Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 174: More Week One Reactions

Episode Date: April 4, 2013

Ben and Sam share their thoughts on Roy Halladay, Tim Lincecum, Yu Darvish, Fernando Rodney, the Royals, Tom Milone, Shaun Marcum, and more.

Good morning and welcome to episode 174 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus in New York. New York. Oh no, I said it. I said where I am. I'm Ben Lindberg. In an undisclosed location is Sam Miller. Lead with the email address, Ben. Lead with the email address. All right. Our email address is podcast at baseballperspectives.com. If we were any other podcast, this is when we would tell you to rate and review us on iTunes and tell you where you can follow us on Twitter and all of those things, and we would talk about the Facebook group that we do not have.

It's been 74 episodes since we plugged our iTunes rankings. Yeah, I feel like every now and then, because I look at how many iTunes reviews and ratings we have, It's been 74 episodes since we plugged our iTunes rankings. Because I look at how many iTunes reviews and ratings we have, and it is a very, very small fraction of the people who listen to us every day. And I feel like maybe a few more of those people could just go over there and, you know, tell people about us. So, yeah, that would be nice if you could do that. So we are going to continue our confirmation bias week. We're going to talk about some things that have happened that maybe we expected to happen. And so they seem to assume some added significance because they are the first thing that we are seeing certain

players and teams do uh so do you want to lead off with one yeah should we i mean should we have some sort of disclaimer that we recognize that what we're doing is just confirmation bias and that we don't necessarily think that there is anything actually significant about this stuff? Sure. Okay, good. I mean, maybe there is in some cases. We'll see. Yeah, but that's the point is that there's not, right? I mean, the point is that some things there will be and some things there won't be, but there's not like a systematic way that these first few days are more significant. That's like the entire point of the phrase.

All right. That's like the entire point of the phrase. All right. So I wanted to mention the Royals who are kind of losing in exactly the way that people predicted they would lose after they made their big we're going to win trade. They got a really good start out of James Shields yesterday. Yesterday, maybe Monday. I don't know what day it is. And they still lost 1-0, and one of the reasons that they lost 1-0 is because with 2 on in the 7th, down by 1, Jeff Francour, instead of Will Myers, came to the plate and grounded

into a double play. Later on, Jeff Francour, instead of Will Myers, made the final out of the game, trailing by 1. Today, down by two in the seventh with two on and nobody out. Jeff Francoeur struck out. And to win the game, Jeff Francoeur. And so, you know, I mean, you've got to feel kind of bad for Dayton Moore in the sense that he really wanted to have a credible opening day starter. And he got a credible opening day start by a famous man, and it didn't work out for him. And he should – I mean, clearly the team that he has put together is capable of scoring two runs in a game. So it is not as though a one-nothing loss on opening day represents any sort of failure of vision on his part or anything like that. But there is thus far,

through a whopping 18 innings, there is thus far no indication that all of his players are breaking out as one. And Jeffancor is still prominently visible uh so i don't know if that's i mean we know what jeff rancor is at this point so we don't know exactly well we don't know exactly what he is yeah it was a five no no i mean he had a five win swing from 2011 to 2012 so we don't exactly know what he is. Defense, which who knows. Yeah. I mean, we know that he is in some seasons, according to stats, very, very bad, and in other seasons, not so bad, but not good. So he's one of those things, I guess.

He is batting eighth. I didn't think to look this up beforehand but i would imagine that this is something close to a new experience for him sorry to the people who hate me typing i'm going to type for a second uh because i'm going to look up and see how often he started in the eighth spot in his career okay um you can talk that you can go on if you want okay uh well i don't want to switch topics if you're you're going to come back with jeff frankor's batting order history uh-huh okay well here we go then he started uh 32 times in the eighth spot in his career uh 17 of them in 2010 which i presume is his last year as a Brave.

Actually, he had never started in the eighth spot as a Royal before opening day. They've lost faith in him to some degree. Okay. Another thing that happened yesterday, if you're listening to this Thursday, Roy Halladay made

his first start. He did not last very long. He threw 95 pitches, but he made it through, I think, three and a third. Excuse me. Pardon me. I have to correct myself. Not the last year as a Brave. It was actually his last year as a Met as well as his lone 15 games as a Ranger.

Okay. All right. Now you can go on. So Halliday gave up five earned runs, six hits, three walks, was pulled with one out in the fourth. So that was kind of confirmation bias because we have been hearing about how ugly his spring was. We talked about it on the podcast uh not too long ago and kind of

wasn't maybe because he did strike out nine guys which is his ex was spectacular right really strange line to go three and a third and strike out nine uh and give up all those runs and hits and walks uh yeah he doesn't he doesn't have a line remotely like that in his career, as I'm looking at it. The closest thing would be probably once when he went... Well, actually, no, that is not... Yeah, go ahead. Oh, yeah, so, okay.

There was a game he struck out eight in four and two-thirds and was otherwise hit hard, walked three, gave up a home run, five runs allowed, and that was in 1999 when he was terrible. So otherwise, nothing remotely like this. So he did miss bats, and he threw fairly hard. I'm just looking at the Brooks numbers and what is classified at least as his two-seam fastball. and what is classified at least as his two-seam fastball,

well, I mean, it averaged about 90-ish. And then what is classified as a cutter was sort of 88-ish. So not good, not encouraging really, but not quite the horror stories that we were hearing in spring training where he was throwing mid-80s. And clearly he was getting guys to swing and miss a bit. I don't know how many of those strikeouts were swinging. But, you know, if you were worried about Roy Halladay this spring or based on the end of last season and what we had heard of the beginning of this season then surely you are even more worried now because of that first start yeah uh so you started by saying that it was a kind of ambiguous start but you're now ending by saying that it's not an

ambiguous start uh i guess i'm saying that these strikeouts are kind of encouraging uh i don't know the velocity would you the velocity would you call not encouraging would that would that be discouraging uh yeah i guess so i mean i'm looking at let's see so at the end of last season uh brooks has his sinker at like 91 and his cutter at 90 so and it's it's April it's his first start of the season so we wouldn't necessarily expect his velocity to be in in mid-season form but does seem to have lost a little bit from the end of last year if you compare it to the beginning of last year well his velocity didn't really change throughout last year. So if you compare it to last April, it still seems to be slower. So yeah, I mean, I guess that is

worrisome. So whose start is more encouraging, I guess, Halliday or Tim Linscombe, who was just pulled after five innings, so we can close the book on him. And he did not allow an earned run. So in that sense, everybody will give him high fives, but in five innings he walked seven, struck out four, and I watched most of that game so far, and he's been all over the place within the strike zone. He basically hasn't hit a target and all day

uh when i've been looking when i remember to look it's been about 91 92 well uh i guess we were both pretty well i don't know you were you were sort of optimist you you picked him as as like a young candidate right i don't know whether that were sort of optimistic. You picked him as like a Cy Young candidate, right? I don't know whether that was kind of just a jokey pick or a serious pick. But when we talked about them a couple weeks ago, we were discouraged, or at least I was, and was not expecting big things. So I guess I'm just equally discouraged now. Nothing about those starts makes me change my valuation for either of them yeah yeah I am probably a

little less bullish on Linscombe at this point and I was pretty much off the holiday train at this point. Sad to say. All right. Another one, and maybe we probably should have gone in chronological order, but the Udarvish start on Tuesday, which was, of course, one out away from a perfect game, extremely impressive start. And the BP staff picked him as the number two Cy Young pick. Pakoda, I think, projected him as the second most valuable American League pitcher. So he came out and his first start looked great. But he was also facing the Astros. And then on

Wednesday, we saw Alexi Ogondo and all of the Rangers look really good against the Astros. And then on Wednesday, we saw Alexi Ogondo and all of the Rangers look really good against the Astros and strike out 15 Astros instead of 14 Astros. So now we maybe kind of wonder whether it's just an Astros thing and everyone who pitches against the Astros looks great. But I think Darvish was really, really good, regardless of whom he was facing. He actually, the hardest pitch he threw in that start was harder than the hardest pitch he threw last year. And he actually had more movement on one pitch than he had on any one pitch last year. So it seemed sort of as if he brought better stuff to the game and and he had actually his

velocity had ticked up during the the spring also so it's certainly encouraging that he is throwing hard early in the season when pitchers do not throw hard uh and he didn't walk anyone which was the first time he had ever not walked someone in a regular season start. So that was encouraging, I think, and I was expecting big things from him. And then seeing that kind of confirmed my expectation of big things. Although, having seen the Astros now kind of get dominated two nights in a row, I'm not ready to crown him as the leading Cy Young candidate. But everybody gets dominated at some point. I mean, the Astros, we already knew the Astros were bad.

You did not need Alexi Agondo to show you that the Astros are not a great team. Yeah. And, you know, the Astros will score plenty of runs off. I don't know. I know what you mean. I'm sort of very, in a way, glad that Darvish didn't throw that perfect game just because I didn't want to see thousands of tweets about how maybe he should do it against a major league team and et cetera, et cetera, the same sort of tired joke that happens every time somebody throws a perfect game against a bad team because perfect games against bad teams are still pretty good um but yeah darvish is maybe

uh has passed strasburg for um pitching porn value at this point and if he's not past strasburg he's definitely number two yeah uh mike and jason were talking about that. I listened to some of the first episode of Fringe Average, the new Baseball Perspectives podcast, which you should all listen to if you haven't yet. What's the email for that one, Ben? Man, I don't know. It's not podcast at baseballperspectives.com? It's not.

No, we wouldn't want to be getting their emails and they wouldn't want to be getting ours we still get up and in emails though occasionally once in a while that's the same I don't know they have their own yeah so they were talking about that and which pitchers

are worth the price of admission on their own and are that entertaining to watch on their own. And they said Strasburg and Darvish, and that Lincecum used to be but no longer is. But maybe he's interesting to watch now for a different reason, because who knows what's going to happen. Yeah, I think that Lincecum hasn't been all that interesting to watch since his Game 1 start against the Braves in 2011.

But yeah, Darvish is interesting in a whole different way. I mean, both of them are interesting in different ways. But Strasburg is, I feel likeasburg is uh amazing independent of the batter like a lot of pitchers they're great to watch because you get to see these terrible swings and that's always what linscombe was linscombe would i mean he would throw us uh you know his splitter which was not on its own an interesting pitch but to see people swing so badly at it made it interesting and strasburg you get the feeling that if you never saw the batter it would still be incredible and uh darvish is different than both of them somewhere in the

middle i guess um so yeah all right we done with that uh yeah you have another i have uh one and a half uh fernando rodney blew a save today and fernando rodney had a 0.60 era last year and if he does that again then i will be a little bit closer to believing that he's not terrible um it's hard for me to get used to fernando rodney being good of course because i watched him closely for a lot of years but rj tells me that uh well do you remember last year rj uh one of rj's great finds was that rodney had moved over on the mound on the pitching rubber right and that it gave his i believe two seamer and change up different looks and seemed to maybe make a big difference um rj tells me that he is back on the other side of the rubber this year. Yeah, he IM'd me that earlier.

That's interesting. You'd think that a guy who made a change and then had an incredible season after being just kind of a, I don't know, league average, not even league average guy would stick with that change. I wonder what prompted that someone should ask him. Yeah, I mean, it's always possible that that change didn't mean all that much. But maybe it did, and it is interesting, yes. So I hope somebody will ask him about it.

Anyway, Rodney blew the game today, and then he got the win. But, you know, he wasn't horrible. He basically gave up one good hit, and I think he walked one batter. It was sort of like not dominant Rodney, but also not the worst kind of Rodney. So I don't know. If you had to guess, what would you guess is the likelihood that Rodney is not saving games in September? Pretty low. Yeah, it's pretty low, right?

You pretty much have faith in him at this point right you pretty much have faith in him at this point i have i pretty much have faith in him at this point i would say maybe a like a one in six chance that he blows it yeah which i guess i would say that about any closer yeah not any closer but most closers um and so the other one this one is a little, well, so for reasons I won't get into, for the last four or five days I've been fighting over the question of whether Tommy Malone is good or not. Like I've had to know this for a particular reason. And I've been going back and forth and I just couldn't, I mean, you know, like you go back into our archives and read what the prospect guy said about him. I mean, you know, like you go back into our archives and read what the prospect guy said about him. And it's really, really cruel and unusual.

Even though he had like a 12 to 1 strike out to walk ratio in AAA. And, you know, he struck out more than a batter an inning and only allowed nine home runs all season. And everything was there. But, you know, this stuff is fringy. He's a lefty with, you know, mid to high 80s stuff. And I just couldn't convince myself one way or the other. I finally decided today that I was going to say he's good. I was going to accept that he's good. He gave up two home runs in the first inning to the Mariners,

which was confirmation bias because I knew he was going to do that. I knew that he was going to give up way too many home runs to, you know, this time through the league. And, you know, he just couldn't fool everybody forever. And then after that, he's been dominant all game in the next six innings. I think he's allowed two base runners, struck out four, walked one, and hasn't allowed a run. And now he's going to get a nice little win. So it goes both ways. You have not told our listeners, I don't think, about your 2013 scouting initiative. It's not necessary.

I'll get to it maybe sometime. Okay. Okay, I have just a couple quick ones, I think. One is Sean Markham. So this is an off-the-field one. This is not something that has happened in a game because Sean Markham is not pitched in a game. He started the season on the disabled list,

and the Mets don't seem to really know what's wrong with him. He was described as having a shoulder impingement during spring training and has kind of had some fleeting shoulder issues in each of the past two spring trainings. So the Mets said it wasn't anything serious. They gave him a cortisone shot. Then he was placed on the disabled list with bicep tendonitis, and now his injury is being described as neck pain, and he's expected to fly. He's in Florida. He's flying, I think, as he listened to this to see team doctors and hopefully figure out what's going on there. So I think I have a bias in favor of players who are coming off of injuries. I think this is something that I've had

when I used to play fantasy baseball and just generally have. If a team signs a guy to what seems like a fairly inexpensive deal, and that guy's been good in the past and he's coming off an injury, somehow I always seem to think that it's a smart move and then it's going to pay off and that it's low risk and that it's high reward can i can i speculate that the genesis of this was in 2009 when the red sox signed brad penny and john smoltz am i am i close uh i don't know oh yeah i guess i liked i don't know if that was the genesis but maybe that was that was another time it happened. And there was another, the Red Sox also signed either that year or the same year.

It was like Wade Miller. Oh, yeah, definitely. Love that one. Different year. Love that move. Yeah, I remember at the time thinking, why didn't the Yankees make that move? Wade Miller, what a great low-risk, high-reward pickup. Did he ever pitch for the Red Sox?

If he did, it was briefly and poorly. Yeah, he pitched 91 innings with a 5 ERA or something. Poorly. He pitched 91 innings with a five ERA or something. So, yeah, so I think I have this belief. And I had the same thing about Markham when he signed a one-year, $4 million deal. And meanwhile, you know, Kevin Correa was getting two years and $10 million. And I thought, wow, what a great move. Sean Markham for one year and $4 million. But, I mean, there's a reason why Sean Markham signs for one year and $4 million, right?

I mean, no one has faith that he can stay healthy, and he never does. And, I mean, I guess even in his seasons when he's injured, he still is generally good when he is on the mound, and maybe for one year and four million if he pitches 100 innings and has a 3-5 ERA or something then he's worth it anyway but I don't know I guess the fact that he has just been injured right off the bat here has kind of made me I guess the the opposite of confirmation bias I've I've re-evaluated my thinking and my stance on these deals for guys coming off of injuries. I'm going to be less optimistic about them than I have been in the past. I mean, it's really hard to start thinking of examples where this worked.

Yeah, it's hard while you're recording a podcast. But they happen, I think. They happen a lot the other way. Yeah, and I mean, I guess, especially if it's someone like Markham or Nick Johnson, who's just year after year after year, if it's just a one-time thing or if it's like more of a freak injury or something, but in that case, you're probably not going to get as big a discount anyway. But yeah, I guess just Markham struggling and, and Russell Carlton's article about how much a previous pitching injury increases the risk of a subsequent pitching injury.

I'm just, I'm going to, I'm not going to give up on the, the, the coming off of injury guys, but I am not going to be as uh complimentary of those moves as i have been all right okay i was going to talk briefly about the tiger's bullpen you're going to be mad at me uh why don't i take it off the air okay uh maybe

yeah maybe tomorrow we'll talk about that or we maybe we can talk about some things that have uh defied our expectations so far or maybe we'll actually have an idea for something to talk about um so we will be back with our last show of the week tomorrow