Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 178: Batter-Pitcher Matchups/Outfield Alignments/A Player Who Can’t Play Defense/The End of Innings

Episode Date: April 10, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about batter-pitcher matchups, curious outfield alignments, where to put a player who can’t play defense, and what baseball would be like without innings.

I have a question about this. A question that involves logic! Good morning and welcome to episode 178 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. It's email Wednesday, but first, Ben, we fixed the Astros. Yes, we did. All they had to do was, I guess, face Bry Maurer and be bashed by us on the podcast. So right now, J.D. Martinez is up with the bases loaded. It's the fifth inning. And if he homers, then the Astros will have doubled their season total of runs. And how many strikeouts?

Like five. But they have five strikeoutsouts but also five walks and of the five strikeouts three of them are from brett wallace who is now hitting 50 150 with 16 strikeouts in 20 plate appearances gosh but like chris carter uh has hit like a legitimate major leaguer today. Sort of. He struck out with the bases loaded and nobody out in the first. And I quit watching the game at that point, convinced that Chris Carter would never get another major league hit. And since then, homer single single.

Break up the Astros. Yeah, yeah. All right, so we're going to answer some questions. You guys came through with a whole bunch of great questions. Yes, really came through. Lots of good ones and lots of ones that we wish going to answer some questions. You guys came through with a whole bunch of great questions. Yes, really came through. Lots of good ones and lots of ones that we wish we could answer but are not smart enough to answer off the cuff. Yeah, but sometimes these questions find their way into full shows. Or articles or blog posts.

That's exactly right. That's what I was going to say that if you'd let me finish. Well, that's our chemistry. We finish each other's sentences. We step on each other's sentences. All right. So first I'm going to start with one from Luke that is near and dear to my heart because it is about a totally unrealistic rule change. Luke writes, and you're going to really know right off the top how awesome

this idea is currently teams take turns hitting and pitching and alternate offense and defense after three outs are recorded instead of alternating at the end of each inning and in between each happening what if teams only alternated offense and defense once a team that's in the field would be required to record 27 outs before they're able to go into the dugout and get their turn at the plate then the home team would come to bat and record 27 outs at the plate what do you think the implications of this rule change would be and i'm assuming that the the bases would clear after every three uh because otherwise that would be absurd um so the bases would clear and this would simply be a way to save energy and time, which is...

I think cricket would sue for copyright infringement. Cricket. Cricket is the thing that you have on your TV? If you're watching cricket, it is. Oh, cricket, the sport. Yes. Yeah. Cricket, the sport would sue for copyright infringement. Well, the thing about this is that it wouldn't have much benefit.

I think that you could only imagine this happening in wartime when you have to save on fuel or something. in like wartime when you have to save on fuel or something. And, you know, like you could imagine that maybe in a dystopian future where we were so conditioned to make the most out of every second because of technology and people just got sick of wasting time that you might do something this extreme in order to save time. But how would it change the game? I think there's a ton of ways that it would change the game. One of the sort of subtle ways is that relievers would have to, I would think, warm up a lot more because you wouldn't have the 10 minutes in between innings to warm up. So you would

constantly be worried that you were going to need a reliever in four minutes. And so it seems like you would almost have to have like a constant stream of relievers warming up from about the 20th out on, or maybe the 15th out on, knowing that it could get away from you quickly and you don't have the end of the inning to bail you out. But I think the most significant question that this raises, But I think the most significant question that this raises, and you might have another question that this raises, but I guess the question is if you assume that fatigue would be a factor, that standing out there for an hour and a half or an hour or whatever would tiring out the hitters at the end of the game because they've also played a long game. Who benefits from a tired sport? And in most sports, the offense benefits from a tired field of play. If everybody's tired on a basketball court, the defense breaks down.

If everybody's tired on a football field, the defense breaks down. If everybody's tired on a football field, the defense breaks down. And my guess is that what this would benefit is the team that bats last because you would have an exhausted – you would have exhausted defenders by the end of that marathon stretch at the end of a long day. Yeah. I think once I was reading about cricket and how cricket works, and I think there is an advantage for the team that bats second. I don't know whether it's because of that or because they kind of know what their target is

and they know what their goal is and how many whatever you call a cricket run they have to score. But yeah, I think that's right. You would probably be pretty tired having stood on the field and chased balls down for an hour and a half or however long it would take. Unfortunately, we would never get to see this kind of baseball because broadcasters would not make any money and would not televise it anymore. So that would be sad.

It's true that that's the case unless all advertising is embedded in the product itself, which is probably going to happen at some point anyway. I also wonder if, I mean, I actually remember, well, okay, so right now, when you alternate, you really have to, I mean, unless the game gets out of hand in the first couple innings, most baseball games have some tension to them for a fairly long stretch of the day. And in this situation, a lot of games, like I'm looking at the Padres game, the Padres and the Dodgers. The Padres beat the Dodgers 9-3 today, but five runs came in the bottom of the eighth.

It was a really good game until the bottom of the eighth. And in the scenario that is being described, the game would be essentially over halfway through because the Padres would have scored nine, and you know that the Dodgers aren't likely to score nine. The other thing is that, like, okay, imagine that the Dodgers score none, and then the Padres score one in the first three outs of their inning, of their turn at bat. You'd have an hour and five-minute game, basically. You'd have the pitcher shut down the Dodgers for an hour,

and then you'd come in and you'd score right away. So you would have – it would be a way to save baseball in a way. You know, you would, by save, I mean conserve baseball. You'd play a lot less. Yeah. You would play a lot less baseball. It wouldn't just be running up and down that you would eliminate. You would play a lot fewer innings, which maybe that's good.

Maybe that would be something that teams would eliminate you would play a lot fewer innings which maybe that's good maybe that would be something that teams would would like yeah i guess i'd rather just see a shorter game i'd rather just see seven innings of baseball maybe yeah of all the rule changes that we've discussed i have to say this is this this isn't one that i'm dying for no i'm it was it was good to talk about but it is not one that I would like to see enacted. While we were talking, the Astros loaded the bases with nobody out and scored no runs. And Brett Wallace struck out. So he's now at something like 45-98-45 with 17 strikeouts and 21 plate appearances. Now reading about the advantage that the second team that bats in cricket has.

I don't know cricket, so another show maybe you'll have to explain the rules to me. Well, I don't think I'm qualified for that. All right, Colby asks, Small sample sizes are the talk of the early season, but we continue to use them all season in matchup versus pitcher stats. How many ABs against a single pitcher would it take before that stat is meaningful, especially how many ABs is ideal to start making conclusions? First of all, Colby, careful with your words.

We do not continue to use them all season. People continue to use them all season. We are continually exposed to them. However, you will not hear Ben or I use them except for maybe once or twice in our lives uh do you have i know this is actually something that's been studied tango has has brought this up i don't have it in front of me but do you recall anything uh as i recall it's it's generally more at bats than than two people will ever have against each other at the point at which it becomes significant. I mean, most guys, and then even when it does become a really huge sample size, then you

kind of are talking about two completely different players from when they first started facing each other. So if a batter and pitcher face each other in 1998 and then they're facing each other again in 2010, I don't know if the 1998 plate appearance is really predictive of what's going to happen. I think if you just look at pure outcomes and how well the batter batted, there is not much to it for most people ever. There's not much to it for most people ever. But I think it's possible to get a little more granular with it and maybe find some significance if you are looking at, I don't know, I mean, you could presumably look at all of the things that describe how a pitcher pitches and what pitches he has

and where he tends to pitch and how hard he throws the ball and compare how a hitter does against similar hitters or hitters with, with or pitchers with a similar stuff. And maybe you could come up with something that way and just kind of looking at the approach of the pitcher instead of the actual outcomes but i don't know uh even so i'm sure it would take some time and it would be kind of hard to know um if if it is predictive or if it's just descriptive i don't know basically that's why we ignore them, I guess. We just don't really ever think there's much to them. Yeah. This is a thing that intuitively makes sense that you would

be able to look at these things and find some significance. But I think it's a case where the statistics will never give you an answer. The scouting might give you an answer. And so I don't totally hold it against a manager who occasionally makes these decisions. I think that managers at least attribute far too many of these decisions to this data. And I don't know if they're just saying it or not, but it comes up far more than it should. So here's the problem with it. And it's a math problem. Basically, the problem is even if these sorts of cases are all over the place out there, that there are lots of cases where a batter has a hard time against a pitcher or vice versa, and it shows up in their results,

the problem is that there are so many batters facing so many pitchers constantly. I mean, thousands and thousands of these matchups are happening, and that you're essentially going to have tons and tons of false leads because through random fluctuation, you're going to get tons and tons of false leads. So even if they are out there, you're much, much more likely to get a false positive. And so there's really no way of finding the real positives within the false positives i think this i think this is what is something referred to as bayesian bayesian odds uh i think this is what it refers to when people talk about bays uh something along these lines but i don't really understand it uh but that's yeah that's basically right that's basically... between those two, then you can sort of adjust your original expectation. But it would take a really long time for that to kind of overcome

or really even heavily influence what you expected just based on how good both of them are. And in the book, one of the studies they did was just to look at the most extreme batter-pitcher matchups over some period of time, just hitters who absolutely owned pitchers and vice versa, and then look at those same hitters and pitchers over some subsequent period of time, and there was really no predictive power to the initial ownage. It wasn't sustained over that second sample.

So even when you look at the most extreme matchups, it's not something that tends to continue. All right. Next question is from Zachary, who says, Imagine you are the manager of an NL team that possesses a player with Bonzian or Ruthian ability at the player at the plate. Every time this player comes up to bat, you are virtually assured that this player will cause damage, but there's a catch. The player is completely incapable of playing defense. He

cannot catch, throw, or do anything that remotely resembles that of a baseball defender. My question is where would you play this player on the field? Um, and he gives an answer and I actually want to talk about his answer a little. There's some, I'd say that there's some parameters to this question that aren't quite discussed. For instance, when he says he's completely incapable of playing defense, he cannot catch, throw, do anything. You really have to decide how far that goes. Most human beings, I think, are capable of catching a throw. And so you have to know whether he's capable of catching a throw or not. If he's not capable of catching a throw,

then that rules out first base. But I've actually long had as a topic idea that I'll never get to the question of if baseball had some rule where if you got ejected from the game, you just you couldn't be replaced. You got ejected. How would managers align their defense with eight guys? How would they align it with seven? This is kind of that question, but we're going to assume some level of competence. In that case, you would just say first base. It's obviously first base because first baseman has to cover the least ground. The limits of how much a first baseman can can do damage are set by the foul lines and because of that it's where they put fat guys who can't do anything

i'm going to assume that he uh was envisioning someone who couldn't catch he can't do anything defensively he just stands there and balls go by him. And so his idea was that you would put him at catcher when there's no one on base, right? Yeah, well, we'll talk about his idea, but do you have an answer? I would probably just put him at the positions that get the fewest opportunities. So I guess I would just kind of put him in left field and maybe switch him between left and right, depending on, on who's batting.

Um, yeah, if he can't play, if he can't play first, like if he can't catch a throw, then first is, is impossible because first base touches the ball far too often. I wonder if,

I wonder if third base, even though third base is considered a sort of semi-premium position, I wonder if third base is a place where the damage would mostly be singles, it wouldn't be doubles, and theoretically maybe the shortstop could shade over there and cover up some of those flaws. I mean, if you have the first baseman playing further off the line, the second baseman playing closer up the middle, and the shortstop shading way over toward third base,

I wonder if that's the place. I mean, in slow pitch, when you only have eight guys, you always leave an infield spot open. Yeah, and I guess you would just spread people out more than usual. So his answer, though uh is that he would well with with uh okay so his answer is for any instance that there are no runners on base and the count is fewer than two strikes this player will play catcher with no men on base and no opportunity for a drop third strike there's virtually no need for a catcher sure it will eventually become annoying to watch this

player chase after the ball pick it up and walk it back to the pitcher after every pitch, which incidentally, slow pitch softball, I have had that guy on my team. But this is winning baseball games we are talking about. So I actually think that there are two issues with this logic. One is that the man would be dead by about the fourth batter. If you can't catch a throw from the second baseman, you certainly can't catch a major league pitch of any sort. And you have to have a credible catcher there that can protect the umpire, or you're going to be kicked off the field. So I think that's one problem is the injury thing. The other thing is that Matt Corey talked about this at one point

in an article. There are all sorts of ways that if you really wanted to, you could delay the game for your advantage. I mean, there's nothing in the rules that stops the catcher from going out and talking to the pitcher after every pitch. And yet there are, I mean, these are sort of unspoken rules that lubricate the game and that keep the game going. And I just think that if you start doing things that are that egregious, that are kind of like loopholes in the basic fundamental play of the game, then the rule would be changed pretty quickly. change pretty quickly. And so I think if a team actually tried to do this, it would take about a day before Major League Baseball passed some emergency measure saying that the catcher must stay behind the plate for the entirety of an at-bat. Yeah. Every now and then, Bill Beck would do something crazy, and there would be about a day lag, and then there would be some new rule

that prevented him from doing that. But I think it's probably a stretch to assume that having a catcher who can't catch doesn't affect the pitcher. I mean, right? Let's talk about Jose Molina for a minute. This was not an excuse to talk about Molina. But I mean, pitchers are used to having a target to aim to and and aren't really used to calling their own pitches so presumably this this guy doesn't know how to

put up a good target or at least the cat the pitcher will have no confidence that he will that catch the ball where the target is set uh and the pitcher would also have to call his own pitches unless I guess he looked to the dugout for pitch calls. So I would think that the pitcher would have a tough time finding the strike zone or a tougher time finding the strike zone with a catcher who is completely inept. Yeah, I think that's true, too. I actually don't think that there's any situation where the catcher is a useless part of the defense. All right, this might be the last one we get to. This is from Nate Freeberg.

Sorry, I'm not supposed to say last names. Sorry, Nate. This is from Nate. I have a question regarding outfield defensive alignments that's been bugging me. Sometimes you'll see managers feature an outfield lineup one day, and they'll later switch that lineup despite featuring the same personnel. For instance, on opening day at home, Joe Maddon had Matt Joyce in left field and Sam Fold in right. On Monday in Texas, he put Fold in left and Joyce in right. I know something like ballpark configuration may

influence a manager to leverage his better defender in one corner, depending on the park. Maybe this is what Maddon was up to uh and then he gives some other examples uh that go counter to that idea so just curious if you ever noticed this pattern before and what your thoughts are on it i'm currently looking up those games i have a hypothesis uh that i expect will be borne out uh do you have a Yeah, it's borne out. Okay. What is it? Well, actually, so, I mean, my theory is just that with a left-handed pitcher, you're more likely to have a right-handed lineup facing you. And so you'd put your faster guy in left

field, expecting more balls to be pulled and sort of harder hit balls to be pulled. And against a right-handed lineup, you'd expect to see the opposite. So the Rays' opening day, the example he gives is fold in right field. Oh, but it doesn't work. It goes backwards unless he thinks Joyce is the better defender. Interesting. Because Madden had fold in right field for Price against the Orioles, the mostly right-handed Orioles lineup.

And then Madden had fold in left field for Hellickson against a somewhat, yeah, mostly left-handed. Well, it's about a 55% left-handed lineup against the Rangers. So maybe, that is odd. That's odd. I'm surprised by that. That goes 100% counter to my theory. Huh. Well, I guess, I mean, pitchers probably differ in how many hits they allow to each field independent of handedness, I would think, right? There are probably pitcher spray charts that are meaningful in some way that aren't entirely lefty-righty.

It could still be that. Yeah, so it could still be the pitcher. I guess that would still be my number one theory that, I don't know, either just because of how hard a guy throws and the likelihood that hitters will pull him as opposed to hitting to the opposite field or uh i don't know maybe he gives up different amounts of grounders and fly balls to each field um i don't know it would be interesting actually to do an article of some sort and try to figure out what the answer to that would be or what madden may have been

thinking there or yeah maybe you could just ask him because he would probably tell you or give you some sort of interesting answer. I predict an unfiltered. We'll come out of this question. All right. Well, that's going to be the end of this show. We appreciate your questions. We appreciate the ones we didn't get to and hopefully they'll appear in some format somewhere down the line. In the meantime, if you have new questions or as questions develop in your mind, you may email us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. We'll be back tomorrow to talk about topics of our choosing.