Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 11: Train Crossing

Episode Date: August 1, 2012

Ben and Sam reevaluate the NL West after the deadline and take stock of this season’s converted starters.

Good morning and welcome to episode 11 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Baseball Perspectives podcast. In Manhattan, New York, I am Ben Lindberg and in Long Beach, California, he is Sam Miller. Sam, we survived the trade deadline and the Orioles did not heed your advice from yesterday to go all in. and the Orioles did not heed your advice from yesterday to go all in. No, although perhaps Dylan Bundy will be traded in an August waiver wire move. It's only a matter of time now. It's out there.

Once the idea is out there, I don't think Baltimore can help but do something monumentally stupid like that. So what is your topic for today? Well, my topic is actually going to sound a lot like the topic we did two days ago, but I want to once again talk about the Giants and the Dodgers because of the action that each team was involved in today. Man, we're already recycling material in episode 11. That's not a good sign. I think we've already recycled previous episode 11. That's not a good sign. I think we've already recycled previous episode 11. My topic for today is Neftali Feliz

and sort of checking in on the starter to reliever bullpen conversion guys. Now, wait a minute. Didn't we talk about that earlier too? Did we? We talked very briefly about java in one episode right did we go beyond that we've talked about uh well we talked about chapman and the first episode and i think at that point we talked about conversions i uh i uh when

actually when we talked about the rangers and uh their plummeting run differential we talked about the Rangers and their plummeting run differential, we talked about Neftali Feliz and whether he should come back to the bullpen. Well, there's new news on the Neftali Feliz front. So, okay, we're revisiting two old topics in a slightly new way. Perfect. Okay. Which old topic should we go over again first well i'll uh i'll start first i just wanted i want to note something that i learned um i was looking through the transaction

logs of the 1977 season uh not randomly but specifically for this factoid and there were as near as i can tell two two trades made in July of 1977, both of them involving very poor relievers and players to be named later. So I don't even know if those would have been considered trades. For all I know, they were guys who were DFA'd and simply swaps were arranged around them. And just 10 years later, in 1987, there were, I think, 13 major league trades in the month of July and mostly

legitimate big league trades. So that's a little bit of history. There is potentially a reason for that, right? Wasn't the deadline used to be in June? I wondered that. I think it used to be in June? I wondered that. I think it used to be June 15th

and I have no idea what year it changed and I remember once trying to find out and not being able to but at some point it did change so maybe that explains that. Well, I'm going to go ahead and confirm what you're saying because I'm looking at June 15th, 1977.

Big day. There are 14 trades. So I think that'll do it. Tom Seaver traded. Jim Fregosi traded. Doc Ellis traded. So the original takeaway was that no one made trades in 1977. And the new takeaway is that Sam doesn't complete his research.

Yes, but you got halfway there. Yeah, together. And that's why there are two of us. Together we can answer any question in real time. So the only reason I wanted to bring up the Dodgers and the Giants again is because really, even since we've talked, the race has tightened up. And it is now in a state of almost perfect equilibrium the dodgers are 50.3 likely to win according to our odds the giants are 49.8 likely to make the playoffs according to our odds um that includes a pittance of a wild card shot for each team

they're both essentially on pace to win or projected, or projected to win 87 games, uh, three tenths of a win separate them. And, uh, they are currently tied and they have fairly similar run differentials. So I just wanted to know, um, in today's trades, uh, the Giants added Hunter Pence, the Dodgers added Shane Victorino. I just wanted to know which team you think won the day. It seems sort of like a draw, I would say. I guess maybe I'd give the edge to the Giants

just because it seemed like they needed that help more maybe than the Dodgers did, at least offensively? Just generally they need, they just generally need offense? Yeah, I mean the Dodgers have sort of hit a little bit since Kemp came back and Ether came back and since they got Hanley. Whereas the Giants, I mean, people have wanted the Giants to add a position player since over the winter when they sort of seemed to claim that they didn't have the budget room, even though they spent quite a bit of money on relievers. And so I didn't really see them going after a Hunter Pence type with the amount of money that is remaining on his contract,

which I don't remember at the moment. But he seemed like sort of a bigger ticket item than I really expected the Giants to get. Whereas it seems like the Dodgers are sort of throwing their money around now and no one is, as R.J. Anderson said to me the other day, the Dodgers are like the new Yankees, in that every time there's a rumor or a player who's supposed to be available, the Dodgers are rumored to be in on him,

which is quite a change from the McCourt-era Dodgers. So I wouldn't say that either team really put any distance between themselves and the other today. They just kind of kept pace, I think. I picked the Giants barely a few days ago and reserved the right to change my answer based on what happened in the next few days. But I think I will probably stand pat.

I don't see Brandon League as being a big addition, but I do like Victorino. I like that move. Yeah, Pakoda grades the two big moves fairly similarly as far as upgrades over what they currently have. The upgrade from Victorino, I'm sorry, from Abreu to Victorino is, I think, about a half a win over the remaining two months. And from Scherholtz to Pence is, I believe, six-tenths of a win. So those are pretty equal. But I think if you look at the

performance that each team has actually gotten so far from the positions that they've just filled, the Dodgers have, I think, start from a much lower performance level. They've really gotten almost nothing out of their left fielders this year. Or last year. Or last year. And I think that probably probably I don't know I sort of tend to think that the Giants would have I don't know I mean Nate's not a bad player and the difference

between him and and Pence isn't dramatic offensively normally I mean Pence obviously has a lot more upside but it's not huge, and Nate is a better defender. And so I think that, I don't know, I sort of see that as a nice move, but it doesn't seem to me to really dramatically change the overall outlook for the team. Whereas I do think that the Dodgers had just a really obvious hole in left field, and Victorino fills it nicely. Neither player has been all that good this year. And, in fact, Sherholtz and Pence both have produced 0.4 wins above replacement, according to our site, this year.

And Victorino is better than that. Victorino is, I think, around 1.8 or so. So, yeah, I think I'll take the Dodgers on this one. And Sherholtz asked for a trade, like, yesterday or something, right? Which seemed like he didn't give them a whole lot of warning, or at least the news came out yesterday. Yeah, I guess I'd give the Dodgers a slight edge on the move today, but I don't know that I would change my answer as far as the division outcome goes. Which did you pick the other day?

I picked the Giants the other day. And was today's move enough to change your answer? Was today's move enough to change my answer? I don't know. I don't know that I have that much consistency, to be honest, from day to day. I think just waking up today might have been enough to change my answer. Mm-hmm. Okay. Uh, well, in... Sorry.

Sorry, folks. Sorry, everybody. Yeah, everyone was hanging on our prediction because we've never made any incorrect predictions. Not yet, we haven't. No. Uh, so we're really banking on this Giants-NL West thing this year. In other Western division news, Neftali Feliz, who has been battling elbow problems now for a while,

we found out we'll have to have Tommy John surgery, so he will not be back. And it really seems to me like the elbow rehab instead of elbow surgery just never ends well. Oh my gosh. I mean, never. I wrote an article about this once because it was like, I understand why you always want to go for the rehab instead of surgery if you're not sure that surgery is required since obviously you miss much more time in surgery and it's very invasive and all the rehab. But it just seems inevitably, and maybe I'm just having some selective memory here,

but it seems like so many times guys will rest for a month and rehab for a while. And then as soon as they get back on the mound, they feel a twinge and there's a setback and then there's a reevaluation period and they end up having surgery anyway, but it's two months later. And so they miss a bigger portion of the following season. It seems like, I mean, I don't know, if I got that diagnosis, I feel like I would want to just go under the knife that day based on what I've seen other guys go through. But that wasn't at all what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to just go over the guys who, the prominent guys who made the bullpen to to starting rotation conversion this spring which originally it was it was five guys and then Aaron Crowe and and Roldis Chapman got whittled down in spring training and and ended up in the bullpen to start the season but uh Feliz and Daniel Bard and Chris Sale uh did make the transition and obviously Feliz and Daniel Bard and Chris Sale did make the transition, and obviously Feliz now is done for the year. Bard is not done for the year, but seemingly is not going to contribute much.

He sort of fell apart with his mechanics and command and had to go down to AAA and initially struggled quite a bit there also. Seems to have gotten it together a bit in the last few outings and maybe back in Boston soon, but overall kind of a lost season for him. And then Sale has been great when he's pitched, but he did have that elbow scare where he almost had to move back to the bullpen or did move back but managed to get himself out of there again. And now he's going through a dead arm period and having some rest. So these conversions have sort of been, I guess, one for three or and even with some possible warning signs with the third guy.

possible warning signs with the third guy. So do you connect it to the conversion or do you think it's just one of those things would have happened regardless of role? I don't know who is the originator of this, what I'm about to say, but there's this idea that I remember hearing that if you have three top pitching prospects, and I think I remember it being in relation to Jerome Williams, Kurt Ainsworth, and Jesse Fopper when they were all with the Giants. But one of them is going to be a major league star, one is going to suck, and one is going to get hurt. And basically that's just your your ratio and that's what happened to these three guys so um i mean i don't i it's it's obviously hard to draw

any conclusions from any three of them but my suspicion is that um they mirror the general pitching population pretty well and so it probably doesn't have a whole lot to do with the their their conversion history. Yeah, I lean towards that too, but I wonder whether it will be regarded that way. Well, nothing's ever regarded that way. Nothing is ever regarded as just the way things are. I mean, any possible narrative that we can cling to, we're going to cling to. Yeah, but not even by media members. I'm talking more about teams, although they're related

because if the media makes a big fuss about conversions that have gone wrong, then maybe teams just won't want to put their players through that in the future. But I wonder whether any team sources are looking at what's happened and maybe inclined to be more cautious about it in the future based on this. We should have lined up a guest, a team source. That would be unprecedented. Um, but I, I mean, it just seems like when you look at a guy like Bard who just kind of fell apart and there wasn't even an injury involved, but it just, you can certainly project on him and say that that role change caused him to get out of the groove he was in last year.

And certainly with a guy like Jabba Chamberlain, of course, who returned to the Yankees tonight, fair or not, it has become the narrative around Jabba that he was just jerked around too many times, too many role changes, too many innings limits, and it got inside his head. And I just wonder, I mean, it's very easy for us to say that, but I wonder whether a team would be more cautious

with a guy who's succeeded in one role in the future before trying to make something more out of him. Yeah, I don't know. It's all very mysterious, this pitching thing. John Lackey collapsed just as badly as Bard did, and Dice Day did basically just as badly as Bard did, and Beckett did two years ago and then came back. So, I mean, it's always really hard to draw any conclusions from the results of pitchers. We're all still kind of guessing.

Yeah, but, I mean mean to have a good podcast don't you have to draw a baseless conclusion now and again? I think that we probably should have staked out opposite opinions on this in advance and then written down a whole lot of insults that we

could quickly fire at each other to have a good podcast. Yeah, we'll try that next time. Alright, so this has been episode 11. Have a nice Wednesday could quickly fire at each other to have a good podcast yeah we'll try that next time all right so this has been episode 11 uh have a nice wednesday and we will be back for episode 12