Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1096: Pivoting to Pivot Tables

Episode Date: August 12, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan talk to 17-year-old Jack Dumoulin, the first American winner of the Microsoft Excel World Championship, about how baseball stats helped him get good at spreadsheets, his high-school baseball career, how he won the championship, and his dream of working for an MLB team. Then Ben and Jeff answer listener emails […]

And you know, I'm gonna try a little harder every day Cause in this life, you gotta work hard to pay Gonna make it up Gonna make it up to you Got to make it up Say I gotta make it up, got to make it up to you. Hello and welcome to episode 1096 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, who is now back in Portland. Hello, Jeff.

Hello, Mike Trout is within eight tenths of one win above replacement to first place among position players. Hello, Jeff. Hello. Mike Trout is within eight-tenths of one win above replacement to first place among position players. Oh my goodness. Keep track. He's in third place. It's Judge and Altuve tied at six and Trout is at 5.2. He hit a tie-breaking game-winning three-run double last night to defeat the Seattle Mariners who had a double whammy of an evening.

He's really going to do it. It seems almost inevitable at this point that he will do it. I am surprised, but also not at all surprised. So we are doing kind of a bonus episode today. As I mentioned last time, it's more of a makeup episode because we had a crazy travel and trade deadline week last week and didn't do our usual compliment of episodes. And we want to make sure that the good people who are supporting us on Patreon get their money's worth. So what we're going to do today is a partial email show, but before we get to emails, we are going to talk to a guest. You may have read about our guest today

in recent days in Fortune or the Los Angeles Times or CNN.com. His story has been making the rounds, and it is only natural has been making the rounds, and it is only natural that it make the rounds on Effectively Wild because it is right up our alley. His name is Jack Dumoulin. He is a 17-year-old high school student in Virginia, and not only is he a hero to baseball stat nerds everywhere, but really should be a hero to all Americans

because he recently claimed the title in the 16th annual Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships in the Microsoft Excel division. And not only was he the first American ever to win this competition, but he got his Excel skills by studying baseball stats. He is a varsity baseball player. Baseball is his favorite sport. And he wants to work in baseball someday. So, of course, we had to talk to him. Jack, welcome and congratulations.

Thank you very much. I'm glad to be on the show. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the World Championships, which I was not aware of before I came across your story. What is the process for entering and how many people participate and just generally how does it work? Okay, so when I took classes in high school to earn certifications for my resume or my transcript for colleges, and I was taking it from Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. And for my Excel exam, the certifications are run by a company called CertiPort. And I had the highest score in my state on the Excel certification exam,

which my teacher had told me it qualified me to go to a national competition dealing with Microsoft Excel. And they also had Word and PowerPoint there. And it was in Orlando, Florida. And it was put on by the same company SureDeport and down there I decided to go and there it was the top I think 124 out of the 320,000 applicants from the U.S. who competed in the national competition total and so the top 124 finalists for six categories, there was Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for the 2013 model, and then Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for 2016 model.

And I competed in the category of Excel 2016. And down there, that competition was you had to create a spreadsheet from scratch using the data given by ShareDeport that you had to import into the spreadsheet. So they give scratch using the data given by your report that you had to import into the spreadsheet. So they give you all the data necessary and you have to create the spreadsheet using the requirements and all the parameters that they want you to do to build the spreadsheet. And it kind of incorporates all the tasks you need to know for Excel, kind of like what you would need to know for the certification test. And for those of you who don't know what's on the certification test, it's sort of like they give you a pre-made spreadsheets and you have to do tasks to alter them, which kind of test your

skills and see what you know about the program. But the national competition, it was more of like a real world scenario where you can create a spreadsheet for a company given the financial data using your skills in Excel. And he was ever able to give the spreadsheet that was the most accurate in the fastest amount of time, being this tiebreaker one. And the total amount of time you get total is 50 minutes, five hours. So is this something that where you have,

you're competing against people from all over the world in this Excel 2016 competition? Yeah, one of these articles says 560,000 worldwide entries yeah goodness okay between ages 13 to 22 i should mention right so this is all like college age kids or younger yeah right you're uh you're punching up so you are you're in a situation where you have all just dozens maybe even hundreds of finalists competing in this final competition is this something where i assume everyone is is taking uh participating in the competition at the same time like is is this just a a live sort

of pressure-filled scenario and and sort of as a follow-up to that how what is the valuation process of a completed spreadsheet is i i have to assume that in some way the scoring of a spreadsheet is automated but how how long does it take to to figure out who has done the best job in the least amount of time? So, like I said, I won the national competition for my category. I went to Anaheim for the world competition, and there it was the top 200 in the world for the six categories. Out of the 560,000 people that you mentioned, there are actually 1.1 million exams submitted by those applicants total to enter

the competition. Because then people will submit more than one to try to get a higher score in their state or their province, whatever the case is. So down in Anaheim for the World Competition, since there's 200 of us, they separate it into testing blocks. They kind of group some of the students in the same category together in their testing block, but you're not sitting next to anybody from your category. So once all the testing is completed, I'm pretty sure the tech guys that are down there doing all the testing, they have some sort of automated system. I'm not 100% sure, but I know it took them a really long time to get through it, like several hours. They sent us all this to Disneyland for the day so they could do all the grading,

and that took all day. That's pretty good. So how did you get good at Excel? So I've been working with Microsoft products ever since I was in elementary school, but I didn't really start with Excel until middle school. I was in a math and science specialty program at my middle school, and we had several science projects we had to do and I took more of the mathematic route to it and I like I'm a baseball player and I'm a huge fan of baseball I like the Dodgers I follow the Nats because I live in DC I have family from New York that likes the Yankees I have family from Texas that likes the Rangers so and I follow every major league team so when I got into it and then I statistics and math, I decided to put that towards my school projects as well as following baseball stats as a hobby.

And being able to excel is the perfect program for me to be able to track this statistic because you can have it on a spreadsheet right there for you. And you can use formulas and things to calculate it and create charts and what have you. And it was just a great way for me to get into it and share my love of baseball with math and being able to put it towards school as well. I had done a science fair project on how baseball field dimensions affect batting statistics and I won first place for a regional science fair here in the county.

And so that sort of sparked my interest in Excel. And as I got older, I started tracking statistics more on my phone. But then when it got time to be able to take these tests and I had the opportunity to get a certification in high school, I started using Excel a lot more and creating my own spreadsheets for keep doing it with the baseball and creating rosters and looking at statistics and then also being able to bring a financial piece into it as well and start looking at that for more of a business concept. But baseball really is probably one of the reasons why I got

very good at Excel because I'm so interested by statistics that Excel putting that together is just it was a great combination for me. So you live in DC like the Dodgers, you follow the Mets, just further evidence that nobody in the world actually seems to like the Washington Nationals. So one of the ways that the article I read concluded is that your dream job would be working in baseball. Now, obviously, at this stage in your life, it would be a little early to be working in baseball. But have you put any effort toward sort of opening some doors? Have you had any contacts with people in the industry? That is, I don't know. Ordinarily, it stands to reason the baseball team would be thrilled to find someone who has your array of skills. However, given your position in life,

I didn't know if that had been something that had been broached yet. It has not been approached, but right now I'm just trying to figure out opportunities to where I could make possible connections for that down the road. Well, coming on this podcast is not the worst way to do that. So I hope someone is listening and reaches out to you. I don't know, have you done any other kind of coding or have you looked into more math training or is Excel really your specialty? I've done a little bit of programming, but it's more so the Microsoft products. So what kind of techniques did you use in the championship? If you can explain to people who maybe are not as adept in Excel as you are, Are you just using exclusively keyboard shortcuts to save time?

And are you using VLOOKUPs and pivot tables and index match? And what are some of your go-tos, your favorite Excel formulas or techniques? Oh, well, one obvious thing would be the fill handle, the little thing where you can drag down and you can copy formulas onto the thing. A lot of people actually that I've talked to have no idea what that is, and it's the biggest time saver, I would say, with using Excel. And I would say some of the shortcuts that I would use is they didn't really have any VLA clips that I had to do. It was more so that the parameters that they gave us, we had to come up with numbers for

a big range of data. It's kind of hard to explain because the test was a little while ago. But some of the shortcuts I would say that I would use, I would say the biggest one is probably that fill handle. That thing was the biggest tool in saving time on that one. Because if you just come up with the one formula you needed, I would just drag that down and it does it for me. Are there specific things that you've done with baseball stats in Excel or that you still do when you are keeping tabs on the teams that you're following?

Or are there any sources of data or sites that you're going to to get that most often? I usually use MLB.com, ESPN to look at the range of statistics to be able to get the numbers for the formulas like OBP, OPS, OPS plus, things like that. get the numbers for the formulas like OBP, OPS, OPS+, things like that. And I put that into the spreadsheet, and I can just compare all the data from all the players over the past couple of years and just sort of combine it into a pivot table. I would recommend Fangraphs, which is a good site where we do this podcast, but it might save you a few steps. Not that you seem to need the help

Excel-wise, but there's a lot of stuff you can export there in already analyzed form. So you earned $10,000 in prize money from the combination of the championship and the US finals. Is that just going to college education or are you doing anything fun with it? I think that's going to go more towards my college fun. That's probably smart. That's what I would expect. I was hoping you were going to buy something that was very impractical, but oh well, I commend you on not doing that. When you went into your finalist testing block, what was sort of the level of competition?

Had you met your competitors before? What was sort of the level of competition? Had you met your competitors before? Were there sort of rivalries? Was it super pressure filled or did it just feel like you were taking any ordinary test in school? You know, since I do play baseball, I'm used to that more athletic competitiveness. That sort of atmosphere, you will be surprised when I got to the competition. It was already competitive at the national level. The world competition was on an extremely another level. There is like an opening reception that you go to and you can talk to a lot of the competitors from other countries. You meet their team of representatives for each category and they're all really friendly. They're excited to be there and take pictures with you. But then when they find out what category you're testing in,

they bring forward whoever's testing for the category and they're friendly switches completely off. They look like they are ready to, it's like dog eat dog, like they are ready. It's a lot more competitive than you think. What position do you play? I am an outfielder. Can you give us a scouting report on yourself? Oh, well, I'm an outfielder. Can you give us a scouting report on yourself?

Oh, well, I'm an outfielder. I used to be a big power hitter, but now I'm focusing more on the contact side of things. Kind of the opposite way that Major League Baseball is going. Well, I like looking at the power statistic. I would just say my game is going more towards the contact side of things, but I can hit pretty well the opposite way. I'm a pretty good defensive tool in the outfield because I'll dive for anything. Okay, so you sound vaguely like Christian Jelic.

Would you pitch yourself as the next Christian Jelic? I would say that's a pretty good comparison. Okay, well, you've got to stop hitting grand balls. I'll tell you that much. Is this something that you intend to pursue when you go to college, or are you going to be focusing specifically on your studies? I think it's going to be more academics, but that love for baseball is still there. So that's why I always talked about the front office dream job sort of thing.

Is it the stats that got you interested in baseball, or did that come later? That came later. I've been playing baseball ever since I was like four years old. Do you have any immediate plans? Because you're working part-time in fast food, right? Just, I mean, as a summer job, I guess. You're working at Chick-fil-A. Are you already looking at specific colleges or is it still too soon? Right now, I would say it's a little too soon.

I'm in the process of going and visiting different colleges and applying. And then also potentially setting up some roads for some internships or a job during college. Do you have any idea what you're planning to study? I was looking at more of the business and computers route, something in that field. And then there's also, I used to be really interested in medicine, but now more that I have all these Excel skills, I want to really work with business and computers. Well, I envy your Excel skills because Jeff and I use Excel a lot, but you are, I'm sure, in a completely different class. We are not actually that great at it. In fact, my fiance is better than I am and helps me with it often. I can't even imagine what you look like in Excel action,

but it must be impressive to see. So I congratulate you again. You have brought the championship home to the US. I don't know whether there's been a huge groundswell of patriotic fervor as a result of that happening, but I am feeling it myself. So congratulations again, and we wish you the best. And if any GMs want to reach out to Jack and hire him before someone else does, you can find him on Twitter at Jack underscore Dumoulin. That's D-U-M-O-U-L-I-N. And Jack, thanks again for coming on. It was a pleasure. Thank you guys very much for having me.

Let me know if you guys ever want to talk baseball. It'd be great. Yes. And I hope I can send you Excel questions, although you must get more than enough of those at this point. Sounds good. Thank you very much, guys. All right.

Bye. All right. Now that I tipped Jack off to Fangraphs, I assume he's going to be coming for our jobs in no time. So I'll enjoy this position that we have while we have it until Jack comes in and steals it away. But seriously, someone should probably think about hiring him as soon as he is eligible to be hired because he has clearly shown some initiative to get this good that young. So wanted to get to some emails that we haven't had time for. You just mentioned before we started recording that Andrelton Simmons is now 10th in

Fangraphs War, which is pretty amazing at this point in the season. And I mean, it's not shocking in that he's been probably the best defender in baseball for years now. And so all he really ever had to do was post a pretty good offensive season and he would be one of the best players in baseball. But it wasn't at all certain that he would do that after some years of slumping. I mean, like the first year when he was in the majors, he made his debut. He was roughly a league average hitter. And then he wasn't far from that the next year And then he got worse

I sort of was expecting him to get better And he got worse He had kind of an unusual profile As a hitter but this year He has added power As has just about everyone But he has also kept The other parts of his game constant

And his defense seems to be about as good as it's ever been. So he's been fantastic. So great. The Angels have another good player in addition to Mike Trout. But we also got an email question about another guy who's much higher on the war leaderboard than one would expect. This is a question from Forrest, and he says, one would expect. This is a question from Forrest, and he says, Tommy Pham is 20th in wins above replacement and eighth in war per plate appearance, and it's August, and neither Jeff nor Carson has yet written about him. Is he another Jason Vargas, who is

sixth in RA9 war still? Is he another one of those types? And he also wants to know whether there are any players that we've avoided talking about, like guys who are having good seasons, but we just haven't talked about them or written about them because for whatever reason, they just have not caught our attention. Well, I guess that's a good question. Vargas is the example that, of course, comes to my mind because he is not interesting. He has never been interesting. He never will be interesting. And nobody wants to read an article about how Jason because he is not interesting. He has never been interesting. He never will be interesting. And nobody wants to read an article about how Jason Vargas is not nearly as good as the ZRA.

Just looking over the list, I don't know who has necessarily been avoided, I guess. I don't have a whole lot of interest in writing about Didi Gregorius. He ranks 19th in the position player war because he has 18 home runs, probably two of which have been legitimate. There is a, I don't know, who else is up here here steven susan jr no that's a bad example he's pretty interesting it's kind of interesting yeah maybe maybe the pitcher side would be better let's just uh let's just look at some pitchers and figure out whose era is completely misleading because that's probably a good a good way to uh okay well let's see michael former i don't care i don't really care that much about michael formermer. I like my pitchers to get strikeouts, and if the pitchers don't want to get strikeouts, well, that's great. You can be fine, but you're not going to get my attention, that's for damn sure.

to write about Aaron Nola. I've been delinquent in my responsibilities of salivating over Aaron, well, publicly salivating over Aaron Nola's curveball, I should say. I've been doing plenty of it in comforts of my own office. Don't care about Lance Lynn. Yeah, that's not going to do it. Jason Vargas, incidentally, is slipping.

This is not a surprise. The reason we didn't write about Jason Vargas is not very good. So he's just going to keep on going down that list. And I don't know you have anything to say about tommy fan oh right tommy fan pay any attention to tommy fan if you i think if you remember last year based on some limited stack as information tommy fam came out with like some crazy good exit velocities right he was uh he was up there and near the top of the list around around other superstars like domingo santana and keon broxton you know the sort of the who's who of baseball talent in the universe and uh i believe fam this year is is not so high i would have noticed if he were however

he's trimmed his strikeout rate by 14 percentage points so instead of striking out literally all of the time he's striking out 14 less than all of all of the time. And so his batting line looks a lot like it did when he was a rookie in 2015. He's walking a bunch, he's striking out a quarter of the time, not so bad. And he's hitting roughly half his balls in play on the ground. So not a massive power hitter, but he's just kind of been good across the board. And somewhat surprisingly, he's gone from two stolen bases in 2015 to two stolen bases in 2016 to 16 stolen bases this season. This is the St. Louis Cardinals. So I think Pham has now stolen more bases than the Cardinals did all of last year combined. So he is a he's clearly a guy who has a lot of raw power in his swing. He hits the ball hard. He looks like a

guy who's made the decision to focus a little more on contact and a little less on trying to maximize maximize that contact his contact rate is up this is pretty dramatic his contact rate last year was 66 percent that's that's uh that's quite low it's not unprecedentedly low but that's uh that's the sort of miguel suno kind of range lots of swing and miss this year his contact rate 80 he's gotten a lot better in that regard. He's taken something off of his maximum power, which is sort of, that's the trade-off that one would get used to, but I think this is something

that Giancarlo Stanton was messing around with, and congratulations, listener. You have convinced me. It is time. It is time for an article about Tommy Pham. I see no further sense in putting it off not gonna lie kind of off of my radar also his outfield defense seems to have improved so all kinds of good things about tommy fam all around he's 29 years old and you might

remember that he was the one who stealthily liked an article that was making fun of matt adams's outfield defense at the start of the season for the Cardinals. Yep. All right. So that's one of your topics for next week, taking care of. So update on bat boning from Matt Trueblood. This is not really an update because it's not new, but it was new to me or at least new to me since I discovered bat boning and its significance. So this is actually from the great Roger Angel book Season Ticket from the late 80s. And this is a story about Joe Sewell of the old Washington senators who I think would have been nearly 90 by the time Angel was talking to him in the late 80s.

So Joe Sewell, this is a quote. He said, I have the bat at home that I used for 14 years, the same bat. It weighs 40 ounces. I never cracked it because I knew how to swing the right way. I took good care of it, worked on it every single day. I rubbed it with a chicken bone and a plug of tobacco, and then I'd roll it up and down with a smooth bottle. The bat was your tool, so you took care of it. They wanted that bat up here at the hall, but I'm keeping it. Can you imagine 14 years using the same bat? That's insane. I know that guys probably didn't swing as hard back then and didn't throw as hard back then, and so maybe it was a little less likely to lead to cracked bats. On the other hand, you'd think they've probably gotten better at manufacturing the wood and maybe using higher quality wood. But apparently Sewell, with his regimen here, chicken bone plug of tobacco smooth bottle, was doing anything that modern technology can accomplish.

Joe Sewell has one of those fun baseball reference pages, I guess. Let's just playing around with with fan graphs. Attention, Jack Dumoulin playing around with fan graphs. We've got who hasn't played. OK, so Mike Zinino this season, he struck out 114 times. Mike Zinino, 114 strikeouts. He's batted 294 times. He's a strikeout prone.

Nothing too surprising there. The league leader in strikeouts is Miguel. So now he's at 154. Anyway, Joe Sewell entered the major leagues in 1920 when he was 21 years old. He last appeared in the major leagues in 1933. He was 34 years old. He batted in his career 8,333 times, and he had 114 strikeouts. 114 total career strikeouts. His season high was 20. That happened when he was 23 years old he walked that year 73 times i'm going to read to you so sewell remained a regular player every season from 1925 through 1933 this covers

ages 26 through 34 every single season he played in at least 125 games except for once but we know that i'm going to read out loud his season by season strikeout totals beginning in 1925 ending in 1933 4 6 7 9 4 3 8 3 4 unbelievable unbelievable joe sewell obviously there's no better evidence that the game was completely different back in uh i guess sort of between the wars i suppose but this is a guy who had 68 triples, 49 home runs, 114 strikeouts, 842 walks. Joe Sewell, unbelievable. He had MVP support in seven different seasons. I haven't run the math to see how much better than the league mean Joe Sewell was in this regard, but clearly sort of a throwback Tony Gwynn kind of character. And if anyone in baseball history would have been able

to use the same bat for 14 years, it's obviously this guy. Yeah, right. No, it's probably what he means by swinging the right way. I mean, there's more than one right way to swing a bat, but he was swinging it probably in a contact-oriented way. So I guess that's more than one right way to swing a bat, but he was swinging it probably in a contact-oriented way. So I guess that makes sense. That would be why his bat wasn't breaking. Maybe he wasn't just swinging as hard as he possibly could. But yeah, I mean, just an outlier in every way. So now we know he's a bat boner. Joe Sewell, 1.4% career strikeout rate. Major league average, 7.5. Now, that's small. That's about one-third

the current league average strikeout rate, but 1.4% career strikeout rate. That's just, yeah. Not enough has been said about Joe Sewell. Yeah. All right. Patreon supporter Jeremy says, Fernando mentioned on your recent live podcast

that he thinks some guys are injury prone mostly because of a lack of grace. I'm curious what your thoughts are on Greg Bird and specifically the comments that came out of the Yankees front office, I think anonymously, which seemed to imply that he just didn't want it enough. Are there actually any players out there who really are injury prone because of a low pain tolerance

or a less than stellar work ethic? Not necessarily Bird himself, but in general. So Stephen Goldman did a great segment on this on his podcast, The Infinite Inning, which I have encouraged people to check out and am encouraging people to check out again right now. And he made a comp to a Ricky Henderson situation when Henderson was with the Yankees. There was this whole dust up about how Ricky didn't want to play and he was not coming back quickly enough from an injury. And then he finally had an MRI or something. I think they said it was an x-ray at the time. And it discovered that like, you know, his hamstring was like torn off the bone or something like that. It was like a serious injury and he was trying to play through it to the extent that he could. And Steinbrenner was doubting him and publicly casting doubt on him and the manager at the time too. So I think it's more common for a team to be unfair about this than it is for a player to legitimately not want to come back or not have a high enough pain tolerance. And even with Bird, he ended up having surgery, which I assume was not for an imaginary problem. So I think that there has to be a range.

There has to be a spectrum of pain tolerance and willingness to play through pain and just general motivation. pain tolerance and willingness to play through pain and just general motivation. But I think once you make it to the major leagues, the range is not nearly as wide as it is in the general population because these guys have already proved that they have incredible motivation to get there and that they can play through injuries and that they're willing to tolerate some pain. So, I mean, there still must be some range from the most pain tolerant big leaguer to the least pain tolerant big leaguer, but that's even assuming that pain tolerance is a good thing and that playing through injuries is a good thing, which I think is also highly debatable. And that's something Fernando is talking about too, that often you hurt yourself

and you hurt your team when you try to play through an injury rather than just allowing it to heal. So yeah, whoever in the Yankees front office was just kind of lobbing those anonymous bombs at Greg Bird, I guess it was out of frustration or meant to motivate him. But I would think in 98% of cases, it's probably unfair and counterproductive. percent of cases it's probably unfair and counterproductive yeah teams are understandably frustrated when they're paying millions of dollars to a player on the disabled list and of course fans are they're they're fans you can't expect them to behave rationally i know i've i've been seeing a lot of this with james paxton lately he just left to start with an injury that hopefully is not a significant injury but he he left to start on Thursday against the Angels. And if you, especially on Twitter, you click on a Paxton post and read the replies,

people, fans are not too thrilled with James Paxton, who incidentally is one of the top five starting pitchers in baseball, but fans still find a reason to hate him. They see him as being injury prone. It's sort of a pitcher equivalent of, I don't know, Jacoby Ellsbury a few years ago, when people figured he was hurt all the time. He was too soft. Troy Tulewitzki has missed a whole bunch of time over his career, which people equate to being soft. People will say Paxton missed four months because he had a hangnail, even though he basically was missing a nail. He had a nail ripped off of his finger so he couldn't do anything. Fans do not like a player who has been injured more than once because more than once means at least twice and you can connect you can draw a line between injuries and fans have

no real window into what it's like to be a compromised player in any way all fans know is that they want the wins and they want the players who are most responsible for the wins to be on the field so fans have the worst perspective here but this does give me an opportunity to make use of some of the Dickie Thon notes that I wrote in preparation for our live podcast that didn't happen at Saber Seminar. And perhaps one of these days we'll have Dickie Thon on the podcast so we can make use of our full array of notes that I'm sure we both took. But for anyone who's not familiar, I'll just introduce Dickie Thawne now for whenever in the future we have him on. Dickie Thawne was a shortstop who was arguably on a Hall of Fame trajectory at a very young age. Between 1924 and 1925, he was at least as good as Cal Ripken.

Or at least that's 1982, 1983 at the ages of 24, 25. I don't know what I said. Anyway, Dickie Thawne is a player who was worth something like 12 or 13 wins over his peak two seasons and then he got hit by a pitch in the eye and it uh very understandably caused some significant problems with his vision in one of uh one of those early years i didn't have a note here but the astros general manager al rosen said uh quote i think he's a better player than either one of them, referring to Cal Ripken and Robin Yount. He thought this is post-injury. And the Astros general manager figured that Dickie Thon, and I think justifiably, ranked among the best shortstops in baseball.

In 1986, this is now a few years after Thon was injured. He has not recovered his previous level of play. General manager Dick Wagner in 1986 said, I think this is the year for Dickie Thon to show he can play every day. And then come 1987, this is where I think the team got a little too frustrated. There was a team official who said that Dickie Thon was just, quote, mentally not prepared to be playing. There was someone, I forgot who he was, his name was Rob Matwick. And he, referring to Thon, he said he definitely showed a lack of confidence in himself when Thon left spring training for a spell because he was having trouble with his vision. Thawne would miss time.

I believe that was the year that he wound up on the disqualified list on the Astros because he just was not able to, you know, see very well. People talk a lot about the five tools in in baseball but there's a there's an underrated sixth tool vision uh the ability to see things this is uh we've had beep baseball featured on this podcast however you do not want to be playing beep baseball when everyone around you is playing baseball so dickie thon walked away from the astros i think a couple times in 1987 because he just was having a lot of problem with his depth perception, which is so totally understandable because he got hit by a fastball from Mike Torres that I believe was clocked at 92 miles per hour. And this is in 1984 when the league average fastball was going about 56. So Dickie Thon was rendered a vastly inferior baseball player to what he had been.

He was having trouble seeing the ball, which is obviously crucial. When he played too many games in a row, his eye would get tired, and he would just feel a lot of fatigue. And you can understand why the team officials would have been very frustrated with Dickie Thon, because just what he could have been. And then when you have any sort of unreliable player, we saw this with the Seattle Mariners and Franklin Gutierrez, where the team grew frustrated because they just couldn't count on him every day. But at the same time, this is not a sign of weakness from the player. This is a sign of I'm trying to play through an injury that has compromised half of my vision, which is pretty significant. So there is just a lack of alignment i think in in

how these things are understood the players have to look at for themselves but also i think for the most part players know when they can and cannot play and produce but when there is so much criticism that is just ready to be dealt your way from the team and certainly from the fans then you can you can understand why players are maybe too willing to put themselves through hell just to stay on the field because nobody wants to be the target of criticism. And you would rather have people noticing that you are performing poorly while playing because you're compromised than not performing at all. I am not someone who encourages players to play through pain that often,

but it's easy to understand how it happens. All right, question from Victor. I've tried, but I can't find a compelling reason why sacrifice bunts don't count as at-bats. A ground ball that moves a runner to second or third base counts the same in the box score as a ground out with no one on base, so does a deep fly ball that allows a runner

to tag up from first or second base. The outcome is the same, but the punishment slash reward is different. I get the counter argument, a sack bunt is a clearly intentional act designed to move the runners over, unlike a ground out or fly out, but that logic starts to fall apart when you consider sacrifice flies. Hitters often say something like I was trying to hit the ball in the air when a runner's on third base with fewer than two outs, but that's obviously much easier said than done. Okay, I responded to this by email i don't know how you feel about this ben and you will have an opportunity to speak in about 60 seconds i recognize that a sacrifice bunt is a very different it's it's kind of a unique it's a unique plate appearance in that you can't go up there and intentionally hit a fly out that's deep enough

to score a runner from third. That's just not something that you can do. You can't so easily intentionally hit a ground ball that moves the runners up. Maybe that's a little easier, but a sacrifice bunt is indeed giving up a plate appearance in, I think, a fairly conspicuous way for the purposes of moving a runner over. It is the absence of a swing. I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a bunt that's a sacrifice and a bunt that's intended for more than a sacrifice. When I look at the sacrifice bunt page

in the MLB.com glossary, a section that I just learned about when I was preparing to respond to this email, it says in the second paragraph, quote, a sacrifice bunt does not count against a player's batting average or on base percentage as the decision to sacrifice often isn't made by the player so that is an explanation i hadn't heard before and that also makes sense because generally the it's the player who's being told to drop down a bunt so i understand

why it doesn't count against the numbers uh That being said, I still think it should. The sacrifice bunts are relatively infrequent, and they are commonly put down by hitters who aren't very good anyway. So I think that players should bear the burden of putting down a bunt. I think when they don't, then it seems to glorify and raise the importance of these statistics, which really, what are we doing here? We have better numbers than this. Anyway, I think that they should count against. I think that everything should be counted against. But at the same time, it's not like we've been hurting to

identify which players have been good or bad. So it's really hard for me to care about it. But if I were first to care, I'd say, yeah, 0 for 1. You put down a bunt. Yeah, I think I'm with you on that. And if that change were made, I'd say, yeah, 0 for 1, you put down a bunt. we would see it become almost unheard of, I would think. Like a manager is going to feel bad and not be beloved if he is constantly making hitters' stats worse by making them drop down bunts, and hitters just aren't going to want to do it. They're not going to want to do it on their own. So I think that might completely change the culture.

There's just too much at stake for players. There's so much money riding on every plate appearance that I don't think guys would willingly do it. I mean, I guess there would be even more acclaim given to guys who did decide to do it because now it really would be a sacrifice, which it isn't currently statistically. i think yeah it would probably only hasten the decline of the bunt and we'd start seeing it even less often okay so i wanted to try something let's just see how this goes so last year in the uh in japan's pacific league the league batting average was 259 let's now see what it would have been If sacrifice bunts were Counted against at bats so 259 I'm going into this blind

I already have a sense this is not going to Change it very much and our answer Is that the league average With sacrifice bunts counted Would drop to 252 so that's not bad That's a 7 point drop seems pretty significant When you're talking about a league in which there Were about 33,000 plate appearances so

The Japanese league would Probably be affected more than any other league because as ben has discussed and written about and podcasted about and done everything else about there are a lot of bunts in japan for reasons that defy american cultural explanation however you know some teams are moving away from it but still seven points that's a that's a dramatic effect seven yeah all right this is from travis he says i was watching the marlins and braves Some teams are moving away from it, but still, seven points. That's a dramatic effect, seven points. All right, this is from Travis. He says, I was watching the Marlins and Braves. Yeah, I don't know why either.

And the broadcast crew had former Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzoni in the booth for an inning. He talked a lot about how pitchers are used nowadays, and he had some interesting things to say about throwing on off days and pitcher health. Overall, he came across as an angry old man who can't understand the propeller heads who run baseball these days, but overall it was interesting. He did, however, mention a couple times that he was sitting behind the plate watching pitchers throw, and he thinks that radar guns are way off. He said something along the lines of, if you sit there and watch the pitches come in, there's no way they're as fast as the guns say, take five miles per hour off of every pitch. Obviously, this is in no way they're as fast as the guns say Take 5 miles per hour off of every pitch Obviously this is in no way scientific But could there be some truth to what he's saying

Is it possible that StatCast And modern radar technology is giving Vastly different readings than their Technological predecessors in spite of The pitches being largely the same I don't think there's any doubt that pitching velocity Is up from past generations but Is there any truth to what

Mazzoni is saying? And maybe it's up, but not as much as everyone thinks. And I think there is some truth to that. I think if you go back and read Dollar Sign on the Muscle, the great scouting book, it maybe touches on this. I think that in the past, when velocities were coming from radar guns, they would not be coming directly off of the pitcher's hand. They would be at some point between the mound and home plate would be when the radar was registering the speed of that pitch. And we know that pitches can decline in speed and do decline in speed on their way from the mound to the plate. And that's a significant drop of, you know, several miles per hour. And now we see speeds reported like right out of the pitcher's hand.

If you go to Brooks baseball, I think it is giving you essentially the first reported speed. So just the fastest it was at any point in the trajectory, which would not have been the case for radar gun readings in the past always. And so, yeah, I think there is something to what Mazzoni is saying. And maybe that is partially responsible for the increase that we talk about in pitch speed. It is certainly not responsible for all of it because I think training techniques and bigger pitchers and guys going for strikeouts and relievers coming in and throwing all out there, all these different factors that are

leading to this increase. But I think there is something to the idea that pitch speed is just measured at a slightly different point now than it used to be and that that will change things across the board. Yeah. Okay. So my first level response to mizone is no my second level response to mizone is what you just said and third level response is even using the brooks baseball slash pitch info consistently measured information we have a about a decade of that and it's all taken at the same release point more or less and just looking at league average starter four-seam fastball is the most fundamental of all pitches in 2008 the league average four-seam fastball for a starter was 91.3 miles per hour this year it is up to 93.0 miles per hour that is an increase of nearly two miles within the span of 10 years for reasons that we have all

discussed ad nauseum it is true that true that these pitches are being measured more precisely and they are being measured further away from the plate. I don't know exactly where a radar gun would pick it up. I thought I remember reading that when the early days of PitchFX that the measurement was taken at 50 feet from home plate because I think that's around where they thought radar guns would pick up the average pitch. I don't know how true that is pitch yeah i don't know how true that is i certainly don't know how true that is pitch to pitch i've never held a radar gun you

probably have you went to scouting school so like how how accurately do you need to point the radar gun to pick up a pitch i guess like how uh yeah not very really i mean i don't know how accurately you have to do it to get a consistent reading. Maybe you're just getting inconsistent readings if you're not pointing it at precisely the same place every time. But yeah, I mean, you can point it. I would try to just kind of point it at where it would come out of the pitcher's hand. I don't know exactly at what point it would actually pick up that speed though. Yeah. So I definitely understand that maybe maybe readings are being taken quicker out of the hand and more consistently now but nevertheless i think that

that effect would be very small and people really are throwing a lot harder now whether or not they should be that is a far bigger question and maybe mazzone could shed some light on that but otherwise no i think i think that this is just just someone who doesn't quite grasp how the game has changed since his days being a Hall of Fame caliber pitching coach, some might argue. But baseball is very different. Everybody's huge, and they throw way too hard. All right. Question from Patrick. What do you think of this?

Defense is underrated because it decreases the times through the order penalty that pitchers face. it decreases the times through the order penalty that pitchers face. More efficient defense equals fewer total pitchers thrown to get through the same number of innings pitched, plus fewer base runners allows pitchers to pitch from the windup rather than the stretch. Even if defense is being credited properly, I think the scale of defensive runs saved and the defense stat at Fangrass could be off because of this. What do you think? I saw this email and I thought about it for several minutes and I kind of thought myself in some circles and I think, I think I will, at least I'm going to say that I arrived at the conclusion that I think this is true.

I think that the actual magnitude of the effect here is quite small yeah because you're talking about like a partial trip through the order like a very partial trip through the order on the average game so i think it's i think it's legitimate now countering that of course and more than countering that is that with the decline in balls in play in the modern game defense is finding fewer and fewer opportunities to make a difference that is also a small effect but still a greater effect i think on a game-to-game basis than than this one but it is definitely a point in favor of having a better defense and that it does lessen the exposure that the other team has your pitchers all right we are approaching the end of the podcast but maybe we can sneak another in also Also, Matt Trueblood says, what if two players had to touch the ball before a force out could be recorded? On a typical ground ball to short, for example become appreciably more valuable to a degree that would really change the game?

Would contact, would teams radically change their defensive alignments? Would any team make the pitcher their designated infield middleman? Or would it always be the most proximate fellow infielder to protect the pitcher's arm? So two people, so the shortstop, routine granted a short, the shortstop would pick up the ball and throw it to first base. But I guess that doesn't count as two people. Two people have to throw the ball before the first baseman. That's the idea here?

Yeah. Okay. Well, it would be stupid. I can tell you that much. It would be fun. Yeah. So it feels like speed would be greatly valuable. There would probably be, I don't know.

I haven't thought this all the way through, but maybe this would cause a global shift back toward slapping the ball on the ground and running because it would be so difficult to actually get someone out yeah right billy hamilton would never get out on a ground ball right he would just he would never he would never get out in a grand ball even albert poohles would get singles on ground balls once every week or so. So this would, it feels like, greatly reduce the incentive to try to hit a fly ball or a home run because fly balls would be, well, what do you do? Okay, ordinary fly ball. Center fielder catches the ball. Does he just have to walk it over to another outfielder and hand it to him?

Is that how this works? Maybe it's only on infield balls. I don't know if this would work in the outfield. It seems impractical. The center fielder could bobble the ball intentionally over to the left fielder, right? And then he could, yeah, this would, sacrifice flies would be automatic or something.

I don't really know how that would work. But otherwise, yeah, it feels like there would be a dramatic shift toward ground balls because every ground ball would become hit. Yeah, no, I think this would totally change the game. What do you think about whether the pitcher would be used as the relay person? Probably not, right? Like even though it would shave some time off the trip that the ball has to take, I doubt that it would ever happen, really. I think you'd probably always go to another infielder.

Right. They'd be so accustomed already to sort of doing the double play turns, right? That they would maybe just throw it a second no matter what. What do you do on a double? Oh, God, this is getting complicated. Okay. So you have a double play attempt or a triple play attempt even. Do you just have to throw the ball around the diamond like completely? What do you?

Okay. So I don't know exactly how this would go. I think that some teams would experiment with the pitcher relay man. But, you know, the pitcher would then be making a lot of throws and he might be taxing his arm. He could roll over because pitchers are terrible at throwing in other directions. I could see it.

It does reduce the distance that you have to have a play made, but would be fairly uncommon, I think. All right. Well, you've got a chat to get to. I have an interview to get to. So we will end it here. I am glad that we caught up with our usual pace

and we will be back next week. I am going to be away for part of next week, so we're going to pre-record an episode for early next week and then probably backload the last couple episodes of the week, but we should get our

usual three in. So I will talk to you then. Powered by guilt. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners have already pledged their support, include Benji Mailings, John Sluden, Dylan DeThomas, Steve Discala, and Shane Allen. Thanks to all of you.

You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can keep your ratings and reviews for the podcast coming on iTunes. Makes us look good. Helps us attract new listeners. If you're looking for something else to listen to, I don't normally plug my video game podcast at the ringer, achievement oriented. But if you're a fan of Keith Law of ESPN, you might be interested in the latest episode just went up today. Jason Concepcion and I talked to Keith about tabletop games and their crossover with video games. And we did get into baseball a bit, too. You can find that on the Achievement Oriented feed.

Keep your questions and comments coming via email at podcast.famgraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Good podcast week this week. Enjoyed these shows. Good guests, so I hope you like them, too. So have a wonderful weekend, and we will talk to you next week we were 17 and the caveman was a pet saying you

more we get a greater thing in a lesser way you had to prove