Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1217: The Sound of Strikes

Episode Date: May 17, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the fallout from Robinson Cano‘s 80-game suspension, the league’s latest adjustment to Shohei Ohtani, Jason Castro‘s injury and Willians Astudillo’s opportunity, and the resurgent Jordan Lyles, then answer listener emails about the topsy-turvy National League, the evolution of orthodoxy about bullpens, the impact of Willson Contreras on Cubs […]

Sitting on the back deck, riding me a bad check, bending down to tie your lace. One, you were the lonely, two, you were my only, three, you hadn't left this place. Around, around, our love came down like the Berlin Wall. Deny, deny, you can't deny, you let the curtain fall. You let the curtain fall. Hello and welcome to episode 1217 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FedGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of FedGraphs. Hello, Jeff. Hello. So last week we talked about how Robinson Cano and his contract were aging well. Gotta say, that conversation has not aged particularly well. There have been some developments in that area since last week. Well, there's a double whammy here. Robinson Cano, of course, was hit by a pitch and knocked out for a long time, and then he was hit by a suspension and knocked out for an even longer time.

So, on the plus side, we no longer care that Robinson Cano needs surgery for his broken hand, because he will have ample time to recover. I don't think that we need to maybe explain the basics of what's happened here. Robinson Cano's news is broken through

to the extent that it's even been written Robinson Cano's news is broken through to the extent that it's even been written on websites that usually don't write about baseball. Robinson Cano is a celebrity and people love to judge athletes that cheat. This is a repeating conversation that we get to have whenever players are suspended. This one, more surprising than the average one. And in the back of my head, I've always known the Mariners had Nelson Cruz, who, of course, was suspended for PDs in, what was it, 2015? I kind of forgot about Dee Gordon's. Yeah, even more recent.

Yeah, they cover the whole spectrum of guys who have been suspended for PEDs. And there have been messages of support coming from Cruz and Dee Gordon. Gordon talking about how the time on the sidelines when he was unable to help the Marlins was the most difficult time of his career. And I don't know how fans are supposed to deal with these messages, because on the one hand, it's like, yeah, great, solidarity with the team,

but also he got suspended for performance-enhancing drugs. People are entitled to be kind of upset, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah yeah i would think so i mean of course he technically got suspended for a diuretic which is often used to mask the use of performance enhancing drugs and he opted not to appeal this sentence which suggests that because the suspension was not automatic in the case of this substance, that MLB or someone demonstrated to the satisfaction of the independent person appointed to adjudicate these things that he had been using that to mask whatever substance was the performance enhancer.

So he gets the 80-game suspension. And yeah, obviously, I think there's a difference in how people remember these things and think about these things, depending on how good the player is. I think Dee Gordon and Nelson Cruz, they took plenty of abuse when it actually happened. But then people just forget about it, and they can kind of skate by because who cares? We're not really talking about the legacies of Nelson Cruz and Dee Gordon quite as much. Neither of them is an all-time great or a Hall of Famer or anything like that chances, which we're getting so far ahead of ourselves here. I mean, he's got, what, five years left on his contract. end of that, then there are another five years before he becomes eligible even. So we're talking 10 years from now before anyone can even vote on him, and 20 years before he falls off the ballot if he's not elected before then. So we have plenty of time. We have decades to talk about the

Robinson Cano case. But I guess we go right to Hall of Fame because really we're using that as a proxy for what do we think about Robinson Cano and how does this affect our opinion of his performance and his worth and his value as a person. As someone who's personally never cared about the Hall of Fame one lick, it's actually been kind of liberating because I see, oh, Cano is suspended. What does this do for his Hall of Fame? I don't care. Just going to skip those articles, freeze up some time in my day. Of course, it is important because the Hall of Fame is a museum that captures a set of baseball history. So it is relevant.

But like you said, it's just so far away. What was the initial Bob Nightingale tweet, which was not unique to him? So many writers write like Cano suspended steroids, immediately destroying his chances at the Hall of Fame. We just don't, my gut feeling is that in 10 years from now, the voting pool will be such that we will have PED users, proven PED users in the Hall of Fame. I think that's going to happen. If it's not Barry Bonds, it's going to be Alex Rodriguez. And just that is clearly the direction that the voters are trending.

Doesn't make anyone dumb, doesn't make anyone smart, just is the direction of the younger voters. People just don't care as much anymore. dumb doesn't make anyone smart just is the direction of the younger voters people just don't care as much anymore so realistically i think that robinson cano did not destroy his legacy he altered his legacy but in the same way that no one seems to really mind that david ortiz etc we have robinson cano etc and uh it's i don't know His statement is that he was suspended for this diuretic because he was taking it for what? High blood pressure or something. Yeah. He said unspecified medical conditions, I think. And someone else, maybe Mark Feinstein, reported that it had something to do with high blood pressure.

Yeah. Just as a rule of thumb, I want to give players the benefit of the doubt often. But I mean, when you are one of the highest paid players in sports, you've got to understand what the rules are, and you've got to understand people aren't going to believe your stories. So Robinson Cano, he's going to be in it here for a little while, and of course he is now ineligible for playoff participation, much like the Mariners for the past 16 years, so maybe that won't matter so much.

But we are now to the point where Dee Gordon is moving back to second base. So that's how committed the Mariners were to Dee Gordon as a center fielder. He will be a center fielder unless the Hall of Fame second baseman breaks his hand and gets suspended for performance-enhancing drugs. Dee Gordon is moving back, which means that Dee Gordon will take over for Gordon Beckham, who's taking over for Robinson Cano, which frees up a position in the outfield for, I guess, Guillermo Heredia, which means the Mariners are bad now. Bring back Ichiro.

Yeah, I've seen conspiracy theories that maybe Jerry DiPoto acquired Dee Gordon because he knew about the pending Cano news because this positive test was triggered at some point over the offseason. We don't know when. That's probably not the case, but it doesn't much matter either way. Well, I can tell you, according to at least local reports, Robinson Cano did not alert anyone with the team about the suspension until yesterday being, I guess, Monday. So no one knew anything. Now, when that report came out, some people were like well shouldn't he have told the team shouldn't he have told his teammates that something was happening but i

my understanding is based on the the way that the rules are written cano had zero obligation to inform anyone and of course he was appealing his own suspension so maybe he thought in the back of his head that it could go away there's the other conspiracy theory that he dropped his appeal because he got injured, but that is also not true because the appeal process takes a while, I guess, or I should say dropping the appeal process takes a while, and he was already trying to drop it when he got hit in the hand. So that's just a wonderful little coincidence, and it sheds light on the bizarre loophole that you can serve your suspension

while you are already not playing. That is odd, right? I wonder why that's the case. It probably shouldn't be the case. It's really dumb. Yeah. So, I mean, I wrote about this from the perspective of, yeah, it's surprising in the sense that we don't get that many major leaguers suspended for PDs or PD-related activities anymore. I think there have been four or so since the start of last season. Most of those tend not to be very prominent, although Starling Marte was one of them last season. So it's surprising in that sense. It's also not surprising in the sense that we know that

high-level athletes are intense and competitive, and they are always looking for an edge and that is not necessarily only true of fringy guys like i made a contrast between cano and brandon mann the rangers reliever who made his debut his major league debut this week and is 33 he's actually turning 34 today wednesday so happy birthday brandon mann he's been bouncing around pro ball for 17 years, half his life in many teams, minor league systems and Japan and independent ball. He's someone who had an 80 game suspension a couple of years ago.

And with him, you sort of say, well, okay, if someone is going to try to cheat or get an edge, it would be someone like Brandon Mann. It makes all the sense in the world. He wants to get to the majors. He wants to provide for his future family. He's not going to get there otherwise. You can kind of understand how that happens. Whereas with Cano, you can't really think of many players who currently have less incentive to take something that might get them suspended than Robinson Cano in that he has already guaranteed himself close to $300 million career by the end of this contract. He is already a Hall of Fame level player.

There's really only downside here. He's accomplished just about everything a player can accomplish in a career and now has just jeopardized his reputation. So you wonder, well, why would someone like that do this? And of course, we know that Alex Rodriguez did this and Barry Bunz did this, and these were already on the short list of the best players in baseball history. So there's really no predicting. things. We don't even know what he took. We don't know what the effect of it was. And if you want to take, I guess, the most pessimistic or negative interpretation of this, you can say, well, this is probably not an isolated event. There was a report that he was tangentially linked to biogenesis back in 2013. It was like someone who was associated with his foundation received a shipment and they never pinned anything on him. But now in light of this news, maybe you attach some greater weight to that. There was a writer,

a reporter who tweeted that Canoe was about to be suspended back in 2012 and then apologized for that tweet. It never actually happened. But now you wonder, well, I wonder whether he knew something. Was that based on actual information? So you could come up with a story where Robinson Cano's whole career is PD-fueled. And of course, he wasn't the top prospect. And he suddenly burst onto the scene. And maybe his whole career was made possible by these substances. And he's been taking them the whole time and eluding detection until now. It's not impossible. There's no way to prove that. I think it's unlikely. I think Robinson Cano was really good at baseball and would have been before baseball was actually enforcing anything. Cano knew the risks and he did what he did anyway. So if someone decides not to vote for him, I understand that position. I haven't decided what I will do because, again, I have 10 years to think about this and I don't intend to spend most of those 10 years thinking about Robinson Cano. But one day you and I will have to make a decision, presumably, about whether we want to check his name on the ballot or not.

Well, I'm still like seven years away. So who knows if I'll even still be writing about baseball by then. That's so much baseball to write about. But on the other hand, a lot of people in the BBWA not writing so much about baseball. That's a different conversation. so much about baseball that's a different conversation this does so on the one hand i'm less hurt by ped suspensions than other people are because i am just generally more forgiving about it i understand the incentives i understand why players do it i understand that we hold them to impossible standards and players don't like to age they want to perform at peak levels i get it

just from a scientific perspective i'm kind of curious about the players who do use them and how much better they get on the other hand when you see something like this just as you were talking about we don't know how long cano has been using and all of a sudden it makes you think twice about the fact that cano was never that good of a prospect with the yankees and then he just burst onto the scene he's one of those non-top 100 guys who became like a superstar which are not very common cory kluber being another one jose altuve i don't think they're users. But on the other hand, who knows? And as far as the incentives go, I guess it's hard for us to understand why someone in Cano's position or Alex Rodriguez's position would use.

But then maybe it's not. Because if you think about many of the richest or most powerful people in the world, they tend to only want to gather more riches and power. It seems like when you are at the top of something, you are so one-track minded, you just want to accumulate more and more of what you already have. We see this with baseball contracts. Players aren't like, well, what am I going to do with an extra $10 million? I'm fine with 50.

I'm just going to sign for less. Players try to get the most. Everything is about making a statement. It's how everything is about improving your legacy and being the most you can possibly be. So in that sense, it is not too hard to explain. And you want to talk about something else? Yeah, I guess we should. Condolences to Mariners fans who didn't need more bad news. They were already long shots. I mean, they've had a good record thus far, but have played pretty much like a 500 team and kind of needed everything to go right to hang in the races.

And I know they're barely out of both races right now, but losing Cano makes it difficult for them to stay in this. It's still possible, but it was unlikely before. It's more unlikely now and if they did somehow manage to make the playoffs Cano would not be able to play so not that the Mariners needed any more bad news or things going against them after this decades-long streak of not making the playoffs but they have one more thing stacked against them sorry Mariners fans Gordon Beckham had a 412 OBP in AAA, so maybe this is the year.

He's only 31 years old. Bring back Dustin Ackley. Bring them all in. Sure. All right. Let's move on. Is Brett Lowery still in baseball? Well, we can talk about that another day. I've wondered about that, actually.

Yeah. Okay. So I have something that's kind of exciting. It's also got a bad side to it, but I think it's exciting. I think you will be excited. Maybe you've thought about this. Maybe you haven't. Jason Castro has undergone knee surgery.

That's bad. That's bad for Jason Castro. That's bad for the Twins. Supposed to be a four- to six-week procedure, but I just saw this morning. It is a season-ender. He had meniscus damage. Jason Castro's gone, so the Twins' starting catcher now will be Mitch Garver. Twins' backup catcher now will be Bobby Wilson.

Hanging out at AAA, Williams Astadillo. The third string catcher now will be Bobby Wilson, hanging out at AAA, Williams Estadillo. And he is there now, as I presume, the third string catcher with the Twins. The only guy standing in his way for a major league job is Bobby Wilson. Williams Estadillo. Historically, that bodes pretty well for Williams Estadillo. I know Bobby Wilson just hit his first homer in six years or something, but good for him. But the fact that it was his first homer in that long bodes well. So yeah, Williams, all right, the stud.

He's a major leaguer, and he's also on my minor league free agent draft team. So I have two reasons to root for him. Not quite a major leaguer yet. He is not on the 40-man roster. Now, I don't know if the Twins are going to do anything. They're probably content with Bobby Wilson for now. And Astrodillo, he's only batting 250 in triple a so far but he did hit well in triple a last year with arizona and importantly he's got 81 plate appearances and he has struck

out twice he is being extremely williams astrodio about everything here he's even stolen two bases out of two opportunities put down a sack bunt, hit a sack fly. He's got a triple. I don't know what's going on with Williams Estadillo, but he is clearly trying to do everything he can to get noticed. And all of a sudden, look, I get that Bobby Wilson's probably a great dude. I get that he's got an inspirational home run now, post-game interview with Ken Rosenthal, I think, and everything. I just can't really care when Williams Estadillo is hanging out in AAA. He's caught a couple base runners he's been involved in a couple double plays i'm just reading statistics i don't know if these are impressive

or not but astadio is closer than he has ever been in his professional career only 26 years old give him a chance it's a matter of time now come on twins do the right thing here. So in accordance with our podcast policy to talk about Shohei Otani, well, basically all the time, but especially when either of us writes about him, I wrote something about him. I will briefly mention it, and I'm guessing this won't be a huge surprise to you, but we've talked about the adjustments that Otani has made as a pitcher, throwing more breaking balls, having better command of those breaking balls, just throwing more strikes with everything. He has four pitches that are working now. And at the plate, of course, he has continued to produce. He batted second on Tuesday, which was exciting with Trout leading off.

I love that. And the interesting thing, early in the season, we talked about and you wrote about the fact that there was a book on Shohei Otani, right, which had been predicted prior to the season, that his weak point supposedly was inside. And so everyone was going to try to pound him inside. And that is exactly what happened early in the season. No one was seeing more inside pitches than Shohei Otani. We know how that worked out for pitchers, not very well. So I looked just lefties, right? Lefties prior to May 1st, Shohei Otani had 49.2% of his pitches were on the inner third or inside off the plate. That was the highest percentage of any left-handed hitter,

maybe all hitters, I don't know. Since then, since May 1st, he has the lowest percentage of pitches on the inner third of the plate or inside. He is down to 18.1%. And if you set the minimum somewhere, wherever I set the minimum, there's no lefty who has seen a greater percentage of his pitches, not on the inside part of the plate. So essentially, like, I get it. I understand that this is how these things work. We've both written about many previous adjustments like this. Pitchers or hitters, they try one thing. It works or it doesn't, and they adjust accordingly.

One thing, it works or it doesn't, and they adjust accordingly. But it seems like it should be more complicated than this. You enter the season, you say, okay, the book on him, you pitch him inside. So then you throw inside more than anyone else gets thrown inside to. That doesn't work. So you say, let's do the opposite of that and throw nothing inside. And obviously that hasn't really stopped him either we know that he can hit pitches everywhere so it doesn't really seem like the answer to the riddle of how to retire Shohei Otani is throw every pitch either here or there maybe you should throw pitches all

over the place it's it's less predictable that way just kind of how you pitch to every other hitter you know yeah I was wondering when when you see something like this and people are like all right there's a book on it the thing about pitching to a guy is not if he has a vulnerability you don't exclusively pitch to that vulnerability you're supposed to mix in some other pitches and then if he makes an adjustment you're supposed to keep you just don't't go from zero to 100 and then back to zero. So I know, like, I did see that on Tuesday, Otani came up. They're facing the Astros, right? And he was getting pitched inside a little bit by the Astros.

And I kind of cheat. Whenever I look at the Astros, I figure whatever they're doing is like the most cutting edge of whatever anyone's doing. So the Astros are on top of whatever the recent trends are. So I don know maybe it's already swinging back and forth but it is funny you don't really think about it often we'd write about hot streaks and adjustments and all these things but everything really is cyclical players are constantly adjusting to other players and i guess with someone like shohei otani what you're likely to see at least at the beginning is extreme swings as teams just try to figure him out. But yeah, you can't do it like that. You got to be more like 60-40, maybe now 40-60.

That's the way it's supposed to work. Yeah, I'm sure they'll get the hang of it eventually. I don't know. It just seems so simplistic. I wonder whether the scouting reports have changed from throw everything inside to throw nothing inside, or whether pitchers themselves have just taken it upon themselves and said, well, I threw inside and that didn't work. So, I mean, it's not necessarily the same pitchers who were trying the opposite of the thing that wasn't working before. It's largely

different pitchers. I guess word has gotten around, but you wouldn't think it would be that reactive. Anyway, there will be an equilibrium eventually, but it's amusing to me that it has swung from one opposite end of the spectrum to the other so quickly. And you wonder how much of the original book, the original book being from a few months ago, was just about Otani when he had his big leg kick, but he dropped it in spring training, like it away quickly so i don't know i don't i always i i assume that teams are smarter about these things than we are but probably they're not because teams can't cover everything in exhaustive detail teams can't arrive at the right answer for everything all the time there's just too much to keep track of especially when you're talking

about players on the other team what you're most concerned about are the players on your. So I don't know how in-depth teams really go with their scouting reports and their approaches to opponents, but they're probably figuring, well, Otani's hit some inside pitches. We better pound him away and get him looking over there. It's the long game. Whatever. So Jordan Lyles almost threw a perfect game. Yeah.

Yeah. My favorite thing about that is that last year, out of every pitcher who faced at least 300 opponents not uh not too large examples as jordan lyles had the fifth highest ops allowed he was bad it's a bad pitcher just last season he took a perfect game into the eighth inning against the colorado rockies who were ultimately shut out by the padres jordan lyles i did not even realize was in the starting rotation this year for the Padres or any team. The Rockies' offense is bad.

Rockies' offense outside of Colorado, even worse. When Jordan Lyles is throwing a perfect and like a dominant perfect game, too. That's part on Lyles and that's part on the people Lyles is facing. The Rockies' bad offense. The Dodgersgers bad team the diamondbacks declining team and their best player is now injured for a month or two not a great division over there in the west the giants they'd still have madison bumgarner and they don't have anything in left field and that division is supposed to be a strength and still i think there are four teams that could conceivably win it this

season but not very good. Yeah, the Dodgers. I mean, people are comparing their record to the Marlins, the Tigers, and it's like neck and neck. It's really kind of shocking even at this point in the season. Let's answer a question related to that. So we're doing emails. It's just us today going to dig into this backlog of emails we've built up lately. So Roland says, with the Yankees scraping past the Red Sox,

the American League seems to be shaping up as expected. Not exactly, but there are no real surprises here. Most predictions had the Yankees and Boston both vying for this division, but the Yankees just edging it. Cleveland, the only team in the AL Central to be worth a damn. AL West running Houston, LA, Seattle, et cetera. The National League, however, seems to be all over the place. Compared to most predictions, it seems like random shuffling.

I appreciate it is only mid-May, the sample is small, and the season is long. Also, as discussed, it is more statistically unlikely that predictions end up being correct than otherwise. Is it unusual, however, for one league to be so out of kilter relative to the other? Is there a reason why, or is it simply that this is an outlying snapshot and things will soon randomize or revert? Well, we probably have similar answers, so I want to hear what you have to say about this first. Well, I don't think it means much that one league has been unpredictable. Really, it's partly the American League, right? Also, just in that the entire AL Central is still under 500. You know who has the second worst bullpen in the majors? The Indians. Exactly. We're going to answer a question about that in just a second, so save it.

But the Indians are technically leading the division, but by half a game as we speak, are technically leading the division, but by half a game as we speak, and they are under 500. So kind of what was predicted, but also not at all what was predicted. And then you have other teams that are maybe exceeding expectations in certain ways there. But certainly it looks more like we expected it to look than the National League, where you have the preseason favorites. The Nationals are in third place as we speak. The Cubs are in third place. The Nationals are in third place as we speak. The Cubs are in third place. The Dodgers are in fourth place and are getting to be in dire straits at this point. So things are looking very topsy-turvy, and I don't know that it means anything, but I welcome this just because people were worried that this was going to be such a predictable season

that everything would shake out exactly like the projections said it would. And that is usually not the case. So the thing I'm reminded of, and this will ring a bell with you, is 2015. We've had a lot of seasons that felt like they were supposed to be really predictable lately. It turns out, no. Maybe more like half the time. So in 2015, i remember writing an article around mid-season that the the national league was sorting itself out pretty much exactly like

it was supposed to uh nationally made plenty of sense it was boring and it was what we expected and in the american league it was something like midway through the year there was a stronger relationship with the opposite of the pre-season projections than the actual pre-season projections the american the american league was almost literally upside down from what we expected it to be, which was fun and also a little bit humiliating for those of us who are supposed to be smart and be able to analyze what's happening in baseball.

It's not true. Every time I go on Chicago Radio every Tuesday for a little weekly segment and they bring me on as this baseball expert, I get something wrong every single time. The other week i was singing the praises of lucas giolito whoops he's bad so yeah uh 2015 is what i'm reminded of now over the second half i remember analyzing the uh projections and the history etc and even even in the middle of the year you still find more signal in the in the projections than in the actual standings teams do kind of find

their level more often than not over the remainder of time but the more time that passes where the standings look bizarre the less time there is for them to work themselves out so that's what's fun we're a quarter of the way through in the national league central has four teams within one game of the lead yeah that is fun and yeah we've gotten this far without any of those fears coming to fruition. And we're at the point now where it's maybe likely that most of these divisions, if you look on an individual basis, you could say, okay, the Dodgers are maybe no longer the favorite, but it'd probably still take the Cubs over any of these teams that they're essentially tied with or barely trailing. And the Nationals are a game and a half back. So it's fairly likely that those things shake out more or less the way that we expected them to. But we're at the point now where if you kind of combine all the odds, you'd expect an upset somewhere probably at this point. And that at least is good in the sense that we don't want everything to look exactly

like we thought it would look and then have to just sort of play out the string for the second half of the season agreed all right and i teased a bullpen question so this comes from matthew for many years the prevailing wisdom was that bullpens were things that were best cobbled together during the regular season or off season smart writers would ridicule teams that expended scarce resources in trading for what were sarcastically called proven closers, and those teams would be compared unfavorably with those teams that tried out some no-name pitchers during the course of the year and for whom the unit gelled. A few years ago, that narrative changed, and now we've reached a point where bullpens are assessed and ranked preseason, and where the expectations for teams are based in part upon the expectation that a

bullpen can be built in the pre-season in a way that the team can realistically rely on, at least as well as a team can assemble a lineup or rotation. So my question is, is my recollection wrong or has there been a change in the Saber metric prevailing wisdom? If the latter, is this based on superior metrics or data measurements that enable teams and analysts to review relievers in a way that cannot be done before? Or is there something else that is going on? And I figured Cleveland's bullpen implosion might be a good way to segue into this question. Yeah, it doesn't help that Andrew Miller was hurt for a few weeks, some sort of hamstring thing. So he came back without a rehab stint, I believe, and he walked the world in his first game back.

So that's not good. But also, when you look at the Cleveland bullpen, they lost Brian Shaw. They lost the other one they had, whose name I'm forgetting. Here's the thing. The Indians came into the season with a thinner bullpen. And it is better than it's looked so far, but they have had their soft underbelly exposed so there has been a shift i i know that we have written more about bullpens over the past several years and more favorably about bullpens part of it is because we've also written about how bullpens are occupying more of the burden of course the royals put bullpens

in the forefront of all of our minds and i think that's going to be unshakable bullpens aren't going away bullpens are getting deeper bullpens are more important they're throwing more innings they're throwing more high leverage innings they are important so therefore it makes sense to write about them more but i do i have a hunch i haven't written about this yet because i haven't done the math but there were a lot of relievers signed to two or three year contracts this past winter there was a run on relie. I remember it being pretty much the only activity in the market around the time of the winter meetings. And my hunch is that on balance, that group is not done very well to this point. This is not biased only by Juan Nicasio in Seattle, but that has been part of it.

And whatever Greg Holland has been doing in St. Louis, that's a kind of a different situation but in any case I have a feeling that there are a lot of good relievers who emerge every season and they get they get written about increasingly by people like us and they are easy to notice because they pile up a bunch of strikeouts but I don't think that reliever performance is necessarily so sustainable year over year i'm thinking anecdotally of uh like aj minter is a is a guy with the braves who had a unbelievable like little september stretch last year came up he threw 15 innings at the end of the season last year with the braves two walks 26 strikeouts absurdly good and this year in 17 innings he's got 12 walks and 15 strikeouts boring bad reliever all of a sudden and i think i don't know what it is about relievers and it's part of it is just the

sample size that they accumulate but i think it's actually dangerous to invest in non-elite relievers before the season because you just don't know how much that is going to carry over and then it would make sense to add during the season when i think i guess if i had to simplify i think first to second half reliever performance is probably more reliable than season to season reliever performance when you're talking about guys who aren't the absolute cream of the crop and even kenley jansen this year doesn't look like he used to. Yeah. And you did a post, what was it, not long ago, early this year, maybe, just continuing to show that there is less consistency in team bullpen performance from year to year than there is in, say, team hitting performance or starting pitcher performance. It's because of the sample in part. Maybe it's because of the talent level of

the relievers or how they're used but for whatever reason or a confluence of reasons there's just less consistency in year to year and that is as true today as it was before or at least it's it's still true to a certain extent so i think you still can't really count on bullpens any more than you could in the past. And there's more appreciation now, I think, for leverage and how that matters. I think in the past we would just dismiss that and say, well, you don't really credit it to the reliever because the manager is just putting him in that position. And that's true, but it is still an important role one way or another. And we know now that it's increasingly important in the postseason because teams are more and more willing to ride those guys harder in October and are just generally using them more in the regular season. So as you said,

it's more important now, but it hasn't reached the point where it's stable and dependable and probably never will. I can at least say this much. So at Fangraphs, we have the positional power ranking series that comes out before the year, and we rate every position based on how they're projected. The projected number one bullpen this year was the Yankees. They currently have the number one bullpen. The projected 30th place bullpen was the Royals. They currently have the 30th ranked bullpen. So there's something there.

The Astros have been good. They were supposed to be. Red Sox good. They were supposed to be. But there's just enough weirdness in here. The Indians' bullpen has been terrible. The Dodgers' bullpen has been terrible. It's a hit or miss. Let's go with hit or miss and then move on. winning and are not. Well, they're winning, but maybe not quite as much as people thought. Matt says, I'm flummoxed by how bad the Cubs pitchers have been recently. Quintana and Darvish have been downright bad, and Hendricks, while still good, is not what he once was. Lester is also running into problems regularly in late innings. Chatwood is also sort of a mess. The starter's FIP is all over four, and other than Chatwood, all over 4.5. Quintana and Darvish have FIPs over 5.

We have four arguably top 20 pitchers, three of them were top 10 in war in 2016, who now suddenly really suck and everyone can seem to hit. I've been wondering about why. Could it be the new pitching coach, Jim Hickey? But that doesn't make sense to me, as he was great in Tampa Bay, and Cubs pitching had issues last year as well under Bosworth. Then I came across this ranking of Wilson Contreras' framing via a comment during an athletic chat with Sahad of Sharma. Check it out, he's the worst in baseball at negative six fielding runs above average. That's his overall defense, twice as bad as Chris Iannetta, who is

also bad, negative three or so. And this comes after he made a big deal about a new approach for framing earlier this year that would solve the problem. His approach was suspect to me, just doing what he did before. And anyway, he's gotten much worse at it, according to the stats. I wonder if this framing is a factor for the pitching. In thinking about it, we have three pitchers who are very dependent on getting close calls for success as they don't have a lot of velocity. Quintana, Hendricks, and Lester. Might not matter for Darvish. Might not matter

for Chatwood. I watched the last few games and Contreras' glove is all over the place. He seems terrible at catching pitches. I also wonder about his pitch calling and maybe the fact that he can't go to the mound repeatedly is hurting him. His arm is so great I always thought of him as an outstanding catcher outside of hitting, but maybe that's not the case. Curious as to what you guys think. So yeah, I was just observing the other day that the Cubs and White Sox are the two worst framing teams in baseball this season, according to Baseball Prospectus. One of those may be less surprising than the other. I don't like watching Wilson Contreras catch because I think it's ugly, and now all of a sudden I didn't think this was ever going to be the case. But if I'm a snob about anything,

I'm a snob about the cleanliness of catchers receiving pitches. It's a weird place to be, but you know, you don't always know what you're going to be when you grow older. So looking at baseball savant, I'm just looking at, you can select pitches around the edges

of the zone as a category. And you can look at the rate of called strikes out of all taken pitches. And the Cubs have gotten 45 percent strikes on edge calls the league average is 48 these are small differences but the cubs are fourth worst here only the rangers pirates and white socks are worse pirates surprise me they have francisco cervelli but i don't know maybe he's only concentrating on his hitting these days so i do think that contrarians is a factor here especially with a guy like lester

or quintana you would think that these are like you remember back in the day lester and david ross had this unbelievable symbiotic relationship where ross is worth like 10 runs a season to to lester alone just getting these called strikes a few inches off the plate and i think with those fastball cutter guys pitching around the the fringes is important. On the other hand, I was actually looking at Quintana on a hunch just this morning, and his called strike rate around the edges is really not that much lower than it's been in the recent past. And he was good last year. He was good the year before that. He's a good pitcher. So I think this goes beyond just Wilson Quintana's framing. Of course, that is a factor. I have no idea how to get into the pitch calling that is very

complicated but i would i would say that most of this is probably on the pitchers and it's bizarre that tyler chatwood is the guy who's helping to keep this rotation look somewhat respectable considering his walks per nine innings is almost eight tyler chatwood has walked almost eight batters per nine innings yeah that's not good not good. And that's obviously not just Wilson Contreras and not just any catcher. I mean, it's definitely a factor if you have a catcher who's hurting you in framing, that's going to make your pitchers look worse

if the stat is not adjusted for that. But at this point, teams aren't really running riot domits out there anymore. So there aren't many guys who are just going to make an entire pitching staff look bad because they're not getting the borderline calls that they could be. Baseball Perspectives has a leaderboard for run values for the components of deserved run average. This is wonky, but deserved run average is the Baseball Perspectus pitching stat that tries to take everything under the sun into account. And this leaderboard has the values for framing alone. So you can look up and you can see in theory, or I guess in practice, if the stat is correct,

how many runs a pitcher has been cost or benefited based on framing. And if you sort by lowest framing runs totals, you do see a bunch of Cubs at the top, but the numbers are very small. It's Udarvish has, according to this, been hurt by framing more than any other pitcher except Daniel Mengden, but it's half a run. So half a run for Udarvish,

four-tenths of a run for John Lester, three-tenths half a run for you Darvish Four tenths of a run for John Lester Three tenths of a run for Chatwood Two tenths of a run for Kyle Hendricks Quintana, two tenths of a run So you add all these up And it's a win maybe Or less And I guess there is a possibility

That it's underrating the effects On particular pitchers Who are very dependent on framing or something, but these are the best estimates we have, and the numbers suggest what you would think, but also that it doesn't matter all that much that these guys are more responsible for their own poor performance than Wilson Contreras is. Wilson Contreras says. Ryan, Patreon supporter, says, what would the response be if the baseball gods decreed that the Yankees and Padres must swap their entire rosters overnight? Let's suppose this includes all minor leaguers in the systems. Would Yankees fans decide that the new Padres were the real Yankees and support those players over the new Yankees? Would they instead root for the laundry and suddenly Franchi Cordero is the most popular player in the Bronx? Would the Yankees attempt to trade prospects for more established players? Would the Padres be compelled to trade high-priced players to trim the payroll?

How would the media coverage of both teams be affected? And how would it alter the pennant races? I'd be furious if this happened at like 11 p.m. Oh, my gosh. So there's a few questions in here to answer the first one it's laundry they would root for the laundry that's the way that it's always gone with when we've seen giant trades before fans always stick with their own team this would of course be the greatest test of that in baseball history but i have to assume that yankees fans would still root for the yankees

and padres fans would still root for the Yankees and Padres fans would still root for the Padres. The Padres would subsequently trade most of the high-priced Padres back to the Yankees, probably because they can't afford them. How would the media—what was the last question? How would the media respond to this? Yeah. Stupor, I think, would be one word. I don't know. I don't know.

How different could the article you and i and everyone else would write an article about how what right i mean i don't know how we can construct a scenario for how the baseball gods make their will known here or how this happens exactly and how it can't be reversed but let's forget all that i guess if this happened yeah the padres would probably have to trade a bunch of guys right john carlos stanton back on the market probably retraded to the yankees i would guess i i would think that the padres wouldn't be able to keep all those players i mean it might not make the yankees all that much worse long term because the padres have a good farm system right right? They'd be bad now.

They'd be bad for a while. And currently they're great, so it would be quite a step down. But they'd also have a low payroll and a lot of prospects and a good farm system. So eventually they'd be good again. It wouldn't ruin the rest of their future, but I think Yankees fans would not be pleased. I wonder whether this would be the exception to the root for Laundrie. I mean, I don't know what you could do, what the alternative is, because you'd just have to start rooting for the Padres. That would be weird. But it's different from just losing one or two players here or there. Your entire team is swapping

with another team. So it would be interesting. So the Yankees are 28-12 and the Padres are 17-27. So if the Padres got all the Yankees, now they couldn't afford them, but if they got all the Yankees, you could see in that division, that division is so currently, I don't know, compromised, that you could see the Padres thinking, oh, we can win this thing now. So we're going to keep these players together. We're going to try to make the World Series. But if you're the Yankees, you inherit a bad team with a good farm system,

and you're 28-12, you have the best record in Major League Baseball, you would probably quickly see the team try to make trades to get better. They would have such a deep farm system that they could make trades to make their roster better. And I wonder how long it would take the Yankees to actually become good in 2018 again. I guess you could think of it as, leave the Yankees to actually become good in 2018 again i guess you could think of it as you leave the yankees out of this what would the padres have to do to make their current roster a good one and it's possible because they have so much young talent that they could trade to make the team competitive so it would it would be kind of fun to watch brian cashman scramble and try to reacquire

some of the players he gave the padres but, but the Padres wouldn't want to trade those players because they have a chance to be good. What do you think would be happening in Andrew Friedman's office when he sees this come across the wire? Yeah, just all five GMs in the office would be on call 24-7. They'd be pulling off eight team trades. Yeah. All right. Question from Joe, Also a Patreon supporter

I was thinking about how pitcher injuries can occur So suddenly, would it serve teams Well to provide their pitchers with Annual platelet-rich plasma injections Or annual stem cell injections Into the elbow I have no idea how invasive these procedures are Or how long the recovery takes

I would think this might impact their off-season Workout regimen, they could get it done At the end of this might impact their off-season workout regimen. They could get it done at the end of the regular season or postseason and then get back into the swing of things, assuming they take a couple weeks off from baseball activities. Anyhow, will you please ask one of your baseball doctor friends who has an idea about these things? So I did ask one of my baseball doctor friends, actually not technically a doctor, but Corey Dawkins,

who is an exercised physiologist and athletic trainer. He used to do the baseball prospectus injury database. He now does his own database at Baseball Injury Consultants and used to write about injuries for BP too. So I sent him this question. He says, it's a good idea, but ultimately I don't think it would work. From a medical point of view, I can think of several roadblocks. One, it's an invasive procedure, and that would be something that's very hard to mandate for all players. Two, while PRP and stem cells are promising, it's still not anywhere close to being guaranteed to work. Three, piggybacking off that, there's likely some sort of sweet spot in terms of its effectiveness.

If the UCL and flexor tendon are completely torn, it likely won't be effective, but how effective is it for 5, 10, or 25% tears? We just don't know quite yet. Four, the layoff is significant. Because it's part of the regenerative medicine, recovery and strength training needs to be brought along slowly, including weights, and that's even before a return to throwing program is initiated. Most likely, they'd be looking at somewhere between 8 and 12 weeks of taking it easy, then starting a lifting program, and then a throwing program. In summary, I think not knowing the effectiveness sweet spot and the downtime would make it very difficult for all the players to agree to it. Medically, more studies need to be performed to figure out this and other details.

Well, you know how more studies could be performed. Mandate these procedures for all pitchers all the time. How are we going to find out otherwise? StatBlast? Yeah, a little bit. A short one. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Deist-a-plast. I noticed over the weekend, the Dodgers were losing a game.

That could be any day. But the Dodgers were losing a game with the weekend to the Reds, 5-3, bottom of the ninth. Cody Bellinger came up. I don't know if you were watching this or heard about this, but Cody Bellinger worked a 3-0 count. The bases were empty. He got a take sign. He did not notice it was a take sign, and he bunted. He bunted in a 3-0 count.

He made an out. He bunted back to the pitcher. He was out. That is curious to bunt in a 3-0 count when you are good. There was a shift on. That's what Bellinger was going for, and I looked it up. I completely forgot about the fact that I wrote about this last season, bunting in 3-0 counts, and the last player to bunt in the 3-0 count

was Cody Bellinger, and he got a hit. Cody Bellinger is actually 6 out of 9 to bunt in the three no count was cody bellinger and he got a hit cody bellinger is actually six out of nine on bunt attempts in his career when he's bunted the ball fair he's been bunting against the shift last season brandon belt is was the only other player who tried to bunt in a three no count he bunted the ball foul that came before cody bellinger's bunt incidentally when belt attempted that bunt this is complicated lots of b words when belt attempted the bunt one of the announcers said that branded belt taking a page out of the cody bellinger playbook before cody bellinger ever tried that anyway so i've had bunts on the brain and so i just did a little bit of very quick research just thinking of bunt effectiveness not in terms of hits out of bunts in play that has remained fairly stable But this year bunting batting average is actually up from where it's been in the past not by very much

It's it's close to where it's been recently, but I was just curious about bunting in play efficiency Hmm, so went to baseball savant as usual from the fan graphs I was able to get total bunts in play and from baseball savant I was able to get foul and missed bunts so that kind of completes the denominator so then it just became a matter of looking at in play bunts over all attempted bunts where attempted bunts are unsuccessful bunts in play successful bunts in play foul bunts and missed bunts i believe that should cover everything this does not cover bunts that were pulled back because i don't care about those.

Those are like checked swings. So going all the way back in 2008, all the data I have covers 2008 to 2018. In 2008, 48% of all bunt attempts were hit fair. That was followed by three years at 50%. So if I just read the numbers down, it goes 48, 50, 50, 50, 48, 48, 47. so if i just read the numbers down it goes 48 50 50 50 48 48 47 so nearly half of all bunt attempts were uh were hit in play in 2016 it dropped to 45 then 2017 46 and this year so far 43 of attempted bunts have been hit into fair territory now a slightly greater rate of those have turned into hits and this is still a small sample we've got one about a quarter of the bunt attempts that we had compared to last year which makes sense

because we've had about a quarter as much baseball but we are looking at early evidence that i think is also very unsurprising evidence that bunting is getting more difficult i i thought maybe on a hunch that batters would be getting better at bunting over time because there have been shifts and i don't need to explain why i think but no batters would be getting better at bunting over time because there have been shifts, and I don't need to explain why, I think. But no, batters have not gotten better collectively at bunting. Cody Bellinger's actually a pretty good bunter. I'm not sure there's a better bunter in baseball than Dee Gordon or Delano DeShields. Jock Peterson, over the past two years, is 0 for 9 trying to bunt a ball fair

to say nothing of trying to get a hit on a bunt. He just hasn't been able to do it. Jake Merzenich also has been bad. He was just optioned because he's terrible at hitting. 41 to 1 strikeout to walk ratio, I believe. That's the one. Yeah. Very bad.

Yeah, so some of those breakthrough Astros from last year, not really consistent, sustainable breakthroughs. Looking at you, Marwin Gonzalez. But in any case, I thought maybe batters were getting better at buntingting i was not able to separate out pitchers and non-pitchers so of course this involves some of that but batters have gotten worse at bunting a little bit and that is probably almost directly tied to the fact that pitchers are throwing harder and they're throwing fewer fastballs fastballs are the easiest pitch to bunt and hitters just aren't seeing so many of them so that's it that's uh that was cody belliger's explanation for why he wanted to bunt and uh hitters just aren't seeing so many of them so that's it that's what that was cody bellinger's explanation for why he wanted to bunt in a three no count he knew he

was getting a fastball and he thought well fastballs are the easiest pitch to bunt and i don't think he was even a bad idea because if bellinger were to swing away yeah he's a powerful bat but a home run there doesn't mean that much relative to just getting on base so if it weren't for the missed sign that bellinger ignored i could think he could justify the bunt attempt but anyway that's all that's bunts yeah it's all about balancing the unpredictability and where the defense is playing and keeping them honest and so forth so reed patreon supporter says listening to the red sox game this was a while ago and once again mookie bets Coast Mike Trout, has a three homer game for the second time this season. My completely subjective sense is that he tends to

cluster his home runs substantially more often than other players. This is backed up by the fun fact that with this game, he surpassed Ted Williams for the franchise lead in three plus homer games. My question is, does Mookie Betts hit a disproportionate amount of his home runs in multi-homer games? And if so, does this raise or lower his value as a player over the course of a season? My second question is, if Mookie Betts is not East Coast Mike Trout, who is? So I don't have a great stat for home run clustering, but given that Betts is only 25 and is already the Red Sox franchise leader with four three homer games and only has 91 career homers in total, I think it's safe to say that he has clustered his home runs more than the typical player. I don't know if that means he is more likely to be prone to clustering them than the typical player going forward. It's possible that it's just random, small sample. If he is a homerun

clusterer, I would think that that would make him a little less valuable than he would be otherwise. Three homers is probably overkill a lot of the time. For instance, the Red Sox won two of his three homer games by scores of 10 to 1 and 16 to 2. So I think you'd rather have him distribute the dingers more evenly, all else being equal. And as for the second question, I think it's probably fair to call Betts East Coast Mike Trout, right? I don't think he is Mike Trout, but I can't think of anyone with a stronger case to come close to Trout. No, unless you want to count Aaron Judge, who exceeded Mike Trout's war last season. I don't really know what we're doing with that, but Betts has so much defensive value that in a way he kind of sneaks up on Trout because he, at least I still think of Trout as

this across the board contributor and his defense is fine. His base running is fine, but he's not like a really strong plus in either category and Betts is. So yeah, he's not as good a hitter, I don't think, as Trout, but he does get close. So if you buy that Mookie Betts is. So yeah, he's not as good a hitter, I don't think, as Trout, but he does get close. So if you buy that Mookie Betts has improved his hitting this year, and it seems like he has, he's going to give Trout a run for his money. And then Trout eventually will win because he's Mike Trout and he's a baseball god. Aaron Judge, not to be forgotten. He's also good. Looks like Francisco Lindor has gotten better as well. He's not East Coast. He's middle, kind of middle. East third. I don't know where we're dividing this.

It's like pull a center and opposite. You have split the country into thirds. It's still Mike Trout, but yeah, Betts is close. I can buy it. All right. And question about West Coast Mookie Betts, Mike Trout. Adam, Patreon supporter, says, could Mike Trout still be a positive war player if he got toot-blend thrown out on the bases like a nincompoop, every time he reached base? And we got actually a very similar question from CJ, who is not yet a Patreon supporter.

He is drafting in the wake of another Patreon supporter, but he happened to ask a very similar question. He says, how valuable would a player be if he always got hits but never stopped running? No homers, of course, but any ball he puts in play is a hit of some kind, but he never stops at first or second or third. He keeps going until he either gets tagged out or scores an inside-the-park home run. In the event he hits a ground rule double or the ball is thrown out of play, he'll stop running, but he'll immediately start running again as soon as the pitcher gets the ball. He also says vroom vroom every time he touches a base for added strategic value.

By gut instinct, my gut instinct is that this player would be valuable, but I'm not sure. Are guaranteed RBIs worth guaranteed outs? Would vroom vroom be valuable enough to offset the insanity he'd bring to his team's fans so vroom vroom guy is if mike trout becomes vroom vroom guy is mike trout still good still worth playing do you think well okay so i could tell you i don't really care much about batting order but this guy you don't want hitting lead off that's true you you have to maximize this guy's runners on

base i wonder so this would require math that i can't really run on the fly while we're doing a podcast but i wonder if the actual greatest utility of this guy might be as a pinch hitter so you can only put him up with runners on base in high leverage situations because then he could do a lot of damage i mean if mean, now here's the thing. Let's say that he comes up and the bases are loaded and he hits what should be a single. He keeps going. That forces everyone else to keep going.

So maybe the single is worth one run, maybe two, but then there's another guy who has to go in front of him and then he goes. So this gets really difficult. You would have to use him uh in very precise situation look if you're the manager i don't know what you what you do you how many times do you call this guy into the office to be like please stop before you just throw up your hands and cut him but he'd still be so valuable like he could you bring him up in the in extra innings there's a runner in

scoring position the game's over. He wins it. So I don't think you can start him, but he'd be a really valuable and infuriating weapon off the bench. What does he do? What does he do if he hits? Okay, it's the bottom of the ninth and it's a tie game, runner on third. He hits a single. The game's over. He's only on first base.

Where is he going? He still goes. He keeps going. He still goes. He makes going. He still goes. He makes all of his teammates. He basically treats it as a walk-off home run. Yeah, you have to meet him at home plate, I think, is the only option. I think it's the ground rule double idea that really kills me here.

I love it. Yeah, he abides by the rules in that case, but only until the new pitch. I love the broom broom guy. Good question from both of you. All right. Question from Spencer. Okay.

Spencer, I'm just going to say, is either brilliant or completely deluded. I don't know which. But Spencer says, I like to watch games with the park audio overlay feature of MLB TV enabled. When I'm working on other tasks, that is not watching the video,

I like to think I have a decent sense of what happened on a play based on just that park audio. Most of the time, this is because of sounds external to the play, like the sound of the crowd or the umpire making a call. However, I also feel like I am getting better at hearing, italicized hearing, balls and strikes. Specifically, it feels like pitches that are called strikes have a different sound signature than pitches that are called balls.

Obviously, this is excluding swinging strikes and pitches in the dirt that aren't really caught. Is there anything to this? Is either of you aware of any research on how the sound of a caught pitch Affects how it is called And if there is, does that have a noticeable Effect on a catcher's framing ability Okay, okay Let's talk our way through this So we're not counting balls in the dirt

Because of course that's going to sound like Woof And we're not counting balls in the backstop because that's going to sound like Exactly So, okay. So why would... Okay, so if a ball is close... I have a theory. Okay, let's hear it.

I mean, starting from the premise that this is a thing, which is already suspect, but... Yes. If it were, you could say that maybe it depends on how the catcher catches the pitch, right? He catches it in a different part of his glove. So he's catching it in the pocket, for instance. Maybe it makes a different sound than if he's catching it on the outside part of the glove, if he's snow coning it sort of. And you could expect maybe that if he's catching it in the pocket or where he intends to catch it, that means that he had an easier time getting to the pitch and maybe it ended up where

he thought it was going to end up, in which case he would have an easier time framing it. Or maybe it would just be in the strike zone, right? Because he doesn't have to reach for it. And so maybe it produces a pop that it wouldn't if it were an outside pitch that he has to really reach for and doesn't catch quite as well. That is my hypothesis for why this would be true if this were true. Yeah. Okay. So my hypothesis is the same as yours. It depends on how the catcher is catching the ball.

The alternative, and this could be a trick question, maybe what he's hearing is the umpire because you can hear the called strike when the umpire goes. is the umpire because you can hear the called strike when the umpire goes yeah if you hear someone going that is not actually the pitch entering the glove that is a person linear thinking that's what we just accomplished yeah i uh look there's research about the crack of the bat rob arthur has done actual research about that and he's been on this podcast to talk about it. If you isolate the sound of the ball hitting the bat, you can tell. I don't know whether you can necessarily tell with the naked ear, but you can definitely tell if you put it in a software program and run some analysis. There is a different sound, but I don't know whether it would be perceptible. I mean, even if this were true, I don't think it would be that the umpire is calling the pitch because of the sound.

I would think it would be that the umpire is calling the pitch and separately there is also a different sound because of where the ball ended up. I don't think there would be time really for the umpire to hear and process the sound and also make the call so i i doubt it would be that but i mean i can't disprove it i definitely do not know of any research or studies on this spencer i'm sorry i've never heard anyone express this idea before i would love to do a study on spencer if if spencer will volunteer his ears to science and we can do a double blind study of sorts or I don't know if it could be double blind or only single blind but blind I guess the point is he's already blind because he's not or heads based on the sound, which to me is more far-fetched than Spencer's claim here. Yeah. So in conclusion, I think that what we're saying is that it's conceivable maybe that you could detect when balls are cleanly caught, and that would be strongly correlated with balls and strikes. caught and that would be strongly correlated with balls and strikes which then if you take it to the next level in a sense you could argue that you can hear different pitch types because fastballs

and cutters are more likely to be cleanly caught than than breaking balls and and change-ups because those are going to be more wild so spencer you are actually underselling your own your own audible inclinations there you could hear hear. What else can you hear? So therefore, if you can hear maybe pitch types, you can hear grips. And if you can hear grips, you can hear catcher signals. Yes. Yeah, we should maybe have someone on who plays beep baseball.

We actually did that. We talked to a beep baseball player. I wonder whether their ears are so finely attuned to this that they can pick up on these things. Anyway, I like the theory, Spencer. It took some bravery to make this claim, so I appreciate your writing in, and I'd like to see it tested.

I can't say that you're wrong. Speaking of beat baseball, you know where a vroom vroom guy would be really successful? That's a pretty good point, I guess. Alright. Jenny says, I've had this question for a while. That's a pretty good point, I guess. All right. Jenny says, I've had this question for a while. Is there a correlation between double plays and how good a team is? A few years back, someone asked Rangers manager Ron Washington how he feels about the Rangers

successfully turning a lot of double plays in the context of it being a good thing. And his response was, that tells me we're letting too many guys get on base. It made me wonder if there is something to that is it a sign of something negative is it just situational so is there a correlation between double plays and how good a team is which i interpreted as winning percentage i just i guess i could have just looked at run prevention but i looked at literally what jenny is asking So over the last 10 years, the correlation between the total number of double plays recorded on defense and team winning percentage has been negative 0.19, where zero would be no correlation and negative one would

be a perfect inverse correlation. So this is a pretty weak inverse correlation, probably because there are ways in which turning double plays does reflect positively on a team. It's good if you have a good defensive middle infield that can turn double plays, and it's good if you get ground balls. But there's also probably something to what Washington is saying. If you allow lots of base runners, there are more double play opportunities. So in general, based on this, Washington was right or more right than he's

wrong. The more double plays a team records, the worse the team tends to be. And yeah, so it's not just about you're allowing more runners on base, but it also somewhat implies that you have pitchers who allow more contact. That's doubly bad. That's true. Yeah, right. Also that. All right. Chris says, I was watching a Boston at Toronto game and a Jays fan ran onto the field. This was after Justin Smoke homered off David Price in the sixth and allowed Carson Smith to warm up and replace Price before another at bat could occur. This was obviously an advantage for the Sox, and it got me wondering, how many times could a team have a hired fan storm the field to get such an advantage before the Sox, and it got me wondering, how many times could a team have a hired fan

storm the field to get such an advantage before the league noticed? How much would this be worth in the postseason? Where would you recruit people for this? What if the Braves used the freeze as a distraction? So the idea here is that fan runs on the field, it buys time for a pitcher to warm up. It's a perfect crime. No one suspects the team of putting the player up to this. I'm not going to lie to you. I got distracted because over the past three years, the teams with the fewest double plays turned are the Yankees, Dodgers, and Cubs. Looks like those are all good teams.

Okay, so we could say this. If you keep using the same fan, that's going to get picked up on real quick, especially if you keep using the freeze in full costume. I think people are gonna catch on to that but you're gonna have to you'd have to demonstrate some sort of recorded connection between the team and the fan like if you want to look at this from a legal perspective and unfortunately we don't have cheryl ring on the line for this but you need to demonstrate intent and maybe some sort of compensation otherwise you just be like please stop yeah this is really this is catching on in the city at very selective times of the

baseball game because you could imagine that fans might pick this up on their own you could as a team you could just not disincentivize this behavior just be like hey look if you wanted to go out on the field at a certain time that would be fine now you'd have some trouble because fans of visiting teams might come over and try to do the same for the run but do you think it would help would it matter should fans be no it wouldn't matter very much i don't think but it would be funny yes it would be funny yeah i i don't think we need to start organizing any grassroots campaigns to do this i i mean there aren't that many cases where someone is not ready when you need to bring someone in, right? I mean, I guess it happens every now and then, but for the most part, people are prepared.

You have the Gabe Kapler situation where one time that was not true. There are less extreme versions of that, for the most part managers and pitching coaches are good at getting guys up when they need to so it wouldn't be a big advantage i don't think you know i haven't heard a single thing about gabe kapler ever since the phillies became a good baseball team that is waiting on you beat writers all right similar weird one from mike i was at a red sox game last night. This was early in May against the Royals, and in the eighth inning saw what could or should be a new strategy for pitchers to take advantage of distracted batters.

Just before Perez, I think, stole third, and Jay also, I think, got caught in a rundown, Matt Barnes, Red Sox pitcher, watched the wave. From appearances, he watched it go around, cross home plate, and continue. He watched it go around cross home plate and continue. He watched and he waited. Then he waited for the wave to go by again. And at the perfect moment, got into his delivery and pitched timing it so that the wave was behind him right in the batter's eye.

Since it was a night game, people were sitting in all the bleacher seats, no carved out black tarp zone. I don't think I've ever seen a pitcher take advantage of the wave before. If this isn't common, should it be? That is fantastic. I want this to be true. I want to watch this just to see if it actually checks out because that is fun.

When was this? May 1st, I believe. All right. I am doing the research right now. May 1st. Give me some specifics while I look this up. May 1st, eighth inning. And I think it was just before Salvador Perez, he believes, stole third. And also just before John Jay got caught in a rundown.

Eighth inning. So this is going to... Who was batting here? Abraham Almonte? That I don't know. Okay. Well, I'm just going to go in order here. So what I can conclude from watching the video of Matt Barnes doing this is that the TV camera is not sufficient to tell us where the wave was. You can tell, this is one of those

things, if you were just listening to the park overlay, you can tell there's the wave going on. There's a distinctive wave signature. We need Spencer to tell us exactly where in the park the wave was at any particular moment he can pinpoint that barnes does uh look back in the direction of center field but also there's a runner on second base so that makes sense so this is one of those things that would require a witness in the ballpark hard to say as to its

effectiveness it's hard to argue that it wouldn't be somewhat effective. You know, in the NBA or in basketball, you have people who are behind the hoops who are like waving things. But that's just something you expect all the time. Right. Which doesn't matter evidently, right? The players just expect it. It's par for the course. But in baseball, this is not. So maybe it would work. This is not, so maybe it would work. Maybe the home fans behind basketball hoops should be shouting out reminders of everyone's mortality when they're shooting free throws, and then they would be more successful.

So I don't know. This would probably work. It's such a negligible thing, but it would be my favorite just pitcher quirk if there was like one pitcher who's just, what's his deceptiveness? Well, there's a lot of fans doing the wave. You'd have to, these would be mostly weekend games when this would work. And you basically need a big crowd, and you want there to be seats in the batter's eye

or around the batter's eye. So there's a small number of opportunities here, but it's great. If a pitcher became known for this, then this is an area where maybe the fans should band together and do this so that's uh that's dangerous we might be getting a whole lot more waves than we are used to all right we're wrapping up here haven't done emails in a while this is good we're really

working through things here all right henry says i've been meaning to write since your recent disavowal of milestone stats. I'm an old fan, completely converted to new statistics. Yes, RBI wins and other counting stats are deeply flawed, ERA and batting average can be red herrings, but they are easy stats, and their application in ballpark, break room, and bar room arguments is fun. War is not as fun. Different formulas, opaque math, and shifting figures make it too easy to dismiss with beer in hand. Formulas, opaque math, and shifting figures make it too easy to dismiss with beer in hand. So which advanced stats have the most potential to be fun?

What stats do you look at when you want to convince your buddy that your team's guy is better than his team's guy? Or when a new team comes to town and you want to see how their big boppers are doing this season? Goldschmidt only has 11 RBI, but it's much more interesting that he's 44 points off his career OPS+. Is that where you go? And what do you use for career arguments, et cetera? What would you put on the Hall of Fame plaques since war might change? And that would be awkward if it were in bronze. This is such a world that I'm just not engaged with because I don't talk to people about baseball in person. It's certainly not in an argumentative way.

Right. I was going to say, yeah, there's no way to answer this that doesn't make me sound like a soulless robot, I feel like. But I've never really enjoyed that kind of barroom debate because I always feel like it's not getting us anywhere. Like, you know, if I'm looking at a stat that I feel is more telling and someone else is relying on batting average or RBI or something. I mean, if I care about the person and have some vested interest in them learning more about baseball or seeing baseball the way I do, then I might try to proselytize a little bit. But typically, I wouldn't. I don't really have an interest in trying to convert everyone necessarily. So I wouldn't really get engaged in this kind of debate. And if someone is just kind of using completely different terms to argue these things,

then I probably just wouldn't even bother getting sucked into the discussion, I guess. I mean, in a way, war is an argument ender. It's not really. It's not perfect and completely comprehensive and accurate, but it's more of an argument ender than any old school stat that is giving you an imperfect view of some portion of a player's performance. So if someone's arguing batting average or RBI and I have war, I'm not really going to get bogged down in the RBI debate, I guess. So what would I use? I mean, I guess I would use something like OPS+, ERA+, WRC+, just because

those tend to be pretty easy concepts to communicate, I think. Even if someone isn't really already on board, you can just say, hey, he's better than average or worse than average. And of course, it gets complicated if you dive down into it, but maybe you won't have to. So that's probably the best one. I mean, I don't know. We got another question recently from someone asking if like 100 War is going to be an exclusive club, whether that's going to be a milestone that we will care about someday. This was Anthony who wrote in about this. And I just don't know that it's ever going to be as satisfying as a concrete number that is based on something

you can see that doesn't change that you can celebrate in the moment. But I just don't care that much. I don't feel like we need milestones. I guess you need some sort of shorthand just so you all kind of understand the terms of what you're talking about. Like when a player gets to, say, 60 war or something, that's kind of like 50-60 war. We start talking about, okay, that's Hall of Fame consideration. So we kind of know that, I guess.

It's just kind of a back of the envelope thing, but we have it in our heads. Yeah, I just don't really care about career landmarks, milestones. do like the the single season ones where you know if someone pursues the all-time home run record that i'm going to be tuned in because yeah because you're right it's fun to have moments where something is tangibly exceeded you just can't do that with war as we talked about recently war can change change retroactively, which is very annoying. You can't go back and unpop the bottle.

So because I'm so removed from this world, all of my baseball communication is on the internet with mostly like-minded people. I don't ever have to worry about this. When you're talking to a broader group or a different audience, you can use shorthand. You can talk about somebody's home runs or their batting averages if it's obviously good or obviously bad there's a there's a real relationship between the traditional numbers and the more advanced numbers if a guy has a 250 obp you know that he's not a good hitter basically pretty much full stop but otherwise yeah i just it's the about war being a conversation editor it's at least an article shortener when you're talking about, like, here's why this guy is an MVP candidate over this other guy.

You don't have to have 12 different paragraphs comparing their average, but their MVP, but their stolen bases, but their RBI. It's just like, well, this guy has this war, and this guy is two lower than that. Yeah, exactly. That's it. It's over. Mike Trout versus Miguel Cabrera, not a hard debate. Right, and eventually people will get more familiar with these stats so that you can bring them up in a barroom argument. We're not quite there yet. In some bars, maybe we are there, but someday we will be, presumably.

So just wait it out. So I wanted to get to one more. This is from William, who says there's been a lot of research about the low odds of a prospect realizing his potential in the major leagues. Talk about Atlanta Brave pitching prospect Mike Soroka has me thinking about the similarly named former White Sox pitcher Mike Sorotka. As a reminder, in the latter's case, Sorotka pitched five years for the White Sox,

three as a starter, and accumulated just under 10 war before being traded to the White Sox with parts to the Blue Jays for David Wells and parts. Almost immediately following the trade, damage to Sorotka's throwing shoulder was revealed that ended his career. The Blue Jays filed a grievance and Bud Selig took over a dozen pages to literally say the words caveat emptor. White Sox GM Kenny Williams was quoted as saying he was pleased with the outcome. caveat emptor. White Sox GM Kenny Williams was quoted as saying he was pleased with the outcome.

With this background, if Soroka pitched five years for 10 war before being traded for a solid player and promptly retired, wouldn't want to wish injury on anyone, would the Braves be pleased with the outcome? How high does a prospect have to be on a list for 10 war over five years to be a disappointment? That's more than double Tim Beckham's career war for a modern comparison. I guess what I would be interested in knowing is exactly how disparate a front office's measure of success is versus the casual fan of a club. Okay, so this is essentially asking about war expectations by prospect rank.

So I don't have that in front of me, but I know there's like prospect value lists, which are essentially the same idea. So if you're talking about 10 war of the first five years, or if you just want to stretch it and call it 12 over six, we just want to cover the team control years, then that would, you're looking at like, that's a pretty good outcome for even like a, oh, what, a number 60, number 70 overall prospect? I'm looking at the pointofpittsburgh.com has updated prospect surplus values or expected values. This was published this year. So for hitters ranked numbers 1 to 10, there's obviously some variation within that group, but the average 1 to 10, the average war produced is 15.9. You go to

hitters 11 to 25, you're down to 12.9. Hitters 26 to 50, 7.5. Hitters 51 to 75, 4.9, etc. Pitchers 1 to 10, you're at 14.4 expected war. Pitchers 11 to 25, 9.1. Pitchers 26 to 50, 6.5. So these are low numbers. Yeah. I don't think that fans will ever internalize that in a way that they're happy with the fans. Of course, evaluate everyone by their potential ceiling. And I think a lot of teams do as well. So I don't think if you had a case like Soraka or this hypothetical Soraka where he's good and then he suddenly disappears, it would take a long time for people to reflect on that in a positive way, even if it's ultimately fine or about normal for that level of prospect. So we could probably stand to internalize this better. We don't.

We won't. We're just not wired that way. But that would be a fine outcome. I mean, you look at where the white socks right now giolito is not good right now the lopez does not look very good carson fulmer does not look very none of the pitchers look very good on the white socks and these have been some very highly ranked prospects uh so you just especially with pitchers people should learn to be happier with less but they won't and we can't and so we're just doomed to be happier with less, but they won't, and we can't.

And so we're just doomed to be disappointed almost all the time unless someone performs like Shohei Ohtani. Yeah, and Soroka, he's already made the majors. He's pitched pretty well in three starts. So maybe, I mean, he has increased his expected war, I guess, relative to when he was still a prospect and was not in the majors. But yeah, I mean, he's 20 years old. You can still dream on the upper end of the potential. He could still get there. So I think it's fair to be disappointed if he gets to 10 wins and never produces another.

But yeah, you should understand that that is kind of what happens when you just average everyone together, because a bunch of people never produce anything at all. all right we're at the last one on my sheet i'm gonna cross it off we're going for the the full completion here andrew patreon supporter let's say one day during a play index you find a player named johnny can't close jenkins this guy pitched 12 seasons in the early 1900s he had a a middling ERA in win-loss numbers, so nobody thought he was all that special, though he did have competitive innings totals. What you discover about this guy was that he'd absolutely fall apart in the 8th and 9th innings, hence the nickname.

However, he was lights out before then, so much so that you figure if he pitched during an era when pitchers weren't always expected to go the whole game, he might be a Hall of Famer. Does this guy have a Hall of Fame case for being born in the wrong era and or misused? Or do you always have to be evaluated against usage patterns and expectations of your era? Yeah, the second one. But also, is his official nickname Can't Close? Yes. Is that what was given? So he just shows up as Johnny Can't Close Jenkins. Yes. so people knew the whole time oh

this guy falls apart when he's throwing 250 pitches for some reason they keep pitching yeah i i understand the uh the argument but at the end of the day it's impossible for us to evaluate players by how they performed versus how they would have performed if they were handled differently we just can't do it there are a lot of cases i mean if you're going to go there what if dust what if mike trout had been drafted by i don't know let's call them the mariners and he busted well what if he was in a better player development organization like the angels and he became the best player the game has ever seen i don't know what you were supposed to do there but it's not really trout's fault so i think you just have to at the end of the day you have to go with

the performance yeah or what if johnny can't can't close Jenkins had to pitch against non-white American born players? Or, you know, what if you could say any, you know, washed out starter potentially could have been a lights out hall of fame closer if they had had closers back then. You could have interesting hypotheticals. It's a fun debate, but I wouldn't put a guy in the Hall of Fame based on an alternate history where he's used differently because you just never know. But it is something I'm curious about. You will hear people say that, say, I don't know, Andre Dawson or Jim Rice, maybe they would have walked more if that had been more emphasized or valued in their day. If they had

been told that walking and on-base percentage was good, maybe they would have done that. And maybe that's a fair argument. There are probably some guys who could have been more patient if they had realized that they should be. On the other hand, there were plenty of players who were very patient in that era without being told to be. And so for some players also, that's not really something you can alter. So you can't really project and say, well, he could have been a completely different guy. We can only go based on what we know. So it's good fodder for debate,

but not necessarily fodder for putting someone in the Hall of Fame. Yeah, this is the kind of barroom conversation that would be worth having, as opposed to my first baseman is better than your first baseman. I don't care about that care about that this is more fun all right so that will do it you can support the podcast on patreon keep funding email episodes like this one by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge a small monthly amount the following five listeners

have recently done so ray danner dawson allen j Allen, Jeremy Kessler, Matt Ittingson, and David Rifkin. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. We haven't emptied out our mailbag, but we have depleted it somewhat today. This was a long one, lots of questions answered. So please keep your questions and comments coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thanks as always to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back, as I'm sure you could predict, with another episode later this week.

Talk to you soon. When you had the chance you should have let us know When you had the chance you should have told us so They should have let us know We'll see you next time.