Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1594: Speed Trap

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about whether we need middle names and what it was like not to know what players were worth before WAR and its statistical predecessors existed, then do Stat Blasts about pickoff attempts in a fan-free season, why home-field advantage has persisted without fans in the stands, and the Phillies’ […]

🎵 I don't know what I can do I don't know what I can do Hello and welcome to episode 1594 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. How many baseball players' middle names do you know? of ESPN. Hello, Sam. How many baseball players' middle names do you know? Very few, I think. There's the ones that tend to be said all at once for whatever reason, like Michael Jack Schmidt, and one that you just brought up off air to see if I knew it, which I do, Derek Jeter's middle name, which I think I know as Sanderson just because that would come up on Yankees broadcasts all the time for some reason. But off the top of my head, I really don't think I could name many. I'd have to sit and think

about it for a while, but probably like a dozen, less than a dozen. I gave myself 10 minutes to try to name as many as I could. And excluding people who, I'm not counting it if you go by your middle name. If you go by your middle name, I need to know your first and your your middle name George Herman Ruth George Herman Ruth classic classic example I knew his and I'm not counting it if you go by if you go by both names for some I don't know like if it's like your initials or something I'm I could count that but I don't think it came up anyway I came up with a dozen exactly a dozen as you said I knew 12 and you know I don't think it came up. Anyway, I came up with a dozen, exactly a dozen. As you said, I knew 12. And, you know, I didn't know. I mean, obviously, there's a lot more than 12 players have played.

Huge superstars, people whose biographies I've read. I didn't know their names. You know, Chris Youngs, the Chris Youngs and the Adam Eatons and the various major leaguers who we have actually had multiple players of the exact same name you still never bother to learn their their middle names we talked the other day about the uh the grammar or i guess maybe the the parts of speech that first and last names are whether the first name is the noun and the last name is the adjective or or vice versa and the middle name doesn't really do anything and i i'm just bringing this up as a baseball thing, because I've spent, you know, my life, like, especially most of my childhood, just memorizing, you know, tiny details about these, these players, I knew, you know, everything about them, you know, like, I know, Derek Jeter's uniform number, I know the exact pick he was in a

draft, I know, you know, the city that he grew up in. I know, you know, his height. I know the year he debuted. I know the year he he retired. I know his his multiple nicknames, not to mention like everything that he ever led the league in and his MVP voting and stuff like that and never, never needed to learn his middle name, which I think if if we don't, if baseball fans can't be bothered to learn the middle names of baseball players, then to me that really says there's no point to middle names. If there was anybody who would care about a middle name as like a naming convention, it would be baseball fans for baseball players.

And the fact that we completely ignore... I mean, I went after I named my dozen. Here are my dozen, by the way. Buster Posey, Ken Griffey, Willie Akins, Jackie Robinson, Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, Will Clark, Russell Martin, which, by the way, I checked and I did know his middle name, but he has two middle names. I didn't know the other one, so I probably shouldn't even count that. Mike Trout, Giancarlo Stanton, Bryce Harper, which I only know because according to lore,

John Carlos Stanton, Bryce Harper, which I only know because according to lore, his name, Bryce Aaron Max, is why he got the nickname Bam Bam. And I have a deep interest in ballplayers nicknamed Bam Bam. And then Tim Wallach, but only because of a week ago I said it. I later remembered Chipper Jones. But there's not a single pitcher in Major League Baseball whose whose middle name i know not a single one i could think of one pitcher's middle initial madison k bumgarner because it's a k and so giants fans on the internet would refer to him as madison k bumgarner when he would strike people out but otherwise the middle name seems to just be a lot of energy devoted to to use, no practical purpose whatsoever.

Yeah. Well, I know a lot about you. I don't know your middle name. I imagine you don't know my middle name. No. For the most part, people seem to dislike their middle name. I feel like the one role that a middle name plays in modern society is it makes it easier for people to impersonate you. If they know your middle name, then that might be a piece of personal information that they can use to get a credit card in your name. Or if you're trying to figure out, if you're, if somebody is being, if somebody on the internet is, you know, trying to be doxed or something, and you can get their middle name, it helps you narrow down all the other people of that name so that you can get their personal information. I mean, middle names, if names if anything they're they're weaponized they're

they're dangerous i guess we better not say ours on the podcast then it'll just remain a secret and i still like i then i i checked and i was like oh well i mean surely i know willie mays middle name i just read a biography i mean he's willie mays and i go and i look and i never had heard that before and you know i checked alex Alex Rodriguez. I'd never heard that before. I checked Mickey Mantle. I never had heard that before. Ted Williams. You know Willie Akins because it's Mays. Because it's Mays. Yeah. Ted Williams' middle name is Sam. I never knew that. My name is Sam. All right. Guess we should just get rid of them. It them. It does seem like there's some lesson to take. I don't know if that's necessarily the action plan, but something.

All right. You have the answer. Okay. Well, you don't have an award vote this year, do you? I do. Yeah. Oh, you do? AL Rookie of the Year.

Ah, okay. Well, that's interesting. I don't have an award vote. I never have an award vote. I never have because I'm in the New York chapter of the BBWA as are many, many other writers. And it circulates within the chapters each year. And so my name has just never been called. And it seems like a fun thing.

I'd like to do it sometime. You had an MVP vote a couple of years ago, right? Yeah, the one that Scott Boris was, you know, sort of yelling about. Because J.D. Martinez, I think thanks to me yelling about because J.D. Martinez, I think thanks to me, I think J.D. Martinez didn't finish in the top three. Well, I'm usually, you know, slightly disappointed that I don't have one or have never had one and hope I have one someday, but I'm kind of glad that I don't have one this year because it just seems like at least with some votes, this is just a tough year to have it

because war just doesn't really work. At least if you're voting for A.L. Cy Young or something, maybe Shane Bieber is just so far above everyone else that it helps. But if you're looking at a war leader board, there are like 20 guys clustered within a win of the leader right now. And so I talked to a couple of MVP voters, see Trent Rosecrans in the NL and Ben Nicholson Smith in the AL. And by the way, can we just say, you say 20 players cluster within a win, but it's really more like 30 because there's multiple wars. True. Yes, that too. Yeah.

So if you like, I don't think Trout is within a win on reference, but he is, I think he's like second or third at fan graphs. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, and so I spoke to Trent and Ben and asked them if they're going to be factoring war in or whether it will be helpful because they'll have to be filling out their ballots, as you will, very soon. And they said, yeah, usually it's something I take heavily into account or I certainly look at. And this year, I'll look at it just to not even cut off some people but just make sure I'm not missing anyone or just get a big group together that I can winnow down but it's just not very

helpful for separating between player A with 3.1 war and player B with 2.9 and there are studies that have shown that war and MVP voting have become much more closely aligned in recent years clearly voters really are paying close attention to this stat in typical seasons. But this year, we're a little more in the dark than we have been of late when it comes to separating players. But we do know something very fundamental that people didn't used to know, which is roughly how much is a good player worth? We know that the best players are worth roughly three wins this year. I looked up earlier this year that really the best that anyone has ever been in a span of

60 games is about five to six war. So we've established the upper and lower bounds now of what a player can be worth in this season or any other season. You know, you can have a 10 war player, you can have a negative 2 war player, but according to fangraphs at least, there's never been a negative 5 war player, there's never been a 20 win player. We know how high and low you can go. And I've talked a bunch of times in the past about my favorite thing, which is pre-war or pre-win value stat estimates of what players were worth, which were just often wildly inflated in one direction or another. So I finally wrote an article about that, which I've just been sort of saving up

examples of these things for years and finally had enough to do it. This seemed like a good time. And as part of that, I asked some people, hey, what was it like not to know what anyone was worth before war, before wind shares, before warp and vorp and total player rating and all of the predecessors of war that started appearing publicly in the 1980s. Really, some sort of wind value stat has existed for the entirety of our time following baseball, even if it wasn't well-known until fairly recently. And since we started writing professionally about baseball, we've always had some number that we could refer to, whether it was VORP or WARP or whatever. And so it just seems like it would have been really nebulous not to know anything, not to

have any standard scale that everyone understood. So I was emailing with Bill James about this, because he's one of the people who helped formulate this scale. And he was remembering a time in the mid-1970s when he got very curious about this question. This was really before he started publishing his abstracts or when he was just starting them. And he wanted to know what is a star player worth? And no one knew. He told me, we just really did not know you know until we work things out We just had no concept of the scale of elements of the game So he tried to figure out the answer with what was available to him at the time

And he was curious about this for two reasons one because it was the advent of free agency And so there were a lot of claims floating around about you know You should sign this guy and he'll be worth this many wins to your team. And the second smaller reason was that the Royals, the local team for Bill, they lost Steve Busby, their best pitcher in 1974 and 1975. He got hurt in 1976 and was either unavailable or diminished in performance. And so a local sports editor wrote, well, the Royals are doomed now. in performance. And so a local sports editor wrote, well, the Royals are doomed now. They can't win again without Steve Busby. And so Bill wanted to know, is that true? And he looked around for examples of other teams that had lost their best pitcher early in the season for whatever

reason. And he found that that happens every year and that very often those teams go on to win without that pitcher, that it is not a death knell at all. And so he extended the study and he came up with a list of 40 to 50 examples of times in baseball history when a team had suddenly gained or lost a superstar. So, you know, maybe a rookie came up and had an all-time rookie season, or maybe someone went from MVP level season to missing the whole year because he got hurt. Or, you know, Willie Mays came back from military service in 1954 and was immediately a superstar. So he came up with a list of examples like that. And he just looked to see, OK, typically on the whole, how many wins did those teams that gained or lost the superstar season win or lose with or without those players.

And of course, if you looked at any one of those teams, there could be some confounding factor, right? They might have made other moves that made them better or worse. But if you look at a whole bunch of these teams, then maybe their movement on average will tell you something about that single star that they added or subtracted. And he found that it was basically like five to eight, you know, and maybe you could stretch it to like eight to 10 or so, but it was really a little bit lower than that. And he says, nobody believed it was possible that the impact of a superstar was that

low, but I found that it only really makes a difference when you lose several players at the same time. If you lose three good players at the same time, which does happen, then that makes an impact. But losing or gaining one great player, teams mostly can cope. And he published this, he thinks, in a publication called Baseball Bulletin. And he says nobody believed it. He says even he didn't really believe it.

He thought it was way too low and that he was guilty of thinking superstars were worth you know 20 or 25 wins too before he started looking into this and so he managed to essentially approximate war just by looking at examples of those teams i mean that's what war says basically that you know a superstar season is like five to ten wins and that's basically what Bill found without any stats really just coming up with this list of teams and seeing what happened to them in the aggregate and that sort of thought experiment I guess is what made Bill James Bill James you know like everyone

was wondering this question and they were all just throwing numbers out there and he did an experiment with the data that was available to him at the time. And he came up with the right answer, really, without any of the numbers that we know now. And yet even he didn't really trust it because it just seemed so far off from what everyone expected. So that was the origin, really, of figuring out what a superstar is worth way before there was data. People still don't really believe it. And I mean, I think like they believe it, but intuitively we still overreact

to one player's disappearance, even over the course of small, small periods of time. And I mean, I certainly do. I mean, I think that we take it into account when we actually like, you know, try to calmly, reasonably assess things. And when teams are making trades and all that, they have this foundation of, of, of knowledge and now a much more balanced view of, of performance and all that. But we still definitely

think, oh, well, you know, they added a reliever at the trade deadline or Christian Yelich fouled the ball off his knee and think of it as being, you know, a huge, a huge shift. And, you know, I guess Christian Jelic is a, it probably cost the Brewers about a projected win last September when he fouled the ball off his knee. But it's more, I think that it sort of feels like what we, maybe what we underestimate is how big the spreads of, you know, like an 81 win team, team true talent 81 win team can very easily win 95 games in a season or 70 games in a season depending on how things go and how momentum starts moving and how other things change and all that and so i think we underestimate the unlikelihood that those

couple of wins that are disappearing that we can count are going to be the wins like that they're going to overwhelm somehow the much larger swings of performance and randomness that are happening all the time so that one player rarely can um can sink or or make a season on on their own yeah i am interested in perhaps in segueing from that what you just said about living in a world before measurements and what we thought of different players and the value of their performances before we had measurements for it into a game i would like to challenge you to a game instead of doing emails today do you have are the emails urgent can we just move the emails? Can I have a stat blast? We can do a stat blast and we can do a game, but maybe the emails will wait. Okay.

Your games make me nervous and flustered. Well, this one, yeah, this one, unfortunately, because I've spent the morning, like the reason I want to play this game is because I spent the morning staring at a leaderboard. And so I know too much. So it's not even going to be a game where both of us are equally at unease it's just going to be you great all right stat blast first or stat blast second should we put the game at the back or the front yeah let's let's because i've got sort of a stat blast too so let's do the stat that goes all right okay Okay. Praise his today's step-lust. So Lucas Apostolaros did a favor for me.

He looked up the frequency of four pickoff throws in a row. I had a theory that perhaps they might be more common this year because there are no fans in the stands. And so he looked it up. And sure enough, I mean, it's great when your theory gets a little bit of statistical evidence behind it. But it's really great when it's kind of overwhelming. And so he sent me basically every sequence of four pickoff throws in a row since 2003. And there were like, I don't know, like on average, maybe 18 per year in the previous decade, in the 2000s. And then there have been over the last decade, over the last 10 years or so, there had been

about 14 of those a year. So they're very rare. I mean, 14 a year is extremely rare. That's like your team would do it once every two years. That's how long you have to wait to see your team throw four pickoff throws in a row. And this year, we're on pace to have like something like 50 if it were over the course of a full year. So depending on where you set the time frame, we're talking about, you know, triple to quadruple

the rate of these, which is like, I mean, we're talking about, you know, triple to quadruple the rate of these, which is like, I mean, we're talking about small numbers and it could very easily be that like if, if one pitcher was doing all of it, then it could really skew everything because these numbers are so small, but these are all different pitchers doing it. I think there were even, let's see, uh, at the time that he looked, I guess Kyle Ryan, he had done three, but it looks to me like everybody else had just done it once. So we're talking about like 10 different pitchers or so had done it at this point. And so this is a rate that has gone quite a bit up.

And I don't really have that much to say about this. I will note, though, that there's no difference between what home pitchers doing this historically and road pitchers doing it historically which leads to my theory that my theory is that pitchers do choose not to throw four times in a row because of social stigma but it's not the booing itself they're not worried about being disapproved of publicly it's rather that they can intuit that it's annoying and they don't want to annoy anybody they don't want to annoy the visiting fans or the home fans so they just stop throwing over like they're in the entertainment business and they're balancing that with the being in the winning baseball games business as well but it does seem like they they

have some sort of i mean i'm totally like going way beyond what this little spreadsheet can tell me, but it seems like they have some feeling of obligation to the people who are around them to not be annoying. And so they opt to stop throwing pickups over. And then when you take all the social pressure away from them, the immediate social pressure away from them, they're just like, let's do it. Let's throw over and over and over and over and over again. But what I really wanted to talk about, so thanks to Lucas for that. That was very helpful and interesting to me, something to keep an eye on. But I really wanted to just talk about the home field advantage in baseball, which has come back like massively. The home field advantage in the course of my lifetime has been basically 4%, 53.9% of games won by the home team over the past decade.

And I think it's, I think that it's, it's reasonable to say that the home field advantage might've been shrinking a little bit because of the computerized strike zone, not row bottoms, but because of more precise assessments of umpires strike zones was 53.5%. So shrunk a little bit was was still there and this year it's uh it is now 55.3 percent which would be the third highest home field advantage in my life run differential has gone up considerably this year so this isn't just the home team getting lucky on close games. They're actually scoring a lot more runs. And the TOPS+, which measures a performance in one split against Foreman's overall, TOPS+, for home teams,

is the highest this year that it has been in my lifetime. So once you drill down to a basic performance level, home teams are better than they've ever been this year. And of course, many of the theories for why home teams do better are kind of they're out the window this year. You know, one of the theories has been that just like, you know, fans cheering for you makes you do better than fans not cheering for you. And one theory has been that umpires in particular are want to please the home crowd or fear the home crowd and therefore are more generous to the home team those are i think probably you know two of the big theories for for where home field advantages come from and those are both you know theoretically gone in empty

stadiums and so here's my question i want to challenge you i'm going to take it's a small sample off the board i'm going to take it's a fluke away from you i am going to take it's a small sample off the board I'm going to take it's a fluke away from you I am going to insist that in fact this is a factual thing that that if you played 100 seasons with no fans that home field winning percentage would not just persist at the same level it did in the previous years but would actually be higher than it was in the previous years. And I am now going to force you under these constraints to explain, to give me a working narrative for why this would be the case. Why it's persisted or why it's even increased?

Why it's even increased. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You must explain why home field is more powerful without fans than with fans. You must do it. That's a tough one. Okay. Well, so first of all, I'm not entirely clear on what the roots of this year's home field advantage are. And I don't know if you are either.

You wrote about it a little bit in your recent article about the postseason. It's pick-off attempts mostly. Yeah, right. in your recent article about the postseason? It's pick-off attempts mostly. Yeah, right. Because you found in your article citing some data that it seems like the strike zone advantage is gone, right? That home hitters are not getting a more favorable zone than they used to, which was always the case. Yeah, and I wouldn't say that I looked at it with a ton of specificity. But yes, using the pitch categories that ESPN stats and info has for likelihood of being called a strike. Very simple, very,

very blunt analysis. Yes, what what was easy to see in previous years where taken pitches were more likely to be called strikes when the visiting team was batting, whether they were in or out of the strike zone this year year they are not. So if you just simply look at pitches, ESPN stats, and info classifies as likely to be called strikes and pitches they classify as likely to be called balls, the advantage that has traditionally in recent years gone to home hitters is gone.

Now, I know that also this week, Jonathan Judge wrote a piece of baseball. And he, I think, found that early in the season, I think I'm remembering early in the season, there was kind of roughly the same advantage to the home teams and that it has shrunken recently. But also the sample has gone up. And so now there's some confidence, you know, a reasonable level of confidence that there is still some advantage to the home team, even if it's smaller, and that Jonathan Judge went, well, that's weird.

Why would that be? Yes, right. Which is, I think, what everybody would feel. Right, yes. So it has persisted maybe at a slightly lower level, and he doesn't know why. So maybe that's still in effect. I don't know, but we still haven't explained that. But I guess one of the psychological theories that I've heard in the past is that it is just sort of a brain chemistry thing. Like you're the home team, like you're being invaded or something. You know, it triggers some sort of like we must protect our turf kind of like, you know, just a remnant of, you know, tribal origins of humanity or something. It's just the barbarians are at the gates and, you know, they could retreat, but we can't retreat. This is our home. We have to defend it.

And that produces something, you know, some. it and that produces something you know some and in your scenario in your scenario this would be the case even if even if all say if there were 30 teams and they all played in new york but they all had their own park then there was they all stayed at home nobody traveled but they still felt a ownership of their facilities that yeah that that psychological advantage would still be at work yeah and you wouldn't really be able to prove that unless you wired people up and had their brain chemistry in real time this season, maybe it wouldn't even be so much that the home players are performing better, but maybe the visiting players are performing worse. Maybe there's just more anxiety around being away from home now, you know, with a pandemic going on, with the fact that you can't get close to anyone, that when you're in an unfamiliar environment, you feel less safe than you would. You're constantly looking around at your surroundings and saying, is someone close to me? Is there danger here? And that could be

heightened in 2020, perhaps, with everything that's going on and all the weird rules that are happening. Maybe it would be a debit there. Some of those things that one does to stay comfortable while traveling are taken away from the players too. You can't make yourself at home in the visiting city anymore. So if we're thinking that there is a certain anxiety to being out of your home, then I feel way more anxiety when I'm out of my home right now. And so if you look at a ballpark as being a sort of a metaphorical home, then yeah,

the discomfort could be greater in COVID times. That would certainly make sense to me. Yeah, that's the best I got. I'm not saying I believe it necessarily. I don't know if any of the changes on the field, I think I've seen that the home field advantage was reduced because of the minor league extra innings runner rule in the past couple of seasons. Someone asked us about that via email, and I think if you look at those games, there wasn't much of a home field advantage in extras, so I don't think it's that that would be making it bigger. Yeah, Jason Mackey wrote in July, home teams won extra inning games in the minor leagues 52% of the time in 2016 and 53.8% of the time in 2017. Over the past two years, those numbers have dropped to 51% in 2018 and 50.5% last season, an indication that, yes, this really is a crapshoot.

And what else would there be really the double headers seven innings i don't know that any of that stands out to me as augmenting home field advantage kind of the opposite in fact yeah because uh it reduces the advantage of the the favorite slightly by yeah shrinking the size of the game down yeah you have a theory uh do i have a theory well i mean i don't do i have a theory i'm being just to be clear i'm being forced to express possible explanations for a thing that i think we would both agree is probably just noise um but forced by yourself yes forced by me to do that my here's my theory and and again just to reiterate for people who are like

saying that it's oh oh, it's familiarity with the contours of the park. We're not talking about why is there a home field advantage still? We're talking about why is there a home field advantage that is greater? We have to explain why it's actually greater this year. Here's my theory. My theory is that travel is tiring. That just generally speaking, travel is more tiring than being at home.

And also, you know, being in another city is more tiring than being at home. And also, you know, being in another city is more tiring than being in your own city. And so you take, I'm going to throw fake numbers on this, but you take a player who's at home, he's able to perform at, you know, like 100% physical capacity. And then you take a player and you jet him around the country and have him operating out of an unfamiliar hotel room and all that. And for various reasons, it reduces his energy level to say 92%. And 92 is just not going to beat 100. But that player who's at 92%, he goes to the ballpark and is surrounded by fans that make this into a huge spectacle. And yes, those fans are not on his side, but they are fans.

They are giving him adrenaline. They are helping him focus. They are giving stakes to that game, which then raises his adrenaline, raises his energy level, raises his focus, and brings him from 92% up to, say, 95% or 96%. Basically, fans are caffeine.

Fans are like a huge jolt of caffeine. And we think, well, the fans help the home team by cheering for the home team. But the home team doesn't need caffeine. They're at home. They're not operating sluggishly. And so, in fact, the more fans you pile into the stadium, my theory goes, the more it helps the visiting team equalize the energy level, the physical state that these players are in. And so that's my theory. My theory is that home teams this year are all still at their normal basic state, or maybe they're a little bit down, but not as much as the road team is, which doesn't have its pick-me-up. Another theory, by the way, a more

conspiratorial theory that I have no evidence whatsoever for and is perhaps quite possibly impossible, but if I were to start a conspiratorial theory, it might be that this year the players aren't allowed to review their at-bats on video in between at-bats. They're not allowed to go down into the clubhouse and look at the video.

And a possibility could be that in your home park, someone somewhere is able to access the video feed or just be watching on TV and then get messages down to you that says it was a slider or here's the sequence. And so it's not like every player getting every pitch and getting to watch the video all the time, but there might be some illegal messages being gotten to some players, some, sometimes that's helping the home team and that the visiting team with,

you know, without access to the full facilities of a baseball stadium, thanks to all these protocols and everything doesn't have any access to it whatsoever. And so they're flying completely blind. I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's even possible. I don't know. I don't know what, what has been put in place to prevent that from happening and so on. But that would be a thing that a person could attempt to rule out otherwise. All right. By the way, on the topic of pickoffs, did you see RJ Anderson's article about Zach Gallin? Zach Gallin, yeah, I did. And I checked it. Zach Gallin has only done it once. So I actually thought, oh no, what if Zach Gallin

is the whole thing and it is not all Zach Gallin? Oh, okay. All right. Because yeah, I saw RJ's article. He discovered that Zach Gallin, at least as of 10 days or so ago, had thrown almost three times as many pickoff attempts as any other pitcher. Without a pickoff. attempt rate or success rate or anything like just doesn't seem to have done anything for him or maybe without all the pickups he would have just been terrible but uh certainly hasn't been great even with it but when rj wrote this he was up to 126 pickoff attempts and the next guy was griffin canning with 45 nowhere close and he watched a lot of these or counted them and there were 43 plate appearances rj found in which gallon threw over at least once and he did throw over at least five times on five of those occasions but i guess not consecutively which is what you were looking at but he was

he he has done it uh many times four or five or three times in a single plate appearance, even if it's not all in a row. What's your stat last? All right. So this is a question we got about the Phillies. This is from Nathan M. In episode 1589, you had mentioned a stat about the Phillies' horrendous bullpen. I found two more stats I needed to share with you. As of September 17th, the Phillies are 24-25. In 18 of their 25 losses, the Phillies have blown a lead. So in 72% of the team's losses this year, they were winning the

game at some point. I am wondering if this percentage is some sort of record. So that was about a week ago, and things have changed a little bit since then, and that percentage has actually come down. So now the Phillies have lost 29 times, and in 19 of those losses, they were winning at one point. So the percentage of losses in which they blew a lead is now down to a mere 65.5%. But that doesn't really answer the question. I didn't really know what the average was or what an unusual number is. So I asked our listener, Adam Ott, and he was able to look this up. Not perfectly for some boring database-related reasons. He's using a play-by-play database, which doesn't have every single game.

You could use just the line score, just the regular old box score, and have every game, but he didn't have it set up to do that easily. So in the games that he was able to check, the average percentage is 44%. So in almost half of team losses, that team that lost was winning at some point earlier in that game. And he broke it down a couple ways here, and I'll put the spreadsheet online for anyone who wants it here. So he calculated it two ways going back to 1918. So one way assumes that in games that he doesn't have play-by-play for, the team did not blow a lead in the games that it lost. So if you do it that way, then the 2017 Brewers are the highest of all time with 65.8%

of their losses having blown leads. So that's just barely ahead of where the Phillies are right now. They are the only team ahead of the Phillies' current rate. You've got a few others close, the 1977 Rangers, the 2019 and 1998 A's, 2006 White Sox, 2007 Tigers. The other way Adam calculated it is just to exclude any games that he does not have play-by-play for and only count the ones that he does. And so if you do it that way, you get the 1932 Tigers on top at 69.1%, then the 1932 Yankees, 2017 Brewers again, and the 1925 Cardinals. Those teams would all be above the current rate, but again, that is just excluding some games in which they might have blown a lead or not blown a lead. So this isn't conclusive, but it certainly looks like where the Phillies are now is either the second highest rate in history or maybe the fourth or fifth highest rate in history, somewhere around there. But it is indeed high, and it's about 20 percentage points or more higher than the typical team, which, you know, not surprising.

The Phillies have a 7-plus bullpen ERA right now. So one would assume, of course, that they have blown more games than the typical team. But that sort of gives you a sense of the magnitude and how often that happens for most teams. And Phillies fans, I'm sure, have felt the heartbreak there and I think it's probably more frustrating right to lose a game that you were winning at one point like you could make the case that in terms of total entertainment value it's better to be winning at some point or to have a team that is winning often enough that you're not just perpetually behind because that would be demoralizing and boring in a different way but i think if you're the phillies and you're on the playoff bubble as they still are as we are recording this and you're blowing lots of leads i think that

is maybe the most painful scenario right because every phillies fan right now can probably summon several games this season that they seem to have in hand and that they blew and it may well come down to one or two of those games being the difference between them making the playoffs or not so this seems like almost historic of course it's a small sample season which makes it easier to do historic things but i think it's about as painful as you could possibly have it set up. All right, let's play the game. Okay. All right, so I every year love to look at the stat cast sprint speeds, and then I like to see

two names next to each other where I go, wait, they're the same speed, and then I send a message to RJ about it, and then he sort of like nods to encourage me, but he's not that interested. But I'm always surprised at how little, how I guess there are various people that I think of as being, you know, faster and more athletic or older or younger or whatever. And then I see the sprint speed and it ain't there

or it is there. A lot of times it is there. And StatCast sprint Speed is this example of a thing that has given us just like a such a specific piece of information that we never had before. And it sort of is interesting to me that after three or four years of having it, I'm still constantly being surprised by it. Like, it's not like now that there's a leaderboard that tells me how fast everybody is, that I have internalized all that information. Like, even though we have the precision, I still am being surprised by baseball players

constantly when I look at this leaderboard. And so I have this theory that, in fact, we all have very bad understandings of how fast players are, that we're all pretty, that we all have a lot of like old information about players or old impressions or just wrong impressions or whatever. So there are 70% of baseball players sprint speeds fall between 26.0 feet per second and 28.9 feet per second. So they start with a two, six, a two, seven, or a two, eight, 70%. Right. And that covers that cover. I mean, obviously that covers 70% of baseball players. So like for instance, 26 feet per second, that's Luis Torrens, Jan Gomes, James McCann, you know, slow catchers, just cat, they're catchers, they're slow. 26 is them. Okay. And then

27 is like David Peralta, Gregory Polanco, Justin Upton, Alex Dickerson, you're sort of like competent baseball players. I think of them as sort of average, they're, they're outfielders. So they run around a lot, but they're not like that. They're not speed isn't a big part of the game. And then you've got so they're 27. game. And then you've got, so they're 27.0. And then you've got your players who you really do think of as fast that are at 28. So examples of 28 this year, 28.0 exactly are Christian Jelic, who like last year, he went 30 for 32 stealing bases. He's fast.

Jazz Chisholm, Javi Baez, who's one of the most kind of aggressive base runners and is fast. They're 28.0. So that gives you a sense that 26 is Jan Gomes, 27 is David Peralta, 28 is Christian Jelic, and then 29 is Elite.

Like that's the 21st overall player out of 500 is 29.0. So you're basically talking about anything over 28.9 is super, super elite. Okay. So I'm going to pick names randomly. And then you're going to tell me whether their speed is the one that starts with 26, the one that starts with 27, or the one that starts with 28 and okay it should be the easiest thing in the world how could you i just told you catchers start with 26 people who go 30 for 32 stealing bases start with 28 and then the middle ground the tricky ones maybe they're 27 easy peasy lemon squeezy okay i have a feeling it's not going to be that easy. All right. Okay. Here we go. Randomly so that you don't just, you know, like you can't just read me.

You got to read, you got to read the, the random. Okay. All right. Here we go. Okay. Orlando Arcia. Is Orlando Arcia a 26, a 27, or a 28? I guess I would say he's a 28. He is a 26. Wow. Yeah. Right? Right? Yeah. That seems wrong. Yeah. It's, see, I mean, it's not like i have a mental image in my mind of orlando arcia

running no i mean i've seen him run but you know i don't remember what that looks like and uh some guys look faster than others even if they're the same speed you know maybe it's like a high effort runner or a low effort runner it looks smooth it looks, easy, but really all I'm, I'm thinking of is, well, he's a shortstop and he's, you know, not old. So he's probably pretty fast. That's a, that was basically my decision-making process there. Yeah. He was, he was 26.1. He was not just a 26. He was the bottom end of 26. Yeah. It's shortstop young and very good at defense. And you think, oh, oh well defense is a skill that requires you to be able to move your muscles right to be able to to dart to be able to react

fast twitch all that sort of stuff yeah not a big base dealer which i guess you know base stealing maybe tells you whether the player thinks they're fast right if they're trying to steal bases and so the fact that he doesn't do that very much i guess that would be a tell but you know i haven't looked at his stolen base totals this year either yeah all right here we go evan white evan white oh gosh would it help you if i told you so like okay evan white 26.3 27.3 28.3 does that help yeah i'll just do it that way okay well i guess i would guess he'd be in the middle maybe just because even though he's a first baseman he's not a hulking lumbering one and he's good at defense, and I wouldn't expect him to be slow, but also wouldn't expect him to be elite. All right, Evan White, 28.3.

So he is elite. He is the same speed as Whit Merrifield and Starling Marte. That's not possible. Those guys are fast. Wow. I'm telling you. All right. Ozzy albies ozzy albies is he 26.1 27.1 28.1 well now i'm now i am trying to out thank you i guess which i shouldn't be doing because it's not as fun. But like, I think of Aziel's obvious as a fast guy. And so he must not be.

No, no, I random. It's random. Oh, well, I mean, just the fact that you're choosing him. No, I didn't choose him. Oh, so even the choices? Okay. All right. So, huh.

All right. If you didn't choose him, I mean, he's definitely not slow. I'm ruling out 26. And if he's 26 then i give up knowing anything about baseball 28 he is 27 27.0, 28.0? Gosh, I guess I would guess 27. He is 28. No.

28. He's faster than Jelic. He's faster than Jelic. How can that be? Well, I guess he's exactly the same. He's exactly the same as Jelic how can that be well I guess he's exactly the same he's exactly the same as Jelic huh gosh I mean so obviously like there's gonna be a correlation here between position and speed and age and speed and and probably like defensive reputation and speed and all of that but it's it's clearly not a perfect correlation and like there are some players who are extremely fast who are

just not good at defense like like Lou Brock for instance was you know like one of the best base dealers of all time and was not a good defender according to the metrics and according to his reputation at the time you know and and maybe with him that was more because he would fumble balls sometimes than that he wouldn't get to them. But there are players who like get more out of their speed or less out of their speed than others. Like you might be a good base dealer because you have good instincts and you read pictures well, or you might be a good fielder because you get good jumps or you position yourself well, and others might make that up on raw speed. And I guess I'm not very good at distinguishing between those in my mind. Yeah. All right. Teoscar Hernandez. Is he 26.2, 27.2, or 28.2?

I think he's fast. And also I'm sick of not guessing that anyone is fast and being wrong every time. So I'm going to say he's 28 something. He is. He's 28 too. Okay. Would I have guessed that 15 minutes ago? No, probably not.

All right. Let's do three more. Okay. All right. Jorge Alfaro. Is he 26.1, 27.1, or 28.1? I think of him as fast for a catcher and athletic for a catcher and yet i'm just like i don't want to guess 28 for any catcher really so i guess i'll go middle okay he is 28 one you are wrong he is the same speed as Victor Robles, Mookie Betts, and Brett Gardner.

Wow. How fast is Real Mudo? Also 28.1. Okay. Or maybe 28.2. Okay. All right. Johan Moncada. Okay.

20. Hang on. 26.3, 27.3, 28.3. All right. So I guess I'll go middle. You are right. Okay. 27.3 all right so i guess i'll go middle you are right okay 27.3 moncada i when he was a prospect he was supposed to be just blazing fast right and so that's the sort of thing that i don't update until until like basically you have a uh like hip surgery like in my head you are you are that fast until uh until i cringe when you when i see you run okay yeah all right ender in ciarte i mean i

would certainly think that he is fast but i uh clearly don't know anything anymore. So, see, now my inclination is just to, like, go middle so I'll be less wrong, even if I'm wrong. So I guess I'd go middle. Ender Enziarte has the same sprint speed as Steven Vogt. That's not possible. 26.1. Gosh. And I would think, like, this is still probably pretty reliable sprint speed right like even though it's a small sample season like i would guess that most of these players have enough sprints enough recorded times that it's it's probably pretty indicative like i don't know if you if you looked at all to see if this correlates closely

with last year or whatever but i'm guessing it's probably pretty reliable so i can't use that as an excuse all right i have i did not pick these randomly they were all i totally i i wanted to feel a little bit better you're messing with my head there yeah no don't they these were all chosen because i could not believe that that these were all true so yeah so those are all uh those are all and then like i i yeah i wrote i i thought about uh david fletcher is a 27.0 come on come on yeah elvis andrews is a 26.3 so yeah there's some uh cole calhoun 26.0 i don't know i mean i cole calhoun my head, he's a right fielder who has good defensive metrics. And so therefore must kind of be fast. But either he's not fast or he no longer has good defensive metrics.

And I just never bothered to update. Or he manages to have good defense. Albert Almora is a 26. And I mean, I think of him as maybe the one of the two or three best center fielders in baseball and so i guess there's something to that too which is just that there's there's more to defense than speed which yeah so sometimes you need to be reminded of yeah all right oh that's a hard game yeah it's really tough i mean especially when someone's trying to trick you yeah all. All right.

All right. That will do it for today. Thank you, as always, for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild, signing up and pledging some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get yourself access to some perks. The following five listeners have already done so. They've set such a fine example for the rest of you.

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