Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 212: Doing Away with Errors/Rotating Positions/What Would Retired Players Hit?/Aesthetically Pleasing Players/3-0 Red Lights

Episode Date: May 29, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about errors, ancient players, whether hitters should swing more often on 3-0, and more.

Good morning and welcome to episode 212 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg and we're here for Email Wednesday. Ben, you live in Manhattan. Are you in the 212? I guess I would be but I don't have a landline right now. So I'm a 646. I'm just a cell only person.

Where is 646? I don't know. It's like the cell number in this area. I was a 212 growing up. My mom is a two one two. Oh, did you ever refer to, did you ever say that you represent the two one two or anything along those? Uh, no. Did you ever drop two one two as like some sort of affiliation? I didn't. I think there are too many people with that affiliation. It's too high profile. I see. So we have some questions. You

have some questions, in fact, that you're going to go over. But before you get to the questions, can you please just, can we note that Eddie emailed extremely important information about Jose Canseco? Oh, yes. Which we don't have to discuss. We won't discuss, but it is extremely important. He points out that Jose Gonseco is listed as the Fort Worth Cats third baseman. He is playing third base. Jose Gonseco, 49, playing third base. Moving on. Okay. All right. First question comes from Kevin in Princeton. He says, gentlemen, a few days ago, Miguel Cabrera hit a warning track fly ball that came down before the outfield wall, but bounced off of Michael Bourne's glove and over the fence. Not only was this scored as a home run, but I haven't even found anyone questioning

whether that ruling was appropriate instead of charging Bourne with an error. Rule 10.12 says an error should be charged to a fielder whose misplay permits a runner to advance one or more bases. Even if you think that the wall interfered with Bourne's attempt or that it wasn't a routine catch, those words strongly suggest this play should have been at most a double and a two-base error because to prevent a home run, all Bourne had to do was literally nothing. Given that the line... He had to do, he did have to do something. If he had done nothing, then Cabrera would have

run forever. Pick up the ball and throw it in at some point. Given that the line between hit and error is subjective and often arbitrary, and given that we're willing to accept a home run on a clear misplay like this without batting an eye, is it time to get rid of

fielding errors entirely? You might have to keep some throwing errors for accounting purposes, such as when players advance additional bases as a result of bad throws. I think since both you and I work for Baseball Perspectives, I think it's house editorial position to be against the error as a measurement. So I think we're both against it. Is that right? Yeah, I'm against it. I'm just trying to think of whether there's any value to preserving it just for the historical continuity of it. Well, yeah. So here's my question, and we can talk about that as well. But somebody, I was talking about this with somebody at my softball game recently. How do you explain to somebody who is not a super in-the-weeds stat head why? Because it seems pretty obvious to most people, I think, that a ball that should be fielded cleanly by any position player is an error.

any position player, is an error. I mean, people don't see a bobbled ground ball as being equivalent in any way to a line drive up the middle. So how do you explain this to your uncle or whatever at Thanksgiving when it inevitably comes up? Well, are we talking about how we explain why it's not a great way to assess assess a fielder or no not a fielder uh why it's not i i think primarily why it's not a good way to assess a pitcher uh or perhaps why a pitcher shouldn't get any uh any kind of leeway because there's an air behind him

or perhaps why the hitter shouldn't get credit for reaching base i think it's the the defensive thing is i think more obvious and easier to explain right uh well i mean i guess as as kevin says it's subjective and often arbitrary so that's somewhere to start sort of but you but 95% of them look like errors to everybody. Most errors are obviously errors. It's very rare that there's a scoring controversy over whether an error should be an error. Maybe one in 20, but maybe one in eight or whatever, but that's still a small minority of them. I mean, mean basically you know an air when you see it so why don't why can't we just say it uh well certain types of pitchers tend

to have more of them right and tend to allow more unearned runs ground ball pitchers i guess okay so that's it that's your reason is that ground ball pitchers give up more than they? It's not the greatest reason. I don't know. What's your reason? Well, I don't have the greatest reason either. The way I explained it to my friend Dan a few days ago was that basically what you think you're seeing, which is a ball that should be caught and is not caught, is in fact true of nearly all balls. I mean, like most – a large number of base hits are hit just as poorly as the ground ball directly to the shortstop. And so if you're really trying to talk about who deserves credit and who deserves blame. The batter doesn't deserve, or I guess the pitcher doesn't deserve credit for getting that out any more than he would deserve credit for getting, uh, you know, an out on a

pop-up that lands in no man's land and goes untouched and is a clean base hit that nobody would dispute. In both cases, he got the batter to do something, uh, to, to perform poorly, to hit the ball poorly. Uh, and yet because of,, and yet because of the bounces that take place behind him, the batter reached base anyway. And so it's actually no less his blame than a large number of base hits. I mean, I've often thought that the weirdest thing about baseball, and maybe the least good thing about baseball, is the fact that most hits, especially singles are hits precisely because they weren't hit well enough to be outs like if you think about all those balls that land in front of

outfielders those would be outs if they were hit better and if you think about every ground ball uh that gets to the infield that's not what anybody was trying to do nobody's really ever except in rare cases nobody's ever really trying to hit a ground ball uh and so if somebody gets a ground ball single they basically have failed but are getting credit for it anyway we were talking about that when i wrote the the marco scudero article and i was trying to figure out which of his hits were lucky or unlucky and it was really hard to do with ground balls because it just felt like everyone that went through was kind of lucky unless unless he had some special ability to aim for the holes which it doesn't seem like hitters really have uh then then why give them any more credit for one that does get through the infield

than than one that doesn't which is which is kind of disturbing yeah yeah from the hitter's perspective a ground ball directly at Derek Jeter that he bobbles and a ground ball one and a half feet to the left of Derek Jeter that he can't reach is the exact same thing. I mean, there's basically no difference in process that led to those. And so it feels very weird to account them differently, except when I can see using it as a way of measuring Derek Jeter, not as the ultimate way of measuring Derek Jeter, because range and opportunities are also important.

But we do want to know if a player is fielding the balls that are hit at him. We do want to be able to measure his hands and his arm and his ability to do these things. So I do think it's worthwhile to measure errors for defenders. I don't think it's worthwhile to measure errors for defenders. I don't think it's worthwhile to measure errors as a way of assigning a portion less blame to the pitcher or stealing a portion less credit from the hitter. Yeah, well, I mean, it's almost impossible to explain. I would think it's really complicated to explain the concept of earned runs and unearned runs and ERA to someone who doesn't know about those things already or who didn't grow up with them. I mean, it's such a convoluted way to measure things that it seems like no one would actually think of it, think of doing it that way. If, if they were to just wipe the slate clean and start over again, um, no one would, would suggest that, or it doesn't seem like the

best, the best way to measure things. Right. It doesn't. And it especially doesn't when you start taking into account things like defensive efficiency and dips theory and catcher framing. And you realize that, you know, maybe 50% or I don't know exactly, but maybe 30% of a pitcher's ERA should be credited to his defender. Not credited, but is actually caused by his defenders, by the eight guys around him. And of that 30% errors themselves you know actual rulebook errors that go in the you know in the records as unearned runs are probably like one percent of the 30 percent it's just such a it's such a a small step toward trying to to do this

big impossible thing which you know i guess uh defense independent stats actually do pretty well. So there's not a real huge need for it, I don't think. Okay, next question comes from Derek. He asked a couple questions, but we will answer his second one for now. If Joe Girardi got 600 plate appearances today, what would we hit? He was talking about it with a friend of his, and they decided that he would hit something like uh 50 he would bat 50 uh he would get on base uh 0.075 and he would slug 50 uh and then he asks what current mlb manager would perform best or any coach for that matter so he would be 48 yes he in case anybody's wondering. Yes, he's 48. He is in excellent shape, or appears to be.

But he, I mean, when he last played, I guess from his age 37 to 38 seasons, so 10, 11 years ago, he hit 218, 271, 276. So he was, I mean, obviously never a good hitter. Wait, wait, what? Where did you get that number? What did you just say? 218, 271, 276. That's his last two seasons combined.

Oh, his last two seasons. Yeah, just because the last one season was 16 games. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I think that baseball needs to have a seniors tour so that we can wean all these old guys off the game and get a better sense of the true aging curve after mid-40s on. Because we basically have no idea what happens to humans after they turn 45 or so. I mean, Pocota gives up. The number of players are just – it's such a small sample of players who make it that far

and they've been and they're a subset that doesn't really fit the rest of the population so you can't even really extrapolate from them because there's like this huge survivorship bias and we basically have no idea for instance you cannot play the what would Mark Witten

do now game we have no empirical evidence of what Mark Witten would do now. And I am dying to know what Mark Witten would do now. I mean, I just think it's – I mean, for no other reason so that we could answer the question of how good Bonds would be because there's actually some relevance. I mean, don't you wonder, like, what would Bonds' true average be right now? I mean, at least once a year, at least once a year, I guess Bonds. Granted, Bonds, last time I saw him, was about half the size of Bonds the last time he played. So what do you think Bonds would hit? I mean, he'd still get on base, I would think.

Although, I don't know, he looks so puny now compared to the Bons who played that maybe pitchers wouldn't be at all intimidated. He is 48 years old also. I would think that he could still get on base. Gosh, I don't know. It's hard because his on-base ability was driven by his eye, of course, but also by his incredible power. And also by the lineup behind him and just this weird kind of momentum that grew around him. Yeah. It is hard to know how much of the walk rate to credit to him. I would guess that he could have a 300 on base percentage,

uh, but would get hurt or something. Yeah. I think that the, the floor that I would give him would be something like, like one 80 to 90, three 60. Like that's the floor.

And it wouldn't shock me if he could do like two 20, three 75, four 25 right now. Uh, and and joe giardi uh well i i have gosh you know dennis eckersley was talking today about uh do you remember the pepsi commercial where they were like in the cornfield and yeah like all the all the legends came out of the cornfield and they were well dennis eckersley was actually talking about the the game that they actually had to play for the winners you know like the the prize was that these legends would come and play a game against you you'd get to play against like dave winfield and so they actually played that game and um

pedro martinez started and eckersley relieved him and he ended up having to go more than an inning and he uh seven months later he had to have like I think shoulder surgery or something he blew out his arm because he he uh he got overworked um so I was I was actually just imagining what uh like what those guys would do as well so I would think think that it's hard to say because Girardi, it's not just his age, it's his inactivity. He hasn't played in 10 years and he hasn't, I mean, I'm sure he's in good shape for a human, but terrible shape for an athlete. And if he tried to play,

I imagine that he would be not that much better than, you know, a high school senior who can sort of play a little bit right now. I think he'd be basically hopeless. I think that the 50-75-50 line both vastly underestimates how many walks you can draw if you're really dedicated to it, and also the almost sheer impossibility, I think of of never getting an extra base hit uh although he's 48 and slow and a catcher and all that but i would guess something like uh 20 90 60 something like that uh do you have maybe 20 20 90 35 uh and then which manager would be best is that part of the

question uh i guess robin ventura yeah that's what i was gonna say yeah you basically just want the the youngest guy the least removed from playing and and i guess it helps that he was a good player um yeah i don't know i'm scanning the list i i don't know i mean mike metheny is young but he had to retire and and wasn't yeah he had to retire i mean hitting wise yeah he had to retire for right like health issues though i mean when he retired what like 2006 i don't know um yeah i don't know i i guess i guess I would probably go with Ventura. I was kind of struck when I was in the Diamondbacks visiting clubhouse a while ago. Everywhere you look in that clubhouse, there is a coach who is like a Hall of Famer or an All-Star.

A lot of teams just kind of have marginal major leaguers or i mean not even my major leaguers but the diamondbacks just have a bunch of stars for their coaching stuff i've been meaning to kind of compare their their career coaching warp to other teams for which there's like no reason at all to do which is why i haven't done it yet, but I will do it at some point. But, I mean, they have Kirk Gibson as their manager. They have Don Biller as their batting coach. Chuck Nagy is their pitching coach. Steve Sachs is their first base coach.

Matt Williams is their third base coach. Alan Trammell is their bench coach. So a lot of talent there. Yeah, and not a Hall of Famer in the bunch. There's like six Hall of Very Gooders or hall of hall of nearly graders there's a whole there's a whole sequel to the book in that clubhouse do i is there any do i have any hope you you know more about these things than i do and what secret projects bp might have going on do is there any hope of me answering the mark whitton question in my lifetime lifetime. Do you think there's any way that that can ever be calculated? No. Sorry.

Okay. What age do you think, if every human being in the world got, say, a thousand in bats, what would be the oldest age that any human being would get a hit? Would any 75-year-old get a hit? I don't know. I mean, I guess if we're talking about however many billion people there are in the world today, there must be some genetic freak out there somehow, somewhere, who is 75 and in the shape of a 50 year old and uh trains every day and plays in some rec league so yes um i would and we're counting any any kind of hit even a infield it's got to leave it's got to leave the infield uh all right i will

i would say there's there's got to be an 80 year old who could get a pop fly that falls in all right so you haven't given me a number yet all you've done is rule out numbers all right 81 and then what about on the low end um uh um i'll say nine nine yeah some kids hit puberty at like eight definitely not all right uh okay uh isaac asks i have a quick question for you guys and i'm not sure if there's a real answer but which do you find more aesthetically pleasing a player with a massive amount of natural talent who makes the game seem easy and never appears to show effort, such as Robinson Cano or Ken Griffey Jr., or a player who constantly appears to be busting his ass

and giving max effort, and he lists Bryce Harper and Brett Laurie as examples. I would kind of quibble with putting Harper in that second group. I think he's kind of... I mean, I don't know. He's kind of aibble with putting Harper in that second group. Really? I don't know. He's kind of a hybrid, isn't he? He's obviously naturally talented, but he is the king of hustle. He is maybe the only player in baseball whose hustle I genuinely appreciate as true hustle. Not false hustle, not wasted hustle.

It is genuine. That is like, it is genuine. It is both unnecessary and valuable. And I love it. Uh, I, I prefer, I think I prefer the, the really smooth looking player, I think. Yeah. I think aesthetically I appreciate the smooth looking player partly because I, I think if I actually saw it in those sort of moral terms that I feel like Isaac is maybe hinting at, where if I saw one guy as making the most of his abilities and the other is not, for instance, then I might switch. But I mean, I basically think that all these guys are working insanely hard behind the scenes and that, you know, Griffey probably

worked insanely hard and Garrett Anderson probably worked insanely hard. And so I don't see any less effort if they're smooth and graceful on the field. And, you know, in the same way, I don't consider Brett Lawry any less naturally talented. It's primarily it's primarily it's it's a style, not a strategy. Yeah, and I would rather watch probably Griffey or Cano swinging all day than someone who looks like he's swinging really hard. I don't know if they had really pretty swings or have in Cano's case. So yeah. I wouldn't want to watch any player swing all day. No, probably not.

Not just that. Okay, next question comes from Lou in Cincinnati, who says that he loves the podcast because it has a zen quality that differentiates it from the competition. Talking to some non-baseball fan friends while the Reds bullpen was spoiling Cueto's day on Sunday, we got into a discussion on baseball's origins and how so very much of the game was created 150 years ago and remained unchanged since. This led to speculation about how things could have gone differently. My question, what would the game be like if they rotated players like volleyball either every inning or even every batter every player had to be able to man every position what kind of player would thrive in such an environment are we do you think we should exempt pitcher and catcher from this i mean he can't probably catcher right yeah because if it were pitcher if you had to rotate on a pitcher i think every game would be like 22 to 16

and and pitching wouldn't be a skill and baseball probably wouldn't be that much fun if pitching weren't a skill yeah so yeah you just have to play all the the regular positions so I mean I guess uh in this game you would want Willie Bloomquist he would be the king I it's it's a good question because I'm not sure you would i mean obviously nobody wants to have billy butler playing shortstop for them but uh it's only wanted bat uh you know out of nine that he's playing shortstop and you and you do you wonder and this is probably actually matt you know you could probably figure this out you could do this we could do this ben this is an unfiltered that i predict you'll do uh you could actually figure out where the defensive bar is for a player to make this team, assuming that they hit like Billy Butler. I mean, I'm thinking. I'm not talking. I don't know if anybody's noticed this.

Right now I'm not saying what. But I'm not sure that you can assume that it would go the Willie Bloomquist route automatically. Right. Willie Bloomquist would have a lot more value than he does right now. Yes. But on the other hand, you'd waste a lot of Willie Bloomquist time at first base too, although not a lot. But if you were, for instance, you take a guy like Brendan Ryan, almost totally worthless

in that league, right? Because his only value is being able to play a position that only like 16 people in the world can play well and being able to do that every day. And I mean if he were a left fielder just as often as he were a shortstop, he would be completely worthless. And so the idea that you would instantly go to the scrappers I think is probably false. I do think that you might see a – I don't know. I'm not sure how many guys, I once asked Kevin Goldstein, um, of the say 10 best defenders in the world, like the 10, the very 10 best fielders in the entire world at any, you know,

any level, any country, how many of them have I heard of? And he said 10, he said. He says that there's not this class of fielders out there who are like super elite fielders, but can't hit even 100. Which shocked me. I would have guessed that there would be probably 500 Venezuelan shortstops who are good enough to play shortstop in the majors, but not enough to hit even at age 27 wouldn't be good enough to hit in short season. And Kevin doesn't seem to think that's true. So if you assume that kind of non-intuitively it's the case that baseball skills tend to clump in people and that the good fielders are also the good

hitters uh and that there's not this class of guys out there who are really good fielders and could play every position you might basically what i'm saying is you might basically be stuck with the same thousand guys that we see right now and you would just have to figure out a way to deploy them effectively and there might be some guys who would get kicked out on the market yeah there's certainly i mean travis hafner travis hafner there you go travis hafner couldn't do it and probably there's a there's probably a lot of catchers oh wait we've we've eliminated catcher from this um but you might end up with a lot of the same guys i think if you had a if if it did go the route where you saw a lot more rounded players and a lot fewer specialists, which basically that's what Billy Butler is and that's what Brendan Ryan is, they're specialists, right? And everybody who plays position is in some way or another kind of a specialist.

He specializes at his position. I think it would be a lot less fun. I think that in all sports, we like specialists. We don't like generalists nearly as much. And I think that shows up in the sort of Hall of Fame voting bias against guys who are good at everything but great at none. So I think that the lack of variety would be bad for the game, but I'm not sure that the lack of variety would actually come anyway.

the game, but I'm not sure that the lack of variety would actually come anyway. Okay, and we also have a question on 3-0 swings. This is from John. He says, I've always wondered why players are so rarely given the green light to swing on a 3-0 count. I understand that you never want to give up an out when a free base is so close, but given the number of mediocre fastballs grooved dead center on a nightly basis, it really makes me question the practice. If anything, it seems far more likely that you'll see a slider out of the zone 3-2 than 3-0. If you want to pitch to plant over the fence, 3-0 seems like the absolute best time to look for it. He then acknowledges that if batters did start swinging more, pitchers and opposing teams would adjust and they would stop grooving

so many fastballs but we haven't gotten to that point is there a logical reason behind the red light or is this just another one of baseball's unwritten rules yeah i think that uh there's two things to say here one is that i don't think pitchers would adjust um i one time looked at tory hunter and bobby abreu Bobby Abreu at that point had never swung at 3-0 or perhaps had swung at 3-0 once as a rookie and had never done it again. This was like 2010 or 11 that I looked at it. So he had like a 14-year run of never swinging at 3-0. And Torrey Hunter had swung at like half of the 3-0 pitches he'd seen that year. And they were basically equal hitters uh you know roughly

speaking different styles but roughly speaking equal hitters at the time and i looked at um at whether pitchers pitched either of them differently on 3-0 because of this and in fact there was no difference whatsoever uh abreu actually had seen slightly uh fewer hittable 3-0 pitches than Hunter had, and I then, so I don't think that pitchers would adjust. I then also looked at which had more value, which collected more value from their 3-0 approaches, and Abreu had the better post-3-0 performance of the two with more walks and not a substantially worse ball-and-play rate

on 3-0 and afterward. So those are two things. I said there were going to be two things. The third thing, though, I think is that there's a little bit of a false idea that 3-0 pitches are constantly being grooved right down the middle. In fact, pitchers are terrible at throwing the ball where they want to throw it. And even if they're trying to throw it down the middle, I think that a smaller percentage than you realize are actually in that really fat sweet spot. If you watch closely starting now, I think that you'll start noticing that 3-0 pitches actually are all over the strike zone. A lot of times they're not in the strike zone and they're called strikes because of the 3-0 auto strike call. But it isn't really

the case that you're just getting this constant stream of balls on the tee. You're still getting pitches that are a few inches from the middle of the zone or sometimes still on the edge of the zone or sometimes out of the zone. And you still have to decide whether that's your pitch. And just because it's a pretty good pitch to us doesn't mean that it's necessarily the perfect pitch for hitters. And they know that the pressures on the pitch are to throw three in a row. So I actually, for most of my life, agreed that batters should be swinging at 3-0 much more.

And I've become a late convert convert partly because of what I looked at and partly just because it makes sense to me now, the way that they do it. There was a BP mailbag thing that Dan Brooks and Harry Pavlidis did last year where someone asked them how often major leaguers swing on 3-0 counts, and they said it was uh something like uh seven percent of the time is what is what their answer was um but that when the pitch was a strike or in the in the strike zone in the typical called strike zone uh they only swing like 9.7% of the time, up from 7%. So, I mean, a very small increase depending on whether the pitch is actually in the strike zone or not.

And those rates are, they said, nearly tenfold less than how often batters swing on 3-2 counts in the zone. how often batters swing on 3-2 counts in the zone. So I still tend to lean towards the idea that swinging more would make more sense. I mean, I think there would be an adjustment if there were a league-wide change. And I guess we could, I mean, if we had the data, we could check this because batters are swinging less often on 3-0 counts now than they used to um so if we if we had pitch effects for a couple decades ago then we would know if if pitchers had adjusted but uh i mean if you just look at those isolated examples of abreu and hunter i can imagine that some pitchers are probably very diligent about studying scouting reports and hitter tendencies and would know for sure that that a Bray would never swings at 3-0 and Hunter swings half the time on 3-0. But I think a lot of pitchers also go on just their own experience and their own memory on facing a hitter before.

And you don't get to 3-0 all that often on on hitters so I can imagine that a good number of pitchers most pitchers probably wouldn't have the sort of sample size from personal experience to say that Abreu never swings and Hunter swings a lot so unless they were studying those scouting reports and looking at some printout that the coaches might have, they wouldn't necessarily know that it was anything close to that extreme. But I would think that if there were an entire shift, you know, in the whole league suddenly started swinging more often on 3-0, that is something that would become apparent and that they would adjust to. Good point. Okay.

All right. That's enough questions then. Thank you for sending them. You can send us more at podcast at baseball prospectus.com and we will be back tomorrow.