Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1062: Mum’s the Met

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan answer listener emails about performance in interleague games, how rising strikeout rates affect defense, the “foul pole” vs. the “fair pole,” the worst best player on a major league team, Terry Collins’ injury gag order, the best control pitcher of our era, “doubles up the middle,” strikeout terminology, the worst […]

Don't say a word I'm only sleeping I haven't been there to tell you And then I'll be telling you anymore Hello and welcome to episode 1062 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs. My name is Ben Lindberg. I'm a writer for The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. You are not at home. No, I'm in Jamaica, and I'm recording a baseball podcast. This is how hard we work to bring the goods to the listeners.

Yeah, all the visitor brochures over here say, come to Jamaica, sit in your hotel room, and record a baseball podcast. So i'm exploring all the island has to offer so what's going on in baseball right now uh what's what is going on in baseball right now i don't know i'm not i'm the wrong person a variety of i'm kind of caught up i i don't know i'm focusing mostly on like the twins just because how how many chances do you get to like think about the twins in a good way not that i think the twins are actually good but like now i filed the thing for espn talking about how they've been like a a one-man team kind of like the angels so far just because miguel sanoa is like taking a leap to be amazing and and now they have jose we've been pronouncing this wrong we were tipped off yes not barrios

it's jose barrios this is a problem that you get when you have latin names that then transition to playing an American sport. Oftentimes their accent marks are dropped. I was not aware that Barrios actually has an accent on his jersey, which is probably related to a campaign many Latin players have had to put the accent on their jerseys. I forgot the name of that campaign. That is embarrassing, but I guess I'm not involved in it, so it's fine. If you look at the Twins official roster, it is Barrios with no accent. If you click on his name, however, on the roster page, then it's Barrios with an accent.

I don't know how to explain that, but long story short, we've been pronouncing it wrong. Now we can really focus on how to pronounce it, and it will matter to pronounce it correctly because he's pitching well. So now the Twins have a second player who is good, a first pitcher who is good, and that's exciting for them. Yeah, it's really a flashback to the Liriano era, right? They haven't had anyone who got strikeouts like this since then. Yeah, no, it's exciting. And I intend after this podcast to try to figure out why the conclusion will probably be, I don't know, but last year never made sense, and he should have been good, and he's always been good in the minors So here he is, so that's my hot take

Jose Barrios, actually good Alright, anything you want to banter about Before we get to emails? No, I had some banter and then I forgot what it was Because I didn't make a note of it So that's what I got It's not our best banter Alright, so let us answer some questions

This one you have already answered in written form, but let's do it with voices. Anthony says, so Jeff mentioned on Friday that Clayton Kershaw's ERA was better in interleague games, which seems fluky given that the AL is better, and some of those were on the road, so no pitcher hitting at all. I was wondering though, I don't know if there's anywhere I can search this, if pitchers are generally better in interleague play because hitters are less likely to be familiar with them. I remember reading a quote from Neil Huntington on Francisco Liriano after the trade to Toronto, where he mentioned that a move to the AL was in the player's best interest because the NL had figured him out or something along those lines. And by the way, someone else

pointed out that we were talking about that Kershaw AL NL thing, maybe skewed slightly by the fact that Kershaw pitches a lot in course field and has a high ERA there by Clayton Kershaw standards. Well, okay. So this is something I'd never actually thought to investigate and I like it because it could, you know, it could, it makes some sense you could believe it so i used the trusty and unbelievable godlike play index and i looked at how pitchers have done in interleague play since what did i go back to 2000 probably 2000 seems like a nice round very round number one of the roundest numbers we've recently had access to as a year and uh over those 17 plus years pitchers overall have allowed an ops of 743 overall 743 however in interleague play against opponents who are less familiar with those

pitchers in theory they have allowed a 742 ops therefore i think the irrefutable conclusion is that pitchers are better in interleague play by one thousandth of a point or is that one point i don't know the right way to express this is i think one point one point of bs so uh essentially no difference and i think it makes sense if you think about it in the other direction the hitters are unfamiliar with those pitchers again in theory but the pitchers are also unfamiliar with the hitters so to whatever extent you can plan in advance without having seen these opponents it doesn't seem to have an advantage in either direction and of course there's also the added element of these players probably aren't all

unfamiliar you've seen people in the other league and they've seen you and they've also seen you on tv etc so nothing there but it was at least electrifying 20 seconds of play indexing because I didn't actually know what I would find. I could find no trend either about pitchers getting better or worse in interleague play over time, which could have made sense. Maybe some advantage would have been there 15 years ago, but then it would go away because of better technology or stuff. But no, couldn't find anything. So interesting question, not an interesting answer. All right Alright Jamie says Is the rise in strikeouts and the fall

In balls being put in play correlated To the importance of defense in other Words if more strikeouts mean fewer Opportunities in the field have Or will or should we see defensive Skills being relatively less sought after I guess the effect won't be huge But it seems like if opposition teams are

Putting say five fewer balls into play per game, then it's simply less valuable to have a really good defensive shortstop and possibly buy a non-trivial amount. Is there any evidence that teams have marginally emphasized defense because of this trend? Will they? Should they? Could we even tell if they were? How high would the league-wide strikeout percentage have to be before teams would start mostly ignoring defense altogether? This is good. These are questions where I've already done the research. This is a good selection. So let's see if I can recall these numbers off the top of my head. So 10 or 11 years ago, 2007, I think is the date that I used. It's still like high-ish strikeouts, but it's before the strikeout spike. That's a phenomenon from the last 10 years or so. So just at the beginning of the strikeout spike, I believe the league average was a team allowed 27, just over 27 balls in play per game. And then strikeouts took off. And now teams this year have allowed an average of 25 balls in play per game, which is clearly a difference as you would expect. More strikeouts mean less action, which is exactly what the question is about so on the one hand that is a

significant reduction that's like eight percent fewer balls in play per game now if you're talking about individual defensive positions though then they get just a fraction of those two missing balls in play per game so i don't think that we've seen a real change in how defense is implemented or how defense is sought after. I think, if anything, teams are focused more on defense now that we can actually measure it better than we ever have. On the other hand, there is a theory. I have not investigated it.

I don't know how to investigate it, but I've at least heard it mentioned casually in whatever casual fora there are for this to be mentioned but there's a theory that we've never been able to explain why league-wide babbitt hasn't really moved despite all the shifting and the theory goes that actually defenders are worse however the babbitt is staying the same because the shifts are actually helping the defense convert balls and playing outs i don't know if I believe it. I actually do know if I believe it. And the answer is no, I actually don't believe it.

But at least it's there. And I think it remains untested. I don't know. Do you put credence in that idea? Not really. I have a hard time buying that baseball players are worse at almost anything than they were in the past. I mean, I guess pitchers are maybe less durable. But other than that, I think skill-wise, players are just better at everything and equipment is better.

And so I don't really buy that. I think that, yeah, defense, very, very slightly less important because of fewer balls in play. But as you just documented, it's not that dramatic in effect, especially for any one individual player that you're talking about acquiring. And I think it might be masked by the fact that we're getting better and better defensive ratings. And so teams are maybe more confident now about their evaluations of defenders than they were in the past, or they should be anyway. And so maybe you would pay more for a defender because you are confident that he's really good than you would have in the past when maybe there were more balls in play, but you weren't totally sure who the good players were. So I think those trends could kind of cancel each other out.

Yes. All right. Question from Zach. This is a small question that was mentioned as a brief aside by Michael Schur on a recent podcast, the one where they drafted sports rules, but it's been a couple hours and I'm still thinking about it. When the ball hits the foul pole, it's ruled a fair ball. So why is it a foul pole and not a fair pole? Does this date back to the days when home runs were extremely scarce? Is this something linguistic where foul is a more parallel pronunciation to pole than fair?

Is it seen as an extension of the foul line, which could be called a fair line anyway? It just seems like if the ball hits a line and the ball is deemed fair, the name of that line should be the fair line slash pole. So I don't have my library with me here, so I can't look these things up. I just asked Sam to look up foul pole in the Dixon Baseball Dictionary for me. He says the first use of foul lines, according to that book, is from 1865. The first use of foul poles dates to 1904. And there's a usage note that some consider it a misnomer, but no other details about that. And then it also has an entry for fair pole, a term popular among sportscasters for foul pole, because a ball that strikes the

pole is considered a fair ball so some people think about this exactly the way that zach does i think it's probably defaults to foul because it makes sense to me that the foul line would be the foul line because it's the line that is supposed to demarcate foul territory from fair. And yes, you could say that it could just as easily be called the fair line, but the whole rest of the field is fair. And the purpose of this line is to tell us when something is foul, really, which also does tell us whether it's fair, but the fair line doesn't come into play on most fair balls. So it makes sense to me that this is the thing we use when we want to decide if something is foul. And so we'd call it the foul line. And then if

you're going to have a foul line, it would be weird to have a fair pole probably. And so you just want those things to match. And I guess if it actually hits the pole, then maybe it would make sense to call it a fair pole, but that's weird. Usually objects just have one name, and that name doesn't change depending on circumstances like that. So if we're calling it a foul pole most of the time, then it's still the same object that it was. So I'm okay with calling it a foul pole, and we all understand what we're talking about when we're talking about lines and poles in baseball, so I'm totally okay with this one. It seems like a situation where the problem isn't so much the adjective as it is having an adjective in the first place. We don't need one.

We don't need it to be a foul pole or a foul line or a fair pole or a fair line. Just say the lines and the poles, because the adjectives open themselves up for the debate, which is exactly what we're talking about right now. But if we know the lines and we know the function of them and we know the function of the poles, then we don't need to describe them in their own names because we already know what they're there for. So that's a ball off the pole. That ball hit the line and that's all you need to know. Yeah. Okay. Good solution. Neither, neither fair nor foul. All right, so Scott in Philly says, Recently, my friend and I had a discussion about the best player on each team,

which devolved into a discussion about which team has the worst best player. Virtually every legitimate contender had someone who removed them from the discussion. Additionally, some mediocre teams were stricken from the debate because of a single bright spot, say Freddie Freeman on the Braves or Joey Votto on the Reds. So there are many ways you could answer this question. You could just look at rosters. You could just do it off the top of your head. You'd probably come up with a similar answer. But I did some research and opened some spreadsheets and I took the projections from Fangraphs, the depth charts, rest of season projections, and sorted them by war for pitchers and hitters and removed

all the duplicates and took the highest value from each team so that I had one value from each team that was the highest. In other words, the best projected player on that team. Perhaps of interest, 19 of the 30 teams had a best player who was a position player. So pitchers are definitely in the minority in the best player on the team discussion. Do you have any off the top of your head that you would guess is the worst best? If I could guess. Okay. First guess, Royals.

Let's see. Where are Royals? Royals are close, but no, not quite at the top. They're fifth. Lorenzo Cain is fifth. Ah, Cain. Okay. Okay.

So then is the answer. Well, I don't know if the projections like Will Myers or is it the Padres Kane. Okay. Okay. So then is the answer... Well, I don't know if the projections like Will Myers or is it the Padres? Yes, Will Myers. Alright. 1.8 rest of season projected war. He is just below Sonny Gray of the A's and then Eric Thames

of the Brewers. Maybe he's better than that but that's according to the projections. Aaron Nola of the Phillies and then Kane of the Royals and then Ender Inciarte of the Braves. I guess the projections are discounting Freeman because he's out for a while. So that's probably why. So if there's some other injury person I'm not thinking of here, maybe that would skew things a bit. But I think those are all the people that you would arrive at without looking at stats. So yeah, I'll say Myers. For the thing I filed for ESPN,

it was sort of looking at who have been the most one-man teams, whatever. Silly topic, but whatever, it's published. So one thing that came out is that the Padres ranked high by one method for finding a one-man team just because they had their top player was responsible for an outsized proportion of their total team war. Well, you can

imagine one reason why that would be their total team war is bad because the Padres are bad. However, to this point, I don't know if you looked at this, but can you guess who actually has the Padres highest war this season? And I will tell you it is definitely not Will Myers. I do not know. I did not look. Who has the highest Padres war? I will read up from third place. Third place, Luis Perdomo. What do you know about Luis Perdomo?

Who cares? He's third on the Padres in war. His ERA is almost six. Second place, Clayton Richard. First place, currently disabled, Trevor Cahill. 1.1 war. He's actually been good, so it's not like laughable, but it is laughable. You've gotten boosts out of a couple of those guys, right?

Richard and Cahill. Yeah, those extreme snickerball guys. In fact, Cahill, Richard, and Perdomo, all very high ground ball pitchers who, well, I guess Richard doesn't get strikeouts, but they're interesting, except that I think they're interesting in large part because of who they play for and because we have all taken time to make fun of the sorry state of the padres pitching staff that it's neat when they find anything there and i think they've kind of found something one of the other interesting little side effects of looking at this analysis is that the padres currently rank 21st in total team pitching staff war. 21st, not good, of course,

but I don't know if you would have believed this before the start of the season, but the team in 22nd place, the Mets. The Padres have had a better pitching staff than the Mets by ERA, by FIP, by XFIP. However, the position players, and again, the Padres were expected to be bad here too because the Padres are laughably bad.

They are in 30th place at negative 0.2 total team war. The Padres have been very slightly below replacement level on the position player side so far. Will Myers has hit. However, his current war is 0 Mets telling Perry Collins that he can't talk about injuries anymore. Apparently that is a new directive that the manager cannot address injuries with reporters anymore just because there's some kind of gag order because this is in the New York Post. I don't know what the sourcing of it was, but evidently Collins was just extremely vague and declined to get into injury stuff and said he was not at liberty to discuss any injury information, which I guess you can understand why the Mets would have that response because injuries have been something that their reputation has really suffered because of, although this seems unlikely to help if there's a diktat that they're not allowed to talk about injuries. It just seems like they're even more incompetent and hiding something. But what I wanted to say was I hope that other teams don't take this as sort of an excuse to do this because this is the way it is in some other sports, right?

Hockey, for instance. Teams don't really specify how players are hurt. They'll just say like upper body injury, lower body injury, and that can cover any ailment. And that stinks, I think. I don't know how it is for hockey fans but if that were the case in baseball if we had no data on who was hurt and why that would be bad from an analytical perspective it'd also be bad from a fantasy perspective it'd be bad just from a following the sport perspective so I hope that other teams don't see that the Mets are perhaps getting away with this and decide to do it themselves because I'm sure no team really wants to talk about injuries.

They just are expected to. Look, we have banter. I guess it's odd to me that you have hockey and baseball, and we'll use those as the two examples because I don't know what the injury policy is in basketball, but in baseball, we know everything about every injury. I mean, sometimes we know too much or some fabricated information like anyone who's ever been on the disabled list in the last few years for the dodgers but you have complete information on even like day-to-day stuff there's just no mystery and in hockey not especially in the playoffs but even in the regular season you just have guys who are

day-to-day upper body lower body and that's it maybe if you're lucky you get that sometimes you just get oh he's day-to-day or he's playing through something. And then that's all that you hear. If you watch a game right now tonight, game seven of the Eastern Conference finals between the Ottawa Senators and the loathsome Pittsburgh Penguins. You have two teams who are just playing like, you know, that half the players on the team are playing through something, but you just don't know what it is. know what it is. At the start of the last round, defenseman Eric Carlson said to the media that he had been playing through two hairline fractures in his foot. And the response to that was, what are we supposed to do with this information? Why did he tell us this? Who would have the gall to actually specify how he is hurt in the playoffs? It was so bizarre that a player would come out and say what was hampering him now in reality he's probably injured in like six different ways but in baseball maybe we take this stuff for granted i don't know

who has it right but if baseball decided tomorrow like this is private medical information and the public has no right to this knowledge do we really have a leg to stand on aside from tradition no i i don't think so yeah you can see this happen in baseball sometimes like during the playoffs because teams kind of clam up about injuries, it seems like, when the games get really important. And so every offseason almost, it seems like there's some guy who is not playing. He's a starter who's not starting or he's a reliever who's not relieving. And everyone on Twitter is clamoring for this guy and why is the team not using this guy and I'm trying to remember who those guys have been like Michael

Waka was that guy maybe once and there have been others that just you know it becomes a talking point why is the team not using this guy and then you'll find out after the playoffs oh he had a thing that he was nursing and he wasn't available or he was an emergency option or something. And teams just didn't want to say that because they didn't want to clue in their opponents. And yeah, that's frustrating when that happens. So I definitely wouldn't want that to become the standard. So please don't screw this up for everyone, Mets. I'll add on to this.

Please don't screw this up for everyone, Matt. I'll add on to this. If you ask during press availability, ask a hockey coach, what's the situation with, I don't know, a player and the player's been playing through something or he hasn't been playing through something, the coach will probably say, oh, he's day-to-day. He's close. He's on the ice. He's skating. Whatever.

And nine days ago, I got an email. This is just one of several, but the email is titled Mariner's Medical Update. And it came from the official Seattle Mariners email account, or they were hacked in a very weirdly specific medical way. Press release says, for immediate release Tuesday, May 16th, 2017. I'll just read it because it's not very long. Seattle, Washington.

Seattle Mariners Executive Vice President and General Manager of Baseball Operations. I did not know he was the Executive Vice President. Jerry DiPoto today announced the following medical update on Mariners right-handed pitcher Ryan Weber. I'll stop there. Did you know Ryan Weber was a Mariners pitcher? He is.

I got an update. Weber was placed on a 10-day disabled list Sunday, May 14th. Weber underwent testing Monday in Seattle and was examined by Mariners medical director E. Edward Calafion. Oh, no. Well, it's something like that. Weber. Here's another bad one. I should have prepped this. Weber has been diagnosed with a stretch of the musculocutaneous nerve.

Officially, musculocutaneous neuropraxia. There is no current timetable on his return. I know from this email exactly what happened to Ryan Weber, who was forced to exit a game a couple of weekends ago. He was diagnosed with a stretch of a very specific nerve in his body. This would be a weird thing to fabricate, but why was I entitled to this information? And I don't know the answer to that. I know that with contracts, I think technically we're not supposed to know contract terms, but they always get leaked by someone. But this isn't a leak. This is the team just straight up telling me Ryan Weber has a stretch of the musculocutaneous nerve somewhere in his body. That sounds like it's probably an

arm thing. It would make the most sense if it's an arm thing. He left holding his arm. It all comes together. I don't know why I know this. I don't know what policy has allowed me to know this via press release delivered directly to my email. I didn't even want this press release for the first time. This is not solicited. I would rather just go to my spam box, but this is the policy. I don't think you get this in other sports and certainly not in a other sport. Yeah. I guess maybe it has something to do with the fact that it's harder to exploit an injury in baseball. You can understand why in football, for instance, you wouldn't want someone to know that, I don't know, someone has a bad ankle or whatever, like you could

actively target that ankle and hurt the guy. And there've been examples of that sort of thing. You can't really do that so much in baseball. It's not nearly as much of a contact sport as really all the other major sports. So that could be part of it. There's just less of a competitive advantage to the other team in knowing the way in which a guy is hurt possibly, especially if he's just going to be on the DL anyway. And I guess in theory it saves Ryan Weber time. He doesn't have to answer questions about what's wrong with him

because everyone knows. Saves maybe manager's time, Jerry DePoto time. The information is out there. No one has to come and ask him what's wrong with Ryan Weber if anyone was really eager to know. But I guess that is just a product of the convention being complete disclosure. If everyone accepted that we were never going to know what was wrong with Ryan Weber, then I guess no one would ask. So if that had always been the standard, you would save yourself a lot of questions too. But yeah, I'm glad baseball is unusual in this respect because I like information. From kind of, I don't know, almost a libertarian perspective, the argument would be that this is

all knowledge that only the players and maybe their families are entitled to and we don't need to know it. But maybe players benefit from people knowing that they're hurt but again maybe i don't know how it benefits them necessarily for people to know how they are specifically hurt like for an athlete in any sport fans could be given some relief just knowing that a player is generally injured and not playing at 100 it gives them a little more forgiveness margin of error what have you but ryan weber walked off holding his arm and i don't know maybe i just got a press relief to let everyone know that well he's not in need of tommy john surgery and maybe that's enough to celebrate yeah i don't know i guess at the end of the day there's two very different approaches to injuries in two different sports and i am happy to know more than

to know less all right well speaking of that do you have a stat segment for us? Do I? Yes. Yes, I do, is the answer. So Jared Weaver is currently on the disabled list with bad pitching disease, is probably the answer. Allegedly, it's a hip problem. I'm not going to go down that avenue. Jared Weaver, great pitcher, better than me, terrible by Major League Standards. He's on the disabled list.

And one Sam Miller, he writes for a company known as ESPN. pitcher better than me terrible by major league standards he's on the disabled list and uh one sam miller he writes for a company known as espn he wrote an article about jared weaver just that was published i think wednesday maybe tuesday probably wednesday days passed slowly and quickly at the same time jared weaver might be done pitching in the major leagues maybe he'll get a chance when he comes off the dl but we've talked on this podcast recently about how the Padres were being atypically candid about Jared Weaver's status in the starting rotation, saying things to the effect of, he's bad, and we think he will still be bad. Stuff like that. So Jared Weaver has been very bad, and one of the unsurprising ways he's been bad is that there have been many

home runs he is a pitcher who throws like a position player and he has allowed 3.4 home runs per nine innings now the major league average is i'm just gonna guess off the top of my head one third of that more or less which reflects poorly on jared weaver this all inspired me to get into the play index to look up pitchers who have given up a lot of home runs one thing i didn't quite realize but that blows my mind jared weaver does not have the highest home run rate in baseball this year did you know that no i did not know that the The answer is actually Mike Fiers. Mike Fiers has allowed 3.64 home runs per nine innings. I wasn't entirely aware of that. Incredibly, Fiers still has an ERA that's just barely over 5, 5.14,

which by today's standards is bad, but not terrible. So Fiers has somehow survived all these home runs. Anyway, I have a few little leaderboards here. I decided, first of all, to go into PlanDex and look up the worst ever home run rates for pitchers in baseball history who have faced at least 100 batters in a season. So this is the first thing I looked at. And the home run rate at the top of the list, 4.44 home runs per nine innings. This was established by one Dylan Overtonton who pitched last season and has also pitched this season for the seattle mariners but last year dylan overton pitched for the oakland

athletics in 24.1 innings he allowed 48 hits of which a quarter of those were home runs at 4.44 that is a very bad rate he had narrowly edging out to 4.35 in second place home runs per nine and a 4.22 that's up there there are a few other ways you can look at this instead of home runs per nine you can look at just home run rate per batter faced and if you do that then the top of the list is populated by four names from 2016 and then mike fires in fifth place mike fires has allowed home runs to 9.2 percent of all of his opponents that's quite bad however the leader by this method is 2016 tampa bay rays reliever steve jelts who faced 112 batters and allowed 11 home runs that's home runs to 9.8 percent of his opponents i would just like for the audience to know that prime Barry Bonds, like peak, peak Barry Bonds between his ages 36 and 39.

I don't know how we accepted that at the time, but that's what happened. Peak Barry Bonds for four years hit a home run in 8.6% of his plate appearances. Now I know there were a lot of intentional walks. I get that. However, 8.6% peak Barry Bonds in his absolute best season. He hit a home run in 11% of his plate appearances, which is absolutely absurd. And Steve Jelts 9.8% home runs last season. However, 100 batters faced. That's a pretty small minimum. I get it. So why don't we bump that up to 150? Because both Fires and Jared Weaver have passed that. Fires has faced 184 opponents. Jared Weaver has faced 191. I think unsurprisingly, when you up the minimum, then the numbers at the top of the home run list go down because this is the kind of thing that either regresses quickly or if it doesn't, you stop pitching. And if you set the minimum at 150 batters faced, then Mike mike fires has the current lead home

runs per nine at 3.64 he beats out 2012 zach stewart who was at 3.53 currently jared weaver is in fourth place at that 3.4 home runs per nine again if you decide to start by home run rate per batters faced then mike fires is at the top of this list at 9.2 percent home runs crazy third place is jared we were at 8.4 percent and the name in second place is mike bynum curiously of the 2003 san diego padres i don't remember my history exactly but in 2003 weren't the padres already playing in petco Park? Yeah, that sounds right. Let's just assume that's true. And even if it isn't, but I'm pretty sure it is,

Qualcomm Stadium or Jack Murphy Stadium was not a very hitter-friendly environment. Nevertheless, Mike Bynum showed everyone what for. That's not an expression. He gave up a lot of home runs is the point. Mike Bynum, I wasn't expecting to find a Padres player in second place and then also in third place. When you look at home runs allowed, then it's only natural to sort of look at overall offense allowed. So this kind of germinated from the home run rates.

Going back to the minimum of 100 batters faced, I decided this time to ignore just home runs and look at OPS plus aloud I will now remind the audience that peak absolute peak Barry Bonds had an OPS plus of 256 over the span of four years overall for Bonds's career he had an OPS plus of 182 with the Giants it was 199 Barry Barry Bonds, basically twice as good as the average hitter. So batters faced minimum 100, the highest ever OPS plus allowed by a pitcher. Say hello to 2016 Dylan Overton. He's back with an OPS plus allowed of 241, beating out 2007 Phil Dumitrate and 1983 Rick Langford, who finished at 229. Dylan Overton allowed the following batting line, 407, 438. Good for him, not too many walks. 822, slugging percentage for an OPS of 1.260.

Dylan Overton faced 128 batters. It feels like nearly all of them reached base. So in fifth place was a personal favorite season of mine. That was 2011 Anthony Vasquez. There's no reason for many people to know much about Anthony Vasquez, and he has since been through some personal hardship. So no ill wishes for Anthony Vasquez, and I hope him great health. However, in 2011, this was nearing the later days of my daily blogging about the Seattle Mariners. That team was very bad. Anthony Vasquez was probably the worst pitcher I've ever seen on a semi-regular basis.

And I think my favorite thing about what Vasquez did that year was that he started seven games, whatever. He struck out 13 batters. He had 13 combined walks and hit batters. And he had 13 strikeouts, 13 combined walks and hit batters and he had 13 strikeouts 13 combined walks and hit by pitches and 13 home runs he had lucky number 13 across the board he was absolutely dreadful he allowed an ops plus of 219 bumping up the minimum now to that 150 batters faced mark i will say that if you do that then current mike fires is not near the top of the list fires this year despite all those home runs has allowed an ops plus of just 157 i don't know

if that's the best way to put it but not so bad jared weaver has allowed an ops plus of 162 so that's obviously not great but that's nowhere near the top of this list. So given a minimum of 150 batters faced, I'll remind you again, Barry Bonds with the Giants, OPS plus of 199, the highest ever, OPS plus allowed by a pitcher, having faced at least 150 batters. This pitcher actually faced 200 batters. He pitched last season.

He pitched in the American League. Do you know who it might've been? I don't. The answer? Well, let's try this again. Extremely well-known pitcher who is no longer pitching in the major leagues? I still don't. Short pitcher?

Right-handed? Probably smokes a lot of weed? Oh, no. I was going to say Tim Hudson, but that's not right. Wrong Tim. I mean, yeah, Tim Lins I mean yeah Tim Linscombe Tim Linscombe last year with the Angels through 38.1 innings he allowed 68 hits of which 11 were home runs many more were doubles and triples he allowed an OPS plus last season of 211 so Tim Linscombe currently on top

of a very specific but still very bad leaderboard to his credit i guess his era plus was 44 the name in second place ryan bowen i don't know who that is you don't need to either he allowed an opus plus of 205 with an era plus of 31 so in any case at least for jared weaver and mike fires while their home run rates have skyrocketed. That has happened in an era where there have been a lot of home runs. Neither pitcher has had walk trouble, neither pitcher has had non-home run hit trouble, and so their OPS Plus figures are kind of less extraordinary, but it will be interesting to see if Jared Weaver is actually done pitching in the major leagues. He will end with one of the higher home run rates ever.

I'm sure the highest ever if you sort by some very specific manipulation of the leaderboard. So Jared Weaver finally having pitched like we would probably expect someone like Jared Weaver to pitch. Too bad you don't get Mariner's press releases about Dylan Overton being terrible or Anthony Vasquez's historically awful season. Those would be emails you'd probably be interested in. I would be very interested.

For immediate release, Dylan Overton. And that would be the whole email. Overton this season, he's pitched in the majors again. So last year he pitched 24.1 innings with the A's. This year he's pitched 18.1 with the Mariners. He has lowered his home run rate per nine from 4.4 to two. His strikeouts, however, have also been cut in half. His ERA, though, has improved by five full runs to 6.38.

Progress. All right. So I have a little Barry Bonds fun fact of my own. Since you were just citing Bond stats, We got an email from a listener named Josh Patreon supporter, he says So far this season, Mike Trout has a 458 OBP through 166 Plate appearances, this is a little

Outdated, Alcides Escobar Who has been a full-time starter for the last seven Seasons, has a 438 OPS Through 163 plate Appearances, my question is To start a season, what is the longest number of plate appearances Into the season where another Full-time major leaguer has a higher on

Base percentage than another full-time Player's OPS and I was Trying to puzzle out how one would Search this because that's a hard thing To do to look at how far Into a season that has happened But I realized I probably didn't need to Look at it that way

because Barry Bonds to the rescue. In 2002, Barry Bonds finished the season with a 582 on-base percentage, and the immortal Nafi Perez finished that season with a 564 OPS, and that was in 585 plate appearances. So Bonds did this over a full season. I don't know if that's been done by anyone else. I just sort of looked quickly to see if, I don't know, any people like Ted Williams had done it or something like that,

and I didn't see any other instances, although they might exist. But good Bonds, fun fact, or possibly Nafee Perez, fun fact. I like it. And as now a Dylan Overton follow-up, last year, he spent most of his time in AAA pitching with Nashville. He had a low ERA. He pitched in 21 games. He started 20 times. He threw 125.2 innings, 125.2 innings for Dylan Overton in the minor leagues last year. He allowed just six home runs in the major leagues he allowed his sixth home run in his third start and if you think

that was crazy well over his next three starts after that he allowed another six home runs so dylan overton allowed 12 home runs in his first six major league appearances after allowing six home runs in triple a in much much more playing time so is there such a thing as a dramatic difference between triple a and the major leagues well no one is actually asking that question in much, much more playing time. So is there such a thing as a dramatic difference between AAA and the major leagues? Well, no one is actually asking that question because yes, of course there is. That's why the major leagues are the major leagues

and the minor leagues take place in Nashville. All right, question from Joe. I recall baseball scenarios in TV shows being discussed on the show at length. I read one in a Tom Clancy book and it made me stop and think rather confused. So he sends us a picture of the page. It's from the Tom Clancy book, The Teeth of the Tiger. And this passage goes, this is the narrator saying,

then Derek Jeter doubled up the middle. Pitchers probably thought of him as a terrorist, didn't they? I don't know what the context for that is. But anyway, doubled up the middle is what Joe wants to know about. He says, when I think double, up the middle is far from the first thing I consider. And when I think up the middle, the mental image I conjure up is one of a chopper or ground ball through the middle. Maybe he meant a line drive over the head of the center fielder, but why not say that? I can't really recall any doubles up the middle aside from someone winding up at second base, taking the extra base on the throw. But that's not a double. Maybe the author considered the portion of the gap closest to center as up the middle.

We can't ask Tom Clancy about this, unfortunately, but Joe wants to know whether doubles up the middle happen often and if this is actually a thing so okay so from a statistical perspective derrick jeter hit i think it was 544 career doubles and using the play index you are able to sort of sort through all the events as you want and he had a good number of doubles that were technically hit to the middle section of the field baseball reference has pole opposite and middle splits however i think if you're going to say doubled up the middle that implies something directly up the middle and not to either side of a center fielder i think we would both agree on that yes sure great so i searched through the events for balls hit specifically to the center field area,

and that gave Derek Jeter a total of, I think it was 52 doubles, technically, to center field. You can picture these as being doubles off the wall behind the center fielder, or more likely, in Derek Jeter's case, maybe a sinking liner or a ball just to the side of a center fielder, something like that. So Derek Jeter definitely did double up the middle in his career the problem you run into is that nobody actually says it that way if you do a google search for doubled up the middle you get for some reason almost exclusively it looks like college results you get the first result for me is site navigation Puget Sound these appear to be the loggers the University of Puget Sound maybe These appear to be the loggers.

The University of Puget Sound, maybe the loggers. I don't know. You students can correct me. Second place, you get something from Occidental versus Chapman, which I know to be college because it says Occidental College Athletics. Then there's Play-by-Play Belmont Bruins, followed by Play-by-Play Belmont Bruins. A different result. Allegheny College versus College of Worcester. Play-by-Play Chapman. Something Wesley Wesleyan versus Chep it just goes on down all these results that are definitely

baseball but it seems to be nobody has actually written this intentionally this hasn't been said doubled up the middle in context of like a narrative story it's all like play-by-play results where someone just writes down the event that took place in and at bat. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say doubled up the middle just as an expression. It's not what you would say. You would say double to center field. Something up the middle implies a grounder or a low liner.

And then if a ball is hit clearly to the outfield, then you always, I think, you always designate the area of the outfield. So it would be double to center. Yep. I agree. It's a weird one. We also got another terminology question from Tom who wanted to know whether you can call striking someone out looking, fanning them or whiffing them.

Wouldn't that have to be a swinging strikeout? He saw that someone had used fanning for a looking strikeout about Jose Barrios, actually, and he wanted to know our thoughts, and our thoughts were the same. I sympathize with whoever used fanning because sometimes when I'm writing, I'm having to say strikeout over and over again, and you really long for a synonym, but I agree that you have to have a swing involved for it to be a whiff or a fan, and as you pointed out, punch out works very well there. Punch out is good for looking strikeouts.

Yeah. And I think just the other day I misused punch out in the context of some posts and I should have known better because a punch out has to be, I think it has to be a called strikeout because when you have a swinging strikeout, then the umpire doesn't make the same motion. He doesn't need to, he doesn't need to be demonstrative. I think it would be funny,out, then the umpire doesn't make the same motion. He doesn't need to. He doesn't need to be demonstrative. I think it would be funny, however, if an umpire did his old dramatic punchout routine after a batter already suffered the embarrassment of swinging and missing. Just to really get it on the nose. But I don't think I've seen that. All right. Ryan says, as I often do, I was looking at Fangraph's leaderboards this morning searching for anything of note. And do I was looking at Fangraph's leaderboards this morning searching for anything of note.

I was looking at all sorts of stats from pitch values to FIP to quality of contact percentage when I stumbled upon an interesting find. Going back to 1900, if you take starting pitchers with 500 or more career innings pitched and sort them by walk rate, you'll get the following pitchers. In first with a 1.11 walks per nine, you get Cy Young. Second, you get turn of thecentury pirate Deacon Philippe. Third, the lesser babe, Babe Adams. And in fourth, with 1.32, is Indians quote-unquote ace Josh Tomlin. So is Josh Tomlin the greatest control pitcher of our generation? Yes, I guess. I think you answered in the affirmative, so I didn't think about it as much.

But this gets into the difference between control and command. Right. And if you define control is just the ability to throw strikes, then this would be at least one way to look at it. You could also just look at strike rate. And yeah, if you throw a whole bunch of strikes, then I think that's pretty conclusive. You have great control. Josh Tomlin, great control, still lacking in everything else. Yes, right. There's a limit to how good being one of the in there. So you want someone who was great and is also a control pitcher, then I don't know, maybe depending on how you define generation, you'd go with someone like Maddox or Schilling or someone like that, Halliday, Messina. Those guys had great walk rates and were also great. Brad Radke had the lowest walk rate. If you look since 2000, minimum 1,000 innings pitched, he had a 3.6% walk rate. So maybe Brad Radke is a decent answer.

But yeah, Josh Tomlin, in terms of throwing strikes, has been just about as good as anyone. So sure, we can christen him the greatest. Here's one thing I like about this. Josh Tomlin, for his career, has thrown 67.4% strikes. That's a lot of strikes for Josh Tomlin for his career has thrown 67.4 percent strikes that's a lot of strikes for Josh Tomlin the league average has been a few percentage points lower than that Tom Glavin Hall of Famer considered to have pinpoint command Tom Glavin through 60.9 percent strikes Tom Glavin's career strike rate actually below the league average and that's interesting I think I've written about it before,

but I think what it speaks to is Tom Glavin's willingness to just not give in and to allow a walk sometimes instead of allowing good contact. Tom Glavin did not allow a lot of good contact, and he would be a really fun pitcher to evaluate by today's standards. And as it happens, he was 42 and having his last season in the first year of PitchFX. So we didn't really get to dig into Tom Glavin very much. But a really interesting comparison here between Tom Glavin and Josh Tomlin in terms of who actually was throwing the pitches where they wanted to. Yeah, a lot of Glavin strikes weren't even in the strike zone. Yeah, also that part. There's that too.

All right, we are almost done here. Let's take one from Dylan. How's this for a hypothetical? A team announces that a lefty is slated to start in a big game. The opposing team then stacks their lineup with righties to gain an advantage. But the first team, unbeknownst to everyone, has a right-hander prepared for the start himself, going through all the traditional pregame warm-ups as if he were the slated starter. starter. That team then throws the lefty for the first batter and then promptly takes him out for the righty. The opposing lineup is already set and stacked with righties, so now the right-handed pitcher has an advantage. What stops teams from doing this occasionally, especially for a playoff game or important regular season game? And I know that there's some precedent for this. There are some notable examples of this happening a long time ago. I believe that I can't conjure off the top of my head, but I know Andy Green was joking about doing this earlier this

year, although he didn't. I think he was joking. And I guess the Rays have kind of done it when they've started a reliever and then replaced him with a starter. Maybe that had something to do with this. But as you already responded, I think a lot of this just has to do with sportsmanship or being nice to the other team being able to tell i don't know how much of all that stuff takes place on field but you would have the scheduled guy doing his whole routine and then somehow you'd have to have the other guy doing it as well i don't know how you hide that it's also the whole routine is it's kind of taxing obviously it's not too taxing because someone still has to go start a game after that but it's not common that you have two guys who are available to start at the same time but then if they go through the whole routine then the guy who doesn't pitch or

i guess pitches a little bit would be kind of knocked off his his own schedule so there's that part but i do think it mostly comes down to sportsmanship because this is not the first time that we've gotten this question this is not the first time someone has proposed this hypothetical i would imagine that someone at least someone with every single organization in baseball has thought about this and joked about or maybe suggested it for an important game or a playoff game and yet it almost never happens and i have to think that there's a good reason for that probably a variety of good reasons for that and it just establishes a i guess you could argue it was an unsportsmanlike precedent or a cunning precedent it seems though though, based on the pattern, that it leans more unsportsmanlike because at the end of the day, as we've discussed before,'t think managers want to have to deal with that uncertainty in their lives.

So yeah, if you had a Game 7 of the World Series situation and you did have multiple starters available, I guess you could say that there would be an advantage and whatever advantage you derive in that situation would be worth whatever cost would come later. But I think all these guys sort of have a respect for each other and a collegiality for each other and wouldn't want to win that way. You'd need like a real kind of Billy Martin, Leo DeRocher type who just kind of didn't

care about anything but winning to do this. And I don't know if there are that many of that type of managers still in the game today. And as an example, I guess you could also point to how infrequently managers will call for the opposing pitcher to be inspected, even though every pitcher has something on his body that he's using to get a better grip that has not been allowed.

We all remember, I think, when Michael Pineda was called out for having some pine tar or some substance on his body, but that was only because it was so conspicuous that everyone could see it. Everyone was complaining about it. But managers don't have the other pitcher inspected, even though every pitcher is cheating by the rules

because they just don't want it to come back to them. There's no real benefit. So if you're going to care about the pitching schedule at all as it's set, then you just don't do this to an opponent. Yeah, all right. Last one. I meant to read this one after Ryan's question about sorting leaderboards in search of something interesting, because Corey says this is sort of a philosophical question about baseball podcasting. Baseball fandom is full of leaderboard type lists. Some of these lists are interesting, say the pitchers who have given up the most first career hits, and some are not, say the pitchers who have given up the most doubles during Tuesday day games with bobblehead promotions. This reminds me a bit of the interesting number paradox. Here's the puzzle. Suppose that there are some numbers which are not interesting. If so, one of them is the smallest of the non-interesting numbers, but that distinction makes it interesting, which contradicts our

supposition. So all numbers are interesting. One might run a similar argument for baseball lists. Suppose there is a boring leaderboard. Nonetheless, someone is at the top of that leaderboard, and that's interesting. The fallacy that gives rise to this paradox is that being distinctive isn't the same as being interesting. So while grouping items in a list does give those items new relational properties with respect to each other and other members on that list. Not all of those new properties are necessarily interesting ones. So my question for you is, what do you think makes a baseball list interesting to podcast or I suppose write about? The easy answer is that interests vary from person to

person, but there's enough overlap for there to be a thriving community of fans who like thinking about this sort of thing. Where do you think the overlap is? And what do you think explains it? So this is a complicated question. And it's one that we probably both think about fairly often because so much of what we do ends up finding a name that's at or near the top or bottom of a leaderboard and trying to evaluate whether that's interesting or not. Like Jonathan Lucroy, you just wrote about because he's had the worst pitch framing in baseball this year.

That is objectively interesting because not only is he the worst, but then there's the added context of, well, he used to be one of the best. Right. That's the thing that you need that context. Like I wouldn't have written that post if it had been some other catcher. Maybe if you were a blogger about that team or something or a beat writer about that team, you'd still write about it. But I probably wouldn't have written about Lucroy except for the fact that he went best to worst. And that is extremely interesting. But just being worst would not have been enough for me. Yeah, right. If like Jared Salta Lamakia was near the bottom again, and I guess he was sketching again, then that's not a post. And there's, I guess, the added layer of difficulty when you

have you or me writing from a national perspective versus, yeah, a team blogger would look at things differently. But we often will need to have a name featured that has some sort of national prominence because at the end of the day, we do need people to pay some amount of attention to what we do. I can't just go out there and write a bunch of posts about Adalberto Mejia on the Twins if I wanted to. I don't think that would go over very well so it's complicated but i think that as a general sort of rule of thumb you want a list that can help explain why a player has been good or why a player has not been good or a team works the same way and you want something that might be explicable in baseball terms, because if you have a list and you can tell like the hypothetical that was given about the Tuesdays and bobblehead promotions, you don't want a list that you can tell just looking at it like

this is random noise because nobody cares. That's just randomness. And I think we all know people don't like to hear about randomness in sports. And it's not interesting if something just randomly happens. But if you can think of a reason like, don't know chris davis has struck out looking a whole bunch this season now i think he's struck out looking a whole bunch in his career but if someone were to look at that and i think he has the most called strikeouts this season that would be interesting because you could explain that in some sort of uh baseball sense and it could explain a way in which chris davis is deficient or maybe in a paradoxical way actually that exact thing came up in a ringer slack discussion just recently because my editor, Mallory Rubin, who's an Orioles fan, just put a question out to the group. Does Chris Davis have

the worst like plate approach of any slugger? And then I posted a leaderboard and Zach Cram posted a leaderboard and the answer was basically yes, probably. He's not swinging at any of these strikes, which is weird. So, yeah, that was interesting. Oh, man. Okay. So current leaderboard. Maybe you just looked at this. Most called strikeouts this season.

Fifth place, Joey Gallo, 19. Three-way tie for second place between Ryan Schimpf, Kevin Kiermaier, and one Keon Broxton. 22 called strikeouts this season. First place, 31, Chris Davis. More than second place. By nine, he has a lot of called strikeouts. If someone were to write about that, that could or would be interesting because you could point to Chris Davis's two-strike approach. Maybe it's bad or maybe in some way it's good and he wouldn't be able to hit these pitches anyway. I don't know. There's something there, but I think you want something you can explain in baseball terms and And ideally, under the best of circumstances,

it's some sort of surprising name. Like, I don't know, maybe Chris Davis is surprising up there. Maybe he's not. I think Miguel Sano has struck out looking a bunch before. Maybe he's not doing that so much anymore. That could show evolution in there. So yeah, I think the point is made. Please take it from there. Often it's about the progression or the story or how the player is perceived or what he's done before, what he might do in the future. So it's not just the leaderboard, but it's something that a leaderboard inspires you to think about. And I don't know if you just mentioned this, you mentioned it via email that the separation at the top of the leaderboard is particularly important. Even as

you were just reading that Chris Davis list, you had whatever, Keon Braxton at 22, and then you paused for the dramatic reveal of Chris Davis all the way up at 31. So when you have a huge separation like that, whether it's a good separation or a bad separation, that's inherently interesting because if a guy's just 0.1 percentage points ahead of the next guy, not so interesting, doesn't really mean he's a different guy. But when someone really stands out like that and you can do the whole fun fact about the difference between number one and number two is as big as the difference between number two and number 23 or whatever, that's always fun.

So yeah, the more you stand out, out the more an outlier you are the more interesting it is agreed and just to tie this all together looking at things differently i looked at the most strikeouts without a single one of them being looking this year this is a different leader board you could look at brandon phillips and yula guriel are tied for second with 20 strikeouts without a single one of them being called. And first place, 31. Mike Moustakis has not struck out looking so far this season. All right. I'm going to go enjoy Jamaica.

Go do that. Not that I haven't been for the last hour, but in a different way. All right. Talk to you soon. So long. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who've already done so include jacob keggy nathan lewandowski eric albers joe clarkin and neil meyer thanks to

all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on itunes thanks to dylan higgins for editing assistance if you're looking for something else to listen to michael bowman and i have a new episode of the ringer MLB show up. We talked to Tom Verducci about his SI cover story on something that Jeff and I talked about on this podcast not long ago, the decrease in the percentage of fastballs used

and the increase in curveballs used and how teams are focusing on spin rate and changing pitch usage. You can get that on the Ringer MLB show feed. You can send your questions and comments to me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangrash.com or via the Patreon messaging system. And we'll be back with one

more episode before Memorial Day. So talk to you then. Oh, baby.