Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 115: The Alternate-History Hall of Fame/Are NL Teams Stockpiling Position Players for Interleague Play?/Is 162 Games Too Many?/Preserving Parity

Episode Date: January 9, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the Hall of Fame, preparing for interleague play, the 162-game schedule, and methods of preserving parity.

Good morning and welcome to episode 115 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast. Yeah, thank you for joining me. I am Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. And with me and very happy to be with, is Sam Miller in Long Beach, California, who sounds awful. I've been talking to you for a few minutes, and I already want to go to the doctor or get a flu shot or something. I don't think I've ever heard you pronounce the D in your name, and I've never pronounced the D in your name. Yeah, that was weird. Something strange never pronounced the D in your name.

Yeah. I don't, that was weird. Something strange happened while I was saying my name and I noticed it at the time. But yes, you are correct. There is a, there is a deadness in my body right now and I'm trying to get rid of it, uh, before it kills me completely. But yes, quite sick. Everybody's quite sick. We're, quite sick. Everybody's quite sick. We're all quite sick. The world is sick. My household is sick. Well, we are going to try to get through this before you collapse. And it's a listener email show.

So we have listeners emails to answer. We're going to do maybe four or so. And I'm going to start by reading them now while you blow your nose or something. So the first question is from Matt in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Matt says, when we look back at player statistics for Hall of Fame posterity purposes, we account for things like disadvantageous ballparks, extenuating non-baseball factors, military racism, etc. Should we also credit players for poor management due to what was not known at the time? For example, Oral Hershiser was crazy overworked in the late 80s because that's what you did back

then. As a result, his numbers aren't what they could have been, but really he was just playing by the rules of the time, which didn't include things like pitcher abuse points, etc. Within that realm, he was extremely successful. What he was being asked to do was only going to last for so long without blowing a rotator cuff. Should we add to his legacy for this in the same way we would a pitcher who put up a good not great numbers in a great hitters park or something like that? What do you say?

I thought that's interesting i thought we were i um yeah i was expecting you to read the other hall of fame question should we bundle these uh okay i guess the other one is kind of more involved yeah but it's also simpler okay um the other one is just basically if you were to start the hall of fame now from scratch who would your 10 be and then he gave us his 10. And if we get to that point, we can read his 10 and then we can – I don't know. Do you have a 10? Do you have 10? Nope.

I do. Okay. Well, yeah, that question was from James in Sarasota, Florida. And he wants to know if we blow up the Hall of Fame, not literally, and start over, how would we define the criteria for membership and who would be our first 10 inductees yeah so to matt's question um this is an interesting question because there is i was um driving today and my mind was sort of uh just barely working like it was sort of churning along at a very low level. And it was thinking about Jack Morris because, ugh, you know? And it all of a sudden, like without me trying to do this, it all of a sudden made perfect sense to me that people would support Jack Morris. And like his case made a great deal of sense. And the case was simple.

And it's not – I mean you know the case. The case is basically that he won a lot of games at a high percentage. And the obvious rebuttal to that is that a win is a team effort and Jack Morris doesn't get the credit for all of it. And there's so many factors that go into a win. And once you start neutralizing those factors, then Jack Morris doesn't stand up, right? neutralizing those factors, then Jack Morris doesn't stand up, right? But if you just look at like the guy was around and doing an important thing when success was happening, I don't know

that that's not a good qualification. Like if you were to do, like the drummer for the Rolling Stones, you know his name, right? Charlie Watts. Charlie charlie watts okay he's terrible at drumming right as i understand he's like a poor drummer he's not a good drummer i think his reputation is that he's not flashy and he's sort of fundamentally sound i guess he is not a hall of fame drummer and yet he is in the hall of fame and he's in the hall of fame because he was there doing a competent job when success was happening to him. And success – a lot of the success happened to him and some of the success happened because of him. But nonetheless, his record is one of great success.

And so like there's a very like – there's a sort of truth and reality to that statement, which is he was there and successful. That's how guys get rewarded. That's how with Charlie Watts. That's how Charlie Watts gets in the Hall of Fame is by being around for a lot of success. This question is this. Anyway, that's kind of a tangent about Jack Morris, who I don't think has any business being in the Hall of Fame.

Oh, okay. I thought you were sicker than you had let on already. You said you had been persuaded by the Jack Morris, who I don't think has any business being in the Hall of Fame. Oh, okay. I thought you were sicker than you had let on already. You said you had been persuaded by the Jack Morris argument. Obviously, Jack Morris has no business. But this goes in the other direction, which really asks us to imagine things that didn't even happen, you know, to measure based on hypotheticals and theoreticals and alternative universes and sort of, I mean, that's kind of overstating what Matt is saying, but it's asking us to, to rate him on sort of a, a, a, a truth that was never actually revealed, but that we think is more true than what actually

happened. Right. So I would say that, uh, I, I don't think that I would give credit for that stuff. I mean, I am sympathetic to the idea that some guys missed years of play because of the war, for instance. And if a sort of flukishly bad thing happened to you, then I kind of want to give that player extra credit. But for the most part, I think that you're kind of limited to what happened and what the performance level was, as long as that's how you define Hall of Famer. If you define Hall of Famer by impact on the game, impact in games, impact on your team's effort to win, which is basically how I would define the criteria for a Hall of Fame baseball player, then I don't think you can put too much emphasis on that stuff. That's how. Yeah, I guess I feel the same way, at least about injuries. I mean, for a pitcher,

the ability not to be injured is a big part of what makes you valuable and what makes you a hall of famer um and i guess you can look at certain pitchers who were overworked more than others and say that it wasn't their fault they got hurt it was the management but who knows whether they would have gotten hurt anyway uh so that seems a little bit like a stretch to me. But what about someone like Edgar Martinez, who had his first full season at age 27 in 1990? From 1985 through 1989, he was in AAA most of that time, and he hit.344,.450,.495. and he hit.344,.450,.495. So you figure he certainly could have held his own in the major leagues for at least a couple of those years and added to his case to some extent. And you're kind of translating minor league statistics in your head there to say that,

but it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to say that if he had been called up earlier, if the Mariners had recognized what they'd had in him, perhaps his record would look more impressive. Although I guess you can also say that he wasn't ready mentally or something, and they knew that he would not be able to handle the major leagues, and maybe his career wouldn't have turned out as well as it had if they'd called him up earlier. So I guess there's some element of imagination there also. And what if, I mean this didn't happen, but what if a manager had decided Edgar Martinez was needed at second base

and he had spent his whole career playing second base and racking up minus 35 defensive ratings every year and it just killed his win value, would we hold that against him? That would be a question about Jeter, except that Jeter seems to be... He's good enough that it doesn't matter, I guess. Yeah, he's good enough it doesn't matter

and he also seemed to be the guy who was pushing to stay at shortstop as much as anybody else. And also, in your Edgar example, why don't we think about a player's minor league career at all? As I understand it, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and museum isn't explicitly limited to major league performance right i mean there's obviously there's negro leaguers in there for instance uh so if a guy has three or four sensational minor league seasons that never ever comes up i'm not suggesting it should but uh i don't, should it a little? I don't know. Maybe in the Edgar context that he could have contributed more in the majors. I guess no one really cares what you do at AAA,

even if it does tell you something about what you might have done in the majors. I mean, I don't know. I guess I've heard it. I've heard that point raised with Edgar, certainly. For people who say that he didn't have enough career value or whatever, people have certainly made the point that he could have had more. And then, I mean, I guess that's not so different from someone who established himself as a star, goes away to the war, and then comes back and is still a star,

there's no real reason to think that he wouldn't have continued to produce as he did during the war years. I don't know how many players have been excluded from the hall because of their service. I don't know how many players you could make that case about. I bet there are none. Yeah, probably not. By this point, I don't know, maybe for the Korean War.

By this point, it seems like everybody deserving who played before 1960 is just about in, right? Yeah, I think so. For the most part uh so just before then i mean those those generations are well overrepresented yes they've been picked over multiple times yes um so james's uh first 10 inductees were alexander cartwright harry wright ban johnson bonus wagner charles levitt jr kennesaw mountain landis babe ruth branch ricky jackie robinson Alexander Cartwright, Harry Wright, Ben Johnson, Otis Wagner, Charles Levitt Jr., Kennesaw Mountain Landis, Babe Ruth, Brent Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and Walter O'Malley.

I have not thought about who my 10 would be. I would say that they would all be players, probably. Just, I don't know. That's kind of what I would be concentrating on. Though, if we were only talking about the most influential people or something, then it probably wouldn't be players. Yeah, I think I would start with all players. I think it would take a while before I wanted to go beyond players.

So my first 10 would all be players. I think that, I mean, certainly there's a place in the Hall of Fame for non-players, and I'm glad that the Hall of Fame includes those. But I think that it is at its heart. It is a sport of performance. And when you're recognizing the great players or the great people in the game, you start with the people who performed. So mine would all be players.

And did you pick those players? Yeah, I think if I were to start it right now, I would want generational distribution. And so I picked a player based on birth year from each decade. So I was going to make that joke sorry you can still make it pretend it's it's okay it's okay uh so i would have uh walter johnson for the 1880s babe ruth for the 1890s a garrick for the 1900s uh jackie robinson for the 1910s which is uh sort of breaking my rules, I think, a little bit, because Ted Williams was a better ballplayer, and as a ballplayer was more influential. But I just think that I'm willing to break the rules

and say that Jackie Robinson as a baseball figure, plus as a ballplayer, is more influential. Okay, so then 1920s Musial, 1930s Mays, 1940s Seaver, 1950s Ricky Henderson, 1960s Bonds, and 1970s Pedro. So those would be my ten. And I would actually be pretty happy with that. I would rather – I think I would rather have like Ted Williams than Musial, and I would probably rather have – I don't know. It's hard not to have Cobb in there, and it's hard not to have Clemens or Maddox in there, but pretty satisfied with that list. And would you do anything adventurous like different tiers as a number of people have proposed and have a room for inner circle people and a room for people who contributed in lots of little ways or anything like that?

Or would you just kind of keep – No, I'm not very ambitious with it. If I were to do anything, I might... ESPN just came out with their Hall of Fame, which was ranked. It was 100 people, and they're all ranked, 1 to 100. And it's sort of a living Hall of Fame. So as other players retire, they'll go on to the list, and players will stay on the list.

And I would be... I personally like everything to be ranked, and it's hard for me to see a unranked list. So I might rank, I might do a ranking, but I wouldn't do tiers or anything like that. It's just, you know, simple is fine with me. I don't, like we talked about yesterday, it's not a thing that affects our life all that much. Okay, so that's our Hall of Fame talk for today.

Later today, we will all react to the results and possibly we'll talk about it again. Possibly not. The next question comes from Michael, who says, In reading and listening to the various off-season podcasts, articles, etc., quite a bit is being made out of teams such as Cincinnati and Arizona having too many outfielders. I am wondering if the media is not properly factoring in the effect of the new schedule. With the Astros' move to the AL, interleague play will go on every day. As a result, NL teams in AL parks, such as the Reds and the D-backs, will be able to play their

fourth outfielders, Ludwig Kubel-Ross at DH. Given that everyday DHs seem to be becoming a thing of the past, is this not just NL teams taking advantage of the schedule change to get competitive advantage and quality at-bats in that spot? Well, this is not a point that I have been convinced by. I've heard it said or variations on it, and I don't really accept it. I think that they're playing the same number of interleague games that they always did, and the distribution of them, to me, doesn't seem very significant. I didn't see nationally... I mean, the idea, I guess, is that National League teams were going into these extended interleague plays by maybe shuffling their rosters or something,

but I don't think there was a great deal of roster shuffling going on. You have 144 games or something like that that aren't interleague, and that's the overwhelming bulk of the season, so I just don't think that it's a particularly efficient use of a roster if that really is the strategy. It certainly doesn't seem like Arizona is trying to have that many outfielders, or at least they're trying to reduce the number of outfielders that they have. Well, they have five, though. They're trying to get down to four.

Yeah, that's true. Well, I guess they kind of went slow last season with four. They just really wanted to get prepared. Right, they wanted to give it a trial run for one season yeah i don't know i don't i i guess i i just don't really get how it would be efficient i mean there's always been the theory that the al has an advantage in interleague because the al teams have a dedicated dh whereas the nl teams do not and just kind of press a bench player into service for that um but yeah i guess i don't really know why the the new schedule would change their incentives to carry someone better for that spot

yeah that's the main thing. I don't think the schedule changes the incentives. And even if you think that that does give the AL an advantage in the interleague, I don't think teams are going to design a roster for those 18 games if it puts them at a disadvantage for the other 144. All right. Next question comes from John in Detroit. He says, the dearth of baseball news, which characterizes this part of the offseason,

got me thinking about the MLB schedule. I love how long the season is, but why 162 games? Needless to say, no other major sport plays nearly as many, and sometimes I wonder if baseball would be better off with fewer games spread out over the same six-month period. I know this is tantamount to heresy, and there's zero chance of it ever happening, but what do you guys think? What ramifications might there be to, say, halving the number of games? Would the quality of play improve? The average attendance go up? The amount of money in the sport drop dramatically. Looking forward to your insight. So what's our insight?

Well, I would hate it. Right. As someone who writes about baseball and benefits greatly from there being more baseball to write about and someone who enjoys a lot of baseball being played, I would hate to see fewer games. Oh, well, see, no, I think it would make it much easier to write about it. The problem with writing about baseball now is that there's so many games that nothing matters, like at all. I don't know.

The first question I always get asked when people find out I write about baseball is what do you do during the offseason? Yes, me too. It's funny that the offseason is way better because nothing that happens for five and a half months means anything at all it's all just small samples and streaks and you know like you can't possibly ever pick one game and write about it as though it means anything uh until like there's two weeks left in the season whereas in the offseason every rumor has a great deal of impact so but if you have the number of

games in the regular season then we'd really never get to the point where anything meant anything we'd be we'd be tossing in small sample caveats till the last day of the season yeah for you're right that's true for analysis that's true for uh the impact of a game on the pennant race it would be less true. But yeah, you're right. Okay, so I take it back. You're absolutely correct. Okay. I guess the quality of play might improve, possibly. I mean, certainly you'd see your best starters would start a much higher percentage of the games. The pitching would be much better. I guess it would probably be a net loss for offense.

Well, how many pitchers would there be on each team? Six? Seven, maybe? Yeah, I guess. Like, basically, you know, three starters, two of them good, and maybe a third one who you're skipping every other time. But maybe three starters, three relievers who are going to be fresh almost every day. And then a long man.

So you have seven. So if you just cut the bottom half of all pitchers in Major League Baseball, they just don't throw any innings, and you just look at the top half of pitchers and those are all your innings, yeah, I mean, it would be a massive massive shift toward defense i i assume that you wouldn't then give those roster spots over to hitters because if you did that then at least you'd you'd be able to you'd get some platoon edge for the offense because you could really that's true you could carry a straight platoon for every position if you had that many positions but i imagine you wouldn't do that. And hitters would be better rested,

and you wouldn't have to give your best players days off ever, so that would counteract it a bit. But yeah, you would still see a lot less scoring, and generally probably people would not like a lot less scoring, so that might be bad economically and ratings wise and popularity wise, I would think. And of course, if you have fewer games, I would expect that you couldn't make as much money, even if you sell out every game. If you're playing half as many games, there's just no way you could make up the revenue. I mean, I guess unless you increase ticket prices by a ton,

which I guess you could do. Yeah, yeah, you'd have to increase ticket prices a lot. I don't know what the normal team has, but the couple teams that I'm aware of, their season ticket base is more than half of their daily attendance. And so those people are already buying 162 games so you're not going to get any more out of them.

I don't know. As far as walk-ups though, if you consolidated all the walk-ups into half as many games, then you'd have a lot more. I think you'd have a lot more full houses. I don't know. I don't think I could enjoy baseball, though, in the same way if it were every other day. I completely depend on it being a routine. If I had to check every day to see if there was a game, I don't know that I ever would have gotten

into it the same way. So much of it is that it's what you do every day and you do it. I mean, when I was growing up, I had, um, you know, I had a lot of chores to do. I had a lot of things I had to do outside around my parents' house. And the fact that there was always a game on the radio is what got me kind of into the routine of baseball. So if that weren't the case, I mean, I don't know what I would, I mean, Mondayays and Thursdays are already – You could stagger it. I mean, as it is now, there are so many games on at the same time that you can't possibly watch or listen to all of them. So you could spread them out and have one every day but not have every team play every day. No, I could as a person who's paid to watch baseball games nonstop. But as a person who, if you're growing up and you're a fan of one team,

you're not going to, you know, if you're a fan, you're not going to like be surfing MLB.tv looking for the Pirates game or whatever. You want a Nationals game on. Yeah. Well, we hate the idea. I actually hate the person who has the game. John Detroit is our least favorite listener uh I like to question it I uh I think there's more there's more too I would like to think even more about this yeah uh hang up I

would like to think more about it and not have to talk about it okay uh so our last question uh yes there's one more question from Nick in Canberra, Australia Which is a very nice town that I have been in Nick says, as a Giants fan, I look with wonderment and horror At the Dodgers' spending since the new ownership took over Does this mean the mechanisms for promoting parity In baseball's collective bargaining agreement are now obsolete? It seems MLB has

achieved parity in spite of rather than because of the incentives in the current agreement. No other sport outside of European soccer has the same disparities in salary, and yet the playoffs are far from predictable. If the Dodgers become a dynasty spending $300 million in annual salary, will this lead to more harsh penalties to promote parody? Remember when we started this show and it was going to be 10 minutes every day? Yeah. That's how we were going to pull this off.

10 minutes. We could do 10 minutes. That's easy. Mission creep. Yeah. That's what you said after we went 15 minutes after a few episodes. I have two thoughts about this.

One is that the fear of an unbalanced league, I think, has always been greater than the reality. It's always seemed like it was going to get out of hand. But I don't think it ever really has. I mean, clearly the Yankees have advantages that the Pirates don't. And I think that if you're talking about the Pirates and the Royals, those are clearly situations where I think there is a lost generation for baseball. I think it's a bit of a tragedy, and you can blame it somewhat on the finances. You also, though, can blame a lot of it on mismanagement. And there certainly have – almost every other team, if not every –

I think every other team probably has shown the ability to succeed within those limitations at multiple points over the last 20 years. So I think that it's a little bit of a false fear. But I think that – I think of it almost like, well, okay, so I think the most common view of God, of the sort of Christian God in our country, is that God is both in control, but also gives us free will. And so what that means is that God blesses people and that's why people pray and ask for their relatives to get healthy but also allows evil to happen. And that's why bad things happen and why their relatives get sick, right? So it's a mix. It's a hard concept to really square, but it's a mix of free will and also kind of like omniscient support from above. situation where there is freedom for teams to spend more than other teams and to to you know make more and to have more and to have unfair advantages and to be like the dodgers or the

yankees uh and to be like the rays and the royals but also you don't want it to be completely out of hand you want to have some guiding force that keeps some stability in the league and so that the league can. I think that baseball is in a good place right now where it's not a heavy hand dictating everything and yet there are sort of supports dictating everything and yet there are sort of supports in place and also kind of free market things that make it so that small teams also have advantages or at least things that equalize the chances a little bit and i why i mean uh you can point to all sorts of individual examples but that's why the rays have been to be the most, you know, one of the three or four most successful teams in baseball over the last three years and more successful than, you

know, far than the Red Sox. And so I think it's a good system and the Dodgers are pushing that a little bit now. And so once again, fear comes up and I have that fear and everybody always has that fear, but so far the fears have not reached a reality. Yeah. And it's not clear how good the Dodgers are going to be really. I guess we've talked about that, but it's not as if they have built a team that on paper will blow away every other team. I would think that most people would not consider them the best team in baseball right now heading into next season. If they did become a dynasty, as Nick says, and we're spending $300 million a year, then yes, I think that is very likely to lead to harsher penalties on that sort of thing. on that sort of thing. But I guess as long as either they keep it below that astronomical number,

which they're getting pretty close to, or as long as they don't just wipe the floor with every other team, I think probably nothing more serious will be done, I would think. As long as no one feels like the system is too rigged, no one will do anything else about it, I guess. Bingo. All right. So you made it.

Go get some sleep and, and get ready to be angry and shout from the rooftops about the hall of fame results tomorrow. Thank you for your questions. Send us more at podcast at baseballprospectus.com and we will be back on Thursday.