Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 162: Aroldis Chapman and Player Preferences

Episode Date: March 19, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss Aroldis Chapman’s role and how much control players should have over the way they’re used by their teams.

Well, at this moment, that's the same place he started last year at this time. You know, we think that if he's a starter or a closer, that the extra innings, you know, the time that he spent getting ready for the season helped his breaking ball. It helped his, you know, his split finger and it helped his control. So, you know, we're going to do the same thing now. Quite frankly, I don't know exactly where the talk came from. Good morning and welcome to episode 162 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus in New York, New York. I am Ben Lindberg in Long Beach, California. You are Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. How are you? I'm okay. I watched a baseball game

today, a World Baseball Classic game. Oh, you did? I was just going to update you on what the score was right now because I figured you wouldn't know. No, I didn't know. I found some way that kids watch things on the internet these days, probably from Europe or something. It's possible that I did something illegal and this might be my last episode if the feds come tomorrow see you're the the sort of person that MLB should be reaching out to and trying to get interested in their product yeah it's really a shame that you can't just boring old yeah boring old person who just sits at home watching things. 162, so that's a significant number.

Yeah. This is episode 162. So I guess I never realized quite how long a baseball season was until I did a daily podcast for what seems like eternity. Podcast is a marathon, not a sprint. Yeah. So we are going to put aside our distaste for the Cincinnati Reds today. Oh, I thought you were going to say for podcasting. Oh, well, we do that daily.

Yeah. But this particular episode, we're going to put aside our distaste for the Reds and talk about one of their players and maybe some other players too. and talk about one of their players and maybe some other players too. But one of the things that many people are talking about right now is Aroldis Chapman. I liked Jeff Sullivan's lead in his post at Fangraphs. If it seems like you've read dozens of articles about Aroldis Chapman potentially being a starting pitcher over the years, it's only because you've missed hundreds more, which is true. This spring alone.

So we talked to someone about the Reds. Who did we talk to about the Reds? Do you remember? I don't. Okay. Well, it was an excellent guest. And I think my skepticism maybe kind of came across, or I intended it to come across about the way that they are handling the conversion of Aroldis Chapman to the starting rotation.

Just because it seemed like there were some mixed messages and people feeling different ways about things. At the time, it wasn't really clear how Chapman felt about the whole thing, but it did seem as if Dusty Baker kind of liked having Aroldis Chapman in the bullpen, and it seemed to be more of a front office-driven initiative. Since then, just over the weekend, Aroldis Chapman came out and said that he would prefer to be the closer. So that adds a new wrinkle to this. He said, I'm waiting to hear the decision so I can feel better, concentrate more. I don't think it's a distraction because when you go out there to pitch, you can't think about that, but it would still be better to know what they're going to do.

The truth is, if they were to make the decision, I would want to be the closer, but it's not in my hands. So we wanted to talk about whether I guess it should be in his hands. Really? Kind of. That's one of the things. Yeah, I thought that what interested, I guess, yeah, that's a good question. That's actually a very good question. And in a way, it seems like it's totally fair that it would be in his hands, right? I mean, a lot of people are – well, here's the thing.

You don't necessarily get the job you want if you're not qualified for it. But if you really want to in life, you can have the job that's worse than the one that you're qualified for. Like if I wanted to – well, I don't know that I'm a good example because I don't really even know what the analogous jobs would be. But if you're the manager at Starbucks, you can probably get a job as a barista at Starbucks. You can't necessarily get a job as the CFO of Starbucks. And so if Chapman wants to use his skills in this way and he's qualified for it, most people have some say over what they get to do every day at work. And you could sort of understand why it would be fair that if he's more comfortable there and if he feels like it's the best place for him to succeed, that he could do it.

I mean he's basically taking a pay cut to do it. He'll make presumably a lot less money in his career as a closer than he would as a good starter. He'd have to be a very good starter, I would think. I mean if Aroldis Chapman were a free agent closer and teams were paying him to do what he did last season, he would be very well paid. He would probably make, what, $15 million upwards of that, I would think, as the best closer in baseball. Dude, Jeremy Guthrie is going to make $12 million as a starter. Yeah.

And has a multi-year deal and Chapman probably won't be quite as good as he was last year because only like three or four guys in history ever have been. Uh, I mean, you know, closers make less than starters. Closers are probably somewhat maybe overpaid, but they also make a lot less than starters.

Um, so, uh, yeah, I mean, he wouldn't, if he turned out to be a bad starter or even a mediocre starter or an injured starter. But in all those cases, he would be correct to prefer closing anyway.

Yeah, that's true. Does that logic make sense? Yes. I mean, I guess from the Reds' perspective, his saying that he would prefer to be a closer kind of forces their hand or at least influences their hand because you then start to worry that he will be upset if he is not made a closer and he didn't demand to be a closer. He didn't say that he would refuse to pitch if he were a starter or anything like that. He said it in a fairly diplomatic way but but made his preference clear. And so you start to wonder whether, not just that he'll be less happy, but that maybe he is not suited for starting in a temperament sense. That he really enjoys the adrenaline of closing, as he said.

He likes coming in and finishing off a game and maybe having experienced that, he would not bring quite the same intensity to starting or he would not be able to regulate his approach having done that and kind of gotten addicted to the rush of closing. So then it becomes a consideration that you kind of have to factor into the likelihood of his success as a starter. I think I would be more pessimistic probably about his, his outlook as a starter, having heard him say that.

Would you? I don't know. Yeah, probably. I don't know. yeah probably i don't know it's hard i mean it's it's hard to know how much more he knows about himself than we do i mean he obviously knows a great deal more about himself than we do um and you kind of would like to take that into consideration i mean for whatever reason i mean if if for whatever reason he thinks that he's going to be better in one role than another, uh, that's probably relevant information, but maybe it's not. I mean, maybe he's, um, I mean, there's all sorts of ways that were self delusional or that we have, um, you know, self doubt or whatever, and sometimes people know more about us than we know about ourselves.

But I don't know. I mean, I guess the question that I have about this that is sort of a bigger question and that is about Chapman and is also, I think, kind of about Steven Strasberg, who this week was in the news when he was talking about how he wants to be a horse and whatever that means is somewhat debatable, but presumably he wants to be a big, tough guy who pitches a lot of pitches and throws a lot of innings and doesn't have some weenie trainer telling him to shut it down in September. I think in both cases, the question is whether players need to be able to, I don't know, I mean for want the information that front offices benefit from, and most of the statistical revolution, or whatever you want to call it, over the last 10, 15, 20 years is kind of inapplicable. Is that a word?

Yeah. Inapplicable. Whoa, where are you? I just moved away from my microphone. Inapplicable to players. And sometimes you'll hear a pitcher talk about how he's into FIP or something, and it's like, great, but it's hard to actually see how that matters all that much. But in these two instances, understanding leverage, understanding the value of a starter compared to a closer and kind of understanding, you know, why a starter is so much more valuable might actually be the kind of thing

that a player should know about. And, well, the Strasburg thing is trickier, too, because even though the kind of stat-headism took a leading role in pitcher abuse and pitcher protection. It's not necessarily like we've gotten all that close to any answers, so I don't know for sure that we even can say that there's a preferred way to handle Strasburg. But the same sort of idea would apply, which is that generally you don't really see a great benefit in loading

players up with information. But in these two cases, it might actually be pretty important to have smart players who are knowledgeable players, who are open-minded players. And it might be one of those sort of rare places where the bloggers and the analysts and the players should kind of interact. You'd think the agents would have something to say about it as they stand to benefit and get a cut from that starting pitcher money down the road also. So that seems like a place where they would have something to say. I guess I'm less optimistic than I used to be about my ability to predict who will succeed

as a starter. Not that I've ever been all that confident in my predictions, but like last year, around this time, I wrote an article about all the guys who were converting to the starting rotation or thinking about it, including Chapman, but also including Feliz and Daniel Bard and Chris Sale and Aaron Crowe, not all of whom ended up actually starting. But I ranked their likelihood of succeeding, and I wasn't at all confident in the ratings. Fortunately, I did have Chris Sale first, which looked smart, but I had Daniel Bard second, which didn't. And I don't know.

Daniel Bard certainly had the repertoire. I think there were probably fewer concerns about his having pitches. I mean, he had three pitches. We don't know whether Chapman does really. We haven't seen him throw a third pitch. And yet he didn't work out in kind of an unpredictable way. You could look at his pre-starting velocity and say that he would still have very good velocity, even after moving from the bullpen. And he just kind of lost more than you'd think he would have lost and just sort of didn't have the approach that worked in that role, or at least it didn't last season.

And having seen it happen with him and having seen it happen with Jabba Chamberlain, although there is debate about the extent to which the team kind of caused that trouble. I think there's also reasonable debate about when Bard's problems actually started and whether he was actually broken as of August 2011. Right, yeah. I guess, I don't know. 2011. Right. Yeah. I guess, I don't know. I'm, I don't, I'm not confident that the Chapman could just immediately step in and be, uh, as valuable as a starter as he was as a reliever because he'd have to be, I mean, he was just outside the top 30 or so in, above replacement in all pitchers. And our wins above replacement

really doesn't take into account leverage or anything. So if you do, then you think he was maybe even more valuable than the stats would say. And the pitchers who are around him are pretty good pitchers. He would have to be a really good pitcher. And as a guy who seems to prefer closing and we know can excel as a closer and may or may not have a third pitch and may or may not have some concentration issues and off the field or mental issues that could complicate the conversion, I am not necessarily certain that it would work out so well, but I guess there's no harm in trying it. And maybe if it gets off to a good start, then he will grow to like it and then the Reds will have a good starter.

Yeah, it sounds like you sort of just described the paradox that we've talked about on this show before, whereby the better you do in relief, the more likely you are to have great value as a starter. And yet the harder it is to actually get away from relief. If Chapman, I mean, imagine that that season, you know, imagine that all you had to go on was, you know, Chapman's frame and his velocity and his pitches and his arm and his ability to throw generally where he wants, you would never put that guy in the bullpen, right? You would still be looking at him and saying, I want to get 225 innings out of him. You're being swayed by his success, which is exactly, I mean, his incredible success in the bullpen is more information that he will be a very good starter. It is not information that he will not be a very

good starter. It's that it tells us more about his ability to start. It does. But I think maybe if there are pitchers who are, uh, whose stuff is likely to play up more than others in the bullpen, which I think is certainly the case, he would be one of them, maybe, just because he has such an overpowering fastball and just sort of not as overpowering secondary stuff, and not the greatest control, and maybe has a tendency to lose focus sometimes. And all of those things would make me think that maybe he's a worse candidate for the rotation than the typical reliever who goes 70 innings with a 1.5 ERA. Not that there are any other relievers who do that, really.

Yeah, I'm imagining Randy Johnson pitching as a reliever for the 89 Expos. Yes, so am I. He'd have 495 saves right now, and that'd be it. That'd be Randy Johnson. He would have finished fourth in a Cy Young one year. That's true. I'm thinking of something that Javier Lopez said at the player panel at Sabre. Someone asked him about roles in the bullpen

and how important it is to know your role and define your role. And he said it was very important. And he said that his preparation suffers when he doesn't know his role. And he actually admitted that you might sort of shut down mentally if you're a bullpen guy with a certain role. And it seems like the game is shaping up in such a way that that role won't be called upon you might just

kind of shut down and then have to reboot again if your name is called and you won't be ready and he kind of made the comparison to starting a job you wouldn't want to go into a job and have them say, okay, go get them without telling you what to do exactly. So he wants to know specifics, and apparently get hitters out is not specific enough an instruction. And so it seems like maybe it's not the best idea to jerk Chapman around like this or not ideal. I don't know that it will do any lasting damage, but I don't know. I kind of would want to see a consistent message and something decisive, I would think, unless there's some powerful new evidence that comes up to change my mind about what he's best suited to do.

But having gone this far, I guess I would just kind of let him start as a starter and see how that goes. And if he has one or bad two starts, one or two bad starts, then maybe we will never talk about this again and they'll just put him back in the bullpen. But if he starts out with an eight inning one run game, then maybe he's just kind of off to the races and will be a successful starter forever. And it could just come down to how that first game or two goes, which is kind of crazy, but that could happen. In 1991, Randy Johnson walked more batters

than all but 20 pitchers in baseball, struck out. What? So if his... Okay. Yeah, his walk total would have been the 21st highest strikeout total. He walked 152 batters in a season. That's interesting. That's a big number.

Jose De Jesus that year walked 128, and he only struck out 118, and he actually had a 3.42 ERA. I'm writing something about starters, very good starters, who pitched in relief and what they did. And Randy Johnson, I haven't really written the thing yet, but I'm just looking at the giant spreadsheet I have, and he did. He made a postseason relief appearance in 1995. He went three innings.

He struck out six. He walked three. In 2001, he did that again. And in 2005, he did that again. And he didn't give up any runs, and he struck out lots of guys. And I'm sure he would have done that a lot if he had been a reliever. That would have been fun. Yeah, he walked more batters than he gave up hits that year,

which has only been done five times by starters since 1980. Two of them by Bobby Witt, one by Eric Plunk, and one by Steve Avery. All right. Randy Johnson trivia. All right. Dontrell Willis, I guess, actually did it, but it was only in seven starts,

and he actually walked twice as many batters as he allowed hits. That was the year he walked 35 batters in. 24 innings. All right. So we're done. Yep. We could read some more stats of the number of things that pitchers did for a while, but we won't. We'll stop. You should email us at podcast at baseball prospectus.com and the next show will be us answering some of those questions.