Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 13: TIE Fighter

Episode Date: August 3, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss two outfielders in the news: Yoenis Cespedes and Jayson Werth.

Good morning and welcome to episode 13 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast. In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg in Long Beach, California. He is Sam Miller. So yesterday we had done a dozen of these things and now we've done a baker's dozen of these things and or we're about to have and the nice thing about doing a daily podcast is that it makes us seem much more experienced than we actually are because our our episode count keeps climbing much faster than most other podcasts do yeah and in about two or three weeks we will have done as much content as one up and in. Right. So what is your content for today? I would like to talk about Ioannis Cespedes. Okay. And I would like to talk about Jason Wirth.

Oh my gosh. Okay. Wow. This might be our first seven minute show. I have a decent amount to say about Jason Wir jason i think maybe good i'm interested to hear it and contribute nothing okay um all uh shall i go first yep so i just wanted to note that uh i mean i i think everybody is aware that cesspit is having a a good year and i just wanted to note that on our show um since he came back from his injury on june 1st uh he's hitting 347 391 593 which basically mirrors his cuban stats and uh he has been everything that billy bean could have wished for uh except that he is a ghastly defender according to most metrics.

But yeah, I don't know that I expected this, to be totally honest, especially probably after the first series against Seattle in Japan and maybe the first couple games of the season after that, he looked like he was going to be so aggressive that he would be easily exploited by clever, crafty Major League pitchers. And that kind of brings up a bias that I think I have and probably a lot of people have that we should work on not having, which is the idea that a hitter who succeeds while swinging at bad pitches is less likely to continue to do well than a hitter who succeeds while not swinging at bad pitches. I think that, for the most part, a hitter at this level who is successful is likely to continue being successful no matter his style, with obviously some caveats for the aging curve and that sort of thing.

But he's hitting well, and I don't see any reason he can't continue to hit well, even if he does swing at pitches on the plate periodically. I would say that's true if you're looking at a guy with a longer track record. I mean, it's not like anyone thought Vladimir Guerrero was suddenly going to fall apart after he was Vladimir Guerrero. But, I mean… They did. I can tell you, covering the Angels, everybody thought he was going to fall apart. Even when he was with the Angels?

Even when he was winning MVP awards, it was always like, oh, wow, yeah. But if anybody ever figures out that they can throw a pitch outside, yeah, no. People think that it's this weakness that somehow the other 29 teams haven't figured it out yet. And I think everybody knows. Everybody knew with Cespedes from about the second game. And I'm sure that they've been throwing him all the junk that they can muster. He's swinging at roughly the same number of pitches now that he was at the beginning, the same number of off-speed pitches, the same number of sliders, and he's been hitting them really well. He also isn't, sort of surprisingly to me based on what I saw in

Japan, he's not actually the most aggressive hitter in baseball, and he looked like he might be. He looked like he might be kind of pushing the boundaries of, of what a hitter could swing at. And he's not really, he swings at about 47% of pitches, which is not even on the first page of the, of the leaderboards. Um, so he's aggressive, but he's not comical. Yeah. Well, I can see why people were worried about it early on because, I mean, in the abstract, I guess, swinging at pitches outside the zone or that aren't quite as hittable is not necessarily a good thing. It's a terrible thing. Right. It's just that there are certain guys who can do that and still make good contact.

But after a few games, it wasn't really safe to say that he was one of those guys. Maybe now it is. It wasn't really safe to say that he was one of those guys. Maybe now it is. But, I mean, I definitely didn't see it coming either. At the time that he signed or when all the hoopla around his workout video surfaced, it seemed like most people who knew something about him seemed to think that he wouldn't even be ready to start the season on the major league roster and that we'd see him maybe in mid-season or something and obviously he's he's far exceeded that he's 13th in true average yeah i i was looking i almost

wrote something about him this week because i was looking at some leaderboards for June and July and noticing that there were very, very few guys who have hit better in those months than he has. And early on in the season, I remember looking, I think I just divided up April into two halves or something. And in the first half, he had been much more free um and had chased a lot more pitches and then uh seemed to in that in the second half of april kind of dial that back a bit and i was wondering if that had continued over the last couple months doesn't seem like it has really um i mean he's not he's not getting progressively more and more selective but um but as you said, it's working for him. He walked twice tonight, so maybe he has turned a corner and he will walk 70 or 80 times between now and the end of the year.

Right. Okay, so that's one outfielder down. Jason Wirth. One to go. So Wirth returned to the Nationals tonight after three months or so away from his fractured wrist. And I'm kind of interested in, I guess, what that means for the Nationals in that they're a team that has been more pitching heavy. They are literally a league average offensive team. They have a 260 true average, and they're 8th out of 16 NL teams.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, though. 8th out of 16 is not average, Ben. Well, the 260 part is average. Okay, fair enough. Well, the 260 part is average. Okay, fair enough. And tonight was really no different in that they won 3-0. Didn't score a lot of runs, but Detweiler pitched however many shutout innings.

So I wonder, I mean, this is the first time kind of that they've had the guys who were expected to be their bigger bats all in the same lineup together. Morse was out at the start of the season, and LaRoche was out for a while, and now Wirth is back. Desmond is hurt right now but should be back in a few weeks. So this is sort of, I mean, they're ready to fire on all cylinders offensively, whatever that means in their case. And so I'm wondering, I mean, lately the Braves have been kind of hot and have closed the gap to two and a half games in the East. So I'm wondering whether more worth will be able to hold them off for the last couple months,

even though there is sort of an outfield logjam for the Nationals now in that they usually will have Morrison left probably, Wirth in center, and Harper in right. But they also have Roger Bernardino, who's been hitting very well this year. But anyway. And Rick Ankeel, who was a good story once five or six years ago. Right. So I guess, do you see this kind of, I mean, do you think this will help them hold off the Braves or allow them to hold off the Braves or would they have done that anyway,

the Braves or would they have done that anyway probably without Worth? Wow. That's the open-ended question that I'm not prepared for. I think that my guess is they would have held them off anyway. But yeah, Worth is kind of underlooked, underappreciated at this point in his career and overlooked because everybody thinks that he's a tremendous failure in Washington. And he has been for the contract, but he is actually a pretty good hitter. And my guess is that he is probably like the third or fourth best hitter on that team right now, right? Yeah, which is not saying that much, really. It's not saying that much, but it's saying something. Harper has been such a hole in that lineup for the last couple months, and I'm sure it'll be nice to get Jason Wirth in there.

Did you know, if we can bring it back to my topic, that Bryce Harper is like 26th or something in swing rate in Major League Baseball this year. I didn't realize that. Okay, we can go back to yours. Yeah, and Harper has played, I think, every game but one since he was called up. So that's maybe one of the benefits in that they can give him an occasional day off now. the benefits and that they can give him an occasional day off now. Although, actually, Ankeel is no longer a national, I believe. He was cut on his birthday, which is sad.

But, yeah, I wanted to talk about also that sort of worth and the contract and who he is. I mean, at the time that the contract was signed before last season, and of course, it was the seven year $126 million deal. At that time, it was seen as this sort of statement by the Nationals that they were a team that people would want to play for. And that this was just this statement was more, or the signing was more a statement than anything um in that it would somehow elevate the nationals to the level of a i guess an attractive team to free agents and i mean a year and a half later uh worth has been worth uh two and a half wins to the Nationals

through a combination of injuries and not quite playing up to what they expected. And yet the Nationals are now maybe one of the most exciting teams in baseball and a young team with young stars who's in first place now. So now in retrospect, it maybe seems even sillier than it did at the time that, that the signing of Jason Worth could make this huge difference to the Nationals organization in that, I mean,

if they didn't have Jason Worth right now, would they be any less attractive to a free agent? Would we really think much less of their future potential? I don't really see it. Yeah, I think that anything like that is almost always a non-factor. And it is surprising to me that it gets repeated every every offseason because I don't I don't think that it has any effect on anybody unless Jason Worth is I mean this isn't the NBA and guys don't quite have really even the same control over where they go because there's

so often you're going to places where there's a need and where there's a very specific opening. And, you know, you can't just assume that if you're an attractive free agent that you get to pick the team you want to go to anyway. Yeah, if anything, maybe it established the Nationals as a team that would be willing to pay people more than they were worth, which I guess would make them more attractive to free agents. But in the sense of people going to the team to play for Jason Werther because Jason Werther added some sense of legitimacy to the team

that had been missing, that seemed far-fetched at the time and much more far-fetched now. Well, weren't they pursuing Cliff Lee the same offseason? Yeah, I think so. And as I recall, I could be totally wrong about this, but as I recall, even though they had overspent on Worth and even though they were pursuing Cliff Lee, nobody, including Cliff Lee, really took them the least bit serious.

Yeah. Well, I guess we've covered our two outfielders in a fairly quick time for us, I think. So that's the end of Episode 13 and the end of this week's shows. And we will be back next Monday with the 14th. So have a nice weekend, Sam. You have a nice weekend, Ben. Thank you.