Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 262: The All-Banter Episode

Episode Date: August 9, 2013

Ben and Sam do a grab-bag episode on an assortment of topics, including Kenley Jansen’s hidden perfect game, Phillies outfielder updates, teams that own other teams, and a comment by Kerry Wood.

Item one, fan base. Ways to increase the American fan base. What fan base? The fan base of the band. You mean Mel? It's not a fan base, it's just a woman. Yeah, but I'm calling it fan base from now on. It's just easier when I call.

You say, the fan will be there. They can tell there's only one person. I'm trying to make it look bigger. Put base on the end of it. Okay? That sounds good. Sounds better. I came up with that.

Good morning, and welcome to episode 262 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller, and this is going to be a weird one, I guess. We're deviating from the formula a little bit. Okay. So neither of us has what you would call a topic. So we've decided to do sort of an all banter episode. We have things that we have noted and want to mention but do not merit a topic on their own. So we're just going to talk about a bunch of things and

maybe it'll be a little unfocused and maybe some of the things will turn out to be more interesting than others and we'll talk about them more. I think it's going to be almost totally unnoticeably different. I don't think anybody's going to notice. I think if you hadn't said anything, we would have been just fine. Yeah, well, I was just worried about what would happen when I asked what your topic was and you didn't have one and I didn't have one. So this way we... I was going to give you a choice, but I don't have to give you a choice now.

So my topics are Tim Linscum and Kenley Jansen. Do you want to tell me your banters or do you just want to banter? Yeah, I just want to banter. And I was going to bring up Jansen also, so maybe we can start there. Okay, so Jansen, thanks to everybody who alerted us, Jansen threw a Hidden Perfect game today. Well, not today, over the course of multiple weeks. today. Well, not today, over the course of multiple weeks. But Hidden Perfect Games are a thing that this podcast has come out in support of. We like them. And Jansen is, you know, kind of doing what Kimbrel did last year, which is to say,

kind of making baseball a little bit scary, where you sort of imagine this hellscape where there are a bunch of pitchers pitching like Kenley Jansen and nobody ever scores and the game is like just nothing but gifts of pitches. Um, but in his last now 36 innings, um, he's got an ERA of one. Exactly. He's got 53 strikeouts in three walks, which is an 18-to-1 strikeout rate. And notably, he's doing that with a completely normal Babik. And I don't know. I mean, Jansen is the most extreme one-pitch pitcher in the game. I was just, when I was writing about Sean Doolittle, you and I were talking on GChat about this.

Jansen has, I think, thrown 51 non-fastballs this year in, you know, like 50, 60 innings, something like that. He throws 95% fastballs, or you might say 95% cutters. He's not only a one-pitch pitcher, but he's another guy who came from nowhere. He was a high-A catcher, I believe, who was okay, but not a particularly good prospect. So they put him on the mound. A year later, he was in the majors. And three years later, he's arguably pitching as well as any pitcher in history has ever pitched, more or less.

And I don't know. I mean, it's worth noting, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, it's worth noting, right? I mean, he's, yeah. So I don't know. I mean, this kind of goes back to the conversation that we had initially with, with I think Ernie Freire and whether like these guys, particularly, I guess Freire, we kind of wondered how long it was going to last. But with relievers who are just this dominant at this point, you just wonder whether they present any sort of existential threat to the game as we know it. And particularly when it's a guy like Jansen,

who isn't the result of years of training or anything like that. He just basically is a guy who showed up and had a good arm, and you don't need much more than that. Just by having a good arm, he was instantly a dominant reliever, and right now he's kind of the least suspenseful thing in baseball. It does sort of seem, I mean, there are definitely more of these guys, but it seems like they don't necessarily sustain it for all that long, any one of them. Like you wrote about how Craig Kimbrell is still great, but he is not really a

fun fact machine like he was last year. He has a 1.19 ERA, which is almost indistinguishable from his ERA last year, but he's striking out about two fewer guys per nine innings. He's walking one more. He's giving up a home run now and then. He's not quite as unhittable as he was last year. So we keep seeing more of these guys, but I don't know what the lifespan of any one of them is, really. Yeah, Kimbrell has, since I wrote that, been better as well, which might be worth noting. But yeah, Kimbrell is maybe the closest thing. I mean, Kimbrell, like you noted, the ERA is insane. Yet Chapman was basically this guy last year and chapman hasn't

quite been that this year he's as i would say he's basically as unhittable but um his inability to uh you know to to keep his walks at a crazy low level as the spirit i mean that it's true everybody has some sort of weak spot um and you just don't notice it until it shows up i mean with jansen right now it's impossible to imagine that guys mean, with Jansen right now, it's impossible to imagine that guys are going to start hitting him. But it always feels that way until guys start hitting you. And I mean, Jansen's interesting too. I think one of the things that's interesting about Jansen is that he only throws 92 really. And compared to the other all-fastball guys who are Freire, McGee, and Doolittle, that's not that fast. I mean, that's slower than all those guys.

And, I mean, he throws a cutter. And we've seen a guy have a long career basically throwing a cutter over and over again and never losing his dominance. But, you know, Rivera was always the exception. Yeah. My question to you is going to be, how does the difficulty of a hidden perfect game compare to one that's out in the open to you? What percentage of the difficulty of a traditional perfect game

is a reliever just stringing together nine perfect outings uh because on the one hand i mean obviously it's it's much easier to throw three innings at a time and and rest in between outings um or one inning at a time and and rest between in outings uh on the other hand you do i mean jansen did that over nine appearances of one inning, so over a two-week period. And I wonder, as the number of appearances increases, whether you increase the odds of just having a bad day, just for whatever reason that day your mechanics are out of whack or something, or you're not feeling well, or you're, you know, not, not in a condition to succeed as much as you were another day. So maybe that would make it harder than just concentrating

it all on one day. Plus you, you probably face a tougher competition, I would guess than you do in, in a single game. Cause you would have to face, I mean, if you're a closer like Jansen, it's a close game. When you come in, uh, you'd have to face pitch hit pinch hitters. Maybe it would be a more difficult level of opponent. So how do you, how do you think they stack up? Um, well, I mean, for, for one thing, I mean, the most obvious thing is that if you remove the kind of arbitrary requirement that the perfect game must start on the first batter of a game and end on the 27th i mean a starting pitcher has 30 chances to throw a perfect game every year jansen has had 190 chances to throw a hidden perfect game

this year because any 27 batter stretch can be the stretch right so? So for that reason, it's obviously much, much easier statistically. But as to the spirit of your question, I don't know. I mean, it's true that a perfect game that a pitcher throws is more likely to come in a situation where, like, a lot of kind of outlier conditions are present. So against a bad offense in a good hitter's park, and on a day when he has great stuff and maybe a favorable umpire and, you know, maybe a, you know, a framing catcher. And so you're much less likely to have those conditions nine days in a row. Yes. But I mean, you know, relievers are just so much, so much more

dominant that it's hard to take it quite so seriously when it's Kenley Jansen. Just because, well, the other thing is, do you think that if you have a perfect game going through seven in the real world, through seven innings, everybody knows you have a perfect game. Do you think that you're more likely to throw to get the next six guys out or less likely than you normally would be in kind of a random situation where you're not sweating and you're not nervous and your defense maybe is, you know, maybe the defense is nervous or maybe the defense is alert and maybe the hitters are focused or maybe the hitters are getting outside themselves i mean yeah what what do you think is the that is uh

that's a good question i guess i i would speculate less likely uh that you're that you're more likely to pitch worse um just because you'd be so conscious of it. And maybe once you get so conscious of what you're doing and not making a mistake, that could screw you up. Then again, you probably really, really want to get those outs. And maybe you're reaching back and throwing a little bit harder, which is something that we do see pitchers do in high leverage situations. So maybe that's the case, that you're trying harder and you want it more, but then again, your opponents probably are even more motivated to do something good. So

I would say it, I guess it kind of washes out, but probably you're less likely to get it from that point on. So not to belabor this point, but Jansen's achievement was, as I'm told, acknowledged by the Dodgers broadcast, but like after the fact and just kind of, you know, like, oh, look at this, what he just did. And then basically nobody dogpiled on the mound is what I'm saying. basically nobody dogpiled on the mound is what I'm saying. And so that continues to wrinkle me somewhat, the kind of arbitrary nature of what we like. And this was also on display for Lincecum's start today because Tim Lincecum, I believe, allowed,

was it one base runner or two? I think he allowed one base runner. No, two base runners, right? I think he walked somebody and he gave up one hit. And he was pulled after 108 pitches, throwing a shutout. And as we talked about, when he had allowed four base runners through eight innings two weeks ago, he was allowed to throw 148 pitches so that he could get a no-hitter. And that always bugs me a little bit, but that's not what I want to talk about.

So I want to bring up Lincecum because he's pitching very well of late. He's got, besides the sort of two incredible signature starts that he's had in the last month or whatever, he's just basically been, you know, he's had a great strikeout rate, a much better walk rate. Other than really one bad start, he's been kind of lights out for eight or nine starts now. A couple years ago, I was talking to a friend and I suggested that the Giants should sign Linscombe right then for something like 15 years and $250 million or something. It was way before they had to. And I was kind of joking, but the premise of this argument was that, you know, you look at Lincecum and you know that

pitchers are unreliable. You know that they have, you know, they have surgeries and they miss entire years and, you know, they have, you know, bad seasons and they have to adjust and all this. But I was thinking that Lincecum, even if those things happen, even if he missed an entire season for surgery and maybe missed half of another year and maybe was terrible for a year, but he would still end up basically making like $350 million in his career or something because teams are incredibly quick to forgive a bad you know a struggling pitcher like they uh it takes only a few starts before teams see this guy as like being

back and having it back and so even if like if lindscombe so so in my head i'm thinking okay so let's say lindscombe hits free agency in 2013, before the 2014 season, and he signs a five-year deal. And then he misses the second year completely because he has shoulder surgery. And then he's not very good the third year. And then he's pretty good in the fourth, and he's pretty good in the fifth. He's still going to get paid a lot because the second and third years are like distant past at that point. And I don't think this was a particularly good argument that i was making but there's like a nugget of something there and you saw it with garza when um garza had had basically six good

starts after his trade value was down to basically nothing he he didn't pitch for almost a year he had kind of a like a long recovery from injuries that weren't expected to take that long he had a pretty awful start to his season and yet it took six good starts for his trade value to get like arguably back to where it was at the beginning and so now i bring this up because we have talked at least once maybe three times or more yes about what we expect Tim Lincecum, the free agent, to get this offseason. And it's just he's a totally different pitcher now than the last time we talked about him. He's like completely different. And I imagine that some GMs have forgotten and maybe that's prudent. Maybe that's right to forget. Maybe all that matters for a

pitcher is like the only data points that matter for a pitcher are maybe like what he's done in his last six starts uh what he's done in his best season so that you kind of have an idea of what his his peak is and whether or not he's a pitcher and if you once you once you factor in that he is a pitcher and that the risk is kind of basically equal for all of them or like at least it's high for all of them you just do that you factor that in and then you've you've you figure out what to pay him so what do you what do you pay lansing him now oh geez uh i mean i think there is something to that compared to position players certainly i'm i guess i'm more willing to change my opinion quickly on a pitcher just just because it i mean it it seems like pitchers can reinvent themselves more easily. And you can just evaluate them more easily.

You can scout a pitcher based on one start. You can't really scout a position player based on one game so much. You have to sit on a series at least. And a pitcher always has either, you know, I mean, he can throw harder, he can throw faster,

he can throw something new, uh, and just kind of completely change his profile overnight almost. Uh, whereas there's no real equivalent to that for hitter. I mean, a hitter can, can change his stance,

uh, which we see happen all the time with no real change in performance or, you know, you could lose bat speed or something. That's, it's kind of hard to pick up. And, uh, so, so yeah, last time we talked about Lincecum, I guess maybe it was kind of at the low point of his season. Um, and I remember being very down on, on his free agent hopes. And I don't remember what number I quoted, but it was a low number. So I don't know. I don't think I would change it that much because, I mean, he still – is he – has he been completely different?

Has he done – you know, is he is he has he been completely different has he done you know is he throwing harder is he i mean his i guess his command has been better which was a problem for a while there well this breaking ball has been incredible uh-huh so what what i've seen at least has just been like like like holy cow yeah right um so yeah i don't know. I mean, if he finishes the season like this, then he's going to make a lot of money, I think, pretty clearly. He still has like a 78 OPS plus, too. ERA plus. Yeah, I mean, ERA plus. So it's 76 going into today,

which is one of the worst in like giant giants franchise history so there is i mean that's a reminder that like this is a this is a guy who has uh you know shown the capacity to let you down hard and you know it's if i guess part of the question is it's easy it's probably easier to say how much he makes per year than it is how many years someone gets him actually am i reading this right he has uh okay that's just because he had one bad start after the break i was looking at his his first half second half splits um so i don't know i don't think there is any level he could pitch at for the rest of the season that some team would would give him a contract like he would have gotten a few years ago um but you know we were at the point where we were wondering if anyone would sign him to be a starter uh and it seemed like the giants didn't really

want him to be a starter that they were only starting him because they didn't really have an alternative and his future seemed to be in the bullpen. So, yeah, I mean, if he finishes the season like this, then that seems to be completely out the door. Okay, so let me ask you – well, no, never mind. I won't ask you that. Okay. Well, okay, so – well, I will ask you that. So I mentioned that Yara Plus is still awful.

He has the same – do we we call it, froth? Do you call it froth? I do, yeah. Fair run average. Yeah, he has the same fair run average this year going into today's start that he did in 2010, which is when he finished 10th in Cy Young voting. And after today's start, it will be better than he had in 2011, which is when he finished 6th in Cy Young voting, and after today's start, it will be better than he had in 2011, which is when he finished 6th in Cy Young voting. Do we consider this relevant?

Well, he had a big, didn't he have a big FIP ERA split even last year? He was like... He did. He has every year for the last four, he's had a big FIP ERA. No, sorry. I'm sorry. I'm confused. Yes, last year he had a huge FIP ERA split. Yeah, full run. Yeah, full run. And this year it's almost a full run. So, I mean, it seems relevant. I mean, we know that that doesn't work for some pitchers as well as others.

But two years, two years is an awfully small amount of time to start. Yeah. Not even two full seasons. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he, and he wasn't really, uh, someone who had that sort of split before. So, so yeah, I think it's relevant.

Um, and, and there was lots of stuff. I mean, last year, uh, I guess he didn't finish with that high at Babbitt, but for most of the year he had a pretty high Babbitt and, and he was still striking out people. And it was just like, his command seemed to be off and he was just, he seemed to be throwing, just leaving more mistake pitches over the middle or, uh, seemed to be getting hit harder because of that, even if it wasn't showing up in some of his peripherals. Okay, new question. Basically, if you ignore ERAs and just looked at his FIP and fair run average, his last four years are essentially the four years Anibal Sanchez had

before he had free agency. Theips the fips are basically the same the fair run averages are basically the same lincecum has the edge in in some and and sanchez has a couple where he maybe has the edge um sanchez got five and 75 right yeah um who oh you know what this partly okay so okay, so I actually, the Detroit and Miami lines are split. So what I was thinking was four years for Sanchez is actually three years for Sanchez. And if you go back beyond three years,

then Linscombe obviously has a huge, huge edge over him. Does Linscombe get anywhere close to what Sanchez gets? I don't think so. I don't think he gets there. I think his, I mean, there's just been too much degradation in his stuff, I think, for anyone to not be worried about that. But the performance is the same. I know, but I have a hard time imagining a team giving a big deal like that to a guy who throws 90

and used to throw 94 not that long ago. And, you know, has that frame that people have always worried about that he wouldn't last. I don't think he gets there. I could see him getting a three year deal or something. I don't think anyone gives him five years. We just recorded a full show. I didn't even get to my banter yet.

Why didn't we just pick, why didn't we just say our topics for Kenley Jansen and Tim Lincegum? I had no idea we would have so much to say about that. Oh, okay. So, okay, well, a couple of mine were quick just uh just a casper wells update since since for a while we had a casper wells update every other show it seemed like uh the new casper wells update is that he was claimed by the phillies so no kidding yeah

claimed but not uh claimedlaimed by the Phillies. He's not on the Phillies, right? He was just claimed by the Phillies. That's what I'm asking. Yeah. That's what I'm asking. That's irrelevant. It says this headline in the Tribune says, Sox's Rios reportedly claimed off waivers.

Wells to Phillies. Yeah. Yeah. Right? So that's what that headline said. Sox outfielder Casper Wells was claimed off waivers by the Phillies. No trade was involved in the waiver claim, and the Sox did not announce a corresponding roster move at the time.

Wells will join the Phillies against the Nationals this weekend. Huh. So nobody in the AL claimed him. Yeah. So Casper Wells, so what is that? His fourth organization this year, I think? I wanted to say fifth. Let's see. So he's played... Yeah, well, because Mariners, Blue Jays, A's, White Sox.

Uh-huh. Okay, and now Phillies. And so he's managed to hit 167, 225, 182 in 71 plate appearances this year. 71 plate appearances while he has been probably waiting to be traded again and not getting regular playing time or anything. Yeah, 76 plate appearances. Yeah, right. Yeah, 71 at-bats. Yes.

He is tied for the league lead in ERA. Oh, sorry, I was reading his White Sox numbers So yeah, 76 plate appearances, 155 average, 211, 169 So he's just bad Yeah, I mean, tiny sample and lots of extenuating circumstances But maybe he just hasn't looked all that good. And then the other Phillies news, since we talked about Delman Young and how the real crime wasn't signing him, but continuing to play him when he turned out to still be Delman Young. So he has now been benched shortly after the podcast when we talked about that because Dominic Brown

is back and the Phillies have decided that they would rather have Darren Roof playing than Del Mignon. So belatedly, belatedly that happened. Still 27. Yeah. so... Is he younger than Darren Roof? He must be not much older. Roof was 26 last season, right? So he's 27. July 28th, 1986 is Roof. I might have been... Let me see.

Oh, sorry. Young is older. Yeah, about 10 months 10 months older um so yeah at some point we should maybe this off season we'll we'll revisit whether whether he will make it to 30 in the majors which we talked about last winter uh that almost that almost went dark oh you got me worried for a second. I did not want to talk about that. Okay. And then I wanted to quickly ask you whether you think there is anything to the idea that a team can, to any extent, have another team's number, as the saying goes. A lot of people are talking about that now because the Tigers have won 12 straight games against the Indians. And so there's the psychological aspect, I guess, of a team potentially being intimidated in some way by another team. If only just because

they've lost to them so many times in a row, they could potentially start to believe that they have some sort of disadvantage against that team. But what I'm, I guess, more interested about is, are there favorable and unfavorable matchups in baseball? Putting aside psychological factors, you know, when you, I mean, it seems like something that is much more important in other sports when you have people matching up with other people at certain positions or, you know, a team that specializes in the run and another team that's good at stopping the run and that sort of thing. Are there any cricket examples you can think of, Ben?

I wish, but no. It seems like maybe there would be some cricket examples. I don't know. Maybe people can write in and tell us, but, but do you think that there is anything to that in baseball? Are there any instances where a team matches up particularly well or poorly with another team to the, to the degree that it's it's more predictive than just yeah it's more predictive than just or not 12 runs in a row but just that they would have a better chance or worse chance against another team than you would expect based on their their record or their underlying numbers uh well i mean you can think of a few small ways, like if a team has a particularly good left-handed reliever and they're facing the Phillies of 2009 or 2010, you know, that would

be a case where they match up particularly well, but only in one small segment. You can imagine a team that runs a lot against a team like the Angels right now that doesn't hold runners on at all, like at all, or a team that maybe had a knuckleballer or something like that. You could see a case where that might show up. And I don't know. I mean, I would hate to rule out anything like this just because all sorts of things turn out to be valid that you don't see the reason

for right away but i would never i would never take it particularly seriously i mean yeah there's there's all sorts of teams playing all sorts of teams 12 times this year eventually one's going to win all of them i wish there were something to this really because it would give us something else to to analyze i always think of this when when it's playoff time and suddenly we're we're writing about every series and covering every angle of every team uh which we never do during the regular season but in the postseason we were analyzing whether a team matches up well with another team and there's just never all that much to say about it and i kind of i kind of wish

there were yeah i mean everybody basically plays baseball the same there's not there's not that much you can do if you start trying to think about like how to put pressure on another team it's like but you can hit and run i mean you can yeah you can bunt you're gonna try to bunt you can bunt more that's about it i mean basically the only trick in baseball is bunting like that's the one thing you can do that's tricky is like like i'm gonna not hit it very hard i'm gonna hit it as softly as i can like like can you defend this and that's about it otherwise it's basically like just play baseball um so you know there's there isn't a lot of variety between teams i mean i don't know like i i feel this way when you do playoff previews too and i mean you to some degree it's interesting when you notice that

you know one team is a team that puts the ball in play more than any other team and the other team has the you know lowest defensive efficiency in baseball and you think okay well that's significant you know one team doesn't strike, and the other team really needs strikeouts. But it's all pretty marginal, and most games aren't that close. Yeah. Okay, and then last bit of banter. Craig Calcaterra at Hardball Talk found this quote from a Carrie Wood feature on CSNChicago.com. Did you see this? It's a great

quote. So it's kind of the classic ballplayer back in my day quote, where the retired player talks about how younger players, current players don't play the game the same way or don't have the same respect for the game, except it's coming from Kerry Wood, who uh who's young i believe is younger than darren ruff yeah almost he's he's 36 i mean he was recently a baseball player uh so this is the quote you have to play with respect so he's talking about uh he was asked about biogenesis and and the suspensions and peds so wood says you have to play with respect and respect the game. When I came up and when guys like Todd Hollinsworth came up, we all felt the game didn't owe us anything

and we respected the game for what it was and kept that integrity. I think over the last few years, we've seen that change. A lot of guys will get to the big leagues and it's almost like baseball's been waiting for them and they feel like the game owes them something uh so carrie wood uh came up in 1998 which and he played played for the cubs uh so he was right front row center for the the buns or the the sosa mcguire home run chase chase and the heart of the steroid era in baseball.

And yet he's now retired, and somehow he's drawing this distinction between when he played and now. It just seems to be this ingrained thing that we can't ever get rid of. And everyone has these college courses that they reminisce about that were really influential for them and made them decide what they wanted to do in life or something, some great professor. And I never really had one of those. But I did take a class in sophomore year, I think it was,

on the history of baseball and America. And I think like 75% of the people who enrolled in the class just read history of baseball and thought it was all baseball. And then they were very surprised and disappointed when there was America. But that was kind of a course that I always think about because we would read these old baseball documents, you know, from 100 years ago, 150 years ago, and everything was the same. The same arguments, the same complaints, the same fears expressed then. Raul Abando. Yes. Yeah, he was right.

He was throwing balls into the into the outfield lawn. So none of this ever changes. And so that I always think of that when when there's some new controversy or people fear that baseball is about to be destroyed by some new development. You can almost always find a very close equivalent in an ancient baseball history. find a very close equivalent in ancient baseball history, just a really close parallel. I mean, it's never really as bad as we think it's going to be or as game-altering as we think it is. But you see it. I mean, every single generation has these players making the back-in-my-day quotes and usually saying exactly the same things. And this isn't just baseball.

It's just it's culture in general. But I always I always wonder why we why we can't shake this. And it's not it's not every player. I mean, you certainly see kind of more open minded players who won't fall back into this cliche. But it's it's pretty common that as soon as you get out of baseball, you immediately consider the baseball that you played to be the best baseball. And every baseball that comes after that is inferior baseball.

And maybe you see the same thing with fans who grew up watching baseball in the 80s or something and consider that to be the best form of baseball. And every other baseball is a pale imitation of that baseball i grew up in the 80s and i consider it to be definitely inferior to what we have now that's good uh i don't i don't hear that that often i hear a lot of people who are nostalgic about 80s baseball and think it was some pure reform of the game so I don't know I don't really have any great observation about this but it's something that I

always try to keep in mind whenever I'm hearing reactions to any new story that most of it isn't new yep okay alright so that went okay so end of episode housekeeping stuff uh you should

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