Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1084: Leaving the Break Behind

Episode Date: July 14, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Jose Quintana trade, an Aaron Judge anecdote, Dan Uggla’s disastrous 2008 All-Star Game appearance, and the significance of Ken Rosenthal being barred from writing by Fox, then discuss ways to spice up the All-Star Game with a skills competition that could actually work before closing with a […]

All day, all night, all music video. Steal your video! You're falling rock and roll! We don't wanna know! Steal your video! You're falling rock and roll! Hello and welcome to episode 1084 of Effectively Wild, the Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, the very same, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you? Doing well. That's great. Are you doing better, worse, or the same as Jose Quintana based on all of your interactions that you've had with Jose Quintana and how you assume he's doing?

Extremely limited, I will say. I would say I'm probably doing worse at most things than Jose Quintana. Certainly financially worse than Jose Quintana. Probably in terms of accomplishments in my field, worse than Jose Quintana. Is that true? I mean, you wrote a bestseller book, right? That's true. Well, all right. Choice of field. I mean, he made an allseller book, right? That's true. Well, all right. So, choice of field.

I mean, he made an all-star game, I guess, once. Yeah, right. Well, he is underrated, right? That's the import of much of the Jose Quintana analysis, including your own. I feel like you are, within your own field, you are approximately as accomplished as Jose Quintana is within his. Now, of course, his field is far, far more lucrative and opens many, many more doors for him than your field does to you.

And for that, you have only yourself to blame, but at least you are roughly as accomplished. It's a fun little reminder that I guess Jose Quintana, I know he's been in a better role lately, but his ERA is the worst that it's been in a long time doesn't matter nobody cares nobody cares about ERA anymore it makes no difference teams see right past it they see Quintana is the same guy it's a little like trading for Johnny Cueto after his bad half season with the Royals which effectively the Giants did because they signed him to a big contract teams just don't care about that anymore it's all so

much maybe this is the best example at least recently where you can just see that baseball is essentially about the projections because Quintana was acquired because he's projected to still be good and even though the Cubs are under 500 and five and a half games out of a playoff spot they understand that doesn't really tell the whole story because they're projected to be really good now they're projected to be even better so good for the Cubs yeah so you don't think he has taken any step back at all? I mean, obviously, he got off to a slow start. He's been fine lately.

But if you look at the full season stats, they are not as good, even if you're looking at defense-independent stuff. But from looking at his stuff and so forth, you have zero concerns about Jose Quintana? Yeah, I have no concerns. I didn't have concerns in April or May. I can't find any indication that anything could or would be wrong. He's throwing the exact same stuff. And if I had to guess, aside from just random luck, I think that he's probably, to me, the most likely culprit for any downturn in performance is that he's dealing with some very inexperienced catchers.

He's dealing with some very inexperienced catchers. I know last year he was just dealing with like Alex Avila and Deano Navarro, who has now appeared in consecutive Effectively Wild podcasts. But this year Quintana has thrown 15 of his 18 starts to Omar Narvaez and Kevin Smith. I know very little about either one of them, but they are not proven established catchers. And I think that Quintana has probably paid a little bit of a price around the periphery. He has not gotten strikes out of the strike zone like he's used to and I don't think that's his fault I think his command is basically fine I know you can find things that are bad in his numbers his sinker for example has been a lot less valuable this year than last year but I can't

find any reason why I would expect that to continue to be true so he should be fine and the uh the thing that I came across this morning when I was writing about this is that Quintana compares extremely well to John Lester, which is a comparison I hadn't thought of before. And maybe a lot of people have thought about that. I don't know. I don't pay attention to a lot of other baseball writing, but statistically Quintana and Lester look very similar and Quintana is five years younger. So this makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I was going to say that I didn't think Quintana is underrated anymore, just because we've all been saying he's underrated so much. And it's hard to

get really an accurate cross section view of how a player is rated. And how do you even determine what that means? And how would you assess it? And we're kind of in our internet advanced stats analysis bubble, which is a very different probably from the perception of players among fans as a whole. But in this community, at least, I would say Quintana is not underrated anymore on a performance level. I think a lot of people understand he's been one of the best pitchers in baseball for years now. But I think maybe in the surplus value category, given his contract in that arena, maybe he is still underrated just because it's hard to properly rate and appreciate how great a deal he is. And what are the terms of his deal now? And he's got option years and team options. So he has a little about three and a half million left this year

next year he makes a little under nine million and then he has consecutive club option years worth 10.5 million with 1 million buyouts so he's effectively under team control for three years and about 30 million after this year and of course this year still has value and to make it even better there's no real long-term commitment for those three years because if something goes horribly wrong the cubs can just ditch him for a million dollars. So they're not on the hook for anything. It's like the opposite of an opt-out clause. Or I guess it's really it's their own opt-out clause.

That's exactly what an option is. I guess he kind of feels like the pitcher version of Adam Eaton, who is basically the same idea. He's just kind of underrated because he didn't star in any particular category, but he was just really good and he was signed for so long for so little money and the white socks had a bunch of these players to dangle and so they have exchanged eaton for top prospects and chris ale for top prospects and jose quintana for top prospects they're probably going to trade some of their relievers for some pretty good prospects and the white socks are turning this into a pretty sexy

rebuild even though there's a lot of risk with the players that they got and uh in this trade first and foremost that being Eloy Jimenez yeah so I guess all of the top guys they've acquired Moncada aside a lot of them have been low level young far away types but also very talented types and maybe that's not such a bad thing because they will arrive in waves and you can kind of stagger the arrival. And that's always a nice thing. And they're just good players. And they seem to have now and after this month the way that they operated. And maybe some of that was drafting, but a lot of it was just trying to contend every year and not doing a great job of that post-World Series, but doing it enough that they just never really restocked. They were always buyers, never sellers. And so they were in a place year after year where they would have like one guy at the bottom of the top 100, maybe was the White Sox system. And now they have, I don't know, like four of the top 30 prospects or something like that. So it's deep and it's rich at the top too. Yeah. It's a little aggravating, I guess. I'm not a White Sox fan, but if I had been a White Sox fan,

I would be aggravated that they couldn't build a better team around the core talent that they've had the last few years because it really was pretty good. I mean, you can't really get a starting pitcher who's better than Sale, except for the one, I guess. And then you have Quintana behind him and Eden and Abreu and et cetera. They've had a lot of really good players and they just struggled to ever find depth and maybe I on the one hand you could say it's a good reminder that it's not actually easy to get average players in Major League Baseball and that's why average

players get 15 million dollars a year but you could also say well bad management and you know blame goes both ways player development has not been that great but now they have at least overturned the situation very dramatically very rapidly and i'm having trouble thinking of a rebuild that landed so many top tier prospects so fast i know there have been a lot of other rebuilding teams but like they have just pillaged the top of the last few prospect lists yeah well i guess it was kind of unusual that they had such tradable assets, even though they were not very good. Often by the time you get to the point where you're in the White Sox situation and you have to tear it all down, you don't have that much that people want. Or you don't have some of the best players in baseball who are also signed long term to team friendly contracts.

Usually you've got aging veterans and that sort of thing. And you have to maybe eat some money to get people to take them. And they had sale and they had Quintana and they had eaten and they still have guys like Frazier and bullpen guys who will probably be moved any day now. So it was weird because they kind of had the stars and scrubs thing going on. Not really enough stars even to make that work. But at the top of the roster, they did have elite players, but they just could never really round out the edges with decent slash not terrible hitters. So those, you know, black holes would just drag them down year after year. But they still did have Salem, Quintana and guys like that.

So it gave them a head start. And I guess they sold at the right time, more or less, and they could have done so earlier and got even more back, I guess. But the way that they've done it, they had some good pieces to offload. And based on what we know from the prospect people and the performance records and everything, their returns for these trades were generally judged to be good to very good so it's only natural that if you have Chris Sale and Jose Quintana to sell you should be able to buy a lot yeah I'm thinking back to the 2015 Brewers when they were beginning their rebuild they got a lot for Carlos Gomez who was a good

player then they eventually got a lot for Jonathan Lucroy so those are two big pieces they had they traded chris davis i don't remember what they got for chris davis so i'm just gonna fill this time with some words while i scroll down on his page and remind myself that of course the brewers got jacob nottingham and bodian derby for chris davis clever move uh by them and then they they were able to sell a lot of pieces out of the bullpen like jeremy jefferson will smith and i don't know probably somebody else but still they they did not have that chris sale piece and and you're right usually a rebuilding team doesn't have a chris sale piece let alone all these the sale quintana eaton and eventually robertson pieces because those aren't teams that are supposed to have to rebuild so owing to the white socks own i guess organizational

incompetence they put themselves in a good situation to tear it all completely down and start over so kudos to the white socks i guess this is probably an exciting time to be a white socks fan because you kind of have to fully embrace the rebuild and it's got to be so much sexier when you're rebuilding and just like getting top 10 prospects instead of like here's a b guy and a low-level flyer because we're trading some relievers. Okay. So can we talk about Eloy Jimenez and specifically, can we talk about the 119.4 mile per hour ground ball that he hit in the Arizona fall league last year? Okay. Do you remember that? Or were you reminded of that? I was reminded of that by you. Yes. Great. Okay.

So Eloy Jimenez has been playing in the minor leagues. Teams have access to minor league batted ball data. We don't, but we do sometimes get access to like spring training batted ball data or Arizona fall league batted ball data. So last October or November, Eloy Jimenez was playing in the fall league and he hit a ground ball. It was kind of a line drive ground ball launch angle of negative one or something degrees. And the batted ball was tracked at 119.4 miles per hour. Now, on the one hand, he was out. The batted ball was fielded cleanly and Jimenez was thrown out. And that was that. But this being the stat cast era that immediately made headlines. And I think it's one of those things where if that reading is true to me that's

the stumbling block because i don't know if it's accurate but if it is then immediately that vaults jimenez into the highest of upper tiers in terms of raw power because the only people we've seen do that are and this is gonna this list is gonna drop off quick john carlos stanton was the first one we've seen do that aaron Judge has now broken Stanton's records. I think Nelson Cruz has hit a ball about 119 miles per hour, which that's great. He's Nelson Cruz. And Peter O'Brien. Peter O'Brien in spring training hit a ball 119.5 miles per hour.

His was a home run. I wrote a post about it with a headline, something along the lines of the man who's as strong as Giancarlo Stanton. And Peter O'Brien, as far as I know, has been waived by about 13 different organizations in the time since but he's also been picked up by 12 right they keep giving him chances because he does have that power yeah so i don't know entirely what to make of it if it's true though i think that means right there that you basically have to give Jimenez like a 75 or 80 grade on his raw power or game power I don't really know the difference between them even looking at Peter O'Brien he's well he's almost 27 years old this is a this is not a very encouraging

example but he at least has been a pretty good hit on the minors but Jimenez has got a career high walk rate in the minors he's still only years old. I don't know much about his defense. His defense is not his carrying tool, but there is no better skill for a player to build around than having really, really, really massive raw power, and Jimenez does seem to have it. So he, I don't know, maybe it's just Aaron Judge fever that has me really excited.

Not all players work out like Aaron Judge. As a matter of fact, pretty much no players work out like Aaron Judge. Also, it's only been three and a half months of Aaron Judge, but still. This is not just a guy where you look at his minor league stats and think, oh, he has some power. No, he's got a lot of power.

Yeah, that's encouraging. And what does contact rate look like? Because if there's anything that you would want to build a prospect around more so than power, it might be the ability to make contact. Or I guess you could say maybe it would be speed. I don't know.

There are a lot of options. But he is, let's see, he's struck out this year in high A, 42 games, 20.1% strikeout rate. Essentially the same last year in A ball in a full season. So I don't know what that is compared to the league average i can tell you it's almost exactly the same his uh his swinging strikeout rate this year is 16.9 percent the league average is 16.8 percent so jimenez higher walk rate than average let me take that back turns out exactly average walk rate mistake. Turns out the league average walk rate is high, but he does not swing and miss too much

for someone who has that much power and very small sample. But I will point out as well that this year Jimenez is basically not at all popped up. So he might just be making more solid contact. So lots to like about Eloy Jimenez. However, all four of the prospects

that the White Sox picked up have been playing in single or advanced A ball. So lots of time to go. Lots of things can go wrong. Jorge Soler has been one of the worst players in baseball this season for the Royals. All right. Since we just brought up Judge, did you read the Judge anecdote in Tom Verducci's latest SI piece? Did not have the time. So bring it to my attention. Yeah, it's just a few paragraphs, so I will read it here. This is an excellent story. He writes, back when the engineers from Thomas P. Moore were designing the retractable roof of Marlins Park, they set out to determine how high the roof would have to be so as not

to interfere with balls in play. They studied the air density and temperatures of Miami and plugged those variables into equations from NASA. Then they wrote an algorithm to generate a volumetric approximation of all the possible batted ball flight paths and then applied it to their building information modeling to determine the final geometry of the roof structure. The engineers finally arrived at a height of 210 feet above the ground at its apex, above second base, to make sure no batted ball hit the roof. It tapered to a low of 128 feet above the ground in deep right center field. The Marlins still were required, however, to submit to MLB a ground rule on how to treat a batted ball that might hit the roof. It was thought of as a formality, seeing as how they had hired

experts to make sure the roof couldn't be hit. So they came up with this rule. Any ball that hit the roof would be treated as a live fly ball, not a home run. If it landed in foul territory, it would be a foul ball. If it landed in fair territory, it would be a live ball, with the batter runner advancing at his own risk. If a fielder caught the carom off the roof, the batter would be out. Crazy, right? Well, nobody gave it a second thought because the idea of a ball hitting the roof was thought to be impossible.

Until Monday, nobody hit the roof. Not in a game, not in batting practice. Then Judge showed up and hit the roof with a home run derby blast. The Marlins estimated that it cleared one girder and smacked against another at a height off the ground of about 170 feet in deep left center field. Think about that, about 17 stories high after traveling about 300 feet. Team officials suddenly had to dust off the obscure ground rule that had never been used before and had largely been forgotten. The blast was determined not to be a home run, making it the most massive fair ball ever struck that was not a home run. The moral of the story is this. You can bring together the brainpower of the world's smartest building engineers, combine it with every bit of local atmospheric data, add it to the computational power of NASA, and you still can't judge proof a ballpark. 17 stories. That's unbelievable. I don't know how many different ways we have to establish that

there is no one else like Aaron Judge, but there is no one else like Aaron Judge. I know. And Vernucci also had a stat in there that sort of surprised me. Just Judge's home road splits this year. And they are pretty dramatic. And you would expect them to be. I mean, most hitters are better at home. And Yankee Stadium is a good place to hit. But he is slugging 834 at home.

And let's see, only 547 away. And he's hit 21 of his 30 home runs at home. I am, I guess, sort of surprised that Aaron Judge could slug 547 anywhere over a 40-game sample. It just seems like he would have to have slugged more than that. So I wonder if he takes advantage of yankee stadium's configuration more than the typical player or whether this is just fluky and small sample which is usually the answer when it comes to splits or or what because i mean he's the sort of guy who you would think park factors might not even apply to as much just

because he hits the ball so far that a lot of his home runs would be home runs anywhere. Yeah. Looking at his baseball spot exit velocities, he has hit the ball on average four miles per hour harder at home. So that partially informs why his numbers would be up. But looking at his spray charts, he's actually hit more of those weird, stupid opposite field home runs not in new york uh he's done a lot less damage to the pole side so it seems like one of those things that is just going to even out over time i don't know like you said park factors should make no difference to uh to this guy nothing should make any difference to this guy he can hit the roof of

marlins park yeah well i didn't plan to end up talking about Aaron Judge, but it's just hard not to these days. Mike Trout, hurry back. I guess he has hurried back. He is back. Yeah. He's back probably the day this goes live. That's right. And a quick follow-up from Stephen who was listening to our episode

from yesterday, and he says during Jeff's stat segment, he went into the 2008 All-Star game, which I distinct stat segment, he went into the 2008 All-Star game, which I distinctly remember because I attended all of that All-Star weekend. To the point of the email, you mentioned the 10th inning when the second baseman made two errors back-to-back leading to the first intentional walk. And as he brings this up, I remember it well. Suddenly, that second baseman was Dan Agla, who actually made three errors in the game,

booting a ball in the 13th inning. He was the first player to make three errors in an All-Star game, but his 08 All-Star game was actually worse than just the fielding. He went 0 for 4 with three strikeouts. That sounds bad. What makes it even worse is that the one non-strikeout was a double play with third and first, one out in the top of the 10th versus Mariano Rivera. He also struck out with the bases loaded, one out in the 12 of the 10th versus Mariano Rivera. He also struck out with

the bases loaded, one out in the 12th inning after one of your intentional walks. His win probability added was negative 0.637. That is the most negative WPA for a position player in an All-Star game. Only three position players have had a WPA with an absolute value higher than that. WPA with an absolute value higher than that. 1987, Tim Raines at.707. 1961, All-Star Game 1, Al Kaline at.650. And 1941, Ted Williams at.844. The only more negative WPAs came in 1941 from pitcher Claude Passeau at negative.758. And 1961, All-Star Game 1 again from Hoyt Wilhelm.

Because the 2008 All-Star Game counted for home field advantage, you can argue that UGLA had the worst All-Star Game of all time. And if I'm not mistaken, baseball reference when probability added does not even include the effect of errors. So UGLA would not be getting charged. So let's see, E4, just going to do a little search here. UGLA, presumably all E4s here are UGLA. So yeah, there's one leading off the bottom of the 10th. There's the next one on the next pitch. Whoops. And then in the bottom of the 13th, there's another E4. So I don't see, unfortunately, winning expectancy change here in this line score, but for Dan Ugla to make not only three errors, but three errors in extra innings of a tie game, his win probability added would be well beneath negative one.

Yeah. In fact, okay, let's see. I'm just going to go through this line score to try to get more precise. So reached on E4. So then that changed the win expectancy by seven percent then reached on e4 that changed the win expectancy by another 22 percent and we go to what did i say the bottom of the 13th i think it was let's see reached on e4 changed winning expectancy by another six percent so what is that that i said six plus seven plus 22 so so that's 35% right there, which does not take into account what the win expectancy would have been had the plays been made, which is what would be the normal

baseline. So, my god, Dan Ugla had that win probability added, which is the worst of all time in an All-Star game, is probably only about half of how bad he was in the All-Star game. And that is outstanding! Wow! That is bad he was in the All-Star game. That is outstanding. Yeah.

Wow. That is bad. Yeah, man. Yeah, worst All-Star game. I wish that I would have done a little more research for the stat segment, but thank you for the follow-up. Just outstandingly bad. Okay.

Not that many weird batting stance nominations so far in response to our email answer from yesterday, but we have had nominations for Odubel Herrera and John Jaso, I believe. So if you can top that, let us know. You got anything else? Well, also, Casey wrote in to tell us that there is an entire episode of David Temple's podcast, Stealing Home, about Clark Field, the crazy Texas Longhorns ballpark from the 20s to the 70s that we brought up yesterday too with the bifurcated outfield. So if you want to listen to that, you can go to the Hardball Times. It's episode 26 of Stealing Home.

Maybe we should just have David Temple on the next one and then we can just let him talk for an hour and then we don't have to do anything. Sure. Excellent. I like David Temple. That's all I got. Well, we do have a topic, but i guess we should throw out there that ken rosenthal has some news that uh has a little we're not here to do i guess larger media landscape criticism but ken rosenthal no longer has a place to write which is weird i don't know what's happening to the business landscape and i don't want to go into the i don't know are there politics here i'm not going to go into the politics here but ken rosenthal still has a job he still does video stuff for fox sports and mlb network but he cannot write anywhere but on his facebook page because

foxsports.com has gone full video only which is uh pretty crazy seemingly i i don't know i like ken a lot he blurbed my book he has been the nicest possible person in every interaction i've ever had with him and i also just really respect his writing too because i know that he is known widely as a newsbreaker and obviously he's as good at that if not better as you know anyone but i also like his writing and find that his stories are not just like a collection of things that he also puts in tweets but good stories with good color and reporting and quotes and sourcing and anecdotes and you know he i think really has never had a tendency to have any kind of like us versus them mentality in his writing when it comes to like stats versus old school stats or

scouting or anything like that. He's always, I think, been open-minded in my experience of reading him. So I have no doubt that if he wants to write somewhere other than his Facebook page, he will be doing that sometime soon and I look forward to it. But yeah, between Ken and Jason Stark, it has not been a great year for baseball writing legends who are also really good at their jobs and nice people. So hopefully they will both have prominent places to write sometime soon if they want them. What is the market for a video only version of FoxSports.com? I recognize that i'm in a bubble of my own existence i mostly interact with myself so i don't have a great grasp on what people do what their reading habits are

what their video watching habits are but yeah i know and i know that i'm not completely alone that i never watch a video on the internet certainly not an autoplay video certainly not a video on the internet. Certainly not an autoplay video. Certainly not a video on like, if I go to YouTube, sure, I'll specifically watch a video. Or if I go to MLB.com, I'll specifically watch a game or a replay highlight. But I can't imagine what... Yes, it's very perplexing to me because I feel the same way. I mean, I watch streaming video, obviously, but I don't really watch video in my web browser. I watch some of the videos we make at The Ringer because I work at The Ringer.

But other than that, if something is on a page, if I click on something and discover it's a video as opposed to the article I thought it was, I will usually leave. And I don't really understand it. It's part of a larger conversation, I guess, about advertising dollars and media and all of that. But my understanding of this is that there is possibly a temporary bubble going on here where advertisers are just paying more per video impression than they are for anything else. And people like video. Facebook likes video because it will keep people on Facebook as opposed to an article that might send someone elsewhere. And so publishers are getting rewarded for video in a way that I think is pretty tenuous, where if

people realize that, hey, maybe no one's actually watching these videos and that it's an autoplay or it's just, you know, something that's kind of going on on the side of an article and it's playing technically, but no one's actually watching it, et cetera, et cetera. I think this could change fairly quickly and all of these outlets that are shifting to video so that they can capitalize on that market might find that that market goes away. Yeah, I mean, just thinking about it logically, I don't know how people could have enough time to watch video to make this make sense. Because other than a younger generation that maybe is conditioned to watch things on their phones and has more time to do that, I think anyone who has ever had an office job

knows that it's not that easy to watch video, which that's the setting where a lot of people consume content is at work, which is always kind of funny to me. Like you would think that weekends or whatever would be the high points. That would be the time when everyone has time to read articles and everything. But no, we all have time to read articles while we're at work. That is when everyone reads articles and you can listen to a podcast with one ear while you work or pretend to work. And you can read with your eyes while you work or pretend to work. But it's very hard to

devote all of your senses to a video and manage to work or pretend to work. And it's hard to skim a video the way you can skim an article. So it doesn't really make sense to me. Can't imagine it lasting in the way that some outlets are treating this now. And maybe this is more than we plan to say on the subject, but it does seem sort of silly. It's relevant. I get that maybe videos are more difficult to aggregate so you don't lose traffic because, you know, people have to watch your video to get whatever at least they have to watch through to be able to then quote your video and if i was going to be cynical it seems like it's a way that you can skew kind of your site traffic data in a way that shows okay people are staying on the website longer or they're whatever all the different

metrics that you have for for site traffic i can see how having videos and video traffic would be useful for that however what it doesn't capture is that everybody hates them and that there's good traffic and there's bad traffic. And I think the internet is still struggling to be able to identify traffic quality. It kind of feels like, I don't know exactly what the nature is of clickbait headlines these days. I know they still exist, but I think they went through at least a phase where they were just outlandish and in your face and conspicuous. I don't know if that still exists. I kind of have trained myself to avoid it. But I think because of Facebook's algorithm partly, right, because it's all about what

Facebook rewards because such a huge portion of the traffic comes from that, that if the algorithm changes so that they are prioritizing or deprioritizing something in their news feed results, then that can make or break a site right there. There is a litany of ways to be able to bring people to your website. However, what makes the biggest long-term difference is, my sense at least, is people don't want to feel like they're tricked. They don't want to be duped. They'll go to your website and they'll watch your video accidentally

or they'll click your gripping headline. But then if they hate what they see, you get the hit hit but those people are going to have a worse opinion of your site from that point forward now maybe i'm giving people too much of the benefit of the doubt because well now this is getting to the bigger media landscape so okay all-star game we should talk about baseball now i guess and there's a there's only three or four days during the year where it makes sense to talk about the all-Star Game at all. This is one of them, I guess. So might as well do it.

Get out of the way. Did you watch the All-Star Game? Nah. I watched bits and pieces. I certainly saw highlights and know about the memorable moments. But I definitely didn't sit down in front of the TV and watch the whole game or anything like that. Yeah, right. All-Star break is great.

It's nice to have baseball around, but it's also nice to have four days of not baseball because, you know, sometimes you just want your Twitter feed to kind of calm down. It's like chill at night, so you don't have to stay up to date on what's going on. Anyway, you have probably had this conversation a bunch of times before. I'm sure a lot of us have had this conversation before, but ways to make All-Star game slash week better. Point one, and we touched on this last podcast, it makes a lot of sense to have All-Star rosters. Fans love to vote and they love to see their players rewarded. I am willing to have an open conversation about whether or not there actually needs to be a game that's played, because I feel like maybe people would just respond well to saying, this guy on my team is

an All-Star and that's it who cares i know that the the game still sells out and people do watch it on television but there can be alternate programming and that leads to the skills competition idea that has been bandied about hundreds of times before and the usual response is that can't do a skills competition because players could get hurt teams don't want their players to get hurt totally get get it. One skill you definitely would not be able to do is a hardest pitch competition. That is a non-starter. Teams will not want Trevor Bauer out there being like, I'm going to throw the ball 112 miles per hour. Now, actually, maybe the Indians wouldn't mind if Trevor Bauer did it, but a better pitcher, then it would be different. That one can't exist, but that is only one. We don't need a hardest

pitch competition because we already basically know who can throw the hardest pitches. It's a Raldis Chapman, everybody. By the way, it's a Raldis Chapman. But there are still so many skills. People seem to enjoy the home run derby. I think that it was rejuvenated a few years ago when they changed the system and people have responded to it quite positively.

I think it's actually become a more enjoyable spectacle where it used to be personally, I think, terrible. I think it used to be a terrible event that has gotten better because people love seeing dingers. Now, there are ways to tweak it. You have the home run derby, but you could have people go for the longest distance. And maybe that's the same competition because people are basically trying to hit the crap out of the ball anyway. But you can have the home run derby, which people like. You can have the hitting accuracy competition, which we've sort of talked about a little bit before, which I think would be fun and novel. You could have a pitching accuracy competition, which I think would also be a lot of fun because I don't actually know.

I would love to see pitchers aim at targets. We talk about gloves and catchers hitting targets all the time. But then you also hear about how the glove isn't sometimes the actual target. And the circumstances are just different there because there's a hitter that pitchers have to be afraid of but i think it would be a lot of fun to see pitchers try to hit targets and to have hitters try to hit targets i think that you could have a sprinting competition because even though i know players get hurt when they run they can stretch they can warm up players run all the time players run in the all-star game they run out grounders so i don't think trying to run as hard as you can would be as dangerous as trying to

throw as hard as you can and so you can come up with any number of these competitions and i think it would be it would certainly be more entertaining to me i recognize i am not the general audience but i think the the larger fan base would respond to it well too because you have these direct competitions between players where you could actually say this guy is better than this guy or this guy's better than this guy as opposed to oh my league beat your league because your league has dan ugla and he went over four and made five outs and committed three errors i don't i know it would be weird without the game but i'm not convinced that the game needs to exist yeah well i agree i'd like to see skills competition. And maybe just because it's different, we have a lot of baseball games during the season. And adding one more baseball game is nice when it's between the best players in baseball. But I think we all crave fun and different and new and exciting. And I would definitely sit and watch the entire thing. And maybe, I don't know, is it not as necessary now that we measure almost everything that happens on the field and we know who has the fastest sprint speed and we know who hits the ball the hardest and we know who throws the ball the fastest. Like I could imagine even that being more entertaining in an earlier era when the only way you could talk about these things was just to have a debate where no one knew what

the answer was. And the only way to settle who was the fastest baseball player was to either get them to race, which has happened at times in baseball history, or just to watch them and say, well, I think he's the fastest. And someone else said, I think he's the fastest. And maybe in that era, it would have been even more satisfying to have an actual answer. Whereas now we kind of do have an answer. We can say that Billy Hamilton is the fastest player or Aaron Judge is the guy who hits the ball hardest or Aroldis Chapman throws the ball the fastest. And we know that with virtual certainty.

So even that maybe wouldn't have the appeal to me that it might have, say, 15 years ago. But I would rather watch that than a game between them, I think. And it would be a good showcase for their skills, obviously. That's the way it works in basketball. I think it's generally regarded to be fun, the skills competition. And Craig Calcaterra was making the point about how it's hard to promote baseball players because if you're focusing on one game like the All-Star game, they might not do anything good. They might not have an opportunity to make a good defensive play. They might go 0 for 3 in the

game as Judge did in the All-Star game. So you don't know if they're going to do something special or show off their abilities. And if you had the skills competition, you know that they would, and you'd have the fastest and the strongest and the best showing why they're the fastest and the strongest and the best. So I would like that. I would like even more a skills competition that would measure something that we can't measure as well, like the hitting accuracy or the pitching accuracy that you were just talking about, because we have some data on that sort of thing, but not a whole lot of data. So I would love to see if Joey Votto can hit a target more often than anyone else, or if, I don't know, whoever pitcher has the best command can throw

the ball through the cardboard cutout or whatever this number of times in that many attempts. So yeah, I would be all over something like that. I would like to know where the line is where an event becomes too dangerous for teams to allow their players to participate in because you know, the home run derby is dangerous in that a player could I guess conceivably strain and oblique because they're swinging really hard. I don't think that's happened at all that I can recall. So players are okay with the home run derby. They're generally okay with the all star game. I mean, we've seen them be okay with the World Baseball Classic. But I wonder if you could do like a home run robbery event or maybe introducing like the fence that becomes maybe too dangerous of a factor but just spitballing here off the top of my head you could maybe have sort

of like a bat control event where you have uh i don't know how powerful pitching machines are these days but if you can get a pitching machine that can you can just like incrementally up the velocity of the pitch you could just kind of do a competition where you say okay let's see it's sort of a baseball version of horse but let's see who can hit a ball let's say i don't know to the outfield you set some some easy boundary to reach say okay who can actually hit a ball to that boundary or beyond that boundary and we're just going to keep making the pitches faster and faster and you could see can somebody hit a pitch that's 110 miles per hour i don't know but it would be fun to try to watch. And if it's a pitching machine, then the player is unlikely to get hit in the brain. Yeah. You see

things like that on Japanese game shows sometimes, and those are always fun, extreme velocity challenges and that kind of thing. So yeah, I would watch that. I mean, it comes down to the injury issue, no matter what you suggest, really, because I guess doing anything is a bigger injury risk than doing nothing. And we've seen how big a conversation that becomes when it concerns the World Baseball Classic, which is just baseball games at a time of the season when players are playing baseball games anyway, and maybe they're more intense baseball games, but it's not anything out of really the ordinary by that much. So even in that area, you just constantly hear about, is this an injury risk and teams don't like it? And is there a WBC hangover effect and all of that?

So you're going to get that no matter what you do. So you're going to get that no matter what you do. Players are just paid so well. And baseball teams are such big businesses with so much money at stake that losing them now for even a regular length DL stint is something that, you know, you can put the price tag on that six figures or seven figures or something. So it's a hard thing to get around you you had mentioned in i think the last podcast that if we didn't have an all-star game then we would think oh why don't we have an all-star game we should do something here what if if we had a situation where there was no all-star game but we voted here are the rosters uh here we're recognizing the best players and we have this skills competition instead that takes place probably over one night but i don't know maybe two if you really want to spread it out but realistically you could say have the futures game featured on on one day or night and then the next day you can have the skills competition and then players otherwise get their

two or three days off and then everyone seems like they should be happy you can build the skills competition up to be a three or four hour whatever i mean you already see like what alex rodriguez was interviewing players on the field during the All-Star game through a microphone. Like clearly what people want from these, or at least what the networks want from these All-Star events is to showcase player personalities and to be able to just kind of have them casually chat and goof around with one another. Nobody really cares about what's taking place during the game. So why not put that even more forward? If you have maybe one or two players participating in an event at a time, it gives it makes you that much more free to just talk to whoever about the competition or about what they're seeing or about

other events they'd like to see or who on their team might be the best at whatever event is taking place. And I don't know, I don't have a whole lot of creative ideas anymore. I'm in my 30s. So that part of my life is over but this feels like one that to me feels obvious and compelling and i mean you don't even need to think of it as a hypothetical because hockey has done it and i think people enjoy the skills competition and the the hockey all-star game is terrible and pointless and there's no reason to play it and i understand the level of effort that goes into the baseball all-star game seems to be a little higher than in other sports but it's still still, I mean, Dan Uggla's box score aside, I don't think people really reflect

on the All-Star game very much the way that they will remember Aaron Judge's home run derby. Yeah. And there have been memorable All-Star moments and sometimes they're for bad reasons, like the Pete Rose-Ray Fossey collision. And sometimes they're just heroic and it's some Hall of Fame legend type who's in the midst of a great season and he does something great in the All-Star Game too. Or sometimes it's like a Cal Ripken kind of thing where a guy is going out and he does something memorable

or cheater or replacing Ripken in the field, that kind of thing. So often there is some sentimental value to it but personally i don't have a whole lot of formative baseball memories that come from the all-star game so and i'm definitely not making any more at this point i don't think so i'd be open to anything that changes it around. But I don't know. I mean, I think probably we would get tired of anything if we saw it often enough.

So this sounds appealing to me now. And if we saw it 10 years in a row, maybe it would be boring and we'd be complaining about how the skills competition is always the same and we know how it's going to go. So I don't know. We become dissatisfied very quickly, but I would definitely embrace that. I think one of the most fun parts of the All-Star game in the Home Run Derby is just getting to see that side of the players. And, you know, like in the Home Run Derby when they're all kind of hanging out in foul territory or in the dugouts, and it's guys you don't normally see associating with each other, and they are marveling at the talents of their fellow players, and they're just kind of loose and laid back and funny, and I like that a lot.

So anything that we can do to promote that is probably a good thing, and I guess you were sort of seeing that in the game, whether it was with the Nelson Cruz picture with Joe West or Bryce Harper's hair flip or whatever. If you're not going to make the game count for anything, which is fine. then make it different at least with the atmosphere and let people see a different side of these players than they do when they are all buttoned up because it's actual baseball that counts that's funny because they actually are buttoned up so the the one that i think i would most want to see is is the pitcher accuracy competition because it's the thing that we wonder about the most and we don't have a great answer we have sort of guesses it would require some sort i don't i don't know some sort of minimum threshold i guess because you can't have people just trying to lob the ball in

for maximum control i think you want pitchers at least simulating something approximating normal effort so then you'd have to maybe get a little technical and be like you have to throw a pitch within five or ten miles per hour of your usual fastball i don't know something like that but if we had a a pitching accuracy competition and i guess it would involve just setting up probably four or five targets and you're i don't know you have 10 pitches from the mound or something who uh who do you think would win my current guess would be dallas keitel yeah that's probably the best guess his he's just like off the charts when you look at like called strike rates out of the zone, like at the edges of the zone, or you look at baseball prospectuses called strikes above average, which is sort of a proxy for pitchers command.

It's like how much the pitcher can expand the zone, which tells you a little bit maybe about his ability to just throw it on the borders consistently. Keichel is like totally an outlier in that respect. And he's also managed to like throw pitches out of the strike zone and still not walk anyone. So yeah, he's pretty amazing. And that is probably the best guess. I don't know, like Cologne probably for a year or two there. Maybe not now, but when he was not walking anyone and throwing lots of fastballs but having them move in slightly different directions and everything

that was impressive maybe like addison reed seems to have really great command and he's always at the top when you look at guys who throw pitches on the edges of the strike zone consistently that kind of thing so if relievers, I might put him up there. And then it would be fun maybe if you turned it around and had a similar competition, but you're like, all right, Jared Cozart, you are not going to be done throwing until you hit all the targets. So then you just have Jared Cozart out there throwing like 95 baseballs. Maybe teams would complain about that one but maybe yeah maybe alternatively they would not if they lost jared kozart yeah i want to see kyle bearclaw in the

command competition that'd be fun interestingly i was uh i was just pulled jared kozart because while you were talking i was looking up the pitchers with the highest walk rates in uh in baseball this season one thing i did not realize uh do you know who has the highest walk rate in baseball this season you might sit well are we counting relievers because the tansys right it is della batances and 21 yeah it's crazy did not realize yeah he has been all over the place he is like taking it to the ultimate extremes here with both strikeout rate and walk rate so i i like when you get a guy who's walking everyone and striking out everyone. It's probably not much fun to watch,

but I like statistically that you can make that work, that if you can strike out enough guys, you can also keep putting guys on, and it can work out, and especially if, like Batances, you don't allow home runs, which he hasn't this year. So that helps a lot, too. Batances currently has about twice as many walks as hits allowed, and he has twice as many strikeouts as walks. That's a fun line to look at. I guess this isn't a podcast about Dillon Batances.

I don't have anything else to really say about the skills competition, except that if ever I haven't been alive through that many Major League Baseball commissioners, certainly not ones that I've paid attention to. It's basically two. But if there were a commissioner who would probably be open-minded about something like this, I think we have said commissioner. Now he has something that should not be as far-fetched as it probably is the All-Star game has been going on for so long it's hard to imagine any sport just kind of giving up on the tradition but football gets so much crap for the Pro Bowl and no one watches the hockey All-Star game because I don't know why there are people who play defense it feels like they should just have five people on the other side of the red line and then whoever has the puck can just go five on oh against the goalie because no one wants to get hurt baseball game is better than that but i'm i know buster only wrote the other day about how baseball has an opportunity to have the absolute best all-star game which i understand it does but on the other

hand what if it didn't actually have a game and i think that i don't know i would at the very least to like if they're going to keep the game i would at least like to see an expanded skills competition i mean we already have the one skill we already have a competition for that one skill why not expand the door's already open i don't know i don't know if there's any momentum toward it but i'm starting it today all right well i'm sure we will revisit exactly the same topic this time next year. I scheduled the thing for the morning. I put up a poll asking people where they think Mike Trout's going to finish the year in war for position players. He's currently in 13th.

He's at 3.4. I think he's 2.1 wins behind Aaron Judge. So that's a big gap. Where would you put the chances of Mike Trout catching Aaron Judge? Yeah, I've kind of had this conversation too. I would put them, let's see, so there's like 45% of a season left. So he'd have to play at a pace that's like, what, like four and a half wins better over a full season or something to surpass him over 45% of a season.

So, yeah, I think there's only like a 20% chance or something like that that he does it. I mean, we kind of know what Trout is usually. He's like a nine-win player, let's say, and so that would be saying that Judge is like a five win player or worse and i don't know if i buy that now so yeah probably uh one in five sounds about right i was uh jose batista i think has the the best first half in the past decade in 2011 he was worth six wins before the all-star break and then after the break he he was still fine. He was worth about two wins. And I wonder, oh, Aaron Judge.

How well do we really know Aaron Judge? Yeah, well, but he hits the roof, though. Mike Trout essentially now has a chance to be the freeze, so we'll see how he does. Yes, I know. Right, yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Michael and I talked about it. It is actually one of the things I'm most interested in

seeing how close he can come. I don't want to sell all the other really good players short. Like there are a lot of players in between Judge and Trout who could also have excellent rest of seasons. But yeah, those are kind of the guys that we're fixated on right now. Yep. Okay. All right. Have a good weekend.

You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Thomas Bennett, Conor O'Loughlin, Nicholas Palacaro, Tom Elmer, and Mark Griffiths. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. On the latest episode of the Ringer MLB show. Michael and I also talked about the Quintana trade, but mostly we talked about the several storylines we're most looking forward to over the rest of the season.

You can find that on the Ringer MLB show feed. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Hope you have a fine weekend. We'll be back next week.