Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 160: The Outlooks for Tim Lincecum and Roy Halladay

Episode Date: March 15, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss their expectations for Tim Lincecum and Roy Halladay after their disappointing 2012 seasons and struggles this spring.

Must go faster. Must go faster. Must go faster. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go! Good morning and welcome to episode 160 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben Lindberg, how are you? Well, we're finishing the week on a multiple of five. That couldn't be better. You're giddy. You've been so excited all day to record this podcast, haven't you? Just so much joy in your heart when you called me today and said,

it's time to do the podcast. Yep. So we're ending the week. We're going to talk about Tim Linscombe and see where that goes, I guess I think did you and I both watch the Tim Linscombe vs. Mark Kotze

at bat that Grant Brisby chronicled did you actually read through their reply so Grant Brisby of McCovey chronicles, uh, highlighted a particular at bat between Linscombe and Mark Cotsey in which Linscombe looks,

uh, other than the short hair remarkably like old Tim Linscombe, he throws a tight slider or I guess probably a curve. He throws a 94 mile an hour fastball fastball, which is really bringing it. And then he throws a 93, and then he throws a 92, and then he throws an absolutely vintage Tim Lincecum split-slash-changeup. Strikes out Katsé. There's every reason to not take this too seriously uh most of the words that

i've used for instance uh came after i said mark kotze at which point you might have stopped listening um and of course it's spring training the fact that it was kotze made me uh take it less seriously somehow even though the the stuff was good it could have been no one standing there at the plate throwing those pitches and that would have been still sort of impressive but the fact that katze was there kind of took away from the accomplishment you know i i one time wrote a post um for the orange county register about who the worst player in baseball was and um this was maybe i don't know maybe a year ago and it was like you know suyoshi nishioka and like sean figgins i mean there was like a long list of players you could vote for and one of the

players was mark katsay and the commenters just were furious at me it was like no no there were like like a dozen comments and 10 or 11 of them were anger at me, including Mark Kotze. Which seems weird because Mark Kotze might be the worst player in baseball. I mean, it's shocking. How were the poll results for Mark Kotze? They were low. But I think it might be because Mark Kotze is a local guy. So I might have irritated some of the casual.

Anyway, so yeah. I mean, all these pitches, though, the hitter is irrelevant. They looked good. 94 is really something. I mean, Linscombe averaged 90 miles an hour last year with his fastball. He hasn't averaged 94 since 2008. He hasn't averaged 93 since 2008. And, you know, he might not average 93 this year but it's i don't remember him throwing

many 94 mile an hour pitches last year no i wonder i don't know who even knows if the gun is right maybe right yeah there's that i mean i was i read keith law's report uh i think it was the day before or i don't know what i guess it was uh he was reporting about tuesday night his outing on tuesday night against the Padres. So it's the same game, and his headline was Tim Lincecum's fastball still failing him and said his stuff was about where it was last year. He was mostly 90 to 91, hitting a few 92s,

but nothing higher than Keith saw. Keith probably has his own gun or was sitting in the scout section and peeking at other people's guns so he wouldn't have seen the TV reading that we were seeing in Grant's post. So I don't know if that is reliable or not. It looked pretty good, at least to me. Yeah, but we only saw five pitches.

So I guess there's two things about this. One of them is that there's sort of echoes of the exercise we did with Roy Halladay last year, which the question we asked was how far can a pitcher drop in our estimation with one bad year. Linscombe finished sixth in Cy Young voting in 2011. He received votes every year of his career up to that point. I think probably he would have maybe been the fourth or fifth best pitcher in the National League, maybe in people's estimations going into last season. And I guess in a way that I didn't even feel about Halliday when we talked about him last year. There is sort of a sense that Linska might actually be just permanently done.

That was his career path, that he was great early, flamed out young, and that he's basically like Matt Morris with a higher peak. out young and that he's basically like Matt Morris with a higher peak. And so I guess that's the first question. Where would you rank him among National League pitchers or among Major League pitchers? And like I guess somewhat – Giants pitchers for that matter. Well, yeah. I mean he's probably – he would have been – well, he lost his spot in the rotation in the postseason last year, for instance.

And I think that probably most Giants fans would put him fourth, although acknowledging that he has the upside for much better. I mean, his season last year almost feels so damning that you actually need to get another pitcher to have a round in case he does it again. So, yeah, I mean, it seems to me that he's fallen a lot more than I thought Halladay had fallen. Now, Halladay, anytime, if it's an arm issue, if it's a shoulder issue or something like that, then you reevaluate. Injuries are different. But just in terms of goodness, he went from being very good to very poor, and it doesn't feel like people expect much redemption out of him at this point. No, I guess not. I mean, over the offseason or even during last season, you would read the

sort of cookie cutter sabermetric posts that would look at Lincecum's peripherals and say that he's been unlucky because he's giving up more home runs per fly ball or he has a higher BABIP. And then there were the ones that maybe went a little deeper than that and sort of speculated that his location was off. And so his BABIP was higher because he was leaving everything over the middle of the plate, which seemed to be the case. I think Jeff Zimmerman wrote something at Fangraphs about the fact that Lincecum is not or was not pitching on the edge of the zone at all. He was just kind of in the center,

and so you'd sort of expect him to get hit hard. And then, of course, there's the velocity, which was discouraging. So I don't know. If you look at Lincecum's Pocota's projection, or Halliday's for that matter. I think they're both very optimistic and project bounce backs because Pocota doesn't know that they seem to have lost their stuff and are not fundamentally the same pitcher. So I'm not, I mean, I don't think anyone is expecting a return to Cy Young Lincecum. I think even Grant in that post, the most optimistic thing he said that was maybe he could be 2011 Lincecum

again, which I guess is, is more realistic. But if he is only throwing 90, 91, then I don't know if that is realistic unless he can continue to evolve and succeed with a lower velocity. But for a right-hander, that is not so good. Well, we've talked, I hope that I can say this, but we've talked at BP about just sort of brainstorming different ways, different data that might make Pocota even better. And one of the things that you've suggested is pitch effects data and, in particular, fastball velocity. And it seems like in cases like this, that would be really relevant. And remind me, I think when you wrote about the Nationals high velocity starters at the beginning of the year last year. You cited something about how each mile per hour added or lost sort of correlates to...

Yeah, I don't remember the exact stuff. It was from a Mike Fast Hardball Times article where he just quantified what the difference in strikeout rate and ERA and everything is that if you lose a certain amount of velocity or gain a certain amount. So one of the things I wanted to do this off season that I never got to writing about was looking, and maybe somebody has done this, but looking at fastball velocity and seeing whether it is a thing that trends downward or upward, or if it's a thing that regresses to the mean. So basically, if you have a guy who throws 93, 93, 93 for three years and then throws 89 the next year, is he more likely to go 89 or lower or is he more likely to go 91,

92, basically regressing to his career averages as you would expect for almost any results based statistic? as you would expect for almost any results-based statistic. And I don't know the answer to that, but it feels, I think that the assumption is usually that you don't get velocity back, that fastball velocity is something more akin to speed or defense, where it's a fairly straight line down, and all you're really talking about is what pace it's going to go down, and that there's not a lot of spikes. I guess defense is a bad example in this case,

but there's not a lot of spiky action. It's much more of a straight line. And the reason that I wanted to look at it was for Dan Heron, but it also would apply to a lot of pitchers. It would apply to Felix Hernandez. It would apply to Hall but it also would apply to a lot of pitchers. It would apply to Felix Hernandez. It would apply to Halliday. It would apply to Tim Lincecum. When a pitcher loses three or four miles an hour or two miles an hour or one mile an hour,

do you generally hold any hope that that's not just a step along the way to 86? I think Bill Petty has done some research on that and there was a, I don't remember all of his conclusions, but there was a post yesterday at beyond the box score about how Lincecum will bounce back. Uh, and it was just sort of looking at his peripherals and his luck indicators, uh, and saying that he would be better. Um, and Bill left a comment on that post saying Lincecum will likely work off an average fastball velocity below 90 miles per hour this year based on what we know about velocity decline and subsequent velocity. That's not good for a

right-handed pitcher. So I think it's closer to what you say about if you lose it, you're probably not going to get much of it back. And maybe you'll lose even a little more. And speaking of Halliday, he seems to have lost a little more this spring. And of course, there are always those caveats with spring training data. You don't know that a pitcher is throwing as hard as he possibly can. And even if he is throwing as hard as he possibly can, he's not stretched out and warmed up yet. And the weather is not warm. And there is a trend, of course, for fastball velocity to increase as the season goes on. But Halliday, I'm looking at a story on his latest outing from Thursday, and it says his fastball range from 84 to 88 miles per hour in that outing, with one scout estimating that he averaged about 85 miles per hour.

And he was, I think he was down around 91 or so at the end of last year, which was down, I think, close to two miles per hour from his previous season, but seems to have gotten much, much worse if that holds up. And you have the Phillies assuring reporters that he is fine, which is not something that you ever really want to read. Especially after last year, they assured us everything was fine with Halliday. And Halliday was, as I recall, very kind of defensive about it and kind of aggressively

defensive about it when people mentioned his velocity last spring and mentioned his poor results last spring. I mean, normally it's best to ignore those results. And probably Halliday was right that last year we should have ignored those results. And yet it kind of chips away at the credibility a little bit in this case, maybe. Yeah. So 2008, 2009 and 2010 Cy Young award winners, those two. And now it's 2013 and we're, I guess, people are worried about whether they can hold a rotation spot at all, let alone be aces anymore. So I always try to remember things like this the next time it seems like there is some Roy Holiday type pitcher who is just dominant

and throwing 200 innings every year and doesn't get hurt and gets everyone out for several seasons in a row. And it seems like that will continue indefinitely, but it never does. Yeah. Even a guy like Halladay who has that kind of, you know, efficient motion and doesn't throw super hard and seems like a horse and seems durable and in great shape and quite a competitor and all these things. And yet, it's all little tiny strings in there, little tiny threads holding it all together. So Linscombe's a free agent after next year.

Let's say that you're the Giants and Linscombe's agent comes to you and says, I want to talk about an extension right now. What's your offer to him? I don't know if I would want to talk about it now. Well, I mean, he assures you that he won't be insulted by any offer. So you could offer him the minimum if you want, what, what is the floor for what you offer? Man, I mean, he's making what, 22 million this year. Um, I mean, gosh, it's almost like you can't be sure that he's a viable starter at this point. And I don't know, I just, I feel like there's maybe no, I wouldn't want to insult him by offering, by just lowballing him and offering him some tiny, tiny number that he almost certainly wouldn't agree to anyway. You're insulting him now by not giving him an offer, by not treating him with the respect that he asked for. He just asked for you to consider it.

I don't know. I feel like I would just... I would happily offer three and 35. I would happily offer him a Jeremy Guthrie contract right now. Really? I don't know if I would. Certainly, if he has any kind of a bounce-back year at all, he's in line for 5-75 at least, and maybe more. He doesn't have to do much to match Anibal Sanchez's season last year, and he's got a lot better background than Anibal Sanchez. Well, I'd offer him at least what the Dodgers gave Brandon League, because we know he can be a pretty good reliever based on last postseason.

So what was that, 327 or something? I think it was 3 and 22.5, unless I'm confusing him with Broxton. Well, I will give him Brandon League and maybe a little more for his multiple Cy Young Award wins in the past. All right. This is one of the most depressing podcast episodes ever. I wish we could leave people on a positive note, but

I don't have one. We could outro with that Black Eyed Peas song about the weekend coming. Remember that? Before they were the worst? With Macy Gray? Macy Gray might have been

in that song? Yeah. Well, we don't have the rights to that song so we can't do that okay all right i'll see you later