Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1199: Two for Ohtani

Episode Date: April 5, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Shohei Ohtani’s hot hitting start, revisit the subject of Joey Gallo bunting against the four-man outfield, and critique a retracted Trevor Rosenthal report, then answer listener emails about Bondsian starts to seasons, Tommy Pham’s prophfanity, how data-driven players may impact projections, Seth Lugo’s breakout potential, short-term tanking vs. […]

Hey folks, a quick note before we begin. In a few moments, you'll hear me and Jeff speaking excitedly about Shohei Otani. Know that we recorded this episode before Otani had his second consecutive multi-hit game and his second consecutive game with a home run, this time off frickin' Corey Kluber, so you can mentally adjust our excitement levels slightly higher than they were. We also didn't get to speculate about what Brian Dozier's thoughts might be about Andrelton Simmons breaking up a no-hitter With a bunt in the fifth inning And on our last episode we speculated about the prospect

Of a Charlie Blackman extension Well that happened on Wednesday too Blackman signed to stay in Colorado for five additional seasons For at least $94 million in new money And because of the way time works We didn't get to talk about that today either Now you know, and here we go Angel, my love, my first caress Here we go. possessed from your love

my first caress Hello and welcome to episode 1199 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters as well as, of course, Fangraphs the site and our dark overlord Dave

Appelman. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I'm joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs Hello Jeff You mixed it up, hello Yeah, changing things a little bit Every 100, 200 episodes or so Just to make sure people are paying attention So we're doing an email show

Bladed email episode today But I think everyone knows where we have to start this episode We're predictable And I'm just going to play a clip. And even if you are not fluent in Japanese, I think you'll all know what this call is actually calling.3ランホームラン スウザニーメジャー初ホームラン 本拠地エンゼルスタジアムで初ホームラン 3ランホームラン

すごい 素晴らしいとしか言いようがないですね ベンチで誰も祝福してくれない この なんだよみんな おいっていう このあーやっと来てくれた That was the call of Shohei Otani's first Major League home run, which came in his first at-bat in Anaheim on Tuesday. And, man, that was exciting. He went three for four in that game. The homer wasn't even the hardest hit ball of his in the game. And this is just kind of the demonstration of what we've all been waiting for and salivating over for months and months or really even years since

Otani first kind of entered our radar screens. And so, you know, yes, it was Josh Tomlin, and it was a 74-mile-per-hour curveball. And no, this does not prove that Otani is going to be a great or even a good major league hitter. Doesn't mean that all the spring worries and scout quotes and skeptics about whether he would hit and pitch were wrong. We can't make that conclusion based on a small sample, just as maybe they shouldn't have that conclusion based on a small sample just as maybe they

shouldn't have done that based on a small sample but it was great to see him be dominant on the mound this weekend then come back on tuesday and just showcase what he can do as a hitter that was the sort of thing that we just haven't seen in baseball for a century and i don't know how often we will see it but we got to see it at least once yep stop right now and you see shohei otani was a four digit ops as a hitter and he has a strikeout per inning as a starter of course that doesn't really matter but yeah a flare for the dramatic he struck out i believe the first batter he faced in the regular season then he homered he got a single in his first ever plate appearance and he hit a home run in his first plate appearance at home so that's uh that's great i don't know when he's going to hit his first triple or stolen uh pick up a stolen base but

yeah fun and you know you can say oh it's just josh tomlin but i didn't see every other angel hitting a home run off josh tomlin although i guess in fairness they did come close actually there were like four other angels yeah but yeah josh tomlin gives up a lot of home runs, but it was a home run. It was legitimate. There was an endearing reaction to it. I mean, it was the usual team sort of no selling it and Trout have a budding bromance going here. Trout looked really happy that that happened, so this was just fantastic. And one of his singles was like 112-something miles per hour, which was the hardest hit ball by an angel. No? Oh, is that a step past? Oh, no. Take it back. Well, we can't edit this podcast, but oh well.

So it was encouraging. And that whole game was kind of like what the Angels could be this season, why we were all so excited to watch them this year. Because in that one game, Otani goes three for four with a homer. Trout homers. Justin Upton homers. Andrelton Simmons is playing shortstop. Garrett Richards struck out nine and five and two thirds.

He actually threw 90 pitches for the first time in two years. I mean, that's just as exciting as baseball gets. The game itself wasn't particularly close or tense, but just the individual highlights and the talent that was on display doesn't get better than that. Yeah. On the other hand, related to the Angels, Matt Shoemaker was just placed on the disabled list. Andrew Haney still on the disabled list. He's got something going on in his elbow. Alex Meyer, I mean, he was never going to be healthy this season,

but he's out for the year. So this is going to be for the Angels sort of a race to get to the end of the season before all of the pitchers are injured. And I think they know that too. They suspect they're going to hit they're going to play defense but they have a six-man rotation and they're probably going to need about twice that many starting pitchers over the course of the season but yeah when it works it's fun garrett richards throws really hard not always strikes but he

throws hard so he's fun he's easy to dream on as long as he's pitching because you know before otani was there richards was the guy who looked like he had ace caliber stuff and he still does. So Angels going to be't, I don't know, it's hard for me to judge. We're just in this baseball bubble and in this analytical baseball bubble. So I don't really have a sense of what his national standing is. Like, are people out there in the world at large interested in Shohei Otani? I think probably some of the excitement died down because of how much he struggled this spring. But now he comes out of the gate and he because of how much he struggled this spring but now he comes out of the gate and he's hitting and he's pitching and I wonder whether it does start to build like in his first start of the season he was pitching in Oakland and so no one was at the

game the attendance was 14,600 which is sad but Oakland's attendance has been sad this year. But I do wonder now, will he be the kind of like Fernando Valenzuela type sensation who starts drawing sellout crowds at home and also bigger crowds on the road? I don't know. It all depends on whether his hot streaks are sustained, but he has the potential to be that kind of player. Even Albert Pujols went two for four in that game. The Angels were just firing on all cylinders. I just checked because I had the sense that Albert Pujols got off to a good start. No, he hasn't. Not so much, no. Not really. And that's going to be interesting too because Louis Valbuena homered in that game as well. Otani is obviously

hitting and Pujols went two for four in that game, but his stats are still pretty bleak. So I don't know whether he's going to get squeezed sooner rather than later and whether that's going to cause clubhouse issues. But hey, that's another reason why the Angels are intriguing this year. So we will follow with interest. Well, as discussed, we know not to worry about Albert Pujols too much until Mike Trout is the league leader in wins above replacement. So that should be at least another two or three days. Yeah, right at this rate. So another quick follow up on a topic we talked about recently, Joey Gallo and his getting four man outfield shifted against and whether he should bunt. And we talked about this a couple of times, but Russell Carlton actually kind of ran the

numbers in an article at Baseball Prospectus this week and came to a pretty firm conclusion. So I just want to very briefly run through this, not too much math, but Russell just looked at some empirical results. So he looked at players who have been fairly regularly in the lineup and have attempted only one bunt in a year, which is, you know, kind of a proxy for guys who just don't bunt regularly. It's just something that they might have done out of the blue once, which is kind of Joey Gallo. We talked about that last time. He doesn't bunt. He doesn said 155 of those guys, 67 of their 155 bunt attempts. So that's 43.2% resulted in making contact with the ball and the ball going

fair. That was over the last, what, five seasons, I think. So 43.2%. If we want to estimate how often Gallo could actually get the ball down and in fair territory, that is how often Russell is estimating. And that doesn't actually change that much. He looked at like really regular bunters and even those guys are generally in the mid 40s, roughly, wise so bunting is hard but not that much harder if you're not a regular bunter evidently based on that data so that's one leg of this argument the other one is how often a hitter who puts the ball in play via the bunt against the shift gets on base or gets a hit and Russell using some graphs splits, found that that is 58.2% of the time. When hitters put the ball in play on a bunt against the shift, they get a hit,

almost always a single, 58.2% of the time. So if he tried to bunt, he would get it down and in fair territory roughly 43% of the time, and if he does that, roughly 58% of the time it would go for a hit. Let's just say a single to be conservative. So Russell estimated that if Gallo were to do this time after time and nothing changed, the defenders didn't change their alignment, Gallo would hit 470, 470, 470. So that's a high average, a high on-base percentage, and a lower slugging percentage than we would normally expect Joey Gallo to have. So if that's a decent estimate, and I guess we can question some of those assumptions, but

if that's right, then Gallo would be sacrificing some power, but 470 on-base percentage, that's extremely valuable. And Russell calculates that Gallo would be sacrificing some power, but 470 on base percentage, that's extremely valuable. And Russell calculates that Gallo would be worth something like twice as much were he to pursue this strategy than if he were to continue swinging away as he usually does. So do you find that argument convincing? Are you advocating that Gallo should bunt unless played otherwise? Gallo should try to bunt. One of our listeners, I asked Levi Weaver about Joey Gallo's minor league bunting the other day. And so Levi asked Joey Gallo, hey, did you ever bunt in the minors?

And Gallo's response was essentially, no, never. Hasn't really bunted since he was a child. You know, he dropped in the one bunt last season, and that was about it. Clearly, there is not a lot of bunting confidence, and that is not unique to Joey Gallo. That is kind of the problem with left-handed power hitters in general, is that they just don't really know how to bunt, because why would they ever know how to bunt? So, they don't like to do it. Now, I was watching Wilmer Font pitch extended relief for the Dodgers the other day.

Ultimately, he lost. He still had a good game, but he also was a reliever who batted twice, and he bunted. He successfully bunted. He bunted with two strikes. He got it down. It was a hard pitch to bunt, and, you know, if Wilmer Font is able to bunt successfully, especially when he's worried about all these other things and it's like the 21st inning I think Joey Gallo could probably get one down

I think that a big problem with this is that players just don't want to look really dumb and I understand the uh the disinclination I think no one wants to try to put a bunt down and look like they can't even do that because, I mean, that just kind of opens the floodgates, the fan criticism. You think, oh, this guy doesn't even know baseball fundamentals. Bunting 101. Now, on the other hand, you watch Joey Gallo, you give him three games and he'll do something that only like 20 other people on the planet could do, and that's hit a ball 500 feet. So I don't think Gallo would need to worry about it too much but very clearly there's some sort of like protection protective mechanism that players have in the back of the head that is compelling them to try to swing away and not bunt uh it comes back to that same question we got about I think it was Mike Moustakis a few weeks ago of how often could Gallo bunt before defenses stopped shifting

him so much and I would love I would love, especially if the Rangers season goes off the rails, which it probably will, I would absolutely love to see Gallard just try to bunt every single time that he comes up. I mean, he's not going to forget how to swing, right? Just do it for science. But yeah. And as Russell pointed out,

it's not like he has to bunt well, really, because there's just no one there. There was a great picture that someone snapped of just a vast swath of field with no fielders anywhere. All he has to do is keep it fair and get it past the pitcher. He doesn't really have to worry about deadening the ball or putting it in a precise spot. It just has to go to like any place in half the field, basically. So I think even Joey Gallo could do that even with his contact issues I don't know whether contact issues for a power hitter transfer

to bunting like is he bad at just placing the bat in the path of the ball probably not it's probably just that he's usually swinging really hard because he's trying to hit a home run so I think he could do it and I have faith and I know that AJ Hinch said part of it is just the mind games factor about, you know, just kind of showing him something he's not used to. And maybe that gets him out of his game. And one of our listeners emailed us to ask if it's smart for AJ Hinch to acknowledge that, to say that it's a mind game because, you know, maybe you just kind of lose whatever placebo effect or anti-placebo effect that you get there. But I don't know. I think he should try it more if he actually gets played this way. And either way, he's fascinating, whether he's

just hitting into the shift or hitting long homers or bunting every time. I want to watch Joey Gallo almost as much as I want to watch Shohei Otani. How many times are we going to have this conversation about bunting against the shift? It's been like 10 years. Shifting is not going away. It's there. And this is just the same thing over and over. It's not Gallo. It's every left-handed.

It's every hitter. It's everybody. Just bunt or don't. And clearly, they're not going to. Just clearly, they're not going to just clearly they're not going to because we haven't seen the rise in bunting there there is some kind of reason and if it's just that they don't want to look bad because they can't bunt that's a bad reason because look at the math it's right there wilmer font can bunt you can bunt yeah yeah i don't know i mean there are certain

things that we've said for years and years, internet types have said, and there was just a long delay between people saying it and teams actually adopting it. Like maybe something like how players should be paid in a nonlinear fashion. So if you're a star, you should be paid more because you're concentrating those wins in one roster spot. And now suddenly it looks like maybe teams are actually paying players that way. And now we're all thinking, oh, we don't want teams to pay players that way now no one's signing for agents but at least they are taking the advice that lots of bloggers were giving them decade ago so maybe it just takes a long while to catch on in some cases anyway every single time a left-handed batter puts down a bunt against the shift for a single, people love it.

No one thinks, oh, what a coward. Everyone's like, what a smart baseball play. And if you try to bunt on the first pitch and it doesn't work, swing away. That's fine. You can still have in a bat and no one will remember. I'm so tired of this. Right. You and Brian Dozier both.

All right. So anything else before we get to emails bob nightingale at 6 25 a.m on wednesday morning quote the miami marlins signed st louis cardinals closer trevor rosenthal to a one-year contract while recovering from tommy john surgery bob nightingale 8 15 a.m wednesday morning agent scott boris says that closer trevin rosenthal is not signing with the marlins he will spend the year rehabbing. This is a delightful little sequence on Roto World where there was Marlins signed Trevor Rosenthal to minor league contract.

And then an hour later, Trevor Rosenthal said he's not aware of any agreement with the Marlins. So I don't know where Bob Nightingale was getting his information. This is not the first time this has ever happened to Bob Nightingale. But you would think that if you were a writer of Bob Nightingale's profile, you would check in with Scott Boris, who seems like he wants everyone to know everything about his clients. So I don't know why Bob Nightingale got this information. It was like, I'm not going to check with the most vocal agent in the world to confirm this information. I'm just going to run with it. This is a big scoop.

The world needs to know that a pitcher who's unavailable to pitch this season is signing with a terrible baseball team. But in any case, Trevor Rosenthal is still out there, not signing. 6.25 a.m., you said? Yeah. So I guess it was even earlier on the West Coast, so maybe Boris was just asleep and didn't answer the text and just had to run with that before someone else got to that hot Trevor Rosenthal news. I don't know.

Is there any part of you that believes that Scott Boris sleeps? Not really. All right, shall we move on to emails? There is a Pete Holmes joke about how if you're ever intimidated by an individual, just remember, everybody sleeps So, you know, you can watch Scott Boris in his little, like, winter meeting scrum And you think, oh, this guy is just, like, really confident He's, you know, great personality for an agent But, you know, he's kind of off-putting and he can be acerbic

I don't know, I'm just using words I don't really know But now you just kind of sit back and close your eyes and picture Scott Boris asleep in his bed. Yeah. I don't know how he sleeps. I don't know if he's a side sleeper, stomach sleeper, maybe even if he wants to take a chance, but he definitely just sits there. Yeah. It's like that public speaking advice about picturing people naked, which I've never done because it just didn't sound very helpful to me. I don't know why they're being naked would really make it all that less intimidating. If anything,

I'd be more uncomfortable if the entire audience were naked. Anyway, emails. I have a whole bunch saved up from last week, but we've also got some new ones. So this one is from Sean. He says, one of the things I'm tracking this year is how long it takes for the last batter to drop below Barry Bonds' 2004 full season OPS of 14-22. Right now, after just under a week of baseball, there are nine hitters who are above that mark. How long do you predict

someone to stay above that mark? Do you think that someone manages to make it to May? Also, just as an aside, peak Barry Bonds was completely and totally unbelievable. Yes, he was. And no, I don't think that anyone will manage to make it to May. Certainly some people are making a run at it and Bryce Harper is having one of his patented hot streaks.

But I look back at the Fangraphs splits pages for the March slash April split for every year going back many years. And the most recent player to make it to May with an OPS higher than Bonds' full season 2004 OPS is Albert Pujols in 2006. So it's been a while since someone did that, and Pujols did it with an OPS of 1423, which is one point higher than Barry Bonds' full season 1422. So yeah, Barry Bonds was completely and totally unbelievable, and I doubt that anyone will do that this year. I assume this is dealing with qualified hitters because, you know, right now, René Rivera. Yeah, that's what I did, right. Sure. Yeah, you could find someone with one for one or something who did it, but yeah.

Christian Villanueva, perhaps, right now. I don't know how long that's going to keep up. All right. This one is from Kyle, Patreon supporter. Did you read, this is not part of the question, did you read the Sports Illustrated profile of Tommy Pham that came out this week by Jack Dickey? I read parts of it that were excerpted in other articles. Not even going to give Jack those clips, huh?

Just going to give the aggregators all the traffic. I see how it is. This is a zero-sum game. Clicks, go. There's only so many clicks to go around. I'm not giving him mine. Well, it's a good story, and it's basically about Pham's upbringing, which was not easy, and how he has a fairly large chip on his shoulder about how the Cardinals handled him

and took quite a while to promote him full time. Of course, he had a bunch of injuries too, but he hit well in the minors, and he felt like he didn't get as many shots as he should have, and other guys kind of leapfrogged him. Anyway, he's still bitter about it. It's not affecting his performance. He's good, but he is still kind of carrying that grudge. And so in this story by Jack, Tommy Pham swears a lot, and it's Sports Illustrated,

so everything is kind of the text version of bleeped out, but you can tell what he's saying. It's just the first word of every swear word. So Kyle is saying, in reading Tommy Pham's comments today to St. Louis beat writer Rick Hummel about that essay article, talked to Tommy Pham. Pham expressed some surprise and maybe some dismay that his swear words were recreated so accurately in the article. So Kyle is saying, that raised a question in my mind that I thought perhaps Ben, a former editor, could answer. Pham complained to Hummel that there were so many cuss words in the piece, which there certainly are. My question is, is that normal to have word usage like that? And if so, is it unusual to not edit them out? I just imagine many athletes speak with a loose tongue and then those types of things don't make it past the editor. Is that the case or am I wrong? If that is the case, why might an editor decide to leave those words in the piece? I don't mind them being in the piece, but certainly makes you think differently about him.

Now, obviously he said those words, so he has to be accountable. My interest was piqued when he seemed surprised to see them used. I'm mainly curious about the writer-editor side of the question and how the decision-making process unfolds when making decisions on the questions I've asked. So, yeah, you don't usually see language like that in pieces about baseball players. Yeah, you don't usually see language like that in pieces about baseball players. Obviously, baseball players use that language in real life, so sometimes it doesn't make it into the piece. Now, you know, often players will censor themselves a little bit when they're talking to reporters. So if you're in the clubhouse and a guy's just talking about how he had a good game or whatever, he's probably not going to be swearing up a storm. how he had a good game or whatever, he's probably not going to be swearing up a storm. He's going to,

you know, just speak in measured tones. And so you won't really have to censor it, even if you were inclined to. It depends on the outlet. Obviously, if you're writing for a newspaper, for instance, you just can't have those words in there. And so if you listen to the old podcast with Andy McCullough and Pedro Mora, Sportswriters Blues, often they would lament how some of the best baseball sayings could not make it into the LA Times at all. So they'd have to come up with euphemisms or just leave them out entirely. So that's part of it. And then part of it is just the writers and the editors' decision stylistically. stylistically. And there have been times when a player said something that I left out of an article just because it didn't seem essential. And if it doesn't convey something about the player's personality or the meaning, the emotional import of what he's saying, if it's just kind of a

casual swear word, you might take it out for various reasons. You know, maybe you don't want to alienate the readers or listeners who don't like to see that sort of thing, or maybe it's just using up a word that you could put to better use elsewhere, or maybe, you know, you don't want to get the player in trouble. Like there was a case a few weeks ago when I wrote something and I was talking to someone who works for a team in a front office and it was not anonymous. He was going by his name and he just, you know, dropped an F-bomb or two. And I left it out of the article just because it wasn't like he was upset or anything. He was just kind of speaking normally, but it just kind of came out of nowhere. And I felt like it was distracting, if anything, and he's someone who is newly working for a team. And I figured maybe he just

hasn't kind of adopted that front office speak where you won't speak that way. So I didn't want him to get reprimanded or something for using that language. It just basically didn't affect the article, the message, the content in my estimation at all. So I just left it out. But there are other times like when Sam and I wrote The Only Rules It Has to Work, we had tons of swear words in there because we wanted to capture what baseball players actually sound like and what the indie leagues are. And some readers complained about that and others didn't. But we kind of were going for this true to life air so i think in this case in jack's story about tommy fam it did add something because it kind of

conveyed just how raw the emotions were and how he actually is still upset by this and yeah you know if he didn't specify that clean this up a little don't include include these words. I don't think he should have necessarily had the expectation that they wouldn't be included there. I think maybe some writers would have left them out. But in this case, I think it added something to have them there. And if Pham didn't like it, then I guess he'll watch his words more carefully next time. But I kind of hope he doesn't,

because it's more entertaining to read him unfiltered. A things here first of all readers complained that there were too many swear words in the only rule yes yeah by what means did they complain i remember well emails i remember i remember amazon reviews like just negative reviews on amazon or goodreads because of, you know, potty-mouthed players or whatever, you know, like often you can kind of infer something about the person who is leaving those reviews and it doesn't really bother you to get them, but it does bring down your average. So it's never great to get a poor review, but yeah, we definitely got some of those. Who buys a baseball book and doesn't who doesn't know who doesn't who how it's look i if you're in a ball game like i get it sometimes parents will bring their kids and then if you're sitting around the kids maybe you're gonna now i know that you're not a prolific

cursor but you know some of us dabble and if you see that there is a young person sitting near you then you sort of censor yourself but even you know someone's gonna say something somewhere because people are getting drunk at a baseball game and then you think oh what parent brings their young child to a sporting event and doesn't expect the child to hear curse words but even there maybe maybe you expect people around you will notice the kid and then sort of censor themselves but in a book no because you're not gonna you're not gonna write the book expecting like oh well there's some six-year-olds out there who've never heard a curse word but they're gonna be digesting this book like it's the first book they've ever read and we don't want to poison their eyes adults are reading just okay

moving it tommy fan what uh you many people will remember that last spring the cardinals hilariously it was last spring right that matt adams was put in the outfield it feels like it could be any season and uh and dave cameron i believe it was wrote a post at fangraphs about how matt adams is terrible at uh at being an outfielder and tommy fam liked it on twitter which was outstanding we liked that so we liked tommy fam's like maybe it's a favorite i don't remember which one it is but i like that in tommy fam's profile which i have now read more of while you were talking that he wasn't just really emotional being like i'm really good the cardinal should play me but he defended himself by saying like in a quarter of a season i was worth

1.4 war right yes i i like that also hard to argue with but finally a more salient general point is there's a lot in there where fam is sort of critical of what seemed like an organizational preference to play both randall gritchick and stephen biscotti which i understand and this is a useful reminder of how a lot of organizations operate where you can argue that fam deserved more of a chance so that the cardinals didn't extend to him the opportunity he deserved as soon as he deserved it. There are some health questions there. But remember, even though it wasn't by the Cardinals, Grichuk was drafted in the first round. Steven Biscotti was drafted in the first round.

Tommy Pham was drafted in the 16th round. And also, he was drafted three years before Grichuk and six years before Biscotti. So this is just the way that a lot of teams will work is that they will give preference to the their higher picks part of it now again Grichik was not drafted by the Cardinals but still high pick so there's are more resources invested in those high picks teams are more invested in seeing them succeed and teams are just less willing to open the door for someone who comes around later. Those players usually don't make prospect lists, and they sort of have to fight against it every step of the way.

This is one of the reasons why we've been talking about minor league compensation, and you figure if you pay minor leaguers more, it's not there to benefit the first-rounders who got millions of dollars anyway. The idea is just to help out players sort of in fam situation situation i don't know what his bonus was but a 16th round draft pick he's not getting very much money so there is there's an imbalance and i don't know where the right balance is because you know players drafted earlier should deserve more of a chance because they're probably you'd hope if your scouts are any good they're uh better so you would just want to give them more of a chance but you don't want to sleep on the guys who you take later because you're drafting them for a reason they all they do have baseball skills

sometimes they turn out to be tommy fam yeah all right question from taylor there seems to be a lot of discussion lately including on your podcast about players making data-driven or influenced changes to swing planes buying buying into launch angle, designing pitches, etc., and teams potentially using these approaches to change players under contract in lieu of signing free agents who have made these adjustments. With these changes not really being considered heavily in projections, could we be entering a period where our projection systems are going to be as inaccurate as they've ever been in the fangraphs era? Or is it not going to matter that much because making these changes are A, difficult, and B, illicit

responses from pitchers and possibly managers in terms of strategy? I guess there's also some possibility that these adjustments begin to spread across the league. Will they become more like the best shape of his life type thing? Or perhaps not, as these changes have a more direct impact on performance. What are your thoughts? Will StatCast or other current or future data be able to help us either incorporate these changes into projections, or at least identify players for whom there will likely be a systematic deviation from projections? Well, since we've had projections, or at least for as long as I've been able to analyze projections, they haven't really gotten better or worse over time which on the one hand that could that could indicate two things at the same time one you would think that projections would get better just as we understand

more about projections but it also at least anecdotally does feel like there are more players who get suddenly better than there used to be that's really hard to research and prove so i haven't done a whole lot of it but in any, projections haven't budged that much in terms of their accuracy. But with the swing plane stuff, I think that it's really interesting, and we do see this happening, seems like, league-wide, as discussed on the previous podcast. But I think the number of players who will actually benefit meaningfully from changing their swing is is a lot smaller than the number of players who try to do something you're not going to see a whole bunch of jd martinez's all of a sudden or josh donaldson's i think that you can look at someone like matt carpenter and he made a big

change to his swing change to his approach to sacrifice some contact for air balls and power and he was the same he hit more home runs but in terms of his overall production he was the same and i think that there are a lot of players who would be capable of hitting more balls in the air but i think that at the same time many of those players are just gonna kind of bounce around their own true talent level anyway if a guy is sort of a league average kind of hitter he's probably just a league average talent who's changing his own approach i don't think there are that many guys who will unlock a new talent level by aiming up so i think that there will it'll just be a small list of exceptions every season yeah we just don't know which is part of the reason that this whole movement is so intriguing to me it seems like there's almost unlimited potential, but I'm sure there isn't.

There have been cases where it just hasn't worked out for guys, where it's backfired. So I think we're going to learn a lot more about that. There are ways in which, in theory, a projection system could take some of this stuff into account. Like, you know, in the future, I'm sure the best projection systems

will be looking at launch angles and exit speeds, and that stuff stabilizes pretty quickly. So if a player does make a change, even if it's, say, down the stretch of the previous season, I'm sure it would be incorporated into the projection the following year. You just kind of have to be careful because we don't necessarily know how reliable, how consistent these changes are just because you're doing something differently for a while, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will continue to do it differently in the same way. So there are a lot of unknowns, but you could factor that into a projection system. You could factor in a new pitch if you're able to just add an entirely

new pitch or change an existing pitch in some way, a projection system could be designed to take that into account. The more StatCast data we have at our disposal, when StatCast era encompasses more than three seasons, I think we'll be able to make some more sort of certain determinations about these things. So I think in the long run, projection systems will be more accurate, but this will be one of the things that will contribute to continued uncertainty. And you wrote a post in the middle of last year. It was called something like, there's something about this year's hitters. One of your very vague headlines that I just

have to click on to see what that something is. You got me again. And it was, I don't know, in June or July, and you looked through that point in the season, you noticed that there was a lower correlation between hitters WRC plus in the previous year and their WRC plus that year than there usually is. So hitters, their results were just more consistent. Now, that could mean some guys were getting worse and some guys were getting better, but it was just less consistency. And I recently refreshed that research of yours and looked at it myself. And I looked at the full season correlation of 2016 to 2017. I forget what I used, something like minimum 400 plate appearances in both seasons. And I went all the way back to 1961, the whole expansion era of baseball. And last year was the lowest

year-to-year correlation in that entire sample. Does that mean that it's definitely because of the swing changes and the launch angle changes? Not necessarily, but it's a bit of evidence, at least, that things are getting more volatile, more variable. So if you're looking for backup, then that would be it, I guess. And someone also emailed us to ask if there have actually been more breakouts, which is an interesting question,

but I don't know the answer to it. And it's kind of hard to quantify a breakout. And, you know, there aren't usually that many breakouts per year, probably, however, you would define it. So it's probably prey to some small sample issues. But that's something that you could also look at just to see whether there are actually more guys kind of going from zero to 60 in a season. Yeah. And looking at things, so far there have been 211 hitters who have at least 10 batted balls this season, and sorting them by average launch angle,

Eric Hosmer ranks 207th, negative 2.6 degrees on average. So the more things change, the more Eric Hosmer stays the same. Christian Jelic, incidentally, is at 170th. Modest improvement, but he's still hitting a lot of line drives, not so many fly balls. Well, if they don't raise their launch angles and hit fewer ground balls, they're going to rank lower on those lists. Because as you pointed out in the previous podcast and also a post the Fangrass, launch angles are up and ground ball rates are down so far. So you got to keep up with everyone else in addition to kind of trying to lap the field. So, stop last. But discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways.

Here's to day. Step last. Step last. This will be a quick one. Is it fair to compare Shohei Otani at the plate to other pitchers? No. But that's what we're going to do anyway. This is going to be very quick. So I just looked up, as you've mentioned, we have stat cast

information going back to 2015. So that's three years and change, where the change is almost nothing. So I'm just going to read, I don't know, see the top 15 hardest hit batted balls by pitchers. Top 15. We're going to start at 15th. I'm not going to read the numbers because who cares? That's too many numbers. Just going to read the names. Joe Ross, Noah Syndergaard, Stephen Matz, Madison Bumgarner, Madison Bumgarner, Tywin Walker, John Lester, Noah Syndergaard, Madison Bumgarner, Madison Bumgarner, Zach Greinke, Madison Bumgarner, Daniel Mangdon, Madison Bumgarner.

And as of Tuesday, Shohei Otani, number one. Shohei Otani hit a single 112.8 miles per hour off the bat. It was one of his line drive singles. It was great, really good hit. The home run was a big loopy fly ball. Nothing against it. That's four bases. The single is just one.

But at 112.8 miles per hour, Otani has therefore hit the hardest batted ball by any quote-unquote pitcher for as long as we have information, which is not very long. But he edges out Madison Bumgarner by 0.3 miles per hour and Daniel Mengden by 0.6 miles per hour. I have no recollection of Daniel Mengden actually doing anything, let alone hit this batted ball, but good for him. I guess it's kind of, it's only somewhat interesting to have information on Otani's batted ball speed and fastball speed, because we already knew he could throw fastballs really hard, and we already knew he had a lot of power. So there's nothing that we've necessarily learned, but it is neat that even in Otani's first week, he's clearly one of the hardest throwing starters in baseball and pretty clearly already a harder hitter than any other pitcher.

He's not really a pitcher. That's why he's a designated hitter and a pitcher. It's complicated, but really simple. Shoei Otani, hardest batted ball by any pitcher. And that's neat. Madison Bumgarner, lots of the other ones. Yeah, fantastic. All right.

Excellent. Short but sweet. All right. George says, what should the new counting stats thresholds be? bum garner lots of the other ones yeah fantastic all right excellent short but sweet all right george says what should the new counting stats thresholds be with new playing times more relievers more off days etc is 3 000 hits really still an attainable benchmark not to mention strikeout rates right what should we consider equally as impressive now is 260 strikeouts, the new 300 strikeouts. Is 20 wins the new 25 wins? Will 3,000 career strikeouts ever be reached? Actually, someone's very close to that, right?

Is it CeCe Sabathia who's very close to that? I don't know. How should we change our perception of milestones for modern day standards? standards. So I would say, I would hope even that maybe we're just in kind of a post milestones era, I think. By the way, yes, CeCe Sabathia, 150 strikeouts away from 3000. But even Sabathia in his early career looks like it comes from another era at this point. So I think there's just so much awareness, first of all, of how context changes everything. I think people have always known that about baseball, but maybe they just weren't fully aware of the impact that a park can have or that a league can have or that one year to the next can have. And so now that we context adjust everything, I think in a way we need

milestones less, we value milestones less. And yeah, there have been so many changes in usage, certainly pitcher usage most of all, that I just, I don't know that we need milestones anymore. They were kind of handy to have around for a while, but now just so many records have been broken because of changing conditions. So many records are unbreakable because of changing conditions. And I don't know, personally, at least, I have no use for them anymore. There's some like romanticization, obviously. There are numbers that have been very big and important in baseball history, but I really can't say I pay much attention to them anymore.

I think milestones only really seem to come up when you're talking about the Hall of Fame, and even there, there are far better numbers to use. So as milestones go, first of all, 20 wins is the new 25. Who's ever talked about 25 wins? It's always been 20. It's always been 20, and 20 is impossible now. You can't even get that far. So I think that the only other real purpose I think a milestone serves is that if someone gets his 200th hit or 500th career home run or something,

it's just a nice, convenient round number excuse to appreciate the player more than you usually do. And in that sense, a milestone can be anything because all it really is is a reminder that, hey, this guy's been really great, and we should acknowledge that before we go back to taking him for granted for his 501st and 502nd home runs. So, you know, where's Pujols now in terms of his career home runs? I'm going to click this and try not to look at all the other columns.

Pujols is at 615 home runs for his career. By the way, he's got an elevated launch angle this season. Is something happening? Probably, yeah, the end of his career. In any case, if, you know, Pujols at this point is almost certainly not going to get to his 700th home run. And if he does, either he will be playing out his contract in a very miserable way, or he's going to bounce back and have a resurgent couple seasons and it wouldn't really climb up the list. But probably, if Pujols somehow finds a way to get the 700,

he'll hit that home run, and that will be an incredible milestone because a few people have gotten there. And he'll get a curtain call, maybe two of them, long-standing ovation, because you're looking at a guy who, for 10 years or so, was the best hitter, second best hitter on the planet. It's not really an appreciation of what Pujols is then because if you want to celebrate what Pujols is at the event of his hitting that home run he would get booed he will be a problem bad for the team very expensive

but it's just it's just an appreciation landmark so in that sense you can set a milestone at whatever you want every play could be a milestone milestone if you have a lot of appreciation to give. And Pujols is also about 25 hits away from 3,000, so that one obviously is attainable, and he'll be celebrated for that soon. But yeah, that's true. You can't really have like, so-and-so just reach 50 war, and you have the message on the scoreboard and the guy standing on second and doffing his cap. message on the scoreboard and the guy standing on second and doffing his cap. I mean, we don't even have war in real time, so you'd have to wait till the next day or something to know whether he got there. And that one would be hard too, because it's like if you have a running back, he's like, he got to 2,000 yards in a season. Oh, he just lost three yards on the next play. He just passed 2,000 yards again. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Pujols is going backwards at this point. So

yeah, you're right. It does give you a good excuse to celebrate someone. So for that reason, I guess we still can use them. Although, yeah, I mean, fewer and fewer people are, well, going to reach some milestones and more and more are going to reach others. So it's sort of hard to say. I think we've been asked this before. So, okay, Albert Pujols is at 99 oh man bummer so albert pools is at 99.4 career war on baseball reference before last season he was at 101.2 so he's he's

passed 100 twice so i was hoping he would be somewhere in between 90 and 100 because i was going to ask what's more likely he gets to 100 or he gets to 90 but in any case albert pools had there been a 100 war celebration well he's intersected that line a couple times yeah right okay let's take should we take a mike trout hypothetical sure nick says if mike trout insisted on pitching one inning every year how would that affect his market value? How many innings would he have to insist on throwing before teams would actively not want him on their team? Assume that if a team doesn't let him throw the desired number of innings, he would not play until traded or released. So obviously one inning, who cares?

But how many innings would he have to insist on throwing before a team would not want him or his value would significantly be reduced okay so are we operating under the assumption that he's throwing at maximum effort well i assume that if he wants to pitch this badly he's probably trying so uh and you know i it's, like Sam has told me that there were reports on Trout throwing in high school and hitting the 90s, which, you know, seems unlikely because his arm has never been his strong suit. So I don't know if that's actually true. I would assume that he didn't have that great an arm or doesn't now anyway. So guessing he would be pretty bad as a pitcher yeah so i think that because like you said trout's arm is his probably worst tool definitely his

worst tool yeah i think that he's not really throwing around the maximum of like his his ligaments i think it's unlikely mag trout would tear his ucl or something trying to pitch really hard because he's probably going to throw like low 80s like most position players do yeah and i think it's unlikely can't say go hurt himself throwing knuckleballs off the mound so that's true but he was also roided out of his gourd so i don't think he had a whole lot of flexibility so the likelihood is that mike trout wouldn't get hurt And you can always find like 10 or 20 garbage innings in a season. Position players pitch more often than ever now. But I think if you exceed like 25, then I would start to have some problems because

you could get sore. You're starting to get more common. You're just increasing the risk. But I think 25 you could get to pretty easily without too much trouble. Yeah, I think so there's just so many garbage innings low leverage innings that you'd have the last guy in the bullpen pitch and at that point you don't really need trout in the lineup anymore i mean i guess he could still wakasahachi swap to some other position but yeah i think he could easily do that and he's's just so good. I mean, we always get these questions about like,

you know, when would you not want Trout anymore? Or when would he be worth a lot less? And teams would put up with a lot for the best player in baseball. Like he's still going to be really valuable, even if he insists on throwing 25 bad innings that you can hand pick that don't matter. Now, if he gets to choose which innings

he can pitch that's bad if he wants to pitch the most important innings he wants to be the the stopper who comes in then you're starting to really hurt yourself but if you can mix and match and plug him in wherever you want it's just uh almost a non-factor i think yeah don't forget that chris jimenez pitched in six games last year for the Twins and did that without too much trouble. So Trout could at the very least double or triple that. Yeah. All right.

Corey says, Ben's hope and faith article got me thinking. It seems like most of the conversation about tanking or rebuilding and whether it's bad for the game has to do with how many teams are competitive at a given time. But I wonder if that's really the most important question. Maybe it matters which methods a team uses to be strategically bad. For example, I agree with you two that there's nothing wrong with the front office prioritizing the future by doing things like trading veteran players or avoiding marginal upgrades on the free agent market, and it's probably even okay for the field staff to think the same way,

like by managing young players' innings or suggesting swing changes that might pay off later but take a player out of his element in the short term. But surely some ways of strategically losing would really be bad for the game, even if they help a team in the long term. Pitchers throwing at half effort to preserve their arms, managers benching their best players to get better draft picks, or hitters using at bats to practice their bunting in hopes of being less vulnerable to the shift in future seasons that might actually

help them what do you think distinguishes acceptable and unacceptable ways of prioritizing the future i used to think it was that in the good cases the players were at least trying to win even the front office was not but in the case where a manager benches a star player, that seems like it'd be bad for the game even if the replacement player tries his hardest. Any better ideas about defining this? What do you have? Well, it is kind of a blurry line. Like, I agree, tanking becomes a problem when you get to the point where a team is essentially throwing individual games. And I don't think we've really gotten to that point in baseball. If we have, it's very subtle.

Like in basketball, people are talking about teams using reverse analytics, which is, I guess, the phrase for like figuring out what your worst lineup is and putting it out there so that you can be as inefficient as possible and lose games. I don't know how often things like that are actually happening. What is happening in basketball? If they are, that's bad. So if there were a baseball equivalent of that, I think that would be bad because part of my argument for why tanking is not really bad is that I don't think it really hurts the product on the field. I mean, yes, some teams are bad for a few years, but then they get good again very quickly. And you get to watch young and exciting players who might be flawed,

but have a lot of potential, and that's exciting in its own way. So I don't think it's okay. I think it's a net positive for spectators, if anything. In this case, if we're talking about players essentially just not trying or teams not putting their best lineup on the field, I mean, I guess it's kind of an academic distinction because, you know, what's the difference ultimately between trading your good players so that they aren't available to you or just deciding not to use your best players who are available to you? Maybe ultimately that doesn't make that much of a difference, but it feels like a difference to me. So if we got to a point where players just weren't trying, where they're just actively giving less effort than they could, or where managers are making self-sabotaging moves,

then I feel like that would really disrupt the whole fiction that we're here to see something important, which obviously is not the case, but we all manage to pretend that it is. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone in baseball is performing for a job. And so if you have a team that is in last place, every single player, probably they're not star players. And so everybody there is trying to eke out a career they're trying to be as impressive as possible and if you have a manager he's trying to put the best lineup on the field as possible most of the time because the manager wants to be able to keep his job and wins are always good for that if you have a player no player is going to perform worse on the field because if i give up a home run here then we can get a better draft pick

because that pick won't be around when that pitcher is still with the team probably players just don't stick around that long and the draft pick could be bad and if you're an executive now front offices now seem to have longer leashes than ever probably because they keep coming up with these five-year plans and saying well we're going to get good and stay good eventually but even there no an executive wants the team to be not not as bad as possible like you know the tigers would probably rather win 75 games than 65 this season because it would reflect well on the on the front office and it would make them seem closer than maybe they would otherwise and so even though tanking or losing a bunch can be good for the franchise in the longer term i think that on any given day any given week most of the people involved with an organization

are trying to succeed, and that's good. As long as you don't lose that intensity on the field and the dugout, then the product is still fine because in any individual game, the difference between a really good team and a really bad team is not that visible to the eye unless you were watching the Oakland Athletics defense. Right.

All right, question from Adam, a Patreon supporter. The baseball gods are fickle and have decided to endow the world's minor league ballplayers with superior skill. Overnight, minor league player skill levels are elevated beyond those of major leaguers. All AAA players are better than all MLB players, and Mike Trout couldn't crack the roster of the Salt Lake Bees. However, all AAA players get better in unison, so their statistics won't change as long as the makeup of the minor and major leagues remains the same. They would have to be called up in order to

show off their new superiority. How long until no current major leaguers are in the majors, assuming none of them deserves to be there on talent. Assume there are enough super talented double A-ers that major leaguers aren't even needed for injury depth. Well, I mean, it would take some years because you would have these long-term contracts and teams would be hesitant to just dump people. But in terms of when teams would notice, I think you would have a few, you know, there are players coming out from AAA every day, every week. And you would start to see like, oh, there's a lot of rookies who are like nobody players who are really outstanding right now. And now that we're in the age of stat cast and AAA has all trackman information everywhere, teams would start to notice, oh, these exit velocities and like pitch velocities are through the roof. Probably that would go along with it. So you would see the skills.

Yeah, that's the key to me. Probably that would go along with it. Yeah. So you would see the skills. Yeah, that's the key to me. Like if this is not, I mean, it's obviously a fantastical scenario, but if it's not just that they are better, but they don't look better, if they actually do look better, then scouts are going to notice in one game that, hey, suddenly every AAA player is major league quality or better than major league quality.

So, I mean, I don't know how they would react to that knowledge, but it would not be unknown. It's not like you would only know when those guys get promoted. You'd know sooner than that. So I don't know because, I mean, obviously the salaries would be all out of whack and you'd have ego issues. And plus, you know, none of these players would be known or recognizable. So that's an issue too for fans, like just to have every baseball player they know go away and suddenly it's just an entirely new cast of characters. I mean, it's like, you know, the entire sport has been recast overnight.

So I think it would increase interest in the sense that this would be miraculous, but I think decrease interest in that we wouldn't know any of these people. So that would be a consideration too. And there'd be some skepticism that this would last. So how long would it take? I mean, I don't know. I always, I marvel all the time about how long some major league careers are. Like it doesn't seem to me like it should be possible for someone to be a major league player for 20 years or something. It just seems like that shouldn't be possible because, you know, you're only at your peak, your physical peak for so long.

And yes, there's the value of experience and you compensate for declining skills in certain ways. But there are just always so many other players who are also incredibly talented who are coming up right behind you. And I'm just kind of amazed that there isn't more turnover. Like, it's amazing that one guy could be among the best 750 players in the world at age 19 and also at age, you know, 44 in Bartolo Colon's case, right? I mean, it's just amazing that that can happen, that they aren't just pushed out and overtaken. And yet that does happen. So I think that maybe in some cases guys do get longer leashes than they should just because they have that experience and you think of them as big leaguers. And so you're less quick to change them out than you would be otherwise. So it would take longer than

it should based on the respective talent levels here. But I don't know. I mean, as soon as one team sort of breaks the seal and calls up all their minor leaguers, then they're going to be the best team in baseball. And so that puts enormous pressure on every other team to do this too. So I think once it starts, it proceeds really quickly. So, you know, I don't know, is it one season? Is it more than one season? Like the first time you call a guy up or someone goes down with an injury and you call up the AAA player and he's amazing, goes down with an injury and you call up the AAA player and he's amazing, then you're going to have really strong incentive to keep doing this. So I don't know, maybe it happens more rapidly than we think. So I'm sort of co-teaching the mountaineering class. And last weekend, we did a trip that we do every year where we go on a midnight hike, a midnight summit of a small mountain east of the

Portland metro area. And so the hike starts at midnight, and you're out there until about 6 o'clock. And the idea is to train these students to understand what an alpine start is because on a lot of mountain climbs, you're going to be waking up way before the sun ever arises, and you're going to be—you have to understand sort of what that means for your body and your energy level. So anyway, we were hiking around at like 2 30 in the morning full moon which was nice but we were having a conversation like what would what would what would you do if like the sun if you saw the sun just kind of like peek up and then and then go back because like it's sort of the joke is like oh who's ever hiking at 2 30 in the morning you would never see this but what if the

sun just kind of like had a false start like if you're if you're hiking what would you say like how what would it take for you to be convinced that that actually happened and you weren't just hallucinating because you're so tired and it's 2 30 in the morning so i'm thinking what would it be like to be a scout you're like in salt lake you're watching the bees and the fresno grizzlies and you're sitting with like i don't know a dozen other scouts you're watching the game and and you swear that all of a sudden for no reason these players are like hall of fame caliber baseball players in front of you and they just like you were at salt lake the night before and the week before in the previous homes and you're like no this is this is definitely the angels triple a affiliate but you're watching and you're

like i'm pretty sure that guy is better than mike trout i think i think that all of these players are better than mike trout and how much would it all of these players are better than Mike Trout. And how much would it take, if you're that scout, for you to actually speak up because you're sitting in a section of scouts? It'd be like, are you seeing what I think I'm seeing right now? Because there would be some sort of like critical mass where the scouts would think, yeah, whoa, clearly something happened. But it would take a lot for a scout to be convinced because it wouldn't make a lick of sense. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're holding up a radar gun

and suddenly everyone's throwing 105 or something and you're checking the other guy's guns and making sure that yours isn't miscalibrated, and no, everyone's saying that, it's hard to argue with. Or you got your stopwatch out and everyone's running to first in three and a half seconds or something. I mean, I guess you can't deny that. So scouts talk and compare notes. So, yeah, they'd be in the scout section just kind of talking up a storm.

And I guess they would give each other the confidence to file reports that suddenly every AAA player is a potential Hall of Famer. I don't know. You're holding up your gun, and Parker Bridwell throws 108 miles per hour. You ask the other scouts, and they're all like between 107 and 109. And so how many different explanations do you try to research before you file a report that says Parker Bridwell now throws 108 miles per hour. Like you're on the phone with a lot of like radar gun companies and you're talking about like, did the polarity of the earth just like reverse like it does every some tens of thousands of years?

Because you would jump through a lot of hoops before you would understand that one. Yes, definitely. All right. Mike says, this may be more of an article idea than a question for the podcast. Here's looking at you, Jeff.

But what do you make of Seth Lugo's spring stats? 17 strikeouts to three walks in 15 and two-thirds innings. That's a dumb and small sample size, yes. However, pair this with the fact that we know that Seth Lugo throws the spinniest curveball of all time, or at least the last three years. And do we start to think, hmm, breakout? I know it's the Mets, but maybe someone said, hey, Seth Lugo, have you heard of this guy, Rich Hill, et cetera, et cetera. And oh, hey, look what comes up when I Google Seth Lugo curveball. And he links to an article in, I think, the North Jersey paper here. And it's about how the Mets basically realized that Lugo has a good curveball and told him to throw his curveball more, which seems very obvious, but evidently was not. So we talked about Seth Lugo recently as an

example of a player who maybe has been overrated by advanced stats because we know that his curveball has this special spin rate and wasn't clear that he's a good pitcher or even that the curveball is a good curveball. But we know now that the Mets are encouraging him to throw it more. And he has now also thrown two Major League innings this year. And in those two innings, he is not allowed to run. He has struck out four and walked none and allowed no hits. So you can add that to his spring training stats. Are you buying the breakout of seth lugo well he's

a reliever so i don't care uh last spring he had two walks and 10 strikeouts which was pretty good this spring three walks 17 strikeouts even though he relieved in six games the previous spring he was more of a starter so i mean if you want to argue that seth lugo is going to be better now that he seems to be working under the bullpen sure sure, I'll buy it because most players are. I don't know. Is it possible? Do you count it as a breakout if a mediocre starter becomes a good reliever? Because I think that would be something different.

Yeah, I don't know. I guess if he makes the transition better than anyone could have expected him to, then I suppose so. I suppose so, if he doesn't have the typical rule of 17 or whatever it is, where your strikeout rate goes up 17% and your walkout rate goes down 17%, whatever the usual starter to reliever conversion rate is. So I guess if you're one of those cases where you're just a fifth starter and suddenly you're a dominant setup man, then maybe I'd call that a breakout. Yeah, Lugo, at least according to Brooks Baseball, his average fastball is up two and a half miles per hour.

That'll do it. That's relieving for you. And has he thrown the curveball more in those two innings than he did last year? Well, he has, yes, a little bit, but mostly he's just thrown fewer fastballs and more change-ups. Who knew Seth Lugo had a change-up? I didn't. Maybe it's good.

I don't know. Okay. Well, yeah. Anyway, in principle, if a guy has a great pitch and his team encourages didn't maybe it's Good I don't know okay well Yeah anyway in principle if a Guy has a great pitch and his Team encourages him to throw it more And he moves to a role where He can throw it more because he doesn't have

To see hitters two or three times in the same game Then yeah in theory he Should be better so there's That I guess all right We're wrapping up here winding Down but let's take one from Andrew, another Patreon supporter. Let's say Jean-Claude Stanton was under explicit instructions to try to hit a home run and only a home run every time he came up. How many would he hit, assuming a

healthy full season? So Jean-Claude Stanton, fresh off the five strikeout game and being booed by yankees fans if he is trying to hit a home run every time which for all we know he is how many will he actually hit will he hit more or fewer than he would normally well yeah okay so first of all that is what he's trying to do i don't think anyone's ever been like sean carlo situational hitting i think that the the difference you'd see is that he wouldn't walk, or at least he wouldn't try to take walks, right? If the idea is to hit home runs at all costs, then he would swing at more pitches. He would swing at more three-ball pitches.

He wouldn't be content to walk. So he would definitely increase his home runs. I mean, he could probably get close to 100, but that's an awful lot of home runs. So he could probably get to 80? 80 home runs? That sound okay? Yeah. But beyond that, I mean, he's already trying.

Right. He did go through that period right where he was striking out less and hitting for less power. And then he abandoned that period and hit a lot of home runs last year. But I mean, I guess the idea is that if it's really, really obvious that he is trying to do this, then he becomes more exploitable and easier to pitch around. Right. So pitchers could just throw him pitches that are really hard to hit for home runs, even for Giancarlo Stanton. for Giancarlo Stanton. And if he is really committed to this idea of only ever swinging as hard as he possibly can and trying to hit a home run, he is just going to swing and miss it

a lot of pitches outside of the strike zone. I mean, at a certain point, you can just throw him a ball three feet outside and I guess he's technically improving his odds by swinging at it. He can't hit a home run when he doesn't swing. So I guess he would keep swinging at it, but at some point, not swinging becomes the optimal strategy when you're really trying to hit home runs. So this is sort of a narrow interpretation of only

trying to hit home runs. Yeah, that's true, because if he's swinging at everything, then he wouldn't see a strike. Yeah, so I don't know how long it would take for pitchers to realize that, but probably not all that long, I guess. So, yeah, I mean, if pitchers kept pitching him the way that they pitch him, then, yeah, he could certainly hit 80 or something, but why would they do that? So I think that he would end up hitting a lot fewer than he would normally. He, at a certain point, only hit some real mistakes.

So I don't know. I'm going to say he gets to only like 20 or something because he'll just hit enough before everyone realizes what's happening that he can capitalize on that. And then there will be the occasional mistake. But beyond that that he's gonna get goose eggs the rest of the season yeah you've convinced me john carlos hand would hit six home runs okay all right let's take this one this is michael says inspired by an episode of breaking madden i had a thought what would happen if a player's only focus was to beat another team let's say ronald acuna gets so angry at the Braves for service time manipulation

that when he becomes a free agent, he does everything possible to play against the Braves as much as possible. Play for an NLE's team? Too easy, not enough vengeance. Sign for the first team the Braves are scheduled to play and in the contract require a trade to the next team to play the Braves after that series?

Ronald Acuna is so good at this point, 2,000 OPS plus, that teams are happy just to have him for 6 to 20 games a year when playing the Braves. Getting through waivers in August, no team will claim him because they don't want to anger him. September trades, Ronald doesn't care about the postseason because the Braves aren't making it with him playing them 162 times a year. My non-hypothetical questions, how much could a player benefit by just playing

the same opponents every time? How bad could one team be if the best ever player in baseball in this scenario were solely focused on beating that team for 15 years? So even if we don't make it totally outlandish, let's just say this Mike Trout. I don't know. Mike Trout develops a grudge against a certain team and he does everything he can and he is just as good as Mike Trout currently is. So what could he do? I mean, I guess he could do more or less what Michael is suggesting here, play in the same division or just go team to team i don't know if he could really find any takers for that because if he's really just a mercenary going team to team then i don't know i guess it would be collusion for no one to sign him but no one's really getting the benefit of

signing him because everyone is getting the benefit of signing him i don't know what to say to this i could say that if you had a let's say you have the braves and in every single game they face an opponent who has mike trout or i guess a kunya or someone like that so call it i don't know a nine win player over the course of a season and that would be instead of a two win player so then the the braves would effectively be playing opponents who were seven wins better than you would expect and so that would dock the braves not exactly seven wins it would actually dock them a little more than that i think is the way that the math works out but they would be

worse by let's call it i don't know eight or nine wins so then all of a sudden if you think the braves are like a 500 team then they would be something like a almost a 70 win team in under these circumstances now how does this happen well i'll tell you it can't yeah all right that's it oh yeah okay i think that's that's pretty much it yeah i don't know what else what else a player could do to really uh get one team's goat i mean there really isn't a it's a hypothetical scenario mean, there really isn't a, it's a hypothetical scenario, but even so, there isn't a realistic hypothetical scenario that we can break down for this one. But I think you've given it a good faith effort here. So we'll wrap up with one more, also a hypothetical. Real baseball is back. People, you can send us some questions about Real Baseball if you'd like.

But this one is from Ethan. He says, let's say that an eccentric billionaire owner, a popular recurring character in our email shows, has decided that Pete Rose holding the all-time hits record is a disgrace and has decided to do something about it. His plan is an unusual one. He has decided to pluck a random 20-year-old off the street with no baseball experience and sign him to his team. He will hit him first in the lineup every day until either the hits record is broken or this player dies of old age. The terms of the contract are somehow such that the player is not allowed to retire until the hits record is

broken and the owner has left it in his will that the situation must continue after his own death. Do you think it's possible that this player could break the record before he suffered some catastrophic injury at age 60 that prevented him from even swinging a bat? How would you even help this player out? If it's not possible for a random 20-year-old, how much baseball experience would be necessary for this player to have before it was feasible? Did we talk about this or was it just an email response? Just an email response. Okay, so it's not possible it's the first it certainly is not possible with a random 20 year old there's just no no yeah chance at all you would you would be lucky to

get that guy 20 hits yeah so so you kind of need to start hits are already so difficult to come by but you would kind of need to start with someone like Jose Altuve. He's led the AL in hits for like five or six years in a row or something. He started averaging, I don't know, around 200, 210. This is peak prime Jose Altuve. The record is over 4,000 hits. So it's just you would need to start with one of the greatest pure hitters in the world and then have that person play every day and play forever. Because even, you you know you look at

each row and you can give him credit for extra hits that he would have had in his earlier 20s if he were in north america and he's still able to play at the major league level now but it's not like he would get that many hits if he gave him a full season he might get 150 he might get 120 i don't really know might get tired but certainly the aging curve is not gradual when you get into your mid to late 40s yeah so you would need to have almost all of your damage done by each rose age right and we're talking about one of the greatest pure hitters of his generation so that that's your starting point a really great hall of fame hitter yeah i, this is not even a hypothetical. It's kind of just what Pete Rose did himself. He was just a pretty lousy hitter for the last several years of his career. And for part of

that time, he was managing himself and starting himself when otherwise he probably would not have been starting. I mean, you know, his last year he got into 72 games. He had a 61 OPS plus. He was 45 years old. I mean, that's basically what it comes down to. Even Pete Rose, the hit king at 45, was playing part-time and batting 219. So, you know, he had 52 hits that year. If he had kept playing 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, I mean, you's going to be adding maybe a dozen hits a year, a couple dozen hits a year. It's just you can't really significantly add to your totals beyond a certain point unless you're just some sort of physical freak who would continue playing through merit alone. So I don't think it helps that much. Now, you know, batting someone first every day for years, that would make a meaningful difference.

So if you wanted to try that, then you could do that. But yeah, the difference between just having someone retire at 42 and having them play indefinitely, it's just not as big as you would think, I think. So that's kind of a letdown, but it's not so much a matter of longevity on that end. It's about how soon you start and how good you are. Yep. All right. So we will wrap this up here. I do want to give credit to a couple listeners who wrote in whose questions we alluded to earlier in the episode.

Listener who asked about player breakouts and whether there have actually been more lately. That was Joe. Thanks, Joe. And the listener who asked about A.J. Hinch and mind games with Joey Gallo. That was listener Elias. Thank you, Elias. And also the aforementioned Russell Carlton,

whose work we bantered about, frequent guest on this podcast. He has a new book out. It's called The Shift. I'm reading it right now. You can go get it right now. I encourage you to do so. It even includes some work on players bunting against The Shift, as you might have guessed from the title support include Rob Borkowski, Doug Baradon, John McGinley, Jimmy Babowski, and Greg Gabrielson. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at

facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wilde. Now it's 7,600 members. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wilde on iTunes. We always appreciate that. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And please help replenish our mailbag. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcastwithfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will be back as usual with one more show this week, so we look forward to talking to you then. Time is the healer, don't let it pass you by Well time is the healer, but oh how it flies Take a second out, take a second out, take a second out.