Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1072: Over the Hill

Episode Date: June 17, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Diamondbacks’ baserunning, Rich Hill’s struggles, regrets about writing, reading the comments, and the prospect of an automated strike zone. Audio��intro: Super Furry Animals, "Some Things Come From Nothing" Audio outro: Guided By Voices, "Gold Star for Robot Boy" Link to Ben’s Diamondbacks piece Link to Jeff’s Rich Hill […]

Hello and welcome to Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, which is not Fangraphs, but sometimes can resemble it. Hello, Ben. How are you doing? Hello. Doing well. That's good. One of the articles that you've written recently, in fact, the article I would argue you have written most recently is about the Arizona Diamondbacks team base running. It's something I think I wrote about somewhere in April or early May or somewhere in there. One of those like, hey, this team is on an early record pace thing,

but, you know, stay tuned. There's still a lot of baseball left to go. Well, there's a lot less baseball left to go now than there was when I wrote that, and they have, if anything, only increased their base running value pace I'm not sure but they are on an incredible run and so I wanted to have you talk about that a little bit because base running as a skill is not something I think a lot of people think about anymore it gets lost easily and rightfully so beyond yeah hitting pitching defense and I don't know what else there is besides base running chemistry i guess we don't

talk about that very much but the diamondbacks are very good at this thing and it's a good partial explanation for why they're having such a successful out of nowhere season yeah and it's okay not to pay that much attention to it in most teams case because it usually doesn't make more than a win or so difference in either direction and so if you're gonna spend your mental energy worrying about baseball teams there are probably better things to worry about or be happy about for most teams. But yeah, the Diamondbacks are on pace. And I don't even feel that bad about saying on pace because they're like on pace to shatter the all-time record for base running runs, or at least the live ball era record since 1920 and the rays the 2010 rays are the leader

in that category and they're an outlier like the second place team is like i don't know 25 runs above average or something and then the razor at around 37 runs above average which was pretty crazy and the diamondbacks are on pace for something like 45 or 46 right now and they are well ahead of the 2010 Rays pace and so yeah it's really impressive and it's not just this year they have been above average for a few years now they've been way better than any other team over the past two plus seasons and I wrote this article about how they're doing it and who's doing it. And I talked to Dave McKay, their first base coach, who has been a first base coach since like 1984. With one interruption, he was the A's strength coach in

1988. Other than that, he has been a first base coach continuously since the mid 80s a few years after he retired as a player which is pretty amazing and it's kind of funny it sounds like first base coaching hasn't changed all that much like a lot of things in baseball have changed over the years and he also does the outfield instruction and he's saying that data plays a much larger role in that than it used to he gets data that tells him where to position the outfielders and he uses it. But for base running, he doesn't really get that much. Like he might get video obviously of pitchers moves and he'll get times to the plate and that sort of thing. But he doesn't think it's all that helpful because in base running, you really need to see it yourself

to feel comfortable with it. And so he just is evaluating the pitcher's move. And so is the base runner. And so there's only so much, I guess, that an advanced scouting report can tell you, which maybe that explains why no one was really trying to steal off John Lester as much as we imagined they would. Maybe they just never read the scouting report. So that was interesting to me. But I talked to him about it. And yeah, he is kind of a fan of base running. Well, he is a base running coach, but because he thinks it's a thing that you can change much more easily than you can change your hitting or your pitching or your fielding, you almost just have to set your mind to it that you're going to be a great base running team and then be dedicated to it. And lots of teams pay it lip service and spring training and say, we're going to run a lot this year or whatever. But most of them just stopped talking about it after that. And so his whole thing is that you have to have constant reminders throughout the year. And if a guy goes first to third on a single in the fifth

inning and then scores on a sack fly and you win the game then you have to remind that guy hey you you won the game for us when you went first to third on that single and so they have the longest leads in baseball according to stat cast this year like 16 feet is their average lead length and i don't think they're a super fast team their stolen base rate and success rate are good but not not extraordinary. It's really just the picking up extra bases, advancing on hits and balls in play. And they've just combined the best of both worlds, really. The Rangers have been fantastic at taking the extra base this year, but they've also made almost the most outs on the bases. And on the other end of the spectrum, the Brewers have made, I think, the fewest outs on the bases, but they also don't take the extra base very often.

So usually you have to choose between being aggressive and conservative, and the Diamondbacks have been both. They have been both very close to the best at taking the extra base and very close to the best at not making outs on the bases and that is why they are a historic base running team to this point in the season yeah the uh so i i only look at the the fangraphs base running numbers because i am brand loyal and the diamondbacks currently are on pace for 47 base running runs above average as you mentioned to those 2010 rays show up in first place since 2002 so this covers about a decade and a half. The Rays are 38 runs above average. So the Diamondbacks would be on pace to beat that by nine runs.

And oh, by the way, there's a 13 run difference between the Rays and the 2013 Mets in second place at about 25 runs. So the Diamondbacks are already only five runs away from second place in, I guess, this isn't really an era. I guess we'll call it the Fangraphs era or something. The Diamondbacks are right there. What's interesting to me also is that there's a team right on the Diamondbacks heels this year that also doesn't get a lot of attention. Really, across the board, they don't get a lot of attention anyway. But the Tampa Bay Rays are at 16.4 runs above average on the bases, which gives them a huge leg up on third place.

So the Rays, even though they're like the three true outcomes team at the plate, they just walk, strike out and hit home runs. They also have been running the bases very well. They have not stolen as much to the down backs. In fact, I'm just going to guess that base running runs are kind of complicated to assign. And I think there's a certain amount of controversy over what to do about like double plays, because if you don't hit into a lot of double plays, that could reflect good base running, but it could also just reflect the fact that you strike out a lot. And oh, by the way, the Rays have been a very good team at not hitting into double plays this year, because if you don't put the ball in play, you make a lot of outs one at a time.

But in any case, the Rays are very good in all of the base running categories. They are similar to the Diamondbacks, yet different from the Diamondbacks. We could have two teams that are just going insane this year on the bases at the same time, something to pay attention to. I'm reminded of, I think we probably all wrote about before Daniel Murphy was a very good player. He was a fine player who was kind of interesting and maybe a little bit homophobic. And then 2013, he had a fine year. He batted 286 for the Mets. But Daniel Murphy never been very fast. I think everyone would agree with that. But in 2013, Daniel Murphy just up and stole 23 bases. And I don't remember exactly what his streak was,

but I think he had something like 20 or 21 in a row at one point. And it seemed like the explanation was basically just go, just use your instincts and run on the pitcher. They don't expect you to go. And it seemed like there was a lot of video reviews of when Murphy was stealing bases. And he just seemed to very frequently find stolen bases when very little attention was being paid, which was interesting because he continued to go. You'd think that people would have noticed this at some point. And they did because there were articles on fan graphs and baseball prospectus and Mets blogs and elsewhere. But it was funny how few of those stolen bases that he had that year were like of the typically contested sort where Murphy was like running on the pitcher's move.

And then there was a close play at second. He made it look really easy. And then since then, he went from 23 stolen bases to 13 to 2 to 5. And then this year's one. So he kind of stopped running. And now granted, he also became more valuable at the plate and he's gotten older. So you wonder what the adjustment here was. But I like what McKay indicated to you, because it does seem like there's so little actual emphasis on, I don't know, not just base running, but I guess maybe progressive intelligent

base running as opposed to just, I don't know, Mike Socha brand run all the time for every base from about 15 years ago. I like that because last year's Padres were a very good base running team and they kind of felt similar. They were fine. They were young, but they took a lot of chances. They turned Will Myers into a really dangerous base runner. The Padres, again, are a pretty good base running team this year. And it seems like they're good at base running just because they want to be. And other teams just haven't put the emphasis on it to stop that from happening. Yeah. And maybe some teams just don't need to. The Diamondbacks are in a position right now where every win is important.

They're trailing in the NL West by one game. And so maybe there are teams that just have such a clear path to the playoffs that they just don't devote their energy to base running. Maybe they're devoting that energy to other things that are just as important or more important. I don't know what the opportunity cost is here. For all I know, running hard all the time gets you hurt more or fatigued more, makes you rest your best players more often. I don't know what the potential costs are. We really only know what the benefits are, which seems to be, in the Diamondbacks case, a few wins. And yeah, I did an article on the 2013 Mets, the current second place team in base running runs at the time, because they were fun.

And Tom Goodwin, a great base dealer himself, was their base running coach and first base coach. And they made it like a team-wide competition where everyone was competing for points on good base running plays. In Diamondback's case, it doesn't sound so fun. McKay made it sound like players are policing each other, which sounds like it's just a culture of fear and pressure. I'm sure it's not actually, but it sounded like you'd be ostracized if you made a bad base running play or something but but yeah what you're talking about with Murphy I mean Goldschmidt is the poster boy for that because he's just not that fast and yet he is one of the best base runners and base stealers in baseball it's just crazy since the start of 2015 he has

the seventh most steals and the seventh most base running runs in baseball. And the guys ahead of him are, you know, like Billy Hamilton and Dee Gordon and Brett Gardner and people like that. You just would not expect to see Paul Goldschmidt on that leaderboard. Like you have to go like a hundred places down on the base running runs leaderboard to find the next full time first baseman on there. It's just not a profile that exists really. And McKay, who used to coach for the Cardinals, compared him to Albert Pujols, who was also not very fast, but a very good base runner in his prime. And obviously both of these guys are such great players aside from the base running that they definitely don't have to be good base runners if they don't care to be, but both of them seem driven to just be the best at everything. And Goldschmidt basically is. I don't know whether

we've reached the point where saying Goldschmidt is underrated happens so often that he's now not underrated. I don't know. People listening to this podcast, I'm sure know how great Paul Goldschmidt is, but maybe to the typical fan, he is still not quite as famous as he should be. Yeah. I don't know if there's a category where I'd rather i don't i don't know if there's a more fitting category i guess for goldschmidt to be a leading than just so i guess maybe offense because that's what he's really good at but the the stolen base is just the fact that he's not only still stealing but still stealing a bunch maybe stealing even better than ever it's just it's outstanding it's just the perfect reflection of how paul goldschmidt is basically just good at everything, just everything across the board.

And nobody seems to care. I know that's not true for the audience for this podcast because these people actually know baseball, but yeah, I think he is absolutely still underrated because I think that there's almost no way for a Diamondbacks player not to be very underrated if he's quite good. Yeah. best player in the National League this year by Fangraph's War, at least. Just walks almost as often as he strikes out, has great power, hits for average, is a great base runner.

Just, you know, he's just awesome at everything. So yeah, Goldschmidt's great. Top five base runners according to Fangraph so far this season, Billy Hamilton, Xander Bogarts, Delano DeShields, Gerard Dyson, I'll say Dee Gordon also, he's number six, and Paul Goldschmidt is at number three so obviously he's one who fits joey gallo confusingly actually is right there at number seven i am going to guess why that might be his double play avoidance is probably yeah that's that's helped because he yeah yeah for the reasons i already mentioned and just because we're here the bottom five base runners in baseball

in order dustin pedroia number five matt dav Davidson, Kendries Morales, Eric Hosmer, Danny Valencia, number one or number 754, depending on your perspective, at negative 6.1 base running runs this season. That is very bad. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about an article you just wrote. Not that we're always going to talk about the thing we wrote most recently, but you happened to write about podcast legend, podcast hall of famer, Rich Hill, who has fallen on hard times. I couldn't bring myself to click on the post yet because I just, I didn't want to read negative things about Rich Hill. I'm accustomed to saying positive things about Rich Hill, but tell me what you found. Okay. Well, Rich Hill had a stinker of a

game yesterday. His season hasn't been all bad. In fact, before yesterday, his ERA was still under four and he's averaging a strikeout per inning. So Rich Hill has made eight starts. Maybe the most distressing thing about those eight starts is that he's totaled just 35 innings, meaning he's averaging less than four and a half innings per start. I know that the Dodgers are a progressive team and they'll piggyback starters and whatnot. They don't want to push Rich Hill too far, but they have definitely been expecting

more than four and a half innings per start from him. So statistically, it's very, very easy to see that something is wrong. His home run rate has basically tripled. His strikeouts are way down. His walks have doubled. He's walking 15% of all the batters that he's facing this season so his numbers are bad across the board and so as is always the case when it comes to situations like this you always have to ask well what is actually going on i don't have the perfect answer hot tip we never do but

one thing you can point to is that rich hill's fastball has lost about a mile and a half of its average velocity. So that's one of the bigger drops in all of baseball. So that is a hint that something would be up. But I think the biggest issue, and this is connected, of course, to the strikeouts and the walks, but Rich Hill has not been so, I guess the word would be deceptive to go through this quickly. Many listeners will know that we have measures that uh that show how often batters swing at pitches out of the zone and how often batters swing at pitches in the zone now if you are a pitcher then of course your ideal is you want swings out of the zone and you want no swings in the zone that's not what happens because hitters are not stupid but in any case rich hill last year got swings out of the zone

about 28 percent of the time this year he's down down at 21. Last year, Rich Hill got swings in the zone about 54% of the time this year is up to 61. So there was last season, a difference between those two numbers of 27%. I still have not figured out a great way to say this out loud. But that is the difference that existed between two numbers that are pretty well known he had a difference of 27 percent between in zone and out of zone swing rates this season he has a difference of 40 percent and that is a very very substantial drop it is one of the very biggest such drops in all of baseball looking at starting pitchers who have worked in the last two years that would give hill the third worst drop in that direction behind jose urina whose name i have just said out loud for the first time in my life and uh wade miley fun

thing about this table is toward the top of this table you find wade miley ubaldo jimenez and chris tillman all orioles starting pitchers all bad it's all bad for the orioles in any case rich hill not getting the swings out of the zone that he used to and getting more swings in the zone than he used to. So that tells you right there that, okay, hitters are taking a more disciplined approach. Hitters clearly are seeing the ball a little bit better against Rich Hill. And the other compelling thing that I found is that Rich Hill is leaving a lot more pitches, like a lot more pitches, up and to the arm side.

So if you are a right-handed batter, which most batters are against Rich Hill, then you are seeing a lot of pitches up and to the arm side so if you are a right-handed batter which most batters are against rich hill then you are seeing a lot of pitches up and away which means hill is having trouble getting pitches to be down he's having trouble getting pitches to be inside of course hill is no stranger to working up in the zone that's kind of been his thing since he came back into baseball in 2015 but he is leaving dramatically more pitches out of the zone up and away and I think that that can lead to a further problem one those pitches are not very difficult to lay off as a hitter I think it's easier to see those pitches and read them than it is a pitch that's coming in or that's going low below the zone because your inclination is to just take a pitch

that looks like it's going to be up and away but when you have a pitcher who's consistently missing up and away then it kind of gets you focused on that area and it also tells you the pitcher's having trouble coming inside or going down low and so you get to kind of focus in on an area of the zone that's going to be up and over the outer half of the plate so i don't know if that's actually true if that actually explains what's going on but it seems to make sense to me hitters would be then able to focus on a smaller part of the strike zone, which would explain why they have a more disciplined approach. So the question then becomes, why is Hill doing this in the first place? And as always, you've got injury or mechanics, and we don't know ever. This is a fairly common problem for someone who's said to be flying open

if you're a pitcher and you're flying open your mechanics and you're likely to leave pitches up and to the arm side if you are throwing across your body this can be a thing and hill does have a little bit of a crossfire delivery so it could be that but you also definitely cannot ignore the fact that he has struggled with blisters and he had a major blister problem last year and also this year where he missed something like a month from the Dodgers because of this blister problem on his fingers when Dave Roberts has inquired recently Hill has said that he's fine and the blister hasn't recurred and he could be telling the truth but it makes me wonder I don't know I've never dealt with a blister problem as a pitcher before but it makes me wonder this could

be too simplistic but if he's just not finishing pitches with his hand in the same way that he used to such that he's just not really committing I guess to getting the ball more in the zone a little bit lower because if you're not quite finishing your pitches then it makes sense to me that you would be missing away and up and that could either be because of having a blister right now or just because having blisters before kind of messed up his release and he doesn't really want to aggravate the area so i don't know if rich hill is has a mechanical problem or an injury problem he's also very much 37 years old so you know things happen yeah but uh that is the current issue with rich hill and i guess for the dodgers the good news is they have a lot of time to figure this out because they're still good yeah

well these were the things that people worried about with Rich Hill, his age and his lack of a track record and his blisters. And they were all legitimate reasons to worry, but it was much more fun not to worry because when he was actually pitching, he was like the best pitcher in baseball. And we all enjoyed that out of nowhere success very much. So yeah, I wonder about the blister because Eno did an article showing or trying to show that probably the curveball was why Hill is getting so many blisters. He throws so many curveballs and he's not really throwing fewer curveballs and it doesn't seem like he's throwing them all that differently, at least in terms of movement or speed or anything. I don't know whether there's any sort of spin rate difference there, but yeah, it's hard to believe. Obviously, the blister has had a lot to do with the fact that Hill hasn't pitched much, but you'd think it would also have something to do with the fact that he's pitched poorly, but hard to establish that connection for sure because obviously he's not going to come out

and say the blister has ruined me forever because he wants to pitch. So a very interesting aspect to Hill's season. I'll have to line up the leaderboard here, but obviously you think Rich Hill and you think curveball, right? That's the moneymaker. That's the pitch that he throws 40% of the time. And so for anyone who is familiar with the fact that Fangraphs has pitch type run values, right? So these are run values that

attempt to explain how valuable a pitch has been. Now, in reality, it's not quite that simple, but yeah, just give us the benefit of the doubt. Generally, a positive run value for a pitch will capture a good pitch and a negative run value will capture a non-functional pitch. So it will surprise nobody that Rich Hill has a very very valuable curveball for 2015 and 2016 combined it was one of the best curveballs in baseball by run values many many many runs above average this season there have been 351 pitchers who have thrown curveballs as measured by fan graphs can you guess where rich hill's curveball ranks in run value? Hmm. 30th. Would you believe 351st?

Oh, my goodness. He has the last... I actually did not know this pre-podcast. He has had the least valuable curveball in all of baseball this season. He is there. And not only the least valuable, he's the least valuable by two runs. So Rich Hill is at negative 6.2 runs on his curveball this season just above him below him i don't know how this goes i never know what to do with the

bottom of a leaderboard in terms of how it ranks but the guy who's nearest rich hill is jeremy jeffress at negative 4.2 runs then phil hughes at negative 4.1 joe musgrove at negative 3.9 and because we can't avoid how bad chris tillman has been he's there at negative 3.8. Chris Tillman has thrown exclusively bad pitches this season. But in any case, Rich Hill, last place curveball. Now, I know this is a counting stat, which means it's partially dependent on how often you throw a pitch. Hill throws a lot more curveballs than most people, but he's also missed time. He hasn't thrown many innings. And the fact that it's last place is incredible to me. I wish that i would have thought to put that in my article but here we are

instagrams follow up yeah right i'm not doing extra work if ifs and buts were candy and nuts then rich hill i don't well i guess that wouldn't have any effect on rich hill's curveball last place unbelievable so i this is maybe more of a Sam question, but Rich Hill, free agent now, what would you give him? Gosh, yeah. I was always lower on Hill than Sam was, not that I'm trying to make myself sound smart retrospectively or retroactively, but I was always wary about the lack of durability. But yeah, man, I mean, he rode the curveball to success and was great at throwing the curveball and now is evidently terrible at throwing the curveball. So what is Rich Hill without the curveball? Not a whole lot, I guess, a 37-year-old who doesn't pitch very much and doesn't pitch well when he does pitch. So that is not someone you would pay for. Of course, it's completely possible that he will regain the feel for the curveball, but he's had these repeated blister issues for so long now that I don't know that I believe that there is a great solution to it.

Maybe if he throws the great curveball that he was throwing, he's just inevitably going to get blisters and have to be taken out of games and go back on the DL. And so that limits his ceiling value, even if he were able to recover his effectiveness on an inning per inning basis. So, I mean, I guess I would give him a one-year deal at this point, just hoping he could recapture the magic of the last couple seasons. But how much is he making right now? He's at $348 is his contract. And that's through when? Started this year. So through 2019. Oops. That could get bad pretty quickly. So yeah,

if we were to tear that deal up and sign him today, I'd give him one and gosh, I don't know, 10. It's possible that he could be completely worthless if he keeps pitching like he has, but I don't know. That seems like a decent enough investment to make on the off chance that he will be good again. So something like that. His approach and the way that he plays,

it reminds me a lot of the most inefficient days of mid-career Eric Bedard, who was also a lefty, not a big blazing fastball, but mostly curveball. Bedard had some different sort of injury problems, but he was inefficient, couldn't really go deep in games, but he would walk a few too many players to be good and reliable, but he would get enough strikeouts to feel like he was close enough to being effective. And Bedard, his first year with the Mariners started just 15 games. His second year with the Mariners started just 15 games.

His third year with the Mariners started zero games. But Bedard, I don't remember exactly what the timeline was, but I think it was non-tendered or he became a free agent anyway. In his last year of arbitration, he made $7.75 million. That was 2009. The Mariners re-signed Bedard in 2010. And according to baseball reference, at least he was paid just $7.75 million. That was 2009. The Mariners re-signed Bedard in 2010. And according to Baseball Reference, at least he was paid just $1.5 million as a base salary. But he also did not pitch in 2010.

2011, he did ultimately get the pitch. But the Mariners had also signed him that year to a contract with a $1 million base salary in 2011. And then the Pirates wound up with Bedard in 2012 and in 2012 bedard got a base salary of 4.5 million so that was after a year in which bedard made 24 starts and had a mid-threes era in 2011 and he looked generally okay mostly recovered from his injuries at that point he was like four or five years younger than rich Hill is now. Different issues between them, of course, different complications. But at least based on that one precedent, maybe Hill would sign for like a year and five million dollars now with some incentives, which, well, that's not at all what he's getting

paid. Which is basically what the A's signed him for right after his first successful few starts for the Red Sox. So it was like one in six or something like that? Yeah. I mean, the lesson of Rich Hill is that pitchers really can completely change in a very short span of time. And all you need to do is see one start in certain cases. And you can tell a whole lot about how a pitcher will perform just based on the stuff.

And so that was the lesson we learned on the way up. That might also be the lesson we learned on the way down, unfortunately, because if the thing that turned him into this unhittable pitcher deserts him, then he will be back to the Rich Hill that he was before that transformation, which was not a major leaguer. So I hope that doesn't happen, but it was fun while it lasted, if that's it. And let's hope there's more. So yeah, it's funny that you mentioned wishing that you could have included that curveball fun fact in there, because what do you think your rate of regret as far as wishing you had included something in a post goes? Obviously, you're writing so many posts that you

have to be like the prototypical, you know, the closer in baseball who forgets the bad outing or whatever. Not that you have many bad outings, but if you do, you have another post to write almost immediately, so you can't really dwell on it. But I would say that probably, I don't know, a third of the time, maybe I will wish I had included something in an article. And sometimes it's something I thought of while I was writing the article, but then forgot to include in the final product. And sometimes it's just that you and I are trying to cover all of baseball in some form, and we're never going to be as well informed about a player or a team as someone who devotes almost all of their attention to that

team. And so sometimes, you know, it'll be a quote that you had never heard or some backstory to a player's change or something that you weren't aware of. So there's often something like that. And when you just get a bigger audience reading you and then you get comments and you get tweets. And so if you did leave out something, someone will tell you about it. So that happens fairly often, I would say to me. Yeah, I think you and I are both completionists. I think when we are writing about a topic, we want to write everything about the topic. We want to just kind of like cover it and move on and not have to write about it again. We just want to get to the story and say everything, provide all the evidence you need for the story.

It's uncommon to have something like this where I regret leaving it out. I just didn't think to look this up. I implied the curveball had gotten worse in the article, but I did not know it was going to be the worst, the very worst curveball in baseball.

That is unusual. I usually will assemble those facts. I wish that I had maybe a little more time to do sort of the quote gathering reporting that you get to do, because I think that adds a lot. If nothing else, validates the research that you're doing independently when you get team or organizational support. But I know that that's just a difference in the job. So when I have to write constant articles a day, I just don't have time to talk to anyone like anyone at all, not even people when I'm done with work. You are most of my conversations in my life. And other than that, I think one thing that I wish that I guess wouldn't

require reporting, but would require some more research is I just like articles that include more anecdotes. And they can even just be anecdotes that you get extirpated from somebody else's work a popular blogging move that you get to do but i don't do a whole lot of that i usually just go straight to the facts and if i do an anecdote it's like oh look at this representative clip from the game yesterday or the day before and that's gonna be a tip off to what we're gonna talk about today so there are times when i think that i am following the same template too often but i also have to remember that the people who read a given post are not reading every single jeff sullivan post because people generally will read about their own teams or teams in their division and

not everything from like i forgot that i wrote about zach godley i guess but i doubt there's a huge overlap between the zach godley post audience and the Rich Hill post audience. Maybe some, because Godley, by the way, has had the best curveball in baseball this season. That would have been a fun poll a few months ago. Another thing is that sometimes I'll regret not including an argument that I don't buy. Sometimes I just won't even think about it, or I'll think about it and I'll dismiss it, and then I won't include it in the article, but then I'll get a million questions and suggestions like, what if it's this thing? And it's better to just, even if you don't think it's true and don't think it holds up, just to nod to it in a line and say, it could be this, but I don't think it is because of that or whatever.

And that way you won't get people pointing out that caveat. Like when I wrote the Jonathan LeCroy framing piece, I didn't talk about the theory that maybe umpires are punishing him specifically because he has a reputation as a good framer, which I didn't consider the likeliest reason or even a likely reason. It's plausible. Like I should have brought it up. I should have at least acknowledged that it's a theory. It's not a crazy theory. It could have some truth to it. And instead, I got lots of comments from well-meaning people, not like yelling at me or anything, but just saying, what if it's this or maybe that played a part? And it would have been better for me to just bring that up. Even if I was going to dismiss it,

it would have been in there. So that's another thing that slips by me sometimes. Yeah. And as much as I think it's popular to complain about the comments or the Twitter people, et cetera, and sometimes can be overwhelming or discouraging to read some of the replies that you get, it is by large, very helpful because when you point something out that one of us missed in an article or should have addressed, we might have a tinge of our own regret, but that helps inform how we process things going forward. And those are useful. If you have actual constructive information to provide, we are very receptive to it. I will speak for myself, but also with Ben's approval right there, I will speak for myself but also with ben's approval right there i will speak for him too yeah we'd like to know what we missed provided you're not an asshole about it so let us know and

yeah nice and uh checking the list at baseball prospectus right now luke roy is still the last place catcher in framing i don't remember where he was when you wrote i remember he was last but i don't remember what the margins were. What are they now? So he's currently in last place by three runs worse than James McCann and also basically Cameron Rupp. Yeah, I don't think he's really gotten any better. So I guess the solution was not him reading my article and saying, oh, I guess I should be better at this. So it's more complicated than that. But yeah, I definitely read the comments and have always read the comments. And partially that's just because I've happened to work at places that either didn't have comments or had really good comments and usually didn't have that many comments. subscribe to comment and so you have to like the place usually there were a couple of people who kept subscribing year after year just to criticize every article which puzzled us but for the most

part really informative intelligent comments that would point out interesting ideas and things that you might have missed and then gritland i think did away with comments not long after i joined but they were okay when I got there, for me at least. And then the ringer doesn't get a ton of comments, but the ones that it does get are decent, at least on my articles. A lot of it is just that we're not writing about the type of things. And there are certain topics that I think will attract trolls, obviously, and certain people who will attract trolls through no fault of their own That's the way the internet works and

We are fortunate not to be Those people and to be writing about those Topics you're not going to get anyone Who's that mad at you if you are Just making a statistical Case about a baseball team And backing it up with numbers Someone might say numbers are dumb

But they're usually not going to attack you personally for it if you would back up your argument. So I think maybe our perceptions of the worthiness of comments are skewed a bit relative to the typical internet author, but in my experience, it's been positive. Yeah, right. I've always wondered about the fact that there are such thing as fan graphs trolls, and it's like, why?

How did this audience yield even like the two or three trolls that we have at a time? I don't know how. It's not a place that should be selective for trolls or really any sort of emotional behavior at all. Fan graphs. And, you know, if you're not going to click on a Ben Lindbergh article and read the whole thing and then just be like a dick about it at the end because you know what you're getting into you know that you're getting into something that's objective and thoroughly researched and informative and insightful you're welcome you know that you're going to get like a matter of fact here is an argument for something laid out about baseball and it's not going to be there's not going to be emotion in it really at all because Ben's not a fan he doesn't care and what I think has helped me to feel even more blessed is pity the wonderful but poor Sam Miller who wound up at ESPN, which is a brand that attracts a broader and more diverse audience.

I suppose you could say in a way that Fangraphs does not and The Ringers does not. And Sam is writing just as well and as awesomely as he ever has but he is of course now at a place where his brand is completely unfamiliar and people are just like ESPN ESPN ESPN what the hell is this and so you'll have some really off-the-wall imaginative wonderfully executed idea that Sam writes but as a reader of ESPN who's used to like here are the top five moments of Joe Flacco being elite. And they'll just be like, what is this article even about? Why would we have a baseball season without stats? Why would Starling Marte, what is the purpose of this? And so that's got to be horrible for Sam when he's, because, you know, everyone, everybody are sensitive to the comments, but.

I would guess that Sam does not read the comments. But based on my knowledge of Sam, I haven't talked to him about it. But, yeah, it's become a popular pastime in the Effectively Wild Facebook group just to not only read Sam's articles but then read the comments on Sam's articles. And it's like two different types of enjoyment because the article is great but then you also get to marvel at the comments that are left on the article. And I think it's kind of a valuable reminder of just how different audiences are. Just having worked for small sites and bigger sites and seen the traffic at those respective sites, I wasn't doing anything different at all at those respective sites. I wrote the same stuff for BP that I wrote at the beginning of my tenure at Grantland, but the first thing I ever wrote for Grantland did way better than

the top red thing I'd ever done for BP, and it wasn't even anything special. So it wasn't like my virtue had attracted those clicks. They were just there, and so there was a certain reception to it. And so it's helpful, I think, to realize that even if you are beloved by one audience another audience might not have the same reaction or just that none of us is all that special. increase exponentially but you can't let it go to your head because it's not like you did it and attracted those readers you just happen to walk into a nice situation traffic wise yeah right talk about living in a bubble you get so used to writing for the people that you write for and then you go to a bigger website which has a bigger audience and you think oh no these people have not been exposed my unique brand of whatever it is that right where i do and uh yeah then it gets a little more complicated so well we've already been talking for about 40 or 40 some minutes.

I have 10 minutes until I have to depart from my chat. So now I don't know whether or not we should devote the rest of this to the thing we were going to talk about. This would be another Friday episode where we don't get to the topic I was going to present. But you know what? The hell with it. We might as well do it for 10 minutes because what's the harm? And it's something I'm sure you have discussed on this podcast before we've all written about it the

automated strike zone i bring it up this is what we were going to talk about last week because last week it would have been june 9th which would have been one day after buster only espn senior writer wrote an article for espn titled baseball keeps getting slower but change will come by 2018 that's actually a vague unhelpful headline but within the article only reported that there is some momentum toward the automated strike zone that we have talked about forever, ever since PitchFX was thought up. There is momentum on the side of the players who would like to have an electronic strike zone come into existence. You can understand that. So this is something that could be discussed for an hour or 10 hours or something like that we have 10 minutes in fact now about nine minutes but there is that momentum this is something that is not going to go away because obviously the bare bones the skeleton of the technology does exist and so to lead off any such conversation one thing i think does need to be understood. If we were designing baseball now with all the same rules, but we knew we needed a strike zone and we had the technology we have now, but there was no history.

We would, of course, almost certainly implement an automated strike zone. That is how baseball would be created. That is how sports have gone. That is how baseball will eventually be. So there is that. Now, there are consequences to implementing an automated strike zone of course the big issue right now aside from it's not the rule is that the technology is not good enough for everyone to be satisfied anyone

who has played around with pitch effects or stat cast track man information knows that there are some calibration errors the locations are not always precise there is the bigger and slightly more difficult to solve issue of where the upper and lower boundaries of a given hitter's strike zone should be right you've got jose altuve who stands four foot nothing and the erin judge who's as tall as a ballpark and then i don't really know where you define the upper and lower boundaries but someone would have to do it maybe you have to put sensors on the player's body. I don't know. But the estimates that are out there now are only estimates based on a player's stance.

So I don't know. I guess what is your feeling of the coming automated strike zone? And what are elements that you could miss? Or if not miss, are you just going enthusiastically headfirst into the electronic strike zone era? Yeah, I do think it's coming. I don't know whether it will be a handful of years or still decades, but it's got to come at some point, I'm sure, just given the way the game and the world have gone. And I guess early on, just accepted what I think at the time was sort of the standard argument, at least as soon as PitchFX showed up and was proven that an automated strike zone would be a positive. And I do think I wrote a long thing about this for Grantland a few years ago, and I think most of it and some pitches are missed and mistracked and the height issue, as you mentioned.

But it does seem like we're holding the automated strike zone to a higher standard than we're holding the manually operated strike zone today or next season using current technology than relying on humans, which as we know, is not that accurate. I mean, it's gotten more accurate. I don't blame the umpires for the fact that it's not perfect. I think they're doing the best anyone could do, but it's not perfect. And I would have to think that even when you do include all of those caveats and problems we just mentioned, it would probably be an improvement, at least if you want to call exactly the rulebook strike zone. But I have come around on the idea that I don't care about the rulebook strike zone, and I actually prefer the way it works now, which is just this kind of negotiation between umpire and batter and pitcher and catcher.

And it adds this complexity and interplay. And when you say human element, it makes it sound like you're being some sort of Luddite or, you know, regressive and you don't trust technology. And that's not what I mean. I just mean that there is a level of nuance there. Just from an analysis and writing perspective we've gotten a ton of mileage out of writing about say catcher framing no which would all but go away and you know it's kind of going away a little bit as it is at least in terms of the separation

between teams and players but it would completely go away and i would be sad about a major aspect of the technique of the most important defensive position in baseball just being wiped away immediately. That would, I think, lessen my enjoyment of the game. And, you know, I wouldn't want some World Series or something to be decided on a bad human call. I think that would be bad. And maybe just avoiding that possibility is worth sacrificing some things. But I like the idea that certain pitchers can expand the zone and that that's a skill that they have and that you can try to be aware of that if you're a batter and a catcher and an umpire, but maybe they can exploit it. And I just, I like that variation between players. And to me,

I think the automated strike zone would just flatten those differences and give us less to talk about and marvel at. And for me, I think currently that is not worth the benefit of going from whatever 90% accurate to 98% accurate. Yeah. There's a lot of what sports are really about is telling some sort of story and i feel like now i might sound like an older man because just like you a few years ago i was all on board with the electronic strike zone i'll still embrace it if and when it happens although it's going to be weird to have these set cutoffs such that there's no more gray area anymore around the strike zone it'll just be like this pitch is a strike and then one-tenth of one-tenth of an inch to the other side it is never a strike that's going to be a little weird but i guess that is what the strike zone is supposed to be but i

like the conversations that get to take place the stories you get to tell after a game even after a bad call in an important game what there was the call against who was it ben revere or whatever way davis pitch against the blue jays in 2014 or 2015 whatever it was there was a close pitch that changed the complexity of a very high leverage bat and then the blue jays had to go against them and then the royals got to win and then they kept playing baseball and into the world series and that's just one example and there have been several more recent examples of controversial calls. But one thing I pulled up a post that I wrote a little more than three years ago on Fangraphs. It's called the most or least important pitch framing question because I don't know how to write headlines. And this is a post that's about pitch framing. I don't need to explain under talked about i think with pitch framing is do people like it should it should it exist and this gets into what you were talking about that it's all a negotiation that's about the batter and the pitcher and the catcher and the umpire but the question that i posed to the audience back then was where do you stand on the matter of pitch

framing and there were two options in the poll One was I like it as a legitimate baseball skill. And the other was I would prefer it not be a baseball skill. So it's not a direct question about the automated strike zone, but just kind of seeing where people fall. And I was kind of surprised by the results because 61% of people, there were about 1600 votes, but 61% of people voted for I like it as a legitimate baseball skill. So three out of five members of the very skewed fan graphs community were in favor of pitch framing and all of the

implications that they're in which would seem to be at least a soft vote against the electronic strike zone and i'm sympathetic to that in the same way that you are i like that there are of course missed calls i write every year about blown calls right down the middle. But what's funny is if you look at those pitches, they all involve something going wrong, like the pitcher missed a spot or the catcher messed something up. And I like that. I like that the strike zone is dependent on actual execution, I, Joe Sheehan calls framing umpire exploitation. And I think I can always count on a comment or a tweet anytime I've ever written about framing. Someone will say, who cares if he's good at it? This shouldn't be a skill. This is only because umpires are bad, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a valid viewpoint. I can't say that you're wrong, but I disagree. I like this stuff and I am in no hurry to lose it. And I think that umpires have gotten good enough also. There's been such improvement

in the accuracy and the standardization and the uniformity of the strike zones that are called now compared to pre-pitch FX, pre-quest tech. The zones were kind of crazy. I think they were getting out of hand and you were getting way outside strikes that just, I think, changed the game to a greater degree than most people would be comfortable with. And now I don't think we're there. I think the zones are good enough that I can live with the mistakes

and the borderline calls that go one way or another. So I don't know whether most people agree with that or not. I just, I think we all remember the times when a call went against our team and it was extremely frustrating and that comes to mind more easily than the times when we got a call, right? Or a call went against the opponent's team. In theory, at least the stuff evens out, although it doesn't always perfectly. So I think it gives us something to talk about.

It gives players something to be mad about. And I don't know if we'd have as much to say about baseball if there were an automated strike zone after the first year and talking about how the rollout went and maybe how nothing changed all that much. Maybe the change would be less than we're expecting. nothing changed all that much. Maybe the change would be less than we're expecting. And, you know, there are unintended consequences and it's hard to say exactly whether it would help the hitters more, help the pitchers more, and what would catching even look like and what would that do to the catching position? There are all sorts of secondary effects that would be difficult to forecast before it actually happened. So I think there's that Bill James line about, I don't know, like every inch in the strike zone is equivalent to like 10 feet in the outfield or 25 feet in the outfield or

something as far as its potential to affect the way the game is played. And so you have to be careful about making changes to the zone. And this would be perhaps the biggest change to the zone. So proceed with caution. And you know what? Ryan Domet, only 36 years old, he could still try to make a comeback. I have to get to my chat. So I guess there's going to be plenty more for us to discuss at some point down the line if and when this comes back into the news. But for now, I don't have a conclusion. Have a good weekend. I do have a conclusion. I will leave you with this headline from MLB.com. Sanchez exits with tight groin after huge night. Headline from MLB.com Sanchez exits with tight groin after a huge night

MLB.com Headline Phrasing Alright that's it for this week You can support the podcast on Patreon By going to patreon.com Effectively wild Five new supporters I am thankful for

Tyler Hodges, Gregory Goldstone, Chris Jillings Jesse Thorne and John Coletti 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. By the way, Jeff just couldn't resist. He did do a Friday Instagram post on

Richel's curveball even after he scoffed at the idea of doing extra work. Maybe it's technically not work when the fact is so fun. Thanks to Dylan

Higgins for editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments coming via email at podcast at fancast.com and via the Patreon messaging system. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. We'll talk to you next week. I'm the tech. Go start a robot, boy. That's okay.