Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2: Explosion

Episode Date: July 19, 2012

Our first episode didn’t destroy the internet, so we decided to do a second. We talked about Trevor Bauer.

Good morning. Welcome to Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast. I am Sam Miller in the Honda Fit, and I'm with Ben Lindberg on the shore of the Hudson River, as I recall. That's right. Still correct. We're coming to you actually just after the final pitch of the night has been thrown in Atlanta, and you are listening to this in the morning on Thursday morning. We're glad you're here. We've made it two episodes, and we're going to see how this one goes. Ben, do you have a topic for us tonight?

I do have a topic, and my topic is Trevor Bauer. Trevor Bauer? He's not even in the major leagues. Not anymore. That's what I'd like to talk about. Well my topic was going to be Brad Penny who is in the major leagues believe it or not but I don't have any opposition of going with yours so why don't we just go with yours tonight. All right let's do that. What do you want to talk about with Trevor Bauer? I'd like to talk a little bit about what Trevor Bauer did during his brief stay in the majors, but I guess I'd probably like to talk a little bit more about what we thought he was going to do and what it was discussed that he was going to do

and whether we can learn anything from what he actually did, which so far has not really matched those expectations. How would you describe what he did? I would describe it as AAA worthy, probably. And I guess the Diamondbacks agree. I mean, clearly he had issues finding the strike zone. And I mean, he still missed finding the strike zone. He still missed bats, as he did in AAA.

Clearly, he can do that. But he had struggled some with his control in AAA before he was promoted. And once he got to the majors, those problems were sort of exacerbated by the big league batters. So I have a confession to make. I actually did some research for the podcast, which won't happen again, I promise. But Trevor Bauer actually had one of the 10 lowest swing rates, or the batters he faced had one of the 10 lowest swing rates of any pitcher who pitched at least 15 innings this season. And the guys who were on that list with him were mostly guys who don't really have the type of swing and miss stuff that he does. Guys like Chen Min Wang,

who you wouldn't really expect batters to swing at necessarily. But the guy with the lowest swing percentage is actually Carlos Marmo, who has excellent stuff, electric stuff even. And I think it just goes to show that you really need the command as well as the stuff. On that other BP podcast, Jason Parks likes to talk about how a hitter with power, a good power tool, can't really use it or make the most of it unless he also has a good hit tool. He talks about a batter having to have a good hit tool to actualize his power

in that if he has good power but not good contact ability, he turns into Willy Mopena, who can hit a very long home run every now and then and get some nerds excited, but ultimately doesn't make enough contact to keep his job. So it seems to be sort of the same thing. If you have this electric stuff, you could have a 70 pitch, and if you have 30 command or control and you can't put it where you want it to um ultimately these these batters are just going to lay off in a way that maybe a lower level batter wouldn't yeah i think that it it's probably especially pertinent when

we're talking about a prospect like bauer because um it it doesn't anecdotally like there you can hope that a prospect comes to the majors and surprises you or you know maintains his strikeout rate or gets a lot of ground balls or whatever but it seems almost unheard of that a prospect who walks a lot of guys in the minors comes up to the majors and doesn't see the walk rate get worse. It just seems like the most certain thing in the world when you're forecasting that jump is pitchers are going to have more patient batters facing them, smarter batters, batters who aren't as impressed with their movement. And it seems almost inevitable that a guy is going to see his walk rate go up and um with bauer the walk rate was always a concern and it probably shouldn't

have shocked us that he um he kind of lost a little bit i mean there were definitely times where it was fun to watch him pitch but um whenever i saw him it just seemed like you could tell what the outcome of the at-bat was going to be by about the time the first pitch was halfway to the mount. He either had it or he didn't. And when he didn't have it, the batters were really good at waiting him out. the batters were really good at waiting him out when he was when he fell behind 1-0 in a count um batters on base percentage was 500 against him so basically if he fell behind he had no chance when he fell behind 2-0 i think batters on base percentage after that was like 700 um and you did some research yeah i mean he he got it and he lost it. I did a little research. You know what else

I learned tonight? I learned that you don't acknowledge the Enyay in William O. Pena's last name. That's interesting. You just go with Pena. I guess I'm just... We're not really an Enyay-friendly

website. I guess I've just become you know, we're not really an NEA-friendly website. I guess I've just become conditioned to seeing it without. But I know Kevin Goldstein often talks about how he doesn't really buy into the concept of minor league translations, that you can just sort of subtract a percentage from whatever a guy did at AAA or a higher percentage of whatever he did at AA and say that that's what he's going to do in the majors because he just sees the majors and everything else as just completely separate entities that once you get there, something that worked in AAA won't just work a little less. It will work not at all. I mean, I don't know that i necessarily agree i think there are times where those sort of adjustments can can maybe be accurate or not completely inaccurate but

um with a guy like bauer and and if they had if the diamondbacks had just let him keep pitching i doubt he would have walked a batter per inning or whatever. He was walking all year. But it seems that whatever his approach is right now is just not quite there. Are you sad at all about this? Does this sadden you? It doesn't because it doesn't affect my expectations or my outlook for him long-term at all. It's four starts. I guess I didn't expect him to struggle quite to that degree, but at the same time, I wouldn't necessarily say his ceiling is any lower

than I thought it was a couple weeks ago. And I think it's a helpful reminder really, um, because this is what usually happens, or maybe it's not quite so spectacular, a failure. Um, but it's, it's very rare that someone comes up and immediately replicates whatever he was doing at the level he was at before. Um, and I think maybe we've gotten a bit spoiled by the prospect type and by these sort of generational talents, if you want to use that term, that we've seen come up lately and just immediately become one of the best players in the league. I think it's a helpful reminder that a guy like Bauer can

come up and just not be fit for the rotation. Yeah, I kind of disagree with that a little bit when it comes to pitchers, though, because I don't know. My theory kind of is that when a hyped prospect comes up as a position player, you want to see him immediately because it's going to be growth from that point on. You're going to see him struggle and it's going to put all of his later success in perspective. But with pitchers, it's the opposite. You almost want to see them immediately because their stuff is never going to be better than it is right now.

I mean, Bauer's command will get better and he'll become a smarter pitcher and he'll learn how to do new things and he'll have a, you know, a pretty good cutter and all that sort of a thing. But he will never be as, you know, as lightning as he is right now. He'll never throw as hard as he does right now. And that's sort of one of the sad things about pitchers' arms is that their most exciting pitches are usually when they're 21, 22, 23. And there is something a little bit disappointing about Bauer coming up and doing so little. Because this could have been a pretty memorable month for us all. But I think he'll still be a very good pitcher. Yeah, I think it'll be a memorable month the next time He'll just, you know, we missed a little bit of an opportunity.

It'll be a memorable month the next time he comes back. Yeah, it probably will be. I mean, he's a long way from attrition setting in. Because I looked at the rookies leaderboards that you can get through our sortable stats on the site, and there really almost is no such thing as a star rookie in most seasons. I mean, you have a guy who won the Rookie of the Year, but you don't really have a guy who's leading the league in anything in most seasons. Like last season, there wasn't a single rookie who was worth three wins,

even according to our stats. But you did have, I mean, had Pineda though in the AL. Yes. In the NL leading all of baseball in strikeout rate. That's right, yeah. For whatever reason he didn't cross that threshold according to our pitching work. And if you look at right now it's guys like Trout obviously

who's just incredible. But even he, I mean, look what he did last year. Yeah. He came up and basically pulled the power for a while, more or less, although he was, of course, young and it was perfectly excusable. Wow, so quick, and we already have pulled a power. Poor guy. It'll mean something more positive someday i'm sure um but if you look at the the rookie leaderboard all the guys who've made

a significant contribution really or almost all of them are either mike trout and bryce harper who are sort of part of a another species um or guys like aoki or Darvish or Suspedes, guys who are in their mid to late 20s and played in other countries first. Or a guy like Todd Frazier who's experienced. It's not really the, other than Harper and Chatt, it's not the 21-year-olds coming up and dominating right away. It's like earlier this year when the Cardinals called up Matt Adams,

a friend of mine was like, Oh, I, you know, I got to pick this guy up and he was asking me his fantasy league, if he should drop some established major leaguer to pick up Matt Adams. And this was right after Harper had hit and Trout and everything. And he's giving me scouting reports and telling me what his potential is. But it wasn't a keeper league, and I was like, you know, Matt Adams is 23. He's probably not going to be worth dropping anyone you've heard of for this year alone.

And he hit 240-something and is now back in AAA. So it's more common for something like that to happen, certainly, than for a Harper-Trout situation. Not that I want to be the prospect wet blanket guy. I think it's great that people are interested in these players. And certainly a lot of people read BP for information on these players. And I don't want to discourage that. A lot of people read BP for information on these players, and I don't want to discourage that. You're right. No, but you're right.

The first bat, you know, when we all go bananas on Twitter for a 21-year-old super prospect is, it's a weird phenomenon that we've started in the last few years, and it usually leads to heartbreak and sorrow. And, you know, yeah, you're right. You should usually hang on to the guy you have unless it's Mark DeRosa. And with Bauer, I guess even more than his stats, it was the whole sort of Bauer narrative surrounding him, all the unorthodox trading techniques and warm-ups

and that sense that he knew something that everyone else didn't know and that he was going to come in and just immediately turn major league pitching on his head and have everyone throwing 350 feet from the warning track. So maybe that made it seem a little less likely that he would stumble out of the gate like that. But you saw even the prospect, you know, the, the prospect experts, um, were divided. I think it wasn't just the typical guy on Twitter saying, why isn't this guy up yet? Um, it was also, you know, a certain well-known prospect guy was like, why is this guy not up yet? And, and Kevin, uh, as I recall, did sort of sound a cautionary note on the podcast and pointed out

the fact that Bauer hadn't been very efficient in AAA and was walking guys and that he certainly wasn't knocking the door down exactly. He wasn't really one of those guys that you look at his stats and say, there's no conceivable reason why this guy is not in the major leagues right now. Clearly, there were still things he had to work on. And I think Kirk Gibson says something tonight about how many things he does still have to work on, which you wonder why he might not have thought that two weeks ago, or if they did think that, why they brought him up anyway. But maybe it was just sort of a firsthand thing.

Well, Ben, it's been 15 minutes. So just like Trevor Bauer, our time in the show is over for now. But we'll be back with more segues tomorrow. And we're on iTunes, so check us out. And we're glad everybody's listening. It was fun to talk to you, Ben, and I'll see you tomorrow.