Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1288: The More You Don’t Know

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about how teams project the outcomes of matchups between batters and pitchers, the perils of second-guessing well-informed managerial decisions, and why teams still make mistakes, then answer listener emails about start-to-start strikeout variance, limiting the number of pitchers used per game, a potential problem with pitcher-catcher headsets, the four […]

If I meet more than you're right, I guess you're right. If I wake up in your mind, I guess you're right. If I sink into your sleep and make it deep, I guess you're right. If I never let you go, I know you so and oh so right! Hello. We've had no baseball played since we last spoke, so no new baseball to talk about. So we're going to take this opportunity to answer some emails, which we haven't done for a while. But I wrote something that I mentioned yesterday I would want to banter about briefly, and it's about second-guessing and about second-guessing in this era when teams are smart for the most part, in this era when teams are smart for the most part, particularly playoff teams, and they know in general a lot more about the things that we are second guessing them about. So what I was

curious about was there have been so many times in these playoffs where we've wondered, why is this guy starting? Why isn't that guy starting? Why wasn't this guy pinch hitting? Why bring in that pitcher there? And you figure there's probably usually more to the story that we can see. And so I reached out to a bunch of front office people and I asked, I tried to get a sense of what the state of batter-pitcher projections is, matchup projections in baseball right now. And it sounds like it's an area where there's been a lot of work done in the last few years and some advances made. So when you and I try to project how a given matchup will go, I mean, public projection systems are not set up to do this really. We have your basic steamers and zips and pakodas and they give us an estimate of each player's true talent

but they don't tell us anything about the actual interaction between two players maybe they're like daily fantasy systems that do those things i'm sure gamblers have those things but as far as the public goes when we try to say well who was the best person for this job or who should be starting i mean what's your process like generally we look at like the season splits and then maybe career splits or there's just not a whole lot to go on because we know that batter pitcher matchup stats really don't mean anything the samples are too tiny So you just kind of look at the projections and factor in what you know, your sense of the player and maybe the platoon adjustment, if there's a handedness advantage there and that's kind of it, right? I feel like maybe the biggest area that we don't

know what to do with is we don't know how to pick up on the significance of like recent trends. You know, you look at the data and you always say because mitchell lichtman and people will always remind us you always trust the projections that we have but what we don't have is like well maybe this guy's got a hand thing or this guy's shoulder is sore this guy just has maybe this guy's like get a buying a house you're going through a divorce or something that's kind of stressful so that's the stuff that we we don't have access to and we don't we never really know if there's like a recent slump or a recent hot streak, if there's anything to it. So that's, that would be one kind of blind spot, but otherwise, yeah,

no, you're, you're right on the money in terms of what our process is. Yeah. So talking to the people who generate these projections for teams to the extent that they were willing to talk, it seems like, you know, about five years ago, the state of the art was that there would be sort of like a steamer-esque projection, and then you would adjust it for handedness, and that would basically be your projection for this batter versus this pitcher. And then they would make refinements after that to try to figure out, well, does he have a standard platoon adjustment or is he a guy with a big platoon split? Because we know that you need like hundreds or thousands of plate appearances to be able to tell what someone's actual platoon split is. And so teams look for shortcuts to try to figure that out. You can look at their minor league splits. You can look at the way they've been used even. Like if a player just doesn't get starts against lefties, you can kind of infer from that

that maybe he's not very good against lefties or at least his team thinks so. And then you can build that into your model or you can take into account things like the pitch types that the pitcher throws, something like that, that might tell you something about the platoon splits. So you factor all that in. So that was kind of five years ago or so, maybe that was the state of the art. Then people really started factoring in

the repertoires of the pitchers and how hitters performed against those repertoires. So, you know, if you throw pitches this speed and this movement and this spin and this location and this release point, and not just looking at one guy and how he does against pitchers like that but grouping players so that okay well here are the most similar hitters to this hitter here are the most similar pitchers to this pitcher how have those similar batters done against the similar pitchers and you can reach some conclusions like that and previously you couldn't really do that like in the book book, Playing the Percentages in Baseball, MGL and Tango and Andy Dolphin, their book from 2006, they did that and they couldn't really find anything because they didn't have pitch effects.

And they couldn't group players with much specificity. They could say, well, he is a lefty who has a low strikeout rate and a low walk rate or something. And, you know, maybe a ground ball rate could factor in there. But you couldn't get the actual repertoire and what the pitcher looked like. And now we can. So there is some signal there. And now within the past year or two, it seems like the state of the art now is factoring in the pitch planes and the swing planes. Planes and the swing planes So not just like the pitch Types but is this guy's

Pitch trajectories a good Match for this guy's swing trajectory And you can try to figure Out the swing plane in a lot of ways There's some technologies that some teams Have that do that you can Kind of reverse engineer it from Some of the stat cast data

You can look at like your minor league players Who have swing sensors blast Blast and Zep, and you can match up their batted ball profiles with the big leaguers' batted ball profiles and say, okay, this guy probably has a swing plane that is like this minor leaguers' swing plane, and we know the angles on that, and we can figure out the pitch angles.

I mean, it sounds complicated. It is complicated. It's way more complicated than anything we ever do when we're questioning these decisions. And on top of all that, there's advanced scouting that goes on. There are people looking at video and trying to figure this stuff out. And there's always the possibility that there's an injury going on or this guy's mechanics are screwed up and the coach or manager knows it, or he says he doesn't see this picture very well or whatever there's like all this stuff that we have no way of knowing sometimes we find out after the fact that someone had a nagging injury and that explains why he wasn't being

used but often we never find out and so the more i hear about this stuff the more i feel like we're just in the dark out here and we're just wildly speculating about what the best moves are. And these projections, like they're not magic. They're not incredible. I couldn't get anyone to tell me exactly how much better they are than your basic sort of baseline projection. But clearly they do enhance the accuracy and they tell you something. So I just don't know how we can feel comfortable and confident in saying this was the wrong move when you have to know that the people who made the decision, they definitely spent a lot more time on it. They have better information. They have more incentive to go over every angle and think these things through than we do when we're just sending a tweet or talking about it on a podcast. We have almost nothing at stake. They have millions of dollars at stake. So it's a tough situation when teams are so smart that you kind of feel like, well, they must know what they're doing, but you don't want to defer to them in every case. We have our professional

reputations at stake. What is more important than the way you are perceived by a podcast audience? It's funny, you talk about like the swing plane versus pitch plane. Totally makes sense. You know, if you have a guy who's like a high spin fastball guy and you have an uppercut swing plane, that could be a problem. But what's funny about that is it's basically just a new stage of the ground ball versus fly ball kind of pitcher and hitter situation that was written about in the book. The other sort of platoon advantage or disadvantage. That's something that we talked about a lot back when, like when in 2014, I think is when that kind of got popular. That's when Mike Trout was missing pitches that were up.

And that's when like what, Jordana Ventura was going to face the A's or something. And the A's had this uppercut swing and lineup. Anyway, it's just a new interpretation of what's still kind of a new research, but more established, a little older research than what we have now. And I guess what I agree with you, at least in theory and most of the time, that these

decisions are made as a consequence of just a really exhaustive thought process, especially when you're talking about the playoffs, which is when the majority of important second guessing is done. And when you're talking about a team like the Dodgers or the Brewers, just these information first organizations. I do wonder, though, you look at, think the Dodgers in game one of this World Series. They bring in Ryan Madsen and Ryan Madsen, I forgot what he did. But anyway, he was bad in game one and then he was bad in game two.

I forgot exactly what the sequence was, but he came in and he said after the fact, like, oh yeah, I wasn't really warm yet. It was taking me longer to warm up because it was cold because it was super cold and windy in boston and conditions were terrible and you can do all the math that you want but at the end of the day if you if you're like mathematically this is the guy we bring in and he's just not ready then like everything goes out the window because what matters the most is you're taking all this data uh player performances and whatever they do when they're at or close to 100% presumably because that's when they're taking the field. And then if a guy just isn't warm, he just doesn't feel good, that's it. And that is probably where the gut feelings come into play.

If you're a manager, you can't ignore your gut all the time. You should ignore your gut most of the time. It lies to you except for when it tells you that you're hungry. Then you can't ignore your gut all the time. You should ignore your gut most of the time. It lies to you, except for when it tells you that you're hungry. Then you should listen to your gut. You've got to have food. Grab a Snickers. But otherwise, if you have a guy who's just not quite ready to perform, then everything goes out the window.

And you would rather have, I'm not saying this is or was true, but let's say maybe you have Ryan Madsen and Pedroro bias warming up at the same time in game one and let's say that uh maybe the numbers say that madsen is like even 10 percent better against the next batter or the next three batters of even than bias would be but bias is warm and madsen isn't you go to bias like it's it's just that that easy now when i say it's that easy it's not that easy it's incredibly difficult. But there is still room for some second guessing. But the problem is that we don't know the specifics of that room. We wouldn't have known Ryan Madsen wasn't warm until he said after the game, oh, I wasn't warm yet. And so you can say it seems like, well, let's call it second guessing what it is.

I don't like that decision because it didn't work. That's what it comes down to. But you can't, at least if you take a team like the Dodgers, you can't really say as a fan, I don't like that because I have my reasons and it didn't work out because you don't actually know what the reasons would be because intellectually they have thought it all through. Right. Yeah. And the people I talked to didn't say we should never be questioned and we're always right. They said that there are times when having more information can mislead you and steer you wrong. I don't have a specific example, but we could imagine how that could happen. You have some piece of information and it seems significant and

ultimately it's not and it's just confusing you and someone who doesn't know it might make a better decision than you and take the longer view. And so that's one thing. And there are still, I mean, I talked to one analyst who said they're doing everything they can to emphasize that small samples, I mean, they do factor in hot and cold streaks and batter-pitcher matchup histories to some extent. There's like a little analytical value there apparently, but it's dwarfed by the larger samples and they've tried to emphasize that. But you do still get occasionally managers who will fall in love with a certain player for a reason that's not really rational. And so he said, you know, if a decision

just seems completely contrary to the projections and there's just no way we can justify it. And also it just so happens that this hitter has been hot lately and is, you know, eight for 15 against that pitcher or something, maybe there's something there where it's just the manager buying too much into that small sample of performance. So there's that. And I think that there are times second-guessing managerial moves. So I wouldn't say that you should stop. It's not harming the world, I don't think, to send a tweet about how something worked out. I guess, you know, whatever, that's fine. And we should all just kind of enjoy baseball and sports the way we want them to. It's just, you know, be aware that teams do know these things and they are pretty prepared. And just keep that in mind, I guess, before saying that something is a fireable offense or that this guy should be let go because of some particular sequence of decisions it's probably more complicated than that and you know just kind of couch your your comments from time to time or be aware that there are things that you

may not know embrace the uncertainty even if that means fewer likes and retweets. It's got to be so weird to be a Dodgers fan versus being like an Orioles fan. Or I don't know, maybe pick another team that doesn't suck so bad, but is still not maybe where the Dodgers are. Well, look, the Rockies had 91 wins. The Dodgers had 92 wins. They had to play a tiebreaker. So imagine the experience of being a Rockies fan probably allows for a lot more good faith second guessing than being a dodgers fan because if you're if you're a dodgers fan you're just like well really a supercomputer has already figured this

out it's already figured out climate change it can tell what the future is like the dodgers have probably already saved the planet somehow we just don't see how it's working but if you're a rockies fan you're just like oh the team is good this year i don't really somehow we just don't see how it's working but if you're a rockies fan you're just like oh the team is good this year i don't really know why i don't think they really know why but they won a bunch that's great but then this like playing ian desmond every day there's no analytics that are like ian desmond is the guy we want at first base all of the time no so then there is still room for second guessing so if you are a fan who likes to air grievances and likes to second guess, and maybe you're a fan of a team that's just like really analytically inclined,

consider switching your fandom to a team that's dumber. Now all the teams are eventually going to get smarter. They are getting smarter by the day, by the week, by the month. But there's still a hierarchy here. There's still room to root for one of those old clown shows. So you can just pick one. I'm looking at the standings right now. There's probably like 10 good, weird, backwards organizations to choose from.

Just consider rooting for one. Then you can feel a lot more justified in your grievances. Yeah. Well, I had some Zach Britton quotes that he's had within the past couple months in my article where he's talked about going from the Orioles to the Yankees and just having his mind blown by how much more information the Yankees have and how much better it is. So yeah, there's still very much a hierarchy and a big gap between teams. And someone I talked to said, you know, this swing plane, pitch plane stuff is state of the art, but every team is going to be doing this within the next couple of years. And that's probably true. This stuff spreads very quickly because, well, I write about it in an article and someone in one of these late adopting front offices says, oh, we better

figure out how to do this because everyone else is doing this. Or it's, you know, they just hire someone from another team who worked on that stuff and is aware of that stuff or a player goes from one team to another and says hey do you have this stuff that they had at my last team why not so it spreads quickly and maybe it doesn't spread if it's like a willpon organization or something and you don't hire the right person we'll probably be talking about that sometime soon but it does circulate pretty quickly so if if there are edges there, they do close pretty quickly, but the edge between public and private is not closing and is probably expanding. And a lot of this information is based on public data. Like we could, in theory, if someone's smart, could do a lot of the same stuff that teams are doing here with these matchup predictions, but it's just not really in anyone's best interest in the public sphere to spend hours and hours and hours producing matchup projections and giving them away for free.

The second someone started to work on that, they'd probably just be hired by a team anyway. Right. That's the thing. If you have any sort of public analyst, generally, you need a lot of experience before you're really comfortable delving into stuff that could be state-of-the-art, like actual baseball research. So you kind of have to go through the fundamentals, the analytics 101, 201, whatever, until you're like a 401, and then you're super capable. But the instant some 19-year-old runs some r program and shows some glimmer of hope the team is just going to snap that person up and give them 40 000 and then that's the last you're going to see of that person forever so you were basically left with idiots like us who are

just like well uh we're gonna i don't know we're gonna do some exit velocity math and take the top five percent it just yeah it when when i'm not saying that ben and i are at the the vanguard of public analysis because we're not but we're unsettlingly close for the the given the state of public analysis because teams have just been hiring analysts like crazy for for years and and if you were if you were good at all, then either you go work for a team because teams will call you, or I guess you inherited a lot of money and you don't really want to work that hard. And then you're just a rich person, but then you just drift off the internet anyway. Yeah. I mean, all the rewards, all the incentives are in favor of second guessing when something

goes wrong because A, you never know what would have happened if the other move had been made so you know maybe you bring in the other pitcher or you start the other player and he's just as bad but we'll never know so we only know what happened in this timeline and if that thing is bad then you can always make it sound as if the other thing would have been better and we can kind of imply that the manager lost the game, blew the game, when really most managerial moves, we're talking about points of win expectancy. It's not usually deciding things. And so no one's going to come out from the team and say, well, actually, guy who's tweeting about our moves, here were our projections. Our projections were based on this and that. And

here's what you don't know. This guy is actually hiding an injury and, or this guy doesn't like facing this guy. And he told us he didn't want to go hit there. Like, no, you're never going to be exposed. The team's never going to come out and say, nope, here's why you're wrong and your opinion is bad. And so it's kind of always most rewarding to take a strong stance and have an opinion and say this was wrong. And the bands that are aggrieved that things went the wrong way will say, yes, this person speaks for us. But often, the more certain you sound, probably the less you know what you're talking about. In a lot of cases, I don't know, it can be tiresome to caveat everything. And so sometimes you just don't because it gets boring after a while. But you want people who I think are aware that there's

a lot of uncertainty and unknowns here. That would be great. You have like a post-game press conference, Ryan Madsen blew another one. And then Dave Roberts is out there. He's just like, you know what? At DariusSucker69420. Actually, here is it. And then it's like seven poster boards of information. Like, yeah's like seven poster boards of information. Like, yeah, we printed poster boards. We do this for every decision. We just have offices. Floor to ceiling.

Poster boards. Anyway, going back a few minutes and you were talking about information spread. It is, I mean, look, we don't know what the Mets are going to do with their GM opening because it looked like Doug Melvin was the favorite until he was no longer even under consideration. So it seems like right now it's between Haim Bloom and Brody Van Wagenen. Wagenen. Wagenen. I just don't know. We're going to go with Wagenen. And it seems like now maybe Brody Van Wagenen, the agent, is the favorite. I don't know if that means anything. We'll know a lot more soon when they actually make a decision. But if the Mets chose to hire Chaim Blum, presto, most of what the Rays have done is now in the Mets information bank.

It doesn't mean that they would be able to implement the same things, of course, because they have such a limited staff. Bring the code over from the Rays system, but it's in his head. He knows what was there and what should be recreated. Yeah, no, exactly. So if the Mets did that, then they have at least the general principles of what the Rays have right now. It's not like the Rays are partitioning information, leaving High and Bloom in some sort of weird need-to-know basis where he doesn't know 95% of what the analysts are doing. He's right there and he's deeply involved.

Now, Brody Van Wagenen isn't. He hasn't worked with a team at all which is not to say he'd be a bad hire i just don't know it would be an out of the box interesting kind of move and uh i don't know especially because he represents like half the team but anyway yeah right now we'll uh we'll talk about that one later but yeah i mean it's just it's just this easy and you look at the giants i don't think the giants are a backwards organization or anything but they'll be looking to hire someone the or anything, but they'll be looking to hire someone. The Orioles are going to be looking to hire someone and they're going to be hiring people.

Presumably, if they're not all player agents, they're going to be people who are coming from other teams. And, you know, you look at how many executives have come from the Indians and there are a lot of teams who act like the Indians. It's not a coincidence. All right. Let's answer some emails. It's been a while. All right. This question is from Henry Clark, Patreon supporter. He says, in your brief discussion of Clayton Kershaw's game-to-game postseason strikeout variants in episode 1285, Ben noted that you usually discount or don't really trust a great start with a very low strikeout total. Hard to be consistently excellent without striking guys out. I buy that. But how reliable is a strikeout total from a single game? Is it possible, for example, that Kershaw had a 15 strikeout true talent level in that game against the Braves and 12 times the batters foiled the most likely outcome, grounding or popping or tapping softly into the first

quartile? In other other words how wide can the gap be do you think between how many strikeouts a pitcher's stuff should warrant in a particular game and how many strikeouts he records that's interesting and uh i guess you you would think that so what he had three strikeouts and eight innings i think in that game and so one thing you can say is well maybe i don't know how often he got the two strikes it's not worth going into that analysis but maybe he could have a guy who gets into two strike counts like I don't know how often he got the two strikes. It's not worth going into that analysis. But maybe he could have a guy who gets into two strike counts, like, I don't know, against 70% of the batters. So let's say you're facing 30 batters. That's a lot of batters.

30 batters. Let's say you get the two strikes against 21 of them. And you throw really, really, really good two strike pitches. But you only get three strikeouts. And like 18 times or whatever, they make bad contact against potential strikeout pitches then you know you can you can see some if you throw just like a filthy slider that's below the zone and they actually put the ball in play but it's a bad ball in play that you can see like that's not really effectively better than a strikeout but i do think that the uh strikeouts

are i don't even trust called strikeouts all that much. It's usually a matter of swinging strikeouts. That's just the surest sign of dominance over a hitter. There's been research into that, right? That swinging strikeout rates are more stable or predictive than called strikeout rates, I think, which makes sense, I guess, because called strikeout rates are dependent on the umpire. They're dependent on the catcher. They're dependent on the hitter and his decision to swing or not whereas swinging strikeouts just means you're

good at missing bats and getting guys to swing at pitches that they're not going to hit which is a pretty persistent ability yeah i i think that is that is true so i would i would think that there's not a ton of variation between i guess i don't know what to call it strikeout true talent single start strikeout true talent level expected strikeout rate in a game yeah yeah right there's i'm sure there are times i mean obviously like a lot of it depends on the lineup so you could have great strikeout stuff in one game against one team and you're gonna get more strikeouts just depending on the hitter. And then it could be a pitcher's ump or a hitter's ump.

And, you know, maybe you should know the umpire tendencies, but there's only so much you can exploit there. So there's probably a decent bit of variance, and I guess there would be some luck in there too. And I guess there would be some luck in there too. Like, you know, you might throw a pitch that nine times out of ten is going to get a swing strike. But one time, one guy just manages to foul it off weakly. And, you know, then he puts the next pitch in play or something. So, yeah, I don't know how to approximate how wide the variance would be there. But it stands to reason, I think, that just the same way that we might look at batted balls and say, well, this is usually a hit, but this one time it was not a hit. But, you know, you could probably come up with some metric that's like expected strikeouts or expected whiffs or something.

And I bet there would be considerable game to game variation, but I don't know exactly how much. Yeah, I think, I mean, one easy way, one easy place you could start is you could compare just like total a game's strikeout rate versus a game's whiff rate, because if you're getting a bunch of whiffs but limited strikeouts, that could be a factor. But that's also for some guys, I think it's, this is going to sound weird, I think like change-up heavy pitchers tend to get more whiffs and fewer strikeouts than you'd expect given given one and the other at least i've seen that before this goes all the way back to like the sean marcamira but anyway so that's one place you could start if a guy gets like 20 whiffs in a game but he only strikes out i don't know four batters then that seems like a game where he had better

stuff than his strikeouts would show but again also the other factor that's in there is that a strikeout requires that you get from two strikes to three, and then batters change their approaches at two strikes, and it does make a difference. Getting that third strike is generally more difficult than getting the first and the second. So it's not perfect, but it would at least be one place to start so you could see whose stuff was really good on a particular day. All right, question from Hector. After listening to your discussion about how the role of pitchers is changing and how you guys feel like it's less interesting to watch games where there are constantly new faces on the mound, I thought of an idea to combat this. What is stopping MLB from putting a cap on total pitchers allowed in a game? I was thinking three or four pitchers allowed so that teams are still encouraged to let the starter go deep into the game

but are still allowed to use relief pitchers if needed. But you have to do it smartly because you only have so many pitchers you can use in a game etc etc we've talked about this maybe at some point i don't know but i forget what we said and what we think so what do you think about capping the number of pitchers in a game pitchers wouldn't like it i think you would end up with fewer jobs for pitchers. Yeah. And very different jobs for pitchers. And of course, teams would protest because, you know, what if somebody gets hurt? And then there's that whole situation. As soon as you make an injury carve out, then teams will just try to exploit it because you can't prove whether somebody's hurt. So that's where I stand. I'm not saying it's a no-go, but there are major

obstacles here. Yeah, I don't love it. It feels pretty heavy-handed to me to limit how teams can run themselves that way. I mean, I do think MLB should probably be a bit more interventionist than it has been lately, which is not at all. And I think some of these trends that we find somewhat unnerving or other people do, I think there are things you could do fairly easily to counteract some of them. I think I'm now officially just in favor of moving the mound back a little bit, just a little bit, just to see how it goes but i don't know this feels to me like a step too far right now i wouldn't want manager's hands to be tied quite this much but i also don't know what other more subtle moves you could make or rules you could institute to encourage starters

going deeper into games because just every other trend is working against that. Yeah, ultimately, it's a lot easier for teams to develop a guy who can go two or three innings than six or seven innings. That's just something that teams are finding out is true. Now, you do have to give the game some time to self-correct. Like we've seen the decline of starters, sure, but we've also seen the decline of like the lefty one-out guy, the loogies. Those people are going away because relievers of like the lefty one out guy the loogies yeah those people

are going away because relievers have to get more than one out now because they're entrusted to get to just throw so many more innings so you could say well we're seeing more relievers but we're also seeing fewer randy chotes now granted if you're a randy chote or mike myers or javier lopez or whoever these else these players are then you're like well what was what was wrong with us we we liked having jobs and you know if you're randy chote you're like well what was what was wrong with us we we liked having jobs and you know if you're randy chode you're only out there for one out of the time but you also last 25 freaking years so people start to get familiar with you so you know maybe maybe there was value in having loogies but i do think that while i am sympathetic and i think i might even be more on

your side than not on your side in terms of lamenting the decline of the starter but i'm also very open to the fact that five ten years from now i could feel very differently about it because we're still getting used to it now i i recognize that i care more about pop-up relievers than almost anybody else on the planet and i'm more interested in who these guys are who are throwing one or two innings at a time but i i think that there is the opportunity for fans and people who market these teams to just sort of refocus how they sell these players or how they recognize these players and and just put more attention on the bullpen to correlate with the more responsibility innings coming out of the bullpen and you know maybe maybe five ten years from now we're all gonna be really interested in the next ryan presley's or i don't know dylan's floro instead of ricky

nalaskos or whatever we're just going to have to adjust with the game and i think it's it's not worth intervening in the game until we actually have enough information to see how people process this all right well since we started recording this podcast there was a report that the red Until we actually have enough information to see how people process this. All right. Well, since we started recording this podcast, there was a report that the Red Sox say that Manny Machado was stealing signs during the Dodgers two-run rally in Game 2 of the World Series. Another sign-stealing story. From the bases? Yeah, this one is not an illegal sign-stealing story. It's just, you know, the typical player stealing signs.

But yet another sign stealing story, which takes us to the next question from Andrew, who says, love the idea of the pitcher and catcher being mic'd up instead of using signs. But couldn't the batter hear the pitcher and catcher talking? Does this mean they'd speak in code? Would we get amazing situations like a quarterback in football, Omaha, Omaha pitch? I don't know. Do you think this is a problem with the headset communication solution to science daily?

First of all, I think that, I mean, you could have code words. You could just talk quietly or, and this is obvious, you just press buttons instead of use words. It seems like that would be just as easy. You just have like a smartwatch or something, and then you just select whatever the option is that you want. Yeah, you select a pitch and you select a location, and it's that easy.

You don't have to say anything. But even if you did have to say something, I think that you could, if you have, I don't often use a headset, although I guess as I'm talking to you, I do have headphones and a microphone right now, but like fastball low. The batter's not going to hear that.

And, you know, you can mix it up every inning if you want to, but you could have really sensitive equipment and then you could, I mean, the catcher is still like, what, five feet away from the batter's head, maybe more. And usually, you know, unless you're at a Rays game or something, there's crowd noise. So I think it's probably pretty loud there and that would help a little bit. So yeah, every now and then you do hear, I remember I talked to Eric Kratz once about whether batters can hear catchers moving, you know, where they set up and how I saw that once Kratz, like he did this kind of tricky thing that I got a gif of where he like pounded his glove inside and then set up outside to like deke the, every now and then you see that sort of thing. So that kind of thing they can hear. And every now and then you could get a clue from where the catcher's setting up or where it sounds like he's setting up. But yeah, I think you could probably speak under your breath and the crowd noise would cover it. Right, and you could say something like,

fastball, not a curveball, low, or something. You can just kind of mix it up so that the pitcher knows what you're doing, but the batter's just picking up these little signs. You do see catchers, I think also, especially in the playoffs, they'll do those dekes, they'll hit the ground and then they'll actually stand up straight or they'll wait really longkes they'll like hit the ground and then they'll actually stand up straight or or they'll like wait really long before they assume a position they'll just like hang out in the middle of the zone and then set up as the pitcher is coming into his delivery or you'll see

them just like move from inside to outside and that's all i think it's in part about the batter hearing or having an awareness of where the catcher is but also if there's a runner on base that runner could tip the batter off somehow i think that maybe what gets lost in the conversation about sign stealing as a guy on the bases, I've never been on the bases. I was a terrible hitter, and I was certainly never at a level high enough to be instructed on how to steal signs, and my vision isn't very good anyway to begin with. But maybe it's less about thinking about the fingers, and the location where the catcher sets up tells you a lot about what the pitch is likely to be you know there are fastball locations and there's like

well here's where sliders usually go or something like that so you wouldn't even necessarily have to read the fingers to give the batter some information if you're a guy on second base so that's something worth considering and it's one of the reasons why catchers will pull off so many dekes. All right. StatBlast. StatBlast. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to day step last. So this is in response to an email that we got from listener Cy. And so I will read this out loud.

Hi, Ben and Jeff. I did not need to read that part. I think anyone who has played baseball has heard the trope, even the best batters fail 7 out of 10 times, referencing the fact that 300 is an all-star level batting average. Following the Moneyball era, it may be more appropriate to reference OBP and a threshold of failing 6 out of 10 times instead. However, it seems that in order to properly assess failure or success

as a context-depend dependent stat such as when probability added is needed my question is what percentage of the best hitters played appearances result in a positive wpa i have been unable to find this information on fangraphs but suspect that it may be possible to determine with a play index i'm curious how closely it matches ovp and if it is consistent from year to year so interesting question i did not do that much research it's not an easy thing to research but i did some so here's here's the shortcut that i took this year there were 140 qualified hitters so i sorted them by uh weighted runs created plus and i just looked at the top 10 top 10 from top to bottom are mike trout mookie betts jd martinez

christian yelich alex bregman brandon nimma, Jose Ramirez, Paul Goldschmidt, Manny Machado, and the woefully still underrated Anthony Rendon, who, by the way, was once again unbelievable. As good as Manny Machado this year. The same WRC+, better in the field, better on the bases. Anthony Rendon, you guys. The Nationals are not actually screwed. They're just losing Bryce Harper, who is not their best player. Anyway, this isn't about how Bryce Harper is overrated or Anthony Rendon is underrated this is about the top 10 hitters of baseball so I went through their fan graphs play log all of their play logs and I just exported

everything that they did and I isolated just the win probability added of their events so in total that gave me pretty close to 7,000 events and I just looked for the ones that had a positive win probability added. Do you want to guess, I guess, what the rate would be? What percentage of their opportunities were positive? Because a positive WPA isn't always necessarily like a hit or something, right? It could just be, well, is it? Is advancing a runner? I mean, getting a runner in, sack fly, those, I guess it depends sometimes, but could be positive. Sometimes.

I'll tell you while I'm running the math. So the average on base percentage of these 10 players was a hair over 400. Okay. Well, I guess I'll say like 50%. No. So they had a positive win probability added in 42 of their opportunities now if you also include plays that didn't have a negative so basically plays that were at zero win probability added that takes it up to 45 so 42 to 45 positive events so it does actually uh stay in keeping

pretty well with on base percentage percentage. Yeah, okay. That's what I got. So yeah, based on one sample and one quick analysis of 10 players in one season, then the best hitters in baseball still fail to improve their team's chances of winning about 60% of the time. So if you fail and then you fail again, but then you succeed and then you succeed, well, look, whatever. I'm getting to 4 out of 10 is where I'm getting to.

But if you are 4 out of 10 successful in your daily life, I think that's pretty good unless you're like, I don't know, carrying coffee to your office for your coworkers. You should probably get it right more than 40% of the time. But if you don't, at least you could say, look, I'm like the JD Martinez of fetching coffee for for the office i don't know if that would go over well but you could at least try it every time i hear the even the best hitters in baseball fail seven

out of ten times it does bother me because it is six times and if you're talking about like barry bonds or ted williams in their best years or something it's like five but yeah i yeah, I mean, I understand where the saying comes from, but it does seem like something we should update. By the way, something we wondered about yesterday, the small variation in attendance between game one and game two of the World Series. Was it like 190 sales or attendance difference between those two games? We got a tweet from Jays fan Jordan, who says,

with respect to the World Series Game 1 attendance fluctuation of 190, MLB holds tickets for affiliates, players, family, etc., and releases them the same day for sale. Variation likely relates to how many tickets returned to sellable supply since it's paid attendance. And he even has a little video here. I don't know why he has this video, but he has a video of a line forming outside Fenway Park, people waiting for these tickets to be released.

So I guess that's as good a theory as any. I don't know why players' family or affiliates or whatever, I don't know why there'd be 190 fewer people taking free tickets in game two than in game one, but maybe that makes sense. That could be it. David Price could just have the smaller group of friends, I suppose. I don't really know.

I guess it's possible. Yeah, I don't know. There are a lot of families and friends and all that. I've never been to a World Series game, so I don't know what it's like for that. But just going to a regular season game, there are so many people who are there as like a guest of someone who's affiliated with one of the teams. It is unreal. Like a significant percentage of the people in the stands have a vested interest in what's happening on the field beyond just being a fan.

So something to keep in mind if you're ever sitting near home plate and you are voicing loud opinions. Yeah. All right. Question from Joseph in Queens, who says, I'm watching the Knicks opening game of the season and Knicks announcer Mike Breen lets everyone know that there is a new record holder for most number of teammates in an NBA career, 240, Vince Carter surpassing Juwan Howard, 236. I thought this was an awesome fun fact and obviously raises the question,

who do you guess is the MLB record holder for most number of teammates who's on the all-time leaderboard? And I guess this is kind of a stat blast too. And I have an answer from Dan Hirsch of course and this one is kind of complicated and it's hard to get a precise answer exactly because how do you calculate who was someone's teammates we don't know like exactly who was on the roster each day of the season so you can't necessarily say that they were teammates like they were in the clubhouse on the same day or so you kind of have to just do a fudge factor here and you don't want to do like teammates as having appeared in the same game as another player because there are actual teammates who don't appear in the same game so anyway dan had a teammates count, which is just appeared on the same team during the same season as another player, which is good enough. Obviously, there will be some guys who played in one part of the season who didn't actually overlap with people in another part of the season with the most teammates. Would you care to name any names or guess any guesses here?

I'll just tell you, like, the names definitely skew toward recent years just because there are more players. There are more teams, more players. Maybe careers are lasting longer. Maybe there's more player movement. So anyway, there are more recent names on this list than old ones bartolo cologne bartolo cologne is number seven on this list he has had 717 teammates he is just two behind carlos beltran and uh any any other names you want to throw out there no No. Okay. Well, the number one all-time teammate is Terry Mulholland, 791 career teammates. But we may have a challenger here, Edwin Jackson, number two,

number two most teammates of all time, 772 teammates. Sowin jackson is 19 teammates behind terry mulholland so one more team yeah one more team might do it if someone else picks him up next year he may be the all-time teammate which makes sense when you consider how many places he's been and i'll just read off some of the the rest of the top 10 here david Weathers, number three. Matt Stairs, number four. Ricky Henderson, number five. Makes sense. Then you got Beltran. You got Colon.

Ruben Sierra. Latroy Hawkins. Jamie Wright. Rudy Sienes. Mike Morgan. Lots of like just kind of generic relievers who hung around forever. And that's kind of the profile here. Bruce Chen.

Mike Stanton. The actual Mike Stanton. Russell Branion had a lot of teammates. hung around forever and that's kind of the profile here bruce chen mike stanton the actual mike stanton russell branion had a lot of teammates wouldn't have expected him to be quite this high david wells jose batista's up there and then jesse arasco another one of those lefties who hung around forever i will uh paste this into a google sheet if you want to look at i think it's the top 100 most teammates of all time so thanks to dan as always for the data so edwin jackson is 35 years old turned 35 in early september he's coming off a season with a low era but bad other numbers but he did throw 92 major league innings he was a starter and his fastball averaged 93.2 miles per hour edwin jackson probably going to get a major league job as a free agent i think i don't know if he's

going to be a start he could be like a fifth starter for someone like oh i don't know the baltimore orioles maybe would be an option and yeah it's it's super close and you know what makes this extra complicated of course this is looking at the major league level but unlike other sports baseball you get so many teammates in the minors yeah well i wonder if you hang around the majors for 15 years or you're just one of those triple a lifers do you have more unique teammates in the majors or the minors if you just float around like if you're a question because more player movement during a minor league season than there is during a major league season uh i'm forgetting the name of the—Hessman, right? Yeah, Mike Hessman.

Yeah. I wonder how many teammates he's had over his career. Anyway, Dan Hirsch, get busy. Right. I'm actually sort of surprised that Octavio Dottel, who— Yeah. Edwin Jackson, he broke Dottel's record. Is that right?

Because Edwin Jackson's been with 14 14 teams and dotel was with 13 teams octavio dotel is only 24th in most teammates 654 teammates so uh jackson and dotel tied it looks at least according to baseball reference are tied at 13 then mike morgan matt stairs and ron valone are at 12 someone named gus weihing is at 11 franchises played for, but that was around the turn of the previous millennium, so when there were only like six teams, so I don't even know how he managed to pull that off. Joe

Gerhardt, well, Joe Gerhardt here, let's just, he played for 11 teams, but from 1873 to 1891, there weren't even like 11 cities in America. Yeah, that's pretty impressive if you error adjust that that's pretty good so hold on let's go through this he played for the washington blue legs the baltimore canaries the new york mutuals what are these like he must have been the american association he must have gone to other non-national leagues. So he was in the National Association.

And then very briefly, he was in the National League. I shouldn't say that briefly. He was in the National League for a while. Then he was in the American Association. Then he went back to the National League and then back to the American Association. But, I mean, there's the Louisville Grays. There's the Cincinnati Reds. There's the Detroit Wolverines.

There's the Louisville Eclipse. The Louisville Grays, there's the Cincinnati Reds, there's the Detroit Wolverines, there's the Louisville Eclipse, the Louisville Eclipse, then the New York Giants, the New York Giants, and then the Louisville Colonels. I guess he played in Louisville, but he played for the Grays, he played for the Eclipse, and he played for the Colonels, all in Louisville, so I don't know

if that really counts. Same city, but three different franchises. Anyway, it's complicated. And then there, oh God, there's also the Brooklyn Gladiators and the St. Louis Browns and the New York Metropolitans. He was just everywhere. Traveling man for the 19th century. Yeah, it's an interesting selection of players

at the top of this list because you get just really fringy guys who bounced around a whole lot, but then you also get some Hall of Famers. You get Ricky Henderson, you get Carlos Beltran, who was that caliber player. Jim Tomei is in the top 30 or so. So if you're really good, then you have a long career, which means more teammates, but usually probably means that you move around less from year to year than, say, a middle reliever or something. But there are multiple ways to get to the top of this list. Or you could just play till you're 45, like Bartol Cologne. That's another way to do it. All right. You have a chat in a few minutes. Let's see if we can quickly get one in here. So this question Is from Cameron

I just listened to episode 1282 And was intrigued by essentially the opposite Of what Ross Stripling did with pitch tipping Instead of talking about apparently Invisible pitch tipping, what if teams Kept mum about intentionally obvious Pitch tipping? Could a team like The Red Sox, who had very little in September

For which to play, tell their P staff to start obviously tipping their pitches? And then would it have a meaningful effect come October if they stopped tipping their pitches? Would it be more helpful to return to one's normal pitching motion or to continue with the various pitch tipping motions decoupled from their corresponding pitch types? coupled from their corresponding pitch types. Could a team use an intentionally obvious pitch-tipping reliever in mop-up situations all season and then use him for high-leverage situations in the postseason to catch opponents by surprise when he no longer tips pitches? I, it's, I, okay, this is clever, but also it would, if it were to help you, and maybe it would help you, but if it were to help you, it would help you very early in the playoffs,

and then it would stop because the next team that you would play would look at the video and be like, oh, they don't do it anymore. So that's it. And then to have pitchers go back and forth between mechanics runs the risk of kind of messing them up a little bit. Now I know that we've seen Craig Kibrell change his hand position or Rich Hill has changed his windup a little bit, and they've done it on the fly and they've been just fine doing it.

So maybe it wouldn't be that bad, but it does, when you get so much paranoia around pitch tipping, it does seem to open the door to messing with people looking for pitch tipping. So I like the idea. I'm just not sure how beneficial this would be. Yeah. And Stephen wrote in to notify us, make sure we knew about the Wander Franco clan in professional baseball right now. Stephen says

there are three Wander Francos in minor league baseball. Three, they are all brothers. Two of them are in the giant system and both play a fair amount of third base. Those two are in high A and low A respectively and can Totally end up on the same team in the future The third one is probably the most well known Because he tore up the Appy League this year As a 17 year old shortstop for the Rays Their uncles are the Ibars

Willie and Eric So much baseball in the blood yet Just one name thank goodness for Different middle names and It's true if you go to the youngest Wander Franco's page on MILB.com, the minor league baseball website, it lists all of the familial connections there. So it says, Wander Franco, son of Wander Franco, brother of Wander Franco, brother of Wander Franco, nephew of Willie Ivar, nephew of Eric Ivar. It takes up like a whole paragraph. I like that he's the son. He's also the son of Wander, as well as the brother of two Wanders. So I guess Wander the Elder just really likes that name.

He's just like a big Shadow of the Colossus fan. Protagonist is named Wander. I don't know what it is, but you hear about this every now and then, like the Odor family, right? And you just kind of wonder what a family gathering at the Franco family's house is like. How do you attract people's attention? I'm sure they all have nicknames or something,

but it seems complicated. Now, what if all three of the younger Wander Francos, what if they each had three boys and then they named them Wander Frankos? I mean, what if the first one has three boys and they're all Wander Frankos? The second one has three boys, they're all Wander Frankos. And the third one has three boys, two of them are Wander Frankos, one of them is like Pete. Right.

Like, Pete. Right. Oh, man. I don't want to root against any of them making the majors, but it was confusing enough to have, like, two Alex Gonzalez's in the majors for a while. It still ruins database searches and all that stuff. Yeah, right. There are different accent marks in them, but it's hard to remember which one is which. And, man, if all three of the Wunder Frankos make the majors, it's going to be hell for a decade or so.

I'm really rooting for Victor Victor Mesa and Victor Mesa Jr. to make the majors it's gonna be it's gonna be hell for a decade or so i'm really rooting for victor victor mason victor mason jr to make the same roster now that's not exactly the same thing but i'm uh my fingers are crossed and and with that team they probably could they're probably good enough to make the majors right now all right i will let you get to your chat yay all right thanks also to eric hartman by the way who emailed a similar question about the most all-time teammates before Joseph in Queens did. I hope that we didn't answer this question on the podcast previously, but we answer a lot of questions, do a lot of episodes. Hopefully we didn't just repeat that entirely. I did have one more question that I wanted to answer this week that we ran out of time for, so I will answer it now.

This is from listener Mark, who says, a friend of mine is a high school umpire, and this is a thing that happened in one of his games. There was one out and a runner on third, the batter hit a fly ball to left, and suddenly the runner started running down the third baseline into left field. Just before the ball was caught, he turned around and ran back toward third, tagged up just as the ball was caught, and continued on to home with a big running start. My questions. One, is this legal? I think it is.

If I read the rules correctly, you only have to stay on the base pass when someone is trying to put you out. Two, would this give you an advantage? I'm pretty sure it would if you timed it just right. And three, if I'm right about one and two, why don't we see this ever? For what it's worth, in this game, the runner beat the throw home and my friend the umpire called him safe. Well, the second question, would this give you an advantage? Yes, I think it would.

The third question, why don't we see this? Well, that's because the answer to the first question is that no, it is not actually legal. I'm sorry, Mark, but you cannot get a running start in a major league game and time your tag up perfectly because of rule 5.09c. Any runner shall be called out on appeal when after a fly ball is caught he fails to retouch his original base before he or his original base is tagged. There's a comment to that rule that says retouch in this rule means to tag up and start from a contact with the base after the ball is caught. A runner is not permitted to take a flying start from a position in back of his base. Such runner shall be called out on appeal. So no, you can't do that.

And I think this is Eddie Stanky's fault. This is Eddie Stanky's fault. Sometimes it seems like half of the rules in the rulebook come from Eddie Stanky, the former middle infielder of the 40s and 50s, finding looph arc of any outfield throw and then take off running step on third as the catch was being made and continue to run at full speed making it almost impossible to throw him out at home a tactic eventually outlawed as a result and we know eddie stanky we've talked about eddie stanky for the so-called stanky maneuver which is distracting an opposing hitter by jumping up and down and waving your arms. You can't do that either. Eddie Stanky would have been a great podcast guest, but unfortunately, no longer available. Mark suggests, actually, after I told him that there should be a new term, a new baseball verb, Stanky to Stanky, to change the rules of baseball in order to prevent

undesirable behavior by a specific player. Carter Capps was stankied out of the league in 2017. I like it. All right. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already done so. Will Hickman, Joel Watts, Ken Koppen, Jason Dondlinger, and John Fairfield. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild.

You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. And you can replenish our mailbag. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Enjoy the rest of the World Series action this weekend.

I suppose it's possible that this was our last episode of the 2018 season. Hopefully not. Hopefully there will still be baseball going on when we speak again. But for those of you who are listening to us for the first time this year, we don't stop. We never stop. We go all winter on the same schedule, which is not always easy. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Have a wonderful weekend.

We will talk to you early next week how can we rely to mold and supply if you said goodbye would that be

a lie Breathe aloud I'm going to freak me out I'm not running away Put me down I wanna hear that broken sound Tell me to stay Oh, I'm all running away