Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1116: Sleep on It

Episode Date: September 29, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about how one’s incentives alter one’s perception of a season, then answer listener emails about FanGraphs’ World Series odds, the mid-1990s Braves pitching staffs, the annual suggestion that a team start a reliever in the wild card game, a comeback for Tony La Russa’s pitching platoon system, Andrew McCutchen’s […]

🎵 Hello and welcome to episode 1116 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg. I'm a writer for The Ringer. I'm joined as always by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. I am also a writer for The Ringer. Are you? No, I'm not. I didn't know that. I'm not. That didn't happen. That was exciting for a moment. Okay. Well, too bad. If that ever happens, you should

break it to me live on the air on a podcast, please. So we're doing an email show today. And unlike a lot of email shows, we're actually going to get right to the emails. I am somewhat limited in the time I have today. So we're going to make the most of it. I did want to just read an email from Riley, a listener who wrote in yesterday, and he has a story that I thought put a different spin on something we just talked about, so I figured I'd read it. He says, I just finished listening to episode 1115. That's the one where we talked about whether this was a good or bad baseball season and how one would even determine such a thing. And he says, I had a different perspective on how a good or bad season is determined. Background, I work for a bank that funds Delaware North, the company that provides concessions at many of the ballparks.

Long story short, one of the services we provide them is that we handle the armored car service for delivering money to the ballparks we place the orders to coordinate with the armored car company etc currently we deliver funds to 10 out of the 30 mlb parks personally i'm not customer facing i deal more with the armored car company generally services occur the morning after each home game fans pay money on game day night then the armored cars take the money back the next morning while replenishing change for the next game. This guy sounds like the perfect person to plan some sort of heist, I think. I don't know what, but I will talk to him about that. There are a lot of pieces in play for each service. The orders have to be placed.

A dedicated armored car has to be staffed and available. Delaware North has to be ready to receive them. Normally this isn't a big deal, but adding in complexities such as rained out games and double headers, even the postseason can add in some frustrations and last minute scrambles for everyone involved. Special cases include game moves from Miami to Milwaukee a couple weeks ago due to the hurricane, since Milwaukee is one of the parks we service. Back to what makes a season good or bad, at the bank I work with a team of people and I am the only one that enjoys baseball. The others are apathetic at best, but generally are annoyed at the sport as a whole,

since many of their professional frustrations stem from it. To them, a good season includes few postponements, minimal last-minute location switches like Miami to Milwaukee, and especially none of the 10 teams in the postseason. The postseason could add some weird dynamics. The armored cars need staffing available just in case the series goes a full five or seven games, or if the team advances, the orders may need last minute adjustments as predicting food sales can get tricky with a packed park. Last season, 2016, was especially frustrating toward the end of

September as many of our teams were in the running to the postseason. Was Baltimore going to have home field in the wildcard? Was St. Louis going to make the postseason? Why does Cleveland keep winning? Why did the World Series have to go seven games? There was a lot more up in the air and my co-workers hated it. The day after Chicago won, I was smiling at work because I witnessed baseball history. My co-workers were smiling because the season was finally over. This year, only two of our 10 teams are in the postseason, Cleveland and Minnesota, and Minnesota may not even have a postseason home game. If Colorado loses their spot to either Milwaukee or St. Louis, that would make it three teams for us. Probably won't happen, but you never know.

By their standards, this has been a pretty good season overall, especially if Minnesota and Cleveland end up losing early in October. Predictable postseason picture without crazy pennant races, few postponed games. My coworkers are content at least until cleveland goes to the world series again bottom line my co-workers are thrilled to see the exact same things that others are more frustrated to see such as fewer september races so i like this email because it's a nice reminder that things that we might bemoan most people might bemoan are actually good news to someone out there it's uh all a matter of your perspective good baseball season for people who don't like baseball yeah exactly you probably

just just for the future you probably shouldn't acknowledge on the air that you want to talk to somebody about a potential heist that should be offline i've never done this before so rookie mistake all right another ben says what's up with Fangraph's World Series odds? 63.8% of the weight falls in the American League. That is, the system thinks that the NL is just over half as likely to win the series as the AL. The team with the best odds in the NL, the Dodgers, have only slightly better odds than the lowest rated division leader in the AL, the Red Sox. rated division leader in the AL, the Red Sox. Perhaps the strangest thing is that an AL wildcard team, the Yankees, have only 0.3% lower chance of winning the series than one of the NL division leaders, the Nats. This is also confusing to me. The AL may be the stronger league, but how could

these numbers be reasonable? This was yesterday, so there's been presumably some update to the World Series odds. I don't know if it's changed any of these things that Ben is pointing out significantly. It's a bug. That's what it is. I'm looking at this and the numbers are too lopsided to make sense. Like, for example, the Dodgers are given a 34.7% chance of winning the NLCS, and they're given a 13.2% chance of winning the World Series, which means that therefore, according to these calculations, the Dodgers have a 38% chance of winning the World Series. However, if you go to the projected standings page, just to see our measures of team quality, the Dodgers are projected by Fangraphs as the third best team in baseball.

So it doesn't make any sense. And so clearly there is just something going wrong with the World Series odds calculations. And so I will put in a notice to try to get that addressed post haste. All right. Thank you, Ben. Yeah. Every now and then we get a really intriguing question and it turns out the answer is just that there's a bug. Like we got an email last week from someone who was noticing that defensive ratings were lower this year. There were fewer guys with like

double digit defensive ratings. And I thought this was fascinating. And I did a little math and I saw that, yeah, that's definitely the case. There's less variation among defenders this year. And I was already in my mind writing the article about how, I don't know, defensive positioning or strikeouts or something had narrowed the gap between defenders and there aren't any great or terrible defenders anymore. And then no, it turned out it was just a bug. There was just some wonky stats for a day or two, and then everything went back to normal. So sometimes the answer is very simple. All right.

Yeah, I like to write about the worst called strike and the worst called ball and those things. And you have presumably seen the automated Twitter bots for every team that are showing when a call has gone against a team. Yeah. And so at least probably once a week, I will get a flurry of tweets of people pointing to one of these Twitter bots that shows like a ball called on a picture right down the middle. And people say, like, is this the candidate for the next one? It's like,

no, no, I go to the video and it's always it's always a glitch. It does happen. There obviously is there are like two or three balls pretty much down the middle that are called balls during the season. But whenever you see that on one of those Twitter accounts, just just assume that it's that's incorrect. It seems like you sometimes all feel guilty for not actively watching the baseball game. But the people who are tweeting me, they're clearly not watching the baseball game. Yeah.

All right. The people who are tweeting me, they're clearly not watching the baseball game. Yeah. All right. Philip says, with the 2017 Indians passing the 96 Braves in combined pitching war, as you wrote about recently, I became curious about 1994 and 1995 for Atlanta's pitching staff. Both of these seasons were shortened, with the 94 season being shortened by a bit less than 50 games and the 95 season about 20 games shorter. The 94 Braves pitching staff had a combined war of 20.3. The 95 Braves pitching staff had a combined war of 24.2. Had those seasons not been shortened, is it likely that the 94 and 95 Braves would have more combined

war than the 1996 Braves, the previous record holder? Also, on another note, the 96 Braves pitching staff also has one of the highest total wars for batting as well with an astounding 2.1. It's interesting that not only were Smoltz, Glavin, and Maddox elite pitchers, they were also elite batting pitchers. were doing over their uh truncated seasons extrapolate that out to 162 games they still would have been on pace to finish below the 2017 indians just for current update the indians have four games remaining in their season they are at 30.4 pitching war this season and the next best is the 1996 braves at 29.5 so unless the indians have a terrible series against whoever they're playing they are likely to finish with the highest war of all time. They also have Fangraff's keeps an ERA minus metric, which is like ERA plus, but better. The Indians are at 75, which means by ERA.

And I will remind people that Fangraff's war is not based on ERA, but it's close. By ERA, the Indians have been 25 percent better than average. And that is incidentally the same as last year's cubs but then last year's cubs were historically extreme uh the cubs were also at an era minus of 75 and no team has had a lower era minus since the 1944 cardinals who had an era minus of 74 i think when i initially wrote that article about how the indians could have the best pitching staff ever people didn't love it uh because people remember those those Braves of the 90s and the Braves had that incredible Hall of Fame starting rotation.

Totally legitimate. Good point. They had a great starting rotation. The thing about the Indians is that everyone is good. The entire pitching staff is good and it goes beyond the rotation. As you and I in the audience knows, starting rotations are used less and less and less with every progressive year. And the Indians' bullpen is just deep and outstanding as well. So if there would be one chief complaint about the Indians, maybe you could say, well, they've faced a

relatively easy schedule of opponents because they're in a division with the White Sox and the Royals. And even though the Twins can hit, there's not an offensive juggernaut and then the Tigers are in there. So maybe the Indians have faced some somewhat easy competition. But nevertheless, this is a historically fantastic pitching staff and better this year than those Braves. Yeah. All right. We got a couple about bullpens and innovative bullpen usage. This one is from Kevin, a Patreon supporter. He says, I just saw this clip from MLB Network.

He links us to the clip. Too long. didn't watch. Brian Kenney advocates for using Chad Green in the first few innings of the wildcard game. The idea being that the most runs are given up in the first inning and that doing this would allow Luis Severino to be ready for two games in the division series. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. And it is basically exactly what Kevin is saying. Brian is saying that Yankees should start Chad Green and bullpen the wildcard game, which is a suggestion that someone makes seemingly every single year, whether it's in the wildcard game or in a must-win playoff game.

We always hear this. It never really happens. But this is a case maybe where it's more compelling than usual just because of the strength and depth of the Yankees' bullpen. They have so many good relievers in that bullpen. Luis Severino is also really, really good and maybe the third best starter in the American League this year. And so normally you would not want to save that guy. I know there's an argument for saving your ace for the DS, the idea being that it doesn't really matter if you win the wildcard game if you then go on to lose the Division Series, because the ultimate goal is to win the World Series.

So you want to maximize your odds of winning the World Series, and maybe in some cases that could be holding your ace so that you can start him twice in that five game series. I am generally of the belief that you want to use your best pitcher to get to the next round and worry about things when you get there. But maybe because the Yankees bullpen is uniquely constructed, there's more to this idea than usual. what do you think yeah i i agree with you it seems like every year we have the bullpenning conversation about somebody i love love love the yankees pitching staff i think that they're going to be a very dangerous team in the playoffs i would compromise and what i would say is i would like to give severino the start and you

can give them either three innings or or one turn through the batting order whatever you prefer and then you turn it over the bullpen i don't think that there's a real value in letting Severino go deeper. The bullpen clearly is deep enough to cover like six innings, never mind covering nine. And then if you give Severino the start and you just limit him, then he will probably be able to start game two of the ALDS, which comes three days later. I would think that his arm could bounce back and that would put him on normal rest to start a potential game five. So you would still have Severino set up to start two games in the DS if you wanted, and you would be able to use the hell out of your Yankees bullpen. I think that while I like the idea of bullpenning in theory, teams don't do it. And a wildcard game

is the highest leverage game of the season to that point. So it just seems like there's too much at risk if Chad Green, say, doesn't know what it's like to start. Or I guess maybe he just wouldn't remember. He used to start. But anyway, as much as we can poo-poo the idea of relievers liking roles, let's just assume they do like having their roles and maybe don't go completely weird for the biggest game of the year. Yeah, I think I'm with you there. All right. And sort of a similar question from Zachary. He says, over the last several years, I have become gradually more obsessed with the dates July 19th to 24th, 1993. As I'm sure you guys are familiar with, over these six games in the midst of an incredibly disappointing season, manager Tony La Russa decided to flip the game of baseball on its head.

Probably a little dramatic, but hang with me. Instead of sticking with his traditional five-man rotation, four of whom finished the season with ERAs above five, La Russa opted to divide his 13-man pitching staff into three platoons of three pitchers each with a four-person bullpen, anchored by shell-of-themselves versions of Dennis Eckersley and Goose Gossage. La Russa's goal in doing this was to get each member of the platoon somewhere between 40 and 60 pitches every third day, citing that a pitcher's performance declines as his pitch count rises. Ideally, each starter in the platoon would not face any batter more than one time in a game, thus maximizing their efficiency on the mound.

Making this change in July was predictably a disaster. Pundits questioned whether La Russa had given up on the season, and veteran starters like Ron Darling were quick to share their confusion and veiled frustration with the media at the time. After all, pitchers were largely paid based on win totals, so the frustration is certainly understandable. Anyway, in the first six games of La Russa's experiment, the A's went 1-5, although the team did have a 4.35 ERA.

The AL average in 93 was 4.32 in that stretch, compared to a league-worst 4.9 ERA for the season. I know the sample size is extremely small, but given the early results, I wish that this experiment had been given more time. To my knowledge, we have yet to see a platoon system installed in the 24 years since, but the occasional September bullpen game is often enough to satisfy my cravings. My question is this, in an era where baseball executives have more data at their disposal and are making objectively smarter decisions, could we see a team implement a platoon system in the future? The numbers on a pitcher's effectiveness each time through the lineup are very well known and strongly points to the type of system being a win-maximizing tactic, especially if your four-man bullpen resembles the 2016 Yankees, or maybe 2017 Yankees too.

Yeah, this seems like we get some variation of this question somewhat often when people talk about maybe going with like a 3-3-3 pitching staff. And what was the year he was referring to, 1993? Yeah, so in 1993, the average starting pitcher in a game went 6.1 innings and this year the average starting pitcher in a game is going 5.5 innings it's no secret that we're seeing a league-wide shift away from starting pitchers working deep one of the things that's weird and unusual about this year's cory kluber is that he's finished so many games it's just a just a thing that we don't see much of anymore because teams are moving away from overusing their starters.

And it does seem, I mean, if you talk to almost any executive, let's say 25 out of 30 general managers or presidents of baseball operations, whatever you want to say is the most important role in baseball these days, they'll all tell you, they know that starting pitchers get less and less effective as they work through the order. Everybody knows, everybody would ideally have a pitching staff, not everybody. Again, let's say 25 out of 30, 20 out of 30. I don't know. Who cares? They would say that ideally they would have a differently structured pitching staff where starters don't worry if they only go four or five innings and then they have relievers, multi-inning relievers who can then pick up the slack. It's what teams would like to have. It's what we're seeing some

teams sort of try to do. It's what these angels have done almost out of necessity because their starting pitchers have been terrible so i think that the biggest obstacle right now is players like what they have been starters like being starters and of course players have competitive fires they want to be out there for as long as possible and if you're a high draft pick or you've been a top prospect you've come through the minors you've been a starting pitcher your entire life and then if you were to join a team where they're like all right we want you throwing three innings every three days as a starter but you're never going to get a win and you're just you're never going to see the order like a third time through players aren't going to like that so you need this sort of buy-in and

you remember years ago when when the shift was just first firing up and all those astros pitchers were complaining about how terrible it was like this would just be a more extreme version of that where you need to have pitchers on your side before you do something extreme like this and i think the closest we've seen recently was whatever year the rockies had that weirdly structured four-man rotation where no one could yeah it's like a 75 pitch limit or something like that yeah right and the thing about those Rockies is that the pitchers were bad and so they did that because they didn't have the pitchers to go any deeper or to have a fifth starter I think that something like this something like this that's being proposed is inevitable it probably won't be that extreme for quite some time and we're not going to see

starting pitchers die for quite some time but teams want this they're developing pitchers or some of them are developing pitchers in this way and i i think that the era of seeing starting pitchers working into the eighth and ninth it is coming to a close if it hasn't already closed yeah someone asked you i remember in a chat some time ago when we would see the last 200 innings pitched pitcher, which was kind of a fascinating question because that is very possible. Right now there have been three, four, five, six, seven 200 innings pitchers with maybe a few more who have a chance to join that group. It's very small. And Sam has written and Rob Maines has written about how fewer and fewer pitchers qualify for the ERA title every year and that we need to change what qualifying is or at least understand that there aren't as many pitchers who are meeting that minimum anymore because of that usage. And I do

wonder, I mean, if we're really at only, gosh, 10 or 10 to 15 guys getting to that 200 innings pitch threshold, I do wonder when 200 will be the new 250, which no one gets to anymore. But within our memories, certainly it wasn't all that uncommon. in 1993 there were 371 complete games six years ago there were 173 complete games this year we're on pace for 60 there are 59 59 complete games and actually we're probably not going to see a complete game over the season's final four or five days just because the bullpens are so big so let's just say it's going to end at 59 that's a drop of 24 from last year's total which which was down 21 from the year before, which was down 14 from the year before, etc.

So I think we've clearly seen a league-wide shift away from starters working ultra deep. The next step will be even limiting starters from working modestly deep. I suspect we're seeing that too. It's not as easy to check, but it's all coming. Yeah. And the problem with these bullpen game or the La Russa tactic, it's always just that players are not going to like it initially, and some writers are going to criticize it, and broadcasters are going to criticize it,

and fans who are not used to it are going to be confused and probably worried and scornful of it. And so the first person who does something like that is going to have to put up with some abuse. And so it has to be worth it, basically. And if it's a half-win advantage, if it's a one-win advantage, I guess you could say that is worth millions of dollars to you. But it's still a lot of annoyance to go through. You don't want to alienate players and make it more difficult to recruit players. There are all these considerations. So if it's not a

huge edge, if it's not like, you know, do this one weird trick and you'll win your division or something, it's just like, well, this will probably help us a little bit on the margins. Then there's a lot of reasonable resistance to doing it. So sometimes an idea comes along that has really big benefits, but that kind of idea is pretty scarce these days. So that's why you don't see that kind of experimentation more often. I'm a little surprised we didn't see something. You'd think that the first team who's going to do this is probably going to be some team playing for nothing, a bunch of young players, some team that's out of the hunt.

I'm a little surprised we didn't see something a little more interesting from this year's Padres, who starting rotation is terrible. They came into the year with no real options. And even though I understand that a few pitchers have emerged to be vaguely major league quality, I'm just surprised because the Padres are never playing for anything. They knew they were going to be bad. They didn't think they'd be the second worst team in the division. I think they thought they'd be the second worst team in the division. I think they thought they'd be the first worst team in the division, but there was the opportunity there for the Padres to just try to make something out of nothing. But instead they just threw money at these old veterans and staffed their rotation like normal.

And so there was what I feel like is sort of a missed opportunity for the Padres to do something more fun, but I guess they don't have any pitches for next year either, so we'll see what they decide to do. Yeah. All right. Question from Daniel. Jeff, in your recent blog post about most improved players, you quickly mentioned that Jed Lowry attributes at least part of his improvement to getting better sleep after repairing a deviated septum,

which got me thinking, what if teams ensured that every player received eight hours of quality sleep by any means necessary? They would conduct sleep studies for each player, give them new beds or a CPAP ventilator if they so needed, read them bedtime stories, anything that would ensure that their players were getting the appropriate amount of sleep. How many wins would this be worth to a team? And, of course, there are teams that are doing things like this, probably multiple teams.

Certainly the Pirates are doing things like this, probably multiple teams. Certainly the Pirates are doing things like this. I know that other teams have been mentioned as having sleep rooms adjoining their clubhouse where players can go nap. And there are teams that have consulted sleep scientists and have implemented various sleeping patterns if teams are going across the country and changing time zones. So certainly teams are starting to pay attention to this sort of thing. Yeah, agreed. I think that this is a question that would be of greater import or significance, I guess, if you were comparing, if you're asking this question like 30 or 40 years ago, where I think that players were not close to taking as good care of themselves as they are today. If you're a professional baseball player today, you are a machine. Not all of them, of course, but your body really is treated like a temple. And players are so conscious of what

they're putting into the bodies, how they're working it out, how much rest they're giving it. And players just don't have the bad habits that I think that they used to do. I know I'm painting with a broad brush here, but you just you don't really get to live like a very flexible life when you are playing in the major leagues and I think that the majority of players are already trying to ensure that they get a lot of sleep even I don't mean to go back to a dark time but you you think about the the Jose Fernandez story and the uh the night of his accident he was out you know he was out on the town two three in the morning whatever it was but he was out, you know, he was out on the town two, three in the morning, whatever it was, but he was only doing that because he wasn't going to be starting the

next day. So even when I think players are out there living their best lives, so to speak, I think they're only doing that during the season when they know that they're not going to have a responsibility to perform the next day. So I think that if you were to poll or at least run some sort of objective study of major league rosters and club houses these days, I think most players are probably getting plenty of sleep. And I think that maybe 30 or 40 years ago, they most definitely were not. So could have been a big impact back then, but now it's probably something on the margin. So I'll say two wins. Yeah. Okay. And then of course, once every team starts doing it, it's not worth anything except the wins that you would lose if you did not do it too. But, yeah, I wonder.

I had a deviated septum repaired several years ago, but I can't quantify whether it made me better or not. I didn't notice sleeping any better, but maybe I do. Well, it didn't make you worse. Yeah. No, probably not. All right. Stat segment? Stat segment. We got an email from Alexander Roche. better but maybe i do it didn't make it worse yeah no probably not all right stat segment stat segment we got an email from alexander roche alexander roche was talking about andrew mccutcheon

who just a couple days ago hit his first career grand slam and uh a fun fact i went to did a little googling and i found a reddit thread reddit thread from september 14th that is titled today i learned pirates outfielder andrew mccutcheon has never hit a grand slam submitted by cespedes plaza quote today the former nl mvp hit his 200th career home run all for the pirates 200 home runs without a slam is the most all-time mind-boggling really that didn't stand for even two weeks because andrew mccutcheon hit a grand slam off kevin gosman the other day i feel like kevin gosmanon hit a grand slam off Kevin Gosman the other day. I feel like Kevin Gosman gives up a grand slam and most of his starts. But in any case, that's all about McCutcheon and Andrew's question. If I can get this email to load again, how much precedent is there for

some quirk like this that referring to players who don't have a grand slam? So I thought this would be fairly easy to look up separately while I was Googling, I did find an article from June 4th, Sunday, this June 4th, by Rob Beer Temple, that was talking about McCutcheon and let's see. McCutcheon had a few quotes in here about not having Grand Slam, such as, for example, quote, a Grand Slam. McCutcheon said with a sheepish smile, I still haven't done that. I ain't thought about it until you just mentioned it. So way to go, Rob Beer Temple. And later, I do think about it, McCutcheon admitted. Sometimes maybe it gets in my head when the bases are loaded. It just hasn't happened.

It's so weird, but it hasn't. OK, so we're getting a whole lot of insight here. Bases loaded, one out. I was like, here it is. McCutcheon said, grinning. I got a slider and I hit it good, but it didn't hit it good enough. Jay Bruce caught it at the warning track. Sack fly.

So there's nothing else in the article that's worthwhile. So there are a few ways to look at this. We can look at using the play index. First of all, the players who have batted the most often without hitting a grand slam. And these splits aren't complete going all the way back to the earliest days of baseball history. There just aren't splits going back that far, but it goes back pretty far. So at least in the regular season, maybe, I don't know, do you have a guess for the player with the most career plate appearances with the bases loaded without a Grand Slam?

No, I remember not too long ago we talked about Pete Rose and Derek Jeter, I think, because they had only one Grand Slam, I think, and had long careers, particularly Rose. But obviously they would not qualify here. So no, I don't really have a guess. Ozzie Smith. They would not qualify here. So no, I don't really have a guess. Ozzie Smith.

Ozzie Smith batted only 205 times, which isn't that much. But he batted 205 times with the bases loaded, never hit a grand slam. Did have a triple 7 double C batted 317. So he was perfectly fine with the bases loaded, just not in that way. Second place is Orlando Cabrera all the way down at 190 plate appearances with the bases loaded without a grand slam. But I don't think anybody's too interested in the fact that Ozzie Smith never hit a grand slam because I'm not going to click the page, but I'm pretty sure Ozzie Smith never hit a home run.

What I did instead was I looked up every player who's ever hit at least 100 career home runs in the major leagues. And then I looked for players who have not hit a grand slam among them. Some of these players just don't have splits like, I don't know, Johnny Bench, Ernie Banks, just these splits don't exist on baseball reference for whatever reason. But I still have at least sort of the past several decades of baseball Alex Rodriguez, of course, being the career leader with 25 grand slams, which is a lot. Anyway, the leading home run hitters who never hit a grand slam but batteded the most often. We've got Glenn Davis, who had 190 career home runs.

He batted 76 times with the bases loaded, never hit a grand slam. So he is, as far as I can tell, the all-time leader. He has the highest home run total without a grand slam. I believe that to be true, at least among the measured era. In second place, we have Ron Kittle, 176 home runs, no grand slams. Freddie Freeman has not hit a grand slam yet. So he's the interesting current name. He is up to 166 career home runs, zero grand slams.

He's batted 81 times with the bases loaded. Claude L. Washington is the leader among these guys in bases loaded plate appearances. He batted 151 times with the bases loaded, never hit a ball out, 164 career home runs. And Ricky Weeks is up there. He has gone deep 161 times in his career. Zero grand slams. He was recently released by the Rays, so his career might be over as far as I know. So

he won't be climbing up this list. Most probably Willie Kirkland, who I've never heard of. He's on this list to Sean Casey. No grand slams. Orlando Cabrera, Garrett Jones, Bernard Guilty, Ed Cranepool, Shannon Stewart, Raphael Ferkal, Thurman Munson, Dave Duncan, Giovanni Soto, and Duke Sims. Those round out the players who have gone deep at least 100 times and never hit a Grand Slam. So I think that's all I got. We know that Clayton Kershaw just gave up his first ever career Grand Slam. I think we're going to start seeing some of these records. I guess these aren't records, but they are records.

They are records of things that have or have not happened. So whatever. I think we're going to see maybe, well, I guess, are we going to see an increase in grand slams or no because home runs are up but base runners are right yeah yeah i think the percentage of solo homers is up or i think that certainly there are a lot of guys hitting home runs without driving in a lot of runs because yeah there are more strikeouts and lower batting average so i guess fewer guys getting on base in that way although maybe walk rate is up a bit but yeah there are just so many home runs that people are clearing the bases before they have a chance to be

loaded so i i think that could be the case time to run a query i guess let's see this is loading yeah okay so we're looking for nope this i just need to uh keep talking for a second while i correct something so this is oh boy i can't wait to see the results that are going to load in this oh thank god here we are okay so i don't know what do we expect more or fewer grand slams than usual well i expect a lower percentage of home runs to be Grand Slams, but maybe still more Grand Slams overall than there were, say, a few years ago, just because there are so many more home runs, period. Let's see. So we got to 30 teams in 1998, right? That sounds about right.

So I'm just eyeballing things here. The low, probably not surprising, 2014, there was a low of 84 Grand slams in baseball. That's not surprising because nobody could hit in 2014. There were no home runs because there were no hits at all. But it looks like the average is somewhere around 120 or 130 grand slams a year. And this year we're at 133. So grand slams up from last year, which were up from 2014. We're at 133 grand slams for the season, so we're likely to end somewhere around, I don't know, 134, 135, which would be high, but not nearly as high as the year 2000's 176 Grand Slams, which is the highest in the 30-team era by 37. That is a heck of a leap in Grand Slams, but it immediately regressed. Okay. So percentage of home runs that are Grand Slams is at least lower than it was then, but is it lower than it was say last year or in 2014? Can you do that quick math? I guess I could. So give me a minute. Okay. Yep. So we have talked about the total number of Grand Slams, but been also curious

about the percentage of Grand Slams. Legitimate question. So starting in 1995, I don't know why I started there, but it did. 3% of all home runs were Grand Slams. And it looks like the peak, unsurprisingly, was the year 2000. 3.1% of all home runs were Grand Slams. This year we're at 2.2%. So it is definitely low. Things have held steady for about the past what is it six over the past six or seven years things have held steady right around two to 2.2 percent so grand slams are about of similar frequency since the year 2011 however in the year 2011 things hit a low never before were were the was the grand slam rate below 2.4

percent this is difficult to say out loud in a compelling way but we're doing it anyway used to be about 2.5 to 3 percent of all home runs were grand slams that has dropped to about 2.1 percent on average over the past half decade so there we go grand slams are indeed less frequent as a percentage of home runs which is not too surprising because with strikeouts up and hits down it's just more difficult to stock the bases in the first place. All right. Question from Joe. I was looking at ground ball and shift data on Fangraph Splits Tool. In eight years of shifting data, 2017 has the second highest BABIP on ground balls with any sort of shift on, 236, behind only 2016's 238. Third place is 230. Using only traditional shifts, the leaderboard goes

2016, 224 average, 2017, 223 average, and 2014, 2010 average. With 16 years of ground ball data, 2017's 241 BABIP is the highest recorded. 2016 is in a tie for second at 239. This could be evidence that teams are shifting too much but it could also be worse defenders counteracting better positioning what is your take why do you think that batting average on balls in play and on grounders is higher now even though teams seem to be going to greater lengths to make it lower i think that as you get an increase in shifting which as far as i know is still continuing then when you start shifting, you're shifting the most obviously shiftable players. You're Ryan Howard's or Jim Thomas or whoever, David Ortiz's, you're shifting sort of

the low hanging fruit, so to speak. And as you increasingly shift your defense, then if you are already shifting against the guys who you know are easy to shift, then you have to start shifting against less shiftable players. I don't know. I don't have an example off the top of my head, but just players where you would think that it would work out less often because there's just no more room to grow. And so if you're doing that, then I think as a necessary consequence of shifting more often, you're just going to end up allowing more hits even with the shift on of some note and i like to look at this so batting average on grounders fan graphs has a neat little split stool so i can look at league wide numbers so let's look at i don't know 2010 why don't we start with 2010 so looking at ground balls hit to the pull side. So pulled ground balls. In 2010, the league batting average was 204. And this year, the league batting average is 189. So batting average on pulled grounders is down. That is exactly what we would expect with the shift going on. So now grounders to the opposite

field. In 2010, the league batted 298 on opposite field ground balls and this year 368 yeah things have shot up now that's actually five points lower than last year which was 373 but if you can hit opposite field grounders you're you're likely to reach base as long as it's not something you do so often that opponents aren't already not shifting you so when you see a player who is shifted and then he kind of mishits the ball squibs it the other, it's probably going to be a single because defenses are just completely unprepared. Like if Joey Gallo could just accidentally mishit the pitch and hit a squibber to the opposite field with the way that he's been shifted, he could probably get the third base. Yeah, right. I think that's true. And I don't know the exact up-to-date shift totals,

but I know that at Sabre Seminar, I think it was someone from BIS had the shift totals then in mid-August, and for the first time in several years, the number of shifts was on pace not to increase. It has increased significantly in every season since teams started shifting, but this year, at least up to that point in the season, it had finally plateaued, which suggests that teams finally think that they have reached maximum shift, or at least as BIS was tracking it, or at least in the infield. I think we're seeing more experimentation in the outfield, but definitely that increase has slowed, if not stopped. So maybe teams think that they are getting to the point of diminishing returns or no returns yeah according to fangraphs we're uh so fangraphs doesn't have

a direct measure of shifts but it does have a measure of balls in play hit into a shift which whatever it might as well be the same thing so in 2010 there were 3300300 shifts or 3,300, I guess, balls in play hit with a shift. Last year, there were 35,000. And yeah, this year we're on pace for, it looks like maybe 33 or 34,000. So not increasing indeed. All right. So this one is from Jamal. He says there are just days left in the MLB regular season. And it occurs to me that not a single MLB manager has been fired since the season began. There are managers who have been told they will not be brought back for the following season, such as Terry Collins and Brad Ausmus, and there will be firings in the offseason, per usual, but this has to be the first MLB regular season in a while that a manager has

not been relieved of his duties mid-season. Is this just a coincidence, or is this a sign of new thinking from front offices that maybe changing managers mid-season isn't very effective at all? Not sure it ever has been. Or has this happened more recently than I can recall and it's totally normal? So as I often do, I went to Hans Van Sleuten at Baseball Reference. I asked him to check this for me. He did not have immediate access to the reason why managers were replaced, but he was able to check at least seasons without any change. This would only be the 11th all time going back to 1878. And that is pretty incredible because obviously there were a lot fewer teams in the early days of baseball. There were only six teams in 1878. So it wasn't all that hard to keep six managers for the whole season. And yet no one did it again until 1893.

So this does not happen all that often. This is only the third time it has happened since World War II. It happened in 1942, and then it didn't happen again until 2000, and then 2006. So it has happened twice in the past couple decades. So it has happened twice in the past couple decades. But if you look back a little longer than that, it is definitely unusual, according to this data on Scent. So does it mean anything? I'm inclined to say probably not a whole lot in that it did happen in 2000. It did happen in 2006. And I don't know that we can identify any trend that those seasons were a part of. So it could just be a fluky thing. It's not easy to go a whole season with 30 teams now without any of them making a change. But as Jamal mentioned, effectively, there have been a couple changes. It's just that teams are waiting until the winter to make that move. And whether that is just a quirk and a fluke of this season in particular, or whether it reflects something that we will see more often, I don't know.

I guess a more thorough analysis of this would have been to just look at the turnover rate period, even in seasons where there was some kind of managerial change. Maybe there have been fewer, but I don't know. You wrote a few years ago, I think it would have been at GrantLight, about how there was less turnover in front offices, right? Yeah, I did. And when I wrote that, I wasn't sure it was a thing or whether it was just something that had happened. There had been a span of, I don't know, it was like at least a couple of years without a change in GM or president of baseball ops or whatever at that point. And I think, as is often the case, not long after I published that article, there were changes. So I don't know. I mean, it does make sense. And I think I argued in that article, it would make sense to see fewer changes just because teams are big businesses now. They're not really run by the seat of their pants anymore. When you put someone in charge of a more than billion dollar property, essentially, you don't want to be cleaning house constantly. And maybe the same applies to managers where nowadays, I don't know if this is the case more than it used to be, but definitely

now managers are often brought on by the general manager and are part of this sort of holistic top to bottom plan for being better at baseball. And the manager works with the front office and vice versa. And so maybe those people are seen as a little less disposable than they used to be, or teams are just doing a better job of hiring managers who are compatible with the people in charge of baseball operations so that those people have a working relationship already, that kind of thing. So I could come up with a lot of reasons why this could be a trend, but I'm not really comfortable saying that it definitely is yet. team that's sort of in the race, you're unlikely to get rid of your manager. And if you have a team that's falling out of the race, like the Mets or the Tigers this year, there's probably just not a whole lot of reason to change the manager during the year because in the offseason, you have to do

you're likely to have to do your entire staffing operation anyway, you have to go find a new manager that you want. And if you try to replace, say, Terry Collins in early September of 2017, well, what are your options, you're going to name some interim manager from the organization. And then come November, you're going to sort of widen your interview pool to interview all the candidates that are out there. So you're just going to have to go through the whole process anyway. So what's the benefit of being so disruptive with a month or two left to go in the season? So I would think that if there's a trend here, which again, we don't know if there is, I would think that in general, we would say that there probably is a trend away from teams

wanting to fire a manager during the middle of the year. But I would think that it's subtle. It's slight, barely there, hard to notice. And it would just be because it's probably not worth the disruption because there's a lot that you have to do when you get rid of a manager because a manager is responsible for having his other coaches. And if you try to keep those other coaches on staff when the manager is gone you don't know how they're going to respond and if they don't respond well or if they want to go away then well then you have to replace an entire coaching staff on the fly during a season

so even if you think that someone like Terry Collins or Brad Alstom might not be great for player development in a lost season how much better are things going to get for a month and a half if you bring in a whole group of new people yeah i mean maybe the advantage is that you get a head start on seeing what your team will look like under a new manager or something but usually the interim manager is not hired to stay on there are cases where they are but but yeah it's not it's not akin, I suppose, to cutting and underperforming veterans so that you get that month at the end of the season where you can bring up some kids and give them playing time and see what you have and get them acclimated to the majors. There's probably not quite the corresponding benefit to changing managers at that point in the season.

So yeah, and often it's a reactive kind of thing. It's, you know, we're underperforming, so we fire the manager, and then, hey, look, the team bounces back, and it's not necessarily because of the managerial change. It's just regression. All right. Matt sends us an email with the subject line, fast and fat, with an exclamation mark.

He says, hey, guys guys i was browsing through baseball reference the other night and found the career of a mr dave orr who played from 1883 to 1890 what was interesting about his career was that even though he was listed at 511 and 250 pounds he managed to lead the league in triples two times tallying 21 in 1885 and 31 in 1886. My question for you is, do you know if anybody heavier than Dave Orr has led the league in triples? If not, who was the heaviest to lead? Thanks a ton. I assume no pun intended at Dave Orr's expense. I believe you did a quick play index to get an answer here. Yeah, it's not exactly what he was looking for, but I just searched throughout all of baseball history using the play index for players i sorted by my triples in a season and i

limited the player pool to players who weigh at least 250 pounds so allow me to read from one through one through seven i'm going to read ranks one through seven highest number of triples in a season for a player weighing at least 250 pounds number one dave or 31 triples number two dave or 21 triples number three dave or 13 triples number four dave or 13 triples number five dave or 12 triples number six evan gaddis 11 triples number seven dave or 10 triples and then it goes from there to Demetri Young, Jose Abreu, AJ Pierzynski. In 18th place, I will point out Dave Orr, 5 triples. I don't know what was going on with baseball back in 1886. I don't know if Dave Orr's dimensions are listed correctly.

It would be an odd mistake to make. If you click on Dave Orr's player page on Baseball Reference, you only get sort of the bust. You get a picture because there were photographs in the 1800s. You get a picture. You don't get the whole body,

but are you looking at the picture? Uh-huh. I can see that being a man who's 5'11", 250 pounds. I can buy it. Yeah, he does not have a sharply defined jawline or chin, I would say.

He's a jowly man with a whole lot of triples, not a lot of home runs. So maybe I'm professing my ignorance of baseball history when I say I don't know exactly how he hit so many triples during his career. I don't know what the norm was. I don't know what rules might have changed. Maybe you know better. You might be better informed about baseball history than me. Well, I wasn't before we started talking about Dave Orr, but I did look him up at the baseball reference bullpen. There is a full body shot of Dave Orr on that page. And yeah, you can confirm he was a Husky guy. But man, he was a really great hitter. First of all, he had a 162 OPS+, which is amazing. And that is maybe partially because he only played eight seasons and not after age 30, which is unfortunately because he had a stroke in 1890 that ended his career. His left side was paralyzed, and he actually became a major league umpire briefly and then did some other odd jobs

and ended up living well he lived till 1915 which wasn't so bad he was born in 1859 but his baseball career was cut off very quickly and there's a quote in here from dan brothers the hall of famer who calls him the greatest hitter that ever played ball. He was the strongest and best hitter. And then from his obituary, he was a mighty slugger, and his home run drives earned him the reputation of being the greatest batter in the world. So, man, I mean, the numbers that he was putting up are really very impressive. He was certainly on a Hall of Fame trajectory, I would say, if he had had a longer career. So that is a shame that his career was cut short, or we would probably all be aware of Dave Orr and his unusual

body type. But yeah, 250 pounds in the late 1890s, that is up there. Just to be clear, the Dan Brothers quote where he talks about Dave Orr as the greatest hitter that ever played ball, that's a quote from 1894. And the quote that calls him a mighty slugger and having the reputation of one of the greatest batters in the world from the Sporting Life. That's an obituary article written in 1915. So these are these are old quotes. There's a lot of baseball that's happened ever since then. Yes. Looking at the the full body shot on Dave Orr's bullpen page, there's something Old Judge. Okay, that appears to be a cigarette company.

Old Judge Cigarettes. Not a Dave Orr nickname. Okay, so never mind. Not an Old Judge. Too bad. Yeah, no. All right. One more maybe we have time for.

This is from Nicholas, a Patreon supporter. In compiling stats for one of the most recent Beat the Stre streak in a day contests, I stumbled onto this thought. Quarterbacks have a passer rating and pitchers have a game score with a quarterback's game value determined by achieving a threshold of offensive performance while not throwing any interceptions and a pitcher's game score starting with a baseline, which is added to or subtracted from depending on the results from each batter they face. Is there an equivalent measure for batters? We know batting average is the result of scorekeeper's decision divided by archaic definition, and OBP is the measure of additional base runners created, but what is the actual value of a hitter's game performance? Is it the number of pitches seen, contact rate, exit velocity, causing the pitcher to work backwards, number of mound visits enforced, intentional walks accrued? I know offensive war calculates the value of a hitter over the course of a season.

I wonder if there is any way to quantify the value of the man with a bat in his hand, as there are ways hard, you could look at single game Woba weighted on base average, which would sort of just tell you how much that player was worth, you could look at re 24, which is a more complicated set, maybe more complicated, I don't know, maybe it's less complicated, but it's also complicated. re 24, that would tell you how many runs the better produced, which seems like it kind of gets at the heart of what the question is. But the thing about something like game score is that it's like kind of simple and sloppy, whereas the numbers I'm talking about are more accurate, because you know, you could come up with a better game score stat. And so if you wanted to do this for hitters, you could, I'm sure, come up with some silly metric where you start at, I don't know, five or 10, or whatever you do, and then you just start adding

and subtracting points so that you can see the best games based on some weird arbitrary definition. But I would say just look at RE24 or Woba. And there's no way to search that as far as I know very easily, but still it would be the thing that I would do. Yeah. You could look at WPA if you want to consider win probability and timing and all that. But yeah, I think it's just not as needed for a hitter. You want something like that for a pitcher or for a quarterback because they are the dominant player in that game. They can influence the game more than any other player can. And each individual batter really only has a small opportunity relative to pitchers and quarterbacks to influence the outcome of the game. So it's just not quite as necessary. I suppose you

could, in theory, have single game war scores. It's hard to access and probably calculate those things. But in theory, that is something you could look at for hitters too. Yeah, I'm trying to run a quick query. Unfortunately, on the Baseball Reference Game Finder, you can't find games by OPS, but I'm trying to search for games where the hitter got on base 50% of the time and had a slugging percentage of at least one. And the all-time leader in games matching that, Barry Bonds. 734 such games

followed by Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, etc. All the way down. Great hitters. And now I understand you have to go on a phone call. That is right. Okay. Well, we will end it there. You'll all soon have the chance to hear that phone call that I just had to stop this episode for. I got to talk to someone pretty cool. Hope you'll enjoy it. More news on that soon. In the meantime, you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who've

already pledged their support include Brian Stoner, Philip Nguyen, Matthew Neer, Chad Post, and James Okoye-Corin. Thanks to all of youins for editing assistance. By the time you're hearing this, you should be able to access a new episode of the Ringer MLB show. Michael and I talked about award picks and how difficult award decisions are this season, which I also just wrote about for The Ringer. There was an incredible logjam of qualified candidates at the top of the war leaderboards in both leagues. We also talked to our pal Stephen Goldman about precedents for the Derek Jeter regime and what we can learn from previous beloved legendary players who have gone on to ownership or management roles.

Not always unqualified successes. players who have gone on to ownership or management roles, not always unqualified successes. You can contact me and Jeff via email at podcast at bingrass.com or by messaging us on Patreon. We will talk to you soon. Take me in your heart again And I know how to keep you hung up But I won't do it again Oh, I know I wish you were my friend