Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 172: The Confirmation Biases of Opening Day

Episode Date: April 2, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the events of Opening Day that reinforced preseason expectations.

You know what you should do? You should make the sound. Every day? This conversation. Our intro sound should be this conversation. Good morning and welcome to episode 172 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, did you watch baseball yesterday? I did watch baseball. What did you watch? What was your schedule? I started out watching the Yankees game,

but the Yankees game was awful. So I just kind of switched around. I guess I probably watched most of the Nats game or I watched more of the Nats game than any other one game. But I kind of just had it on in the background while I was writing things and half paying attention to stuff. it on in the background while I was writing things and half paying attention to stuff. Fun. Good times. All right. So today we're going to talk about our, well, I don't know. How do you want to phrase it? Well, I was going to wish you a happy confirmation bias day because that is kind of how I think of opening day. It's harmless, but we have all gone so long without watching baseball that when we are finally exposed to baseball again,

we kind of, I think, I don't know, maybe read too much into it or all the things that we've expected to happen for the last few months, some of them do happen on opening day, and we kind of take that as confirmation of how we thought certain teams or players would do and and if it were any other game during the regular season we probably wouldn't make much of it at all so uh i don't know there are already a lot of posts up about the internet on the internet about things that people thought would happen that happened already

and how it means something so we i guess just kind of thought we'd go over a couple maybe. Yes. As I like to say, many of my predictions appear to be coming true and everything else is small sample size. Right. So we're going to talk about things that are biases that were confirmed or whatever. I don't think that's actually what those words correspond to in the phrase confirmation bias. But yes, we're going to talk about things that we thought would happen and did happen

and whether we feel more strongly about them happening, I guess. All right. So do you want to go ahead with one? Well, I guess the obvious one is Bryce Harper. There was kind of a, I don't know, sort of a Bryce Harper breakout narrative. I mean, he broke out last year, I guess, but kind of a new level of breakout. A lot of people were predicting Harper for MVP, even at his age. And so, of course, he comes out and hits two home runs in his first two at-bats, and suddenly everyone who predicted that Bryce Harper would have an amazing season

was feeling pretty good about that prediction. Yeah, Baseball America, by the way, yesterday did their season preview questions and pulled their staff on some questions, and one of the questions was who would be better between Trout and Harper this year, which is a question that's been asked a lot. And I was actually surprised. It was about a 50-50 split. I think Harper had a few more votes, in fact.

And I thought that Baseball America would be kind of moderate. And they weren't. I was sort of shocked that uh that they believed that i mean you know trout had like one of the 25 greatest seasons of all time and uh so yeah anyway go ahead um yeah so that's one so i don't know i i mean i expected bryce harper to be good i don't think i don't even remember what my preseason picks were. It's been like two days. But I didn't predict that he would win the MVP and probably still wouldn't. I think he's going to be really good and it's going to be really, really fun to watch him all year. So that was just a good player being good. Okay, so a friend of mine has offered me a bet. The bet goes like this.

In the next 15 years, if Bryce Harper hits 15 home runs, or sorry, 50 home runs in a season, then my friend has to buy me dinner every year for the rest of those 15 seasons. Okay. However, every season that Bryce Harper does not hit 50 home runs before that, I have to buy my friend dinner every year.

And so if Harper never does it, then I have to do it for 15 years. I see. If he does it this year, then I get dinner for 15 years. And anywhere in between will dictate who wins. And I've been trying to figure out whether this is a good bet. What do you think? I mean, I guess, I don't know. I kind of want to say that he will do it.

And given his age, I guess you would kind of project him to do it right about the middle of that range, or the point at which he would be most him to do it right about the middle of that range or the point at which he would be most likely to do it would probably be around that age range, which I guess would be something like his peak power age. I don't know. I think he'll do it probably. I mean, I don't know if it is statistically sound to predict that someone will hit 50 home runs, but based on the fact that his power tool is legendary and scouts have been telling us how amazing it is for years and now that we've seen it, it appears to be that amazing.

I think he will probably do that. I guess I would say he'll do it if he's going to do it a little bit closer to now than to the end of that 15 years. Yeah, I think the timing aspect of it favors me. Yes. But I'm not convinced that the probability aspect favors me. Yeah, I'm not sure. All right.

So you watched the Yankees play terribly. Yes, that was another one. So you know that guy at Louisville who broke his leg? When I heard people talking about how bad the injury was... I still have not seen it. I probably shouldn't see it. This will actually, this analogy will

work well then because I heard people talking about it and I cringed because I kind of knew what it would look like. It sounded bad, I knew. It sounded like the Jason Kendall landing on first base thing, which I hate. Yeah. And then I saw the replay a couple times. And now when I hear people talk about it, my heart rate goes up.

I get stressed out. I mean, it's like a whole different thing because I've seen it. So even though it's the same thing, people talking about an injury, the fact the fact that I've seen it, it makes it so much worse to hear talked about. Right. And I feel like the Yankees heat lineup yesterday is that injury. Uh, it is a deformed broken leg. Yes. Um, and it's sort of shocking even when you looked at the depth chart before the season and you saw that there was like one and a half players that would have been there normally, you couldn't really wrap your head around it

until you saw Vernon Wells batting fifth, and you saw kind of going along with this, you saw CeCe Sabathia starting a whole new troubling narrative. So, of course, there's reasons that their lineup was off. There's reasons, I think, that Sabathia may not be a problem. But on the other hand, I had the Yankees predicted to win something like 86 or 87 games, and I think that still seems statistically sound to me.

But I would say that it is overwhelmingly more likely in my mind that they will win 77 than they will win 97. And it is also probably fairly likely in my mind, much more likely in my mind that they will win 67 than they will win 97. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess you just have to project how many games you think they would win running out their current roster and then how many games you think they would win over a full season

with their full roster and what you think the likelihood is that we'll ever see that full roster or for how long we will see it. I mean, I guess the Yankees that we'll ever see that full roster or for how long we will see it. I mean, I guess that the Yankees that we saw yesterday, at least position player wise, would probably be a 70 something win team. So the longer that they run out that lineup, the less likely it is that they will have a good season. I mean, it's not saying anything particularly perceptive, but as long as those players are playing,

they're probably not going to do that well. So they need to get those guys back. They do need to get those guys back. And, of course, the guys that, I mean, it's also possible that Robinson Cano could sprain his ankle tomorrow, and it could get even worse. I mean, if Sabathia is is and i don't know that you should worry about sabathia i was just i looked at his his pre-season start from last april 1st

so one calendar year earlier and he was throwing pretty slow in that game too not quite as slow but something like two miles per hour slower than he did in his next game so maybe he'll throw two miles per hour faster next time and that'll be okay. I mean, he's coming off elbow surgery and made two starts in spring training. So it would be kind of weird if he had thrown as fast as he threw last year, which was in itself kind of a decline that was in a way concerning. So if he, I mean, if there's something wrong with him, then I guess I would probably just pretty much write them off at this point because they were kind of on the bubble anyway. So Sabathia and his career has his worst.

April has been his worst month by ERA. It's a little worse than in July. It's a lot worse than anything else. And it's a run and a half worse than September. And the world is awash in splits that don't mean anything. But I just wonder, do you take a split, like a seasonal split like that, like a time of year split like that, to ever mean anything? Do you think that there's anything to the idea of a slow start?

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's maybe a little more meaningful just because April is a low-scoring month. So if he's bad in April, then it's maybe a little more meaningful just because April is a low-scoring month. So if he's bad in April, then it maybe means a little more, and it's a pretty big sample size with Sabathia. I don't know that statistically you could conclude that he is actually a worse player at the start of the season or that he's just not effective then, but I certainly believe that there are players who start slow um and and do that in a consistent way i don't know that i can tell which ones they are uh well okay um do you have another one uh i mean i guess there was bullpen stuff that happened. In Milwaukee, they had a bad bullpen last year and blew a game yesterday.

They did eventually end up winning. The Cubs had Marmo struggle and get taken out right away, which is not particularly surprising. And I guess there were a couple questionable bullpen situations where things did work out on opening day, like the Tigers' closer-by-committee situation seemed to work out with Koch and Benoit. And I guess the Angels had kind of a revamped bullpen that worked.

But I do not conclude anything from those because, I don't know, you don't even conclude anything from a full season of bullpen that worked but uh i do not conclude anything from those because i don't know you don't even conclude anything from a full season of bullpen performance so one day that's true um and did you see uh shinsu chu take a route to deep center field so i think this is maybe the most convincing single thing that I saw on opening day that would fall under confirmation bias. Because it's really, really, really hard to imagine Chu staying in center field. And the only reason it's possible is because they don't really have anything that seems convincing as an alternative until maybe Billy Hamilton comes up. And although I guess if Ludwig were missing for a while and they didn't replace him, then Heise is a better option in center field than Chu is. Although Heise is not any great shakes out there. But yeah, Chu just, you know, he doesn't have the experience there.

He doesn't have any, I don't really, I'm not convinced that he has the right field excellence to make it seem like he could go to left, to center field. And you know, he's not a young man. So he just took a questionable route to a ball deep into center field. And then he really struggled once he got to the wall so peter borges got a 12th inning triple that peter borges would have caught if he'd been in center field and most center fielders i think probably would have caught in choose defense i think that the ball carried more than the announcers expected and maybe more

than anybody expected i think it was on a two-strike swing by borges and the ball hadn't really been traveling in that park all day and so you know it's the the route is maybe acceptable um and in choose defense also it's probably his i don't i assume there was some sort of spring training exhibition that the Reds do, so he played one or two games out there, but it's a new park, new position in a new park, so it might not mean all that much, but it was the second biggest win probability added swing of the day on a ball that you could reasonably blame on the defender. And I guess there was the story of Steven Strasburg.

I don't know that that is confirmation bias in either way. But I feel like we spent all of last season talking about that and several podcast episodes, and now people are talking about it again after one day and you kind of uh i i saw in the bp roundtable you had an initial reaction to that then that you then changed quickly i think uh i don't know i'm agnostic about it i don't know that there's i don't really know what the correct thing to do is from a medical slash baseball perspective. And so I, being a person who doesn't like conflict at all in life, look at it through the lens of trying to avoid conflict.

And so whatever keeps the story quiet I would think would be perfectly adequate from Davy Johnson's perspective. And I don't know whether letting him go out for the eighth, even though he had such a low pitch count, would have done that, or if pulling him after 80 pitches, even though he had completed seven innings, does that. I'm not sure that there's any way to avoid that, and it's just going to probably be a minor annoyance that so long as Strasburg pitches well this year, it won't be too bad. I agree. And finally, we saw Placido Polanco bat cleanup, which I wrote about recently.

And Giancarlo Stanton, who was batting in front of him, did not get walked either intentionally or intentionally. And he did get pitches to hit, which is something I was wondering about. When I wrote that article about Polanco batting fourth, I kind of wrote about how it was sort of the perfect test case for almost like a laboratory environment for seeing whether lineup protection matters, which basically anyone who's ever looked at the issue has never been able to find any indication that it does. But this just seems to be such a vast gulf between, or in hitter quality between three and four that you kind of wonder if

maybe this is the extreme environment where you do see some sort of effect. There was a commenter on my Polanco piece that predicted that Stanton would break the all-time intentional walk record. He would be intentionally walked more times than Barry Bonds, which is what, 120 or something in a season. So, I mean, I didn't expect him to get anywhere near that, but I did wonder where he would end up. And yeah, I just kind of... Is Stanton minus Polanco a bigger gap than Bonds in 2004 minus Alfonso? No, it was Edgardo Alfonso. Oh, well, that's a big gap. I don't know.

But, yeah, there is just so much. I mean, there's so little quality anywhere else in that lineup that you wonder whether Stanton will get any pitches to hit and whether he will change his approach at all. And that'll be kind of an interesting thing to watch as the season progresses. But on opening day, confirmation bias day, we didn't really see anything that stood out about that. Alfonso was maybe 0-3. 0-4 might have been Ray Durham or something along those lines

does I wonder if Stanton I'm stuck on the idea of whether Stanton could break Bond's record which I don't think he could I don't think he could get close but I'm thinking about it I wonder if Stanton if he were close I wonder if it would matter that

the Marlins aren't going to be in a lot of competitive games, and you don't walk the team you're beating by four. You walk the team that you're trailing by one or tied with or whatever. Yes, I'm sure that's a factor. Alright, well that'll do. We'll be back with day two of the baseball season tomorrow, and have a good one.

And send us questions to answer. Oh, yeah, that's right. We've got to remember to do this at the beginning. Yeah, because no one's listening at this point. At this point, they're probably not. I'd like to think that people are listening to roughly the end of the show, but clearly we were winding down 15 seconds ago, and so I could see shutting it off then,

and I wouldn't be insulted if you did that. People's time is important. You know what you should do? You should make the sound. Every day? This conversation. Our intro sound should be this conversation. Okay. That's a good one.

All right. See ya. And we still never even said what the email address was. The email address is podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Talk to you tomorrow.