Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 216: Whither the White Sox?/Dissecting Yasiel Puig’s Debut

Episode Date: June 4, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about where the White Sox should go from here, then discuss the (over?)hyping of Yasiel Puig’s big-league debut.

Hello, Yossi O'Pwee! What a way to start a career! Good morning and welcome to episode 216 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you? Great. Oh. It always surprises you when I don't just groan or something. It always surprises you when I don't just groan or something. Yeah.

Well, it's good to hear you. It's good to hear you chirpy this morning. What do you want to talk about? I want to talk about the White Sox. Okay. And I want to talk about being a hater. Okay. I guess, actually, I want to talk about Puig's debut Okay

I guess I'll go first Sure So I got an email, this is in response to a reader email, not a listener email so I feel justified in answering it before our listener email show It's from Steven

He asks What should the White Sox do To become relevant again As near as I can tell They have almost no sellable parts Even if they want to eat a ton of salary Rios, Peavy, Reed, maybe Crane Could yield players who could play for the next

Sox championship team Sale could provide that yield too But he might be the only player you consciously keep Veceto, Santiago, and Quintana Might have enough upside to keep the rest of it, blow it up. The farm system seems to have low upside pitchers and a lot of Viseydo clones. I'm not sure the Sox could get back the talent that Houston received when they finally began selling off everything. It strikes me as one of the biggest challenges faced by a front office in a long time. I'd love to hear the thoughts of one or more of our writers.

So I guess I basically agree with Stephen's assessment of the state of the White Sox. Jason Parks last night and asked him basically if there had been any encouraging news about the White Sox farm system this year because they were the one team that did not have a single prospect on our top 101 list. And he said basically no, there has really not been any good news about their system this year. It's still bad. I guess their top prospect was or is Courtney Hawkins, who, again, was not on our top 101, but he was 55 on Baseball America's list. He is hitting 189 right now in high A with some power.

But so Jason said that he has been very disappointing. The rest of the farm is not pretty. And it is kind of hard to find sellable parts on the major league roster. It's sort of, it's different from the Astros, as Stephen pointed out, and that there aren't really affordable players like a Wandi Rodriguez or a Hunter Pence or Bud Norris or people like that who the Astros have traded or have been rumored to be considering trading. There are just kind of, I mean there's Rios, there's Peavy and then it's pretty thin after that. Danks isn't a terrible comp for Wandi, is he? Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

Yeah, he has to stick for a few starts and do a few decent things, but you know you know so when he wanted he liked right okay um so i mean under kenny williams the white socks never really did a rebuilding it was always uh trying to patch together the roster trying to win and and to his credit he was often successful with that strategy um but the the farm system kind of is showing the impact of his years of not, and maybe it's not his fault, maybe it's ownership, but not spending over slot in the draft and not really going after the international market. And they've kind of corrected that. At least last year, they spent more in the draft. And it seems like that's a new philosophy and pursuing more players on the international market. But as we've discussed, it's kind of hard to remake your roster quickly via those avenues anymore.

So what do you do with the White Sox? It's a team that doesn't really seem to be going anywhere right now, doesn't really seem like it's going to be going anywhere with the current core and yet you can't really forecast anything from the farm system coming along and making the team into a contender without without them doing something drastic it seems like like a wait and see approach doesn't seem like it's going to lead to anything very good here. So do you just blow it up and trade everything you can and hope that that's enough to kind of kickstart a rebuilding movement? First, I just want to note that Courtney Hawkins, I'm glad he's bringing back the Courtney. I find it odd how every boy's name eventually becomes a girl's name and

never goes back and it troubles me. And there's nothing I love more than seeing a classic old boy's name reclaimed for the boys. Just wanted to note that. All right. Do you think that, you know, we sometimes look at team age and, uh, I, I remember you wrote about the Phillies last year and you found something in their age that showed that they were like about to fall off a cliff or something like that.

Um, right. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if instead of looking at team age, if it would be more instructive to look at team service time and average service time per player, which I've never seen anybody do. But I wonder if that might actually be more telling. Yeah, possibly. I think if you look at team age, I think I did that last week when I was looking up something else. And if I remember right, they had maybe the second oldest position players and fairly young pitchers on the younger side at least.

So they have about half of their 25-man roster is six plus years of service time. So I'm wondering if that's higher than normal or not. I don't know. are tricky because um i'm pretty sure that that we i've certainly have thought uh they were going to be bad for pretty much each of the last seven years and they've been bad for like half of those years and then they've been good for half of those years and so it's um you know i feel a little at this point i feel a little bit of deference to kenny williams who's won a lot more games than I expected him to. Do you feel the same way at all? Do you have a history of miscalculating the way it talks?

Yeah, I guess so. And I guess that's kind of what Pakoda is known for, also, for sort of underestimating them and maybe because of the health thing and their excellent track record of keeping players off the DL. Yeah, well, and also it's interesting how Pakoda is also known more than anything for nailing them that one year. Yes. The White Sox are Pakoda's number one anecdote. And also the biggest strike against them sometimes.

Yeah, so... And their health, actually. I just looked up for something i was writing this morning and they actually have the sixth most days missed on the dl this year uh i didn't really look to see whether it was important players but um but they don't seem to have had that kind of magic touch so far this season um yeah i we. I remember getting one of our first angry emails, I think, back when we started this podcast about our, or it might have been an angry blog post about us that we didn't give the White Sox enough credit, that we didn't recognize the star potential of Vecino and Deaza, for instance, or the farm, which I think we were not given.

We didn't give enough credit to their farm system for producing. Yeah, for like serviceable people or parts that could be on a roster even if they weren't stars. Exactly. And so, yeah, so I'm a little bit hesitant. But, yeah, I mean it's not – the White Sox right now are not as sexy a team as the Angels and the Dodgers. They're not as expensive a team as the Angels or Dodgers. And they're not doing quite as poorly as the Angels and Dodgers. However, you could very easily imagine that if they had three fewer wins

and had made one more signing this offseason, editors around the country would be wrapping them into that trend because they are a big market and they do have the lousy farm system and they don't seem to have a plan that goes beyond getting the next veteran who comes available. It's not clear that that's a way that you can win these days, unless you have, well, no, I was going to say unless you have $225 million, but it's not clear that that's a way that you can win even if you have $225 million. Yeah, I went on a Chicago station this weekend,

and before I went on, the host was talking about how it's not viable for the White Sox to rebuild. He was kind of making the Cubs-White Sox comparison and saying, you know, the Cubs have such a long history and such a loyal fan base that they can rebuild. Their fans will understand and they will stick with them and Wrigley will sell out every game anyway. Whereas the White Sox don't have that kind of currency and can't really just punt a few seasons because they will lose whatever fans they have right now. So I'm sort of sympathetic to that viewpoint. But on the other hand, the White Sox aren't drawing anyone anyway, as it is. They're 11th in attendance this year. So maybe they just don't have that much to lose right now. Yeah, I think that's an over, I think a lot more teams feel that way about

themselves than is probably true. I mean, it's true that you don't want to spend four years wandering about collecting number two draft picks. But I think a lot of teams underestimate their ability to bounce back from a losing season popularity-wise. And so I don't know that I accept that. And clearly, it's far worse to lose for a long stretch at a time. And it's not entirely clear that there is a way, that there is a non-rebuilding way to go from bad to good at this point. And you can't not be good.

You can't be bad and say, well, we're not rebuilding. We're just bad. You have to actually produce something out of it. And I don't know. I mean I'm not panicked about the White Sox right now because, like I said, they won 85 games last year. They've got a decent track record. They've probably won more games over the last six years than 20 major league teams. you know, six years than 20 major league teams.

And so, you know, it's not as though they've descended into this horrible cycle of losing. You could also imagine that if they had won three more games right now, they'd be at 500. And, you know, people would be saying, well, geez, do they have enough to get a piece of the trade deadline? Rick Hahn said something recently. I think it was a Sunday morning interview. He called the White Sox's past week difficult and embarrassing, which maybe sounds like the words of someone who is ready to do something drastic. I don't know. Maybe not.

Yeah. Man, poor Gordon Beckham. Yes. Well, Gordon Beckham comes back. I mean, if Gordon Beckham is the cavalry who's going to fix your offensive struggles, that's about as depressing, I guess, as the Marlins getting Casey Kochman back and hoping that that improves their scoring. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've been staring at their baseball reference page since you started talking, and I can understand your emailers' frustration because I just kind of keep scrolling up and then scrolling down and then looking, well, maybe they're good against lefties. No, they're not good against lefties.

Maybe that's their great hope was that they're going to have a good platoon split like that's how sad this is okay all right um so uh puig made his debut last night uh he did some things i don't know if you saw any of those things yeah didn't watch the game but watched all the things that he did the so the things he did were a couple of singles uh in forward bats um you know a uh a hard turnaround first might be considered a thing that he did uh a throw to second a throw home neither of which netted an out but allowed him to display that he does in fact have a functional arm, and then a game-ending play in which he caught a fly ball at the warning track. That was the sexy one. Well, we'll get to that.

And doubled up the base runner who had been deked at second base with a sort of a flat-footed throw that was more or less on the line and got Christon Orfea out for the final out of the game, which was a nice bit of timing for a sexy debut. And so I don't like to be the guy who's like, ah, kids with their hype and their young people and all that. But I do find myself not that impressed by his game last night and sort of turned off by the fact that I woke up this morning and it was just nothing but like crazy adulation for him. I just don't get the

feeling that like if he, you know, that if Andre Ethier had had this same game that people would be, you know, that excited about Andre Ethierier's performance. I feel bad. I feel bad about this because I want people to have their fun. Heavens knows I've made a living hyping young players for websites and magazines.

I don't know. I'm not that excited. I don't know. I'm wondering if you're going to make me more excited or not. I just want to do a quick review of the MLB.com recap of Puig's debut. sense of um of uh of of cliche or overwriting or over romanticism that in fact betrays the the fact that in fact there wasn't a whole lot here to write about directly like like i feel like with manny machado you don't have to really get into the cliches you just say what he's done and it speaks for itself or you you gift what he's done and it speaks for himself but here i think that there's a forcedness that actually shows that there's a bit more there's a bit more effort

being made to hype the player than than is necessarily deserved so i did kind of get the sense that puig was going to be the story one way or another today unless he went oh for five with four strikeouts or something people were probably going to seize on the positive aspects. But yeah, but read the highlights. All right. So, all right. Okay. I actually feel bad because I'm going to start with my favorite.

Okay, so Puig singled on a 2-2 changeup in his first at bat against Eric Stoltz, a crafty southpaw. Notably, he's crafty. He could have said he singled in his first at bat against Eric Stoltz, a crafty southpaw. Notably, he's crafty. He could have said he singled in his first at bat against Eric Stoltz, who was out of the game a year and a half ago. But no, he's a crafty southpaw. But he was erased when Punto hit into a double play, but there was a new energy in the grand old ballpark, and it reached Adrian Gonzalez, who then went on to homer. So Puig actually gets credit for Gonzalez' home run against Eric Stoltz.

I can just imagine before the game, Don Mattingly looking at his lineup and going, well, there's no way Adrian Gonzalez could ever hit Eric Stoltz. But, well, maybe I'll leave him in the lineup in case the energy trickles down to him. All right, so that's my favorite. But then a team that had been dragging suddenly seemed inspired, which, you know, they scored two runs against Eric Stoltz. After his second hit the other way with one out in the sixth, he made a wide turn before slamming on the brakes.

This guy plays the game on the edge, exactly what Mattingly had been pining for all season. When Punto drove a single to right center, Puig didn't get a good read, pausing near second, but his blazing speed carried him into third where he was stranded on Gonzalez double play ball, where he gets lauded for not getting a good read, interestingly. There's the Bo Jackson comp. Yes, I've heard that many times. There's the Mike Trout comp. There is a Major League

debut every bit as sensational as a seasoned script writer could conceive, which is a classic cliche that in this case is 100% not true. Many script writers could conceive of a two-for-four, two singles, and pretty okay. play to end the game that really probably more of the credit behind the scenes should go to the middle infielders who deeped the heck out of D'Norvia.

And then Don Mattingly, quote, this is Hollywood. And then finally, on the last play, there was a momentary delay before the outcall was made by umpire Wagner. talking about the four umpires the only wagner had to make a call and what actually happened is that uh because it was the home plate umpires call uh there was i think maybe there was a little confusion about whose call there was and so there was like a split second where wagner looked at another umpire to see if like like it's me right it's it's me and and that's it it was not not nearly it did not nearly seem that the four umpires could not believe what they just seen i mean if if if if more than one of them had collapsed in a in a fit of ecstasy then i might have accepted that but but in fact none of them zero umpires collapsed there was zero fits of of of ecstasy um and so there's this quote which my my other favorite part of this piece is that there is this quote in the middle of it that i can't

believe the writer used because it completely it's it's the most banal quote and if you're reading the piece you get to this quote and you go oh okay so that's what really happened and it's from bud black he says it just happened that the right fielder has a strong arm and made an accurate throw. And it took all the comments out of it. It's true Puig has a strong arm and he made an accurate throw. It was not the sexiest throw I've ever seen. The lead, by the way,

was Kevin Kennedy saying that he's Roberto Clemente. But yeah, the hits were not... I didn't see the game live. And so in my head, I had a mental image of what the hit, what the first hit was going to look like. Just, just, just totally guessing what it was going to look like. And it was exactly that. It was a change up just out of the zone and he sort of flails out with his arms and bloops one in the left field, which by the way, as an aside, um, when you see a guy, would you, what would be more impressive to you? A first pit, a first single where he squares up a

ball that's out of the zone or a first pitch single where he hits hard, a pitch that's right down the middle. Like, would you rather, what's more impressive to you, a guy for it, for a young player, a guy who has the back control to hit anything at this age and you sort of hope that like that that's not going to become a fault and that maybe that that back control is the one thing that is is ingrained in him or the ability to damage a mistake uh i mean not that i would read that much into either but i guess probably the latter i guess i'd rather see the guy who could hit a ball that not anyone would hit and then hope that he swings at good pitches most of the time or learns to do that.

Yeah, I think so too. Although you might imagine that if the next at bat he swung at a pitch that's four feet outside that you might consider that a problem. Okay, and so yeah. And then the second single was a chopper that was off the first baseman's glove. Both balls. I mean, he was close to an 0 for 4.

And, you know, it's baseball, so he was probably close to a 4 for 4 too. There's not that much you can say about one game. But, I mean, I remember the similar Bryce similar bryce harper reaction when harper made his debut last year and to me completely warranted like that was an exciting game like that throw that he made uh was like a heart-stopping throw i mean it was an incredible throw and puig's throw was was good but i just don't think that it would have been – nobody would mention the throw otherwise. It's mainly the fact that it was Puig's first game. And so I don't know.

I mean bless his heart. Bless everybody. I hope we have a great deal of fun with him and I'm willing to put these feelings aside and let him have a good career. But yeah, I don't know. It just feels a bit much. It feels a good career. But yeah, I don't know. It just feels a bit much. It feels a bit much. I wanted to talk about Puig and then I looked at what other people were saying about Puig

and I thought, oh no, I don't want to talk about Puig. So I decided just to go the hater route. Yeah, well, you know, we joke about narrative and we write about narrative. And fortunately, you and I write for a place where we don't need to make up that much narrative, I guess, or I don't know. We write for baseball perspectives,

and people are just kind of okay with looking at the numbers and what actually happened. So we don't have to embellish too much. I mean, we have to make the story interesting, but fortunately, we don't have to kind of conjure an amazing performance out of thin air. I mean, I think it was, I don't know, there was certainly nothing about what he did that made me discouraged or made me think that he is not the prospect that people think he is. He's fast, he looks strong, he put the bat on the

ball and he can throw the ball. Yeah. And I guess it's, I don't know. It's a, it's probably a combination of, of him looking decent and, and the Dodgers just being kind of depressing and needing some sort of good

story to liven them up, I guess. I mean, if you're, if you're someone who writes about the Dodgers all the time, there's been a lot of doom and gloom and outfielders not hitting and outfielders getting hurt. And now suddenly there's a new exciting player and he hasn't gotten hurt or played poorly yet. And you're, I don't know, I guess you're looking for something to make people click on your article and they won't click as much if you

if you say that he had a an okay debut and could have gone over four pretty easily um so i don't know it happens um but i'm i'm looking forward to to watching him uh i think he will be an entertaining player one way or another. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. I just, while we were talking about Puig, I remember that Nate Silver once wrote an article. It was in 2006.

He wrote an article about attendance with two-team cities. He was writing about the White Sox and the Cubs and Kenny Williams taking an aggressive approach over the offseason because the sense was that the Cubs were on the brink of competing or being good and the White Sox had to kind of seize their chance to be successful while the rest of the city didn't have the Cubs to cling to. And he basically found that there is not much to the idea of competition between teams in two team cities and that if one team is good, it doesn't necessarily hurt the other team. But if both teams are good, it can actually, or if one is good, it can help the other team

just because that team then draws so well that it's harder to get tickets for that team. And then the other team sells tickets because people just want to go to a baseball game. And I think he found that Chicago fans just sort of tend to be more loyal than at least the data he was looking at to their teams during tough times than in some of the other cities he was looking at. their teams during tough times than in some of the other cities he was looking at. So I don't know that there is much to the idea that the White Sox have to do something because the Cubs are about to be good again. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. The better the Cubs would be, the better it would be for the White Sox. And in fact, the time that the White Sox need to be good is specifically when they can't count on the

Cubs to essentially push business their way. Interesting. Did you know that Starbucks, it turns out that the Starbucks moves into your town next door to your local independent coffee shop and all the hippies go out and protest and talk about what a shame it is that your city is becoming too commercial and how it's going to doom the local coffee shops. In fact, a Starbucks moving into your town is great for local coffee shops. It's about the best thing that can happen to a local coffee shop because it creates this huge boom of fancy specialty coffee drinkers.

And so it blows up the market for latte drinkers. And so all this time, Starbucks has been being blamed for hurting small business. And in fact, it actually builds the market and is good for small business. I wonder if that's true in Manhattan, where the Starbucks saturation is such that you literally can't go more than two or three blocks in certain neighborhoods without finding one. I wonder when it reaches that point, whether that still applies. Did that just talk about sort of towns or was that sort of all inclusive? I've got to be honest. I i didn't i didn't do the research necessary to answer your follow-up questions all right never ask follow-up questions

yeah sorry especially at the end of the podcast rob nyer by the way just listed the four the four greatest throws of his life or something like that and puig is one of them although i didn't read any of the intros so there might be all sorts of caveats for why pu And Puig is one of them, although I didn't read any of the intros, so there might be all sorts of caveats for why Puig is not technically one of the foremost. Interesting. And, in fact, he might, for all I know, there's something ironic that I'm missing by not having read the words. So I don't, yeah.

Okay. Oh, they're calling it The Throw. Capital T. Capital T. Two capital Ts. Yeah, that's a bit much. Yeah, it's an okay throw. Maybe if it had been the World Series?

Nope. No? Still no. Still no. It was an okay throw. It's a good throw. Yeah, good throw. Good arm.

He's got a good arm and he threw an accurate throw. Okay. Tell you what, though. Let me make this let me make this point if if denorfia had been deked one half second less and had made it back safely nobody would be talking about the throw right now i think well i mean considering the excerpts from that article you read i think think someone would be talking about it. It would be the greatest almost out in the history of baseball. Yeah.

Okay. Well, tomorrow, email show. So send us some at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.