Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 12: Sam Walks to His Honda

Episode Date: August 2, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss players who turn down trades to contenders, Yu Darvish, and their standards for playoff starters.

I'm actually not walking to my car. Now I'm walking to my car. This would make a good opening sound effect for the show, your walk to the car every night. Okay, I'm going to drop a shovel. That sounded staged. I said it was staged. It was much more organic the night before when you knocked over the broom unintentionally. Hello, and welcome to Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives daily podcast. Today is August 2nd, and we are recording our dozenth show together.

I'm Sam Miller, and I'm joined by an elegant, acerbic, all-around man of letters who has presided with a certain relish over what he has declared to be the end of American civilization. How's that? Well, you never said my name. Ben Lindberg, how are you doing? I'm doing very well. Do you mind that I've stolen your introduction from a Gore Vidal obituary? No, I mean the man that just passed away, and I am his literary equivalent.

I should have probably practiced once or twice beforehand. Welcome. How are you doing tonight? Very well. Good. Do you have a topic for discussion? Yeah, I suppose you could say that. Alright. I want to talk about players who turn down trades to contenders. Oh, players who turn down trades to contenders.

And that will actually go nicely with my topic, which is you, Darvish. Alright. Who goes first? Why don't you? Okay. So there were some players who turned down trades to contenders. Alfonso Soriano reportedly rejected a trade to the Giants, or at least... Was there a...

Right, right. It wasn't exactly rejected a trade so much as there wasn't a trade because he said he didn't want to go there um i believe uh he wanted to be traded to the dodgers and that didn't happen victory you know happened so he didn't go anywhere and then carlos lee uh who earlier had decided not to go to the angels um and went to the marlins instead then decided not to go to the Yankees and to stay with the Marlins. So, you know, reading the responses to these things, there's sort of a healthy mix of good for him. He's looking out for himself. I don't blame him. And man, this guy must like losing. He doesn't care about winning.

That's not a good attitude to show. I can maybe guess where you come down on this debate, but where do you come down on this debate? Wow. I guess I'm trying not to be too predictable. And now that you've told me that you know where I'm coming from, I think that, um, I guess, you know, to be honest, I don't have a ton of sympathy. Uh, I mean, the, basically, as I understand it, a lot of no trade clauses are basically a, uh, contract leverage, um, issue. They,. They exist so that if the player does get

traded toward the end of their contract, they have a certain amount of leverage to renegotiate if they have options, that sort of a thing. And in that sense, I think that it's great that players would use the powers that they have within their contract to get themselves a better life i have no qualms with players getting uh every dime that's coming to them i generally find it kind of odd i mean i don't blame them i don't want to seem like i'm judging them or anything like that but i find it a little bit odd when a player will uh turn down a trade uh that's basically you know two months um it's not very months of their life. It just doesn't seem to me like that big a burden. I mean, it must be. Like I said, I don't really mind them.

If it really bothers them, they have every right to do it. I'm surprised that so many players would see it as a burden. They move around a lot, as it is. I mean, Carlos Lee has lived in Florida for like 45 minutes, and like you say, he would have gone to a contender. a lot as it is. I mean, Carlos Lee has lived in Florida for like 45 minutes and like you say, he would have gone to a contender. He doesn't, you know, he spends half of his life on the road

anyway. I mean, I guess in Soriano's case, he's still signed forever. So wherever he went, he would be for a while. That's true. Whereas Lee is going to be a free agent, yeah. Yeah, and there are always issues that come up. Derek Lee rejected a trade to the Angels when I was covering the Angels. And we never heard this definitively, but the rumor was that basically his, I believe, daughter has medical needs.

And she had a doctor in, I think, Chicago where they were at the time that they didn't want to leave. in, I think, Chicago, where they were at the time, that they didn't want to leave. And there's probably all sorts of details like that that are either really important in the person's life or seem really important to them in their life, and so I don't begrudge them that. But I don't know. Like the Carlos Lee one kind of baffles me, and the Dempster one kind of surprised me. It always kind of surprised me, to be honest. It worked out well for Dempster in that he got to go to a contender that I guess he wanted to go to more.

But in Lee's case, I mean, I guess it's probably there's a tax component to it. Going from Florida to New York, he would probably lose out on some money, I think. And then more importantly, I guess he would probably lose some playing time since he would be going to the Yankees who have a bunch of first base DH types. And that would have been the case with the Angels also. And as a guy who's not having the greatest season and is about to be a free agent maybe he wants the most plate appearances he can get to make a case that someone should sign him uh so from a personal interest standpoint i i can understand it just aside even aside from the

all the logistical hassles of of changing teams and I don't know that he would be really uprooting anyone since he just got there, as you said. Don't you wish that there was a way that this didn't have to come up for the player every time? I mean, don't you wish there was a way that the teams could clear this with them before it ever got to the media? Because it does seem kind of annoying to everybody involved, including the people who are supposed to be going the other way,

who have been traded and now they have to slink back to the team that didn't want them. Yeah, well, we sort of talked about that when we talked about the Dempster to Atlanta rumors and whether that would change anything secrecy-wise. But I don't know. I don't really have any problem with this. I mean, I never blame a player who goes after the money because I'm guessing the majority of people who criticize the player for doing that

would do the same thing. So I guess it's just a matter of whether they've been hypocritical about it at any point, whether they've had the usual, the standard boilerplate athlete quote about wanting to play for a winner and that's all I care about, just want to win, etc. Once you turn down a trade to a contender, I would think that that sort of cliche would ring pretty hollow if you tried it after that. I don't know, though. I think there's a difference between wanting to play for a winner in the sense that you parachute into a team that has already been winning and the idea of wanting

to win. That going to a winner that is just about to get their ring isn't quite the same accomplishment as being with a team from spring training on. Yeah, that's true. Although you never really hear anyone who does do that and ends up winning a ring say, man, I didn't even contribute that much. I was barely here. Well, Jose Guillen. Yeah, I guess so.

Anyway, it's one of those things that will probably get some negative feedback from, from certain people. If you do it, who don't want to think that players would be motivated by playing time or, or financial concerns, but only about where they can win. Um, I actually don't know if Lee is a guy who's been – how many playoff teams has he been in? I'll have to look as you talk about your topic. But I don't know. I don't particularly blame them, but it does sort of make some of the –

I think it makes some of the platitudes you hear a little more hollow possibly. But I don't blame anyone. So you, Darvishish today pitched very poorly. He pitched very well actually, and then he pitched very poorly in the same breath basically. I'm going to steal a statistic that came across the wire from ESPN, which is that when he's facing a team he's already played this year, his ERA is now 6.45 in nine starts. This is a narrative about Yu Darvish that I've been hearing

since early on in the season, in fact, almost immediately after he started facing teams for a second time. And it seems to me that people have been burying you darvish uh after almost every bad start he's made uh since well in fact i think i did a bp book event after his second or third start and he had walked i think five guys for the second start in a row and there were people there who wanted to bury him um and he's having a an okay year not a great year um i don't have a real coherent thought about what i want to talk about with you, Darvish. I guess there are kind of two little things. One is he now has an ERA plus of about, I think, 103 it'll be.

And I just wonder, I want to get your opinion of when a playoff starter stops in your mind being good enough to be a playoff starter uh we saw teams trying to upgrade their rotations this week because they didn't like their fourth starter and um they wanted to do them with some pitchers who themselves aren't particularly good and who if they had already had that picture they might not have thought that guy was a worthy playoff starter like Joe Blanton. And so I wanted to just do a quick little quiz for you and figure out where we think the line is for an acceptable playoff starter. So I'm going to name a name and then you tell me yes or no. All right. And just assume good health and assume just that you're – not based on what he's done in the last week, but your general sense about it.

And we're talking any game in a playoff series. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, would you be comfortable with this guy in your playoff rotation? Mm-hmm. All right. Mark Burley.

Yes. Okay. Mark Burley has a 109 ERA plus over the past three years. So I think that anything above 109, we're safe. So Aaron Horang. I mean, comfortable. I would certainly want to do better than Aaron Herring if possible. And I guess maybe it depends on where Aaron Herring would be pitching also

as kind of a fly ball guy. Ben, it's a 10-minute podcast. Sorry. Sorry. These decisions about postseason starters are only made in snap judgment. I guess I would say no. Okay. He's a 92 ERA plus, so we're going to say the line is between 92 and 109.

Derek Holland. Yeah. Okay. He's a 104, so we're between 92 and 104. We're narrowing it down. Maybe we should just say a league average starter would be. I'm getting there. I'm getting there.

Okay. Jason Vargas. This is when I want to talk about where Jason Vargas is again, but I guess no. Okay. He's 98. Let's see uh gavin floyd no and uh john danks john danks healthy john danks um yeah okay so floyd is 100 and danks is 101 so that works out nicely my era plus detector is perfectly calibrated it is so we've got darvish at 103 or 104 so we are concluding that he is an

acceptable fourth starter for a playoff bound team uh which is what he looks to be now that the rangers have added dempster and um so I guess the Rangers don't have to worry because they've got four guys who fit our qualification. These are all ERA pluses over the previous three seasons, by the way. Yeah. Except for Darvish. They could worry a little bit about the fact that we're even having that discussion about you, Darvish.

Yeah, I mean, I think they would like him to be their ace and to be much better than he is. I think real quick about Darvish, those nine starts that ESPN cited where he has that bad ERA, it's not all that bad. He's been a little bit wilder than normal. He has walked 36 batters in those nine starts, which is four per outing. He's walked a little bit more than three per outing in his other 11 starts. His strikeout rate is about the same. His home run rate is only very slightly worse. And really, I think that I'm not totally dismissing the idea,

but obviously Darvish is more likely to have faced a team a second time later in the season than earlier in the season, naturally. And if you look at Darvish's season, it really breaks down not really just by the first time you've seen him and the second time you've seen a team, but really by month. And his stats have been fairly steady by month across the board, except that in April he left 84% of runners on base. In May, he stranded 72%. In June, he stranded 69%. And in July, he stranded 62%. And while Darvish has been way too wild to be considered a top pitcher this year, I don't think we've actually seen a great deal of difference between April and July,

and I think the Rangers still have a pretty reasonable pitcher in their rotation. Yeah, and that's always kind of the narrative with Japanese pitchers, or often it is, that a lot of their success initially relies on deception, which is not the case with Darvish. He's not really one of those guys who has a herky-jerky motion. With him, it's, I guess, more about his approach and the nibbling and batters letting balls go and not swinging at them when they would have earlier. But RJ did an article earlier this year where he looked at Japanese pitchers as they face teams again, or face batters in more and more plate appearances and couldn't really find any sign that there was

a decline in effectiveness. And I mean, I sort of, I expect Darvish to be better from now on than he has been to this point. Well, once again, it becomes clear by the end of the show that we should have had RJ on instead of ourselves. Ben, it was nice talking to you. This was fun. And I'll talk to you again tomorrow. Yes, you will.