Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 195: Bad Body Language/Upgrading Bullpens/Steroids and the Children/BABIP and Bad Luck

Episode Date: May 3, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss whether a pitcher’s body language can cost him strikes, whether it’s worth trading for relievers early in the season, a study about perceptions of steroid use, and whether a low BABIP is always unlucky.

And you obviously can look at things that are going to be per se unlucky and visualize that in your head why it went that way. But at the same time, there are so many things that came in between that unlucky inning and what things that I could have controlled, things that could have done better. Good morning and welcome to episode 195 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. It's me, Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. How are you doing, Ben? Okay. So we each brought a topic, and I don't know about you, but it's gotten to the point after 195 episodes where when I start looking for a topic, everything that I see that happens

in baseball, I think, well, that's something we talked about already and we should mention it to update yes already done i've had that feeling more and more lately yeah so like today um manny machado is raking he's two for three with a walk he's now got something like a 900 ops he's on pace to hit 67 doubles he's a super super duper star and so that would update what we talked about on tuesday and the tigers and the houston astros are in the 13th and uh the tigers right now have gotten two men on with one out and brian pena struck out and the astros might be about to get out of it and so that would be like what we talked about on wednesday when we talked about the joy of Extreme Extra Innings.

But alas, we do have to come up with new topics. So what have you brought today? I have more like a question and a comment. So I'm going to ask you something about bullpens, and then I'm going to just mention something about steroids. And I want to talk about – oh, and the Tigers got out. The Astros got out of it. So we're going to the bottom of the 13th.

So yeah, we might be up late tonight. So I want to talk about your article about Marcus Scudero that ran on Thursday at Baseball Prospectus. I also want to bring up something briefly that I observed today. So if possible, I'm going to start with that. We are all over the place. We are all over the place. It's Friday. It's loose. So today I watched Chris Medlin. And I just want to start with a caveat that I don't actually know what I'm talking about with this.

So this is just my impression. You should start every show with that caveat. I don't want to claim that I'm observing some definite fact. It's just impressions. But my We should start every show with that caveat. He looked a bit lost. He looked like he wasn't expecting to get calls. And later in the day, I watched Addison Reed. And Addison Reed also looked like he had bad body language, although a different kind of body language. He looked like he was tweaking. He was very antsy on the mound, like almost uncomfortably quick to get the ball back.

And both of these guys, as I observed them, were not getting calls from the home plate umpire. And in Medlin's case, I think it raises some question about his catcher, who was Evan Gattis. But in Reid's case, I didn't notice the catcher's role in this as much. But I was just wondering, theoretically, if you had a hypothesis that a pitcher's body language might also affect calls, obviously to a lesser extent than catcher framing, but to some extent, to just a small extent, a pitcher's body language might affect the calls he gets. Do you have any sort of idea of a methodology for how you would actually enact that study? And I bring it up partly because I know Russell Carlton is listening

and he will do it on his lunch break. Right. I guess, I don't know. I mean, you do have to kind of control for the pitcher if you want to be rigorous about framing stuff just because certain pitchers hit their targets much more often and it's easier to frame a pitch if you know where it's going and are prepared to catch it in that particular position. So there are adjustments for pitcher that can be made, but I'm trying to think about what you could do specifically to control for body language. I mean, I guess you would have to control for their location. Well,

you can't even do that. Yeah, you'd have to figure out a way to measure their body language. Even if it was subjective, you'd have to figure out a way to at least assign a certain body language factor to each player. But then the question is, where do you get the cause and effect? I mean, Medlin to me, I mean, I'm watching Medlin and he's throwing pitches and I'm thinking, I didn't want to give him the pitch because he looked like a freak out there. He looked

weird. But on the other hand, maybe he looks weird because he's already not getting the calls. So where's the cause and effect in that situation? Is it that he looks uncomfortable because he's mad at the umpire or is he mad at the umpire because he's not getting the calls because he already looked uncomfortable? It's mad at the umpire or is he mad at the umpire because he's not getting calls because he already looked uncomfortable it's a it's a hard thing to to to figure theoretically i i guess i i could believe that it could have some effect i i was talking to

russell martin last week and he was talking about how he tries he thinks there's like a a rhythm of the umpire kind of and he he tries to not upset the rhythm of the umpire and kind of lull the umpire into, I don't know, just feeling comfortable kind of and not doing anything weird. I mean, not like physically moving and distracting him, but just kind of like receiving the ball, holding it for the same amount of time every time he catches it, throwing it back in the same amount of time and just

kind of being in that same rhythm he feels like helps him get calls. So I guess the same. That is a perfect way of stating it. Medlin took me out of that and I could imagine he took an umpire out of that and Reed did as well. Yeah. I could imagine he took an umpire out of that, and Reid did as well. Yeah, so that would be pretty tough to do statistically, I guess, but I could conceivably see it mattering, sure.

Manny Machado just popped out to second, but Nate McLeod homered, and the Angels are going to lose again. This is incredible. The Angels are just never going to— We should talk about the Angels sometime. Sometime, yeah. All right. So why don't you start? Okay. So I have a question. David Schoenfield at ESPN's Sweet Spot blog wrote something a couple of days ago. He wrote a post called Brewers Need to Acquire a Reliever.

And it was just kind of about how John Axford is struggling and is, I mean, he's kind of lost his closer role and maybe has even lost his setup role. And so he was saying that they need to go get someone and not wait for the deadline because they have some talent and they shouldn't let the bullpen kind of derail their season, which it maybe sort of did last season. And I mean, just looking at the numbers, it doesn't look like the Brewers bullpen as a whole has been awful. It's kind of middle of the pack. So and Jim Henderson has kind of solidified the back end a little bit.

So I don't know. But every team could conceivably use some bullpen help. So I don't know, but every team could conceivably use some bullpen help. But I wonder what you think about the idea or the suggestion that a certain team has to trade for a reliever, given your kind of belief that bullpens are completely unpredictable and a bad bullpen one year, there's no reason to expect it to be bad the next year or vice versa. So I wonder whether if a team has struggled relief-wise, you think that they need to go get someone or whether your attitude is just kind of it will resolve itself somehow. I mean, there's an extreme point that you can reach.

And right now, I noted Nate McClouth-Homert. Nate McClouth-Homert off of Ryan... I actually never learned how to pronounce his name. I think his name is Brazier or Brazier or something. I mean, it's Brazier, right? You can't avoid it being Brazier. Ryan Brazier is a guy who I've known about for about four years because he threw a no-hitter in double-a when I was covering the angels and I was doing like a minor league report every day

and the thing about Ryan Brazier is he's not actually any good he I'm shocked that he ever made a 40 man I'm especially shocked that he's on the 25 man roster and he's only there because they've gone through literally every member of their 40 man roster he. He is the last pitcher on their 40-man roster, and every single pitcher on their 40-man roster is pitched this year because of injuries. And so, I mean, it would be dumb to deny that at this point the Angels' bullpen is a wreck, and it would be great if they could go find a reliever, like as though there were some great reliever out there, who could bolster the eighth inning.

There's an extreme where it's it's it's obvious but i think this is like one of those things where um for the most part unless something extreme has happened um most major league bullpens are within a small enough range that it's not worth sweating this uh the the day-to-day swings. I mean, the amount... I've been in a lot of these manager meetings with particularly Mike Socha before games, and the amount of energy that is devoted by reporters,

who I guess are the proxy for the public, to the bullpen is just wildly out of line with the amount of actual impact that the bullpen has. I mean, every single day there is a question about if not the closer, then the eighth inning, and if not the eighth inning, then the seventh inning. I mean, it's just, it is a really easy storyline because none of these guys actually have any kind of, like for the most part, they are all fairly interchangeable. And so therefore, you can very easily look at the last three weeks and say, well, why isn't this guy pitching? Or how is this guy still in there? And I mean, I would guess, I mean, the Brewers bullpen

was a problem last year too. So I mean, I'm not knocking David Schoenfeld or anybody who would point to that as a flaw on the team. But, I mean, realistically, it's not as though you're going to go out and get the three guys who are going to instantly turn you into a top-ten bullpen. Realistically, there's not anybody out there who's going to, you know, make a huge difference. I mean, these guys are all virtually, I mean, as a group, these guys are virtually interchangeable with each other over the course of a season. And that's especially true when you're talking about the pickings that are available in May. You could – I mean, you could find an Ernesto Freire somewhere maybe.

No, you couldn't. I mean, seriously, you couldn't. You could get an Ernesto Frieri, except that the Angels traded Ernesto Frieri for Ernesto Frieri just about this time last year. I think it was early May last year. But the thing is that Ernesto Frieri was available for a reason. He was a lottery ticket. And it's not like the Angels expected this from him. The Angels expected to get the sixth guy in their bullpen. They gave up Alexi Amorista for him. It's a total random one in a thousand chance. Well, it's not a one in a thousand because it's practically random.

It's like one in four. It's like a one in four chance that you get an ace. And it's like a one in four chance that you get a guy that you wave two and a half weeks later. And it's basically a much better chance that you're just going to get a guy who you forget about. I mean, Ernesto Freire was nobody's idea of a savior at the time and if every team went out looking for an Ernesto Freire, one in a hundred would get their closer out of it. Okay, so unless you literally need bullpen help because you don't have a bullpen

and that your relievers are all injured and cannot pitch, it's probably not worth devoting that much energy to. Not at this point. Not at this point in the season. I mean, look, I'm overstating my position. In the offseason, I think it's perfectly fine to upgrade your bullpen. And, you know, I like what the Angels did with their bullpen this offseason by going and getting Ryan Madsen and Sean Burnett, and it just goes to show you how unpredictable bullpens are.

But if you can, I mean, theoretically, I think if you can go get 40 guys to bring to spring training in March, that's a great way to build a bullpen. In May, those 30 guys are all pitching in AAA somewhere and it's harder to get them. And if you put a lot of effort into it, you maybe will get two or three and they're not going to do much for you. The brewers are basically stuck with what they got and what they got is probably not that much different than what everybody else has got. Yeah, I think I mentioned at some point there was a post by Jack Moore who wrote about how teams with bullpens as bad as the Brewers last season historically just got a lot better the next season. I mean, not just the bullpen, but just the team improved a lot because

the bullpen just kind of was okay again. And probably a lot of those teams did something to fix the bullpen, but maybe the bigger factor was just random stuff going right. The other thing I wanted to mention was just an item. It was an AP story that was syndicated in a lot of places on Thursday, and it was about the results of a study or a poll, I guess it was called a study of how American adults rank the, I guess, the importance of, or the degree to which steroid use among adolescents is a problem. And so the study was commissioned or co-commissioned by the Baseball Hall of Fame,

as well as the Taylor-Hooten Foundation and the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society. And it was conducted by Gallup. And the results of the study were that American adults rank steroid use among adolescents as less of a problem than alcohol, bullying, marijuana, and sexually transmitted diseases. Those polled ranked cocaine and eating disorders as bigger problems than steroids. 97% of the respondents believe that steroids cause negative health effects, but just 19% think steroid use is a big problem among high school students. So, I mean, you often in Hall of Fame season hear kind of the writers refrain that we can't put baseball players in who took steroids or may have taken steroids in the Hall of Fame

because of the message it will send to the children, and it's a big problem among teenagers, and you don't want to set the wrong example and all that. So this suggests that kind of the general public doesn't see it as a huge problem, at least relative to all these other things. Relative to the cocaine epidemic among our nation's youths. Right. And it was interesting, the quotes that accompanied the results of this study. So the president of the Hall of Fame, Jeff Idelson, is quoted in this little article thing as saying that the study shows that steroids and performance enhancing substances remain a mystery to the American public. And then Don Hooten, who's the head of the Taylor Hooten Foundation, said some stuff about Congress doing nothing.

Congress doing nothing. And then it quotes Neil Romano, the former director of the White House Office of Drug Abuse Policy, and an organizer of the study is saying the American people haven't connected the dots between steroid use and our children. So I don't know whether these organizations commissioned this study because they were kind of hoping to get results that would show that people agree with them that it's an epidemic or a big problem or what their goal was exactly. But it seems like either the results would be that everyone is worried about this, in which case they can talk about that, or as the results showed that people don't seem to think it's a huge problem relative to these other things, then they can say, well, people aren't getting it. They aren't connecting the dots and steroids are a mystery to the American public.

So I don't know. I mean, relative to alcohol and bullying and marijuana and STDs and all these other things that are problems for or are issues for, I mean, most adolescents or maybe a lot of adolescents. I mean, steroid use, it's not a good thing, I guess. I mean, I'm sure it has ramifications, but just kind of the percentage of the teenage population that is ever going to be things it it seems like it makes sense to me that steroids would rank behind them and not that this is confirmation that the threat is kind of unrecognized i don't know i yeah i think that when parents talk about uh you know the children in steroids i don't think that for the most part they're not actually talking about they're worried that their kids are going to do steroids so i i think that you're drawing a little bit of a false conclusion there they what they what they're worried about is that

children are going to learn bad lessons about competition and getting ahead and that you know nine-year-olds whose hero is this guy who they think is great and perfect and larger than life is um it turns out to actually have gotten there by cheating and that the child will draw some lesson from that or will just be so disillusioned by it, they'll grow up to be a cynic. Cynicism is a pretty foul thing to have in your life. I'm not saying I agree with that. I just think that it's a little bit different than what this question is asking. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, very few teenagers are in any position to benefit from steroids. It's never going to be a big problem with teenagers. I mean, it's a problem in as much as it screws up the you know, high school football level or whatever. But, I mean, it's a very small percentage of teenagers that are incentivized to do steroids. So, yeah. I was just looking at this Tigers-Astros game. In the 11th inning, a runner was thrown out at home, which is like the third most exciting thing that can happen in baseball,

a runner thrown out at home in extra innings. It's almost impossible to top that. Behind position players pitching and pitchers playing positions? I actually don't think that position – I think position players pitching is actually like maybe sixth or seventh. I actually – while I like the specter of position players pitching in a game, like I look – the looming threat of that makes all games better i actually find that when it actually happens it it uh damages the game because

you know the end is near that can't go you can't go another seven seven innings when darnell mcdonald is on the mound right so uh but on the other hand pitchers playing positions is number one you're right that is number one i haven't I haven't decided what number two is, but when Roy Oswald has to play third base, that's number one. So anyway, the 12th inning, two men on, Prince Fielder up, and he grounds out. 13th inning, first and third, one out, and then strike out, fly out. And 14th inning, leadoff, ground rule double, ground out, intentional walk, intentional walk, bases loaded with one out. So we're waiting to see what happens.

So this is just, I mean, you can't beat it. I'm basically rooting against both teams at all times in those games. I don't want to see any base runners or anyone in scoring position because that jeopardizes the survival of the game. So I'm constantly rooting against both teams unless one team gets a lead. Yes, as am I. Oh, Don Kelly singled. It's 4-3.

It's going to be riveting for everyone tomorrow when this game is hung over. It is a bummer that they've gone ahead 4-3. However, it's possible that if the Astros score 1 in the bottom of the 14th, that we will look back on this as the best inning of the game. A lot of things, see the thing about extra innings is a lot of things in retrospect that you're rooting for turn out to have been the thing that you wanted to happen. It's just that the margins between game ending and game going on are so perilously thin that you don't ever actually know how to root.

So you don't get too ambitious. You just hope for outs. Anyway, you wrote today about Marco Scudero, whose BABIP last year drove him to a career, really a career second half. He was an incredible hero for the Giants in the second half as well as in the postseason. And this year he's having quite a poor season. And the only real difference in approach or results is in his BABIP. And usually we would look at that and say, well, he got somewhat lucky last year. He got somewhat unlucky this year. He's in the middle.

But you actually went ahead and watched something like 300 batted balls that he hit and logged how many were you considered lucky and how many you consider were unlucky. Anded balls that he hit and logged how many were you considered lucky and how many you considered were unlucky. And you found that he actually wasn't lucky last year and he isn't unlucky this year, that he's basically getting outs when he should be getting outs based on balls being hit not hard and balls being hit hard are turning into hits for him when they should be. So I just want to talk about this because what are we supposed to do? I mean, we've been using BABIP as a handy tool for the last decade or more. And as you found

it, it creates a narrative that isn't actually really necessarily all that telling. But we can't look at all 300 balls in play that a guy hits and decide whether he's been unlucky or not. Speak for yourself. You can, but most people can't. And certainly we couldn't do it for every player. No. So what do you think we're to do with Babbitt? What is the appropriate way to do BABIP? And second question is, do you think that there will come a time when instead of classifying every ball as a grounder, line drive, or fly ball as Baseball Info Solutions does, that somebody out there, like maybe it'll be us, I don't know who it'll be, but somebody probably with money,

will just classify every ball based on the likelihood that it should be a hit, We'll just classify every ball based on the likelihood that it should be a hit, essentially creating an offensive version of UZR, where there's basically a percentage likelihood that it will be a hit based on some freelancer's impression of it, and that we just completely calculate the batter's luck entirely. Well, taking the last part first, I think, I mean, privately, teams are at that point already using hit effects. I mean, I know these teams are using, they're kind of just judging batters based entirely on their hit effects stats, or at least coming up with models based on just kind of what the run value of their batted balls is

based on hit effects without even looking at the results of those batted balls, just looking at how hard the ball is coming off the bat and at what angle it's coming off the bat because certain angles are more likely to lead to hits at certain speeds. And so they're just kind of looking totally at the process of how hard you hit a ball and at what angle and not at all looking at what happens after that, whether there happens to be a fielder there or not. So I think teams are doing that publicly. I don't know how we can do that. I would like to do that, but

I mean, you could theoretically record an angle at which you could record some kind of trajectory. And I don't know if that would be accurate at all doing it from TV. But, I mean, calculating the speed off the bat, I don't know. People are calculating hang time and stuff. So if you combine the hang time with where the ball was fielded, maybe you can get an initial speed and then, I don't know, it's possible, I guess. I don't know that it will be public, though, because that's a lot of effort to go to, to collect that kind of data, and you would need some sort of incentive to do it, some sort of financial incentive.

Is there going to come a point where all the cool stuff is unavailable to us and baseball analysis is just going to suck? It's just going to be super boring? I've been worried about that for a while. There was a BP event a couple years ago where there was a stats panel. It was at Foley's, the bar in Manhattan. And it was like me and Corey Shorts from MLB and I think Vince Gennaro. And I don't know if there was anyone else.

But, yeah, I was kind of – I brought up the idea that, like, maybe the longer – I mean, the farther into the future we go, the less you and I and everyone else on the internet will know what we're talking about. will know what we're talking about. I mean, when Baseball Prospectus started, Baseball Prospectus was, I mean, the authors there and the stats available to them was probably way ahead of what most teams were using and what was available to most teams. And so BP at the time kind of had this tone, like teams are stupid and making mistakes. And now we don't really have that tone anymore. And it's not just because we've kind of mellowed and grown up as a company a little bit. It's also just because it's harder to make fun of teams or to make a compelling case that the teams are overlooking something that we're seeing because there's just, I mean, they have access to things that we don't. more brainpower available to the public as a whole than to any one front office, which is kind of

sequestered and cloistered and doesn't talk to anyone else or share information with any other front offices. So there is that. There's kind of just more intellectual capacity behind the public. But yeah, I mean, when every team has field effects and can track every movement a player makes on the field and analyze that, and we're looking at, you know, ground ball, line drive, fly ball stats, I mean, it's hard to keep up. Yeah, it's depressing. Yeah, yes, it is. As to your first question about Babbitt, I think a lot of times the traditional Babbitt narrative fits. And I mean, I expected it to fit with Marco Scudera. I expected to see that when he had a 360-something Babbitt, he would have a lot of bloopers and slow rollers and just guys with no range who didn't get to balls. And that this year when he has a 260 something

babbitt would just be the opposite and he would be hitting all kinds of line drives that were just finding fielders uh and yeah i didn't see that in his case really and as i mean it's a very subjective exercise that i did to kind of look through and and try to determine which hits were lucky and unlucky. I mean, I think it added some sort of value, but it's hard to say. It was just, I don't know, it's hard to classify those things. But yeah, for him, I don't think it fit so well. I don't think he was just, he was getting lucky so much. But I also said at the end of the article that i'm not sure it makes a difference

really in any kind of predictive or forward looking sense i mean i think when we look back at at marcos guiro last season we can say he was just a really good hitter for the last couple months of the seasons he was he was just hitting line drives everywhere and and getting the kind of results you would expect. And then this season, he's just been hitting the ball on the ground a lot. And I guess he's had some sort of back issue that he's dealing with apparently and just doesn't seem to be hitting the ball as hard. And so he's not having the same hitter in both of those samples and that the results are different, but everything else is the same, then I think you're missing something about what actually

happened. But I don't know that it matters that much because when you think about it, I mean, Marcus Goudreau is not going to be able to sustain a 360 something BABIP regardless of why he did it. Whether he was fluking into hits that weren't actually hit all that hard or whether he just was actually hitting everything hard for a couple months. We know that he's not that kind of hitter in the long run and is not suddenly becoming that kind of hitter at his age. So really, I don't know that it's any more sustainable that he was good for a while than it would have been if he had just been lucky and fluky for a while. Either way, it's going to come to an end.

So it's more of a descriptive sense, I guess. And that's true for Marcos Guterl. Maybe it's not true for everyone, maybe with a young player who doesn't have that kind of established career babbit that we can look at and say, he's that kind of guy. If it's a rookie or something, and we don't necessarily know what his baseline is, then maybe you would want to take that into account. Yeah, I think that it probably it's the case that we too often's a lot of luck simply in what percentage of line drives he hits.

Essentially, the difference between a home run and a swing and a miss is a quarter of an inch. And over the course of a couple hundred at-bats, I don't think that luck changes either. Even if you look at the batted balls, I don't think that necessarily tells either. Even if, even if you look at the batted balls, I don't think that necessarily tells you whether he's, he's, he's been unlucky or not. Um, so yeah, but I mean, of course the, the, the golden goose or whatever, that's not the right word, but the thing that you want to find is you want to figure out the way to identify Marco Scudero falling

apart when it is real, as opposed to when it's not real. And so you have no real choice but to do what we do and assume that you're going to get a lot of false positives. The Tigers scored four in the top of the 14th, which again, it seems like the worst case scenario because there's virtually no chance this game is going to keep going. But just imagine if the Astros score four and exactly four, like not five but four. How incredible. This is like an instant epic if they just score four. So it's always hard to know whether you're seeing a good thing or a bad thing. Unless you're listening to a podcast hours later.

Well, but actually there are a couple of people like Eric Hartman. Hi, Eric, who is going to listen to this probably before the game is even over. So we're going to end it now. We'll be back on Monday with episode 196. Email us your questions at podcast at baseballperspectives.com, and have a great weekend.