Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 118: All About Pitchouts!

Episode Date: January 14, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss TV shows, the lack of things to talk about, and some interesting findings about pitchouts.

Hi, and welcome to episode 118 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. Daily podcast, man. You still think this is a good idea? I think it was last week that I said was the most boring part of the offseason and what would we ever talk about? And suddenly last week seems like an action-packed week that was full of things to talk about. Yeah, last week wasn't so bad, actually. I mean, last week actually was kind of action-packed. Justin Upton got traded and then not. But otherwise it was slow. But now in the last three days, like Andre Dawson said something?

And that's about it. Marcus Thames retired. Awesome. Why? That's surprising. I don't know. Let's talk about it. What are we going to talk about?

Do we have something to talk about? I guess we can talk about your health. How are you feeling? 100%. Wow. Marcus Timms didn't play last year. Nope. I thought that last year was the year that what's-his-name did the thing.

TJ Simon. But I guess it wasn't. Yeah. No, so he's gone and you won't even notice he might have been gone already for all you knew he didn't even play in the minors so that's the news well i'm glad you're healthy uh i think you infected several of our listeners through the podcast because you've sounded so terrible sometimes but uh you're back. That's good. And I watched you tweeted about Elementary, the Sherlock Holmes show,

that you controversially compared to Sherlock, the BBC show. Yeah. And I liked it. Yeah, I like it a lot. It was of comparable quality. I don't know if I would say it's better, but I enjoyed it just as much probably. Yeah, I stated that it's better than Sherlock, and I got a lot of people who were unhappy about that. But, you know, anytime you do a comparison sort of thing like that, there's really two variables.

And one is that I like elementary more than the average person does, and the other is that I like elementary more than the average person does, and the other is that I like Sherlock less than the average person does. I'm probably not that far off the median opinion on either of those things. It's just when you go the same, the wrong direction on both of those things, you're going to have one past the other. I actually do like elementary a great deal um i think the procedural part of it is uh fairly contrived just like any other but i think that johnny lee miller's character is just tremendous uh there's a i think a real darkness to the show that i like i think the cops are great um And I don't know. I mean, I'm into Sherlock, the BBC show. My wife likes it a lot more than I do.

I find it to be a bit campy, and I don't know. The nice thing about elementary is that the character Sherlock has to sort of work at it. You know, this is a craft for him. It's a job. It's a job. It's labor for him. And he works to stay in shape sort of. With Sherlock, I just find that he's almost like a magical superhero. And he's just sort of born with this ability to solve things. And I don't know, it feels a bit less

satisfying to me. It is certainly more Sherlock-y. There's much more Sherlock to Sherlock. Elementary, I think, would be a good show, even if it were called The Mentalist or whatever. I don't know. I think I enjoy reading Sherlock Holmes far more than I've ever enjoyed any televised or cinematized version of it. Yeah, that's definitely true.

Have you seen the 70s BBC series? Yeah, those are pretty good. Those are all on Netflix now, I think. Yeah, I enjoy those. Yeah, I agree, though. The writing is so good. It's crazy that they're still trying to make...

I guess they're not really trying to top it so much as take advantage of this wonderful setup. There is a moment in the first episode of elementary where he watches baseball or watson is watching the ninth inning of a mets game and sherlock ducks into the room for a minute and he predicts how the three outs of that inning will be recorded and then he just walks away and then it happens exactly as he said and i was really looking forward to his explanation of how he deduced that that was going to happen and then the episode ended. I was going to do a post on that actually at the time and I realized that nobody watches that show. If Larry did the Ferris Bueller thing there would just be no nobody would share my joy. Well we just talked for a few minutes already.

We've got a few minutes behind us now. I listen to some weekly baseball podcasts that are running on fumes at this point and lamenting how they have nothing to talk about. And here we are doing it daily. So you wrote an article. Yeah. Let's talk about what you found out. So I was – I don't know what you read. You just read it. What did you, what did you, did you find this interesting at all? Oh, I,

I wrote a piece about pitch outs and I took all the pitch outs that were thrown this year. And I just looked to see how often they were thrown, how successful managers are at calling pitch outs at the right time. Um, and whether it is a sound strategy or not. That's basically it. I never really thought about pitch outs before. I probably won't ever think about it again because what I found is that the stakes are extremely low and very few pennants are being won or lost based on pitch outs.

But also, managers are really bad at deciding when to call them. They very rarely call a pitch out when the runner is actually going. And so what happens is that all these balls are just piling up while managers try to guess when the runner is going. And 29 out of 30 managers basically sort of defeated the purpose and gave the offense, theoretically, theoretically i mean based on run values and such gave the offense more scoring opportunities than fewer because they were calling too many pitch outs and not at the right time well i'm gonna add it to my i guess my shorthand for evaluating managers if i look up a manager's stats uh not knowing anything about how he is in the clubhouse or

just looking at what I can tell from his stats, if I'm writing a manager comment for the annual or something, I look and I just kind of, I guess, mentally deduct points from the managers who have called for a lot of intentional balls and a lot of sacrifice bunts, even if that's maybe just a small minority or small fraction of their value to that team, I kind of mentally mark them down if I see that they're near the top of the league in handing those things out. So now I will add pitch outs to my list of demerits for managers. If I see that a certain manager has called for a lot of pitch outs, in most cases, that's not such a good idea. Although I guess you found that the more they call, the better they tend to be at calling them. Yeah, they do, but they also call more of them. And basically, it's a sort of a thing where you can't get too mad about it because, again, it doesn't really cost you much. It costs you a ball.

And so you're really talking about one or two runs a year. It's really staggeringly small. It arguably wasn't worth the article and more arguably isn't worth the podcast. But on the other hand, it is pretty convincingly almost always a bad call to do. Unless you're preternaturally good at judging when runners are going to go, it's really hard to make a profit at it. And so even if it doesn't matter much, it also is sort of one of those manager ticks that adds up to a little bit the more you do it. And so one of the things that interested me is that – so, OK, so Mike Socha, to the surprise of no one I'm sure, calls more pitch outs than anybody else by like a lot. Can we just talk about how often pitch outs are I mean you should go and read

Sam's article if you're listening to this it's up at BP um but can you because when we were initially doing the research or or I was helping you uh pull the the list of pitch outs and you were very surprised at the total number of pitch outs that there were last season. And we thought there might be some kind of mistake and some of them had been omitted somehow. And it seems like you can watch baseball a lot and not really have a good sense of how often pitch outs happen. So what did you find? Before I say, everybody in your head, get in your head an idea of how often you think a manager calls a pitch out. So just, you know, how many per game or how many games per pitch out.

So just have that number in your head. So what it actually is is it's about 400 across the league all year. So it's just a little bit less than 15 per manager all year or about one every 11 or 12 games per manager. That's like nothing. That's like one every two weeks. That really surprised me. First we looked it up with PitchFX and I just assumed that there was a glitch. And so then we looked it up in the event logs that we also have access to. And they were the same. The numbers were identical.

So we trusted them from that point. But yeah, they're rare, which is weird because if you've been following baseball for 25 years, you've seen hundreds, probably thousands of pitch outs. And it feels like a pretty everyday occurrence but they're actually pretty rare i was impressed because um i i led this piece with a quote from fp santangelo who noted uh davy johnson had just called a pitch out and davy johnson rarely called pitch outs and fp santangelo noted that in his call of the game i was pretty impressed that he'd noticed that because i have never noticed a managerial tendency for or against pitch outs. I mean, like I said,

I think maybe you might have guessed that Socha would be on the upper end just because of Socha, but I covered Socha for a few years and I never noticed that he covered more than any other manager. And yet he does, he called 17 times as many as Davey Johnson last year. Only 34. called 17 times as many as Davy Johnson last year, but only 34. And Davy Johnson has a reputation as kind of a sabermetric darling, I guess, when it comes to managers. So this is maybe just another piece of evidence in his favor. Yeah, it's not real consistent tying the number to what you think of the manager, but there's

some, there's certainly some of that so davy johnson is the least and joe madden is is right with him and um you know just about equal so joe madden called i think three last year those are the first two guys you think of i think probably for stati stuff but the third guy you think of is maniacta and he called the fourth most pitch outs um don mattingly is the third fewest and eric wedge is tied with him i don't think of i certainly don't think of wedge as statty and i don't really think of mattingly as satty but then you have kirk gibson is next and kirk gibson is the sort of the most hardcore anti-intentional walk guy in baseball like he'll call like he'll walk he'll

intentionally walk you know six guys or something whereas the average manager I'll do like 30 or 40. So, so he kind of fits there. And, uh, but, uh, other than that, like the A's through the second most pitch outs, um, last year, which doesn't really necessarily reflect a statiness, but on the other hand, their manager doesn't always reflect the statiness. They also sacrifice a lot so uh yeah so i didn't find it was that consistent but there was it leaned toward the the ideas that you probably have about managers with the statier guys uh throwing fewer well i guess it's not that surprising given what you found about what it's worth or whether it makes sense as a strategy i guess then it makes sense that it happens less often than you were thinking it happened. Because if it happened more often, it would be any different in the past, whether there

are fewer pitch outs now, or maybe whether you thought there were more pitch outs because there used to be more pitch outs when you first started watching baseball. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. I think it's quite possible. I mean, Davy Johnson, of course, was managing in the 90s's he wasn't a couple years ago and Madden is a sort of new school guy and I don't know yeah I don't know who knows well that will be

the sequel you can look for tomorrow so we can have something to talk about then too alright tune in to pitch yeah the daily podcast about pitch outs tune in to pitch yeah the wild

the daily podcast about pitch outs smallperspectives.com if you have pitch out questions for us you can email pitch outs

at pitch and yeah are we done I guess right good unless there are any other TV shows

you want to talk about um i'm uh well no i'm missing downton right now oh well please go say i've been missing it bob all right uh we're done send us emails so that we can have more things to talk about