Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1260: Waiver? I Hardly Know Her!

Episode Date: August 23, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a listener-created tool to determine the first big leaguer to be born after and the last big leaguer to be born before any given date, the waiver-claim process, the Nationals’ trades, disastrous season, and hazy outlook, the Cubs acquiring Daniel Murphy and the Rockies opting not to, the […]

A younger body with an older soul A younger body with an older soul Yeah, what you ask for is unknown Yeah, forever on your own Start thinking solo Silent Build your home Hello and welcome to episode 1260 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hi, how are you? Doing well. joined by Jeff Sullivan of GameCrafts. Hello. Hi, how are you? Doing well.

So you just took a little trip, which we will talk about in a moment, and we'll get to some headlines, and then we will get to some emails. But I wanted to start with a cool thing that a listener created, which it's always nice when we talk about something, we just idly bring it up on the show, and then suddenly a listener brings it to life in some way. So last week when we were talking to Rachel McDaniel and we were discussing the idea of the first player to make the majors who is younger than you and how that can be kind of a jarring moment

when you realize that someone younger than you could have accomplished something as great as making the major leagues. And we were talking about it because Rachel is just, I guess, barely older than Ronald Acuna. And we were speculating about who our youngest players were, and neither of us knew off the top of my head. And I just said something, oh, I could probably go look that up somehow. I didn't think of it anymore. But effectively, Wild listener, Dave Myers did, and he has some programming expertise, and he built a website where you can look to see the first player younger than you and also the last player older than you, which is pretty cool. It's all based on RetroSheet, and you just put in your birth date, and it spits out the players.

So this is kind of cool. I don't know yours. I just sent you the link. So the site is called enlightenment.rip. That is an appropriate domain name, maybe, because we were talking about how this reminds you of your mortality, the first player who is younger than you, and then also when you are older than the oldest player, which fortunately neither of us has gotten there yet. But enlightenment.rip, I will link to it. I'm sure many of you will want

to check this out. So I just put in my birth date and the first player younger than me to make the majors. Mine is Justin Upton. He was born on August 25th, 1987. He made his debut on August 2nd, 2007. So he was 19 at the time. He is of course still around, just went on the DL. Sorry, Justin. I guess another milestone would be like when the player who is younger than you ages out of the league. That would be probably a sobering moment. So I'm going to now root for Justin Upton's career to last forever. But who is your first player younger? So I have some worse news for me. I'll just say the obvious answer for both of us, presumably Bartolo Colon, last player older than you. Yes.

So he's 45. So the first player younger than me, first player younger than me, he lives in Idaho now. He's just killing it on the recreational circuit. We've talked about Billy Butler about a month or two ago. First player to debut younger than me. He was born on April 17th, 1986. Made his debut on April 30th, 2007. he was 21 years old good for billy butler he has had an entire major league career made tens of millions of dollars and uh and he's done he's he's completed his career old man jeff sullivan still podcasting even though billy butler's out of the league so

yeah kind of a cool tool thank you you to Dave for building this thing. You can find Dave on Twitter at Dave Myers World. And again, the URL enlightenment.rip. I will link to it. Everyone should go check it out. Find out who their MLB end caps, as he's calling them, are. So that's kind of cool. Yeah, I feel like at least I think I still look younger than Billy Butler.

But I don't know. He has kind of a young face yeah he does kind of yeah not not a young body necessarily but from the neck up maybe no he's he's got a big al body but he's got a pretty young face right yeah so i guess we should get to the news in baseball which is mostly Nationals related. The Nationals, yesterday, Tuesday, they traded a couple players. They are done. They are acknowledging that they are done. They are waving the white flag, and they put a bunch of players on waivers, and a couple of them ended up with different teams. So Daniel Murphy is now a Chicago Cub, and Matt Adams is now once again a St. Louis Cardinal there was briefly some possibility that Bryce Harper might go somewhere reportedly the Dodgers put in a claim right but nothing worked

out there so it appears that Harper will now finish out his season with the Nationals because they could put him back on waivers I guess but he would just have to be claimed and go for nothing I don't think they could get anything back for him. So that's not going to happen. They will hold on to him and take the qualifying offer if he leaves. And that's that. So Murphy going to the Cubs, Adams going to the Cardinals. This is obviously two teams that are very much in contention and maybe favored for playoff spots at this point.

much in contention and maybe favored for playoff spots at this point. It's sort of, I guess, an appropriate time to take stock of the failure that has been the Nationals season. But you wrote about this from a Rockies perspective in an attempt to get the least traffic you could possibly get for this post. I guess you could have written that Daniel Murphy goes from the Nationals perspective and maybe done pretty well. But you chose to write the Rockies angle. Rockies notorious for not having a lot of fan graphs readers, as I understand it. But on the plus side, on the plus side, this was the rarest case where I got to write an article with an opinion in it. And my opinion is it looks like the Rockies did something not great.

Yeah, or failed to do something that would have been good. Yeah, right. That would be a better way to put it. So I got to this a day late because Tuesday was a travel day for me. So all the news happened while I was on the road. Found out about it after the fact. But as I was thinking about it more, of course, it's interesting that the Nationals, one of the so-called super teams, were a failure. They've done this before, just in 2015.

Not the first time we've seen a very good national team turn out to be not so good national team. There's a whole article to be written about the death of this year's super teams, or at least the partial death of some of the super teams, and that's something that you and I might race to by the end of the season. But what is interesting here, of course the Cubs now, they're deeper, and Daniel Murphy's been really good for the last two months since he's shaken off some of the injury related rust but the rockies suck at first base a lot and they also have sucked in left field and we have talked before a lot of positions really yeah no this is a lot of suck on the rockies yeah and i don't i i don't

actually i don't like using that kind of language, talking about professional baseball players because they're all really great. And Ian Desmond could be the hell out of me, so what do I care? What does he care? What do I have to say? But just objectively, the Rockies have been very – they have not been as good as the other great players at those positions. And so they're very much in the race. And I just don't – I don't understand. I get – I understand it's really difficult to get rid of ian desmond he's under a huge contract for

a few more years and owners don't like to cut bait with that much money left and ian desmond might maybe still has uses he can play a bunch of positions he's athletic it's the ball hard whatever i don't understand herodopara i don't understand why he's on a roster i don't understand i know he's been losing playing time to dav Dahl, but Dahl is also covering a right field. You can, the Rockies have the opportunity to claim Daniel Murphy and presumably get Daniel Murphy. Yeah. Should we explain how waivers work?

I know no one ever wants to explain how this works, but there's always a lot of confusion because, you know, teams put superstars on waivers and everyone thinks that means something and usually it doesn't mean anything. But basically the broad strokes, do you want to just explain how this works? Okay. So the trade deadline that you know is not the trade deadline. That is the not complicated trade deadline. Before July 31st, up through July 31st, you can make whatever trade

you want for the most part and it can just happen. After that, it gets more complicated because there are revocable waivers. So you will hear news every so often about a team putting a player, a notable player, or a bunch of notable players on waivers. That does not mean the team wants to get rid of those players. Do not overreact. Most players are put on waivers in August because there is no harm in doing so. So, when players go on waivers, what happens, they're called revocable waivers, and so if a player gets claimed, then if you don't want to trade that player to the team that claims him, you can pull that player back, and that's it. There's nothing that happens, and you can't really do it again. But the way that this works is that in August, it's a little like, I guess, the posting process where you end up only being able to negotiate with one team. Unless a player clears

waivers. But the way that it works, so the Nationals waived, we'll use Daniel Murphy as the example. So there is waiver priority, and the priority begins with teams in the player's own league. So National League gets priority over the American League in the Murphy case, and it goes in ascending order of record. So the worst teams have priority over the best teams. The Cubs have the best record in the National League. They claimed Daniel Murphy. Nobody else in the National League did for some reason. And that's why Murphy was available to the Cubs.

Now, had the Cubs not claimed to Murphy, he would have been available to first the Orioles, then the Royals, and then the rest of the American League. And then had he cleared waivers in the American League, he could have been traded to anyone. So I don't know what else I've left out. But if a player is claimed, and if the Nationals didn't want to trade Danny Murphy, or if they didn't want to give him to the Cubs, then they could pull Murphy back. But then they could not repeat this process, then the revocable waivers are no longer available to them. Right. And because Murphy went to the best team, we know that all the less good teams must have opted not to claim him.

Right. And the only other thing that's worth mentioning here is in the case of Matt Adams, if a team claims a player, you can also just give them away, which is what the Nationals did with Matt Adams. They decided, I guess, it wasn't worth trying to get anything out of the Cardinals. They just gave away. So that's the risk when you claim a player if you're a team, and this has happened before.

Teams will try to claim players to block better teams, rivals from getting access to those players. And the only real risk is that you will then potentially end up with that player, which, you know, if it's a good player, then that's not so much a problem. But if it's an expensive player, you might end up with that money on the books So that makes it complicated I don't think there's anything else that's worth talking about here Yeah, so the Cubs gave up just, what, some cash

And a high A infielder Who is not a big prospect And they got Murphy back And we can talk in a second about what that means for the Cubs maybe But you are wondering Why didn't the Rockies claim this guy who, despite his defensive limitations and base running limitations and health issues that are for now in the past, he's a really good hitter. And he's been a very good hitter for a while now and will likely continue to be a good

hitter. And the Rockies are not good hitters for the most part. Nolan Arenado is a good hitter. Trevor Story is a good hitter. Trevor Story is a good hitter. And that's about it right now with this current Rockies team. And I think people probably still don't realize the degree to which these Rockies, who are competing somewhat unexpectedly and despite having been outscored on the season are a pitching and defense oriented team because if you go by run scored like there are a lot of years where the Rockies are among the leaders in run scored even though they're not really a great offensive team just because of Coors Field this year they're 11th in just raw run scored and that's before adjusting for anything if you do look at the park adjustments they are worse offensively than any team but the royals marlins and tigers they have an 84 wrc plus where 100 is league average so they're just a bad and thin offensive team and daniel

murphy would have improved that oh no we we we have talked before about like the lowest ranks the rockies have ever had and like runs scored because of the the bargain and and so the lowest the rockies have ever ranked in their league and run scored was eighth and yeah that's because of the uh that's because of the bark so anyway i just i don't i don't understand it's not often you get to write about a transaction and have a strong opinion about the team side of it, I think. And in this case, I don't know if it's the front office who decided we don't want Danny Murphy, and I don't know if it's ownership who decided we don't want to take on Danny Murphy's money. Now, if you look at the Rockies' bullpen, everything they've poured in there—

Which is like $4 million or something. Yeah, it's not a huge amount of money if you're trying to make the playoffs and you think this could put you over the edge. And the Rockies are right in the middle of a very crowded race in the National League. Not only are they trying to win the National League West, but also they're right in the mix for the Wild Card. I think they're a half game back, one game back. I don't know exactly where they are, but there are a bunch of teams right there. And if you know anything about the so-called baseball win curve, curve when additional wins make the biggest difference it's like right here it's exactly where the rockies are where like a slight improvement could genuinely make the difference between them

staying home or them playing one game or them playing at least three games in in the playoff so i don't get it i i don't know i don't't understand what the Rockies opinion of Ian Desmond is. I don't know what their opinion of Gerardo Parra is. They can't be that high on the players because Ryan McMahon and David Dulles started to play more often lately with the team in the hunt. So I don't get it. I don't know what the Rockies were thinking. I was talking up in Seattle. I was talking to someone who provided the possibility of maybe there were just too many players on waivers and they got

confused. I don't know if there's any merit to that, but there's a lot of names on the wire. So maybe they were like, oh, David Murphy, I didn't know he was still in the league. And then they just skipped right by. But yeah, I don't know. I've reached out to a number of people. I don't know if that would make it better. No, it definitely wouldn't. But I reached out to a number of people to try to figure out if anyone had like a good explanation for this and and like the consensus answer has been nope no idea yeah so that's the right yeah that's a weird one and as for the cubs they have had a crowded infield for the past few years and kind of still do but i guess he will get playing time

at second where of course they've had Baez and they've had Zobris sometimes but they've got Chris Bryant who is hurt they just put Addison Russell on the DL so I guess it's just kind of depth and insurance and he's a good hitter and they'll find playing time for him somehow and they're a good hitting team unlike the rockies although they've had sort of a slump lately but i'm sure this isn't really a response to that small sample slump so much as it's that they got a good hitter for not very much yeah that sounds about right it's uh it's not entirely like when the feelers got justin boer which is just i guess they got a pinch hitter morphy's going to play more often because as you said, Russell's been hurt.

He's on the DL. The Cubs are essentially, they've decided, well, Hugh Darvish is down. He's down for the year. Mike Montgomery is injured now. Tyler Chatwood is dreadful, and he should never pitch. So we're just going to hit the daylights out of the ball. So that's the Cubs approach.

It's not the cleanest fit that there's ever been on the roster, but the Cubs are probably just thinking about percentage of plate appearances available and with murphy who's been very good for two months and also for several years cubs have decided this is going to reduce the number of plate appearances we give to below average hitters i don't know if they have a below average hitter left on that team they must but i don't know who it would be yeah i guess are we gonna jason hayward i don't yeah i guess on him lately cubs non-pitchers have a 109 wrc plus and cubs pitchers must have been truly terrible right because as a team i think they're at like 101 to yeah the Cubs pitchers have a negative 45 WRC plus, and that's in 256 plate appearances.

Only the Giants pitchers have been worse than that. So the Cubs pitchers alone are dragging down their overall offensive stats quite a bit, but their actual hitters are pretty good at hitting. One thing I like, so I know that the Fangraphs playoff odds have been really high on the nationals all season and it's one of the reasons that i just i kind of assumed they would just improve that they would do better than this and so even even after even after the moves that they made subtracting daniel murphy and matt adams the nationals we still at fangraphs give the nationals a 12 chance at the playoffs and and their rest-of-season projected winning percentage is currently 7th best in Major League Baseball,

according to Fangraphs. Now, Fangraphs bases that on updated projections, but the Fangraphs Playoff Odds page also has something called Season-to-Date Stats Mode. So when you click that tab, then it gives you estimates of how good a team is based on how the team and the players have performed this season. And so, you think, okay, you flip over to season-to-date stats mode instead of projections mode, and that should account for the Nationals being in a slump, and they should look worse. The Nationals, by that tab, their rest-of-season projected winning percentage is still seventh best in Major League Baseball.

Better than the Braves by a point better than the Phillies the Nationals by almost every measure have been good just not in the one that they care about the most which is just I mean it's it's the Dodgers have it even worse in that regard but yeah it's just again for the Nationals another season where they look at didn't think, but we weren't that bad. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know to what degree their clubhouse dysfunction that seems to have cropped up is just a result of how many things have gone wrong for them in that they have played well in a lot of ways, and yet they're where they are. So you would think that that would lead to a lot of frustration. And I don't know, I guess you could say that if there's some kind of clubhouse dysfunction, like there was that one, what was the Bryce Harper comment when someone had a hit fall in

on opposing team? And he was like, if he were on our team, that wouldn't have fallen in. Like just that mentality, that mindset, like, I don't know if there's a point where that sets in in. If you just keep having these close losses or you keep not having the clutch hit, where at some point you just internalize that mentality and you just think, oh, we're the kind of team that doesn't get a clutch hit. I have no idea whether that is a thing, but they at least seem to feel that way. And it's not hard to see why, given just how much worse their results are, not even compared to what we expected coming into the season, but compared to what we would expect based on what they've actually done this season. Yeah, so it was JT RealMuto who was connected to the Nationals all season long. And now I guess if you were Mike Rizzo, if you're ownership, you get to think, well, I wonder what would have happened this year if we actually got JT Real Muto. But I guess this is going to be the probable end of the Bryce Harper era. And I guess we shouldn't talk about that now because we have the entire offseason to fill up. So just put that one off to the side.

Yeah, right. We can do a full postmortem. to the side. Yeah, right. We can do a full postmortem. But would you say that, like, it's a, I mean, this will be the larger discussion, I guess, but we don't have to review the whole Bryce Harper era. But do you think that the end of the Bryce Harper era is an end of a Nationals being a favorite or a contending team era? Obviously, the Phillies are good now, the Braves are good now. Are the Nationals going to be bad now Or are they just going to be Another team in that division

I don't think they're going to be the favorites anymore I think with the Braves and the Phillies coming up Obviously those teams aren't in exactly the same place Right now with their rebuilds But clearly they're ready to be competitive They are competitive, they're more competitive than the Nationals Right now and the Phillies are poised to spend Probably a lot of money in the offseason So the Phillies are going to get better But than the Nationals right now, and the Phillies are poised to spend probably a lot of money in the offseason.

So the Phillies are going to get better, but from the Nationals' perspective, never mind the players they already have on the roster, but you've got Victor Robles coming up. It looks like he should be ready almost immediately at the start of next year. And with the emergence of Juan Soto that makes an enormous difference, the Nationals could, if they wanted, I don't know how safe this is, but there's an argument that Juan Soto is just better than Bryce Harper. I don't know exactly how much I buy that, but Juan Soto hasn't really slowed down. You look at this season, Juan Soto is at 148, WRC Plus, Bryce Harper is at 134. So the Nationals can think, well, we're going to have soto and robles next year gonna have

rent down and and turner still and you're still gonna have scherzer and there's like there's a lot of good talent so the nationals are going to be in position assuming they lose harper this offseason they're still going to sign someone probably some boris clients and i think they're going to be a pretty good team next year it's just they're not going to be the favorites at the outset i don't think assuming the phillies are very active in trying to get at least one superstar. All right. Want to talk about why you were in Seattle? Sure.

So I went up on Tuesday because the Mariners were gracious enough to host the second annual Celebrating Women in Baseball event. This is an event that was in the idea stage for a few years but last year we talked about this on the podcast before but last year and meg rally and myself approached the mariners with the idea to have this event i didn't prepare a statement for this podcast and i'm not very good at thinking off the top of my head to explain what it is but how it has manifested the last two years is that meg rally goes up and she acts as a moderator before a, I should say beside, a panel of four women who work in the game. And so this year, Meg was joined up sort of on stage, I guess I'll talk about that later,

with Root Sports' Angie Mentink, and that's an on-air reporter who has covered the Mariners for 21 years. She's also joined by Amanda Hopkins, a repeat participant, at least when she was hired, baseball's only female scout. Frances Traceman was there as the senior vice president of sales and also Leslie Manning, who is the Mariners coordinator of professional development. And so all four women were available to just participate in a panel, responding to questions from Megan, responding to questions from the audience for about an hour. And then there was a little bit of a networking opportunity after the fact. from the audience for about an hour,

and then there was a little bit of a networking opportunity after the fact. It was a more successful event than last year in that it was not held just beyond the center field fence during batting practice, and so there was less of a threat of people becoming dead or concussed. Also, there seemed to be, I didn't count, but it seemed to be a far greater number of people in attendance. The downside was that because of all of the smoke that has enveloped the entire western seaboard of North America, the event was moved from a wonderful outdoor area into an indoor area, which is the main interview room.

So it's the room where the Mariners will hold their press conferences and announce things like Wade LeBlanc contract extensions or maybe more meaningfully robinson cano contract and free agency so meg was up there moderating from the podium which was a pretty cool little thing but still it being indoors and it having to be shifted indoors at the last minute was a modest inconvenience because everyone who was there in attendance was given a half-off drink voucher and there were no drink vendors available in that room or near that room because it was around the clubhouse so it was a very successful event followed by another Mariners loss which is something that happened last year but at least this one was was closer and we're excited to do it again next year the Mariners been very supportive there were a lot of front office executives who showed up and also beyond that

and below the executive level a lot of team support there were there were people who worked for other teams in seattle who showed up there was there was media who was present and a lot of fans showed up so it was uh it was a rousing success meg and the participants did a great job and what we are trying to do now is figure out how to make a better event in 2019 so it's not just the same format every single time. And I don't have the answer to that. But everyone, we'll solicit feedback. So anything you can think of, just let us know, and we'll see about including it. Yeah, that sounds great.

That's a really cool event. And I'm glad that you all and the Mariners do it. And I'm sorry that my trip through Seattle, brief as it was, did not not coincide with it this year hopefully I'll get to go at some point but yes please keep doing it and expanding it every summer that's great and incidentally the Mariners have officially checking the scoreboard lost to the Astros on Wednesday so the uh the Astros are now a game ahead of the A's but the Mariners are just falling slowly further behind their Their playoff odds are now down to 17%, according to Fangraph. So still a six-team race for the American League playoff picture, but it's increasingly looking like, I don't know,

let's call it maybe a five-and-a-half-team race. All right, let's get to emails. Ronald Acuna has hit a leadoff homer since we started ToppDig, by the way. First pitch? I don't know, but Jose Ureña is currently serving his suspension, so no one is around to hit Acuna because he hit this home run, so that's nice. All right, question from, well, let's start with Curtis, who says that Steamer, that is a projection system at Fangraphs, Steamer's current projections have Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

as the 18th best hitter in the major leagues, tied with Francisco Lindor and just ahead of Matt Carpenter. Of course, Vlad Jr. is not in the major leagues, but this is saying that if he were, he would be the 18th best hitter in the big leagues. Is there any precedent for minor to major league projections at this level? How did guys with elite minor league numbers project according to these projection systems, and are they more or less accurate than a typical major league projection?

Safe to say the Vladdy hype train is at full steam here north of the border, just wondering if there's any validity to a projection system's minor league scouting. So, yes, there's certainly validity to it. We've known going back to Bill James that minor league stats are a predictor of major league performance. I sent this question to Jared Cross, who is one of the people behind the steamer projection system, just to see if he had any thoughts. And he was away from his computer computer he didn't have a way of checking numbers but off the top of his head he said he thought that chris bryant and reese hoskins had been up in that territory before their call-ups and that bryant might have even been higher than vlad is right now

and he says evaluating these are tricky since players who stay in the minors and continue to accrue plate appearances are less likely to be underperforming or unlucky. So we should actually be under projecting those guys somewhat if we're doing it right. He also says, I don't think there are enough players in the Bryant or Vlad class to say much about their projections in particular. So there just haven't been that many guys in the period that steamer has been operating that have had projections like this so it's hard to say whether they tend to actually be accurate or not and he goes on to point out i think that if you are in the minors despite stats this good for so long then it's possible that you are overperforming or getting a little lucky, and that's why teams

are not promoting you, in which case you would want to kind of revise the projections down somewhat. Of course, in Vlad's case, I don't think anyone is questioning the performance or his potential. This is just a combination of mostly service time issues with, I guess, Blue Jays not being competitive and, I don't know, not needing every win right now, but mostly service time stuff. So I think that it's hard to say, but in theory, yeah, I mean, minor league projection has a lot of validity, I think, for your major league performance, but probably like bigger error bars around a guy who's in AAA than a guy who is already in the majors and doing it for real. Yeah, of course, any projection, you're going to have more confidence in it if it is based on

major league results as opposed to minor results. I think we, I don't have proof of that in front of me, but I think that's something that we can pretty easily intuit just because Major League is what we're trying to project in the first place. So there are some capabilities that work far better in the minors than they do in the majors. So, yeah, there's more volatility around the Guerrero projection, but then as evidenced by, oh, I don't know, someone named Juan Soto or Ronald Hooney Jr. I know that this is anecdotal, but it seems like many of the really, really good prospects who have come up have turned into really, really good players. I know that there's like this glaring Yohan Mankata exception at the moment because we're not really clear whether he makes enough contact. But I think that when you look at Vladimir Guerrero and you just look at the

breadth of his skill set, he does every single thing that you would want a hitter to do so now steamer steamer doesn't know that steamer doesn't know his profile it only knows the statistical interpretation of his profile i guess but it just so happens that that statistical interpretation of his profile is just about what's the word perfect it's perfect and so he's ready for the majors now the projection is uh it seems appropriate because like a wrc plus of 131 is very good, even if it sounds like, oh, maybe he should be 150 or 160. That's a little high. That's like JD Martinez territory. We're not that confident, but he seems like he's extremely, extremely good.

Yeah, he is hitting 394 as we speak now with lots of power. He has an 1100 plus OPS. There's a fun article at Fangraphs that I can link to. Craig Edwards ran through the numbers, the odds of Vlad batting 400 this year, and they're not good. Craig calculated that he has something like a 12% chance of doing it if you take this year as his true talent, like his actual stats to date, and then maybe a 3% chance of doing it if you just kind of use what we estimate his real true talent to be. And then, of course, if he actually does come up to the majors in September, he has a worse shot of hitting 400 for the season because, of course, it's better competition. So it's not likely that he will do that.

And the fact that he is even challenging, that is kind of bad because he should be in the majors already and not batting 400, but, you know, in the level where he belongs. What do you think the odds are that we will see him this season? Is it just at this point? Are they just going to wait till next year or might it still happen god i'm so i'm so torn between my cynicism and my not wanting to be so cynical about it because i was i was asked this the other day on on the radio about uh with white socks bringing out michael kopeck whether they're whether teams are maybe evolving in the way that they think about these things and i think that the answer is no i think teams know about the

the pressure that fans want to see these these players but the the teams also know that that pressure doesn't mean anything it doesn't really show up at the box office so much and again we'll just go back to chris bryant everybody knew exactly what the cubs are doing and it doesn't seem to have had any sort of meaningful long-term negative consequence. So I think if you're the Blue Jays, you just look at this. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was ready for the majors. He was ready for the majors months ago. He was maybe ready for the majors out of spring training. He's an extremely good player, and he should be in the majors right now.

And we all know why he's not, and the Blue Jays know that we know why he's not. And no matter what they say, he's destroyed the ball in AAA since he got there. He's batting.365, slugging.603 in triple a his first ever exposure to the league with 11 walks and seven strikeouts he's amazing he's ready to be one of the blue jays best players if not their best player right now as as we're talking he's not in the majors for the reasons that we all know and at this point i mean the minor league season's almost over the blue jays could say well we want him to rest up have a long off season i mean there's just they're so close to the end that I don't know what, I don't know how much it would benefit them. And I hate saying that because I want to see him and I know you want to see him. We all want to see him.

And they would draw some more people to the stadium down the stretch if they had him on the roster. But I mean, is that, is that worth that seventh year of control over a very possibly elite or maybe even all-time young hitter? And no, the answer is no. From the business perspective, the answer has always been no until the rules are changed in some way. It would shock me if he comes up at this point because he's not a young pitcher like Michael Kopech who could get hurt.

Guerrero is exactly the kind of player that teams are afraid of losing a year of control because a year of control of a player with this kind of profile is exactly the kind of player that teams are afraid of losing a year of control because a year of control of a player with this kind of profile is worth a lot of money and and that's how teams are oriented so if he comes up I will be I will be astonished yeah speaking of Kopech by the way who debuted on Tuesday against the Twins for people who don't know he is one of the top prospects in baseball and he's one of the guys that the White Sox got back in the Chris Sale trade. And there was some question earlier this season whether he would actually pan out because he was wild and he was having all kinds

of control problems. That was sort of the knock against him. He was famous for throwing extremely hard. You've maybe seen the video or heard of the video of him throwing 110 like with a crow hop, like a, what is it, a pull down throw? Is that what they call it? So that, you know, obviously not exactly a reflection of what he can do on a mound in a game, but pretty impressive. And then there were reports that he hit like 105 in games. I don't know, it's minor leagues. I'm not sure exactly how reliable that was, but he throws really, really hard is the point as a starter. And so I think people were kind of expecting

he was just going to come up and set records immediately, and he did not. He was throwing, you know, 96, 97. I think he got up to 98 in his debut, but it seems that he is just much better throwing 97, let's say, instead of trying to throw 105 every time because he has really turned around his season in the minors, he came up to the majors after three straight starts in which he struck out a total of 27 batters and walked zero. And then that continued in his debut. He only went two innings because of a rain delay, but he struck out four, didn't walk anyone. So he suddenly now strikes out as many guys as before or more and just doesn't walk anyone anymore and it seems to be because he has taken

a few ticks off and still throws really really ridiculously hard but not so hard that you wonder about his arm blowing out on every pitch here is something i can't believe so uh michael kopek between may 28th and july 5th he made eight starts. And over those eight starts, he threw 37 innings. He had 33 walks and 50 strikeouts. So the most important fact here is that over eight starts in a row, Michael Kopech threw 54% strikes. Now, strike rate is not as familiar as walk or strikeout rate, but let's just say that a strike rate of 54% is terrible. Yeah. It's like he was Tyler Chatwood of AAA. His next eight starts, that's July 14th through the present, including his abbreviated start in the major leagues. His next eight starts, he threw 46 innings with four walks and 63 strikeouts.

He threw 71% strikes over those starts. He went from walking 33 in 37 innings to 4 in 46 he walked eight batters on june 14th alone in three innings he has walked half as many batters his last eight games i don't know because it's the minor leagues you know as well as i do it's you it's not as easy to come by video certainly not video that's good or that has a worthwhile worthwhile camera angle because it's just all terrible down there. Everything is terrible. Pay the players, but also pay the production of the game so that we can all interpret things. So it's really hard to know what Michael Kopech might have done.

But this is so dramatic and so sudden. There were nine days between his start on July 5th and July 14th. Maybe that might have been the minor league all-star break or something. I don't know. Maybe he got a little extra time to work on something. I don't know what Michael Kopech might have done, but just statistically, it really does look like he turned a corner. Now, the risk is that Tyler Glasnow did this in AAA last year,

and then he came up and he was bad again. But on the other hand, now he's apparently good. So I don't know what that means. I don't know if Glasnow just remains to be seen. But something seems to have changed for Michael Kopech, whether that's toning it down and just throwing less hard. I have always been skeptical that that actually works in terms of improving your command.

But if that's what it is, it sure as hell worked out for him because he's gotten so good lately. Yeah, I've read that he has done that. I read some quote from his AAA pitching coach, but I don't know if there was some other kind of mechanical change that accompanied that. And yeah, I don't know whether usually speed correlates with command. There's probably something there, but like for most pitchers, I think they're used to throwing about as hard as they can throw. And if they take some speed off, it isn't necessarily the case that they will be able to put it exactly where they want to because they're used to throwing at that speed. I don't know. Maybe they could adapt in time.

But I don't know that it is that much easier to place the ball exactly where you want it throwing 95 instead of 97 i mean you're still almost maxing out your abilities but if he was someone who just was really trying to set a record every time he threw a pitch i could see how that would be counterproductive so maybe in his case that was it but i don't know maybe there's something else going on. Yeah. I, uh, maybe there's an opportunity to write about him soon. Cause I just, just when you see, I love looking at minor league strike, right. I just think it's a useful indicator and it's also, everyone understands what strike rate means. And so it's, it just, this is as stunning a statistic, a mid-season statistical turnaround as, as I have seen from a pitcher. It's like, he's a little minor league Cole Calhoun or something.

All right. Stat blast? Stat blast. 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. So this will be kind of quick, maybe. I don't know. So we briefly talked about Mike Fires, I think.

I don't even know if that's true so but for the most part i i tried i tried to write about mike flyers when he was claimed off waivers by the a's and i just couldn't find anything that was worth sending out to the world you know like i could i could write a few hundred words on mike flyers but i didn't think it would improve anyone's life so i uh i skipped. So did, I think, the rest of us at FanGraphs. And so, of course, since Mike Fiers was completely summarily ignored by myself and my colleagues, he started three times for Oakland and allowed a total of three runs with one walk and 21 strikeouts. He's been amazing.

He's been one of the better pitchers in Major League Baseball. And I was curious what might be going on with Mike Fiers. And I found something. Something has been going on with Mike Fiers. And so I remembered. Something has been going on with Mike Fiers. And so I remembered when the A's claimed him, I saw some quote, it's not in front of me, but I think it was David Forst, A's GM, saying something to the effect of, we're happy to have Fiers and we're going to just see how he does with our pitching plan for him. And what that implied is that the A's had something they wanted to do with Mike Fiers to maybe try to try to make him better like fires used to strike out more batters than he has lately anyway

so i saw the words pitching plan and i thought okay that's interesting and then fires turned in three good starts in a row and i thought though that's even more interesting so what i did i looked at uh i have two things i'm going to i'm going to say so i looked at uh at all pitchers in major league baseball through aug August 1st, when Mike Fiers made his last appearance with the Tigers, and since August 2nd, after Mike Fiers wound up going to the A's. So I was looking at four-seam fastballs, and I was looking at curveballs. So I have a data sample of 260 pitchers who threw a sufficient number of four-seam fastballs on both sides of that date.

And Mike Fiers has shown the, out of that sample of 260 pitchers, Mike Fiers has shown the fifth biggest increase in average fastball height. His average fastball since joining the A's is up 0.43 feet, which more relatably, that means a little more than five inches. His average four-seam fastball has now risen by a little more than five inches his average four-seam fastball has now risen by a little more than five inches since joining the eights so uh he was already throwing pretty high with the tigers but he's just working up with his own that's not anything that's too unfamiliar we hear about pitchers doing this all the time here's where it gets even more interesting

so fires also has a curveball a big sexy looping curveball, and so I looked at the same kind of data, and I wound up with a sample of 116 pitchers who threw enough curveballs on either side of that August 1st date, and Mike Fires' average curveball height has dropped by the most. It's down 0.44 feet, or again, a little more than 5 inches. So since joining the A's, Mike Fiers' average fastball has risen by 5 inches, and his average giant looping curveball has dropped by another 5 inches, meaning he's added another 10 inches of separation between his fastball and his curveball, which is exactly what people have just said, classically fastball up, curveball down. So long and short of it, Fiers is trying to keep his fastball above bats,

and he's trying to keep his curveball below bats, and it's been working out for him. It's not the only stuff he's done since joining the A's, but that's the most visible stuff, and it's certainly worked out to this point. So pretty easy changes. He used to throw his fastball higher than he did with the Tigers, and his curveball has been around for a while. So I don't think it was anything too radical for the A's, but just these simple differences, and Mike mike fires has turned into a really good pitcher

apparently so fun move and the kind of thing that might be cited as an anecdote in this book i've heard about that's in the works yeah that is possible we've certainly seen i mean anecdotally it's hard to go back i mean there may have been times certainly prior to PitchFX and StatCast and all this where some team will see something in a guy and will acquire that guy and will like on day one sit him down with some stat people and coaches and say this is what we want you to do and they buy in maybe because things haven't been going so great and then suddenly it's like they're a different guy and it seems to be often the same teams kind of preying on the same teams when it comes to this sort of stuff. I don't know how long that will be the case, but I am pretty fascinated by that process.

Yeah. Now, you and I had a brief little Gchat conversation last week that was just about the teams that we're most at least interested in. And they're just certain teams where you can see a player that's on that team or maybe got moved to that team to think, well, they're probably not going to do anything interesting with that player. So I'm just not even going to pay attention. But then there are the other teams that just seem to have a knack for it. Now, I know that I acknowledge one of those teams is the Dodgers, and the Dodgers are also out of the playoff picture looking in right now. That's a whole other conversation. But yeah, Mike Fiers, in this case, he's doing something interesting.

So I'll probably put up a post about that that will just be this stat blast in several more words. Cool. All right. Well, I have could be a stat blast. I suppose it's sort of stat blasty. So this is inspired by a listener question. This all five cases, the run came via a solo home run. Furthermore, each homer was hit by a left-handed batter or a switch hitter batting lefty. What is the record for most consecutive games where a team's only run comes via a solo homer? What if you restrict it to solo homers from the same side of the plate. So I sent this question to Rob Mains of Baseball Perspectives because I saw that on Wednesday he had written an article about solo home runs. And I will link to that article, but the upshot of it is that we're living in kind of

the golden age of solo homers. If solo homers is something anyone likes, I don't know whether anyone's excited about the golden age of solo homers, but it makes sense because homers if solo homers is something anyone likes i don't know i don't know whether anyone's excited about the golden age of solo homers but it makes sense because homers are up even though the home run rate is slightly down from the last couple years it's still extremely high historically speaking and everything else all other kinds of hits are down certainly singles are way down because strikeouts are up so the other ways that you can get on base are down and Certainly singles are way down because strikeouts are up. So the other ways that you can get on base are down and home runs are up and therefore more of the home runs are solo home runs. And so Rob was chronicling how many more of the types of games where all the runs are scored

on solo homers we have seen. And so just citing his article here, he says from 1908 to 1999, there were 82 games in which both teams scored all via bases empty homers. So both teams scored and all of the runs scored were via solo homers. And just in the 21st century, a lot fewer years than 1908 to 1999,

there have already been 73 of those games compared to 82 over the much longer period, and that rate is only increasing in recent years. So we are seeing much more of that, but what the Cubs did is extreme, even by the standards of this current era. So Rob did a little research. He had some data. He used the play index and the streak finder to determine this. The Cubs did, in fact, make history.

I am quoting from his email here. Until they played those five games in which they scored one run per game, all via sole homers, the record was three such games held by 11 teams, the most recent of which was the 2016 Indians. Those teams in those 33 games went 4-29. It's generally not a great idea to only score runs via sole homers and only score one run. It's hard to win when you do that. The Cubs, though, were 2-3 over their five-game stretch, so good for them. He continues, the only teams to have all homers in the streak from one side of the plate were the 1979 Dodgers,

that was Davey Lopes, Steve Garvey twice, and the 1957 Giants, Danny O'Connell, Thalme Thomas, and Willie Mays. Unlike the Cubs, those were all hit by right-handed batters. And Rob says, I decided to widen Eric's net a little by looking for streaks in which all scoring was via solo home runs, but not just one-run games with solo homers.

Even so, the Cubs still reign. No other team since 1908 has scored at least one run per game, all via solo homers, for five straight games other than this year's Cubs. So it is historic, straight games other than this year's Cubs. So it is historic and it is kind of emblematic of this era. It's really sort of the exemplar of the brand of baseball we are seeing these days. Although, as Rob points out, the Cubs are not really the team that you would expect to have set this record if some team this year were going to do it because they don't hit that many home runs really. And they do hit other stuff. They do tend to get on base in other ways. So, you know, you'd expect a team like Toronto that has the seventh most homers and the six fewest base runners. That would make more sense for a team to pull off this feat.

But for whatever reason, it is the Cubs who ended up doing it. So it's weird and historic and baseball prospectus has a stat that both of us cite from time to time called the guillen number which is something inspired by joe sheehan back in 2005 when everyone was saying that the white socks and ozzy guillen were playing small ball and joe was saying no they hit lots of homers and he came up with this guillen number and it just tells you the percentage of runs that a team scores on home runs, and the Cubs are very low on that list. They have scored only 34.3 percent of all of their runs on homers, which is 26th in all of baseball, so it is really weird that the Cubs were the team to do

this, but now they have daniel murphy and maybe they won't do this anymore yeah the uh the yankees have the highest gain number right now in major league baseball at 50 i guess 49.9 of the runs have scored on homers however that's the fifth highest gain number in major league baseball history last year's blue jays were higher at 50.5 but the the real winner, the 2010 Blue Jays, who scored 53% of their runs on home runs. That was before the home run spike, so good for those Blue Jays, I guess. Yeah.

All right, let's take this one because this is related to something you wrote about recently. This is a question from Jojo. He says, as a follow-up to your chat the other day, I wondered, with all the position players pitching this season, is there a statistical adjustment for that? If teams are throwing games away, surely this allows some players to pad their batting stats. Does it also affect catchers and framing? Is there any difference in numbers if you adjust for non-pitcher pitchers? It's probably still a small sample, but at what point do we see a distortion of the data, which is used to decide careers and salaries etc 50 players

one team doing it a lot in one division are we at that point well i don't think we're at that point yet but it did just for absolutely no reason on monday i threw up a quick little post i just looked at run differential with position players pitching every team at that point but the pirates and tigers had been involved on either end of a position player pitching taking the mound this year. And so most teams were with, you know, negligible run differentials, nothing that would really make that much of a difference. But the Phillies were at, I think, like negative 11. Their position players have allowed 14 runs,

whereas they've scored three runs against position players pitching. Realistically, this should be a filter. Like, if this continues to happen more and more, and we're not at the point yet because they're throwing, I don't know what percentage of innings, but less than 1% of innings, presumably. It doesn't really make that much of a difference, but there should be something like with hockey players.

If you dig deeper, I think there's a category where it's like goals and then empty net goals, which don't really... Of course, it's difficult to score an empty net goal, but it's not that difficult. You can score it from any part of the ice so it should be something that is removed and realistically something we should have with nationally pitchers is we should have all pitching appearances against pitchers removed if we want to be intellectually honest because that's not really that much of a challenge but position players pitching even worse it just it should be data that's thrown out or at

least kept separate but because of how much data that's thrown out or at least kept separate. But because of how much data we already have, the idea of keeping it separate is just kind of hard. So I guess if you had your ideal leaderboard, there would be a little box you could check that says, eliminate stats with position players pitching. Or maybe for a pitcher leaderboard, eliminate stats against other pitchers. But that doesn't exist, so it's just something you have to look for. Yeah, it's like teams will do that, I think, or some people will do that with amateur players, like college players that want to know if you were facing a good opponent, if you were facing

a division one team, if you were facing the Friday starter, real prospects, because obviously in college baseball, there are people who will go on to be Hall of Famers, and there are people who will go on to be accountants. And there's a very wide range in talent there. So you might want to know, is this guy good against the types of players he will be facing in the future, or is he feasting against non-prospects? So sort of the same idea. Did you see Sam's recent article, Sam Miller at ESPN? Did you see Sam's recent article, Sam Miller at ESPN? He wrote about position players pitching, and he found that there is a big difference in how they do or how hitters do against them, depending on the leverage of the situation. curious about why position player pitchers are as successful as they are. They're not successful.

They're very bad at pitching compared to actual pitchers, but they're not as bad necessarily as you would think they would be. As you have discovered in the past, their batting average on balls in play is surprisingly low. And just generally, they're not worse than the worst actual pitchers in baseball as a group so he looked at this and he found that if you look at like situations that actually matter which are rare it's a pretty small sample because even now when you bring in a position player pitcher the game's out of hand usually but there are times when they come in in moments that actually matter usually in extra innings when the team is just out of pitchers, but it's still like a tie game and it still matters. In those situations,

the hitters just destroy them and they're just completely terrible, like worse than any actual pitcher is. Whereas in the typical blowout situation, they're not so bad. And so Sam, you know, with the appropriate caveats about sample size is speculating that in those blowout times, guys aren't really trying. Like they're not putting forth their full effort because, you know, the situation doesn't matter that much. And maybe there's like an unwritten rules thing where they don't even want to beat up on the pitcher who isn't really a pitcher. where they don't even want to beat up on the pitcher who isn't really a pitcher. It's kind of interesting because you would think that there's a lot of incentive to be as good as you can be at any time because every hit counts if you're going into arbitration or free agency. Teams probably are not docking you for getting a hit against a position player pitcher, as we're just saying.

So that hit could make you money. player pitcher as we're just saying so like that hit could make you money and yet it kind of seems like maybe hitters aren't actually trying to beat up on position player pitchers as much as they could be yeah i like the premise i wish there were more examples of position players pitching in times that mattered i as inspired by that i looked up whether pitchers hit worse in higher leverage spots and they do but it's nothing it's not as notable as you'd want it to be now of course there's a selection bias there and that the better pitchers the better hitting pitchers are likely to get those plate appearances more often but at first blush it didn't seem like there was much but it's something to dig into because pitchers come up in higher leverage spots

ever so often and it would be interesting to see if if they when that happens if they are pitched too harder or if their results are worse. Yeah, and Sam said he had looked to see whether the pool of hitters in those situations are different because you might expect in a blowout, like, the starters are out of the game and you're just facing the scrubs. And whereas in a tie game, maybe you're not, you're still facing the good hitters. And he said there was some difference in the caliber of hitter, but probably not enough to nearly explain the difference in results. So that is kind of interesting. All right. Jacob is asking a question that has come up before on this podcast, I think, and we've talked about it. You've probably written about it, but this is related to something we were talking about earlier in the episode, and I'm not sure what the current state of thinking about this is.

So Jacob says, Plus of at least 100 in their history, and they both happen to play at the two highest elevation ballparks in baseball, the Rockies and the Diamondbacks. Every other team has had a WRC Plus of at least 100 since 1997, and every team besides the Padres has since 2007. The highest the Diamondbacks have ever had was a WRC Plus of 98 in 1999. the Diamondbacks have ever had was a WRC plus of 98 in 1999. The Rockies seem particularly affected by this as their highest is 97 in 2007 and 2014, but they've also been at 90 or lower in 15 of their last 26 seasons, including this season. When I look at these stats, it seems to say that either the Rockies and D-backs have some sort of disadvantage, park-neutral stats don't do a good job accounting for altitude, or neither team has ever had an

above-average hitting season as a team. Which do you think is most likely? I personally think it is probably a combination of a disadvantage and an overcorrection of park-neutral stats. This always trips me up because I never know which way to go. We'll focus on the Rockies here because they're the best example here, but I've never really been clear on whether they have a home field advantage or a road field disadvantage. And I guess the real answer is it's both. You never really think about the Diamondbacks in this term, but they are at a little bit of elevation. So I don't know. We know the Rockies have always been far better at home than on the road. If you look up home road splits, the Rockies tend to have the greatest difference in win-loss percentage over any

meaningful amount of time. So there's a huge difference, but I've never really known which way to say it goes. So the Rockies hitters see, as we know, they see pitches that move differently in Colorado than they do elsewhere. But something that I didn't really think about before is that when you have a team that comes into Colorado and and is not used to hitting there they're also seeing pitches that move differently they just move less maybe than they do in other environments but the movement is definitely different so i would think that the rockies hitters get used to hitting at home and rockies pitchers get used to throwing the pitches at home and then they're just they don't really know necessarily quite how to handle themselves when they're not in their familiar environment.

But this continues to trip me up because it is the weirdest environment in the four major sports. Yeah, and there have been studies on this, right? You've done – you looked for like a hangover effect on the road, right? Was that you where you looked to see like, well, do the Rockies, when they go on the road, are they worse at the beginning of a road trip when they're just adjusting to the ball moving differently? And then do they get better later on? And there wasn't much there, right? I think what I found, and I haven't looked at this for a while, but I think that I just, they're worse, but it doesn't get better over a longer road trip.

Now, I didn't, maybe, maybe for all i know maybe teams continue to get worse on long road trips and the rockies are actually better than the average i don't know that i only ran math for them but i i couldn't find any evidence of them getting better as you would think that they're getting more accustomed to seeing pitches more different yeah it is i mean it's hard to believe that you could never have an average hitting team over 20 plus years and that it would be these two teams with maybe the most extreme offensive environments. Now the Diamondbacks, I guess there's an altitude component there. There's also a dryness component there. I don't know how much difference it makes to pitch movement compared to Coors, for instance. So I don't know if the same kind of hangover theory applies as well there,

but it does seem curious. And so it's possible that it's a stat issue that the park factors are just missing something and maybe digging them a little too hard for the park for whatever reason. But this is, I think, still not a settled matter. A number of people have looked into this. I've seen studies. I think I've seen some that have found something and others that haven't found something. It just doesn't seem like we've had the conclusive answer yet. Okay, Segev says, I am watching the Orioles-Blue Jays game and have just watched Chris Davis strike out three times in a row, and it made me wonder how many fielders would teams have to have been missing for each of his at-bats this year for him to be an average hitter. You could obviously get rid of the third baseman or

whatever infielder stays opposite field in the infield shift, and it wouldn't change much. You could probably even lose one outfielder and manage to keep him way below average, but if you left the four infielders and just removed the entire outfield has he done enough to say that he would actually be an above average hitter in that scenario i'm assuming that davis doesn't know the defenders are missing and all of his at bats happen as normal i don't know how that would be the case but maybe it doesn't make a difference i don't know but it's uh this is uh i feel almost bad answering this question it's kind of like the the territory we've talked about where you're kind of kicking a player when he's down. Cymborski and his projection system, whether Rafael Palmeiro or Chris Davis would actually be a better hitter in the major leagues this year, because Rafael Palmeiro has been better

since we talked about him. I think he's gone on a hot streak since we talked about how amazingly well he has been hitting at age 53, almost 54. He turns 54 next month month i'll just give you an update on his numbers now this is again for the cleburne railroaders in texas this is the american association a mid-tier independent league he is now hitting 301 424 495 that is a 919 opsPS and Patrick Palmero update on the same team. He has a 685 OPS. Anyway, Cheryl and Dan determined that if you manage to translate these stats and use the projections and everything that Palmero might actually be projected to be a better major league hitter right now than Chris Davis, which is kind of amazing, but that is not the question here. Okay, so let's try to do some math here on the fly. So the league average weighted on base average is, what is it, about 315, I think. Let's try to figure this out. So the league average weighted on base average right now in baseball is 315 and chris davis is at not that number he's at 241 so that is a uh a difference of 74 points which is a lot so what would 74 points come down

to here how can we get chris davis 74 more points of weighted on base average so problem is when he strikes out which he does quite often it doesn't doesn't really matter how many fielders are in the field right okay okay maybe here let's do this let's do this easier so let's so far chris davis uh fangars also has a weighted runs above average stat great okay this is this is more useful So he's 26 runs below average right now. 26 runs below average. So we want to get him, according to the fangrass factors here, looks like we want to get him, I don't know, do you want to start with singles? Does that sound appropriate?

Sure. A single is worth about 0.72 runs. So let's just say we're looking at negative 26. So we're taking 26 runs below average, and we're going to divide by about 0.72. So we're looking for 36 more singles for Chris Davis to have this season. 36 more singles now.

If you removed a defender from the infield, you would probably be taking away the guy who's closest to third base, I would assume. But maybe you leave him and you take away the shortstop who's playing around second base. So that way you keep two guys. Hmm. Because if you take away the guy who's close to third base, then Davis would just probably try to bunt constantly because there's not even anyone on that half of the field. And, you know, if Chris Davis knows that his counterfactual is that he has a 46 WRC+, he should just be bunting.

He should always be bunting. So you might be able to get him to bunt enough there to add up some hits. But even if you leave the guy over toward third base, but you leave the shortstop, or you take away the shortstop so that you have a guy covering first base, a guy who's shifted to get a ground ball, and then a guy who's somewhere around second or third base, but covering for the bunt. That leaves a big hole up the middle,

and still he doesn't hit many ground balls, and he still would pull most of them. So that's not where it's at. You need outfield hits. There are only two hitters this year who have been shifted more often than Davis. Well, actually, that's maybe setting too high a pitch minimum here. I'm on Baseball Savant doing this search. So Chris Davis, by the way, is the most shifted hitter in Major League Baseball this year,

just searching on Baseball Savant. He has been shifted on 91.1% of his pitches So it's basically only less than 1 out of 10 of his pitches Is he actually seeing a standard or non-overshift infield alignment Poor Chris Davis So there's a reason for that And that is why we're saying that, yeah, you could take away a fielder in the infield And unless he started

bunting which he really should then you might not even notice right so if you wanted to leave singles alone a double is worth about one run so if davis is 26 runs below average we have to find him 26 more doubles so then you have to take away an outfielder but like he i mean this is his fly balls are so lazy like his good fly balls are already home runs he doesn't hit a whole lot of like liner shots so yeah i hmm if you take away one defender i think you could still chris havis might have a wrc plus of like 75 or 80 i think if you take away two defenders that's probably a little too much but i think it's closer to two than one you'd have to take away for him to have an average batting line that That's where I'm going to go with this. And I am too

upset about him and for him to actually want to run the math. Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes sense. All right. Well, I guess that's kind of a downer note to end on. Maybe, let's see, I had one other one that we can answer. This is from Ari. He says, If an NL manager managed like an AL manager, how many games would it cost him? In other words, the manager lets the pitcher pitch as long as he would if there were a DH and lets the pitcher just take his plate appearances whenever they come. He never double switches, doesn't pinch hit except when the pitcher was coming out anyway, and generally doesn't let the fact that the pitcher has to hit influence his bullpen management. How many games, if any, would this cost the team over a season?

Okay, hold on. When does the pitcher come out? The pitcher just comes out whenever he would come out as a result of his pitching performance, purely. So the manager is not considering if the pitcher has a plate appearance coming up and if he wants to pinch hit for him in that plate appearance. So it would be just like with an AL team, you take out the pitcher whenever you think it's advantageous for a new pitcher to come in, but no other consideration. But you're still able to pinch hit late in games

because sometimes AL managers will pinch hit. So really we're just looking at pitchers don't come out if they're about to hit or if they just hit so the only real differences here are no double switches and pitchers are removed regardless of when they are due up in the lineup so these are not huge these are not huge factors i think double switches generally don't make the difference in winning or losing a ballgame. So you figure there would be a few more times you would, I guess, have to go to the bench to pinch hit. Yeah, well, that's the thing. In this scenario, there is no DH,

but the manager is acting as if there were. So I think the pitcher comes to the plate more often. It's just, for whatever reason, in this hypothetical, the manager doesn't care if the pitcher for whatever reason in this hypothetical, the manager doesn't care if like the pitcher is due up in the next inning or something. He just doesn't even enter his mind. So all he cares about is whether the pitcher has something left in the tank. But this is only true for the starting pitcher? Or does he just let the pitcher bat all the time? Like when even when he goes at the bullpen? Yeah, I guess it continues to be true. The relievers

have to hit also, I guess if he wants them to be the reliever. number nine hitter has come up 480 times so what did i say before 257 so let's just let's just call that 480 minus 257 that comes out to 223 additional plate appearances just doing the simplest possible evaluation here that's 223 plate appearances that are now going to pitchers instead of people who would replace pitchers now the people who would replace pitchers are not actually league average hitters. They're pinch hitters, and they're going to be a little worse. But I guess there's no reason why we couldn't run that math too. So let's just keep on doing math. Okay, so the league average pitcher this year in the National League has a weighted on base average of 0.131, which is terrible. However, if you want to look at the National League's average pinch hitter,

then you are looking at a Wubba of 287. So now we're taking 223 times the difference between 287 and 131. So that works out to 30.328, which is a number that doesn't mean anything to you. But then we just divide that by a fan graphs number that they keep track of every year that converts Woba to runs. So we're looking at now a difference of 25 runs to this point. If I've done all the math right, 25 runs by letting the pitcher bet instead of the pinch hitters over the remainder of the game. So that's about two and a half wins. Fold that into the rest of the season, that would come would come out to what three and a half wins or so of course these are also

maybe higher leverage plate appearances on average but i don't know if that's true so let's just go with three to four wins based on that and then not double switching and the other stuff i don't know what that means another half win or so so let's let's go let's let's even round it up five wins maybe five wins by al managing in the National League. All right. So that would be bad. That would be pretty costly. Don't do that. Yeah, don't do that.

All right. Well, this has been a very mathematical episode of Effectively Wild. And I think that I don't want to have to do so much math on the fly again. That makes for very, hopefully as the listener, you are not aware of how annoying this was. Pencils down, test over. Well, I'm happy to report that while we were recording that episode, the Cubs actually scored some runs that were not scored via solo home runs.

Daniel Murphy drove in one of those runs with a single and David Bodie hit another home run, but it was a two run shot. So streak over. You can support the podcast and keep our streak going by pledging on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash effectivelywild, sign up, pledge some small monthly amount, as have the following five listeners. Ira Aranen, Scott Brady, Chris Vernier, Andrew Schaefer, and Ben E.

Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and so many other podcast platforms. Your ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated and help push us up the rankings. You can replenish our mailbag, keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance.

And we will be back, as always, with another episode a little bit later this week. Talk to you then. Every day You think you'll find your way But it's okay Till you find out you've been lying So low So low