Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 122: PECOTA Projects Elite Draft Picks from the Past/Should Scouts Fear FIELDf/x?

Episode Date: January 18, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss PECOTA’s projections for top draft picks from 2007 and talk about whether FIELDf/x and comparable technologies will ever pose a threat to scouts.

Hi. Hello. Who's doing the intro today? I guess I will. We didn't discuss it beforehand. This is episode 122 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus daily podcast. In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg, and in Long Beach, California, you are Sam Miller.

Are you still in the Honda Fit these days, or have you migrated? I haven't been in the Honda Fit in probably a month and a half. Yeah, I didn't think so. I guess I can hear traffic noise in the distance. I just sit on the stoop now. Well, I hope you move back indoors once the crickets come back. Like indoors in my house? Oh, you mean indoors back into the Honda Fit?

Yes. We have a topic. It is not timely. It is not topical, but it's a topic. It is not timely. It is not topical, but it's a topic. So we're going to talk about a Nate Silver article from 2008, pre-2008 election, Nate Silver, who was at the time projecting pitching prospects for Baseball Prospectus. And he predicted, I guess it was all of the pitchers selected in the first round. Is that right?

Well, no. I guess what we're looking at, if you're looking at the thing that I'm looking at, it's Pocotas for players with no professional playing time. So basically this was 2008, June 5th, 2008, and I believe these are the 2007 draft picks who, I guess, who had not played when the 2008 season began. So, you know, like the David Price class of draft picks, the ones who didn't play that summer. So the players are David Price, Mike Moustakis, Josh Fitters, Daniel Moskos, Matt Wieders, Ross Detweiler, Matt Laporta, Casey Weathers, Jared Parker, Madison Bumgarner, and Rick Porcello, which is a pretty good group of players.

Still going with Porcello, huh? Oh, sorry. I forgot. Porcello. Yes. Doug Thorburn clarified for us from the Bill James Handbook, which apparently has a pronunciation guide, that it is Porcello. Anyway, continue.

That's all. That's all I got. Uh, that's all. That's all I got. So, Nate projected these players, and they are all, uh, they're all, I guess, I guess you could say a couple of them are busts or complete busts. They all made it to the majors, at least. They got there. Uh, I don't know. Do they, I honestly don't know who Casey Weathers is. Yeah, Casey Weathers, uh, Casey Weathers did not. That's right. Other than that, I guess they all made it.

And I guess it's the... This was in 2008, and so he projected their stats in 2012, which is why we're looking at it now to see how it turned out. And I guess the projections don't look quite as good as the actual text that Nate wrote. In some cases, he sort of perceived something about a player that Pakoda did not because it was based on so little information. player that uh pakoda did not because it was based on so little information yeah it's sort of interesting how little um how little credit pakoda is willing to give any of these players and so well i guess the pitchers it actually the hitters it's fairly optimistic about for the most part um

not not across the board uh it sees josh vitters for instance, as being terrible. And so far, Josh Vitters, in his short time in the majors, has been terrible and is kind of, I don't know, maybe not quite a bust yet, but kind of busty. But the pitchers are all like... Josh Vitters is busty. He's busty. The pitchers all have just the most depressing projections. There's very little reason to hope that any of them are going to turn into anything. And you recall from about 85 seconds ago that I named those pitchers, and a lot of them are very good. One of them won the Cy Young

Award this year. One of them is Madison Bumgarner. One of them is Jared Parker. They're good pitchers. And Pakoda, though, clearly believes in the idea that there is no such thing as a pitching prospect, because like Price for 2012, it projects a 4.78 ERA, 5.2 strikeouts per nine, which is much worse than he is. In case you're not at a computer and you can't look it up, he's better. Yeah, and yet Nate wrote about him that he's on something resembling the Justin Verlander career path, which is a good call. Yeah, his comps are perfect because his comps really do show the entire range of pitchers that a pitcher can be.

So it's Verlander, who Nate specifically names as a comp for Price. So it's Verlander, superstar, Hall of Famer. Mark Mulder, star, but not Hall of Famer. Very good major leaguer for a while. Mark Pryor, superstar, arm injuries, disappears. Injuries disappears. Paul Wilson hangs on a long time but never really even average. And DeJuan Brazelton, who is nothing. Basically, we are the last generation that will have ever heard of him in any way. Pass it on, probably.

I will. I'll tell my kids. You'll tell your children around the whatever we're burning in the postal apocalyptic haze. So, yeah, so that's what David Price could have been. He could have been Justin Verlander, Mark Mulder, Paul Wilson, Mark Pryor, or Dwan Brazelton. And so, Pocota averages all this together and comes up with a pretty unimpressive projection for 2012. And it's sort of the same way all the way down the line. Like, Bumgarner was projected to strike out 5.1 per nine, walk 4.2 per nine, and have a 5.75 ERA this year in 2012. And he's better than that.

Porcello, 6.5 ERA, 4.7 so i got 4.6 walks per nine uh parker 6.45 era um and so yeah i mean i i think that everybody who reads baseball perspectives is aware of the fragility of pitching prospects pakota was particularly aware of it and i think i don't know i think you could probably argue to a fault looking at it right now. I mean, certainly this is not the final word on prospect projections, this one article written about 11 players five years ago. But just in this group of pitchers, it seems far too pessimistic on the whole. Like even the guys that it hit,

you know, Moskos and Weathers are the flops there. But, you know, I mean, okay, so you project two flops that were there, and then you miss the five guys who turned into basically. Yeah, well, the Moskos,

Nate said his strikeout rates at Lynchburg simply aren't adequate for a player who is relatively old for his league and whose selling point was his polish. So at that point in 2008, he was 22 years old and at high A, and he had something like almost a 6 ERA and struck out just over 6 per 9. And I guess at that point, it was already pretty clear that that was a big mistake and that he wasn't really going to pan out. I thought the— Moscow. Wasn't Moscow's basically a big mistake the day he was drafted?

Yeah, right. Yes. And I thought that the Wieters comment was interesting because I guess it was the year, what was the year that weeders went crazy in the minors? It was after this year, so it was the next year that the weeders phenomenon. Right, there was no website of weeders facts at this point. Right. There is no website of of weeders facts at this point. And so Nate said that he said thinking of a Carlos Pena type bat appended to a catcher's body should give you roughly the right idea. I mean, it's not a perfect comp, but he had a low batting average and he hit some homers. So in that sense, he kind of had a Carlos Pena-esque season when he went crazy was that he would be just one of the best hitters in baseball the second he stepped on the field whereas I guess

the season before that season he was just kind of expected to be a pretty good hitter who was a catcher and would therefore be good and I guess that's kind of what he's turned out to be to this point. I think Wieters is probably the best projection on here that we're looking at. I mean, I don't know. You keep reading Nate's words, which is fine, but that sort of defeats the point. Yes. We're talking about, right? I mean, if you're trying to argue that a human can give better context than stats alone,

I think everybody kind of agrees with that. A human using stats but also able to look at it. Right, yeah. If you haven't read Nate's book, he did a whole chapter in there kind of about Pakoda and he compared Pakoda's 100 top prospects from a period of a few years to, I guess it was Baseball Americas, top prospects from a period of a few years to, I guess it was Baseball Americas.

And he found that the stats or that the scouts kind of beat the stats. It wasn't an enormous advantage. And Pocota had some hits that were misses for Baseball America and vice versa. But on the whole, the scouts kind of won. And Nate's observation about that was that that made perfect sense and that the scouts really should win because they have all the statistical information and they also have the scouting information, which Pocota kind of incorporated more so than other projection systems, but not as much as a scout can. So if a scout is looking at the stats and also is a scout and can perceive scouty things, then theoretically he should outperform a straight

projection system. Yeah. I mean, the only way you can make an argument against scouts is basically if you think that the human brain is broken, that it has serious flaws with the way it processes information or that scouts are essentially bad at what they do and won't consider alternative sources of information. And I think that there's some truth to all of those things And I wasn't really around 15 or 20 years ago, so it's possible that that's how it was 15 or 20 years ago. I don't really know. It might have been. It probably wasn't. But at this point, I think there's enough accountability in the system and the priorities have been kind of hammered in that I don't think any of those things are particularly true about current scouts.

So anyway, though, Wieders is the best, I think, the best projection on here. The hitters, though, are all, I think, across the board are too optimistic. Moustakas, although I guess it's conceivable that Pakoda wasn't factoring in a decrease in league-wide offense. So, like,ocota's projection for Moustakas is 264, 328, 427, which is about 30 points of OBP and about 20 points of slugging too much. But it's conceivable that if you translate it for ERA, that that actually might be quite close. Wieters is quite close. It's about basically 15 points of on-base percentage is the only difference. Witters, it's hard to say, but it didn't really like Witters,

but Witters is actually even worse than that. And Laporta, it thought was going to be basically Josh Willingham at this point in his career with maybe even more power, and he's obviously not. in his career with maybe even more power, and he's obviously not. Yes. Not completely related, but I wonder in Nate's book and also in many other places, there's this story of how kind of when Moneyball came out and the statistical revolution was getting underway. There was the stereotypical stats versus scout conflict, which was probably overblown, but at that point probably did exist to some extent.

It arose out of the fear that stats would, or stat guys would take scouts jobs and that teams wouldn't need scouts anymore because they'd be able to rely on the stats. And that turned out to be a false alarm that really hasn't happened to any appreciable extent. Nate mentions in his book that the A's now spend more on scouting than they did kind of during the Moneyball era. So that turned out to be a false alarm that stats would just make scouts obsolete. But I wonder whether that will happen to some extent when the technology does advance beyond where it is now. Not that scouts will never have a role. They will probably always have an important role.

But I guess, I mean, the stats that we've had to this point have not been able to replace what a scout does. You can't look at stats, especially for a minor leaguer, and tell what kind of player he is. When FieldFX is set up in every park at every level, which conceivably will happen, let's say at some point, you know, whether it's in the next decade or a little bit more than that, but it will happen at At some point, probably every professional ballpark will have some sort of FieldFX camera system that will capture everyone's movements and know how fast everyone can run and how quickly they get a jump and how hard they throw the ball, which already we know. So that's scouting information. That's what we rely on scouts for to some extent. Of course, there's always the makeup aspect, which a field effect system is never going to be able to judge.

But it does seem like a system like that with complete coverage would probably, certainly not make scouts redundant. But do you think that any of that fear that turned out to be misplaced a decade ago will actually turn out to be warranted, say, a decade from now? I don't know. I mean, when it's the trade deadline and Zach Granke's going to get traded and like 12 teams send scouts to go watch his start, I mean, you could not possibly have more information on a pitcher

than major league teams currently have and are able to access on Zach Greinke in the present moment, right? I mean, not only do you have seven or eight years of data of him in the majors where every pitch is charted and perfectly measured, but I mean, you can pull it up. You can watch all these games. You can see different angles. You can get all the pitch effects data, and I assume tons of other data that we don't

even see. And yet, they all send a scout to watch him. So, like, I don't know if that's, like, a rational thing that they're doing. I'm not sure why they do that. I think somebody, like, maybe Kevin wrote about it recently or like last trade deadline, but I didn't read it. But I mean, clearly there is a... I think Kevin and Jason talked about that on the podcast at some point

and it was like teams will send an experienced guy to go look at those players, but it's almost like it's almost an information gathering mission as much as it is a scouting mission. Like it'll be hanging around the field before the game and watching a guy's body language or talking to people around the team and trying to find out if he's putting the effort in

and what his mindset is. So it's not so much, oh, he's throwing harder or not throwing as hard. It's just the sort of stuff that, uh, is not picked up by a computer. Yeah. And that's, that's sort of what I was getting at is that there are still all these things that aren't picked up, uh, that you can't measure. I mean, when I, uh, when I'm in a minor league park and i see the scouts i um it is sort of interesting how they're basically they're clocking every pitch and i and i think you know why why are you guys doing that like that doesn't really seem that helpful at

this point in time yeah um but i think that's just to some degree that's just what they do to stay busy in between kind of the more important tasks. And the more important tasks are doing all the things that you can't get a computer to do. And I think that there's – I mean it wouldn't shock me if what you're suggesting came true. But I mean the further you try to project, the longer that you're looking at a guy's future, I think the more important makeup becomes. I mean, it's sort of the thing where each year that you project out, makeup is a bigger slice of what's important,

whether that's a long-term contract or whether you're talking about a 19-year-old. And I think that that's going to be around for a long time. I think it will be around long after it's even useful, if it ever were to stop being useful. Because people trust themselves more than they... I don't know. There's a weird faith that we have in humans that we'll never have in machines, in things that aren't human, in things that have no pulse. I mean, when you look at driverless cars are going to come around someday, right? And at some point, there's going to be a driverless car that smashes into a pedestrian and kills him. And it's going to be a humongous scandal because we don't quite know,

we don't have faith in driverless cars. We don't know how to deal with a machine that malfunctions. Whereas of course, every day, you know, scores and scores of pedestrians are hit and killed by humans that are driving. It's like, yeah, no big deal. Cause we, we sort of accept that humans do things, but we don't quite know how to deal with machines yet. And I don't, I think that that's probably going to be the case for as long as you and I are just in baseball. Yeah, I agree that I would say it would probably always be useful. I guess I just wonder if you do replace those kind of lower level tasks that scouts do,

if you can completely replace them with a machine that's doing them just as well, and presumably you could if it's something like just a time to first or timing a pitch, I wonder whether you can sustain the same size workforce or scout force. I mean you would still have some guys doing those important things but if you take away the less important things that can be more easily automated then I wonder whether ultimately that does kind of cause the ranks to thin

a little bit if only we knew somebody who had some insight into yeah we should have Kevin back again is is it 500 yet it's been a while it's been it feels like we've done 500 it's been over 20 it's pretty it's close enough wow can was that really only 20 episodes ago feels like forever it It does. It does. It was, yeah, it was the dead part of the off-season 20, so that's probably why. Yeah.

All right. Well, that's the end of this one. That's the end of the whole week. All right. Did you say 120 or 121? This is 122. Oh, wow. Okay.

Never mind. Oh, yeah. You were hoping we were. So we might be off Monday, I guess. We will be. We will not be doing a podcast on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, so that gets us one closer to ending. That's really, I think, what the holiday is for,

is getting us closer to ending the number on an even number. Yeah, or on a multiple of five. I'm okay with a five also. Arrest. Okay, so we will do one non-email show on Tuesday, and then we'll do an email show on Wednesday. So send us some emails so we can talk about them at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.