Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 251: Baseball Stories That Would Be Bigger Today/Finding a Narrative for the Nationals

Episode Date: July 25, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about events from baseball’s history that would be bigger stories today, then dicuss narratives to explain the Nationals’ season.

So, Stephen A., I'm finding it hard to appreciate this as punishment fitting the crime. Well, I think that you're wrong. You're finding it hard to appreciate. I'm sorry. I'm finding it impossible. Good morning and welcome to Episode 251 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. We are going to talk about baseball.

What's your topic? Gosh. I don't know how to distill it, so I guess I'm going to talk about baseball. Okay. Me too. I think I'm going to talk about, or I guess together we're going to talk about picking a narrative for the Nationals. Short term or long term? For this season. Okay, sure. Well, gosh. Let's go with mine first. asked us what moment or game in baseball history that, if it occurred today in 2013, would

set the world aflutter more than any other, i.e. blow up the Twitterverse, cause ESPN's debate shows to freak out, etc., debating it. And I wanted to answer this, because right now we're in the middle of two freakouts. We're in the middle of the Ryan Braun slash Biogenesis freakout. And we're in the middle of the A-Rod Yankees freakout. And these are both huge freakouts. I would say more bigger. Related freakouts. We don't know that for sure yet. We don't know how much of the Yankees A-Rod thing is Biogenesis related.

I mean it could emerge that he's like negotiating a suspension or something and that the Yankees are stalling or whatever. But we don't know that. There's nothing that gives us any real evidence of that. I mean, they could be completely independent is what I'm saying, right? Yeah, it's getting weirder and weirder. It is getting weirder and weirder. It's super duper weird.

I would say that these are both freakouts. These might be bigger freakouts than we've had in some number of years going on simultaneously. Maybe. I don't know if that's recency effect or not. It's hard to know. Yeah. Okay. That we're just – It's hard to know.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, anyway, so I – because of this, I wanted to know what – I think it's a really interesting question. And it is fun to imagine some events from the past in the current climate, how they would be responded to. And so I wanted to know if you had any that were – that come to mind as things that would be big freak outs either positive or negative and whether in discussing this we will kind of zero in on what makes for a good freak out so i don't know do you want to read ender's top five i want to i want to

save them i want to save them till the end okay do you uh do you have any do you have a top five do you i don't did you don't have a top five uh do you do you have a top one or do you have any? Do you have a top five? I don't have a top five. Do you have a top one, or do you have anything you want to say? Do you feel like saying anything tonight? I'm thinking about saying some things. I don't really have a top one prepared for this. Have you thought about it at length? I've thought about it somewhat, and I've thought about what sorts of, particularly

I think maybe I looked at it from the perspective of what I would be doing if these things happened today, how I would respond to it. So I basically came up with seven that I think would be particularly fun in this era. And one of them is Jackie Robinson. And so I'm just going to say that because nothing really has to be said about that about that i mean obviously if something like jackie robinson there's there's basically no probably way for jackie robinson to happen in this culture right but well you could have a player come out that will happen and that will be a big story when that happens you could and not to minimize that but i think that the jackie robinson i i don't i think the jackie rob Robinson thing is sort of historic in a way that nothing else can really ever be historic in our culture in baseball. So you can and I think that it will be a big deal, a big deal, but not quite.

I mean, I don't again, I don't want to minimize anything, but it doesn't seem like it's quite Jackie Robinson. So but Jackie Robinson is just so obvious it barely even needs to be mentioned, right? So I think that Johnny Vandermeer's second no-hitter would have a sort of Sharknado-type effect by about the fourth inning. I think it would be pretty crazy. I feel like that only lasts for one news cycle. There's no, doesn't really have legs. You can't really. Yeah, these are all kind of different things.

What I'm thinking of are all sort of different things. Some of them are news cycles. Some of them are like entire season debates. And some of them are just like, you know, a two hour blow up, right? So like, I think that Johnny Vandandermeer if something like that happened even you know today even if it was just a match johnny vandermeer i think that uh we would all get extremely excited um maybe more probably more than any one game could be uh you know other than maybe something totally unrealistic um so that might be like the pinnacle of what one game could

be as far as watching is seeing a guy go for maybe like maybe a second perfect game or something like that. Um, and maybe on par would be, uh, Carrie Woods start, which is, I think probably without much question, the greatest start ever. Um, and so I think that that would be a big blow-up thing i mean i i'm imagining that there would probably be uh an average of 35 gifts per per site right for that for that game i just thought of one that seems almost as obvious as jackie robinson um what is it ray chapman yeah i don't know if that's on your list but It's not on my list, but I thought about it. And it's interesting because what kept me from putting that on is I didn't really know how we would react.

I don't know if it would be a soul-searching thing or if it would just be kind of a standard morning thing. If it were just a standard morning thing then i'm not sure how big a deal it would be but if it were like a we need to change the game now sort of thing and i think it's reasonable that it might be a we need to change the game now sort of thing because if it were if it were a thing that that had almost happened before uh and there had been stuff written about how it could happen again and how the league needs to do something to stop something terrible from happening and then it happened without something having been done whether it's you know it could be a pitcher getting hit by a line drive and every time that

happens people say well you need to find some sort of protective insert for caps so that this doesn't happen again uh so either that or i don know, like a broken bat impaling someone, although they have taken steps to reduce the number of broken bats. So something like that where there have been close calls before and people have said that we need to do something and nothing was done, then I feel like there would be a very big deal. Yeah, and I mean, I wasn't alive back then, obviously, but it feels like we talk about the threat of death a lot more now.

Like we are, as a culture, I think, a lot more squeamish about dying in accidents. You know, liability is such a huge thing now in a way that I don't get the sense that it was in previous generations. You know, we don't I don't know if it's because we didn't live through World War One and World War Two or if it's just because we're, you know, raised in general affluence and all that. But basically, I mean, we are much more squeamish about danger now than I think ever that we ever were. And so, you know, pretty much everything that is risky about baseball has been written about a lot. And so there's a ton, like you say, there's a ton of stuff that has been written about any accident that is going to occur. And some accident, I mean, if they play long enough, some accidents going to occur. It's just a fact.

If they play long enough, someone's going to have a terrible accident on the field. So it might be the case that there would be, I mean, one of the ways that I thought about this question is, um, what sorts of events in baseball's past would require the most hot takes, you know, like, like you've, uh, you've seen the hot take, uh, meme going around about the Ryan Braun. I think we started it with our with our matt garza heart hot takes the other day yeah well anyway i was thinking about what would inspire the hottest takes or the most pressure to come up with hot takes and yeah the ray chapman would would inspire some hot takes for sure and i guess i'm kind of thinking of like what would be a bigger story now than it was at the time. Because I mean, something like, like the Black So that I feel like if it happened now, we would all have the most fun rewatching that world series and trying to find evidence. Just think of how many articles or how many gifts you could get out of that. Uh, that was another way I looked at this is like what would produce the most gifts and the black socks

thing happening now would be this great like uh like group uh detective work that we would all be doing i think it would actually be a ton of fun yeah to go back and like sort of like forensic scientists try to figure out like which like where is the where do these players sacrifice a half step how good are they at camouflaging it? What can you say for sure was a lack of effort and what wasn't? I mean, it would be a lot of fun to use PitchFX on the pitchers and try to figure out just what it means to not try. I think we would actually probably learn a lot about baseball watching with the tools that we have now. Now I'm rooting for someone to start throwing some games. Oh, it would be dynamite.

It would be dynamite. It would be dynamite. I mean, it needs to be over the course of a nine game series and preferably with eight or so players because, uh, you need a big enough sample. So yeah, it'd be awesome.

Uh, I think the first year of free agency, although it's hard to say because the first year of free agency would be huge now, but only if you knew what was coming. Like I, I think at the time, I mean, I, I, Because the first year of free agency would be huge now, but only if you knew what was coming. I think at the time, I have read a lot of articles, contemporary articles for other

pieces and it's like a news story. The AP covers it like this guy is a free agent, this team is going to look at this guy and all that. But it's almost like nobody really quite knows how to calibrate it. They just don't know if it's a big thing or not. And so it took a lot of years for the hot stove to capture our attention as it is. And so it might actually be the case that if we had never had free agency, even if we had Twitter and all that, that we wouldn't make a big enough deal about it.

So maybe not. Maybe I should take that one up. I think that the Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio MVP race in 1941 would have been extremely bitter and there would have been a lot of fighting because it was a 400 hitter in the 56 game hitting streak. And they were close enough that I close enough that I think, you know, people would dig in and be very passionate about it. But I think that you would see the stat heads come out extremely passionately in favor of Ted Williams. And there would be a lot of, I think a lot of kind of, you know, minimizing what Joe DiMaggio did. And also, in thinking about this, I didn't realize this,

but there was another guy who got a first-place vote that year. So this is a little thing I discovered today named Thornton Lee, who I've never heard of. And Thornton Lee got one first-place vote, and he actually, according to baseball reference, produced more war than DiMaggio that year as a pitcher. He went 300 innings, 2.37 ERA, a whopping 300 innings. He struck out 130 and walked 92.

He got one first place vote and finished fourth. The DiMaggio hit streak, which of course was also huge at the time uh would be even huger now i mean we'd be we'd have every every network breaking into coverage to bring you his bets live and it would just be huge and i feel like the pressure would be crushing um maybe in a well it was then too so yeah it's hard to know because they all a – well, it was then too. Yeah, it's hard to know because they all talk about how crushing it was and they all lost their hair and all that. You know what's interesting is that we haven't had a real record chase

in the Twitter age. Nobody has really – maybe it's because offense has gone down and kind of in a way the very top pitchers have gone up in a way right like the best pitchers these days are not as good as the best pitchers were in the 90s and so we haven't seen a lot of extreme performances but we really haven't seen a record chase in the twitter age the closest thing is miguel cabrera's triple crown which was almost a non-event and I don't know if that's just because people don't care about batting average and so on these days, or if it's because the Triple Crown, it's not really... Well, I don't know.

I mean, a lot of guys have been close, and so maybe people are kind of not into it until it happens. But it's hard to know exactly how big a record chase would be. How big would Maris be? I thought about that and I wasn't sure, but it seems like it was plenty big at the time. How big would Hank Aaron be? I don't know, but it was huge at the time.

And I could, I don't know, I could maybe envision the DiMaggio streak actually being less of a big deal maybe because we would just get we would talk about it so much that we'd get bored of it maybe I mean I'm not probably not but I could maybe see the case where like it just becomes like it just takes up a lot of oxygen maybe when he breaks the record the hitting streak could be a big deal but by like you know by 50 51 52 53 it would be less of a big deal like you know like nobody was paying attention to cal ripken's 2100 and like 85th game right so maybe with the maggio probably not though it probably would have been a

big deal so i take it back i take back my objection but my my my my number one answer my number one answer my number one event that I think would be absolutely bananas in a way that it wasn't at the time even though it was huge. Do you have a guess? Do you have a guess for what my number one answer is? I mean I just think it would be insanity all the time and so much fun and gif-able and lots of debate and like lots of everything. Tell me. In fact, I think it would actually change the way people consumed baseball for a few months. Michael Jordan playing baseball.

Yeah, that would be big. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I guess so i mean we'd people well would it be i mean it was it was big it was big it was big but you couldn't see it you could only see sports and you could see 20 seconds on sports center every night right there was nothing you could do so now that we have milb.TV or whatever, and now that it's very easy to just broadcast.

I mean, there's probably channels. There's probably satellite channels that do nothing but broadcast. Where was he, Birmingham? Yeah, AA. Yeah. That does nothing but broadcast their games. I mean, you'd have so much access to it. You'd have his splits.

You'd have GIFs of every play he made. You'd have, you know, everything, right? We'd all be watching it. I feel like we would all be watching it. That's what would be different, is that everybody would just spend the 15 bucks to get minor league baseball TV, and we would all watch every game,

and we'd talk about it. It would be a huge event every day. Yeah, I wonder. I mean, I could see it being huge initially, it all watch every game and we'd talk about it it would be a huge event every day yeah uh i wonder i mean i could see it being huge initially but he played 127 games and hit 202 so i wonder whether after game 50 or you know after it becomes clear that that he's not really going to be a great baseball player uh whether you continue to watch game after game as he just kind of goes over four yeah possible yeah that's a good one yeah thanks thank you ben you're welcome uh so yeah send us uh send us your your picks if you're listening and have a good one um and now

you we should and you're you're not you're not gonna you so good one. And now we should... And you're not going to... So far, all you've said is the Black Sox aren't good and Ray Chapman. You don't have anything else to contribute? Ray Chapman was mine. All right. Ray Chapman was yours. We should read Andrews.

Yeah, that's of course. We will read Andrews. So let me navigate over to Andrews. Andrews top five, which is a good top five. Although it is a good top five. I think that number five is, I don't think, well, okay. Number five, Pete Rose bowling over Ray Fossey in the All-Star game. Could be.

Could be a hot take issue. There would probably be a lot of hot takes on that. Actually, now that I think about it, there would be a lot of hot takes about that uh so that's a good one there must have been hot takes on oh i bet there were a ton of hot right i don't know whether there'd be more maybe you got the more just because there are more people doing hot takes now maybe but right i don't know but yeah when there's more people doing hot takes, the takes got to be hotter. Yes. So I think there would be a real hot take arms race. Number four, Bill Buckner error. Number three, pine tar incident.

Seems like it would be about the same. I think the pine tar incident might be a lot less actually. I think that everybody would see the gif and it would be quickly moved past. Although, you know, when the league did make them replay the game, so it did last or replay from that point. So it did last, you know, over the course of weeks. So maybe that's a good one. Maybe that works. Babe Ruth's called shot would be very very big if you if there was actually

debate about it I mean I'm assuming that there would be 9,000 camera angles and there would be a lot less debate but maybe not maybe it would be debatable and number one is the hitting streak which yeah I'm probably underrating the hitting streak I'm underrating the hitting streak because I wouldn't really want to talk about the hitting streak yeah Yeah, there'd be a few people. We'd probably do a downer podcast where we talk about how it's just hits and bloopers and what's the big deal. Yeah, we'd do our tepid take. Yeah, a lot of our takes are tepid.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I feel like we could have just made this an entire show um let's let's do it yeah and just no no no let's we'll talk about the nationals for five minutes okay uh all right so the nationals uh kind of keep reaching new lows uh when when the bp events were going on in washington a of weeks ago, we were all kind of saying that, you know, they still looked like one of the most talented teams in baseball and there was still time for things to turn around. But it's been a couple of weeks and they've been bad since then. And it's looking like it will be difficult, not impossible, but difficult. And they certainly haven't taken any steps toward turning things around.

They've fired their hitting coach. They've lost a bunch of games recently. They just lost to the Pirates 4-2. And they're now nine games out in the NL East. And I've kind of been trying to figure out what the narrative will be. If this is, you know, if this is their season, if they finish out of contention, um, how we will attempt to explain it or simplify it, um, in the way that we often do. And we've, we've talked before about this for, for other teams, other teams like you know maybe with the

angels the narrative is that you spend too much on on over 30 players or something or you don't have enough pitching which was a concern for them before the season or maybe with the blue jays it was you know going after risky injury guys or something like that. You could, you could kind of generalize like that. But the nationals, it seems kind of, kind of tough to, to come up with one that is as compelling as those in that pretty much every pundit before the season picked the nationals to, to win. A lot of people pick them to be the best team in baseball. They didn't really seem to have a lot of weaknesses. The common thought process was that they were a great team last year that upgraded over the winter and got Denard Spann and Soriano and kind of improved at

the margins here and there and would be even better. And they were a young team that came into its own and would get even better. So if that hasn't happened, and it certainly hasn't happened yet, then what is the lesson that we take from it other than the general unpredictability of baseball? I mean, the pitching has been good. The pitchers that we thought were good have been good. It's really the offense has been the worst. I mean, worse than any team but the Marlins and maybe the White Sox at this point.

Is that true? I think so. Just looking at true average at least. Wow. Before Wednesday night's game, they ranked 28th in true average ahead of only Chicago and Miami, and then they scored two runs. That's incredible to me because, I mean, I still think of their lineup, and they have basically Espinoza was a zero before he got sent down,

and Suzuki is not good, and Spann's been below average, but the rest of their lineup is actually produced for the most part right i mean yeah well i mean harper's been good and uh zimmerman has been good and yeah um laroche has been okay it's really yeah it's espinosa being horrible and and he's been gone for a month and a half and rendon's been been good. And it's really, like, the bench has been awful. Like, Lombardozzi, Bernardina, Tyler Moore when he was around, Chad Tracy, guys who were all really good last year have been just terrible this year.

So, like, I've heard some people kind of talk about, like, the hubris of last season, resting Strasburg, shutting down Strasburg, with the belief that they would just be contenders every year for a while and they didn't necessarily need to win last year because they were set up so well. And so maybe people are kind of retroactively talking about that a bit more. But from a team construction standpoint,

it's kind of hard to see where they went wrong. They were a team that it seemed like needed so little offensive help. Not that they were going to have an overpowering offense or anything, but they traded Mike Morse because like they just didn't really, didn't really need another hitter. They just kind of, he was just sort of a spare part that as it, as it turned out,

I guess would have been sort of useful maybe. So I don't, I don't, I don't know what to it seems like we've been wrong about the Nationals or as wrong about the Nationals as we have for any team recently, and I have a hard time coming up with a narrative to explain it. Yeah, this, somebody should write about their bench, because, I mean, if you look at their starting eight,

if you include Rendon as the second baseman instead of Espinoza and Rendon has more plate appearances then you have six guys who have OPS pluses over 100 um and most of them fairly well over 100 and then you know two guys who are below but not all that far below and yet they are also 27th in OPS plus so yeah it's not a metric issue. They really are getting insanely bad performances from guys who have had to play quite a bit, Lombardozzi and Bernardino and more. I guess, do you remember what the playoff odds were? I vaguely recall that Pakoda was a little down. Before this season?

Yeah, before this season. yeah uh yeah uh i think kota projected them for something like 87 wins or something pretty conservative 89 maybe um which they could still pretty easily get to they could get there um but even that was a lot lower than what most people were picking them to do i'm trying to think of what it was that lodged this in my head, but somebody made a reference. I forget what it was. I don't know. It might have been to the Pirates or something like that. internationals that being young doesn't mean that you have plenty of time. And I would say that if I, I mean, the simplest narrative, which maybe, I don't know, I would want to think more about this, but just this idea that if you're young, I think people think, oh, if you're young, you're going to get better. Everybody thinks if you're young, you're going to get better. And in fact, if you're young, you're, you know, hoping to maintain the gains you've made. And if you've played really well recently,

whether you're young or old, if you've played really well recently, there's probably some possibility for regression. So I would say that the Nationals narrative would probably just be the plexiglass principle, right? I mean, they won like 30 more games than they won the previous year. And it's really hard to maintain that. I mean, there's a lot of, I guess they didn't win 30, they won 18 more games. It's hard to maintain that, even if you think that it's all true talent, and you look around and you say, we've got young guys and they're coming into their own. In fact, it's pretty easy to slide back. I mean, I don't think that they're probably a true talent 80 win team right now.

probably a true talent 80 win team right now. But, you know, just because you win 98 and you're young doesn't mean you're, you know, it's all bright days ahead of you. So maybe if anything, it should be, you know, like seize the day and do whatever you have to do this year because it's all you've been given. It's all you've got guaranteed. Yeah, that's a good one. Sure, we'll go with that. Yeah, that's a good one. Sure, we'll go with that. I was just thinking with the first topic that a lot of stories would be much smaller than they were at the time now, just because of things that were controversial that just wouldn't be now because we have so much information and so much replay and all those things um like i

don't know like jackie robinson stealing home against yogi vera and yogi vera maintaining until this day that that he was out uh and there's that famous picture of him sliding in and there that whole kind of mystique around that play uh we would have like 10 10 ultra slow angles of that and we would know whether he was safer out and that would be that. It's true. And also I think that just in general, well, a lot of things,

I think a lot of things have lasted for a century partly because you don't see them. You only hear them described. You have names for them like, you know, Merkel's boner. Yeah, that's exactly what I was just going to say. You haven't, you know, that all you know about it is that like you know the phrase merkel's boner for years before you actually know what it was and then you never actually get to see it so if you saw a gif of it on you know john boyce's like gif of the week you'd kind of just move on

after that and not only that but um you would like there are there were thousands of interesting things happening alongside Merkle's Boner that just didn't get recorded, and now every single thing gets recorded. And so there's just not that much oxygen for one play or even one game or really even one storyline. There's just not that much oxygen for anything. So you really need to have, I think the keys for a hot take story these days are you need to have some sort of divide between the internet writers and the maybe newspaper writers or something along those lines where people are going to just fight. You need to have a thing where they're going to fight. And I think a lot of what's driven the Ryan Braun stuff is that a lot of people I follow think, ah, steroids aren't

that big a deal. The league's jerks for doing all this. And they don't make you better. And all these things that are, I'm not saying they're right or they're wrong, but they would be considered controversial in mainstream articles. And so you have this perfect conflict between writers. And that's where you need the conflict to be. You need to have writers yelling at each other and insulting each other. And A-Rod, it's not quite as much, but I feel like there was a period for a number of years during the fire Joe Morgan years

where it was almost like it felt like the morally right thing to be on a rod's side because everybody was bad mouthing him and and and like holding jeter up as like some jesus christ figure and so i think there's still a little bit of lingering uh sympathy for a rod that he's like always getting just completely crapped on uh and you know now it seems like every day it becomes clear that he deserves just completely crapped on uh and you know now it seems like every day it becomes clear that he deserves to be crapped on but um i don't know i i think that there's still some of that like oh look at look at those mainstream guys there they go again on a rod kind of a thing yeah all right that's enough uh we'll be back with one more show for friday