Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 17: Manny Comin’

Episode Date: August 9, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss Manny Machado’s surprising promotion to the majors and Roy Oswalt’s tumultuous transition to the bullpen.

Yo! Yo! Hey, yo! Check it out. Here we come. There's something in your right, yo. Watch out, man. Look at that fool. He's attacking. Good morning, and welcome to episode 17 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast. In Manhattan, New York, as always, except when I'm in Vancouver, it is Ben Lindberg. With me is Sam Miller in California, in his garage, in his car, under the compost heap and the lights that keep the worms from escaping. How are you, Sam?

You can really paint a picture, Ben. What insight or observation do you have for us tonight? Something, something, something Roy Oswalt. Okay. And I will talk about the news that just broke before we started recording, which is that the Orioles are calling up top prospect Manny Machado. You go first. All right.

So I don't know if you've been following at all. Roy Oswalt has had a little bit of a hard couple of days on Sunday. I believe it was he came into a game in relief and pitched two innings and um he had pitched uh you know quite a bit recently and he didn't feel like he could go a third inning and so he you know as the reports go he told his manager that he didn't have a third inning in him and maybe the manager uh ron washington might have kind of thrown him under the bus a little bit after the game and they had to clear the air or whatever. And just generally speaking, Roy Oswalt doesn't seem to be having a great time out there this year. He's having a disappointing season after joining the Rangers.

He hasn't played a key role. He's been hit really hard. He's been demoted to the bullpen to make way for Scott Feldman. And the only reason I bring this up is because there was an article, a magazine article that Buster Olney wrote about seven years, six years ago. And I'm going to read you the opening of this article starting now. Maybe you didn't hear right. Mississippi pine trees are flashing by at 60 miles an hour. You feel like you're on a roller coaster on two paved lanes and you're white knuckling the door handle.

Maybe your senses are just overloaded. You ask from the back seat, say again. Ten years, Roy Oswalt says again. He glances into the rear view mirror my goal is to play 10 years and then i'll figure out what to do after that you try to block out the onrushing trees and do the math the astros right hander is five years into his career he's 28 and he's talking about the possibility of walking away from baseball at age 33 oswalt has racked up back-to-back 20 win seasons and his career winning percentage is 680.

He propelled himself into the national consciousness last fall by blowing away the Cardinals in Game 6 of the NLCS. A guy this good talking about walking away in five years when he might be making $15 million a year on the foundation of a Hall of Fame career? Come on. Oswald's eyes are back on the road, looking past the cracked windshield of his SUV. Some people play for a chance to get into the Hall of Fame, says flatly i'm playing for the competition of it and uh so now it's um six years later and uh you can sort of see why maybe he uh he might have wished that he had followed through on that and it's just interesting because um it the way that um only framed it and the way that i read it at the time it was like i sort of had the same reaction you know royals what was at the top of the game top

of his game and uh it seems so odd to think about leaving in five years um but oswald probably had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about i um i looked at all the players since 1950 who have been most similar to oswalt from the five years between ages 23 and 37 and i took those 10 guys five just above him and five just below him in a popular uh player assessment statistic and um the 10 of them basically they were uh the 10 of them averaged uh the average age at which they left the game for good was 33.4 years the average age at which they had their last good season which i defined as average era or better while qualifying for an ERA title, was 31.6 years. So, in fact, the aging curve, the expectation of attrition for a pitcher is right around what Oswalt expected, and now we've just seen it. It's played out what turned out to be probably

fairly predictably. It's surprising to me that pitchers who had been as good as he had didn't age more gracefully than that. Yeah, you think about some of the names on the list, and Mark Gubizaw is probably a good comparison for Oswalt. People, I think, nowadays don't quite remember how good Gubbaza was because his career was essentially done at 32 and you know Dean Chance and Brad Radke and Sam McDowell and

Jose Rio are other guys on that list and Carlos Zambrano is actually would be on that list but I excluded him he was very similar to Oswalt for those five years, and his last good year was at age 29, and he's 31 and really right on the brink of being out of the game. Yeah, it was interesting to see that news about him kind of declining that third inning the other day because you so rarely hear a pitcher take himself out of a game.

You so rarely hear a pitcher take himself out of a game. There's such a stigma around that, about the notion of not wanting the ball or not always wanting to be on the mound. And I guess coming so soon after his kind of mini tantrum or just displeasure about his change in role, it was hard to separate the two i think in in general if a pitcher turns down more work when he's had a very heavy workload i mean you'd probably rather see him maybe advise the manager before the game that he's not available for three innings or something rather than make it an in-game decision. But, I mean, I'd rather have a guy turn down an extra inning

than pitch an indefinite number of innings and hurt himself. But it's hard to say whether his concern was genuine or whether it was more of a pouting thing, sulking thing about being in the bullpen. Yeah, he doesn't have any experience in the bullpen, so you could see why the whole thing would be uncomfortable for him. And I mean, I don't know. I think in general, probably too much is made of the ball player's obligation

to basically kill himself on the field if he's asked to. But I think that when you're in an unfamiliar role, I guess what I'm saying is that maybe a starter has some obligation to perform like a starter. And a reliever has some obligation to perform like a reliever. And if you don't really have a defined role, as Oswalt is kind of bouncing between roles um i don't know that the obligation is quite so strong or should be quite so strong did you think they sort of had a short leash with him moving him so quickly it seemed to me i mean obviously they know him better than we do and they see his stuff and everything but uh just looking at his peripherals they weren't so bad that you would

say this guy needs to be moved to the bullpen immediately it was maybe more of a he hasn't pitched all that much yet um yeah it was peripherals were good in fact i mean other than too many home runs the home runs were tough but you know he he had i think he had back to back i i tweeted this factoid it was a couple weeks, and I've kind of forgotten it. But I think in his career, his career high for base runners was like 18 or 19 in a game. And he had back-to-back games where he allowed either that many or one below. So, I mean, he was really getting beat up bad, and you could see why in the middle of a pennant race they wouldn't really want to stick with him but yeah i he you know i think that if he were um you know 26 or if he had been on the

club for four years they probably would have stuck with him he's last man in first guy out okay so the orioles tonight called up manny machado uh who is their top prospect or top position player prospect, I suppose you should say, and one of the top prospects in baseball and is not really a guy who anyone thought was going to be promoted anytime soon, or at least I hadn't. There was no buzz, no when is Machado going to be called up. There was no buzz, no when is Machado going to be called up. They are, I think, in the lead in the wildcard race right now. And of course, as we've discussed on the podcast before, everyone has sort of been waiting for them not to be for a while now.

And so they've called up Machado now to kind of give them a little boost down the stretch, or at least that's the idea. So we could talk about whether Machado is ready. Of course, that's not a call that we can make as well as the Orioles can make. But we could also talk about whether it will really help the Orioles, in that Machado is at AA. He just recently turned 20, and he has been very hot of late in the last week or two. But on the whole, on the season, he's not having a really outstanding season.

I mean, given his age and experience, it's impressive and certainly in line with expectations for him as a first-round pick, an early first-round pick. But it's a lot to ask a guy to go from AA to the majors in August, independent race, and make an impact. So the expectation is that he will play third. He is a shortstop, and there's been a lot of talk about

whether he will ultimately be a shortstop, but it seems that the consensus is that he can, at least for a few years. But J.J. Hardy is playing short, and they seem happy with him, so it looks like he's going to get most of his time at third, where Wilson Benamit has been hitting pretty well lately. So it's not really a black hole at third that the Orioles are trying to fill, and I wonder whether it's too high a bar to ask Machado to clear at this point, really, to be better than their pre-existing options. And, of course, if he doesn't play, then there's the concern that he's not getting as

many at-bats as he could be and possibly it could affect his development in some way well the most uh recent um example of a team doing this comes just last year than Machado is now. And unlike Machado, he was crushing AA. He had a 950 OPS or something like that. I mean, he was pretty clearly the best player in that league already, no matter what age. And he came up. He struggled.

It was clear that he wasn't really ready to hit major league pitching. He seemed to be pretty easily beat on a lot of good fastballs and a lot of good inside stuff. And he didn't get to play every day. And he got sent down, and then he got called back up, and he still didn't play every day. And pretty much if you wanted to make the case, you could say it was a worst case scenario. And yet I think everybody in the Angels organization and certainly Trout feels very strongly that that those few months were actually really beneficial for him. months were actually really beneficial for him, that it was more important for him to get those at-bats against major leaguers than to get maybe twice as many at-bats against double-A pitchers. And that's part of the, at least the narrative of his success this year. But going back to the

Orioles and their present needs, it's always hard to expect anything out of a 20-year-old. He's a young 20 as well. He's 20 years and one month, so this is not like one of those calendar 20s where he's really almost 21. And like you say, he wasn't dominating AA. And the default, I think, in baseball is to always assume 20-year-olds are going to be bad. I still don't mind the move. I like the move. I think it's nice.

It's aggressive. It could pay off. It worked for the Marlins in 2003 with Miguel Cabrera. And, you know, sometimes it works. And I kind of hope it does because it will be really exciting. Yeah, and the idea, I guess, is that he can handle the position defensively, even if he doesn't contribute offensively immediately. Although, I always wonder, I mean, when you look at the positional spectrum and you say that if a shortstop moves from shortstop to third, he will be a... I mean, if he can handle short and you move him to third, then he'll probably be really good at third because it's a less demanding position.

But Machado has only be really good at third because it's a less demanding position. But Machado has only played two games at third. And, I mean, maybe he's practiced there, I don't know, but it seems like even if his physical tools and fielding skills would enable him to make that transition very smoothly, I don't know that you can necessarily make that transition smoothly without ever really having played at third before. It's a new angle and a new set of responsibilities. So I don't know. I'm skeptical that it will help them in any way. I certainly wouldn't

say that it would hurt Machado. I don't know enough to say that I think some guys it might hurt to come up too early and or when they still have some growth left in the minor leagues and to struggle in the majors other guys maybe it would be a challenge and a beneficial thing like Trout and that's obviously something that they've considered and decided that this is the right move for him and uh i don't i just i don't see it helping the orioles or in in any way uh stalling their their kind of collapse that everyone thinks is inevitable over the next couple months yeah if everybody thinks it's inevitable anyway you might as well just throw every random variable you can in there and hope that something lights. I mean, I don't think anybody – I haven't looked recently, but I imagine our playoff odds for them, even with them leading the wild card, are still around single digits, which is sort of bizarre and sad.

Yeah, 8.5. Yeah, so wow. 8.5. Yes. Wow. So as far as I'm concerned, any magic trick they think might work is a great idea. Of course, you're also the one who thought that they should trade him at the deadline. Trade Dylan Bundy, trade everyone. I still think this is probably their only chance.

This is probably the only time in the next five years that they will be this close to a playoff spot so uh if you have uh manny machop sixers and this is the one year that you're in the playoff hunt you might as well get them in there all right well we'll see how that works out and this has been episode 17 we will be back for our last show of the week tomorrow morning so thank you sam