Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 209: Veterans vs. Young Players/The Dodgers and Grit

Episode Date: May 23, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about some recent conflicts between veterans and young players, then discuss Don Mattingly’s comments about the Dodgers’ lack of grit.

Let's take the classic wobbly chair for example. I mean we've all been there right? Chairs wobbly. Your lady goes to sit down in it. Oh it's like she's sitting on a Titanic. That's not good. And what do you do? You reach for the closest paper towel.

Try to stiff it up. Stuff it underneath. Wrong! Half a man. Good morning and welcome to episode 209 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I am Ben Lidberg, joined by Sam Miller. I feel like maybe before we say our topics, we should summarize the response we got to the to the refund idea yeah we got more emails about that one topic than we have gotten about any any other single topic i think yeah i i thought maybe we would let it go one more day okay and then we we could sum them up tomorrow okay we can do that is what

i was thinking so if anyone has more thoughts or ideas about how to make that work, the idea we talked about on yesterday's podcast about giving fans refunds when their home team loses, let us know. And charging more, charging more for the ticket. Yeah, so what are you going to talk about, though? Do you want to talk about why you've introduced the show every day this week I don't know why that is

I don't know I'm not really trying to hog it I'll let you do it tomorrow I guess so tune in yeah Sam will be saying good morning on tomorrow's show I'm going to talk about, I guess, the Dodgers and grit. Wow, that actually is going to probably dovetail nicely with my topic,

which is veterans. Oh, all right, excellent. I'm not sure we have much to say today. This might be a short one. Yeah, maybe. We've been going long lately, so we have earned a short one. Yeah, we've built up some goodwill. So why don't – well, I'm curious to know where you're going to go with this, so why don't you start?

I am also curious to know where I'm going to go with this. Why don't I start? I'll start. So there have been two big veteran versus young guy stories, I would say, in the last week. And one of them was big news today, and I think everybody knows about it. It's Bryce Harper getting pretty aggressively called out by Rafael Soriano after Harper was unable to catch the game-ty uh, hit by Gregor Blanco last night. I think it was a double, might've been a triple.

Um, and he was, you know, whether he could have caught it or not is disputable, but he was clearly sort of, uh, terrified of the wall. Uh, what was his being concussed and everything like that. Which is interesting in light of when we talked about that lately. Yes. His, his, uh, I'm never going to quit playing hard even if it kills me tweet. So Soriano said a four-year-old could have been in position for that, his four-year-old, not just any four-year-old.

Rafael Soriano's four-year-old, who is well-known to be terrible at defense, could have caught it. And, you know, I mean, it was really uh he he walked it back and said he thought it was off the record which changes literally nothing i mean it's it's a i guess it it changes what you thought his intent was of saying it but it doesn't change that he's he's saying that to a person who's you know in the media um and uh so that's i mean that's a big story that everybody's heard of i don't know if everybody is familiar with the Jordanian Valdispin stuff, but probably a lot of people are and maybe not quite as many.

So I'll sum that up. That's from about a week ago when Valdispin hit a home run in the ninth inning of a game that his team was losing pretty badly. And he pimped his home run. He looked at it. He flipped his bat, he watched it, etc. And he was facing Jose Contreras, and the reaction among his own teammates was so negative that they have now come out in public

and really ripped him and said he needs to grow up. And his own manager, even, the next night, sent him out to pinch hit. And if you believe the writers who have covered this, his manager Collins probably knew that, I mean, he probably sent him out there specifically to get drilled, knowing that he was going to get drilled and that he had to, like, take his lumps. So you see this team really uh rallying in defense of their their veteran opponent and uh you know being concerning

themselves with the way that their young teammate played and both of these i think are it's hard to to i i think that it's hard to dispute that both of them are really stories of veteran versus young player. And Major League Baseball has, I think, a complicated relationship with its young players. And you see here, I think that there's somewhat of an inequality in the way that young players are treated. I don't think nearly the big deal would have been made if Prince Fielder or even name a veteran who's not very good like Joaquin Arias, I don't know, had done what Valdesman had done. I don't think it would have been a big deal.

And I think if it had been, say, a rookie closer ripping a veteran right fielder, it would have been a much bigger deal. Even with it being Bryce Harper, I think that it didn't quite rise to the same level of attention as it would have been if Trevor Rosenthal had ripped Carlos Beltran for a similar thing, something like that. So I just wanted to note these two stories and wonder if you think that uh if it if it leaves you any sort of sour taste in your mouth to see um veterans in general get a lot more leeway and to see young players in general i really have to walk on eggshells for a few years knowing that um that they are not going to be given much benefit of the doubt

and that people are in a lot of ways looking for the thing wrong to point out about their behavior. I guess so. I guess I don't know that I was really surprised by either instance. I was surprised, I guess, just by how vocal Soriano was and how blunt he was about it, and maybe that is because he didn't think he was going to be quoted. I don't know.

I mean, Harper has always been under more scrutiny than any player, really, of the same age, and he sort of developed a reputation as a possible clubhouse problem type long before we even saw him in the majors. And really, he hasn't been that kind of guy at all since he made the majors. He's been pretty much a model citizen. But there was always that sense that he, I don't know, was kind of full of himself or immature. And I wonder whether it was true then, whether it was ever true and he has surmounted that or has grown out of that. Or whether it really wasn't ever true and people were just looking extra hard for for any sign that that was the case just because it was bryce harper um or or the third option is that it is true and it remains true and that it simply has has yeah that he's hidden it slash um that you know that he's been kind of protected to

some degree and that i mean you know it's it's conceivable that Soriano, I mean, you know, this is to some degree, like I tend to think that Soriano is completely in the wrong in this case and all that. But, you know, you might argue that this is smoke and that if a teammate is bad-mouthing him like this on or off the record, it suggests that, you know, maybe his teammates don't think he's all that. Yeah, that's possible. It suggests it's possible. I'm not suggesting that it is true.

But it's possible. Most of the stuff that I've heard about him as a teammate seems to be pretty positive. And you'd think if there were more dissatisfaction with him, that would be something that beat writers would just be going after constantly. Because it would be a popular story if Bryce Harper were disliked by everyone on the Nationals. So, I mean, Valdez-Spinn, if the reports were accurate, I think I remember reading that he basically tried to fake an injury or fake an illness to avoid going to the plate to get drilled. And then I also read that he sort of threw some sort of tantrum after the game that his teammates didn't back him up or didn't hit someone to retaliate for his being hit, which, you know, if those reports were accurate,

then I don't know that it's so much a rookie veteran thing as it is a veteran foul to spin thing. I mean, that would seem, I mean, if that behavior is characterized accurately and has been reported accurately, then that seems like the sort of thing that even if a veteran did it would be pretty unpopular. of thing that even if a veteran did it would be pretty unpopular. Yeah, but a veteran probably wouldn't be sent out to pinch hit the next night in order to throw that tantrum. What are the odds that they would have sent? I guess it depends on the veteran, perhaps, but like I see Marlon Bird quoted here in this story.

Do you think Marlon Bird would have been sent out to be hit the next day? No, I guess maybe he would have just been in the lineup regularly but probably wouldn't have been sent out specifically to be taught a lesson um so i don't yeah i'm so yeah i feel i feel a bit torn about this because um i mean i i think that i really like young players. I like watching young players a lot, and I find myself rooting for them a lot more than I would root probably for a lot of veterans, with a few exceptions. I think that the aging curve for my love

is the opposite of the normal aging curve. It's like a reverse parabola. It starts up real high, and then it goes down, down, down. And then once you get to your novelty seasons like your Jason Giambi, then I fall in love all over again. And so it does sort of break my heart a little bit to see what sometimes seems like unfair treatment to players. And also because it feels like there's, to some degree, you wonder how much of this is, creates sort of long-term neuroses for these players. You know, these, you take a guy

like A-Rod, who was vilified from the time he was, you know, 17 years old, in a lot of ways, and you wonder, well, is the fact that we hate A-Rod now just tied to the fact that he got an unfair shake early on? People expected him to behave. Well, maybe they didn't. I don't even know that anybody expected him to behave anyway. He's a target because he was young and he was good. And I always worry about that happening to young players in general. But on the other hand, I tend to think that most of these guys are sociopathic

and that they didn't make the majors because they're great people who are really well adjusted. A lot of them are horrible people and a lot of them are horribly adjusted. And it's the role of the team, it's the role of the front office. It's the role of the management, the manager. It's the role of whoever wants to take on the role to somehow turn this group of 25 people who probably comprise 23 sociopaths into a cohesive unit that's capable of living with each other for six months at a time. And I guess there's probably some real benefit to this. I mean, if you have to kind of boot camp people out of their bad habits, there's, you know, maybe it's worth it. Maybe this is the only way that any of these guys survive into the, you know,

long enough to hit 500 home runs and and reach milestones and go to the hall of fame and stuff yeah that's that's possible and i guess i can see where it comes from i mean there's there's sort of an implicit threat with the appearance of of any rookie uh just because there are only 25 roster spots on a team and whenever a young player takes one of those spots he's he's generally taking it from a veteran um so i mean i guess i can understand why it would be threatening but that's the yeah that's the worst way to look at it though if it's that then it's just awful and it's bad and it's abusive i mean if that's all it is it's horrible right we should we should have we should have a yeah well pretty clear uh opinion on it if that's what it is, it's horrible. We should have a pretty clear opinion on it if that's what it is.

I mean, I think we're trying to be more generous than that. Yeah, I don't know. I guess it seems like a stretch to me to think that Soriano was trying to make Harper a better player by showing him tough love or something. Yeah, that's true. But I don't know. I guess I can understand the origin of it and the hazing and everything. And I guess, I mean, most of the time, I guess baseball hazing is pretty harmless. It's more of the like wearing a pink backpack or whatever than it is truly cruel stuff, although I guess there are exceptions to that.

I think it's also a lot more than you realize. It's the pink backpack stuff, but you only see that one day a year. I think it's actually pretty constant throughout your rookie year that you have to get the veterans bottled water. When you're on the bus, you have to run the errands, all that sort of stuff. I think it's a pretty diligent campaign, but it's never particularly nasty, I think, is what they would say. When you were in high school, was there like a haze the freshman thing? There were threats of it, and that was enough. We were all terrified of it and I remember not going to the first rally because everybody knew that freshmen would have puppy. We were sophomores. I went

to a 10-12, but everybody knew that sophomores would have puppy food thrown at them. None of us went. That sounds horrible. A bunch of sophomores actually did go and there was no puppy food at all. It was just, it was really, it was more like, it was the threat. It was like. It always confused me. I mean, I went to the least threatening high school in the country. I mean, there was no actual fear or anything, but it was just so strange that it was like,

as soon as you got to be a sophomore, you were expected to, I don't know, like not necessarily haze the freshmen, but look down on them in some way. And I, I just always thought, why, why are we doing that? We were, we were them like three months ago. Why would we suddenly treat them differently they they pretty much are us uh so i never really understood that but there was no there was no threat to it or anything but i i guess i don't know maybe it's probably a little more elevated in a in a major league clubhouse um now i will say that the first year that I spent in prison was... Right, well, that's different, yeah. Yeah. All right, go ahead, talk about Greg. All right, so the Dodgers, there were some comments made by Don Mattingly

that reminded me of something that was briefly a story a couple months ago or a few months ago. It was late February, and there was a comment by Brandon Belt who said something like he was asked about the Dodgers and or trade for a bunch of people and just put them together, they they don't gel immediately. And and the Giants still had the chemistry going for them of having been together for a few years. comments to Russell Carlton and he wrote an article about it just kind of looking to see whether teams that had less turnover outperformed expectations in some way. And he found a very small, very modest effect that was in the direction of that at least, that less turnover teams benefited players. But it wasn't a big effect. It wasn't anything that you would really plan around or decide not to bring in

a bunch of new players because of that. Anyway. So Don Mattingly made some comments yesterday and, and they were also pretty, pretty blunt comments. And I guess maybe we were talking about him being on the wobbly seat recently. By the way, I thought a lot about this today, and I think it has to be wobbly chair because almost anything can be a seat. I was sitting on a sofa cushion at the time, which is a seat, and there's no wobble in a sofa cushion. I think it has to be a chair to really evoke the wobble. Okay. So he's on the wobbly chair and, uh, maybe he is trying to, uh, I don't know, maybe he's trying to save himself by making

some, some dramatic gesture, but anyway, he, he came out and he benched Andre Ethier, uh, and sort of, sort of questioned his, his toughness, um, and, and really extended that to the entire team, pretty much. And he said he was asked if he was trying to send a message, and he said, we're in last place in the National League West. Last year at this point, we're playing a lineup that basically has nobody in it, that fights and competes and battles you every day for every inch of the field. We talk about it as an organization. We've got to find the club with talent that will fight and compete like the club that doesn't have that talent.

If there's going to be a message sent, it's going to be over a period of time. And I guess the Dodgers were in first place at this time last year, I think. And he also said part of it is your mixture of your competitiveness too it's not just all let's go put an all-star team out there and play games and the team with the all-star team wins it's trying to find that balance

of a team that's got a little grit and a little fight they'll fight you and has enough talent to get there also with that all grit and no talent is not going to get you there and all talent and no grit is not going to get you there, and all talent and no grit is not going to get you there. There's got to be a mixture of both. So it seemed sort of from before the season started that grit was just going to be the story of the NL West

one way or another. I mean, the emphasis that the Diamondbacks put on that and how everyone focused on the Diamondbacks search for grit over the winter seemed to suggest that I guess how they did would kind of be a referendum on the importance of grit. which is where they are right now, tied with the Rockies, I guess, that it would be kind of a point in Grit's favor that certainly columnists would write many articles about how Grit allowed them to transcend their various parts and be better. And then there was the Dodgers, which was kind of the opposite, or at least they didn't seem to put any special emphasis on grit and they just kind of went out and got good famous players and put them all together on one team.

So now we're a couple months into the season and the Diamondbacks are in first place and the Dodgers are in last place. first place and the Dodgers are in last place. Grit is getting some credit for the Diamondbacks success. And now lack of grit is getting blamed for the Dodgers struggles by, by the Dodgers manager. So grit is now even more of a story in the NL West than it was probably before the season. And I don't know. I just wanted to make that observation

and I guess ask you, I don't know, whether you think grit has really been a factor in the fact. Oh my gosh, man. In the fact that. Come on. That's your question. It's an awful question. I don't know.

How much of the six-game difference in the standings between the Diamondbacks and the Dodgers right now is relative team grit? I mean, can we explain the Dodgers' struggles without going to grit? I mean, can we make sense of it without falling back on that explanation? And obviously Mattingly has, has a better sense of whether they are gritty, uh, than we do. And, you know, it occurs, yeah, it occurs to me that, that maybe the, one of the number one ways that we measure managers, uh, unofficially is by how much grit they're able to muster.

unofficially, is by how much grit they're able to muster. So in a way, this might be Mattingly kind of preemptively defending. I don't know if it's defending himself, but getting ahead of the no-grit story, which is going to land on him, and turning it into a no-grit story that he is trying to throw onto the players. And the interesting thing about his quotes was kind of that he seemed to be blaming his front office to some degree for the lack of grit as though this is, you know, like almost like he knows that it's his job to make gritty warriors out of men. And he's saying that the lack of grit preceded him, that these are guys who are notably ungritty or something like that.

But I don't know. I mean, I tend to think that, well, okay, so two things. One is that I'm completely agnostic on the topic, and I think we all should be. I remember hearing, it's interesting that Belt said that, because the Giants last year were such a grit-infused narrative that I wondered whether, the Diamondbacks' decision to go grit was credited to Kirk Gibson, a gritter himself,

but I wondered whether it was actually a deliberate attempt to copy the Giants, that this was like, that somebody in the Diamondbacks front office looked at it and said, Grit is the new OBP or something like that. And so it's interesting that Belt said that, but I think I remember one of the Giants saying, I think it was one of the Giants, saying that he doesn't know how much to credit grit or how much not to credit grit. But one thing he knows is that every single team he's ever been on that has won had that thing. And every team he's ever been on that didn't win didn't have that thing.

And you could argue cause and effect and all that. argue cause and effect and all that, but there was a sense that, I don't know how to put this, but I think it's fair to point out that talent doesn't necessarily correlate that strongly to victories. It correlates strongly, very strongly, but there's a lot of unaccounted-for swings, and we mostly credit those swings to luck and fluctuation. But from the player's perspective, you have to wonder why you start at the beginning of the year

and you know your team's not as good as that team. You can just look at the roster. You know who's better. And yet at the end of the year, you win more games than they do. You have to wonder if there's some sort of, I don't know, emotional aspect to it that gets credit. And you want to feel like it is. It feels better that way.

It feels sort of morally upstanding to win because you wanted it more. And so you can understand why players would, would credit it. And, um, I'm, I guess I'm agnostic cause I want to give players some credit for knowing more than I do and being in there. Uh, and yet I, you know, I tend to think that it's, uh, you know, I tend to think that most of the fluctuation in baseball can be fairly easily captured by statistics. But what was the question? The six games, there's six games between them. How many do I think have to do with grit?

I would say none. I think that probably grit matters. Grit is such an all-encompassing word in this case. But I've come to believe that makeup, I guess, is a better way of saying it, gets more and more important the longer the timeline that you're looking at. And so I would say that for the purposes of these six weeks, I doubt that it has much to do with it. If you were planning a roster, though, I would certainly be probably happier to have gritty guys or good makeup guys than not good makeup guys because I would think that three or four or five years down the road, the effects would start to multiply a little bit more.

How much – I mean it seems to me that a large percentage of a manager's job is kind of unlocking that inner grit or maximizing the grit of the players on the roster. I think in the public's mind, that's like 95% of their job. Yeah. So I don't know, to come out and suggest that I guess that you were you were burdened with just ungritty players and and it's not your fault I mean not that he came out and said it's not my fault but but yeah you're right he's I mean he's kind of putting the onus on the players or on the front office who assembled those players and I don't know maybe that maybe that is fair. I can't really say from where I am, but I don't know.

I would like to think that my manager could at least get the most out of the players that I assemble. I don't know. I wouldn't want to hear him making these comments, I guess. When you read these comments, did it occur to you, everybody immediately said, okay, well, Mattingly's gone, Mattingly's going to get fired any day now. Did it occur to you at all that perhaps this is actually something that the front office wants him to say, that he's passing along a message to the team that, you know, that basically has been approved from on high and that he's trying to put each of them on the wobbly

chair? That could be. I guess, I don't know. I saw it more of sort of a last-ditch effort to either inspire his team or give everyone the perception that he inspired them, because if they now suddenly start playing well, then we will look back and say the Dodgers have won this many games since Mattingly criticized their grit. Yeah, if you're a manager on the wobbly chair, what you really want to do is something drastic almost every day. Sort of bold, closed-door meetings. Yeah, you know it's going to turn around without a doubt. And the worst thing that can happen to a manager is for there not to have been some event at the turning point that you could take credit for so you basically want to bench somebody every day or get somebody demoted or uh have you know have

the third baseman pitch or something like every day you need to do something nuts because then one of them will hit yes and there's a there's a poll in this LA Times story by Dylan Hernandez that I'm reading from. And the question is phrased in a very confusing way. It says, is Dodger Andre Ethier not mentally tough enough? Which took me a while to figure out. What's wrong with that? That's perfect. What do you have? I don't know. Can't it just say, is he mentally tough enough wrong with that that's perfect what do you know can it just say is he mentally tough enough yeah that's right it'd be less confusing so so 57 percent of people who have voted in that poll uh have said that yes he is not mentally tough enough

i don't know what that means. It means don't read polls. You know what bums me out, Ben? What? Every year I do this huge predictions challenge with a friend of mine. We predict about 500 things. And one of the things we do is first manager fired. And the day before opening day, I changed my first manager fired from Don Mattingly to Clint Hurdle. Just kills me yeah

right we never get that one right I mean that one's one of the hardest ones to get right so although it shouldn't be I guess you should go with the I don't know with the team with the highest expectations or right it's always tricky you go with basically you look at two things

you look at lousy team that's overpaid, that's paid a lot, or you look at horrible, horrible team that's had the same manager for a little while. Okay. We're done. We have one more show tomorrow. Tune in to hear Sam do the intro, and email us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.