Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 192: Stephen Strasburg’s New Injury Scare/The Underhyped Manny Machado

Episode Date: April 30, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the news about Stephen Strasburg’s forearm and talk about why Manny Machado’s performance this season hasn’t gotten more attention.

Casper! Your dependable friend So if you've got a little trouble or you're taking a fall You can smooth away your tears All you've got to do is call Casper! Good morning and welcome to episode 192 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller.

Sam, it is 12.04 a.m. Eastern Time. Do you know where Casper Wells is? I do. Yeah, where is Casper Wells? Chicago. Yes. We have another day and another Casper Wells transaction. Also, we've learned that the A's paid $100,000 to the Blue Jays for Casper Wells when they got him.

So I guess the Blue Jays made a little bit of a profit on there. Yeah. Do you know what you have to pay to claim a guy? Is it, I feel like, I don't know, for Rule 5 it's $50,000, I guess, but I don't know if it's the same for picking a guy off waivers. I, for some reason, the number that is in my head is 25, and I don't know if that's, well, okay, so $20,000 in 2009. Mm-hmm. So let's guess that it's somewhere around there. Okay.

It looks like $20,000 in 2011 as well. All right, so that's not a bad little profit. So it seems so odd, though, for the A's, because if we're to believe Moneyball, the movie and the book and I guess the TV show, is there a TV show about that? The A's, like Billy Beane has to fly to Cleveland in order to save $70,000 on Ricardo Rincon. So it feels weird that they would just give up $100,000 like that. I mean, think how many sodas you could put in a vending machine. And they got five plate appearances out of it.

So I don't know, maybe they're going to get $106,000 out of the White Sox. Maybe that's just how they roll. Yeah, so I guess it was Cespedes coming back that kind of took his roster spot with the A's. So I guess with the White Sox, I was looking to see if maybe they would actually keep him for a while. I don't know. They have, I mean, Rios is, this is a good Rios year so far.

And they have Deaza, who is not doing great. And they have Veceto, who is not hitting yet. I don't know whether he would start over one of those guys or whether it's just depth or whether he'd be a fourth guy. I guess they have also on their roster right now in the outfield, they have Jordan Danks. Maybe he's a Jordan Danks replacement. I don't know.

Maybe we'll be talking about him getting DFA'd on tomorrow's show. Yeah, maybe Casper Wells is just like Beanie Babies in the late 90s. Maybe this is a bubble market. Dutch tulips. Yes. Well, we will continue to monitor this story. What is your non-Casper Wells topic? Manny Machado.

Okay, and I guess mine is just by default kind of Steven Strasburg Are you paying attention to this Dodgers game at all? No, I'm focused completely on the podcast You weren't paying attention It's just an extraordinary game

before we get to our topics It's 12-0 in the fifth and that's a blowout but it doesn't quite capture just what a blowout it is. Through four innings, the Rockies also left eight men on, and as I'm watching it right now, they have a 588 on base percentage for the game, and Tyler Chatwood, the pitcher, is batting. He has a chance to get his fourth hit of the game in the fifth inning, and if he gets a hit, if he gets, oh, he has a chance to get his fourth hit of the game in the fifth inning. And if

he gets a hit, if he gets, oh, he just grounded out. If he had gotten a hit, then Dexter Fowler would have batted five times in five innings, while the Dodgers, meanwhile, have only turned the lineup over once. It's an extraordinary game. And the Dodgers are one two-run homer away from having the second-worst run differential in the National League. Who started for them? Ted Lilly. Ted Lilly. I guess that makes some sense.

Yeah. All right. So anyway, do you want to go first? Okay, I guess. It's just kind of a half-developed topic because it's a half-developed story. We don't really know what's wrong with Steven Strasburg, but all season people have kind of been saying that he doesn't look quite right. I was watching him pitch against the Braves earlier tonight, and he didn't look quite

Steven Strasburg-like. He didn't look quite Steven Strasburg-like. The Braves announcers were talking a lot about how he seemed to be kind of searching for his mechanics or kind of uncomfortable, and he was shaking his arm a lot, though that's something he always does. And he just hasn't looked really Phenom-esque yet this season. Although, I mean, to look at his numbers, you wouldn't really... Nothing really stands out as being terribly wrong. I mean, he hasn't struck out as many guys as he did last season. His velocity is exactly the same, basically.

He's not throwing fewer breaking balls or anything. I mean, there's no real red flag there, I guess. But after his start, there was some news, and national speed reporters started tweeting. Davy Johnson said that he has tightness in his forearm. He is getting some sort of medication. Doctors are examining it. It's too early to tell if his next start is in jeopardy, but you would think it probably is,

given how cautious they've been with him in the past. And it just sort of, it sucks, I guess. I'm not usually that upset about a player getting injured, but it's disappointing. Our lineup card topic that the staff is all contributing to this week is players who we wish would have stayed healthy in their careers. Um, and I, I hope Strasburg doesn't get added to that list of, of players that we wish would have stayed healthy, that we wish would have seen at their full powers for, for years at a time. Um, because we, we hoped and thought that this would be kind of the, the first season where he would be at full strength for an entire full season.

And, and we would kind of really get to see what he could do with with the leash taken off and and no more restrictions on his on his workload and everything and now a few starts into the season uh we have forearm issues and i guess a lot of people i mean just looking at kind of the the tweets responding to those tweets, you know, a lot of people were immediately making jokes about how, you know, if only they had been cautious with him last season, if only they had shut him down. Kind of the narrative, if this does turn out to be a significant injury, then I don't know. I guess it will just be one more piece of evidence that we don't know anything about pitcher injuries and follow, we just can't prevent them, at least with certain guys who maybe have some kind of mechanical precursor that leads to injury as he does or as people who know about those things or claim to know about those things say he does. So I don't know.

It's just It's disappointing, we talked a lot about Strasburg last season and You know, for non-performance Reasons and I hope that we don't have to do that Again this season, but now we are And And it has implications of course

For the Nationals who kind of Entered the season as I guess the Weakness with the Nationals entering the season was that they didn't have a good six starter, which is kind of a ridiculous weakness. But they were just so strong everywhere else that it was like there was nothing to complain about other than the fact that they didn't have more starting pitchers than they needed. starting pitchers than they needed.

But so now, you know, maybe they will have to dip into that depth, which was a little bit shaky. And I don't know that the Pocotic projection for the Nationals, I thought was pessimistic and you thought was pessimistic, I think. But I don't know, maybe not yet yet at least it hasn't been so we'll see and of course Dan Heron has

been more like I guess like he was last season than he was in seasons prior or at least home run wise he's given up a lot of them so that's a concern too. Um, anyway, those are things that I am thinking about that. Um, do you know what, uh, forearm tightness, like what is the, what is, what does that point to? I mean, is forearm tightness just,

just forearm tightness or is it like the sort of thing that shows up just before shoulder pain or sprained elbow? I think it's an elbow precursor thing, I think. I mean, not that this will definitely lead to something more serious or a more serious diagnosis, but I think that that can be a precursor to some sort of UCL thing or Tommy John thing. I think the first reports about that often say something about forearm. So Strasburg is the most obvious number one pick ever, basically. At the time, there was nothing remotely close to a number two pick in that draft compared to him. And, you know, he got the record setting bonus. And, you know, if you're ever going to take a, you know, if even the most dogmatic,

no such thing as a pitching prospect person would have taken Strasburg in that draft. And so when you were talking, I was wondering whether this has any implications about the idea that there truly is no safe pick and wondering whether the Nationals would look back at this in a decade and think, oh, geez, we didn't get that much out of our first round pick. Maybe we should have taken a position player and so then i'm looking at the draft and um the first round and really it's interesting because there are other guys who are somewhat successful uh in that first round but they're virtually all pitchers um except for trout who uh i don't know if the nationals were well i guess nationals wouldn't have been thinking about it but i don't know if i don't know if the Nationals were, well, I guess the Nationals wouldn't have been thinking about him,

but I don't know how many teams thought about him seriously as that high of a pick. I mean, he slipped to 25, but the Angels swore that he would have been their number two if they'd had the number two pick. But, you know, the guys who have been successful from that draft seem to basically all be pitchers. It's Zach Wheeler. It's Mike Miner.

It's Shelby Miller. And, you know, there's some decent prospects still coming. I guess maybe the exception to that might be Dustin Ackley, if you believe that Dustin Ackley is any – I don't know. I don't know what Dustin Ackley is at this point right now. So I don't know if anybody's going to look that snackly is at this point right now. So I don't know if anybody's going to look back in 10 years and think that was a good pick either. But gosh, that's not a very good draft, I guess, maybe is my point. But there's a lot of, basically the position players in that draft

really flopped heavily too. So I guess what I'm saying is that that would not probably be the lesson that I would take from this. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess Strasburg has been good in the – he's been so good in the brief time that he has pitched so far that maybe – I don't know. I wonder how far he is off from an average guy pick there already,

just in terms of average return. I wonder if he got, if something did, like let's say he ended up having to go back on the DL for two months or something like that right now. Like right now he goes on the DL. I wonder if the Nationals started extension talks with him, whether he would be receptive to that, knowing that he is an extremely high risk right now

and that he might never get a payday. I mean, he's been paid once, so maybe the team doesn't have all that much leverage over him because he's obviously never going to be poor. But, you know, right now, I now, it seems like all you have to do is kind of just start whispering names around him, and you could sort of freak him out and make him really question what he's doing with his life.

And it would be interesting if they signed a guy who was on the DL and who had never pitched 160 innings in a season if they approached him about an extension four years before he's even a free agent. But I'm all about weird extension talks. Yeah, that'd be an interesting one. Anyway, yeah, I don't know. I guess like we were talking about yesterday with the Upton trade and reevaluating it and whether it's fair to reevaluate it based on things that happened afterwards.

I would guess that you feel the same way about reevaluating the Strasburg shutdown based on things that happened afterwards. Yeah, I do feel the same. Okay. All right. So Manny Machado, who incidentally, just by the way, off topic, I learned this weekend that Riley Breckenridge does an impression of you on the podcast.

Really? Yeah. So just so you know, that's out there. I would love to hear that. I just thought of that while you were talking for a long time. All right. Manny Machado is playing like something very close to a star right now. He has been very hot at the plate for the last 10 games or so.

He has a 119 OPS plus right now. He has the 7th best fan graphs war, the 8th best baseball reference war. He's lower on ours. He's, I think, 64th in baseball, but he's still well above average. And defensive metrics adore him. 3rd best by UCR, 3rd best at any position, and 3rd best in defensive runs saved at any position. And he's very young.

Obviously, you guys all know this. He's about a month younger, a month older than Mike Trout was last year. And he's about four or five months, I think, older than Bryce Harper is now. And yet there's not nearly the hype around him unless there is and i don't know about it and i just wonder if you think that um it's too early to start talking about manny machado as uh like a bona fide uh like huge success story and if you have any insight into why uh he's not really lumped in with troutout and Harper or I guess maybe that's unfair maybe nobody should ever be lumped in with Trout and Harper but I guess why he's not I mean you

know I remember Phil Plantier getting more hype than Manny Machado seems to be getting as a pro and you know like all sorts of guys come up and have like few good months as a 21-year-old or even a 23-year-old, and it seems like the hype machine is at full speed. And Machado, it's been kind of quiet, it seems to me. I guess there was a fair amount of hype when he was first called up because the Orioles were an interesting story, and he was so young. And I don't know, we talked about him at the time. You, you really liked that decision to call him up as I recall. Um, and I don't know, I guess

maybe the fact that he is, he's not playing shortstop has something to do with it. I don't, like if he's, if he is a third baseman long-term, if they just kind of leave him there, I don't know whether they'll, they'll move him back over when JJ Hardy leaves or, or whether they'll just sort of think that he looks fine at third and they won't mess with him and they'll just leave him there. Um, I guess maybe that has something to do with it. he's not like a premium up the middle type player. Maybe that makes him a little less interesting or exciting. But I don't know. I mean, he certainly deserves to, I don't know.

I mean, I guess he was very hyped, I feel like, before this season. And I guess, I don't know, this season he hasn't been. It kind of feels like to me, too, or at least no one's freaking out about the fact that he has started pretty well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, clearly there's been hype about him throughout his career. It's what he's doing right now that seems to be a bit under the radar. Brett Laurie, for instance, seemed like he was a lot more – kind of got a lot more attention two years ago.

It might just be because there was no Trout and Harper at the time to set the bar impossibly high. My theory is that it's that he doesn't really hit homers, and he doesn't really steal bases. And he's not probably going to steal bases. He might hit homers, but he's not going to steal bases. And he doesn't play shortstop, and he doesn't have shortstop eligibility in fantasy. And so my theory is that this is actually mostly the fantasy tail wagging the dog, that he's not hyped because the average fan right now

views the sport to a large degree, especially out of market, to a large degree based on fantasy relevance. And Manny Machado is kind of a fringy fantasy player. He's sort of the classic... I mean, I guess this is actually... The things that I'm saying that describe a fringy fantasy player. He's sort of the classic... I mean, I guess this is actually... The things that I'm saying that describe a fringy fantasy player have always described underrated players and have been identified as things that Hall of Fame snubs excel in,

which is broad base of skills, not a lot of home runs, but yes, a lot of doubles, good defense, particularly good defense at a position like third or second, which doesn't have quite the same prestige as shortstop or center field or catcher. And so he's not, yeah, maybe he's just, he's not kind of classically sexy. He's more like real life sexy. He's not kind of classically sexy.

He's more like real life sexy. And so maybe that's why it's hard for that message to get out of Baltimore. Yeah. And Harper and Trout are out there doing their things. They are out there. I mean, there's probably a lot of tweets comparing Manny Machado to previous 20-year-olds that just aren't being written. comparing Manny Machado to previous 20-year-olds that just aren't being written, and there's a lot of probably baseball reference play index queries about him that aren't being queried because he's the clear number three in this race. He's not nearly as sexy as the other two.

Well, he should be appreciated more. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if the Orioles somehow make the playoffs again, whether he gets MVP push. I mean, obviously we don't know what he's even going to... Who knows what his stats will even look like in June, but whether his age

kind of helps or hurts in the building of his personal narrative. Okay. Anyway, alright, that'll do. All right, tomorrow is email show, so please send us emails. I believe we could use some more emails. So email us to them at podcast at baseballprospectus.com

and we will be back tomorrow.