Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1076: Undoing the Dodgers

Episode Date: June 27, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about high fastballs and the Red Sox, Carter Capps, the Nationals bullpen, the Giants’ clubhouse chemistry with Mark Melancon (and without Ángel Pagán), then discuss the Dodgers’ enviable present and future and whether anything can end their NL West hegemony. After that, they close with some episode-ending banter about […]

🎵 Music 🎵 🎵 Music 🎵 Come on, send me in ecstasy, baby With your love Hello and welcome to episode 1076 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass, presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangrass. Hello. Hello. We covered our weekends in the pre-episode banter, or the pre-episode, pre-banter episode. I don't know how to say it. Before we started recording, I had a pretty good weekend.

You actually didn't say. How was your weekend? It was fine. Well, it's probably not ever interesting to listen to people talk about the weather, but it got to 100 degrees both days, I think, in Portland, Oregon, which is not something that we are accustomed to experiencing. And so even though we try to schedule every single weekend to get out in the wilderness, this was a weekend where the earth was trying to kill us. And so we stayed inside and not allow that to happen. Well,

get used to it. All right. So we have a few banter topics, or at least I do. I don't know what you have. I wanted to ask you just about something you wrote about, which is the Red Sox and high fastballs. I have not read the post yet, but I was intrigued by the title because I am not sure what I'm supposed to think about high fastballs these days. It was a strategy that seemed to be in vogue maybe a year or two ago, and everyone was talking about how high fastballs were the new thing, and I haven't heard it as much recently. There was suggestion that high spin fastballs are better if you throw them high in the zone and then you did a post looking for more high fastballs as a counter to the home run surge and i think you didn't find them really there hasn't been a trend toward them

but i know that according to the title of your post the red socks are all in on high fastballs and the rays are all in on high fastballs and the Rays are all in on high fastballs. And those are obviously two of the heavily analytical teams, or at least have been of late. So does that mean that this is a good thing that everyone should be doing? Should teams be doing more of this? Or is it entirely dependent on the makeup of your pitching stuff? Is this a strategy where if you ask me about the post, that way you don't have to read it? Because I got that. I'm going to use that on you you and that saves me half an hour every few days yeah right so high fastballs to speak generally i remember talking about high fastballs years ago right around when the royals and a's were playing that one game playoff somewhere around that so uh september uh august 2014 i

had been doing some player interviews preparing for a hardball Times article. This turned into a very long story. And within the article and within some of those interviews, I was talking to some players who were talking about how hitters had become so good at hitting pitches down that generally, if you have a swing that you have adopted to try to hit low pitches, you are going to become more vulnerable against high pitches. And this kind of goes all the way back to the other non-platoon splits written about in the book by Tango Tiger and Mitchell Lichtman about ground ball pitchers versus ground ball hitters and ground ball pitchers versus fly ball hitters and etc. And what they found was that fly ball hitters were better against ground ball pitchers. And it follows now that we have more information that that's because fly ball hitters tend to hit fly balls on pitches that are down ground ball pitchers tend to throw pitches that are down. So to try to speed this up a little bit, it seemed like there could be a vulnerability if the league was getting better at hitting low pitches, that there could be a vulnerability against high pitches. And again, we talked about Mike Trout and all this. Yes, yes.

So fast forward, I don't think it ever went out of fashion necessarily. I think the Rays have gotten some, I would say maybe undue criticism. Their home run rate took off last year, their pitching staff's home run rate, and the Rays have been connected deeply to throwing high fastballs and I think a lot of people were hasty to say oh look the Rays were made to pay for their high fastballs by the home run spike but of course what the research has revealed is that the home run spike has come on pitches down and in the middle of the zone and not on pitches up so I think the Rays their problem last year was that the pitchers were just bad, which is another reason that you give up home runs. So speeding this up again, so much of the conversation in the last year, I don't know, it feels like it gets more intense

by the day, but there's all this talk about the fly ball revolution. I'm kind of tired of hearing those three words put together. What about airball revolution? That's a decent substitute, but it is becoming more weary by the day. All this talk about players trying to hit more fly balls, which great, that makes sense. All this old timey non knowledge to try to erase from players muscle memories. So you've got all these players in theory trying to hit the ball in the air. And generally, not all the time, but generally, these players are trying to do that against pitches that are down, there are more pitches down than there used to be as sort of a general trend players like to work downitchers are told from the time that they're in

Little League, keep the ball down. If you have a broadcast who's talking to a color guy or maybe a studio reporter and they're trying to do a little in-game report on a pitcher who's been good, but the reporter doesn't have anything actually insightful to say, then that reporter will usually say the pitcher has been doing a good job of keeping the ball down. It's something that people say about a pitcher that doesn't mean anything. And of course, the strike zone has expanded downward, which made it more rewarding to pitch down. Yeah, yeah, that too. Although it seems like that has stopped, or at least it's taken a little intermittent pause. Anyway, so all these hitters are trying to hit low pitches. This is like mad libs of baseball trends

over the last five years we've just named like putting it all together this is the this is the sabermetric da vinci code i'm telling you so there's all this talk about hitters trying to hit pitches down hitting low pitches the guys like you and assessment is justin turner all these fly ball hitters swing changers they've gotten really really good against pitches down not so good against pitches up so i don't know what's happened with the high fastball i don don't know why people wrote about it less often. I don't know if they actually have or if it's been less emphasized. There's been a very, very slight league wide bounce back in the rate of high fastballs thrown the last two years, but nothing dramatic. It's still lower than the rate from like, I don't know, 2012, 2011. But the Rays are still throwing high fastballs. The

Nationals are still throwing high fastballs. And now the Red Sox are throwing not only a bunch of high fastballs, they're throwing more high fastballs than any other team in baseball this season. And in fact, their fastballs are higher than any team's fastballs we've seen in the past decade since the start of pitch tracking technology. Now, of course, the difference is only like an inch on average, but it's a pretty substantial difference because the actual differences in pitch height between teams are just not that large. So the Red Sox are throwing a lot of high fastballs. Just by coincidence, perhaps, they've had a very good pitching staff.

Their starting rotation is fourth, I think, in Fangraph's war. Their bullpen is fifth. They haven't had a good version of David Price. They haven't had any version of Carson Smith or Tyler Thornburg. Eduardo Rodriguez has been hurt. Steven Wright has been hurt. So they haven't had exactly the pitching staff they wanted to, but it's still been good. Of course, it helps to have Chris Sale and

Craig Kimbrell. It helps to have the best starter and maybe the best ender right now in the game. But still, I don't know if you knew that they had a... Oh, man. Who was a... Blaine Boyer! Blaine Boyer! The guy who couldn't get anybody struck out last year. He's on the Red Sox now, it turns out. This also came to the surprise of many

Red Sox fans who commented on the post. and he's getting a few more strikeouts because he has increased his average fastball by like more than six inches in terms of his height so i went into a tremendous backstory detail and explaining what this article was about could have summarized it very quickly but the red sox are throwing a lot of high fastballs last year they threw the second highest fastballs in baseball this year, the number one. That's not much of a difference, but the fact that they were already number two last year, and yet this year they have the largest team increase in average festival height suggests that there is indeed something going on. Just about every single one of their pitchers compared to last year has increased the festival height, and I don't know

why this hasn't caught on as more of a trend, except the actual answer is yes, I do. Yes, I do. Let me walk that back. That's going to be my next question. Well, why don't I stop talking for a second so you can actually formally ask the question? Well, I assume that this is some sort of Brian Bannister brilliance that the Red Sox are doing here that we will find out about later. So yes, why have other teams not pursued the same strategy? So when we were all writing our Mike Trout high fastball articles, I think we would always ask the same question, why don't they do this more? Why doesn't every team do this? Why is it only like the Royals

for a while who were doing it and the Astros and Mariners, etc? Why wasn't everybody doing that? And the answer we got was that pitchers just aren't comfortable throwing high in the zone, because again, they've been taught for decades, in some cases to throw the ball down and this is kind of the same you could call it maybe the pitcher version of the hitters air ball or fly ball revolution where the many of these hitters were taught for so many years to just hit a line drive or swing down on the ball and it's taken a lot of work to very very gradually rewire some of those hitters and it's still not to the extent that we see a huge league wide trend in the amount of fly balls. So the pitcher equivalent would be they've been taught to throw the ball

down. And so they have trained themselves to throw the ball down. They've tried to aim their fast balls down at the knees, and they were doing so probably unprepared for the reality in which the major leagues feature hundreds and hundreds of people who are looking for those specific low fastballs so that they can hit them in the air with their elevated swing planes or whatever we're saying these days. So pitchers are reluctant to throw fastballs down because it's not something they've done a whole lot. Some of them are more able to make that change than others. Like turns out Blaine Boyer maybe can kind of do it. That's great. Chase Anderson, someone I want to write about soon is throwing more high fastballs. He's just one more name. Felix Hernandez is doing the same thing. Dallas Keuchel is not,

but not everybody needs to live at the top of the zone. I think pitchers feel like they don't have the same command up in the zone because it is different to throw up than it is to throw down, but I think it is something that we are going to see more of even though the trend hasn't kicked off in earnest. There is just enough of a bounce back, just enough of a hint of a bounce back that I think we are going to see high fastballs coming back and it feels inevitable. Okay. So if anything, aside from the ball is possibly capable of counteracting this home run surge, it could be high fastballs. And so maybe this is something we'll be hearing about over the next couple of years as pitchers get comfortable with it or teams are able to advocate it or whatever. Are the Red Sox suppressing home runs successfully this year?

Is that part of their pitching success? I didn't analyze it specifically. Oh, but I can tell you that their fastballs as a staff have been the best in baseball. They've been the best by weighted on base percentage allowed. They've been the best by Fangraph base percentage allowed they've been the best by fangraphs is super nerdy run values they've been the second best by uh stat casts expected weighted on base percentage allowed so the fastballs have been good and so that captures kind of all of it but in terms of home run prevention i don't know it's hard because they have the park effect that they play in such a wacky stadium but their their home run rate is below the league average, which in this terms means better

than the league average. Yeah. Okay, cool. That was a thorough answer. I wanted to mention a favorite of ours, Carter Capps. I don't know if you were going to bring him up. I was. Yeah, I thought so.

So there was a note on Twitter from the broadcaster of the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Rockies AAA affiliate, Josh Sushone Perhaps is how you pronounce it And he noted that Carter Capps was charged With two illegal pitches Which I assume means balls were Charged to him for his back foot not

Staying on the rubber, and then Rod Barajas, who is still a baseball Player? No, no, no no he's a manager oh okay all right good that makes i made the same mistake yeah all right okay then rod barajas was ejected for arguing about this and then caps was ejected after an additional two pitches which i assume were ruled illegal pitches i assume he got away with those and then he was ejected because he was still mad at it or maybe he felt like

they weren't any different from the pitches that had been ruled illegal. I don't know. I didn't see it. I'm extrapolating from one tweet. But this is interesting. Carter Cupps still

not pitching particularly well. He has less than a strikeout per inning. He's walking tons of guys and is not really making that convincing a case to be called up but not terrible but this is something that if he does make it back to the majors as entertaining as he was when he was completely unhittable and he was doing his hop and no one could touch him now he has the potential to be even more entertaining because if it works then

he's doing the hop and that's fun if it doesn't work then he's going to get balls charged to him over the place he's going to get ejected all the time for arguing about it so i am hoping that he makes it back and then we'll be like analyzing frame by frame images of every delivery of his, I'm sure. Maybe that will get tiresome over time. But this is a new development in the Carter Capps saga. I don't know if this is really being handled well or whether anyone could expect him to succeed under these conditions, because now he not only has to worry about throwing his pitches and what the hitter is going to do, but also if he is complying with this rule. And I mean, I guess that's on him. He's trying to do something that no other pitcher

really is trying to do. So that's his fault that he has brought this difficulty onto himself. But it seems like it would be tough to retain your full concentration when you're hyper aware of your mechanics and whether your back foot is actually touching the rubber and whether the umpire is about to say that what you just did is not allowed i think i saw a tweet maybe from the same person maybe from somebody else that said that caps has not been called had not been called for any of these illegal pitches in any games previous at least not anytime recently caps he was pitching in the minors and then he kind of disappeared for about a month and a half. He went to essentially

extended spring training in May and the beginning of June because he was so terrible at everything in AAA. And so then he disappeared, then he came back and then he was not very good again. The last two games,

he has faced the minimum over three innings. He's struck out four guys. So he's been pretty good. Who knows what that means? But I have a sneaking suspicion. This is a guy who's coming back from Tommy Johny john surgery and of course it could take a while to kind of find yourself but you remember in spring training there was the footage of caps who had like a crow

hop that he had adopted in the bullpen and so i wrote about that a bunch of people wrote about that and then the padres came out and said no that's not how he's actually going to throw that would be stupid everybody who wrote about this is. He's going to go back to throwing his normal way, which is awesome. And so that's what the Padres had to say. But he's been horrible in the minors since going down and he was not good in spring training. And so while it's possible, he's just trying to get his regular mechanics back and his arm doesn't feel good or whatever. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Padres have made more dramatic changes to his delivery than they let on. I don't know what that would look like because clearly he's still doing something kind

of silly. But the fact that he has been so wild when he was such a good strike thrower the last time he was healthy implies that something is off here. And also the fact that it was just the first two illegal pitches called in a, I'm just going to say, pointless AAA baseball game on June 23rd. And then for the manager to get ejected and also Caps to get ejected. I don't know what would provoke two people to fly off the handle that quickly, but it seems to suggest to me that there was something else. Maybe there had been some sort of warning or the umpire had been jawing off or what, because it seems like Caps has been called for this before he's going to get called for it again heads up carter caps they're not through with you so i don't know

what might have caused him to lose it so fast maybe it was just very hot in albuquerque which would not be uncommon but something was up and i wish that i had had the foresight to send in a message to try to get some more backstory on this because right now i don't know any more than you do yeah well it's a threat to his livelihood So I wouldn't blame him for getting upset about it. And the more upset he gets, maybe the more reluctant he makes an umpire to call him on this in the future, right? Because no one wants to get yelled at usually. So maybe it's like an intimidation tactic or something. I don't know. I have sent you a link that I would like you to click on. And so if you open

this link, it's a link to an article, a very short article, headlined Caps and Barajas Ejected and Losing Effort at ABQ by Eric O'Brien, Sunday June 25th, 2017. Now you have opened the link, I assume. I'm not watching you. And you see what looks like a freeze frame of Carter Caps in a position

such that it looks like he's trying to slug a guy in the face, even though he's not. Now if if you look below that there's a little caption for the picture that's probably not supposed to be there it says caps ejection dot jpg right but there's another word it's not a typo it's not carter i'm gonna read this out for people it's ch ihs space caps space ejection dot jpg so that's a card of caps plays for the Chihuahuas. I did not know and had never considered that the Chihuahuas could be shortened to the Chiz? Cheese? I guess it's the cheese.

Yeah. So I never thought about that. I guess so. Yeah, no, neither did I. Okay. All right. Yeah. Another thing I want to bring up, there's been a lot of discussion about the Nationals bullpen unrest. It sounds like the team is about to mutiny about how bad its bullpen has been. And most recently now they have picked up Francisco Rodriguez to try to rectify of the Washington Post had an anecdote about a national walking up to him. And he says another national is that this is happening all the time. And he says, when the hell are they going to get this done? What are they waiting for? Waiting is just doing more damage. And this, in this case, is upgrading the bullpen. And so the team, we've heard this before.

There have been previous reports about how upset the team is about this, that I think there was a Nationals position player who said that they feel like they have to win the game three times or something like that because they keep losing the lead and having to regain it. And whatever they are having to do, they are doing it pretty successfully because the Nationals are one of the best teams in baseball. But I guess you can understand why this is so frustrating to the team. Just it's annoying to feel like you have to keep digging yourself out of a hole or you get a lead and then you lose it. It's demoralizing. I don't know whether it actually makes the team play any worse. I think Russell Carlton has looked for examples of like tough bullpen losses to see if there was some kind of hangover effect where you play worse in subsequent games, and I don't think he found anything. But you can certainly understand why it would make playing for the Nationals more

unpleasant. But if you are the Nationals, you don't have a strong incentive other than this to make a trade for a reliever right now, right? Because everyone's been linking them to David Robertson for a while now, and maybe that trade will still happen, but they have no need of David Robertson between June 24th and July 31st. Particularly, they need David Robertson once they make the playoffs. They could probably use other relievers once they make the playoffs, but there's very little danger that they are going to lose their first place position in a historically terrible division. So as far as making the playoffs goes, they don't really need a reliever. They've done just fine with a terrible bullpen to this point. And maybe if they hold out for another month and they're acquiring some rental from a

team, the price goes down with each passing day because it's less value acquired. Maybe it doesn't go down linearly because teams know that playoffs is a big part of why you want the reliever. And so that's still going to be in play, but still not having to acquire that month of David Robertson. Maybe you give up a slightly worse prospect or something. So I can see why they're waiting. I guess the question is whether that backfires because the team is miserable and mad, and maybe that has some kind of carryover effect too. I don't know whether it does. Maybe they go get someone on July 31st and the bullpen's fine the second half and no one minds or cares about the fact that it was bad for the first half. But it's kind of an interesting question because you always wonder whether a team will be like the first mover at the trade deadline and whether they'll try to jump the gun and get a guy before everyone else is ready to buy. But the Nationals have some incentive to wait because the pennant or the division title is pretty much locked up for them already. Yeah. is pretty much locked up for them already. Yeah. And what's interesting is if you just look over the last month, which is completely arbitrary, but the Nationals bullpen has been almost exactly

league average by one measure, which would be win probability added, which is not very predictive, but it's a good barometer of how bullpens have been doing. Over the last month, the Diamondbacks have had the best bullpen. The Giants have had the worst. I think that probably fits how people have felt. The Rockies have had a steep drop off into the middle of the pack whatever but the Nationals are there in 14th place by wins above replacement over the past month the Nationals are right there in the middle as well they obviously have not been great they have not been bad they have not been good they've been just right in the middle and they are nine games clear of the still bad Atlanta Braves so like you said there's really nothing for them to worry about too much the damage in one sense has been done because now everyone's opinion of the bullpen has already

been biased by what happened early and that's going to take a long time to clear yeah but the past three seasons i think the texas rangers have opened with horrible bullpens and then they've recovered by just kind of shifting some pieces around and there's the year they went out and they made a few trades to get guys like jake deman and Sam Dyson etc so you can you can tweak but the Nationals I don't think they shouldn't need to go and get another Mark Melanson if they don't want to they could potentially get the very same Mark Melanson if they wanted to open the poppocket books but I understand that he has a stretching routine that might have caused the Giants to come crumbling undone from the middle that's a reference to a Ken Rosenthal article that came out on Monday. I realize I set

that up with zero context. So the Nationals, they do not have, like you said, a strong incentive to make a move now. I don't know why they would dilly-dally. It does feel like they've been linked to Robinson for, I don't know, half of a year, if not more than that. I would guess at this point, given that nothing has gotten done i would assume that almost certainly the stumbling block has been that they just haven't been cleared you spend the money to get him so that's something that ownership could change on a whim if they wanted to maybe if the owners have watched enough of these bullpen games then they would be willing to just kind of put that out of mind by just writing another check and allowing

them to get david robertson failing that they could always go for i don't know tommy canley who's great and also in the white socks or they could get them both so i don't know what they could do but they definitely don't need to do anything now because as horrible as a bullpen has been and overall it has been horrible they do have the second best record third best fourth best oh man no okay fourth best record of the national league but best in the East, best out of the Central. They have been worse than the Dodgers, D-backs, and Rockies, but only one of those actually matters to them. So Nationals doing great despite a horrible bullpen, just going to show that you do not need good relief in order to be a very, very good baseball team. Well, I was about to bring up the Ken Rosenthal article

that you just alluded to, and it's about the Giants' chemistry troubles. And this is always, it's one of those questions that comes up whenever a team is doing terribly and was expected to be good and isn't good. Then you start hearing about clubhouse problems in many cases, and you don't know whether that explains why they've been bad or whether it's a product of why they've been bad or both. But this was kind of a fun article for multiple reasons. One, as you mentioned, the Melanson stretching session controversy, which is really kind of crazy. So Melanson, I'm quoting now, sources say, rubbed some teammates the wrong way early in the season by putting an end to the bullpen's 3.30 p.m. stretching sessions before night games, a practice that the relievers began in 2012.

And I was wondering about the mechanism here. Like, did he forbid everyone else from stretching? He said, you guys can't stretch anymore? Or did he just say, I'm not joining you for the stretching session? And when the closer doesn't stretch, then no one else wants to stretch? I don't know. I'd like to know exactly what was going on there. But he was evidently late for some stretching sessions.

I don't know. Lots of fuss about the stretching sessions. But I'm always intrigued by this because often you will get a team that has a great reputation for chemistry and then fast forward a year or two and suddenly it will be completely the opposite. Like the Oakland A's in 2013 were like the model chemistry team and Sam wrote about them for ESPN and he wasn't clear whether that was an intentional tactic for the A's to get clubhouse guys or whether it had just happened somehow. But then last year, of course, they were a bad chemistry team and they had Billy Butler and Danny Valencia fighting and clubhouse unrest and all of that. And so that was just a span of like three seasons. And now you have the Giants who are probably renowned for having the best clubhouse chemistry or like they're, I don't know, other than possibly

the Cardinals, the Giants have been the team that you are most likely to hear they play the game the right way. Or like when someone signs with them, they say, you know, oh, these guys, they know what they're doing, or you want to be part of this clubhouse, or they're so professional or, or whatever. It's a different feeling in this clubhouse. I'm pretty sure I remember Melanson saying things to that effect when he signed last offseason. And yet it can all seemingly fall apart very quickly. And I don't know whether that, again, just has to do with the results or whether there

are more things going on here. But it's always, I think, helpful to have the reminder that it's hard to predict this stuff and it's hard to stay consistent as far as chemistry and the clubhouse goes from year to year because everything is changing players are constantly changing the giants haven't had all that much turnover really and and bruce bocce is still there of course but maybe all it takes is like one guy leaving or one guy coming to screw things up And that was the other fun anecdote from the story Was the Angel Pagan bit in here About how Pagan was evidently such a clubhouse cancer pariah

Whatever you want to call it That he brought the whole team together because of that And Rosenthal writes Some with the Giants mused that the team even misses Angel Pagan Who created an odd sort of unity Because most of the players disliked him. That's funny. I think we've all probably experienced dynamics like that in the past with your friends at school or at work or whatever. Like there's one person you can't stand and you just bond over how much you don't like that person.

And if you've never had this experience, maybe you are that person. I don't know. Anyway, this was a fun, fun article. Good inside stories from Rosenthal. Yeah, I enjoy it. And I guess Angel Pagan would be sort of like, I don't know,

the Grant Brisby of the Giants. We all hate him and we're all better friends because of how much we don't like Grant. I was trying to think of the right comparison while you were talking because you're right.

I think there are teams that would argue to their own death that they had very good chemistry and they would swear by it. And the Giants are one of them. They've ridden that sort of can't put your finger on it sort of dynamic to tremendous success. They've been the most successful baseball team in the past decade, you could say. But the best I could come up with on sort of short notice is if you I don't know, if you have a picture of like billowing flames coming out of a building, and then if you just get the picture just right, it can look like I don't know, Jesus or the head of a dragon or a bunny rabbit or something. I guess I could have said clouds, clouds would have been less grim. So just like seeing an image in a cloud where you could take a picture of a cloud no longer billowing smoke, let's just say a nice regular cloud and you can see a turtle or a turtle and the bunny rabbit any shape i don't need to come up with the shapes you know shapes you know what they are what they look like other things other nouns that you see in a cloud and if you look at that picture you can say absolutely that looks exactly like a bunny rabbit chasing a

turtle on a race car i don't know that's a very complicated cloud but thunderheads develop quickly and you could draw the outline you can say just in this moment, everything came together. And it was exactly like that it was exactly in that shape. But you think of how often a relationship between two people falls apart. And it never happens without warning. But you know, we've all dated, we've all been there. It also doesn't have to be any sort of romantic relationship, just any sort of friendship with an individual. And it can change very quickly, especially when you are around that person a lot. Or if you are around that person because of a very passionate cause, which would be akin to playing in a baseball season. So the dynamic between any two people is tenuous and complicated.

And then you throw in 25 way interpersonal relationship with people who did not select to be around one another for the most part. And then you have these weird coaches, and then sort of like pseudo bench coaches, where I'm still not even entirely clear what the roles are. But there's just all these different authority aspects to it as well. And you can imagine that any sort of good feeling that's collective in there is just such a delicate house of cards that anything could topple it over anything conceivable and you could achieve that same harmoniousness again almost without reason sometimes it's as simple as just getting a good night's sleep and you come back to work and whoever was not feeling well just feels more refreshed but there is just not as far as i know

any real good way of predicting or projecting the hormones that drive human relationships and dynamics. And so I think this is probably why we have reached kind of an impasse. I don't know. It's just such a difficult thing to study in the first place. But all the people who have talked about the importance of chemistry and then all the analysts who have downplayed it because there's no you can't find it. Well, I don't think that the two are at odds. I think that chemistry is real, but you just can't really know if you're still going to have it tomorrow, and the Giants would be one example of that. Speaking of things going on with the Giants and Grant,

Grant has a TV show now. Yeah, I have not sent him an email to ask about that. But yeah, co-hosting a show but still writing recaps of the second worst team in major league baseball but doing these shows airing i assume they have to tape after the game because these are yes it's live shows yeah that's insane grant has he has a family and he's like the show is air at 11 o'clock at night after your standard 7 o'clock West Coast game, and he has to write? Maybe the show is just him writing his recap? I don't know.

I'd watch that. How many times? That's a 26-episode season. Giants Outsiders. Incredible. Check it out. And of all years to launch that as a program, they chose this one. Well, that's what I was going to ask.

Do you think that they are giving Grant a TV show because the Giants are terrible and no one's watching them anyway? Or are they giving Grant a TV show because the Giants are terrible and no one's watching them, so they have to juice the ratings by bringing in Grant? Well, I am someone who's biased because I'm in favor of his voice. I think that's outstanding. I love to hear him talk. I don't know if anybody loves to watch Grant talk, but I am fascinated to see how this goes. And I would love to know more. I don't know why I haven't sent him a message, but hey, Grant, if you're listening to this, send us an email. Explain what you're doing. I'm confused. He's not listening. He's too busy being on TV. NBC Sports Bay Area. Everyone watched Grant's show after Giants games.

All right. So the nominal topic on this episode is one that Grant would hate. It's the Dodgers. And everyone's writing about the Dodgers, talking about the Dodgers today for a good reason. They have, as we speak, won 10 games in a row. And the last win on Sunday was a really wild one it featured Brandon McCarthy getting the yips and then ungetting the yips it featured Adam Adovino throwing four wild pitches there were five run scoring wild pitches in the game Kenley Jensen walked someone and had an RBI double I don't know which was weirder and of course Cody Bellinger hit his couple of homers and so I think everyone's writing about the Dodgers now because they have succeeded finally in pulling ahead of their division rivals at least for now they've been kind of neck and neck with the Diamondbacks and Rockies all season long and they just swept the Rockies so they're now four and a half games ahead of them as we speak or maybe four games ahead of them and two and a half ahead of the Diamondbacks. So it seems as if there is finally some sort of separation appearing there. And I think that it's a good time to talk about the Dodgers, not just in the context of this season, which by the way,

those preseason projections of the Dodgers looking a lot better than the Cubs. Those are looking pretty good in retrospect. But I think that it's a good time to assess the Dodgers' long-term future because I wrote an article a couple of years ago in March of 2015 at Grantland, which was itself sort of a take on a Sam Miller article that he had written a couple years earlier, and he had written that when the Texas Rangers were riding really high and they were like the best team in baseball and they had a great farm system. And it seemed inconceivable that they would ever stop winning and just not have a juggernaut that was just constantly replenishing talent with new talent. talent with new talent. And so Sam wrote an article trying to think of ways that the Rangers could fail basically in like looking at the history of empires and civilizations that have fallen and trying to apply them to the Texas Rangers. And that article didn't age so well because like two years after that, the Rangers are like one of the worst teams at baseball.

And I think Sam got a follow-up article out of that. So it worked out okay for him. But my article taking that same sort of structure and trying to come up with scenarios in which the Dodgers could fail to succeed or at least be dethroned has aged well, I suppose, because people are writing exactly the same thing about the Dodgers now that I was writing in March of 2015, because nothing has really changed. I just reread most of that article. And other than the fact that I called Yasiel Puig one of the dozen best players in baseball or something, most of the article still applies. And the premise of the article was basically that if you were designing a franchise from the ground up, you would design the Dodgers because they had everything going for them. They were good in the short term. They weren't like a total powerhouse team or anything, but they were projected to win. They were the best team in the division. It was a weak division and they did make the playoffs, of course, and win the division. They've won it for a bunch of years in a row now and they also seem to have a great long-term future they had one of the top rated farm systems at the time and they also had this brilliant new front office brain trust with like six different former gms and

andrew friedman and farhan zaidi and josh burns and all this brain power that seemed to dwarf many other front offices. And then, of course, they had the payroll. They had the highest payroll in baseball, too. And they also had a ballpark that's believed to be among the best. And they had Vin Scully at the time. So they kind of had everything going for them. And I talked to Stan Kasten, their president and CEO.

And I was talking about like windows and and when the dodgers window was or whatever and he immediately interrupted to say there is no window where the dodgers we should be contending every year period and they have done that to this point and they seem to be as well positioned for the future today as they did two and a half years ago. And Dave Cameron wrote a post for Fangraphs on Monday, essentially comparing them to last year's Cubs and pointing out that they've had plenty of things go wrong, but they've still been great. And their lineup is really deep. It's like the NL equivalent of the Astros lineup. And they have, as both of us have written recently, the best defensive catchers who are getting them all sorts of extra strikes and

big strike zones. And even though so much has gone wrong with the pitching staff and the starting rotation, and Julio Urias is now out for the year and maybe next year too, and Randy McCarthy, who was great up until yesterday looked really shaky for an inning or two there and kenta maeda has had issues and ryu has had issues and still they have the best war of any team's pitching staff somehow so i wanted to to ask you if you could think of any reason why i guess either a the dodgers would not be the team that you would want to start with today if you just had to pick a team to, I don't know, win the World Series in any given time frame or make the playoffs the most number of times in any given time frame. Or just if you could come up with any way that things could unravel for this team. Because in 2015, when I wrote about about this I came up with a few scenarios

in which maybe things could fall apart for the Dodgers so one was they had this staff full of injury-prone pitchers and I said well maybe that completely backfires and it kind of did like all the injury-prone pitchers kept getting injuries but it just didn't really affect them didn't really hurt them and that still seems to be the case because they just have this depth where they can bring in Alex Wood or whatever, and he'll be great. And they can just have a six-man rotation. And when someone gets hurt, they bring in another guy. Another scenario I had was slow prospect replenishment. So some guys get older and some guys hit free agency. And for whatever reason reason this vaunted farm system doesn't produce the talent that it seems like it should. That doesn't seem to be happening. Cody Bellinger, of course, is the latest arrival, but they have lots of young guys even with Rios out now for a while. They've got Jock Peterson. They've got other guys in the pipeline. line. Another scenario I had was like the TV deal gets devalued somehow, like renegotiated or something because they had this giant TV deal that was just assuring them that they could spend a

ton of money. Don't think that's happened. They're still bringing in lots of money there. I brought up shaky lines of communication because at that point they still had Don Mattingly and there was some question about how he would gel with Friedman anxiety and whether there would be problems there. And well, now Mattingly is not there anymore. And Dave Roberts seems to be on the big market and the payroll, and they would keep operating like they were still with the Rays and A's, and they wouldn't take full advantage of the resources that they had. And I don't know that that's really happened. I mean, they haven't signed that many huge free agent deals, I guess. They signed Kenley Jansen last winter. They extended Clayton Kershaw. Was that a post-Friedman move?

Did Friedman do that or was that before Friedman? I don't know Oh, that's a good question Yeah, well you can Google that But they haven't really had to do all that much Because the roster has been so deep And they've had the prospects And they've resisted the urge to trade them

So they haven't really had to go into the free agent market But I guess that's still one potential thing you could bring up And then the last one I had was just that riches and smarts aren't worth as much as they once were. And I think this was around the time when everyone was talking about parity and how payroll and money didn't seem to be making as much of a difference as it used to. And things were so competitive, maybe, that it would just be hard for the Dodgers to stand out at least the way that earlier dynasties did. And to some extent, that's come true that any of them is any more of a concern than it was then. Probably most of them are less of a concern then. So do you see any vulnerabilities in the Dodgers?

Or aside from the fact that we just have a hard time projecting more than a couple of years into the future with any team, is this team just totally set for the foreseeable future? So I've never seen the movie san andreas but i feel like that might be one reason why the dodgers could encounter some harder times down the road uh incidentally the kershaw extension was signed in january 2014 it looks like andrew friedman joined the dodgers in october 2014 so okay kudos previous general manager whose name i have already forgotten was Was that Ned Coletti? The Freedman? Yeah, right.

Because Coletti was part of the Freedman front office for a while or maybe still is. I don't know. Yeah, hysterical. So I think that the biggest problem here is just that when things are going well, it's really difficult to envision what it could look like when things aren't. And the same is true vice versa. And this is one of the reasons why I think fans are seldom at what you could describe as an appropriate state of optimism or pessimism, because no matter what, a team is always coming

off at least one win or at least one loss. And those little pushes do have an effect on your optimism or pessimism, because it's really easy to see more wins after win, and it's really easy to see more losses after loss. Now, this micro phenomenon but i think it also applies to the greater scheme and i mean the the easiest example we can deconstruct the dodgers bit by bit and it wouldn't even be all that hard i don't mean to suggest that they aren't in a great situation i'll get into that a little more and by get into that i mean just repeat what you said in different words but the easiest thing to do the easiest thing to do it was just November, last November, everybody was writing, you might not have even realized, but when you were asleep, listener, you were writing an article about how the Cubs were a developing dynasty.

Everybody wrote an article about the Cubs dynasty. And right now we're halfway through the season, and they're a game and a half behind the Brewers. Yeah. And it doesn't mean the Cubs aren't still going to win their division. It doesn't mean the Cubs aren't still a really good organization in a hell of a spot. They have a lot of young talent. Kyle Schwerber is still a good baseball player. I don't care what just happened. But at the end of the day, they're here and they deserve to be 38 and 37 or something like that. And the biggest problem is that the greatest pitching slash defensive unit in baseball history from last season has regressed and regressed hard. Some of that it's not all talent. It seems like a lot of it is connected to overuse

and that's overuse. It's a consequence of being too good for two years in a row that they had to keep pitching but the Cubs have not come apart but they have not run away with things in the way that they were supposed to I don't know how many team preview podcasts I interrupted by saying that Dakota forecasted the Dodgers to be like eight games better than the Cubs this year well by the way they're better than the Cubs by 12 games right now in the standings, which is crazy. And it doesn't have to be the Cubs. You can look at the Mets who look like they're in a horrible situation. They had all that fantastic pitching and now they're down at Harvey. They're down now with Syndergaard. They're down Zach Wheeler. They're down the other one. They still have Jacob deGrom who's pitching fine, but it's hard to tell who's actually doing

what because they're in like the most laughable division in the history of sports only one team is good and that team is the worst bullpen in the world that has ever experienced so the cubs aren't screwed obviously the mets aren't screwed they can come right back and win 95 games next season there's no reason well there's some reasons but there's no reason why that wouldn't be a possibility so even a team that's down on their luck can still bounce back but it's just it's that easy to drop a team from being extremely good to being just fine or even worse than that. It's not hard. You have Julio Urias, who's now out for maybe two years, and he was he's not far removed

from being the top prospect in baseball, at least the top pitching prospect in baseball. And that's not his fault. That's nobody's fault. It's just, hey, pitching, it's bad for you. It's kind of like smoking. Something doesn't come with a warning label. Clayton Kershaw missed time last season with a back injury. And since then, he's allowed a career high number of home runs.

He still hasn't completely found his slider. You've written about it and he's made some progress, but something changed when Kershaw missed action and he's been very good. Hasn't been himself. Kenley Jansen throws one pitch extremely hard as a closer. Who knows what could happen there? Justin Turner is one of the weirder track records in baseball. And right now he's batting something like 476, something absurd.

But there are enough issues. And it's all buttressed by the fact that, yeah, they have Corey Seager and they have Cody Bellinger and they have Jock Peterson. They have all this young talent everywhere. They had the fourth best farm system ranking, according to Baseball America, this spring. And they have Jock Peterson. They have all this young talent everywhere. none inside the top 40 now that Bellinger has, I guess, erased himself from consideration there. So still lots of talent to come. Yep. Oh, and also Chris Taylor is good now. Why not? Yeah. So they have so much support in the same way that the Cubs have so much support and the Cubs have even more coming in the system. But I guess maybe I don't even need to advance beyond the Cubs point. The

Chicago Cubs, the developing dynasty, the defending world champions have 38 wins and 37 losses. And they are still still looking up at the Milwaukee Brewers. They have not played better lately. They've just kind of been the same. And this was a team that it was extremely hard to poke holes in. And for that reason alone, the same could be said of the Dodgers. But still, like you said, great farm system, great roster

right now, and they have more resources to spend than anyone probably except for the Yankees. So still not a team that you would rather begin with, I don't think. If there was ever any debate, and there was, if there was debate about whether you'd rather start with the Dodgers or the Cubs a few months ago, I think it's pretty clear what the proper answer would be now. Cubs are still close. Maybe they're second, maybe they're third. I don't know. The great separator between these teams and the Astros, who are also legitimately amazing, is that the Astros presumably cannot afford to keep all this talent around. They are probably going to be more susceptible to sort of the window theory, I guess, than a team like the Dodgers, who conceivably could just be good all the time.

So I don't think you'd ever start with the Astros. But yeah, Dodgers still number one. Not that Houston's a small market or anything. They should be able to spend. They've certainly been able to save enough over the last years of not spending that you'd like them to spend. But yeah, obviously they're not the Dodgers and the Yankees. No one is the Dodgers and the Yankees. But yeah, even though like Puig has taken steps back since I wrote that article, everyone's writing the is Kershaw actually the best pitcher in baseball anymore? Or is he merely second or third or whatever? All the things that have gone wrong, the Rich Hill struggles this year, and yet they are pretty unassailable. And they even have one of the youngest lineups or average batter ages too, in addition to just having one of the best lineups period. So it's hard for me to imagine, like the way that the Rangers went south after Sam wrote about them was just an incredible wave of injuries. And that hurt them a lot for a couple of years there. And then they also had some prospects like the Profars and that type of person who didn't really pan out as much as you would have expected them to. And so I guess the Dodgers are vulnerable to that too, but they've collected such incredible depth here and their payroll allows them to stockpile so much talent that I don't think they're as vulnerable to that

as the Rangers were. And that was like a historic stack of injuries that the Rangers went through. But even if the Dodgers went through that too, I don't know that it would derail them because they kind of did. Like last year, they had the most pitcher injuries, certainly, maybe the most pitcher injuries on record. And they like as many people starting for them as terrible teams typically do and yet they were successful even even the pitching staff was successful amid all of those injuries and all that turnover because they just had so many guys who for most teams would have been a fourth or fifth starter or whatever and for the dodgers they were like a seventh or eighth starter, and they just got to use

them when their top line guys got hurt. So I don't know how this front office, especially with the smarts that they have there and the creative stuff that they're doing and the resources that they have, it's hard for me even to come up with a scenario where this team would not be not only good but like the favorite in the division for the next gosh i mean five years like i know that just the error bars are enormous when you start going out that far but like they have peterson who's 25 they have bellinger who's 21 they have seager who's 23 these guys presumably are going to be good for a while. And, you know, that's like a core, a foundation of a team that you'd think would be too closely wed to their small market behavior because so many of them came from smaller market operations. What I like about it is that they're not necessarily unique in this way, but maybe they are the most unique in this way.

Sorry for semantic fiends who disagree with most unique. But they have this sort of small market mentality where they have not allowed themselves to go too crazy just as a response to having all these resources. They still, just like a team with half the payroll, worry a lot about depth. They still don't worry about sort of the sexy move. And the best example might be just when they traded away the very recognizable Matt Kemp for some no-name Hezmonic Randall and et cetera. And that's not it. People have expected the Dodgers to make sort of, I don't know, the Chris Sale splash or the Chris Archer splash.

And they still haven't done that. Of course, they have gone out and they've done things like sign Kenley Jansen or all that depth doesn't come without any cost. They have, of course, spent money. And one of the benefits is that they can afford to have Scott Casimir doing nothing on payroll but yeah it's fine and they can survive that when Brandon McCarthy wasn't pitching well

that's fine they could they could survive that so of course there is a benefit from having all that money but they still are very reluctant to move their their prospects you saw how closely they hung on to their prospects when they were negotiating for Brian Dozier and they wound up settling for Logan Forsyth and said who I know he hasn't had a fantastic season but it turns out didn't need to they have Chris Taylor I don't know it's a weird year yeah we've seen enough examples of the Dodgers holding on to their youth that I think that they have not been corrupted by the resources that they have it hasn't happened yet and when you combine the knowledge they have, the resources they have, and that sort to like to spend their way out of it or promote prospects their way out of it or trade prospects their way out of it or whatever it's just such a

rich roster and system that it's just hard to see them going into a season anytime soon with you know not a really good chance to make the playoffs so yes that's the benefits of having a historic and wealthy franchise but they have also assembled a really smart roster too wait i have one more point yeah because i just noticed the dodgers apparently did not know this not only do they have brandon morrow but all of a sudden he's throwing three miles per hour harder than last year go dodgers did not know that yeah one uh very quick thing I meant to bring up in the banter. I guess the trade deadline season sort of began today. I don't know whether a Dainey Echevarria is, I mean, that's like a trade from the Marlins

to the Rays is about as boring as you could possibly, like a salary dump from the Marlins to the Rays. That is not getting a lot of people excited on either end of that deal. Although you wrote about it and you did your best to make it exciting. You titled your post, How Adani Ejeveria is Interesting. I don't know whether you were trying to convince readers or trying to convince yourself. And whether you succeeded at either. I did not.

Okay, there are three ways. There are three ways that adenia is most interesting to the average baseball fan one he is a major league baseball player that is extraordinary he's so good you wouldn't believe how good he is you want to go play like down in the park with adenia he would throw your glove the ball your glove would come right off you would hate it you couldn't stand playing catch with adenia he's so much better than you and then the other way he's interesting the marlins used to talk a lot about Echevarria's defense they loved his defense and the numbers never matched up and it was always confusing we're like oh the Marlins are just a

backwards organization whatever but they have this like pretty well respected infield coach and Perry Hill and long story short all of a sudden in 2015 Echevarria's numbers started to be good and he learned some things about I don't remember the story whether it was him or Dee gordon because they both suddenly got good at defense because it turns out they both didn't really know what they were doing before and they just relied on the raw talent anyway h3 his numbers went from bad to good so now his numbers are as good as his reputation thirdly and this is the bigger one this is what i addressed today it looks to be a good defensive shortstop he's only getting paid something like 4.25 million dollars this season so no real commitment surprise. The Marlins didn't want to pay him the rest of it. But two years ago, I guess three years ago, it was when Echevarria had his best season. He was a

three win above replacement shortstop and he had good defensive numbers and he hit like 10% below league average. He was still wasn't a good hitter. And then last year, his offensive numbers fell apart. His numbers, pick a number, it dropped, it got worse. But now that we have the benefit of stat guest information at Baseball Savant, they have rolled out a statistic that is, it goes by, I guess, expected WOBA, expected weighted on base percentage. And we have not messed around enough with it to know how reliable it is, but it's cool to look at.

And it turns out by that statistic, Echevarria was actually a better hitter last season than the season before when he overachieved last season he greatly underachieved by that measure by the uh unrelated but also neat hard hit rate statistic at Fangraphs Echeverria was a better hitter last season I don't need to go into detail about Adene Echeverria nobody wants to hear it that's why I'm talking so fast but I think that there is some actual upside here and in such a boring like typically raise way where the marlins were just looking to shed some salary and the rays are like whatever we'll get a good defender and we're probably going to win the surplus value battle here because they give up two nothing prospects and it doesn't matter it's not going to win the raise world

series probably but it's just a little tiny little inefficiency the marlins made a move they probably didn't need to make and the rays made a move that's going to help them a tiny little bit and even though most people probably won't notice this is just what the rays do all the time if you look at their transaction log every single one of the moves is like this they just like add a few million dollars of surplus value and in this move that nobody cares about and then well here they are they're one game out of the wildcard race and they don't even have a Kevin Kiermaier. Everybody counts the Rays out, but they kind of know what they're doing in this really annoying, subtle way. Well, very low profile start to trading season, but I guess we can say it has officially begun

with this move. All right. So we will end there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have recently pledged their support include Daryl Purpose, Jared P. Stout, 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 Bauman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. We also talked about the Dodgers. We interviewed Dr. Jeffrey Dugas about the injury to Urias and what his prognosis is and why shoulder injuries like that seem to have become less common among major league pitchers. We also talked to the freeze, Nigel Talton, the Braves between inning phenomenon. Asked him if he could beat Billy Hamilton and how good he'd be on a big league roster. So you can check that out on the Ringer MLB show feed. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system.

We will talk to you and answer those emails soon. I scheduled my second You see my little love, the blessings of love.