Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 176: Jose Fernandez and Service Time/Jose Bautista and Umpire Payback

Episode Date: April 8, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about why the Marlins have put service-time considerations aside in Jose Fernandez’s case, then discuss Jose Bautista’s comments about umpires.

Good morning and welcome to episode 176 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you doing? Very well. Did you watch, did you see Jose Fernandez at all? No, I was out, but I was watching on my phone as he struck out more and more people. How did his stuff look on the phone? I could not tell. You know, I actually have an idea for a piece that I've wanted to get to for a really long time.

In fact, I wanted to do it for my second ever piece for Baseball Perspectives two years ago, but I've never gathered everybody together. But what I want to do is take a pitcher who we all know nothing about, so like probably a September call-up that we've never heard of, and have one person watch the game on TV, one person listen on the radio, one person watch from the field, one person just look at the pitch effects

and describe the pitcher and see how different our descriptions are of him. It's a good idea, isn't it? Yeah. So you were watching, I assume? I wasn't. I just went and watched the highlights, Jose Fernandez's major league debut on MLB.com, and I cannot possibly believe that that's real. I also can't believe that he is not the number one prospect in baseball.

I can't believe that he's not a bigger deal than Matt Moore was a year ago. It is unthinkable how good he looked. I mean, I only saw 11 pitches and they were specifically chosen. They were all strikeouts. But you should see how far behind his fastball these guys were. I mean, they were hysterically behind his fastball. Really incredible. I mean, it is like the fastest 97 that you'll ever see.

It was really awesome. It was great. That is absolutely a worthwhile highlight to go watch. Reason to watch the Marlins. That's good. For like two more starts or something, right? He'll get replaced by the much more reliable Nathan Eovaldi. You'd think so, but they haven't, I don't know. They seem to sort of suggest that he was

maybe, uh, up for good or that they would cross that bridge when they got to it or something. I don't know. Jason talked about it on his podcast and thought he would be up for the year. Uh, and I heard an interview with a Marlins beat writer who said that he might very well be up for the year. So I don't know. I'm certainly, if he has a couple more starts like that it would be hard to send him down I guess why do you suppose um the Marlins don't care about service time when everybody else does do you do you think there's anything to the idea that they figure they're going to trade them they have in the past cared about service time I think, with Stanton and Cabrera, I think. I think they did the service time thing, hold a guy down.

Miguel Cabrera? Yeah, I think so. Well, Miguel Cabrera was a child at the time. Right. Well, but I don't know. Maybe that's not a good defense. I don't know. I think there's some precedent for them caring about it.

The interview I was listening to was on Keith Law's podcast, and he was talking to Clark Spencer, I think, Marlins beat writer, and he speculated that it was a PR move mostly, that the Marlins have just had such an awful offseason. Their fans are making fun of them just as much as everyone else is, and their fans are making fun of them just as much as everyone else is. And so he thought it was sort of a PR thing to give people a reason to watch the Marlins and maybe to make the Marlins look like they care a little less about saving money. But I don't know.

It's kind of strange considering how cheap they've been in every other area that they wouldn't just hold him down for a little while. I mean, he's so young, so inexperienced, and the Marlins aren't going to win this year. So it seems like the perfect time to play some service time games. And they wouldn't even be service time games. No one expected him to be up. Right. No one expected him.

Right. I mean, he wasn't even going to be in AAA, if we're going to say. I mean, I guess if you're trying to build some sort of plausible deniability about your sinister motives, I mean, this is a pretty cheap way to say, hey, look, we did a thing that was patently irrational, if you're just talking about a money-saving team. So I guess in that sense, it it's very cheap it's a very cheap way of of having buying something to point to it's like a nice token thing that they can do uh but also i mean what how much goodwill can it possibly build i mean it's this it seems like if you're gonna invest your money in pr stuff probably like a year from now when things quiet down might be more effective.

Miguel Cabrera, by the way, debuted on June 20th, and Giancarlo Stanton debuted on June 8th, and that's totally right in that suspicious zone. So I now assume that both of those are completely service time decisions. Yes. Anyway, and, you know, the other thing is that Jose Fernandez will pitch. I mean he'll be on a fairly – I assume he'll be on a fairly strict innings limit. I think they said 150 to 170.

So I wonder if he goes 150 by like the end of July or like mid-August, say mid-August. Do they send him down at that point or like what do you do with him because you don't give him that you don't waste a 25 man roster spot on him i guess you dl him you figure out a reason to dl him with some sort of tired arm or something but i wonder if they send him down and then keep him from hitting free agency. Because as long as he spends two weeks sometime in the season in the minors, he won't hit free agency for an extra year. He'll be a super two, but he won't hit free agency until the end of the year.

So you don't have to do it until after another year. So you don't have to do that at the beginning of the year. They could figure, hey, we're not going to keep him on the roster all year anyway. Yeah, good point. They could do that. All right. Well, that's not what we're here to talk about today, is it? No, not primarily. So we're going to talk about Jose Bautista, who was, well, where I heard about this was Ken Rosenthal sternly lecturing him to chill out.

I wonder if Ken Rosenthal will take over Peter Gammon's place as the sort of designated lecturer, the sort of one person who has the moral credibility to tell somebody to chill out when Gammon's is no longer doing it. Anyway, Bautista has a bit of a war going on with umpires. He seems to think that he is being, if not picked on, certainly the victim of bad umpiring. And you wrote about this. I did. You wrote about this this weekend. You looked at whether Bautista gets worse calls than the average player. And what did you find?

He does not. Okay. Yeah. I mean, he said some things. Basically, he implied, I guess, that maybe calls are not going his way because he is so demonstrative when he disagrees with a call. And he says he understands umpires make mistakes now and then, He says he understands umpires make mistakes now and then, but he said seven or eight times out of ten that he disagrees with an umpire when he goes back and looks at the video.

He concludes that he was right. And so he, I don't know, he, well, he said, just because one guy reacts more than the other, then every single time there's a close pitch, it's a strike. Or are you going to go by the parameters defined by Major League Baseball? What's a strike and what's a ball? So yeah, I look to see if more pitches outside the strike zone are called strikes on him and more or fewer pitches inside the strike zone are called balls. And nope. fewer pitches inside the strike zone are called balls, and nope. He gets more favorable calls than the average batter or the average non-pitcher batter over the period of time that I looked at, which was the past three years, which is sort of the relevant time for Jose Bautista

when everyone has known who he is. And it has changed a little bit in each of the last two seasons. He has gotten slightly less favorable calls, which perhaps could be some sort of trend as word spreads that he is a difficult guy to deal with for umpires. But there's no real conclusive evidence to suggest that. Even last year year he was basically getting a league average strike zone. So, I mean, I understand. He basically said,

I am a competitive guy and it bothers me when this happens more than the average player. And I guess, I mean, if that's kind of the downside to his hyper-competitiveness, which probably plays a part in his being such a good player, then that's probably worth it, I guess, for Toronto. There was some talk, John Gibbons was kind of worried that there would be payback, whether in Batista's at-bats or in his teammates, and that calls would go against the Blue Jays. And he actually talked to him about it after an incident this spring. And that's always possible. It's pretty hard to prove that

that's not happening. But I don't know. It doesn't seem like that big a deal. I guess it's kind of annoying maybe to watch it if you're a Blue Jays fan and you have to see your star player freaking out about calls that are usually pretty acceptable. upset about in this most recent game, it was the Blue Jays opener on Tuesday, were pretty defensible calls, pretty fine calls. One of them was within the rulebook strike zone, and the other was just barely outside it, but it was a 3-0 count, and a pitch in that location on a 3-0 count when umpires call the strike zone bigger is pretty much almost always a strike. So he kind of has a point that umpires don't call the rulebook strike zone. They don't. It's the actual strike zone that they call is kind of an ellipse, whereas the rulebook strike zone is a rectangle. And the actual strike zone that they call shrinks and grows depending on the count, which is not something the rulebook strike zone is a rectangle, uh, and the actual strike zone that they call shrinks and

grows depending on the count, which is not something the rule book strike zone does. So in that sense, I guess you kind of have a complaint if you, if you want to complain about that, but he's been in the big leagues for 10 years. And by now you'd think he'd have kind of come to terms with the idea that, that the rulebook strike zone is not the one that is actually in practice so um first off i'm watching uh one of these gifts in your piece and i noticed that the uh masterson strikes him out and the catcher runs off with the baseball and the umpire just takes another ball out of his his ball bag and tosses it to the mound uh does the catcher no longer roll the ball out to the mound?

Is that just a completely dead tradition? I don't know. I didn't notice that. The catcher just takes off with the ball. I mean, it's theft. I don't know. Certainly it's a waste of baseballs. So I was trying to think about whether I think that umpires would hold us against him.

And I don't obviously know, but I'm based on what I know about umpiring culture. And there are a couple of things at play here. One is that guys yell at umpires because they're trying to get the next call. I was reading Bruce Weber's book about umpires. I was skimming it in anticipation of this. There's a passage about when the Braves used to pitch, the whole game plan was to try to get more and more inches off the plate. One of the strategies for this is that they would just be yelling at the umpire the entire game and umpires hated these games they hated it when glaviner maddox was

pitching they wanted the guys out of the game as quickly as possible because you know they were basically fighting with these pitchers over the strike zone and if they didn't give them these pitches the whole dugout screaming at them the catchers yelling at them and it worked i mean it wasn't the case that umpires said well screw these guys they're being mean to me i'm not going to give it to them they i mean even the umpires kind of acknowledge that like before you know it you're giving them that that ground i mean i i'm blanking what the phrase is but there's actually a a uh and a uh phrase uh that is in popular culture that takes this principle and puts it in other circumstances like called working the umps or whatever, working the refs, something like that. There's some phrase like that, right?

Do you know the phrase? Yeah, no. I don't know exactly what you're thinking of. Yeah, it's like what you say when politicians are bad-mouthing the media. They say that they're working the refs or something like that and what they're basically doing is saying hey come on you're not giving me this call give me the next one and you do it by being rude and dismissive to them but on the other hand umpires according to weber's book umpires also kind of see themselves as these moral arbiters who are tasked with kind of rewarding the good guys subconsciously

and keeping parity in the game. And that's where the 3-0 auto-strike comes from, is the idea of keeping parity in the game. So I could see if you think that the guy's a bad guy and you're subconsciously sort of, you see yourself as being on the side of the good guys, I could see it coming into play. It'd be interesting to look at not just

batista but if you could identify some sort of group of players who might have reason to think that umpires are mad at them such as like roberto alomar or milton bradley or i don't know who else uh to see if calls systematically go against them i mean obviously you couldn't do it as well for pre-pitch FX guys, but I wonder if we could ever work up a big enough group of people to look at besides Bautista. But my guess is that if anything, well, my guess is that the number of calls that would be changed by umpires' personal impressions of Bautista would be minuscule and would be just as likely to favor him as go against him. That's my guess. Yeah, I would agree. I didn't really expect to find anything before I looked. And I mean, yeah, I can imagine if you're an umpire, I guess it seems just

as plausible to me that you would give a guy a call here and there just to avoid being yelled at and having to yell back and just the hassle of getting into an argument and getting shown up and having people yell at you. Yeah, I could certainly see how that would lead to more favorable calls, if anything. But I think umpires are probably pretty impartial about things. Yeah, I think so too. They're major league umpires probably in part because they're not holding grudges and making calls based on emotion and how they feel about particular players.

So I'm sure that happens from time to time, but I would expect that they are pretty professional on the whole. I would think that they are pretty professional on the whole. I would think so too, and I also would guess that Bautista is not quite such an outlier as he implies. I think that the umpires take crap from everybody all the time, and that one of the probably, I don't know, probably one of the defining features of the umpire-player or umpire-manager relationship is that everybody is condescending and dismissive the umpire player or umpire manager relationship is that everybody is condescending and dismissive toward umpires because those guys aren't athletes and they're not, you know, they didn't kind of, they're not involved in the game in the same way. So I

would imagine that the amount of abuse that they take is probably pretty brutal. I also didn't realize that Bautista had any of this sort of reputation around him. And I don't know that, I don't know how many other umpires did know that he had this reputation around him. But the thing that he said, which you quoted this week, which is, sometimes I have trouble more than other players dealing with my production being affected by somebody else's mediocrity, is a pretty jacked thing to say. And if ever a guy was going to get the short end of a stick from umpires, it would be after saying that.

That seems like a finable offense, the sort of thing that umpires will talk to each other about. And it will be interesting maybe to redo this analysis in about 18 months because that's a jerky thing to say. Yeah. about 18 months because that's a jerky thing to say. Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't really aware of his history of doing this before this year,

but apparently it has been going on for a couple years and has drawn attention in the past, primarily since Jose Bautista has been a player that people are interested in. It's probably likely that he has always been like this going back to 2004, I guess was his first season, but no one paid any particular attention to Jose Bautista back then. So since he has become a prominent player, it has been more notable and people have talked about it more and it has made more notable and people have talked about it more and it has made more news

so probably not that big a deal in the end but it's something that people can write columns about and I can write a blog post about and we can talk about it on our podcast alright that's the end of our podcast we'll be back tomorrow with episode 177 emails at podcast.baseballperspectives.com for Wednesday's show.

And we hope you have a nice day of watching baseball tomorrow. I have one closing observation. Do you remember over the winter, I think it was a listener email show, someone asked who the next person to get the Chipper Jones treatment would be with the farewell gifts and being celebrated in every ballpark he goes to. And I think we concluded that it would be Rivera, right, I think, or he was the most likely, and it is happening. He received a display, a photo display of him pitching at tiger stadium and Comerica park with

glass bottles containing dirt from the pitcher's mound at both ballparks. So I hope that the gifts get crazier and crazier as the season goes on. All right. I have no more things to say. Okie doke. See ya.