Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 219: The Mock Draft Mystery/Joey Votto’s Future/Scouts and Espionage/The New-Look Royals Lineup

Episode Date: June 7, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the mystery of mock drafts, how Joey Votto might age, the kinds of information scouts can trust, and the Royals’ lineup evolution.

that is the most unbelievable catch that I've ever seen a full-blooded sweep shot and somehow he's come up with it there's no way in the world the naked eye could keep track of this one all one could see was that he seemed to hang up he must have been it straight into his hand as he buckled up I think it buckled in into him just have a look at this as it go at it there's Slater taking evasive action here. It goes straight into that air and he's clung on to it. Have a look at that. He's got it. It's unbelievable.

Good morning and welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. This is episode 319. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Sam, how's your mock doing? Ben Lindberg joined by Sam Miller. Sam, how's your, how's your mock doing? Uh, that's the joke in that is that of course I don't have a mock and, uh, the, um, the way that I know that's a good joke is that when you said it, I literally had no idea what a mock was for like, that's what we, in the mock drafting industry, industry, we just call it a mock. Yeah. terms of information exchange or utility of information relative to time devoted to coming up with and disseminating that information as the mock draft? Yeah, well, I guess if you think about it as just a framing device where the actual

goal is to write words about players and to describe them and explain what they're good for. But most people aren't going to read about just any player. You have to give them some incentive to read it. You need to make it real in their lives. So isn't a ranking incentive enough? I don't think a ranking is certainly useful because when your team gets the player that no mock draft had them taking, you want to be able to look and see whether the player was better. But in advance, if you're a Brewers fan and you're picking 14th, you don't want to read about every player.

You're kind of lazy or you can't keep all these names in your head or you're just not that into this, which would describe me, except for the Brewers fan part. So you have to, but if you tell somebody, ooh, the Brewers are on this guy, then they're going to click on your thing to see what you say about that guy. So I think it's a useful thing from a publishing sense. And I don't just mean in the way that people click on that thing and read it, which is also useful. But it actually is good for creating a real connection between the reader and the player that they otherwise wouldn't be able to manage. However, that said, it is the weirdest thing. Because not only is the track record terrible.

And it's fully acknowledged by the people doing the mock drafts that it's awful. They don't pretend that there's any real accuracy here. They've been doing it for a while. They know that they're going to get almost everything wrong. Especially if they can't pin down number one. Not only does that speak poorly to their ability to pin down two and three and four and five, but, but there is literally no, there's no possible way. There's, you do not know the players that are available at that point. It's, you know, it's like trying

to put together a puzzle and you not only don't have the box on the cover, but you don't have eyes. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's value to it in kind of knowing what types of players a team is interested in or what their philosophy in drafting is. Maybe you can glean that sort of thing from it, even if the results don't play out the way that you mock drafted it but so i guess you learn things from it that you might not learn from a straight ranking of players but it's such a such an odd exercise to devote yeah people devote days of their lives and come out with revision after revision over you know a period of a month before the draft and then they put out their final thing on the day of the draft and they update it twice on the day of the draft and then the draft starts and it's just it's just done in in a few minutes it's over yeah but again i mean it's it's also good for the you know it creates a framing device for your reporting so that you know i would imagine that it's good and incentive for the for the reporter to have a lot more conversations to talk about a lot more players with a lot more teams and so it's good incentive for the reporter to have a lot more conversations, to talk

about a lot more players with a lot more teams. So it's this weird thing where it actually does benefit the reporter in his reporting and it does benefit the reader in his reading. It's this total island of pointlessness in the middle of it and all the benefits are secondhand. It's a strange thing because it is both absolutely essential and has never has never contributed a lick of value uh you know directly and also so what you so what if you know where you're who your team's getting i mean it's literally you don't even need to know the guy's name for four years okay so like why do you need to know it a day in a week? Right. He's probably not ever going to play for your team, even if your team picks him. So you think you could wait until the pick happens, at which point you can just start waiting again.

It's weird. It's very weird. Okay, so we wanted to talk about an email that we got, which is maybe my favorite email that we've gotten. I know you enjoyed it too. We talked on the Wednesday email show, Matt from Germany brought up the idea of forming an infield wall, I guess to cut off the batted ball, and then we were talking about kind of adapting that idea to distract the batter. And we kind of concluded that it was crazy, that maybe it would kind of work if you did it. It would be very distracting if you had a fielder time his dive in front of the pitch. if you had a fielder time his dive in front of the pitch. But it wouldn't work because, A, he might get killed,

and also because the umpire would hate it and would not give you any calls and various other reasons why it seems completely insane. And then we got an email from Ian from Derry, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, where we are very big. And he basically told us that this exists more or less in cricket. The wall is pretty much a thing. So there is a position in cricket called the silly position, where and i'm quoting in here occasionally field extremely close to the batter in positions such as and i guess it's called short uh and also called silly and these players wear extra pads and a helmet because they are standing right in

front of the batter uh and the idea is i guess it's partially to get in the batter's head that there's a fielder crouching right in front of him. And Ian sent us a picture which is amazing. The picture is, the picture email is actually better than the original email, right? Yes. And I'll upload the picture to the BP server and I'll link to it in the podcast post so you should go right now and look at this picture

of the fielder in the silly position standing what maybe 5 feet 4 feet in a crouch as though he is the catcher he's in a catcher's crouch with his hands everything about this screams As though he is the catcher. He's in a catcher's crouch with his hands. I mean, everything about this screams Monty Python-based prank, right? I mean, Ian is pranking us.

But it's on Wikipedia. So unless he was very dedicated and he went and edited the entry before he emailed us to put this over on us, it is a real thing. to put this over on us. It is a real thing. And I almost felt like there had to be another reason why it was called the silly position. I figured maybe that the first guy to do it was like Sir Reginald Silly or something in 1887. And so they named it after him because I mean, I asked, is it called silly because you're standing right in front of the batter where you could get nailed in the face with a cricket ball? And yes, that is why it is called the silly position. So it is there partially to get in the batter or the batsman's head because there's a guy crouching right in front of him. because there's a guy crouching right in front of him. And also because I guess if the ball bounces off the bat or bounces off the batsman's pads,

you will be right there to get it. And then Ian says, if it looks like the batsman is winding up to take a big hack at the ball, they will take evasive action. Which I would really like to see. I didn't actually look to see if I could find a video of this happening, which I would like to see. I actually look to see if I could find a video of this happening, which I should do. Anyway, it's it seems like the first thing you would do if you were the batsman is take a big hack.

So I don't know why. I don't know. I don't know how it works. Right. Don't you just immediately swing for the silly position? I guess, unless that would make you less likely to hit the ball. I don't know. It's crazy. Very silly. And Ian says, and one of my favorite parts is that they basically make the rookies do it. We were talking about kind of the veteran-rookie relationship

the other day in baseball, and I guess there's no real equivalent in baseball. I mean, there's hazing, but on the field, there's no hazardous position that you can put a rookie in, really, I guess. That's true. But in cricket, you can make the rookie play in the silly position where he may get hit in the head with a cricket ball. So amazing, amazing email from Ian, prompted by an email from Matt in Germany. So our international listeners have really stepped it up this week.

So what do you want to talk about? Joey Votto. Okay. I want to talk about a couple things I read that aren't related. Okay. Goodness gracious, Ben, we've already gone 10 minutes. I know. And you've got multiple topics. Well, they're short and it's the end of the week. Mine is short as well. I'll start. So Joey Votto, you're aware of the two amazing Joey Votto batted ball facts I saw? The one where he never hits a pop-up? Yeah, he basically hits one infield fly a year. Roughly speaking, I think it was none in 2010 and then one in each of the last two years.

He actually has, from 2010 to 2012, he somehow, if I'm reading this correctly, has something on the order of four or five times as many hits on infield flies as outs on infield flies, which is amazing. I don't know what that means. But, yeah, he basically hits one infield pop-up a year, which is absurd. He has not hit one yet this year, in case you were wondering. The other one is what, his line drive rate is crazy?

No, he has hit one foul ball into the stands down the right field line in his career. Uh-huh. So, that made sense, right? Yeah. Which is also pretty hard to imagine, because he's, I mean, you know, I mean, come on, that's insane. Right. And he remembers it. He's, he claims to remember it. Wow. Well, that's not my topic. Okay. My topic is related to that, but today Jeff Sullivan tweeted his spray chart, Joey Votto's spray chart from 2013. And it's probably after Ross Detweiler, it's probably the second best

spray chart I've ever seen. It's a big mass of balls, outs and hits and doubles and airs and stuff to left field and down the left field line and left center field and a few to center field. And then in right field, it's all green. It's there's all it's only green it's only base hits there's uh exactly one red square in right field probably 40 balls to right field that he's hit and one out one of those balls was an out and um and a whole you know a bunch of my home runs and some doubles and some singles so then i went i went looking for this one and uh baseball reference described it as a as a line drive so i figured oh okay it's a line drive not not a surprise so then i went and looked at the line drive and it was actually a rocket that he hit that nate i think nate sheerholz made this

tremendous diving catch on. And so the only out that he has made to right field this year is this tremendous line drive that took a diving catch. And so I just wanted to note this because I feel like, I mean, there have been great hitters, of course, in our lifetimes. There are great hitters right now. And Joey Votto might be the greatest hitter in the league right now but he you know he might not be you could certainly make a case for two or three other guys um but i don't know that we've ever or at least you know in a long time seen a hitter

uh who had such a clear plan and so much ability to enact this plan. I mean, there are certainly guys like Miguel Cabrera is able to hit pitches that you throw at him. He's strong. He uses the whole field. He's just very talented. He's a very talented man. But that's his plan is to hit balls hard. Joey Votto, it just feels like is this whole other level of planning, preparation, and execution that it seems almost unheard of and almost impossible because baseball

is supposed to be a lot harder than this. And so knowing what we know about Joey Votto, his incredible, incredible, incredible ability to do with the ball what he wants, he's also going to lead the league in on base percentage for the fourth consecutive year this year by the way um uh he's about to turn 30 he's you know maybe on a hall of fame track or maybe not he's kind of at this point in his career a bit like david ortiz was in in total production um and you know he's he's going to be 30 he's going to be a first baseman. The bar for offense at first base is extremely high.

And he's basically a 30-win player right now. He essentially needs to double that to be a Hall of Famer. And I just wonder, knowing what you know about his style and his ability, does this make you more confident about his ability to age than you would a player who is simply talented and able to hit? Yeah, I guess so. Not to a tremendous degree. I mean, I feel like, I don't know, it's easy to get seduced by that sort of thing maybe.

to get seduced by that sort of thing maybe. Um, and think, well, he has this incredible control over what he does. So he will simply defeat age somehow. He will, he'll compensate and he'll adjust and he'll find some new way to, to succeed when his skills start to erode. Uh, and maybe he will, I guess I would think that it's more likely that he will than the typical player. But who knows? I mean, guys get hurt and they look really good one year and then suddenly they look old all of a sudden and no one saw it coming. So I wouldn't have a tremendous amount of confidence in his ability to defy the normal aging curve. I guess, I mean, Ichiro is sort of a similar player, maybe, in that he seems to have a clear plan or he has an ability to put the ball where he wants it.

And I guess he, I mean, he has aged well, even though he's looking sort of old now but he kind of had a different skill set and the speed and the defense and all the different things that he did where you would normally say that a player who fits that profile would age well I don't know if Vado really has that so much but I guess for a for a player who fits his profile or close to fits his profile, then yeah, I guess having a greater awareness of what you're doing would help probably to some extent. Yeah, Itro's a good example. The guy I was maybe thinking of as the closest thing in recent history is Joe Maurer, who similarly has this incredible control of the strike zone.

You know, maybe the best control of the strike zone in baseball right now. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe not. And Maurer, there was a point when he was the MVP in 2009 where it just felt like he was going to be a 10-win player or whatever, 8-win player forever because you just couldn't get him out. But yeah, there is always the temptation to judge guys based on their peak. And of course, even guys who are extremely talented do have peaks and they all decline. And so I don't know. I guess I was thinking about Votto in relation to Josh Hamilton, who you wrote about this offseason as a guy you identified as likely to fall off a cliff based on his approach at the plate. And I mean, it makes sense that Hamilton would be in danger of falling off a cliff because

when you swing the way he swings, it feels like you have a low margin for losing bat speed, et cetera. And it might be the same with Vado. I mean, it might be if you do have a plan that relies on you having this ability that it might not be that easy to adjust your plan when you lose 5% of that ability when you lose a little bit of bat speed. So it might not actually be an advantage. It feels though, it feels, yeah, I don't know. Like I think right now I just want him to age well.

I want to watch him do this for a long time and see what he can do. But you can certainly envision ways that his 30s aren't quite so glorious just as you can with any baseball player. He's a first baseman who hit something like 10 home runs last year and is on pace to hit 20 this year. It's not like he's necessarily the greatest hitter ever but yeah i don't know i mean it's he feels like i mean giambi also was a guy who had this incredible control of the strike zone and was for a while

it was you just couldn't get him out and he was walking 100 and some odd times he had like a 480 on base percentage but it didn't quite feel quite so cerebral. There's something about Votto that makes you want to root for him because it seems just so deliberate. And maybe it's just because he expresses himself better or he talks about it more with the media or something. I mean, maybe we're biased towards a guy who gives a better explanation or lets us see more of his thought process or something. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we are. I'm sure we are. I know we are. Yeah. It's one of our weaknesses. Yeah. Okay. So the first thing I wanted to mention yesterday but didn't get a chance,

did you see the thing that Durkhe Hirst wrote? No. So he wrote a story. Unless you're talking about six years ago. No, not his best sellers. But his his most recent post at his website, Dirk Hayhurst dot com, he told the story. His post was called My Life is a Lie. And he told this really interesting story about how when he was in college, basically he was an effective college pitcher in 2002. He was the ace on his college staff. He was told by an Indian scout that he should expect to go in the

first 10 rounds. He thought he was going to be drafted for sure. He was not drafted that year at all. So he came back in 2003 and he was still in college. He didn't understand what happened. He kind of kept asking people why he wasn't drafted and why he was told he would be drafted and then wasn't and didn't really get a satisfying answer. But from what he could glean, it was that he didn't really have a third pitch. He was just a two pitch pitcher, fastball and curveball. He was effective in college at Kent State, but I guess people didn't think he was very projectable. He hadn't shown any sort of third pitch to go with those two pitches. So he was advised to come up with new pitches and mix them in. So he started trying to throw these things that he had really never thrown before

in his life. And he said, I was told that when the right counts and situations presented themselves to make sure scouts could write down more than fastball slash curveball. And so my entire 2003 season was one of waste pitches that looked like backed up sliders and tumbling splitters and change ups that were about as deceptive for my fastball as a fake mustache. splitters and change-ups that were about as deceptive for my fastball as a fake mustache. And so he tells this story about a scout from the Padres who came up to him after a start when he hadn't thrown his slider. I guess he had been experimenting with the slider and this scout thought it could be

a good pitch for him. But the scout saw him pitch and I guess he was just throwing his two pitches so the scout asked why he didn't throw his slider in that start and hayhurst basically i mean the real reason was that he didn't really have a slider but he didn't want to say that so he just lied and he said that he had a blister on his finger uh and as it happened he actually had a band- on his finger, which was not really part of the plan. It was just serendipity. He had a cracked fingernail from throwing a two-seamer or something. So it had nothing to do with why he hadn't thrown a slider. He just didn't have one. So he convinced the scout that he hadn't thrown the slider because he had a blister uh the scout said

oh sorry to hear that i wrote down in my last report or whatever that you had good command and a budding slider uh and apparently hayhurst said that on the day that the scout had seen him he had thrown two curveballs sideways by accident and the the scout thought it was a new pitch or something. And so he's like, yeah, the blister. And then the scout said, I'm just glad to know you still have it. I think it could be a real separator for you. And then Hayhurst was drafted by the Padres. So his story is basically that he lied his way into getting drafted by pretending he had this pitch and just hadn't thrown it.

And I wondered how often this sort of thing happens, because it seems like that kind of thing where a scout goes to a player and gets that extra intel is sort of seen as a way in which scouting can be a separator. Like, you know, that scout probably filed that report to the Padres and said he had a blister, that's why he wasn't throwing it. And the Padres maybe thought that they knew something that other teams didn't and that other teams had written Hayerst off thinking that he didn't have this pitch and really they got this scoop because they had a great scout go talk to him.

And you hear that sometimes, like if, you know, someone will ask, well, why did this guy struggle at this level or something? And a scout or one of the people who talks to scouts on the internet will say, oh, well, the team told him not to throw that pitch or, you know, he was supposed to be working on this other pitch and that's why he struggled or that's why he didn't throw it that much because he was under specific instructions not to throw it, that sort of thing. I hear that from time to time and I always think, oh, that's really useful information. I never would have known that. But this person who talked to Scott's got this great intel. So now I can kind of adjust my expectations accordingly. And now I don't know whether to trust it anymore. I kind of always just took that at face value. I assume that was always true. Maybe it is usually true. Maybe it's almost always true. But I guess it's not always true. Not every if Hayhurst did this then I would assume that other fringy pitchers did the same thing there's certainly a lot of incentive to do it

so I don't know I don't have a question or comment or anything but it was a cool story and I will think about it in the future I just sent you an article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a couple years ago about the value of espionage and whether it actually is worthless because there's so many lies and lies upon lies that you're just as likely to get bad information and overvalue it because you think that you've discovered great information like like this slider would i mean it basically it wasn't um if if well how to put this uh if this padre scout had simply you know come across the information uh you know like in a press release of dirk a

harrison put out a press release to all 30 teams saying, I have a slider, I'm working on it, etc., no team would have taken it all that seriously. But this scout thought that he, like you sort of said, he thought he had discovered this thing. He got an edge. He got this inside information. And so because of that, perhaps overvalued it, thought, I've got to do something with this information. Can't waste an edge when it comes to you. I've got to do something with this information. Can't waste an edge when it comes to you.

And whenever you hear this information, it's either coming from the player or it's coming from the team, right? The player development people. And they have the same incentive to pump up their prospects or explain away their bad performance, even just to increase their trade value or whatever. So, I mean, it's always, I guess, coming from someone who has a motive to lie about that sort of thing. Not that they

always are, not that they even usually are, but now that will be in the back of my head, I guess. And then the other thing I wanted to mention was something that I mentioned to you earlier today. I wanted to mention was something that I mentioned to you earlier today. You wrote an article on Wednesday about lineup construction and how it hasn't changed at all in the last hundred years or so. Really, if you look at the roles that are typically assigned to each lineup slot, they're pretty much the same. You tried to see whether number two hitters, prompted by a listener question, you tried to see whether number two hitters have gotten better, whether teams are more likely to put their best hitters there. And it seems like the evidence is circumstantial at best that there has been any real change in philosophy there. was kind of a very sudden change with the Royals, where Ned Yost came out and said that he asked the team's stat guys basically to make an optimal lineup for him.

He asked them to look and see whether there was any edge they could exploit to take advantage of matchups and ready lefty matchups, not advantage of matchups and right, righty lefty matchups, not pitcher batter matchups. And, and they kind of overhauled the Royals lineup so that one day, I'll see this Escobar was batting second for the Royals in Ned Yost lineup. The next day he was batting ninth and Eric Hosmer was batting second.

So this was basically the change you were looking for happening on that same day by coincidence where the manager went to the front office and said, do this scientifically instead of traditionally. And I would guess that it happened basically out of desperation that the Royals had been shut out the night before they had been averaging 3.4 runs a game basically since the beginning of April they were 9 and 22 they have the second worst offense in the American League and I guess he figured it it can't really get worse might as well see if we can get any kind of edge here. And I wonder, I guess, why it takes extreme circumstances to make this kind of change. Why does it take a desperate manager who is maybe trying to save his job or at least salvage his team's season to be pushed to the brink of not scoring at all for over a month to have to go to his front office. I mean, I guess it's good. I

mean, good for Ned Yost for making use of that resource and cooperating and kind of ceding some of the manager's traditional authority to the front office and to a bunch of stat heads. But I wonder why it doesn't happen more often, and I guess is this basically a glimpse of the future? Is this what's going to happen for teams that are not struggling and not the Royals, that it will at some point become the new norm? One of the things about lineup arguments that gets brought up anytime you talk about lineup arguments is that it's a fairly small advantage that you're going to gain.

And it's also a fairly certain one. And so that works as an argument for it. There's no reason not to take a small edge. Small edges are what you've got in this world. But from a manager's perspective, if you're going to do something radical, the lineup is sort of a place where you're not going to get big rewards from that radical decision, and yet the average fan is obsessed with lineups. And so it's a place where you could potentially get you know you could get a lot a lot more focus on it than you want I mean

it's basically bullpens and lineups or what the average fan looks at right I mean average fan is obsessed with who the number one starter is and who the number two starter is new number three and that has no value whatsoever so the so I mean I don't know I hate to always fall back on this presumption that managers are all terrified of being criticized. But, I mean, I'm terrified of being criticized in my life. And so it makes sense to me that a manager would sort of pick and choose where he wants to stand alone. And it is kind of an odd place to stand alone. That's why I looked at number two hitters.

odd place to stand alone. That's why I looked at number two hitters, because it seems to me that the number two spot is the natural place for the ultimate lineup revolution to begin in a very small way, because there's not that much difference between batting a guy second and third. A lot of times, I mean, with Batista, it's noticeable, but a lot of times you wouldn't even notice that this guy has gone from third to second. You still have protection behind him. It's this quiet little move that you get to make that paves the way to what is ultimately an optimized lineup. Hosmer, incidentally, you and I were talking about whether their lineup is better. And it's hard to say because we don't know what true talent level we're putting on each player. So we don't actually know what method they're using to create this lineup

because we don't know whether they think Hosmer is a, for simplicity, I'll use batting average, a 260 hitter or a true talent 310 hitter. And so I am looking at their Tuesday lineup, though, and Hosmer had been batting third. So they moved him from third to second. So that at least suggests that, I mean, you could see a situation where Yost basically went to them and said, how do I make my lineup? And maybe they said, well, first tell us who your best hitters are. Because, you know, Yost, I guess in the spirit of compromise, if you're the stats department,

you might want to help him organize the lineup, but cede the talent evaluation to him. And so clearly he thinks that Hosmer was his best or his second best or his third best hitter because he had been batting in third. And so moved him up to second is consistent with a statistically derived lineup. He also swapped Moustakas and Kane, by the way. Moustakas had been sixth because he'd been terrible in slumping. And so he got moved up to fifth, which split up the righties.

And then Sal Perez was bumped up from seventh to third. So that's the change. Yeah. It's interesting. And he repeated it today. You didn't say that. Yeah, same lineup. He repeated it today.

Because it kind of worked, I guess. I mean, they scored four runs with it, which I wonder if they had been shut out again, would he have changed it again or not? And it feels like, I mean, Tony La Russa, I forget what it was. Tony La Russa did some sort of crazy lineup. Oh, no, no, no, no. The pitcher batting anything? Yeah uh what oh no no no no uh he did yeah no no no no when he in the uh

like in the 90s i think he did the the piggybacking pitchers thing you know like what the astros are doing oh yes and it lasted like three days it'll yeah and it just it always seems like whenever a manager does try something interesting like this like like they just happen to pick the, you know, the three days that the team gets blown out 14 to one. It feels like at some point we should get one of these things that leads to like an 11 game winning streak so we can actually see it play out, but it never happens. So the Royals won today, so maybe we'll get to see it play out. In a way, I mean, doesn't it make a manager less open to criticism if he, I mean, if he says, well, our stat guys made this lineup i

mean i guess then you could say well why did you ask the stat guys to make the lineup but if people are mad at him already for the way he's organizing his lineup then he can kind of pass the buck in this case and say well like our front office says it's the best lineup. Yeah, I don't know. I don't really know how to judge Ned Yost in this situation. Okay. All right. We're done.

Email us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. We will get to your questions next week. Have a wonderful weekend.