Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 245: Listener Emails Like You Wouldn’t Believe

Episode Date: July 17, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about knuckleballers, batting practice, crazy Coors Field seasons, Bryce Harper’s hair, and more.

Nobody questions things in this country anymore. Nobody questions things. Good morning and welcome to episode 245 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. It's Wednesday, so this is our email show. Yay. Yeah.

See now, people, everybody just heard that sarcastically. But it was genuine. It was. I need to be more careful about the image I present. We love email shows. I do like them. I do like them. Originally, we liked them because we didn't have to come up with anything.

But now I like them because they are genuinely great questions. And I actually, I didn't today but I actually end up preparing for them more than the regular shows a lot of times now because the questions are too good to treat half-heartedly as I'm going to today. Okay. This one comes

from Matt. We did get a listener email telling you to go to the doctor. It's just a little cough at this point, and I'm sorry. Usually right around the end of the night I start coughing, but I'm essentially 100%. Sorry to tell everybody this, but once again I am kissing my wife. After about three weeks I am back to kissing my wife. Gross.

All right. This one comes from Matt. Let's say the knuckleball was in some way solved. Something about grip or delivery was figured out that made it relatively easy to throw a pretty hard-to-hit knuckler, given you could throw a baseball 80-something miles per hour. To me, this seems plausible, but even if it's not, just go with it. What percentage of pitchers would have to become knuckleballers before it would be banned?

How would the rule be written? I have to think there would be a breaking point for knucklers, whereas there would not be for any other pitch. It does seem plausible to you. It does actually seem very plausible to me. Yeah, I think we talked about this came up a lot at the Sabre conference in March, and Brian Kenney kept bringing up why teams don't start knuckleball academies and just start minting knuckleballers.

And Bill James pointed out that all of these institutional obstacles in the way of knuckleballing become becoming mainstream. And that even if you have a pitcher who can throw a knuckleballer, you still have to have a catcher who can catch a knuckleball, which is not easy to find in the minors. And you have to have coaches who can teach the knuckleball. So he was, they were saying, you'd have to basically start like a knuckleball academy and just have it be a separate entity from the miners and that's why it that's why it seems plausible to me it's the idea is that once it picks up momentum it's the sort of thing that might tip yeah like a lot of you know uh once you if you became the organization that had all the

resources in place you would have like uh what do they call that? I forget what they call it, but like the idea that if you establish an industry in one region that you basically, if you're the first to establish that industry in that region, that you have this like incredible natural advantage for centuries because all these, you know, tangential or sort of supporting industries pop up around you and the transportation structure gets in place for you and everything like that. So, I mean, it does seem plausible that if it picked up momentum, that it would get easier and easier. And right now, it doesn't happen partly because, as you say, there's not an efficiency of numbers,

right? Yeah. I'm not saying it's likely. I am saying it's plausible, though unlikely. Yeah, I could imagine if you kind of set up some system to filter your pitchers who aren't going to make it and you tell them you're not going to make it pitching this way, so you can either be cut or released

or you can come to our Knuckleball Academy and try to learn this pitch. Maybe that would work. So let's say then that it would uh as matt suggests uh so the question i guess is how much of the knuckleball's effectiveness has to do with the fact that hitters are so unfamiliar with it right i would guess not that much. I would think that if there were 50 knuckleballers in baseball, that you would see the effectiveness of it go down some, but not much. And my guess is that you could test this by looking at catcher performance for knuckleball pitchers. I know that each of these knuckleball

pitchers tends to have a personal catcher, and I don't know if they're selected because they're pretty good at catching it or if they're selected because somebody had to be and they eventually get pretty good at catching it. If it's the latter, then you would think that hitters would also adjust and get better at it. If it's the former, I imagine that you could pretty easily look at catcher performance of knuckleball pitchers to see whether there is an improvement in pass ball rate. Certainly if you had the time and the resources, you could look at how well they catch the balls. You might look at framing rates for it. And if they did improve at catching it or not missing it,

then you would take that to mean that hitters would improve at hitting it? Yeah, I would speculate that you would see the same curve for hitters that you do for catchers. Okay. I think there is some element to it just being an effective pitch when it's thrown well, but I think maybe the lack of familiarity aspect is underrated. Just, I mean, there are never more than a few of these guys really in the majors at

any one time. I have to think that's a pretty big advantage. I mean, okay, so if it gets to the point where you're facing a knuckleballer every other day, I would think it'd be a pretty hittable pitch. I don't know. I don't know for sure. Um. Why though?

How? How? How? It's not, it does, it's never the same pitch twice. Yeah. Right. Uh, I mean, you'd, you'd adjust to the speed of it, so maybe that would help somewhat. But it's not that slow. I mean, they're throwing it, you know, people hit curveballs that are slow.

You know, they hit change-ups, especially if they know they're coming. I mean, I think that there's probably some adjustment for the speed, but primarily the adjustment is the movement, right? I mean, it kind of gets in your head. The movement gets in your head. Yeah, right. And the point is that it's unpredictable. So whether it would be more predictable when you see it often, I don't know, because the movement is sort of essentially random, I guess.

Yeah. But that's not the question. That's not his question. Right. So what percentage of pitchers would have to become knuckleballers? If we suppose that a team could churn out knuckleballers and the pitch would be more or less as effective as the pitch that we know, what percentage would there have to be for the league to take some

sort of action? I think that, well, okay, and I just want to back up one second, too, to note that the, as I understand it, and again, once I leave baseball, I get into trouble, but as I understand it, the underhanded free throw is a very effective way of shooting free throws, particularly if you're very bad at shooting free throws. And yet nobody does it because it's really super uncool. And the knuckleball is also fairly uncool. And so what might keep this from being plausible, although I doubt it, would be that it's not a revered way of pitching. So you might have kind of cultural barriers to it.

But to ban it, I mean, it's an aesthetically displeasing pitch for the most part. It's pleasing in moderation, I think. In moderation, yes. It's a cute quirk. It's fun to watch a few pitches in slow motion. But I agree that it is not what Major League Baseball wants its league to become. That it would be troubling to the league if every third pitcher, or even worse, was throwing this pitch that isn't that much fun. And I don't know how they would justify outlawing it, because it's not any sort of foreign substance. It's not even...

I mean, I guess you can say how the pitch is delivered. You can set limits on how a pitch is delivered. I don't believe you're allowed to throw it underhand, for instance. I don't believe, although that was actually a question. Yeah, I was going to ask that. Did you look that up? I did. Yeah, so that was another question that we got.

I think it was from Bobby, and he was watching a softball game, and his 5-year-old son asked whether they can pitch underhand in baseball and he wasn't sure. And he asked, uh, whether they can and if they can, whether anyone would, I think, uh, it seems to me that you, that you can, I, I just kind of looked at it quickly and I found on mlb.com, uh, there's like a, an Ask the Umpires Q&A section. And there's no date on this. So I don't know when this answer comes from. But it's from Lance Barksdale.

And someone emailed him the question if pitchers in the major leagues are allowed to throw underhand. And he said, I would think they can if they want to. No, there's no rule. So unless that's changed since this Q&A was published, they are allowed to do that. So I would think that, well, do you want to finish what you were saying? No, no. I'm still thinking about what the justification would be in writing for outlawing it or how you would get around it.

I suppose you maybe could adjust the strike zone in a way that would be beneficial for other types of pitching. Like if you shifted the strike zone lower, for instance, you might give pitchers more of an incentive to throw non-knuckleball pitchers and to throw traditional pitches. Or, yeah, I mean, I guess if the commissioner felt that this was seriously jeopardizing the game, he could just step in and say no more knuckleballs. But what's a knuckleball necessarily? I mean, is Robert Coelho's pitch a knuckleball? Is Dickey's a true knuckleball? Is Dickie's a true knuckleball? Yeah, that's hard to quantify.

How do you decide? A lot of these pitches are technically all kind of on the same spectrum. And if you just don't call it a knuckleball, does it stop being a knuckleball? I mean, Mussina threw a knuckle curve. It wasn't a knuckleball ball but it had knuckle in it yeah that would yeah that would be tough um i guess there's no real specific grip that you could that you could ban and completely eradicate it without eradicating something else potentially. Yeah, that would be tough. I guess with the underhand thing, I would think, I mean, you know,

pitchers used to throw underhand when the point of pitching was just to give the batter something to hit. And then when it moved away from that and they started to want to miss bats, they started throwing overhand because it's more effective. I guess I could imagine someone throwing underhand just from time to time, just like the element of surprise sort of thing. And I guess, I mean, there are submariners who come close to that, like Chris Hayes, kind of, if you remember him, kind of almost through underhand.

So I could see some benefit to that if it wouldn't completely screw you up when you wanted to switch back to overhand. Tom Candiotti this spring was talking about about knuckleballs to tim kirchner kirchner kirchner and uh he says that he's heard people say that we should outlaw the knuckleball they say it should be illegal so apparently this is a uh conversation that at least has been made known to some people you could you know you might it might be a compromise thing where like you – one pitcher gets a knuckleball. Sorry, one team gets – each team gets one knuckleball pitcher, something like that. And so it's maybe – it still doesn't get you around the squishiness of the definition. But if you're not outlawing it completely, I don't know that it has to be quite so rigid a definition.

There gives you a lot more wiggle room if you're allowed one, if you're allowed some. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that could work. Should we move on? Yep. Okay. This one comes from Will in Brooklyn.

He wants to know about batting practice. He says, Watching the Home Run Derby made me think about the idea of batting practice and question whether pregame BP is actually batting practice. Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. I'm sorry. I really feel bad about interrupting in the middle of this question. But I just found a forum.

And you know how good forums are. Yes, very reliable. It's a forum from 2003, a Yankees forum from Travis Moon, who posts, knuckleballs and curveballs should be outlawed. These pitches are a form of severe cheating in the game as far as I'm concerned. Does baseball allow pitchers to throw underhand? All capitals, no. Does baseball allow spitballs?

All capitals, no. The Steve Sparks, Tim Wakefields, and other pitchers who rely on such cheating trickery as curves, sliders, forkballs, et cetera, need to learn to throw a straight ball travis just wants fastball after fastball yeah all right go for it straight fastball though too much movement on some of these fastballs if you ask me travis two seams two seams sounds like cheating me travis sounds like a pseudonym for Nelson Cruz or someone who can't hit sliders. Oh. Sorry.

He was an all-star. You respect him. Yeah. Yeah, he looked great in the outfield tonight. Okay. Sorry, go ahead. So Will, he was watching the Home Run Derby. He questions whether pregame BP is actually batting practice.

Those pitches resemble nothing that a batter will see in a game. While understanding that it's a warm-up, there are lots of ways to warm up and get loose. Why not warm up against something that even resembles Major League pitching? What's the benefit of smashing a 50-mile-per-hour fluff ball before the game, etc., etc.? 50-mile-per-hour fluff ball before the game, et cetera, et cetera. So his crazy idea, he says, which he says is probably against the rules. I don't know that it would be. Have actual pitchers throw BP to hitters.

Whether it's warm-up fastballs down the middle or pitches that the batter knows are coming, pitchers are going to throw those pitches anyway, and it seems mutually beneficial to both the hitter and pitcher to throw them to each other. You could even just use your worst bullpen arm uh so basically he's saying why don't pitchers who warm up before the game just throw batting practice to hitters who were warming up before the game um i guess i mean one i guess obvious reason is that batting practice is is quite a bit before the game whereas the pitcher is warming up immediately before the game. I mean, if he warmed up—

Oh, wait. So, yeah, you wouldn't have the pitcher—I mean, far too many pitches are thrown, right? Yeah, that. For one thing. Right, that. And if he warmed up by throwing batting practice, he would be cold by the time the game started. Yeah. I think that it's probably unrealistic to think that you're going to have

the pitchers themselves throw batting practice. For one thing, the point of batting practice is for it at least to be somewhat hittable. I mean, you couldn't throw it, you couldn't do anything to really mimic real-life conditions without putting batters at risk, without having guys getting injured, and you don't want that. So you might want to find the, and you also don't want him to stand up there while a pitcher who loses his control throws 15 balls in a row or even four balls in a row.

So there is perhaps like a place in the middle where you have real pitchers who are throwing real pitches but not nearly at the same intensity as, as, uh, as a game. I mean, you, you just can't do game conditions hitting is, uh, you know, hitting isn't, it's a, it's an inefficient activity. There's a lot of pitches before one gets hit usually. And, uh, you know, guys get injured, so you wouldn't go all the way, but we should know that. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I've seen, and I think it's used as a training system by some teams, but it's like a pitching machine that can put actual movement on pitches and pitch kind of like a real pitcher, and it's sort of like the ball comes through a hole in a wall sort of,

and the wall is like a video screen that shows a pitcher going through his motion, so it looks like the ball is coming out of his hand as it comes through this hole because it's placed right where his release point would be. So that sort of thing seems like it might work. I mean, you wouldn't have to worry about wild pitches. You could set it up to throw in the strike zone somewhere, but you could have it be fast and you could have realistic movement. I could see the benefit of that.

Yeah, I could see the benefit of that. I mean, you need to have them be strikes and you need to have them not go at your head. That's basically the key thing. And then the more realistic you make it, probably the better. We should note that the New York Times wrote a great piece about a year ago about batting practice. Did you read it?

Do you remember reading it? Vaguely. So it's basically a long piece about how everybody hates batting practice. Oh, yes. Yeah. Did we talk about that? I think we might have talked about that. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know either. Well, I'll just read a couple paragraphs from the top. Despite its almost sacred place in the game, there's one little secret about batting practice. Many players think it's a colossal waste of time, a mind-numbing, flaw-producing, strategically empty exercise. Eric Chavez of the Yankees is a veteran of 15 years of Major League Batting practice,

but he thinks it has helped him about as much as staring at a wall for an hour. It's a part of tradition, he said. It's fun for the fans who try to hit a couple balls in the stands, but in terms of work, what are you working on? It's a 30-mile-per-hour pitch. Bobby Valentine, the manager of the Red Sox, thinks players get almost nothing out of batting practice and would be better served working on specific drills in indoor cages at each stadium batting practice he said i hate batting practice however the article goes on to note that nobody is really pushing any sort of movement to ban it even though everybody hates it and pitchers in particular despise it because they don't get to do it they get to shag for an hour they hate it um and so there's a lot of

complaining from pitchers but no it doesn't, it didn't seem like any managers were phasing it out, even though theoretically they have the power. Yeah, so I think there's something to that. Okay, next question comes from Justin in Kansas City. It seems that in almost every James Shields start, he gets crushed in the first inning, then settles in and does much better for the next four or five innings. I would assume this is a fairly common pattern, that starting pitchers give up a larger percentage of walks, hits, and runs in the first inning.

This made me wonder if there are certain innings in which teams score more runs, perhaps in the first when the starter is settling in, then maybe in the fifth or sixth when it's more likely that the worst relievers are pitching, and certainly less in the eighth or ninth when stronger relievers are pitching what do the numbers say does this actually happen um and yeah it does uh justin just about had it right uh i just quickly looked up the the league batting splits from from last year for the whole major leagues and uh the first inning is is the inning when hitters hit the best. But I would say that that's probably because you're guaranteed to have the top of the lineup

up more so than it is a starter settling in. But the league average OPS in the first inning last year was 759, which fell to 710 in the second inning. And then 723 in the first inning last year was 759, which fell to 710 in the second inning, and then 723 in the third inning, and then the fourth inning was actually the highest at 761, and I guess that's when the top of your lineup comes up for the second time against your starter and has seen his stuff already and has a little leg up. And then it goes back down a little bit in the fifth, and then it goes back up a little in the sixth,

maybe when your starter's tiring and your middle relievers are in. And then, as Justin speculated, it is much lower in the eighth and ninth, 694 and 667, when you're facing your setup man and closer. So that's the answer to that. Good stuff. Joe Posnanski did a long piece about this once, and I can't find it because he's written in a thousand different places. Yeah.

So if you ever want to go looking for an article, you could go. You could go look for that one. This one was kind of related, and it came from the Deadspin Fun Bag that Drew McGarry does. Someone asked him, let's say that for an entire season, a player somehow faced the exact same pitcher for every at-bat, like 600 at-bats, same pitcher. Let's say it's a league-average batter and a league-average starter.

Would that hitter get a huge advantage as the season went on? Would the pitcher? Would neither get an advantage and things would pretty much work out normally? I don't believe it's pronounced McGarry. Oh, really? Yeah. I heard Jonah Carey say it in person once, and he said it differently, and Jonah knows him. How did he say it? I think like Magary or – I think it was Magary.

Okay. All right. So that answers that. Yeah. Okay. So that's that. No, no. So Drew answered at Deadspin, and he said it would ebb and flow just as it would against standard competition.

Some days the batter would have the pitcher's number. Some days the pitcher would have a leg up. Agree or disagree? Well, I mean, technically, sure. I mean, technically, there would be days where the hitter would do better, and there would be days where the hitter would do better and there would be days where the pitcher does better but i think that i mean it seems clear that at least i i mean we've all been led to believe throughout our lives that uh the the pitcher has the advantage early on and that a hitter who sees the pitcher uh takes some of that advantage back once he has seen all of his pitches and once he has uh become very familiar with those pitches. And there's probably only so many ways to attack a hitter,

although I don't even know that it's that. I think it's more just picking it up, getting used to that particular throwing motion and getting used to the movement on each pitch, being able to identify each pitch. So it seems clear to me that you would have an advantage. Probably the hitter gets probably some advantage back just with the second plate appearance. I would guess that the numbers would back up,

that the pitcher is best in his first plate appearance against a guy. The question is when would that, assuming that's true, and I'll assume it's true, when would it stop getting more? Would the hitter be better in the 600th than he was in the 599th? Or would you think that after, like, eight plate appearances, it would run out? Because, I mean, when you think about these managers who put in, you know, Raul Abanez because he's got good success against a pitcher

and we all mock that idea because it's like 11 plate appearances and they're spread out over the course of 10 years and he's like three for 11 with a double. That's probably kind of silly. However, the very fact that he has 11 plate appearances might make him a better option than a guy who has no plate appearances or, I don't know, maybe two, option than a guy who has no plate appearances or you know i don't know maybe two maybe three maybe four i mean i wonder at what point you quit gaining an advantage over the inexperienced hitter and whether it's significant enough that that should be a decision that you should go with the guy who's seen the hitter the pitcher x more number of times than the other guy or like if you could sort of make an adjustment uh to make an adjustment to their true talent levels

knowing nothing but that. Yeah. I think I just came up with an article idea. Yeah, could be. Not that I'm going to do, but... Yeah, I guess that it would plateau pretty quickly, probably, the extra advantage that you'd get. Maybe it would just increase very slightly over time.

I mean, we know from the times through the lineup effect that hitters do better against pitchers within one game as they face them multiple times. I guess it's tough to separate the familiarity advantage from the fatigue disadvantage of the pitcher possibly throwing more pitches but probably seems like it's it's mostly the hitter having seen the pitcher so um so yeah i would agree that that the hitter would would have an advantage uh the more he sees them at least up to a certain point i'm seeing a comment on a Deadspin thread that says,

there are few six-letter last names with more pronunciation options than McGarry. Yes. Yeah, there are a lot. I always thought it was McGarry, though, and I still hear McGarry in my head. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's see.

We have, let's see, you said you had something quick to say about this one. Stephen asked, do either of you know what product Bryce Harper uses because it's really humid out and that's some serious lift? Yeah. So some reporter asked him this and tweeted it. And who was the reporter, Ben? It was Amanda Comack, Nationals Pete Rider. Oh, okay. So it's called Suavecito. And Suavecito is actually based in Santa Ana, which is where I used to work and near where I live. And like most things in Southern California, almost all things it seems sometimes, there is both a Hispanic cultural imprint on it as well as another one. A lot of times in Southern California, you'll see a lot of restaurants that are like tacos and Vietnamese or tacos and donuts or tacos

and burgers. I think they're called ricochet or something like that. There's always like, I think they're called like ricochet or something like that. There's a word for this. And so this seems to be a combination of like Hispanic cultural imprint and like rockabilly. And it looks like a pretty cool brand. And so they have a Twitter account that I assume has gotten a lot more followers in the last day. And they simply retweeted Amanda's tweet mentioning this, and they have not made a big deal about it since they've just been doing their thing. Their slogan is, get it, hombre. I wonder how it stays looking like that after he's had his cap on.

Because it seems so solid that it should be like a sort of Oscar Gamble style thing where it's like perched on top of the hair. But it doesn't seem to be above his head by the amount that you would expect based on how high his hair is. So I don't know how that works really. Yeah, yeah. There's like some sort of spring mechanism in it that it squishes down but then pops back up. It's possible that he's got some sort of trick hat with a compartment. Yes.

A hair compartment. That is doubtless the explanation. Okay. And then let's do one more. Isaac asked, I was surfing around, baseball reference recently, and came across Brian Bohannon's 1999 season in Coors Field. Bohannon made 33 starts through almost 200 innings and had an ERA of 6.20. Amazingly, his ERA plus was 94, and he racked up 3.1 wins above replacement.

I decided this was probably my favorite late nineties Rocky season ever. It's the type of season that even with an understanding of park effects and adjusting for era, my brain just can't understand. That being said, I thought I'd ask you guys what your favorite Coors Field season was. And then he, he nominated some other candidates. One of which was actually the one that I probably would have picked. Dante Bichette's 1999 as well was a pretty special season, kind of the hitter equivalent of Bohannon's. Bichette hit 34 home runs that year and drove in 133 runs, slugged 541, hit almost 300.

133 runs, slugged 541, hit almost 300. And depending on your Winslow Pup replacement metric, was either replacement level or well below replacement level with that offensive season. Now, the caveat is that a lot of that is defense because he was not a gifted defender and he was in a big outfield. So a lot of that was defense, and that maybe takes away from the specialness of it a little bit. But even so, he was basically, after park corrections,

and again depending on your park factors, rated about average or so offensively, maybe a little bit more with 34 home runs and 133 RBIs. So that's one that I've always enjoyed. So that would be my pick. My favorite has always been Jeff Cirillo's 2000. And so Jeff Cirillo this year, he hit 403, 472, 607 at home, which is a 1,078 OPS. And he hit 239, 299, 329 on the road, which is a 628 OPS.

So that's a 450-point gap. That was good. I like that one particularly though, because the cumulative line, which is 326, 392, 477 is a perfect 100 OPS plus, which makes it a wonderful, a wonderful line to keep in mind if you want to play OPS fun fact games. So I've always been a big fan of that Jeff Cirillo. I also like that line because, as I recall, Jeff Cirillo, later on when he was not with the Rockies, I believe, if I'm remembering this correctly, he accused the Rockies of cheating by using a humidor.

He thought that the entire idea of a humidor was cheating and should not have been allowed. The entire idea of a humidor was cheating and should not have been allowed. I also, though, like the entire team's line that year, the 2000 Rockies. At home, 334-401-538, which would be an MVP season in probably like 30 or so years of baseball history. And on the road, 252-320- 368, which is a 688 OPS. And Nafee Perez that year, all of his years, as noted, are good, but that year he hit 287, 314, 427, which is a 741 OPS. Just for comparison, Albert Pujols right now has a 753 OPS, and so basically the same. Albert Pujols right now has a 753 OPS.

And so basically the same. Albert Pujols has a 111 OPS+. Nafee Perez had a 69 OPS+, which is the same as Zach Cozart this year. So all in all, a great season from a great team. Yeah, pre-humidor course. I miss it, but I'm glad it's gone. I hated it so much. I miss it, but I'm glad it's gone. I hated it so much. I hated it. I really found it distasteful. It was my least favorite part of baseball for a long time.

I only like it in retrospect. Right. Okay. We had a lot of other good questions that we maybe will still get to, and we welcome you to send us more at podcast at baseballprospectus.com, and we will be back tomorrow.