Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1309: Manager Overboard

Episode Date: December 15, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about why there have been so many Noah Syndergaard trade rumors, then answer listener emails about whether Giancarlo Stanton would be better if he raised his launch angle, how and when a manager who kept intentionally walking hitters would be stopped, how and whether to debate saber skeptics (about […]

But it all really doesn't matter at all No, it all really doesn't matter at all Life's a gas But it all really doesn't matter at all No, it all really doesn't matter at all Life's a gas I hope it's gonna last behind less than 12 hours after the last time we talked by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. That means that this time I do not have a Williams STD update, which is fine. We don't need one every single time. No, just every single time except this one time. But yeah, not a lot has happened since the last

time we spoke because people were asleep. So we'll do emails today. It's been weeks since we actually did an email episode, so we're going to hard to understand. The Marlins trade all of their good players, and you can understand why they would trade this one and why he would want to be traded. No mystery there. I think what confuses some people is why Noah Syndergaard has been a subject of so many rumors, and particularly this three-team trade between the Mets and the Marlins and the Yankees that was rumored for a while. I don't know whether there was any substance to that at all. Obviously, nothing happened. But why is it, do you think, that Syndergaard has surfaced repeatedly this offseason? Because you would think for a team that is trying to compete and is making moves that are tailored

toward competing in 2019, they would want someone like Noah Sindergaard. And it doesn't seem like money is as big an obstacle as it has been for the Mets lately. Just broadly speaking, I think one of the reasons people feel like this winter meetings was pretty slow was because when it began, this was the rumor. This was what was popping up, I think, on Sunday and Monday was Real Mudo and Sindergaard. And Gary Sanchez even worked his way in there somehow in some sort of iteration of all this.

And it's easy. Reporters can report things that have been discussed just for the listening audience. Everything gets discussed. Like teams, you wouldn't believe how many iterations of rosters and transactions teams will talk about. So anyway, this is not directly answering your question, but this was the Rumour jour, rumor de week.

What's week in French? Anyway, I didn't take French. Rumor de semana, I guess, in Spanish, when the Wiener meetings began. And so when you have that, when you have all this talk about Corey Kluber and Trevor Bauer, all these players getting moved, and then the big trade is a three-team trade where two of

them are just dumping money like it uh it ends up seeming like a slow week anyway to actually answer your question in part i think it's interesting that brody van wagenen's agency i believe didn't it represent noah cinder guard and maybe still does i don't think van wagenen directly represented him is that correct right i think that's right. Yeah. There are some players he was part of the agency. And so you don't know what he knows. He may know something about player preferences, even if he wasn't directly their agent. Yeah. So I think, I don't know, maybe part of it could be based on some prior knowledge. Syndergaard is a guy who has, what, three years of club control left. He's about to start getting expensive. He's in his first year of arbitration.

And, you know, he hasn't been completely healthy for a few seasons, so that could be part of it. He made 25 starts last year, just seven the year before. And he's been good without being spectacular. Like this past season, he was a good starting pitcher. He wasn't amazing. But I think maybe more specifically in the case of the three-team rumor that had Real Mudo ending up with the Mets and Syndergaard going to the Yankees is I have like 75% of me believes that it was symbolic that this was a demonstration assigned by the Mets that

they would be willing to not only trade with the Yankees, but trade a premium cost-controlled player to the Yankees. And I think that the idea is to show that the Mets are, they're brand new and they're open for business and they're willing to entertain new ideas as they try to push forward, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that it was actually a bit of branding. And I don't think maybe it's a complete coincidence that of how few rumors came out this past week, I think teams clam up more than they have in history. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Mets seem to not be so clammy.

And you could understand maybe why you would be willing. I mean, everyone's willing to consider everything, as you said. But Sindergaard, obviously, he has not been super durable lately. And he throws so incredibly hard and just seems to want to throw as hard as he possibly can at all times. And he's already had some injuries, and he's obviously a candidate to have another. So if you were to trade Syndergaard for a dependable position player under the same sort of team control, then you could understand that. position player under the same sort of team control, then you could understand that. But it's not a move that I would say is likely to happen just because if they're trying to get better for 2019, it's hard to get better in a trade in which you are giving up Noah Syndergaard.

It's just, it's difficult even if you're getting Real Muto back. So that would kind of be a lateral move perhaps. Yeah, and part of this is probably that the Mets are looking to trade for a player or two that isn't available in the free agent market, but then they could replace that player with someone who is on the free agent market. So we've seen them linked to moving Syndergaard, moving Nimmo, moving Conforto, maybe moving Rosario. One of the weirder rumors that's out there right now,

or at least that has been out there this past week, is that the Marlins were potentially going to move Real Muda to the Mets, but the Mets were unwilling to trade Ahmed Rosario. That was like the big stumbling block for them. Not that he's a bad player, but he's not Nimmo, he's not Conforto, he's not Syndergaard, etc. But, you know, the Mets, in part because of the Cano and Diaz trade, they have subtracted from their farm. So if they want to get better at the major league level, there are only so many ways that they can do it.

So maybe they figure it would be easier to replace Noah Syndergaard with a free agent starting pitcher. I don't know if that's true because, you know, you can always go sign Yael's money grand doll as a catcher and not have Real Muto, but not my prerogative. All right. Emails? Emails. Okay. always go sign yel's money grand doll as a catcher and not have real moto but not my prerogative all right emails emails okay question from eugene is john carl stanton a player you think might benefit from a swing change to increase his average launch angle he seems to get overlooked as a candidate for making such a change since he's a prolific power hitter already, but he had a relatively low average launch angle in 2018 at 11.6 degrees. He generates a very high exit velocity, of course, but his flat swing also contributes to a 45% ground ball rate. Maybe with a swing change, he would lose a tick or two on his exit velocities or strike out a bit more, but he would see some of his ground outs and singles turn into homers. And for reference, 11.6 degrees launch angle.

This year, there were 281 guys who put at least 200 balls in play, and Stanton was 170th out of 281 with that launch angle, so closer to the bottom than the top. No, and here's why. So Giancarlo Stanton from the beginning he's a lot like Nelson Cruz the both of them have I think similar I'm not looking at Cruz's numbers right now but similar swing similar ground ball rates similar launch angles and I guess you can point out that Stanton has had lower ground ball rates in the past and in 2015 he had 35 percent

ground balls in 2012 he hit 36 percent ground. I don't think he really changed his swing in those years, but those were pretty good years for him offensively. But this is a guy who has a career WRC plus of 142. He has a lot of strikeouts, but he has been one of the best hitters in baseball consistently for just about a decade. And there's a theory out there that when you are a player who's reached the major leagues, you shouldn't be messed with too much. At least if you're here, your swing shouldn't be messed with too much because you have been selected for having a swing that got you to the majors. It's a very difficult level to reach. I think that theory is a little too broad. There are players in the major league level who could benefit from swing changes, but I do not think that the best players

at the major league level would benefit from swing changes you don't want to mess up sean carlos stanton yeah i agree right if you're someone like well obviously there are guys who have gotten to the majors and then have made a swing change and have gotten way better the whole gd martinez and josh donaldson and justin turner and daniel murphy all those guys but none of them was a star when they made those changes. They got there, so they had some raw ability, but they were not excelling. Now, I mean, it's interesting. If you look at, there's sort of a launch angle sweet spot, as Tom Tango of MLB has called it,

where you want to get balls between about 8 degrees and 32 degrees or something like that. Like anything higher than that is just going to be a pop-up or a lazy fly ball. And obviously anything below zero is just going to be on the ground. So you want as many of your at least hard hit balls as possible in that range. Now, if you look at just the percentage of balls in play between eight degrees and 32 degrees, Stanton in 2018 was almost at the very bottom. There were 323 guys this year. That's the number of people in the sample.

And Stanton, in terms of the percentage of his balls in play this year, was 280. 280 of 323 in terms of the percentage of them that were in that batted ball sweet spot. So in that sense, you would think that maybe there's room for improvement there. Like the number one guy in terms of putting his batted balls in that launch angle range, Joey Votto. Joey Votto had 45.9% of his batted balls hit in that range this year. That is very good. Stanton was at 30 that is not very good so i mean it's possible that he could increase that and i don't know if you looked only

at his hardest hit batted balls maybe the picture would look a little bit better there but it's also that he is so strong that he hits these balls that would not be home runs for anyone else. Like, I think we have both devoted entire articles to Stanton home runs that were hit at like angles that no one else has ever hit home runs at because he can just hit these low line drives that just keep going and going and get over the fence. So for Stanton to hit a ball at whatever, 11 degrees or something, as hard as he hits it, that's a little bit different from some other guy who's just weakly hitting it at that angle. So, you know, I'm sure he could make some tweaks. Like, he didn't have his best season this year, obviously. But in general, he's been such a good player that it's unlikely that if you changed something dramatically, he would be better than he's been. Not impossible, but I think there's just also a misconception that everyone who has a low launch angle would be better with a higher launch angle. Right. This past year, so you were using between 8 and 32 degrees. Yeah. So Stanton, for the four years we have for him

of SACS, he's always been between 29 and 32% of his batted balls in that range. So very consistent. And this past season, Nelson Cruz was at 31%. Very Stanton-y. Now Cruz in the past has been around 35%. So, yeah, you could say Stanton, I guess, could stand to hit a few more balls in the air. But like you said, you know, if he can hit a ball out at 14 degrees above the horizontal, then you don't. There's not really a reason to change that very much. Maybe you would tell him to target some pitches differently. Did you, did you read, this is only peripherally

related, did you read the interview that was, I might get this wrong, was it Barry Jackson did with David Sampson, former Marlins executive? He was a two-part interview series. I read a headline or aggregation of it, I think, but didn't read the whole thing. So it was Barry Jackson with the Miami Herald. He did a two-part interview with former Marlins president David Sampson. And in there, there's a little anecdote. And I'll just read a few paragraphs here out loud. This is because you brought up John Carlos Stanton. I will talk about John Carlos Stanton.

On the Marlins one year with Barry Bonds as their hitting coach, 2017, Samson told LeBretard's show, Dan LeBretard's show, I'm trying to think if I ever had a worse hitting coach in my career than Barry Bonds. Pause for comedic effect. Hold on.

I'm thinking, no, you know why Magic Johnson was a bad coach. He didn't have patience for people who didn't see the court the way he saw it barry bonds can't teach hitting because he just hits you've got stanton saying two strikes i'm bailing against the slider i can't lay off at barry barry says don't swing at it that's how the conversation goes stanton said jeffrey loria very much wanted barry bonds to try to start his road back into baseball because Jeffrey was fond of him and Barry got that opportunity. So I think we've talked about this before, just the

drawbacks and benefits of hiring someone elite to be a coach. They're just like, well, they never really had to work at it. So this is like a joke you would write, like Mark McGuire's a hitting coach is just like, well, we're going to start hitting dingers now. How do you do that? Well, you get the pitch and then you hit it for a home run. That's basically the idea. So anyway, you can wonder whether John Carlos Stanton has had the best coaching throughout his career. But anyway, we're talking about one of the best hitters in baseball. Probably you don't want to mess around. Yeah, it's funny. I don't know if that's a universal rule that only bad hitters are good hitting coaches and same for pitching coaches. I mean, I know that Ted Williams had a lot of success making his hitters better when he was a manager.

And some people will say that Barry Bonds gave them great hitting advice, right? F.P. Santangelo told us that on the podcast. So I don't know. Maybe it varies by player, but you also do hear that sometimes that guys who are just so good just don't understand what it's like to be less good, and so they can't give good advice. And one last note about Stanton, if you limit his batted balls to just 95 miles per hour exit velocity or more, which is basically when he hits the ball hard, then he does hit balls in the sweet spot pretty regularly. So if there's a group of 185 guys and in that group, he ranks 42nd in terms of hitting balls in that sweet spot when he hits the ball well, which is right around JT Real Mudo to name someone we just said, and right above Justin Turner and Max Muncy and Ronald Acuna. So that maybe tells you that when he makes good contact, the ball is going where he wants it to go and the swing is good, but maybe he's not making

great contact as often as he would like to, but probably does not need to just totally redo his swing in the way that, I don't know,andi diaz does but maybe not haven't looked into his numbers at great length yeah something i always wish that you could search for in baseball savant or or just i don't know if i had the capability would be to take a hitters i don't know like top five or ten percent of their batted balls by exit speed and then see their launch angles because i think that tells you really what the what the swing plane is all right question from steve Patreon supporter. With the new intentional walk rules,

the act of intentionally walking a batter is a transaction between the manager and the umpire directly with no player interaction and critically for this scenario, with no player oversight or ability to overrule the manager. Suppose a manager snaps and decides that he will simply

intentionally walk hitters forever or until he is stopped. What would happen? What would the mood on the field be in the dugout, in the stands and in the front office as he walks one batter, two batters, five batters, 10 batters, 50 batters? A few specific questions follow. Are there any other in-game decisions that the manager has this kind of unilateral control over? Pitch hitting comes to mind, but few others. Even if a manager tries to play someone who can't throw as a pitcher,

the players on the field could presumably shift and let someone else pitch. Second, what provisions are there for the front office to fire a manager during a game? The intentional walk rules say that it must be the manager to signal the ump, but I don't know if the rulebook clearly specifies who the manager is or provides a formal process to remove someone as manager if they start to do things like intentionally walk everybody okay well let's see let's answer these one at a time so the manager can call for the intentional walk he can signal for a pinch hitter he can bring in a reliever he can ask for a replay review yeah Yeah. Is there anything else besides argue? I mean, yeah, he can just make substitutions, but he is limited by the roster size, I guess, to a certain extent.

Yeah. So I think that maybe that covers that. I certainly don't have access to the unprinted, understood league rulebook about firing coaching staff in game. Yeah. I would assume in a situation like that, you know, there's like a phone that goes straight from the dugout to the front office or something like that. And then someone in the front office who's watching would call the dugout and maybe get in touch with the bench coach. So maybe you call to have somebody restrain, physically restrain the manager in a case where he's a broken record? His brain synapses are just firing in such a way that he just keeps saying,

intentional walk, intentional walk, intentional walk. The home plate umpire at some point would probably be like, I don't know, let's use Bob. Bob, you doing okay? What are you doing here, Bob? I wonder, what would happen first, do you think? Would the home plate umpire signal for a delay? Or would a player come out and restrain, a player or coach come out and restrain the manager? Would the general manager come down on the field in his suit and pull the manager away? Yeah, I would think that the coaches would try to intervene. I mean,

there's probably a stigma there where you don't want to show up the manager. So I bet it would go on for longer than you would think just because they don't, you know, it's like a mutiny on the bounty sort of situation. It's like, when do you decide that this person is not competent and you're risking a court martial and you're going against all the norms? And I don't know whether there is a procedure in place. I don't think so. I mean, I don't see why you couldn't get fired during the game. I mean, guys get ejected during games and then they're gone and then someone else takes over as the acting manager.

So a GM could just come down from upstairs and stand in the tunnel and shout, hey, you're fired. And then the manager would be done and the bench coach would be appointed to take over. So you could do that. Now it would take a little while. I don't think you could queue up intentional walks. I don't think the manager could say, I want to walk the next 50 guys. I think you have to do it batter by batter. So it's going to take a while because the batter has to trot down to first and here comes the next hitter. And so there's going to be a little time between signals for people to intervene. And at some point, I guess the coaches just, I don't know if they physically restrain him

so that he can't make the signal or what, but something like that. Okay, so based on Yahoo answers, I can at least tell you that in the KHL, the Russian Hockey League, a coach in the KHL was fired during the intermission between the second and third periods. That sends me to a Puck Daddy link that no longer opens. There is also something here. I'm just going to, I haven't read this all the way through, something called the Ballard paper bag incident. So let's see what this is about.

Late in the 1978-79 season, an owner of a team named Ballard forced G.M. Gregory to fire the coach Roger Nielsen. The players lobbied to have Nielsen reinstated. Ballard reinstated him after a few days later, but wanted Nielsen to return to the bench with a bag on his head. Nielsen declined the paper bag, but was back on his head coach. So that wasn't really helpful. So anyway, someone, a Russian hockey coach has been fired in the middle of a game. There is a tweet here. If you search, if you Google, quote, fired during a game, end quote, the first response is a tweet by deon sanders that asks has any coach ever been

fired during a game on the commercial break the tweet responses are not very helpful but a lot of people have asked this question it turns out there's a has an nfl coach been fired during a game is a question here oh here we go in 1944 this is i have not back like double checked any of these things in 1944 cleveland brown's head coach paul Rosbick was fired after heading into halftime down 45-3. So that's one opportunity here. There's a Reddit post. Let's see if there's anything here. Has there ever been a manager fired during a game currently watching Lester Everton thinking Martinez should probably go,

even though Lester are brilliant? I still think he should go right now because that would be hilarious. The first response, unfortunately, this involves some German names, so hear me out. Gene Luring, the president of Fortuna Köln, fired Tony Schumacher, the coach, during halftime with the words, oh no, well, translated, I as the club had to act. Luring was quite the character. He once had a stadium ban during Christmas time, so he dressed up as Santa Claus to watch the game from the stands and not be recognized. So it seems like coaches have been fired during intermissions in other sports. Now, baseball doesn't have an intermission in the same way, but if you can do it in some leagues during a game you can presumably do it at any point during a game right yeah well fonte davis retired at halftime in a football game this year that is different i obviously a manager could just walk away if you wanted to but yeah i don't see any reason i mean i don't know whether you would fire the coach for this or whether you would just try to get him some help i don't know depends on why

he is making this move is he just doing it to sabotage the team or has something gone terribly wrong oh hold on yeah okay we're getting close here okay this is this is from quora slightly more reliable than slightly more reliable uh as uh this is this is coming from a user named danny bucka he's a high school baseball coach and instructor according to himself so as i began i Slightly more reliable. This is coming from a user named Danny Baca. He's a high school baseball coach and instructor, according to himself. So, as I began, I went straight to Billy Martin, who was hired five separate times by the New York Yankees, which of course meant that he was fired five times. Through the years, Martin feuded with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, as well as a few of his players.

Tension ran high and tempers followed. Martin actually pulled star right fielder Reggie jackson in the middle of an inning to the disbelief of jackson and the baseball world this move was an obvious show of disrespect for jackson who was furious upon returning to his dugout the two had words and needed to be separated by coaches and teammates remembering this conflict i wondered if steinbrenner may have done the same to martin upon one of his five firings such was not the case oh this got boring. It is allowable. MLB has no jurisdiction when it comes to ownership making managerial moves. I don't know what that means. There are numerous managers who were fired shortly after a game was completed,

and one firing that this user thought stood out involved the San Diego Padres. On September 23, 1992, the Padres had a promotion called Unemployment Night. Okay. After a 7-6 loss to the Houston, manager Greg Riddich was fired with a 78-72 record. He was 200-194 in three seasons as a Padres skipper, and he was replaced by Jim Riggleman. Back to Jim Riggleman.

Fired on Unemployment Night. I hate to think the two were linked. Okay, so this was not actually a helpful answer, but we do have a link here from the Daily Mail. Chichester bus? British words. Chichester bus. Mark Poulton, I was sacked during a game we were winning by a board who stitched me up. Who stitched me up? What the hell does that mean?

Anyway, written English here. Mark Poulton became one of football's oddest managerial managers when he was fired during, that's in all caps, during a game. With his side, Chichester City, in the top half of the Sussex County League, and leading Red Hill 2-1 in the cup match last Tuesday, Poulton had no idea the axe was about to fall. But having seen two goals

from Graham Gilman put City in charge, Poulton was still recovering from the shock of seeing one of his players taken away in an ambulance when his mobile phone went off. It was club director Gary Walker, and Poulton revealed, he said he was sorry to interrupt me and then told me I'd been sacked. I couldn't believe it. The club are a complete mess and a shambles. I'm better off out of it. I must be the first manager in football history to receive a call during a game to say that he had been fired. It could not have come at a worse time, as one of my young players, Nathan Paxton,

had just been taken to the hospital after breaking his jaw, cheekbone, nose, and eye socket in a collision with their keeper. But there had been a lot going on ever since I started at Chichester and I feared it might end like this. He feared it might end like being the first coach to be fired during a game.

Most managers would have left the ground but trooper polton stayed on to complete the patch and saw his team lose four to two polton added in the sun it's the most unprofessional and shambolic organization i've ever been involved with there are people there who aren't interested in the good of the club only in waging their own personal wars i am deeply unhappy with the way i've been treated i've built up a good squad and we started to get results blah blah blah okay i should have walked away when i got the call but i would never walk away from my players and so i stayed until the end of the game when i told the lads the majority said there was no way they would continue playing for the club chichester city who have just appointed a new board of directors, refused to comment.

I think to stitch someone up means to frame them or put their ass in the jackpot somehow by tricking them into being in some bad situation. So yeah, well, if a manager were to intentionally walk everyone, I don't think his team would walk off the field in support of him. They would probably be pretty pissed too. But how many intentional walks do you think that he gets through? Just give me an estimate before something or someone intervenes. Before something intervenes. Okay. So what situation are we saying that this begins in? Base is empty or like an obvious intentional walk situation? Second and third one out.

Yeah, I guess, right. You would be quicker to do something if this were like a high leverage. You know, if the bases were loaded in a tie game or something, then it would be obviously more suspicious. So let's just say it's an average situation. I don't know. Average leverage, not an intentional walk situation, but not like going to make the team lose immediately either. Okay. So the first one is unusual, right?

The first intentional walk in this hypothetical. Okay. So you give him one. You're like, oh, maybe, you know, as an analyst, you're like, oh, there must be some matchup data. They're like, clearly, this is brilliant. What a great move. Way to go, Joe Maddon. You're really just playing the odds.

So you give him one. The second one, you're like, who the hell does two intentional walk? I think it would happen fast. I think the second one would leave people stunned. And then I don't know how fast the manager can actually do this. Can he just like go up and start like rolling his fingers in his hands being like, intentional walk, intentional walk? No, yeah, I don't think so. Yeah yeah the batter has to go to first right so there's like there's a period of time so i think when the manager calls for the third one then something

would begin to happen but i don't know if it could happen fast enough to prevent the third one from happening uh-huh yeah i mean i just think there's such a taboo against questioning the manager, especially during the game, that I just don't know if anyone would get in his face and stop him or whether it would happen quickly enough. I mean, we're talking about like two minutes or something. I don't know, maybe after the second one, the batter just refuses to go down to first or walks down really, really slowly to give the team some sort of time to figure out the situation. So, yeah, I'm going to say four. I'm going to say he gets to walk a runner in if the bases were empty before something stops him.

What do you think stops him? probably coaches just physically carry him out of the dugout or just i don't know band together and remove him from from duty do you think how many intentional walks in a row would it take for the team to take the manager directly to the hospital um probably well that many you probably you'd sit him down you'd have some kind of conversation and figure out what's happening, right? It depends. Is he just raving and ranting? Or is he just totally calm and lucid and seemingly rational, except that he keeps issuing intentional locks? I don't know, that makes all the difference. I don't know. That makes all the difference. If he just calmly was saying it, you know, I thought it was the best move to your fantastic conversation a few weeks ago featuring Jay Jaffe. I searched for and found a video of Jay speaking with Chris Mad Dog Russo about the Hall of Fame. Russo is a noted Sabre skeptic, but two aspects of their conversation struck me. Russo's willingness to listen to Jay and Jay's attitude toward Russo.

At one point, for example, Russo asks about Jeff Kent's candidacy. The conversation is civil, but the subtext is clear. Russo scoffs at the mention of unbased percentages as a viable metric undeterred. Jay explains why Kent isn't a viable Hall of Fame candidate despite his above-average career offensive stats. At the end of the clip, I was left thinking that this is how to comport oneself when speaking with Saber skeptics. So assuming either of you speaks to Sab saber skeptics with any regularity, have you noticed a shift in how those conversations go?

More than anything, I would enjoy hearing the two of you reflect on the state of conversation between the sabermetrically inclined and the saber skeptic. I think this is too difficult because we live in bubbles, right? How often? We do. When I took a lift home from the airport, I guess on Thursday, I was talking to my Lyft driver, whose name is Micah. He's great. He has a pest control company in Portland.

Look him up. He's a big baseball fan. Said he doesn't want the Mariners to trade Mitch Hanegar, but he doesn't read fan graphs. Now, he did say he's going to look up fan graphs, so gain the reader. All right. Traffic. Yeah. Mayor of nothing right over here.

Jeff Sullivan trying to be friends with everybody. But I don't have a good answer to this question because I genuinely don't. I already try not to talk about baseball a lot when I'm not at my job, so to speak. Like I talk to you, but this is the most I talk about baseball during the average week. Of course, at the winter meetings, I'm talking to team people and stuff, but that's different because all team people now are on the same page. So I genuinely don't know the last time I had, combative is the wrong word, but like a conversation with someone where I was trying to make a point and they didn't understand the numbers I was using. Do you? I'm going to think. the numbers I was using. Do you? I'm going to think. Not often. I mean, it's almost like things have become polarized in politics in the same way that it's almost like there's no point in trying to convince someone of something because they have probably grouped themselves into one camp already. And I guess you could make that analogy that perhaps one side has an increasingly shrinking base that believes things that are contrary to fact.

And it's not really that useful to try to persuade them of alternative viewpoints. And it's kind of the same with sabermetrics. Like at this point, if you are in the vehemently anti-stats crowd, I mean, you've been exposed to it at this point. That's the thing. Like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, if you were anti, it may have just been because you didn't know and you weren't familiar with it and it was new to you. We were all, at some point, we were all exposed to it for the first time and maybe had our doubts. And now though, if you've persisted this long in being resistant to it, odds are someone else has already tried to persuade you of that and it hasn't worked. And so why even waste your time? So it depends on the tone. Like if the person is just, you know, respectfully disagreeing and you think, well, maybe they have a point or maybe they just haven't been exposed to this line of thinking and maybe I can be the ambassador. There's some value in that, but I think that sort of thing is rarer and rarer at this

point. And I've noticed that I think Meg has made this point on Twitter that there's no point in quote tweeting the person who's mad about stats and dunking on them on Twitter anymore because it's like, we won, you know. So act like we are the party in power, I guess, because at this point, you're punching down almost if you are sort of gloating about how much more you know about baseball than someone because baseball teams already operate in that way. Right. Now, I had forgotten there's one very obvious example that you and I both participated in, and it happened a few months ago when we had noted international comedian Jim Jeffries on the podcast, and he said that Bryce Harper is the best player in baseball.

And I believe our conversation at that point was, oh, okay. And we didn't really engage on it because I think we both knew it wasn't going to go anywhere. So we had an opportunity there. But I think generally, even if you don't want to talk about wrc plus or wins above replacement which most people don't have a concept of it's easy enough to say well you know you you focus on the fundamentals you you can get everybody to agree that not making it out as a hitter is good running the base as well as good playing defense is good and so you can kind of talk your way into it where you can at least agree

on the concepts of what makes a good player even if you don't agree on all the numbers of it so i don't think it's it's that hard but i mean i don't if i interact with some if if someone comes to me on twitter who just is making a combative argument that's stupid i'm not going to take the time you know it's just those those there's just no point. There's no benefit to me engaging in that. Yeah, I did engage in one of those just this week. I very rarely do that either. But in this case, I don't know.

I had been working on a book chapter forever and I needed a break and someone tweeted at me. So I thought this will be a good diversion for a few minutes. And I knew it wasn't going to go well because the person was tweeting at me about Harold Baines and the exchange started with, you know, did you ever see Harold Baines play? Which is, it's just sort of a specious argument. I mean, I didn't even really want to respond because I didn't want to dignify the idea that you had to have seen someone play to have an opinion on that player. And I did see Harold Baines play because he played forever.

I saw him when he was an older player, but still a pretty good player. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't make me more qualified to weigh in on Harold Baines because I saw him play. I mean, that's kind of why we keep statistics, right? So we don't have to have seen every game to judge a guy or seen any games for that matter. When you're talking about a career that's over and you're just judging the value that was provided, I think you can do that. I'm not saying there's nothing you can learn by having seen it. Certainly there can be some things that the stats

missed and maybe he added some extra value off the field in some way. So I might be amenable to that argument if Baines were a borderline guy, but it's not like we're talking about a difference of a few wins here, putting him over the edge. Statistically speaking, he's just nowhere near the standards. So even if I had seen him play in the 80s and I was making the point, well, lots of people who saw him play decided that he was not one of the best players in baseball because he never finished high-end MVP voting and all the writers who had seen him play decided he was not a Hall of Famer when he

was on the ballot, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, the conversation didn't really go anywhere. We didn't convince each other of anything. It was not uncivil, but it ended up with him basically saying, well, he had lots of hits and RBIs and so he's a Hall of Famer, which was kind of where I expected it to end up when it started. And under different circumstances, I just wouldn't have bothered. But that's kind of what I mean. You can tell from the tone, I think, with which this begins whether there's any point in actually reaching out and trying to persuade someone of something because often you can tell that their mind is made up before it even begins. Now, one of the things that I think delights me a lot in the Harold Baines conversation is, what was it?

He went 15 seasons, I think 15 seasons or something, between 100 RBI years, and he's one of a few players to do that. But that's not good. That just tells you there were a lot of seasons in the middle where he didn't have a few players to do that but that's not good that just tells you there were a lot of seasons in the middle where he didn't have a bunch of rbi so it's like yeah that's a it's a fun fact without being like a good fact you know right right it's impressive that he had like good seasons separated by that far apart but what was he doing that whole middle time it's like yeah that was one of the things the person was citing was like well he was a six-time all-star but he played 22 years so it's not that great to be a six-time all-star i

i don't know you can all look up the exchange if you want to but you probably shouldn't because it's a waste of everyone's time i can't really dispute anyone who says he's a hall of famer to them because there's no objective standard or definition for what a hall of famer is he just doesn't measure up to the historical standard for what a Hall of Famer has been. And I think there's something to be said for preserving those standards. I mean, it's a fairly inconsequential thing whether someone makes the Hall of Fame or not, but people care about the Hall of Fame, obviously. And part of the reason we care about it is because it has really high standards. It's like 1% of players get in. And if you put everyone like Banes in, as I wrote in an article this week, it would be like 4%

of players, which is still pretty exclusive, but a lot less so. And if a guy gets in who's not as good, and not only is he not as good, but he gets in via a sort of side door because there was a tiny committee that had a bunch of people who liked him and worked with him on it i think that does cheapen the honor a little bit as nice a guy as bane seems to be i can i can as long as we're doing harold baines i will tell you harold baines compared to himself in high leverage situations he had a t ops plus of 110 that's actually that's that's good that means he was about 10 better than his normal self in high leverage situations it's also not close to the highest of of all time i don't know what minimum

to set here but i set a minimum of 1 000 plate appearances in in those situations and that puts him in 100th place all time tied with like prince fielder ken griffey grady hatton is up there hatton good baseball name but like the first place all time here is noted clutch hitter Brian Roberts, I guess. Carlos Pena at 125. Alan Ashby at 123. I forgot Alan Ashby. He's even a hitter.

Joey Votto, by the way, 121. Russell Martin, also 121. They are good. So Harold Baines, I guess, clutch. But I liked on MLB Now, there was a segment that was looking at like the years of Harold Baines' career peak. And they actually used WPA on the air to basically say that Harold Baines was fine, but he wasn't even close to Will Clark. So Will Clark for the Hall of Fame, I guess, is the argument we get to make now. Right.

Did you already prepare a stat blast? It's very quick. I did. Okay, good. Go ahead. Let's do that. Oh, man, yeah. Will Clark is, like, way better than Harold Baines.

Anyway, Will Clark for the Hall of Fame. 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 Deistaplast. So this touches on something that, as long as we're talking about T-Opius Plus, I looked at JT RealMoto early in the previous week because he has spent his entire career in Marlins Park and Marlins Park is hard to hit in. So, uh, this is just a very simple home and road all time split stat blast based on T-Opius Plusops plus which again for anybody out there who has not

already heard this you just heard it in the stat blast song but t-ops plus compares one's ops in a split to one's overall ops so a positive t-ops plus means you're better in the split etc everybody gets this so the t-ops plus is not park adjusted so for example using baseball reference the hitter who is all-time benefited the most from his home environment, again, not surprising, Carlos Gonzalez. A T-OPS Plus of 127, because Carlos Gonzalez has spent almost his entire career batting in Colorado. I should say he's actually tied with Damon Berryhill at 127,

but Carlos Gonzalez has batted a lot more often. So for those of you who are curious, Carlos Gonzalez at home in his career has slugged 592. And on the road, he slugged 420. At home, he's batted 323. On the road, 251. So anyway, Carlos Gonzalez, very unsurprisingly, has hit better at home. The other side is where it is more fun. So looking at the players with the lowest home TOPS+, I set a minimum of 1,000

plate appearances. So there are a lot of recent players. Desmond Jennings is here. He has the 10th worst TOPS+, at home. Derek Dietrich has the 6th worst. Khalil Green, for anyone who remembers the Padres' most curious shortstop from this millennium, Khalil Green, has a T-OPS plus of 82 at home. Third lowest, Gil McDougald. Gil McDougald, a player for the Yankees in the 50s, I believe. A T-OPS plus at home of 78. JT RealMoto has the second lowest home T-OPS plus in measured known baseball history.

A T-OPS plus of 77. He has not been able history. A T-O-P-S plus of 77. He has not been able to hit very well in Marlins Park. I looked at this on Fangraphs. He has been just fine to the pull side, but his power has been destroyed up the middle and going the other way in Miami, which is interesting. And even though JT Romoto is relevant now, because teams can look at him and think, oh, he's actually an even better hitter than he looks like. Anyway, the real winner of this fun fact is Rick Wilkins.

Rick Wilkins, catcher to the stars. A T-OPS plus of 75 over the course of his career. He came up with the Cubs. He wound up playing in Houston, the Astrodome years. He wound up in San Francisco, Candlestick Park. Played some time with Seattle, the Dodgers, the Cardinals, the Padres. He floated around a lot over his career. He played for about a decade. And Rick Wilkins, if you look him up on Baseball Reference,

it's basically just a picture of a giant human neck. But for his career, he had an OPS at home of 648 and an OPS on the road of 837. So Rick Wilkins, really good hitter Half of the time Alright, question from Brian, if Bryce Harper Tried to pull a LeBron from the time Of the decision and join an established Star to take a team to the World Series Which team slash star combo Would be the best option?

In this scenario I'm using the Astros as that Era's Celtics, who were the team LeBron Was trying to counter. I would also Count out the Yankees as they already have their own trio. If he joined either of those, he would just be Durant. Part B of this is if he decided he wanted to join a basement dweller and turn them around, which is the best spot and which other free agents should he try to recruit with him? So basically, if he wants to be the guy who pairs with some other star to take a team

over the top, where should he go? And if he wants to take a team from the basement to the top by himself, where should he go? Can't answer. He can join the Orioles, but he's not going to the White Sox, right? Because they are bad. They've been bad, but they're on the way up and they have young players and they're mid-rebuild. And so he would kind of get in on the ground floor and he could be the face of that just resurgence, even though there will be other players responsible for it. So that would be a good move for him.

He might have to wait an extra year to start winning, but it would look good if he led them back to contention. Right. And I think the White Sox are in a fun and interesting position. We'll see if the Indians try to start a pitcher, but if the Indians get a little worse, that actually incentivizes other teams in the AL Central to try to get a little better quicker.

Anyway, so because of the differences between LeBron James and any baseball player, that there's just a lot less ability to actually move the needle here. But if he were going to pair with a player and sign with the team, that's pretty obvious he would do it with Manny Machado. They could just announce their signings in tandem. Go to the White Sox, they could use them. Go to the Marlins would be real fun.

They could use them. Maybe they have the money, I don't know. Go to Baltimore, maybe they aren't gonna bring manny machado back but we're talking about a stupid hypothetical here anyway so unfortunately you just can't like the rating maybe bryce harper if he were going to do the decision part do uh that maybe the ratings would be good because bryce harper is a household name and he's a superstar but i don't i don't know do we need to explain why in terms of like war lebron james is like 10 times more important than bryce harper is or could ever be for a baseball team well i think the i mean the best thing he if he wanted to take a team that's kind of on the

fringes and pair with some other established superstar he should go to the angels right and you have trout and harper and an upton in the outfield i don't know sorry cole calhoun but you put bryce harper out there and i mean the angels have been lurking on the periphery of the playoffs year after year after year so add bryce harper that's a pretty big upgrade and suddenly you have trout and you have harper and you Otani. I don't know whether Otani can be a superstar as a DH, but you have all those guys. And suddenly that is quite a combo or duo or trio. And that might actually be enough to put the Angels over the top. Do you think Bryce Harper would, in this situation, want to sign with a team where he knows he's actually playing second?

Would actually, hold on. If, let's say say let's say it's a new york team right because the angels don't get that actually that much media if bryce harper played on the same team with mike trout would they get coverage commensurate to their actual value to the team like harper would be the face of the team right probably i mean yeah currently harper gets more coverage or just seems to be more prominent and is not nearly as good. So I assume that would continue to be the case. Maybe Trout would like having someone like Harper on his team to just take the spotlight on why isn't Mike Trout more of a public figure or something.

I don't know. Maybe he would like that. But yeah, I would think so. All right. Question from Hamish. I'm a relatively new baseball fan living in Australia. I haven't been a big sports fan always, so it's really new and exciting to me. With the only other sport I enjoy being Australian rules football. A really stat-heavy game that he would thoroughly recommend we look into. Baseball coverage here is basically zero. It's easy to see which teams or players are

good, but it's great to listen to you provide context as to which are the best and why through objective stats. I'm still wrapping my head around it all, but it's such a complex game, and I love getting into that nitty-gritty of it all. The one thing I have most trouble with watching baseball on TV is trying to identify the pitches. What's an easy way you use to identify pitches? What do you look for? How do you determine where the ball breaks, etc.? Curve balls are generally easy, but I have trouble with sliders, change-ups, etc. Also, what exactly is a cutter? I can't seem to find a strict definition, but it seems to be some vague pitch between a slider and a sinker. Can we help Hamish identify

pitches? Okay, well, I applied for an internship position with the Mariners about 10 or 11 years ago. And the idea at that point was to be someone who could watch and chart pitches by pitch type. Now, I don't know why they were doing this at the time when PitchFX was coming into regular use because it turns out it's been automated. I doubt that internship exists anymore. I also didn't get it, and here's why. Most camera angles are not from dead center. They are from some sort of like in between shortstop and second base position. And so you're looking at a pitch from the side.

And when you're looking at a pitch from the side, trying to spot the difference between a slider and a changeup is almost effing impossible. So you have to go in it's sort of bayesian like you can look at you can tell a fastball but you can't tell the difference between fastballs but you know that if you have a pitcher who's facing an opposite handed batter it's more likely he's throwing a change up or a splitter if you have a pitcher who's facing a same handed batter it's more likely that you are seeing a slider so you kind of look

at the the target like where the pitch is supposed to go, and you look at the handedness, and that can tell you most of the time what kind of, like if you have a righty pitcher facing a lefty hitter, and he throws some sort of a non-fastball pitch that breaks and ends up low and inside, that's probably a slider. If it's low and outside, probably a changeup. Do you have anything to add? Well, I would just second what you're saying. It is really hard to do, especially if you don't have all the information that a lot of us do when we're watching a game.

When I was an intern myself, I was not hired to do that job, but every now and then I would get asked to do that job, and I was terrible at it. I'm sure I completely screwed it up because I don't have high level playing experience. Like if you're a player, it's just something you know and you recognize because you've seen thousands of pitches. But for us, not really. And so I felt completely out of my depth at that time. And then when I went to scout school, that was the hardest thing that I had to do. I mean, especially like you're at this field, you don't have a radar gun. You don't even know how fast pitches are going. You don't know anything about the pitcher. And so you don't know like what his repertoire is. It's just completely, you're going in with nothing and you're supposed to recognize it, you know, probably just like sitting off to the side or something like you're not getting the behind the pitcher's back angle that you're used to. I mean, that was difficult. It got a little easier over the course of the couple of weeks there, but initially it was like,

man, it was not a fastball, but that's about all I got. So it's really hard. So don't feel bad if you struggle with this. Now, obviously if you're watching on TV and you have the center field camera angle, it's a little easier. You can see the velocity. And that is obviously a big hint. Although if you're looking at, I don't know, Edwin Diaz and he throws a slider 90 something, you might get confused, but nope, that's just how hard he throws a slider. But I think, you know, you can look up there some handy diagrams online. If you just Google like pitch movement, you can just see the basic idea. Well, this pitch breaks that way generally, and this pitch breaks that way. And so that will help you.

But, you know, the count tells you something. You're more likely to get certain pitches and certain counts. And as you said, Certain hitters and situations And obviously you know To learn you can follow along If you want to just call up Like the stat cast page That tells you pitch by pitch

What every pitch was or Brooks baseball or something you know You can just kind of follow along and say Okay I thought that was that what was it actually Oh it was that alright I'll recognize It next time. And you can, of course, look up what the pitcher throws generally, and then you'll have some idea of what you're picking from, what the options are. So that will help you get better at this. But yeah, it's not something that you just know immediately. Yeah. Let's do one more. Yeah, okay. So one more.

Well, we haven't done a terminology question in a while. We actually got one about Edwin Diaz. That was why I brought up that example. Someone asked us if you can call a pitch gas or straight gas if it's not a fastball, because this is a question from Mike, who said he was watching a video montage of Edwin Diaz that the Mets posted. And one of the Mariners announcers in the clip said,

straight gas on one of Diaz's pitches that got a whiff. And it was like a 90 mile per hour slider. So Mike wanted to know if a pitch can be called straight gas, if it's something other than a fast fastball. I would say no. I would say maybe it looks like a fastball if Edwin Diaz is throwing it. But to me, gas is a fastball. Yeah, to me, gas is a fastball as well. And I think gas implies that this is a pitcher who's throwing at the top end of his velocity range. You can't throw a straight gas if you can throw 10 miles per hour harder than that. I personally think I could be convinced.

Yeah, I mean, it's the hardest you can throw that particular pitch, I guess. Yeah. To me, no. But this was the one I wanted to get to. This is from Thomas who says, I've been wondering about this for a while. How many innings are in a baseball game? Or phrased differently, how many outs are in an inning?

The question seems inane, I know, but as I discovered when trying to explain baseball to my younger sister many years ago, it has two contradictory answers. Obviously, there are nine innings in a baseball game. Everyone knows that. But everyone also knows that there are three outs in an inning. But wait, there are 54 outs in a game, 27 per team. So are there 18 innings in a game or are there 18 half innings? But nobody ever says there are three outs in a half inning.

When the third out is recorded, you say the inning is over. If the pitcher gives up 10 runs, you say he had a terrible inning, not he had a terrible half inning. So what the hell is an inning? Is it three outs or is it one ninth of a baseball game? Crap. Okay. So he presents an interesting argument in that inning is used in two different ways. But I think if you get down to it, people do refer to half innings such that there are nine innings in a baseball game.

This is a little like when you say if a team is like one or two games over 500. Like what is, if you're 51 and 49, are you one or two games over 500? I always say two, but I understand that the argument is that you are actually one game above 500. Because if one game were different, then you would be exactly 500. I say an inning is six outs and there are nine innings in a baseball game because I refer to half innings. But I also understand that when you're saying, oh, the pitcher had a bad inning, that does complicate things, but I don't think in a way that is intentional. Yeah. I mean, I will certainly say, oh, he got out of the inning or that's the end of the inning but i agree with you that an inning technically is the top half and the bottom half or i guess if it's the ninth and you don't play the bottom of the ninth it could just be

the top half but i think there actually was some confusion about this early in baseball history i look this up in the dixon baseball, and the term inning came from the cricket term innings, is, you know, each individual player's turn at bat is called an innings. Now, this apparently comes from like an 1880s newspaper that says, baseball authorities have long held that inning referred to a time at bat for one side, and innings, innings, to a time at bat for one side and innings, innings, to a time at bat for both sides. But this distinction was not consistently followed by sports writers for many years. So at some point early in baseball's formative years, there was a distinction, or at least some people observed that distinction between inning and innings for top half and bottom half. But at this

point, it's all context, right? We all always know what we mean when we say inning without saying half inning. So it's both is the answer. Yeah. I mean, if you're watching a hockey game and you have a, you know, they cycle through four lines or three sets of defensemen. Let's say you have a defenseman who's out there and his team allows two goals when he's on the ice. You can say, oh, that defenseman didn't have a very good second period. But it doesn't mean that the second period is only when the when he's on the ice. You can say, oh, that defenseman didn't have a very good second period. But that doesn't mean that the second period is only when the defenseman was on the ice. You're just using it as a shorthand to say that, oh, when that defenseman was playing, he was not good in the second period. But people understand the second period is 20 minutes.

So, yeah. As long as you're saying top half and bottom half, then we know we're going to the bottom of the inning. That right there, I think, well, you already, look, we're not doing this anymore. Now I'm. Yeah. You've got to chat. So we will let you get to that and end there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

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if you are a supporter. That will do it for today and this week. Thank you all for listening. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will talk to you early next week. Just keep walking Because it won't be Where you're tied Tonight

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