective. Yeah, Dan, if you're listening,

maybe you can mail me all of your baseballs so I can send them to a lab to be tested just to make sure the ball's not juiced for sure. So the other follow-up is about bat boning. We have a lot of bat boning talk to get to. So if you didn't listen to our last episode, you should probably just go back and listen to it now. It was one of the last answers. But bat boning is a thing that despite being people who write about baseball and follow the game very closely,

I don't think either of us was in any way aware of. But it's a tradition in baseball for giant cow femurs to be used. Bats are rubbed against them ostensibly to make them harder and reduce chipping. So as we expected, a lot of people

wrote in about the bat boning segment. First thing I'm going to do is just play a clip that I came across of Bob Euchre talking about bat boning. And I happened to find this on Twitter. I saw a reference to Euchre talking about bat boning and then a couple people in the facebook group were able to help me track down the exact clip thanks to brian and matt so here it is bob euchre on bat boning from a game last april boning used to be a very popular thing with the players in years past, you would take an actual big bone off of some huge animal, a trotosaurus or a bratosaurus, dinosaurus, and carry it around with you, and the pitch, swing, and the miss, and Colton Wong is gone. Yeah, and all you did, you'd sit on the bat handle this is what they did players did

and you take this big bone and you rub it on the surface that you hit with right-handed batter you know whichever way you hold the bat and supposedly that hardened the bat where they didn't break or chip as much. So boning your bat was quite a popular thing. And Robert Redford was a bat boner from a long time ago and in that movie. But they don't do it anymore animals just don't want to give up their bones anymore that's all okay so that was wonderful in many ways i especially liked bob euchre saying boning used to be a very popular thing with players in years past players not so into boning these days. Just got to focus on the field.

But a lot of people sent us, there's a picture of Joe DiMaggio boning a bat. There's a reference to Ted Williams boning a bat. He didn't want his bats to chip, so he would bone them. There's some more recent... I'm sorry, I can't help this.

I'm surprised I'm able to keep a straight face while saying this, mostly. And there are some more recent references. So Don Baylor, evidently a bat boner. And when he was a hitting coach for the Diamondbacks a little while ago, he brought bat boning back. And he had a bat bone in the dugout that I guess he encouraged players to use. And then someone else sent us an article to, and this is an article from this February from the Palm Beach Post. And this is about Nationals equipment manager, Mike Wallace. And he's got a bat bone that he's been dragging around for 35 years now.

He got it when he was with the Expos. He's taken it with him ever since. He found it in a butcher shop 35 years ago. It's been used by generations of hitters. George Brett boned on this bat. Vlad Guerrero boned on this bat. Ryan Zimmerman boning on this bat right now. Wallace says, quote, Zim uses it the most. He likes to teach the younger guys

how to use it. He mounted the bone now. Dude, come on. It's still a thing in baseball. Almost no one sent us any evidence that this works or that there's any sense whatsoever to bat boning. Some other people said that they have done it in their own amateur careers. And

I don't know if this is the sort of thing that maybe at one time had a point, maybe the bats were softer and they're better manufactured, better wood. Now that could be the case that this is just sort of a remnant. It doesn't work anymore, but it's been passed down. Although we did get an email from Anthony who says that the process of lathing the bats as they're made today exposes less compressed wood fibers, even on ultra hard woods used in bats. He says none of the woods used in bats have an LBF, wood hardness measurement, high enough to make boning useless. If they made bats out of desert ironwood or lignum vitae, there would be no utility in boning them because they are already uber hard,

but both maple and ash have lower LBF. Then he brings numbers into the discussion. Lignum vitae has an LFB of 4200. Oak, which is denser by a smidge than the ash used in bats, has an LFB of 1290. Lignum vitae is so dense and hard it doesn't float. Bats still float and they can be compressed by boning, which makes the surface of the bat harder and more resilient. I haven't verified any of that, but it sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about. Anyway, the manufacturer Marucci still holding a torch

for bat boning, although it seems like on the player level it's clearly being phased out but still around in some capacity so this is a thing we know now bat boning it's real i i wonder if this is one of those things where now that we have talked about it and thought about it for a few days we're just going to suddenly become hyper aware of all instances in which bat boning comes up now granted i'm sure people are going to start emailing us and tweeting us whenever anybody brings up bat boning in any sort of circumstance but i can't believe it's been this long and i'd never i'd never heard of something and you'd never heard of something that's so steeped in baseball tradition this goes back decades many of the best

players ever have done it i don't know if we've just somehow avoided references to it or what because it's not like it's been hiding, and it's their players do it. We know what other things players do with their equipment in their spare time, but somehow bat boning has avoided us this entire time. Yeah, I never saw any Sonoma Stompers boning bats. Ryan Zimmerman

is doing it now. He's having a breakthrough or a breakout, re-breakout, I don't know, bounce back. Bounce back is the word I'm looking for, season that he's having at the plate. Is he boning better, I don't know, bounce back. Bounce back is the word I'm looking for. Season that he's having at the plate. Is he boning better? I don't know. It's as good of an explanation as any I can think of. Yeah, well, actually, Travis has a post up on Fangraphs right now.

Ryan Zimmerman's unsatisfying explanation behind success. I have not clicked. I have not read. So for all I know, it could be that he is boning his bat more. I'm not going to click. I'm going to just leave the mystery and presume that maybe it's bat boning credits it to more successful boning he's been able to get his bat harder and harder through proper boning this season and uh he's altered his boning angle he's uh getting more optimal boning so do you have any banter

you want to get to before your topic? Well, it's a lot less delightful, but I did want to mention, did you happen to read Jerry Krasnick's article on the Mets and injuries? No, I've got it open in a tab and I'm looking forward to reading it, but I have not yet. Okay. Well, it's only several thousand words, so I'm sure that you can read it on the fly, but I don't know if it's worth doing a whole summary but i think people have wondered for uh years what's the matter with the mets why everybody seems to be constantly injured and then so many of the injuries are constantly downplayed and then even just this season you know david wright is out joanna sespedes is currently

out noah cindergaard is out and his is the most bizarre of all the situations since he refused an mri etc and the team did not have him take one which whoops should have done that probably i don't know it's all hindsight but enough people have asked about the mets and injuries and it was one of those things that called for some measure of i guess i'd say investigative journalism or just like sourced journalism which is something that i wasn't going to be able to do from portland oregon and i don't know, I guess it's something that you could have conceivably done. But Jerry Krasnick did it first. He went and talked to, I don't know, 20 people talking about the Mets and everything that's gone on with them. And I don't think reading the article, no spoilers, but

there's no like conclusion reach that says this is the problem. Here's how to fix it. Of course, it's an open question. And no one is really quite sure what the true magnitude of the Mets health problems is and no one is therefore quite sure how to resolve it so there's no real good measure of how injured a team has been or how costly those injuries have been there there's a website that's called man games lost I believe it is.com and that measures the amount of time players miss on the disabled list but of course that doesn't really tell you about the quality of the players then there's like wins above replacement that goes missing but those are all estimates and so on and then you know the Dodgers show up high in these measurements in part because they sort of deliberately put people on the disabled list because of their own system so it's all it's all complicated it's by no means

clear the Mets have even been the most hurt team the Rangers would probably have something to say to the Mets about all of their complaining. Rob Arthur wrote something for 538 a couple of weeks ago about the fact that the Mets weren't even that good at getting injured. Like they were just slightly worse than average if you look at wins above replacement lost per season over a certain span. That's cited right here in one of these paragraphs. Crossing writes, quote, meanwhile, 538's Rob Arthur used a different set of calculations and determined hyperlink that the dodgers lead the majors with 42.8 games in war to injury from 2010 to 2017 and the mets are eighth at 32.8 so 10 fewer wins lost i guess 10 wins gained however you want to say it to injury in the last seven

plus years so there is perhaps understandably a lot of uncertainty about just how much has actually gone wrong for the mets it does not help that they are such a high profile organization with injuries to such high profile players clearly now they're also just sort of selective that now whenever a mets player is injured it just means cue the freak out a mets another mets player is injured and there's stuff you can't really do about that but there is speculation within the article that maybe Jeff Wilpon is too involved in matters where he doesn't know anything I guess that's me paraphrasing but not really he's not a medical expert so he should probably butt out but Sandy Alderson denies that Wilpon is too involved but of course you kind of have to deny that when you're talking on the record about your boss. Right. There is some speculation about Mets strength and conditioning coordinator Mike Barwiss,

who there's a video from this past March with Mike Barwiss working out Ioannis Cespedes and ESPN's Jessica Mendoza. So she could sort of get an eye on how Ioannis Cespedes prepares for the year. And there are several paragraphs written in there about Barwiss and how he's sort of controversial within the strength and conditioning community, which I can't speak to anything about that. I don't think I've ever done a squat, but Barwiss, some people think he's too much of a showman. He's achieved some level of success because he's worked out with football players. And some people think maybe that doesn't translate over to baseball very well, but I don't know.

There's just so many different ways that players can get injured that it just seems like that's way too complicated a subject to pin on any one person or any one problem if anything maybe it's just a problem of communicating and different ideas being expressed by different people within the organization and you uh you can all i would recommend that anyone interested just read the article because it goes into far more detail than i can in my summary of the article that I've read twice. So everyone click on it. Just Google Jerry Krasnick Mets and that will probably come up.

It's pretty good. And if anyone's looking for an answer for why the Mets are the Mets, tough beans. It's not in there, but it's at least interesting to read. Yeah, I will take that recommendation as soon as we stop speaking. So about bat boning, one more thing to say. We got an email from Joe who said that in high school when he played travel ball, his team boned bats. And they used chicken drumstick bones because they were cylindrical and accessible, unlike giant cow femurs, which aren't really just lying around. But his understanding was that they would compress the pores in the wood in order to harden the bat.

But chicken drumstick bones, I think I need the giant cow femur. This isn't bat boning if you're using something that you could pull apart. Yeah, no, that feels like it's too weak. That's bat rubbing. That's not bat boning weak you that's that that's that rubbing that's not bat boning then at that point you were just touching your bat with a bone it's basically like a voodoo thing whereas i think you need if it was to make any sense at all you need like a strong firm enough bone to withstand like strong pressure that you're applying on the bone with a bat in order to like harden it i guess which is what we're alleging is taking place.

Yeah. Yeah. About that. But, you know, even if you're boning, I don't know. I've never boned a bat before. I've never boned a bat in my life. I'm never going to. I think I've maybe even held a wooden bat like three times ever.

But if you're boning it on a bone, I guess I need other words, you'd be creating like a small flat surface. Would you not on the bat because you're rubbing it up against something. And so you'd end up sort of like striping a bat in sort of a very fine way that you'd have to look for to notice. But I would think that that could alter the quality of contact and not always in a good way because you're not going to be able to bone in a perfect cylindrical fashion. Yeah. You know what they say that it's the hardest thing to do in sports is to bone in a perfect cylindrical fashion. Yeah, you know what they say. It's the hardest thing to do in sports is to bone a cylindrical bat with a cylindrical bone. It's just no flat surfaces.

So can pitchers reverse bone the baseball to make them softer? I don't know what you're supposed to do. Maybe that's what's going on. Maybe that explains the home runs. They're boning the baseball. There you go. People were like, we have all these bones and we're out of things to bone

with them. Let's bone some baseballs. And so now they're just boning the pores right out of the leather. Alright, well thank you Joe. Thank you Michael. And I forgot there's another follow up I should mention because this is another thing we talked about in the last email show. We talked about

defining a jam and what constitutes a jam. And we were using run expectancy tables and basically saying that anything higher than the default run expectancy when you start an inning, anything over a run expected that seems like a jam. Or maybe we set the market like 1.3 or something, which was certain situations but not others. But Travis wrote in and said, based on the non-baseball definition of jam relating to being stuck or squeezed, I think a baseball jam has to have multiple runners clogging up the base paths, a traffic jam of sorts, along with the pitcher being metaphorically stuck between a rock and a hard place. People also use the phrase got out of the jam allowing only one run, alluding to the idea that a jam

has a high potential to lead to multiple runs. I don't think runner on third, no outs, really qualifies, since there isn't any sort of traffic jam on the bases, and while it's likely that the runner will score, it's basically a sunk cost, and the chance of additional run scoring should be the same as at the start of the inning.

Perhaps instead, we could look for a run expectancy table for how often a given situation leads to multiple runs, excluding scenarios where zero or one run scores. And I like this because my initial inclination when we answered this was that there had to be multiple base runners, and I didn't really come up with a good reason why that had to be the case. And as you pointed out, there are times when there are multiple base runners and a lower run expectancy than you start an inning with, which obviously shouldn't count. But I agree with Travis. I think there should be a traffic or a clogging aspect to the jam, at least in an ideal jam situation. Yeah, I guess it's hard because when we're trying to define a word like this, it makes things binary and nothing is really binary and you can have degrees of a jam if you if it's the top of the eighth inning and you are your team

is leading by one and you bring in a reliever to inherit nobody out and a runner on third that feels like a jam just because the lead is suddenly in great jeopardy and if the pitcher succeeded striking out the next three guys or whatever then he could walk off the field the announcer would say and i don't know sean kelly but probably not him gets out of the jam by retiring all three battles he faced so i'm not this feels like something that will just inevitably end up as a fangraphs post where i pull the audience about a bunch of different situations and then i figure out what the people think is a jam just kind of crowdsource it and in fact i'm just going to make a little note right here and that's one topic down for next week.

Thank you, Fangraphs community. In fact, that's two topics because I need a follow-up post examining the results. Fantastic. Thank you, Fangraphs and by extension, the Effectively Wild community for raising these important questions that we can cover with your help. Yeah. One other quick thing that one of our listeners mentioned, Patreon supporter Michael also pointed out that Kenley

Jansen has been incredible so far this year. I don't know that we have that much to say about it, but Kenley Jansen has a negative 0.96 FIP right now. Always fun when you see the negative FIP, especially when you're like six weeks into the season already and someone still has a significantly negative FIP. And he has, in 16 innings, struck out 32 guys and walked zero. I don't know. God damn. I don't know if he's... The best part is that he has a 393 BABIP to go along with his 1.13 ERA and infinite strikeout-to-walk ratio and negative 0.96 FIP and 0.20 XFIP. So I don't

know how this is happening. I haven't looked to see if he's doing anything differently or if it's just the fact that he was awesome to begin with and he's just having a particularly awesome stretch. We can't really say lucky stretch because he's been unlucky of anything it seems like but he's just been amazing just going to make a note of that and that's two so one one thing looking at this so kenley jansen obviously has been amazing for a while and he's been one of the rare pitchers who throws at least 70 percent strikes and we don't talk about strike rate raw very much but the league average is usually about 63, and really wild pitchers are like 59 to 60% strikes. So a small difference makes a big difference.

Jansen way up there, like prime cliff lead territory. So here's the fun thing about this season. I know it's a small sample, whatever. Kenley Jansen this year has thrown a whole bunch of strikes again, about 73%. So their baseball reference keeps track of how often different types of strikes are recorded. So for example, Kenley Jansen last year got 26% swinging strikes. So that's whiffs. When he threw a strike, batters swung and missed 26% of the time.

So this year, Kenley Jansen's swinging strike rate is up about 2 percentage points. He's getting more whiffs. However, he's also getting more called strikes by 10 percentage points. So he's getting more called strikes and swinging strikes, which all come at the expense of foul balls and balls hitting in play. So batters are simultaneously watching more Kenley Jansen pitches go by, and they're also swinging and missing more often, which is crazy. Oh, that's going gonna be a fun poster

right unless he like blows it over the weekend and one helpful thing is that he's thrown a first pitch strike 77 of the time the league average is 60 so kenley jansen just constantly ahead and dominating the fools that he faces i guess this means that kenley jansen is probably better than tommy canley yeah did you see that Latroy Hawkins said that he was the worst teammate that Hawkins had ever had? Who's that? Kenley? Yeah.

Interesting. I did not see that. Said that on a live baseball broadcast. Just more interesting than the typical comment you hear in a baseball broadcast. I wonder what the reason was. I think they had a fight of some sort in 2014. All right. So now that we have planned out your next work week, what did you want to talk about today?

Well, it's been half an hour, so I guess it's about time to start wrapping this up and we can move on to our Monday schedule. I actually came in. I didn't have a dedicated topic. I had two potential like mini topics that I wanted to discuss. So in essence, I guess they're just banter points at this point. We'll just go with them as we can. I guess we can start with the less interesting or less fun one. But one topic I wanted to bring up so much, talk about how the zone has been changing in the past few years.

And obviously there's a home run surge and more home runs on polls down in the zone, not so much up in the zone, etc. But one trend that has been, I think, under discussed that we can discuss here for five or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, who knows how long this will go, is that league-wide fastball rate continues to plummet. There are fewer and fewer fastballs every single season. And so we have data going back to 2002. I don't know how trustworthy it is all the way back then, but I'll bring it up anyway. According to Baseball Info Solutions, in 2002, there were just over 64% of all pitches were fastballs. That probably makes sense. It's maybe fairly intuitive that pitchers throw off their fastballs. Everybody says they throw off their fastball, and they used to throw nearly two-thirds of

the time. Are we lumping in sinkers and cutters and all those? Because at one point they did, right? They just called those all the same thing. Yeah, so that's one of the problems with going further back is that pitch identification and classification skills have changed so cutters according to baseball info solutions there were no cutters in 2002 and 2003 that's probably not true but i don't know maybe they just emerged so it's difficult to tell fastballs separate mariano rivera existed at the time but did he i i'm

skeptical now i don't remember what the world was like 15 years ago it was a happier place was it i don't know it's not what the data says data says no mariana maybe there were cutters but moving forward when cutters started to show up in the data as recently as 2008 pitchers threw more than 60 fastballs this is just fastballs not counting cutters cutters i'm using as a separate pitch even though i know they're called cut fastballs i don't care and fastballs have dropped from 61 in 2008 all the way very very steadily they have dropped this year to just over 55 so far compared to last year there's been a drop of about a percentage point and a half i know

this is a very subtle, small drop, but it's just another one of those things where the fastball rate is changing consistently. It is trending downward. It is now dropped by at least a percentage point in two consecutive seasons. And if you know anything about how baseball moves, those are pretty dramatic shifts, considering we're talking about the most reliable, most traditional pitch. Everybody has a fastball. it's the first thing you ever learn to throw when you are a baseball player and baseball is shifting away from fastballs so i know we've talked before about guys like rich hill and lance mccullers

and masahiro tanaka and guys who are moving away from throwing fastballs and this is a league-wide trend and i think it's a fun thing to discuss considering how much talk there is about there being more velocity in the game you think that would go hand in hand with more fastballs, but no, not so much. Yeah. Well, zone rate is also down, right? Pitchers are throwing fewer pitches in the strike zone. And obviously that's connected. It's sort of a chicken and egg-ish kind of thing. I mean, you tend to throw breaking balls and off-speed pitches more outside of the zone and so if you're throwing more of those pitches obviously you're going to be throwing fewer strikes but you're maybe deciding to throw fewer strikes because you are scared of

hitters hitting five balls and hitting home runs would be at least one reason to do that in the last couple years now that we know that hitters are dangerous when they make contact and either there was something going on with the ball or just hitters have changed in a way. They've altered their approach. They're swinging super hard to try to hit home runs or not worrying about making contact. trying to take advantage of that and trying to play into that tendency to swing really hard, no matter what the situation is, and get guys swinging really hard at pitches outside the strike zone that they then can't adjust and make contact with. So when hitters have altered their approach in that way and the results on balls in play have changed the way they have. It would seem to make sense for pitchers to test the limits and try to get hitters to chase and swing hard at those pitches that they can't actually hit. So that would explain the last couple of years. That doesn't explain the larger trend because offense was way down a few years ago and evidently this was still going on. I guess if

you think about it in the most simple possible way, most hitters will tell you that they go up to the plate looking fast. Well, then they adjust to anything else. Sometimes they guess, of course, they try to figure out what's coming, but they go up there ready to respond to something going 95 miles per hour and then they figure it out from there. Well, I guess just from a very simplistic perspective, if you were a pitcher and you know the hitter is up there thinking fastball first, why do that? Obviously, there are a lot of game theory implications on either side of things. You have to throw a certain amount of fastballs.

But if the hitter is looking for a fastball, how much of even throwing now 55% fastballs, how much of that is just throwing a bunch of fastballs? Because you've always thrown a bunch of fastballs. How much of working off of the fastball is just because that's what people have told you to do obviously a change up is only going to work because of a fastball it has to be a change up from something everybody needs to throw fastballs but how many do you need to throw how many fastballs you need to throw in order to keep a hitter honest especially now it feels like there are enough games this is anecdotal where the hitters will talk about how a pitcher was really good about pitching backwards and throwing surprising pitches and surprising counts because you still

go up there expecting fastballs and fastball counts there are still such things as fastball counts and i guess i just don't know how how much that is an examined position versus it's just maybe one more area where baseball is too caught up in what it's always been because fastballs are simple to throw. And a lot of these lost fastballs have been converted into curveballs, right? Curveballs, are they up again this year? Because I know that was a thing people identified last year that there were more curveballs being thrown, not solely because of her chill but in part curveball rate this year is not up it hasn't gone down slider rate is up a little bit and there are

also more change-ups all right so subtle subtle things i can tell you though fangraphs keeps track of pitch type run values i don't want to go into the explanation of what that is just think of it as a measure of how things how people have done against things so last year hitters had a a wildly successful year relative to their own average against fastballs and they had what looks like their worst year ever on limited record against sliders i haven't run the numbers for all the different pitch types but he would certainly back up the idea and in this year the same thing is happening again where hitters are have not been good against any other pitch but they've been particularly good against fastballs this could be a post but we're using as a podcast right now that it the evidence

would certainly seem to suggest that hitters are up there maybe this is just part of the i don't know what to call it fly ball revolution strikeout revolution whatever the it is that's happening in baseball right now revolution that hitters are just up there trying to swing hard trying to hit fly balls hit home runs and they're trying to hit them against fastballs and so if that makes them more vulnerable against other stuff well it makes sense we'd see these shifts but everything i guess i don't know what this means on its own but it just it's part of the the picture of the baseball landscape and we spend so much time writing about, talking about the trends within the game. And this is just another one that I don't think people have talked about very much, if at all.

Just isolated circumstances like Rich Hill and Lance McCullers. Well, there's a gradual league-wide shift that's taking place here. Yeah, right. I mean, there's been so much attention about Hill and the idea that maybe you don't have to work off the fastball. If you have a really great breaking pitch, just throw it. If it keeps working, if hitters aren't hitting it, then you might as well keep throwing it. And that has to seep into clubhouses somehow, circulate among players who are seeing certain players succeed with that kind of pitch mix and executives and coaches talking about it.

So, yeah, and this is the sort of change, the slow creep of change that we're used to in baseball. This is sort of the opposite of the 2015 home run thing, which is why that confuses us so much. This is what we're used to, a percentage point here, a percentage point there, not a sudden overnight change. So this is more of a standard baseball change, but still a meaningful one and an important one. So if I've done this correct, in 2012, out of all I just looked at the quick search, all qualified pitchers, there were 25 qualified pitchers who threw fastballs less than 50 of the time so for this season out of the qualified pitchers similar number of total pitchers there are 35 pitchers who have thrown fewer than 50 fastballs and given that there's a small number of qualified pitchers in any given season that's a pretty significant shift that's 10 more pitchers so far

we have guys like dylan bundy who's throwing exactly 50% fastballs. Johnny Cueto is way down there. Clayton Kershaw is way down there. I don't need to read every name. There's 35 of them for God's sake. But there are a lot of these pitchers working away from fastballs. And that is interesting. I guess it's an easy thing to get lost when we talk about how fastballs are faster than ever, because what you think is, okay, pitchers are overpowering, but all those pitches work together. And when the batters know that you have a faster fastball than ever, well, it makes all their other pitches better too. Right. All right. What was your other mini topic? All right. Mini topic. And this one came up in the chat. I don't know how often we've talked about who is the best player in baseball or

who is a threat to Mike Trout. We have talked about that a million times and the answer remains no one. No one is as good as good as mike trout we spend so much less time talking about the other side of things and so a question that came up in my friday chat this morning that i would like to discuss with you just a little bit is is clayton kershaw still the best pitcher in baseball the answer is yes probably last year it seemed like if there was a threat to his title it was being posed by noah cinder guard which well that's currently sidelined i guess understandably this stuff is there, but you know, not the lat. So the question that was posed to me was how close is Chris Sale and how much more would Chris Sale have to do? I bring this up in part because,

hey, Chris Sale has been absolutely amazing. He's the current leader in pitching war. He's even ahead of Jason Vargas. And you just wrote about Clayton Kershaw over the weekend, and then he had a very encouraging start. So I don't know, Chris Sale, Clayton Kershaw over the weekend and then he had a very encouraging start so I don't know Chris Sale Clayton Kershaw I do want to kick this off by pointing out I guess two things one over any measure of recent stretch of time that is longer than just this season Clayton Kershaw's these are the best pitch in baseball yes and I was curious the point I always think about when I think about comparing people in the American League and the National League is that well for a long time the American League has been better I think that is an uncontroversial stance to take if you think that it is controversial you are wrong and so I was

curious how has Clayton Kershaw done in interleague play because those are his games against American League teams so Clayton Kershaw for his career has a 2.36 ERA. That is fantastic. In interleague play, however, against teams in the much superior American League, his ERA skyrockets to actually down to 2.22. He's been better against American League opponents, not necessarily a representative sample of American League opponents. One more fun fact that is not pertinent to this, but in the baseball reference splits, they have a neat tool that shows how players have done against teams that are 500 or better or teams that are under 500.

You probably have seen the stat. Clayton Kershaw has actually had a lower ERA in his career against good baseball teams instead of worse baseball teams. That's weird. But in any case, interleague play reveals no league deficiencies about Clayton Kershaw. So that's just one thing to keep in mind as we have this conversation. Yeah, Sale is so good. You and I both wrote about him early in the season, just after a couple of starts, because I think we were both curious about how going from the White Sox to the Red Sox would affect him because he had that different approach last year where he was pitching to contact. And at the same time, his catchers were lousy defensively. So he was pitching to contact and at the same time his catchers were lousy defensively so he was

losing strikes and also not really trying to get strikeouts and was throwing softer and changed his pitch mix and was throwing more fastballs counter to the trend we just talked about so we were curious about whether when he went to the red sox he would kind of go back to old chris sale and be striking out everyone and be throwing fewer fastballs. And yes, that's what happened. And he's been amazing. I think part of the reason why he did that was because he wanted to go deeper into games. And he did go a little bit deeper into games and he had a career high innings total. But let's just see if he's, he must be going just as deep into games this year if not deeper right because he's just been so effective that why wouldn't he he's

had eight starts and 58 and two-thirds innings so he's had 7.33 innings per start this year and last year i can tell you right now. Okay. Baseball reference keeps track of this. Chris Sale for his career has averaged 6.9 innings per start. The major league average has been 5.9. Sale last year was at 7.1 innings per start. Sale this year, 7.3. It turns out if you're trying to pitch to contact,

as I think we've discussed, what that also leads to is more hits, which leads to longer innings in terms of plate appearances. So Chris Sale this year is being most efficient by just striking out every mofo that he faces. is more hits which leads to longer innings in terms of plate appearances so chris sale this year is being most efficient by just striking out every mofo that he faces i can tell you among qualified pitchers this season there are 95 of them chris sale has struck out 38.8 percent of all of his opponents the second best striker rate is lower than that by almost six percentage points that's danny salazar who is woefully inefficient danny salazar also has like twice chris ale's walk rate so salazar zero comparison to chris ale who has just taken baseball by storm yeah he is throwing a career low i believe a career low rate of fastballs as

a matter of fact he's dropped by 14 percentage points from last year he's throwing fastballs less than half of the time because by the way he has one of baseball's best change-ups and sliders all of those pitches are working phenomenally this season he is so good and he's good at a level where we know Chris Sale is an ace he's pretty much always been an ace since he began to start with Noah Syndergaard there was more uncertainty just because his career is so new and he hadn't yet proven his durability and you know what he's hurt right now makes sense i see why people were skeptical but this one feels like it could be a legitimate challenge it's weird because sale's been around for so long you wouldn't think he could just like elevate his game but maybe for the first time

in a very long time he has a good defense behind him because the white hawks kind of made him look worse white hawks wasn't a great ballpark for him he had terrible catchers last season so i can kind of see it but it would really hinge on believing that kershaw is in any way worse because kershaw's level is is so high so when you were examining kershaw and his different slider did you see i don't know do you feel like kershaw's only a year older than Sale is? He's still relatively young. Do you feel on any level that Kershaw has gotten a bit worse or is he kind of back to normal in your head? that he is worse other than the slider thing, which he has maybe corrected. He's throwing a tiny bit slower than he has in years past, but it's May, and so that's not really that unusual for average speeds to be lower early in the year. So it doesn't seem like he's lost speed in that way. If the slider is back, then he hasn't really lost stuff, it doesn't seem like.

the slider's back, then he hasn't really lost stuff, it doesn't seem like. So I don't think there's any compelling evidence that Kershaw is significantly worse other than the fact that he missed a significant amount of time last year and it was a back thing. And sometimes back things can linger and recur. And so that's somewhat worrisome. The older a guy gets, the more you worry about that type of thing. You'd worry about that type of thing. You'd worry about that type of thing regardless. So maybe just that in that we saw some frailty physically. But performance-wise, I don't think I've seen enough to say he's any worse. Okay. Yeah, I guess it's hard to evaluate Kershaw's numbers just because he did start with kind of the weird slider.

So as he throws more games a season if his slider is indeed back to normal then he should look like he's back to normal just like chris sale he has three elite level pitches right and a change up that he's folded in and it's actually been an effective pitch for him this season which i was not expecting and i don't think anybody was most of all clayton kershaw probably was not expecting that. So Chris Sale right now with the Red Sox, he has what would be Clayton Kershaw's best ever FIP. I really don't want to bother explaining that. They have identical ERAs right now, 2.15, but yes, Sale's been better at other things. Yeah. Kershaw, obviously his strikeouts are down considerably from where they've been in recent

years, but that could get better again as the slider sort of rediscovers itself. So do you comfortably say that Chris Sale is baseball's second best pitcher right now? Yes, I think so. When Michael Bauman wrote for the Ringer this spring, who's the second best starter in baseball, which is a good question because there is no clear consensus. And I think he ended up with Max Scherzer and I probably would have ended up with Max Scherzer too, just based on sales approach last year. But based on sales approach this year, I think I'd probably take him over Scherzer if only just for age related reasons. And I don't know, the pitch-to-contact thing, you just alluded to

it a second ago, but people often ask about that. So I'll just say that it's true that if you look at the average strikeout, it takes more pitches to get the average strikeout than it does to get the average batted ball. But that's not taking into account that, as you said, when you get a strikeout, it's an out almost always. And when you get a batted ball, it is very often not. And then you have to face someone else and get another batted ball. So you have to add up those pitches too. And it ends up kind of evening out, except if you get the strikeouts, then you don't

allow hits. So that's good. So yeah, the way that sale's going now, I would probably put him as the second best pitcher without too many doubts. And I always get a little weirded out. I think Scherzer is great. He's clearly great, but being in the division that he's in and pitching for the team that has the best offense in the division, he does face kind of weaker opponents than other people do. So he's in a weaker division in the weaker league. So Scherzer has it relatively easy as pitchers go. So for me, Sale has definitely, if not jumped past him, he's maintained his lead ahead of him.

So if Sale is number two, and I think we both agree that Sale is number two behind Kershaw because Kershaw is the pitching version of Trout, except that he's been on that disabled list. Trout has not. How much longer would their current statistics have to remain their current statistics, Kershaw, weird start and all, for you to believe that Sale has actually gotten as good, if not better, than Kershaw? I might need this whole season, I think. Yeah, I think so. It depends. It depends. If Kershaw keeps struggling stuff-wise, then maybe faster. If it seems like there's a real reason why he's not being as effective, then yeah. I guess it would take me less time to switch from Kershaw to Sale than it would for me to switch from, say, Trout to Harper or whomever. It's a pitcher. Pitchers can rise and fall fairly quickly. I mean, so can hitters, of course, but maybe you can identify it more quickly with a pitcher. You just look at what he's throwing and how hard it is and where it's going and how much it's moving, and those things all make themselves clear pretty quickly. So yeah, I mean, if Kershaw's striking out less than a

batter per inning all season and Sale's striking out everyone. I think I might be comfortable saying Sale. Yeah, I mean, I'm not there yet. And the difference is probably minute regardless of who we're saying is the best or not the best. So it's splitting hairs probably at this point. But yeah, I'd still stick with Kershaw. Yeah. And we're having this conversation as, as you mentioned, Clayton Kershaw has a 2.15 ERA.

Right. Exactly. It's not like he's given us a ton of reason to find another answer to this question. So people think of this as like the Mike Trout Appreciation Podcast, but this can also be a Clayton Kershaw Appreciation Podcast. Yes. There's room for both. And bat boning. That too.

All right. So we'll leave it there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who've already done so include Chris Hilton, Matthew Lum, Ross Bacorish, Kennard Pack, and Jason Dondlinger. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and you can rate and review

and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. If you're looking for other things to listen to, Michael Babin and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. We also talked about Kershaw

and Trout and Harper and we interviewed Seth Maness of the Royals about coming back from primary repair surgery, the faster alternative to Tommy John. We also talked to the guy

who set the all-time record in MLB's Beat the streak game but fell just short Of winning the 5.6 million dollars Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff Coming via email at podcast Fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging System we're ending the week on a multiple of Five if we're still paying attention to that have

A wonderful weekend I'm gonna go rest my Vocal cords we'll talk to you next week Sometimes I feel Like I'm going to go rest my vocal cords. We'll talk to you next week. I must admit that I just don't know Admit that I just don't know Admit that I just don't know