Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1458: The Overlooked League Leaders

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about “sinister right-handers” and scientific songs, then discuss the latest revelations about the Astros sign-stealing saga before reviewing the overlooked accomplishments of some of 2019’s league leaders and discussing the role of bold ink in the era of sabermetric saturation. Audio intro: Liam Gallagher, "Bold" Audio outro: Sloan, "Follow the Leader" […]

Yes, I know I've been wrong. I didn't do what I was told. Yes, I know you saw some. You didn't do what I was told. Good morning and welcome to episode 1458 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hi. Hey, Ben, I've been meaning to mention this. Have you ever heard the phrase sinister lefty? This does ring a bell. I mean, sinister means left-handed right does it or comes from the same root or something is that right i think it does wow uh okay well i read a i saw i don't know if you ever heard in a baseball context but there was a study uh that came out a

couple months ago that looked at baseball players who batted right but threw left. And so like Ricky Henderson is a sinister lefty, according to this. Anyway, I'm jumping ahead. This paper calls them sinister lefties. And I have never heard this phrase. And I looked in Nexus to see whether this is a baseball term and uh sorry this is a these are called sinister right handers sinister right handers because they bat left-handed but they throw right-handed uh and so i looked i could not find any reference to this whatsoever

and this journal article just like takes it for granted that this is a phrase. I reached out to the author of the paper and I got no response. But this was sinister right handedness provides Canadian born Major League Baseball players with an offensive advantage, a further test of the hockey influence on batting hypothesis. And I also look to see if this is a hockey term and I could not find any reference. So sinister right handed. I just wanted to run it by you and see if this is a hockey term and I could not find any reference. So sinister right handed it. I just wanted to run it by you and see if you knew it. I don't think I know it. No. All right.

Well, there you go. Recent research has shown that major league players that bat left handed and throw right handed, otherwise known, otherwise known as sinister right handers, just like otherwise known, are more likely to have a career batting average of 299 or higher compared to bat players with other combinations of batting and throwing handedness moreover possibly owing to early exposure to hockey canadian-born mlb players have increased propensity to be sinister right-handers however it is yet to be determined whether this provides a relative offensive performance advantage compared to players born in other countries so there you go sinister right hander will you ever use the term i might i don't know since it's evidently so

widespread i guess i guess if if left-handedness is is known as yeah now i've forgotten the word sinister sinister then maybe that's all it means all Yeah. If I Google it, I do see it. Like there are a few hits, like a very few sinister righty or sinister right hander and not all from very recent years, must just be a handful of people. For all I know, it's the authors of the study who are posting on Reddit or wherever and saying sinister righty. But there's like a Kenyon College 1982 letter here I'm looking at. It says, there's nothing odd nowadays about describing some left-handers as dexterous nor in identifying sinister right-handers so seems like every now and then someone said it but i don't think it rises to the level of otherwise known as the wikipedia page for bias against left-handed people has the latin adjective sinister meant left but took on meanings of evil or unlucky by the classical latin era and this double meaning

survives in european derivatives of latin and in the english word sinister alternatively sinister comes from the latin word sinus meaning pocket okay a traditional roman toga had only one pocket located on the left side so there you go left hand pocket so it's actually a bank shot it comes from pocket apparently i didn't know togas had any pockets. And me neither. In more technical contexts, sinistrol may be used in place of left-handed and sinistrality in place of left-handedness. All right, etymology corner. One other thing that I've been meaning to bring up,

this is not about baseball, but it is about data, I guess. Did you see this thing that came out a week ago? Researchers analyzed 80,000 different chord progressions from 700 songs to determine, with science, the perfect pop song. Did you see this? No. So this is data, which we like, that is used. Basically, this is like an ex-woba for pop music. And the perfect pop song, the greatest pop song in history, according to science, the greatest, Ben, do you know what the greatest pop song in history is, according to science?

I'm guessing I'm going to disagree with science, but what does science say? Obladi, Oblada! What? No. Yes. Oh, wow. Okay. I mean, it is catchy.

You can't get it out of your head. So in that sense. Yeah, this is according. You can't get it out of your head. So in that sense. Yeah, this is according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Oh, wow. All right. You got anything to talk about today? Well, there's the daily Astros update, I guess, just the latest developments in Stein-Sealing Gate. So over the weekend, some people uncovered clips from, I guess, just the latest developments in Stein Sealing Gate. So over the weekend, some people uncovered clips from, I believe, the 2017 Astros World Series DVDs that appeared to depict the setup. So if you look at the screen gabs, you can see someone sitting there in the tunnel and someone seems to be taking down a monitor that was hanging on the wall. And there's

the famous trash can is over there and then of course there's a some kind of towel like a gatorade towel that seems to be hanging in this little gap maybe between the dugout and the tunnel as if to perhaps obscure the proceedings wait what what's the towel doing it seems like maybe it's trying to hide the fact that there's a monitor there, potentially. It's hard to say. I mean, if I didn't know what we were all looking for, I would see this and think, okay, there's someone sitting there and there's a screen. There are a lot of screens. If you had asked me three weeks ago if it was weird for a screen to be in the tunnel. I wouldn't have said it was because,

you know, you might have players want to run in and look at a strike call or something after they strike out, see where the pitch was or, you know, any controversial call on a replay. I don't know that that would have raised my alarms. But now, of course, that we've heard about this whole scheme, it was sort of surreal almost to see it there. This is the scene of the crime or the alleged supposed crime. So that was one thing. And then, of course, there was a subsequent report, first by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellick, and then by Jeff Passan, that linked Kevin Goldstein, our former colleague from Baseball Prospectus, to I guess not quite exactly this sign stealing scandal, but Astro's sign stealing in general. So there was a 2017 email from Kevin to Astro's scouts that said one thing in specific we are looking for is picking up signs coming out of the dugout.

What we are looking for is how much we can see, how we would log things if we need cameras slash binoculars, etc. So go to game, see what you can or can't do, and report back your findings. And the source was anonymous in the Athletic Report, and then Passon revealed that it was Kevin Goldstein. Goldstein so August 2017 that was after the Astros had been stealing signs via the trash can method as best we could determine for a few months so this I guess it depends how you interpret it it could suggest knowledge by the Astros front office Kevin Goldstein of course has been with the Astros since what 2012 2013 he's been there for a while now. And this suggests that there was something unsavory going on. Astros front office people were interested in stealing signs. The propriety of this particular sign stealing, I don't know. The reports make it sound like something of a gray area. Clearly, given what we know about what else the Astros were doing, it is highly suggestive. But there seems to be some disagreement about

what scouts are and aren't allowed to do. These are signs from the dugout, not signs from the catcher. Of course, where a scout typically sits, the scout seats behind home plate. You wouldn't be able to see the catcher signs. And then the question is, how is this information used? Was it to analyze these teams' signs in advance, advanced scouting, going into the playoffs and producing advanced scouting reports based on that? Or was it also somehow related to real-time in-game sign stealing, which of course would be against the rules if you're using cameras. So it's a little hazy, the specifics of it, but obviously it does not look great. Just the fact that the Astros were willing to use cameras, eager to use cameras to steal signs. And based

on this reporting, some of the scouts at least say now that they were uncomfortable with this at the time that they didn't think it was right and i know scouts are allowed to have cameras for some things like if if you have cameras to just record players to watch later and produce your scouting report or whatever i think that's okay although there was an incident that Mark Carrigg reported where what, a race scout was jettisoned from Yankee Stadium for using a camera but then was allowed back in? I think it was sort of a misunderstanding of what the stadium policy about cameras is. So anyway, this is different from the sign-stealing that we've been talking about before. stealing that we've been talking about before but given that we've been wondering who knew what when about this whole thing and now this is a front office link at least someone high ranking in the front office was interested in cameras and picking up signs of some sort that just increases the

evidence that this went beyond the players and a coach. Yeah. So this is a passage from the athletic piece that I thought was really interesting. So a longtime scout outside of the Astros organization said that across the sport, asking advanced scouts to attempt to track signs is not uncommon. So that's a pretty important sentence. A general manager confirmed the same, So that's a pretty important sentence. A general manager confirmed the same, but the potential use of a camera stood out to both. That's BS, the scout outside the organization said.

When you start bringing in help, that's when it crosses the line and is unacceptable. Other guys would call them out. If you're sitting there with a camera trying to steal signs and somebody saw it, you get ratted out quickly, said another scout unaffiliated with the Astros. There's a gray area, but I think cameras are past the line. It's cheating, basically.

I don't know if it's cheating, cheating, but it's over the line. And I mean, it really is interesting because like I've something I've thought about a lot in my life is that if you're driving and a police officer sees you speeding, then like, I think most of society agrees that a police officer who sees you speeding can pull you over and give you a ticket. You broke the law. And, uh, or the same with, uh, maybe it's simpler with red lights. Okay. If a police officer sees you run a red light, then you get a ticket. And in some cases, in some intersections and in some zones, there are radar cameras as well, speeding cameras.

And if you if you speed through those zones, you also get caught. And it seems pretty obvious that as a society, we could make it impossible to speed like cameras are cheap. That's the whole point of like a lot of this technology is that it allows you to kind of create omniscience at a very low cost. And it would be impossible to speed. You could put these cameras or you could put these trackers on every mile of every road and they would there would be no margin for getting away with it because the cop would

always be there in the form of the camera or the tracker. always be there in the form of the camera or the tracker. And while public policy does like to have police officers to keep roads safe and make it so that it's hard to speed and that laws can be enforced, I don't think anybody wants it to be all cameras all the time where it becomes impossible to speed. And so then you can really get tied up trying to think, what is our collective philosophy here? We don't want you to be able to speed, but we kind of do want you to be able to speed a little, or we don't want it to be too easy to catch you.

It has to be hard enough to catch you that you're not going to get caught automatically. If you go two miles over a speed limit at any time, you're not going to get caught automatically. If you go two miles over a speed limit at any time, you're not going to be immediately flagged, even though we have the power to do that. And so somehow we want to have some enforcement, but we recognize that technology is so much more powerful than society, that technology can overwhelm our collective ability to manage ourselves. And we don't like that. We don't we don't like that. We want there to be some sort of like we like the gray area, basically. And in the same way, this the longtime scout

outside the organization said that across the sport, asking advanced scouts to attempt to track signs is not uncommon. It's not uncommon, in other words, for teams sport asking advanced scouts to attempt to track signs is not uncommon it's not uncommon in other words for teams to ask their scouts to try to steal the other team's signs presumably a third base coach signs or the dugout signs so we're talking bunts and pickoff throws and stolen bases and things like that it's not uncommon to ask scouts to try to steal those so we do, or the sport does not collectively think that it is wrong to try to steal the other team's signs. And if you bring a camera into it though, it becomes too powerful. Like it, anybody can crack the signs if they have video of it over the course of, you know, games and you can just sit down and, you you know with a notepad and figure it out right it would be very easy and so that it's too powerful but it's the same act it's the same

concept of stealing signs so that you can use the team's signs against them um and so i uh i i appreciate the scout who said it's cheating but i don't know if it's cheating cheating. What it is essentially is an intentional gray area, just like speeding. We have agreed to have an intentional gray area. We have agreed that it is illegal to speed, but we're not going to make it impossible. And you're not going to get caught every time. And you're not going to get caught most of the time. We have also agreed that stealing signs is okay, but it can't be automatic. You have to do the work and you have to be, like you have to not be able to do it most of the time, right?

Yeah. And it's a weird thing. It's really weird, yeah. Yeah, I can't really wrap my head around how wrong this specific act is. It's very difficult to understand. It's almost like it's okay if you're not that good at it, but if you're better at it, then it's no fun anymore. Then it's bad. It's like preserving some element of skill, I guess, in it. It's like,

all right, if you're good enough to pick this up with your naked eye, then you've earned it or something. But if you just have a camera trained on it, that's too easy. Anyone can do it. Then there's no skill involved, and it's wrong. So I don't know. I mean, it's consistent with the Astros' whole MO, which for the past several years has basically been finding things like that that maybe are not technically against the rules but they certainly go against baseball norms and the astros are just saying well to hell

with that like we're gonna do it and we'll get some sort of advantage and sometimes that's benign and it doesn't really hurt anyone or it doesn't go beyond what people consider the line. But it seems like more and more lately, it has gone beyond that and sometimes well beyond that. And so this specific thing, I don't know. I mean, obviously, I haven't spoken to Kevin about this. I don't know that I've spoken to Kevin at all since we had him on the podcast for episode 1000. So I don't know if he would have some defense for this but obviously it looks quite bad and the more astro's front office people are connected to this the more it would be pretty difficult not to say that the people in charge are directly responsible that luno's gotta go that there's no way that he could have been ignorant about this,

and then really to just throw the book at leadership more so than just players or coaches or managers, then kind of everything is on the table. So I don't know how this will change things in the future, whether all of these gray areas will just all decide, well, we can't have these gray areas anymore. We've got to make everything black and white somehow and actually codify this. So yes, you are allowed to do this or no, you are not allowed to do that or it's open season, anything goes or trying to sort of put the genie back in the bottle and say, you can't do any of this. I have no idea which way it's going to go, but it seems like we were going to be talking about this for a while and wrestling with all of these things as the investigation proceeds and as more things come to light. I mean, the fact that they

were discussing this so openly, seemingly, via email or internal Slack or whatever, this was clearly part of the culture, I i guess and maybe some scouts were uncomfortable with it it sounds like but you know people who felt like they knew kevin because they listened to his podcast or something and didn't want to think that he would do this i don't know once you get immersed in that environment and that astros culture where it's like let's look for any possible advantage we can find even if it's not really accepted by baseball as a whole. It must be difficult after several years in that environment not to start thinking and behaving that way. The gray area extends to the punishment, which we don't know what a punishment would be for these things.

We don't even know what is considered in play for these sorts of things. If there was a, if they codified all this and said, if you're caught using cameras to steal signs, the penalty is X. It's, you know, two draft picks, your next two first round draft picks, or you're, I don't know, I don't even know what else it would be. You lose a home game or something like that. Like you had clear discipline that that would follow each of these types of acts. I feel like then it would kind of be I would I think that would make it more fun. Then I think then we could let teams try to cheat and it would be part of the game. It would be part of the the risk reward and they would be making rational decisions about

what it is worth doing in order to suffer some penalty it's the the fact that we don't know what penalty we're even talking about right now that makes it just seem like the astros were we're just getting away with something and it makes it feel like there's no real accountability for it and so i think uh i think a lot of this would be will be easier to wrap our heads around once we see what sorts of things are going to happen to them and if it is clearer going forward what sorts of things are going to happen to teams that try this because there is going to be attempts to cheat uh in the future and uh like i don't know that it's weird how the discipline in some ways gives you um an anchoring effect of like how knowing how bad the crime is you just like how bad was

this crime really morally ethically well just look at the punishment that's how bad it was yeah true like i will have i i will admit i didn't when the chris correa stuff was coming out with the cardinals that also all felt weird and and and gray to me at the time and i think we had a conversation about it where i i wasn't sure how seriously to take it and whether it was actually bad guy behavior or whether it was just like kind of quasi bad guy behavior. I didn't really know. And then he went to jail and I went, ah, now I know. Thank you. Like, wow. To prison. Yeah. Right. When we were talking the other day about Mike Fiers and why he was saying this publicly now, and he had to be clear, I think, told his own teammates, right. Prior to this public report, his teammates on

the Tigers and the A's. But there was a statement that Danny Farquhar made about that incident in 2017 where they were banging on the trash cans and he kept stepping off. And he said he was, quote, so mad that the media didn't come to me after, which is so interesting that he was mad that no one asked him about this so that he could tell them about it, but he wasn't going to be the one to volunteer it. And you can understand why media members didn't pick up on this, I guess. I mean, now that we watch the video, it's like, gosh, how did no one notice this? It seems so obvious.

But if you're in the press box or something or you're not listening to it, it's just not really something that you key in on, probably. And so Varkar was just hoping that someone would come to him and, I guess, ask why he was stepping off or, hey, what's that banging? Just so he could say something about it. But he wasn't free to break the code and say something to the press unless they already knew and he was just kind of confirming it for them it's interesting yeah yeah all right okay well until next time that's today's astros update all right anything else nope okay well ben i wanted to talk about Bold Inc. Okay. From 2019. I wanted to make this a Bold Inc. episode.

I love Bold Inc. I think that Bold Inc., of course, is what appears on your baseball card or your player page if you lead the league in a category. And I think that along with maybe MVP finishes, Bold Inc. is the best quick look guide to how good a player was in his era the the underlying you know the how good 40 home runs is is just so it changes so much from era to era and so to be able to look at a player's page and see either they led their league in a lot of stuff or they didn't i find just to be like such a great guide for what their best seasons were, what the player's peak was, when a great player was really like the greatest version of himself, and just how good he is. And so I love bold ink. I'm a big fan of bold ink. But I also find that the way that I consume baseball these days, I hardly even know who leads the league in anything

at the end of the year. like they don't put out like uh like there's not there's a mlb programming to announce the mvps and we we all like gather around and and see who won the mvp there's not an equivalent for who led the league in triples that that's just that the season ends and someone was at the front of that race and so i will admit i didn't know a lot of who led the league in what this year. And so I went and I looked at all the bold ink this year. And some of the things surprised me. And some of them didn't surprise me, but I wanted to commemorate these players

and also talk about some of the players who led the league in some of the things. So I don't know how versed. Do you know who won the batting title in the National League this year? Okay. time i bet i could think of it but uh off the top of my head no all right well it was christian yellich christian yellich won the batting title all right he also won the obp title and he also won the uh slugging percentage title he won the slash triple crown okay oh so he must have won let's see looks like he won fractions of a point huh Quetel Marte. He must have. I don't know. I don't look at gray ink.

I'm not as big of a gray ink fan. Gray ink being finished in the top 10, which I believe is a baseball reference invention, or maybe is a Bill James invention. So interesting. So he won the batting title by a fraction over Quetel Marte. In an earlier part of our lives, that would have been a pretty big deal. We would have heard about that. But would have been a pretty big deal. Yep. We would have heard about that, but now not that big a deal.

Yeah. Well, that's because of batting average, right? And its status on the statistical landscape. I mean, I know that Christian Jelic was the best hitter in the National League. I knew that, but I just didn't know the batting title thing because batting average has sort of receded from the front of our minds. Okay. Of the baseball card stats, how many people do you think you do know like of runs hits doubles triples homers steals batting average and we'll just end it there how many do you know very few i think i i know homers yeah i think i think that's about all i know i know homers too and I I don't even

know if I would have known AL homers if I weren't watching for Mike Trout yes right and seeing Solaire pass him seeing Solaire pass him on this few days yeah yeah the second to last day of the year and then he had two more home runs and so it didn't even end up close but yes that while we're on the topic Trout unfortunately Trout led the league in on base percentage and slugging percentage, and I think intentional walks, but this was the second year in a row that he did not lead the league in anything new. We had been watching for a while as he slowly conquered each category. Looked like he was going to get dingers, and he had a very good shot at hit by pitches too, which would have been a first for him, I think, also. Oh, interesting. Yeah, that would have been a first for him i think also oh interesting yeah that would have been a first for him but since he didn't play september uh he unfortunately did not

get to so the mike trout bolding uh project uh stays uh stays steady it's gonna get harder and harder probably yeah all right let's see so hits hits is whit merrif. Whit Merrifield led the American League in hits. Wow. So Whit Merrifield, of course, was a Royal, and the Royals lost 103 games, and they were not expected to win, like, really any more than they did. They pretty much went into the season projected to lose 100 games. They did lose 100 games. They were playing for, you know,

as little as a as a ball club could collectively play for and yet whit merrifield led the league in games played so he in this season where nothing mattered he still played every day he led the majors in or led the league in at bats he led the league in hits he led the league in singles he led the league in triples he led the league in outs made and he led the league in caught stealing and so he even was going out of his way to slide hard into second base with you know caught stealings so he did try really hard despite it and i feel like that's worth noting yeah the royals didn't even lead the league or the majors in stolen bases after all that spring hype that I was giving their new stolen base machine. The Rangers led the league in stolen bases.

Yeah, come from behind. The Royals finished second. Yeah. But what they did lead the league in is, so I said Whit Merrifield led the league in triples. He actually tied. He had 10 triples. He tied with... Is that a question?

I don't know. Oh, well, he tied with Adalberto Mondesi, his teammate. And he also tied with Hunter Dozier, his other teammate. That's a lot of triples. Yeah, that's three Royals tied for the league, tied for the major league lead, in fact, with 10 triples apiece. Now, Mondesi is very fast. And Merrifield is also fast and

batted more than anybody else in baseball and made more outs than anybody else in baseball but hunter dozer is not even fast he only stole two bases yeah and the royals didn't lead the league in triples no come on they did they must have no they they they and the Diamondbacks had 40 and the Rockies and Tigers had 41. Oh my goodness. Better ballparks for triples maybe? I don't know. Kaufman's got giant outfields. Wow.

Yeah, Kaufman always has a lot of triples. This is off topic, but I just noticed the other day while I was writing something that the Tigers RBI leader had 59 RBIs in this year. Their home run leader had 15 home runs. Their runs leader had 61 runs in this year. Yeah, 15 homers to lead a team in 2019. Oh, man. That's bad. Yeah, Brandon Dixon hit 15 homers for them.

Oh, boy. Yeah. I guess how many 15 homers for them. Oh, boy. Yeah. I guess how many did Castellanos have before he was traded? He had 11. Uh-huh. Okay. Which is kind of crazy, too. I mean, that's almost four months.

Yeah. All right. Young St. Nick delivering. Yeah. Until the Cubs got him, and then it was Christmas in July. All right. The Royals, by the way, we've already established that they led the league in single. Sorry, that they had the league leader in singles, Whit Merrifield.

They had the league leader in homers, Jorge Soler. They had the league leader in triples with those three. They also had the league leader in hit by pitches, as it turns out. And it was Alex Gordon. Again, going back to Whit Merrifield trying surprisingly hard in a season that nothing really mattered. Alex Gordon set a career high in hit by pitches, which is, I don't know. I mean, if you do it in a season that your team is an independent race, then it seems worth it. If you do it in a season that your team loses 103 games, you might wonder why you tried so hard.

it seems worth it. If you do it in a season that your team loses 103 games, you might wonder why you tried so hard. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of these league leaders in a lot of these categories, this is probably something we've talked about before, but well, A, one thing I know we've talked about is the lack of exciting record chases and records being set, which is one reason to pay attention to these races and to know who's actually leading the league is if they're doing something that hasn't been done before. So if that's not happening so much in this era, then that's one reason why we're not looking at league leaders every day.

Another though, I really think that just having all-in-one stats has just made me a lot less likely to look at the component stats. I mean, you need the components to paint a complete picture of a player, obviously. But if I'm just trying to get a snapshot glimpse of, is this guy good? What kind of season is he having?

First, I'm going to look at something like WRC Plus, and then I'm probably going to look at War. And am I going to look at the hits column after that? Probably not. So it's just i think that we have those sort of all right sum it up for me in one or two columns they're there now whereas in the past you didn't have that and so you would have to sort of build your own mental war basically like in an imprecise way probably but you'd have, okay, this guy had this many hits and this many

of them were extra base hits and he played this position and he stole some bases and here's what I think about his defense. And you would come up with some understanding of what he was worth. And now we just have that number. And once we have that number, I don't think we look at the other numbers so much. And if we do look at the other numbers, we're not looking at results either. We're not looking at hits. We're looking at how hard did he hit the ball and at what angle and how good should he have been based on the quality of his contact. And we'll look at like strikeouts and walks and rates, I guess. Rates are probably a lot bigger than raw totals used to be, which I don't know, maybe that's just because we have a better understanding of context and how that can affect stats. And so you want to see what someone's doing on a per plate appearance basis. But

basically everything is conspiring against knowing who led the league, at least in these traditional categories. But I might now know who led the league in wrc plus or war or something instead yeah i think i know um i think i know as many league leaders as i've ever known it they're just in a lot of categories that are not on the first page of a baseball reference page right yeah i yeah i mean i know a lot of things about players if i'd ask you if i'd ask you who led the league in war i yeah i mean i know a lot of things about players i if i'd ask you if i'd ask you who led the league in war i would i trust that you would have gotten that well actually you would have said well which which war and then i you would probably could have told you either way you might have told me yeah you might have known you might have known

three for each and you might have known the pitcher and batter breakdown as well do you know who led the league in win probability added among pitchers though oh among pitchers i know i know yell at everyone in in wpa but i don't know pitchers it's uh will smith okay which uh it's odd because i always think oh yeah win probability added that sure that totally favors relievers but if you look at the leaders they're mostly starters and then here's will smith up there at everybody well no wonder he's off the market already. But not closing. Yeah, right. In Atlanta. Which is probably a little tougher to lead the league in WPA if you're not closing,

just because the leverage tends to be a little bit lower if you're not the last guy out. Yeah. All right. Let's see here. You mentioned it being harder to break records. At the beginning of the year, I wrote an, I wrote an article, uh, trying to handicap, uh, how likely it was that each of the,

the 20 most high profile records could be broken in, in this season, single season records. And, um, and all of them seemed like real long shots and none of them came close. The closest one was what I considered the fifth easiest record to break single season record to break,

which was 67 doubles. And, uh, of course, Nick Castellellanos had 59 which is a very credible challenge although uh so many of them came late that it didn't really feel like he was chasing 67 in any meaningful way but he did not get bold inc for that because of course he switched leagues so i don't know if you knew this but did you know that while nick castellanos was loudly doubling 50, sorry, 58 times, he had 58, that Raphael Devers had 54? No, I don't think I knew that. Raphael Devers had 54 doubles, Ben. He led the league in doubles with 54.

He also led the league in total bases. Raphael Devers led the league in total bases. Of course, Fenway, good doubles park yeah it's a doubles leaders in fenway but yeah great season yeah great season so holding for him let's see do you know who led the league the american league in rbis uh i mean no so i could guess some good It was Jose Abreu. Right? Wow, RBI man. Wow. I know. Jose Abreu.

In a walk year. He had to be clutch, right? Because it wasn't like that was a great lineup or something. He must have cashed in a pretty high percentage of his opportunities. He must have. But I will tell you something else that's sort of odd. This is going to be a little bit of a roundabout thing. We'll get back to Abreu. But in the National League, the league leader in runs was Ronald Acuna. And Acuna, of course, batted leadoff in a high-scoring lineup with good hitters behind him and also had a lot of speed and also had a lot of power, drove himself in and also had a good on base percentage. So I thought, oh, I wonder if he also like led the league in run scored percentage, which is a stat that I like to look at on the base running pages of Baseball Reference,

which shows what percentage of times you get on base, you come around to score. And Acuna scored 39% of time the time he got on base, which is fine. The league average is 32. And so he's above that, but it's not like elite or anything like that. It's just pretty good. The NL leader was Trey Turner at 42%, but the major league leader at 47%, which is a lot, like that's five percentage points higher than the NL leader. And it's Larry Garcia at 47%. And Garcia, not super fast. I looked at his base running rates. He took the extra base.

So extra base taken percentage is also a stat I like to look at on Baseball References base running page, which basically says if you go from first to third on a single, you took the extra base. If you score from second on a single, you took the extra base. And if you score from first on a double, you took the extra base. So Garcia was 52%, which is good. Again, that's pretty good. But like Javi Baez was the league leader in that at 72%. So he was at 72%, Garcia only at 52%. So it's not like he was world beating there. Baez actually made fewer outs on the bases. So it's not like Garcia was a extremely efficient base runner. He didn't steal a ton of bases and he didn't have a good lineup behind him. And yet

combination of this, I guess, Abreu's clutchness and maybe some good situational things happening. He led the league in run score percentage and Jose A happening he led the league in in run scored percentage and jose abreu led the league in rbis and yet despite that like it's again this is like 15 years ago a player leading the league in rbis in his walk year would be a pretty big deal and in in 2019 you took the under right on his free agency yes and and then he accepted the qualifying offer yeah so uh anyway the game has changed yes yeah so a breu baseball prospectus has a stat called others batted in percentage it's just the percentage of base runners on the bases when you come to the plate that you drive in and he was 17th in baseball 19.4 percent so it was good but it wasn't like some otherworldly season so i don't know must

have been some combination of uh i mean i guess guys got on base ahead of him so i guess the top of that white socks lineup was doing all right tim anderson won a batting title oh yeah that's true yeah and mungo although he never got on base any other way but he did win a batting title yeah didn't he often bat lower in the lineup am i i feel like i remember tim anderson hitting sixth a bunch yeah i don't know that might be i might be off by a year like he's an on base guy but that's true too all right let's see times on base leader was freddie freeman that sort of surprised me not because yeah freddie freeman's not good at getting on base but because it wouldn't have been the

first person i guess uh walk leader in the national league do you know who led the league in walks in the national league hitter walks hitter hitter walks yeah no i i don't tim anderson by the way batted second most commonly but uh his second most common spot in the lineup was seventh so i was kind of right uh reese hoskins reese hoskins led the league in walks which is you know that that is how reese hoskins is he is a player who draws a lot of walks he also had a season that i think was widely considered quite disappointing, both like at a national level and at a Philly-specific level. He didn't have a very good season.

It was a little bit of a step back from 2018, which was a step back from his rookie season, but drew a ton of walks. He also struck out a lot, which reminds me of this. The leader in strikeouts in the American League was Rugned Odor, who struck out 178 times times which seems really low for a leader right yeah in this day and age and it is so uh it is tied for the lowest by a league leader since 2010 and if you look at al strikeout leaders over the past seven years, they averaged 210. I know that people strike out 210 times, but I didn't realize they did it on average once a year.

But Odor led the league with 32 fewer strikeouts than that, which seems interesting to me. I don't know if it's significant, but those are the things you find when you dig into the bold ink. Yeah, I like bold ink. I mean, it's not a great way to evaluate players, really. If you're inner circle great, then you're going to lead the league in some desirable categories at some point along the way. But of course, you can be a great player and never lead the league in anything or almost never someone like uh well taking a name from the news carl speltron right carl speltron has almost no bold ink he once led the major leagues with 162 games played and that is his only bold ink on his whole baseball reference page but But of course, he was a Hall of Fame level player. So if you can look at great players and they never led the league in anything, you can look at great players.

You know, you look at Barry Bonds' page or something. And when you're at that level, it's bold ink everywhere. And then there are players who have bold ink, but it's not in anything good. who have bolding, but it's not in anything good. Or it sort of tells the story of their career, but the story is not, this guy is great because he led the league. It was, well, he led the league and grabbed it into double plays

or hit by pitches or sack bunts or something. So it sort of tells you what type of player he was, but not necessarily that he was a great player. Yeah, I once wrote about the best player to never lead the league in anything. And I think I only included positive stats or playing time stats, but no double plays. And it was Barry Larkin, who never led the league in anything, came very close a few times, but never led the league in anything. I've got more, by the way. Okay. Yeah. I didn't know if you were wrapping me up, playing me off all right

let's see here no no no no did that do you know who led the national league in intentional walks as a hitter nope all right it's cody bellinger that's not that interesting okay but second michael franco 19 of course he was batting eighth he was batting eighth and that's why he did and every once in a while not often but every once in a while, not often, but every once in a while, you will actually have somebody who leads the league in intentional walks strictly by batting eighth. It's very rare, but it does occasionally happen. But Franco, the thing about Franco is that he wasn't a good hitter

for a number eight hitter either. Like he hit 234,7 409 and the 297 was like seriously propped up by 19 intentional walks he only threw 17 unintentional walks and honestly like probably some of those unintentional walks were also because he was batting eighth i'm just gonna real quick see what NL batters hit overall. Overall, they hit 234 like he did batting eighth. And that includes some pitchers because some pitchers occasionally bat eighth. They did slug 379. So he had like 30 points of slugging on the average number eight hitter. But his on-base percentage was considerably worse than the average number eight hitter. And his OPS was not better than the average number eight hitter. And yet for some

reason, everybody saw Mike Alfranco and said that he looked like he could hit. So they walked him a lot. I wonder if a lot of those intentional walks came early in the year because he was coming off a good 2018 season. Not like a great one, but a pretty great one for someone who's batting eighth. And then because the Phillies got Real Mudo and they got Harper and they got Segura and they got McCutcheon and suddenly that lineup looked like it was very deep. Franco was batting Lita on opening day. So maybe it was like, oh boy, this is 2018 Michael Franco.

Yeah, he was batting eighth on opening day. That's right. And you know, it checks out, Ben, because I'm looking at this game one, intentional walk, game two, intentional walk, game three, no intentional walk, game four, three intentional walk. Oh boy. Game five, no intentional walk. Game two, intentional walk. Game three, no intentional walk. Game four, three intentional walks. Oh boy. Game five, no intentional walk. Game six, intentional walk. So within the first week of the season,

I mean, I had barely left the cabin and he already had six intentional walks. And at that point, he had, at that point, again, this was six games, but at that point he had a 1537 OPS. He hit three homers in the first four games as well and uh so he was mashing the ball and so that makes actually that makes a lot then eventually they figured out we don't have to worry about this guy no he had uh two on june 2nd and then let's see from july 2nd through the end of the year well i guess he had two on september 27th

so they did keep coming a little bit. But yeah, you're right. A lot of that was that. All right. I'm going to switch to pitching now. Do you know who led the league in complete games? It's a tie. You got three names.

How can you miss? Is it a tie with like one or two or something? It was a tie with two. Yeah. Well, I'm going to guess that, gosh, I mean, maybe did, well, Verlander must have done it, right? I'm only in the, sorry, I'm in the National League. Oh, okay. The American League, strangely, yeah.

So Shane Bieber and Luke Giolito both had three in the American League. Yeah, so Shane Bieber and Luke Giolito both had three in the American League. And then Verlander had two. And Yvonne Nova had two. But it wasn't one of Yvonne Nova's like a five-inning rainout game. I think we talked about that. I think we did a stat blast about that. So, sorry, this is only the National League.

Three NL pitchers with two complete games. Okay. Well, I don't know. I don't know why I'm making you do this. I guess like the good pitchers's not so it's walker bueller had to and then uh sandy alcontra and uh zach efflin huh well i definitely would not have guessed those last two at least let's see innings steven strasburg led the national league with 209 innings and um justin verlander in the American League had 223. And I bring this up because I want to go back to the records

that might get broken someday. One of the records that I argued could be broken was 383 strikeouts. And that seems pretty hard to do because pitchers don't throw enough innings, but strikeout rates, of course, go up, and innings go down, and they go down uh they're going in opposite directions but they don't always move in perfect tandem and if the strikeout rate goes up enough then it might get there and so of course garrett cole this year struck out 324 batters 326 batters and he skipped a start in august he only threw 212 innings and so

uh if he'd thrown as many as justin verlin also he was it's hard to know how much to this is uh why he was able to strike out so many batters but he almost never threw more than like 105 pitches in a game he was uh the astros were way ahead and they were protecting him and treating him quite cautiously and so he would usually throw i, in fact, I think if I'm remembering this right, I think every start he made was between 90 and 109 pitches. And so you could imagine him maybe throwing, I mean, certainly one more start, you could imagine nine more innings, but at 223 innings, it is awfully hard to get to 384 strikeouts. So I don't know. Do you feel like seeing Garrett Cole strike out 326 batters reinforces the impossibility

of getting 384? Or is it a positive development and we might get there? Yeah, I think probably he just looks so dominant that if he couldn't do it and couldn't even really come that close, I just don't know if anyone can now give it 10 more years and the strikeout rate keeps increasing the way it has. Well, maybe. I could see at a certain point, probably, like if you just left everything alone, I think maybe you would get the strikeout rate increase outpacing the decrease in innings for the league leaders because, yes, pitcher innings counts and pitch counts are still decreasing, but there is a point at which you're probably just hurting yourself if you're limiting Garrett Cole, a pitcher like that, and you're saying you can't throw many innings for us. you're saying you can't throw many innings for us, you know, you want Garrett Cole to throw as many innings for you as he safely can. So I think maybe we won't go that far below where we

are right now for the best pitchers in the game, the best pitchers who are the ones who would be most likely to make a run at the strikeout rate record. So if you held the innings ceiling at, let's say, 210 or something like that, or even 200, and you just kept letting the strikeout rate increase unchecked, then eventually you'd get to the point where it'd be plausible. But I would hope and think that probably there will be rules changes and something done to corral that rising strikeout rate before we get to that point cole also led the league in era and he also led the league in fip and that's only the third time this decade that a person has led his league in both of those so 20 20 times that it could have happened and 17 other times the era leader and the fip leader were different which i mean obviously we know that that doesn't always they don't't always align, but I would have guessed more than that, especially because a lot of times it seems like the ERA leader and presumably also the FIP leader, the ERA leader wins by like, like six tenths of a run. Like it's not even always that close. Like, uh,

you know, you got Clayton Kershaw with an ERA in the ones when nobody else is all that close. You would have thought, but it's only the third time. And neither one is park-adjusted unless you use the park-adjusted versions. So if someone were in a good pitcher's park, that would help their FIP too. So, huh. Yeah. Most earned runs allowed in the National League, Noah Syndergaard. I like earned runs, Bouldink,

because it is very often a pitcher who is actually good. They say that with losses. They say in order to lose 17 games, you have to be pretty good because they keep throwing you out there. But that's different. With earned runs, you actually have to be good because you have to throw enough innings. Not just make the starts, but you have to throw enough innings.

And so usually the earned runs is led by somebody with an era of like 4.2 which is what noah sindergaard had i'm going to some of the now less baseball reference and more um i don't know what other sites sites uh stats roberto perez uh led the american league in framing runs at baseball prospectus but he also led the american league in prospectus, but he also led the American League in caught stealing percentage. And he also led the league in, well, caught stealing percentage. I shouldn't have even said caught stealing percentage because I'm sticking with baseball prospectus here. He led the league in framing runs. He led the league in blocking runs and he led the league in throwing runs. We know that he was a very good defensive catcher. I think there was a lot of talk about how he didn't have a single pass ball all year. He also led the league in throwing runs. We know that he was a very good defensive catcher. I think there

was a lot of talk about how he didn't have a single pass ball all year. He also led the league in caught stealing percentage. He also was a good framer, but he was the best in the league in all three of those, which I don't think that happens very often, especially because it can be hard to do framing as well as the other two. Like one of the reasons that Yvonne Rodriguez was said to have been so good at throwing runners out is because he came out of his crouch to throw runners out and people thought that actually made him a worse framer yeah and people will sometimes say the same about blocking and framing yeah exactly if you're concentrating so much on getting a call

then you're not going to be as quick at blocking a ball i don't know whether that's true, or I think I've seen some studies on whether there's a correlation there, and I forget what they found. But yes, to be the best at all of those things, that's really impressive. Those are totally different skill sets, really. Yeah, and he also was a league average hitter and hit 30 home runs or something like that, 24 home runs, and drew a lot of walks and didn't get a single MVP vote, which I think is a shame. I think that's a travesty. Not a single one. He was 11th in the American League in Warp and 30 guys get MVP votes

and he didn't get any. Yeah, that's too bad. I think I had him at the top of my fielding Bible ballot for catchers, and he did win a gold glove at least. But yeah, the overall contribution. And he played a decent amount for a catcher. He played 119 games, 449 played appearances. I guess that's a little on the low side for a catcher who gets top-level MVP considerationp consideration but a vote certainly there were far worse players who got votes yeah no al catcher got a vote and no catchers did though all right the league leader in hard hit percentage is miguel sano okay i was a little surprised yeah i'm always surprised if it's not like aaron judge or something but. He did have the highest average exit VLO. Aaron Judge did. Yeah. And the fastest sprint speed, you want to guess? Well, I guess it probably wasn't Buxton this year.

It was not? Then I don't know. It was Tim Lacastro. Would not have guessed that. No. We need to talk about Tim Lacastro for a minute because I was, you know, like I'm aware of him as a fast player and I'm not that much aware of him otherwise. But Tim Lacastro's sprint speed this year was better than any sprint speed

that Billy Hamilton has ever had. Although sprint speed started in 2015 after Hamilton had already been in the majors for a couple years, I think two years. And it is, I believe, the second highest a couple years, I think two years. And it is the, I believe the second highest sprint speed on record in those five years. Uh, it was 30.8, I think feet per second. And Buxton one year was 30.9, or maybe it was 30.7 and 30.8, but, uh, he was one 10th of a foot behind one year of Buxton. He never got caught stealing. He led the league in stolen base percentage. Obviously he has never been caught stealing he uh led the league in stolen base percentage obviously he

has never been caught stealing in his career he's 22 for 22 and he also in 250 plate appearances been 250 that is the minimum plate appearances that i will allow in most queries 250 minimum okay yeah 22 hit by pitches this year. Oh boy. Wow. Right. Yeah. Pro rate that for a year and you're talking 50 or 55. Huh? Wow.

Yeah. And he's fast. So Tim LeCastro, put him in your, put him in your memory. I will. Yeah. It's a run hunt territory. It is. Yeah.

And then lastly, Victor Robles led the league in outs above average stat casts outs above average and victor robles had a very sloppy first few weeks of the year in the field made some made some bad plays looked a little bit jumbled out there and then but then turned out to be just just a fantastic defensive center fielder i believe he led the league in defensive runs saved as a center fielder and he led the league in defensive runs saved as a center fielder, and he led the league in outs above average as an outfielder, period. And he did not win a Gold Glove Award, which I was surprised by because the Gold Glove Awards these days are pretty much determined

through some rigorous methods and do a pretty good job. Did you have Victor Robles atop your fielding Bible awards? I don't remember, but not in my mental ranking right now. All right. Well, he led the league in things. What's your hierarchy when it comes to looking at defensive stats these days? Where do you go first? I think I i usually look at if it's an i guess i i tend to go to baseball reference first for everything because it's where i'm most comfortable querying and so unless i have a like for you know pitcher war i know that there are ways that can be misleading and so i will often not stop at pitcher war but otherwise unless i have a real reason to be suspicious, I tend to look at baseball reference first for everything, just because

that's where I already am. That's where my, that's where my play index is. I've got the spreadsheets and all that stuff. So usually I start with that. Although I do like outs above average for outfielders. Yeah, it's complicated. I think fan graphs is probably my default, not trying to be a company man here, but I think just the ease of sorting of everything and leaderboards and situational leaderboards,

there are certain things that you can do with the play index that you can't do at Fangraphs, but there are many things that you can do at Fangraphs that you can't do at Baseball Arphans. They're both indispensable, and I'm on them both constantly but i think i probably look at fangraphs more and if only because fangraphs has what baseball reference has for defense but also other stuff too so it's an easier place if you're gonna just go to one but it's hard because you know when i vote for the fielding bible stuff at the end of the year, they give you defensive runs saved, but they also give you multiple flavors of defensive runs saved. So like the standard one that you can find at Fangraphs or Baseball Reference. And then there's also like the StatCast enhanced version of defensive runs saved, which was recently revised to do a better job, I think, of accounting for positioning.

revised to do a better job, I think, of accounting for positioning. And then you have to consider, well, do I want to give players credit for good positioning or do you only give them credit for where they start on a play? And you assume that they're just following the scouting report that someone else gave them. And then, yeah, you've got stat cast stats for outfielders and you've got ultimate zone rating and you've got bp stats and it's just it's a lot there are a lot of options out there so i kind of just look at all of them and weigh some of them a little more heavily than others but uh i try to take it all in before i make a decision i've been just noticing that sandy alcantara also led the league in losses and was actually he was pretty good he had a 10 109 ERA plus. He was

better than Madison Bumgarner, for instance. And I thought, wow, he must rank, he must, I wonder where he ranks. He's higher than Zach Wheeler in ERA plus. I wonder where he ranks among qualified pitchers. And so I looked and so few pitchers qualify anymore. Yeah. Like I, this has been something that we've been talking about and i've been writing about but it has really continued to go down so fast that this year noah cindergard was in fact the worst qualified pitcher he had an era plus of 95 that's the worst to qualify you have to be basically in at least about an average pitcher with pedigree. He ranked 34th out of 34, so one per team, more or less. And yeah, so that's that. So how many qualified pitchers were there this year? 34. Oh, okay. 34. Qualified for anyone who doesn't know what we mean,

just qualified for the ERA title, which is just an inning per team game. And then I guess that has dropped off dramatically in recent years. The hitter number of qualifiers hasn't really. It has a little though. A little. Yeah. I keep wondering whether it's going to just because maybe we get some NBA style load management where you're giving guys more rest days and then fewer people get to that 3.1 plate appearances per team game threshold. So how much is that down, if at all? I think we've talked about this before, but I haven't looked this year.

I can look in a minute. By the way, I queried wrong. I was only looking at National Leaguers. So in fact, there were 61 in the majors, which is neither low enough to shock me, nor is it even a drop. It's slightly up from the last two years. Okay, but going back several years, it was higher still. All right, so we want to see qualified hitters per year.

Is that what we want? Okay, so in 2019, there were 130, sorry, there were 135, which is the lowest this century, down from 165 at the start of the century in the first year that's been under 140 this century. So it's down a little. Okay. Yeah. And I guess that probably is just rest, right? Just giving players days off and hoping that it will help them.

Or it could be other things. It could be like, I don't know, more time-sharing arrangements. Yeah, I would think for that it would probably be more time-sharing arrangements because when you get down to 502 played appearances, you're probably not talking about rest so much. You're probably talking more about a role. But if you look at 150 games, players playing in 150 games, those are also down.

And those, to me, feel like rest. So there were 55 this year. Three years ago, there were 83. Now, 83 was unnaturally high. But 55 is also the lowest this century, down from 75 in 2000. And it's been going down somewhat steadily since. All right. So now we know the league leaders.

Yes, we do. Do with that information what you will. One more Astros update before we roll out of here. After we finished recording, the Houston Chronicle reported that the MLB video monitors who began working in MLB parks after the newer, stricter rules were put in place in the 2018 postseason, in the 2019 season, the Chronicle says, Major League Baseball instructed video monitors working in Minute Maid Park to listen for banging sounds emanating from the Astros' dugout, according to a person with knowledge of the directive. And also, according to this report, video monitors in other parks were not specifically instructed to listen for banging sounds, which suggests that MLB may have had some knowledge of this specific scheme that the Astros were using in 2017. And if that's the case, of course, you have to wonder why this investigation did not get launched until now. Is it that they didn't think they could prove it until Mike Fiers came out and provided his testimony? Is it that they just didn't think it was worth dredging this up and making it a public story when it wasn't one already. And only after it became a public story was MLB willing to act. I don't know.

Now, in his 2017 ruling, when he fined the Red Sox for electronically stealing signs, Rob Manford said all 30 clubs have been notified that future violations of this type will be subject to more serious sanctions. So the question will become, can they prove that the Astros were doing this after he issued that ruling, whether in the 2017 postseason or in the 2018 and 19 seasons, because then they would have been warned before they kept doing it. According to that 2019 policy via the Chronicle, clubs that broke the rules put in place in 2019 were subject to progressive discipline. The policy also said that violation of these regulations with the knowledge of any front office or on-field personnel will result in the loss of

player selection rights under Major League Rule 4 or loss of benefits under the international amateur talent system. So essentially taking away draft picks or taking away international bonus pool money, which is the most likely punishment. But if the Astros' offenses were particularly egregious, maybe they will go beyond that, especially if they can pin it on specific players or coaches or managers or front office executives. On our next episode, I think we will delve into the history of sign stealing. We will have an expert guest, and we'll get into those distinctions between legal and illegal sign stealing and talk about what it means that illegal sign stealing or at least frowned upon sign stealing has been going on for well more than a century now.

Can we ever get rid of it? And how hard do we have to try? That will do it for today. Thank you for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount

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You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastfanagraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You still have about a week to sign up for the Effectively Wild Secret Santa, so check out the link on the show page or in the Facebook group. You can go and sign up there to take part. We will be back with another episode

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