Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 268: Clayton Kershaw and Cooperstown/Xander Bogaerts and Historic Years for Young Talent

Episode Date: August 19, 2013

Ben and Sam banter about the Saber Seminar, then discuss Clayton Kershaw’s odds of induction into the Hall and the best-ever years for young players.

Hall of Famer Whitey Ford now on the field, pleading with the crowd for some kind of sanity. Uh-oh, and a barrage of pretzels now knocking Whitey unconscious. Wow, this is a black day for baseball. Good morning and welcome to episode 268 Of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller, Ben Lindberg. Ben, you told me you were on a train from Boston. Were you...

A bus from Boston. A bus from Boston. Did you come... Were you at the Boston Red Sox baseball game? I was not. I was at the Sabre seminar. I see. How was that? Are you going to talk about that?

Or do you want to banter about it? It's not my topic. Let's banter. It was fun. It was a fun two days, full days of presentations and discussions with baseball people. Mostly

analytic stuff, but not entirely. There were a lot of Red Sox people there, player development people, amateur scouting people, pro scouting people. John Farrell was there. Brian Bannister spoke. So there were a lot of interesting guests, and there were a lot of our listeners there. lot of interesting guests and there were a lot of our listeners there uh probably more more of our listeners concentrated in one one room than i've ever seen before which is nice because i always

think when we get all these emails that it could just be one guy with a with a lot of email accounts i'm never i never totally believe that all those people are individual people, but I met several of them at one time this weekend. And they said that I sound more enthusiastic when speaking to a room of hundreds of people than I do when speaking to you alone in my apartment. That's probably true. Yeah. How was Bannister?

He was good. I guess he talked about what you would expect him to talk about. I mean, he was very frank about his limitations as a pitcher, which is not really something you're used to hearing from a professional athlete or a former professional athlete. And all the things that we knew about his career and how he realized that he couldn't throw all that hard.

So he had to do different things to try to compensate for that and throw different pitches and develop a cutter and try to fine tune his movement using pitch effects and all this interesting stuff that you don't usually hear from pitchers. And he was very open and honest about not being that great at baseball, but managing to make it to the majors anyway. And he seemed to stress that for some guys, it could be a good idea to do something risky that could hurt them in the long term. He had a serious shoulder injury that ended his career. Doctors told him he would have a 5% chance of coming back from it, and he didn't even bother to try.

But he's happy with the tradeoff that he made. He realized when he started throwing the cutter all the time that that could potentially lead to injury. Or he thought that was the case. And maybe that is what happened. But he feels that if he hadn't done that and taken that drastic measure of just totally changing the way he pitched, he never would have even made it or lasted five years in the majors. So he is happy or says he's happy. And he made $5 million. So that's not so bad. And did anybody talk about clubhouse chemistry? It came up a bit just someone asked, there was no presentation about it. Someone asked John Farrell about it. Um, and he, uh, he, he said it was kind of a chicken and an egg thing. Like he thinks it's real, but it's hard to say whether it's just winning teams have good chemistry or, or teams with good chemistry win. He did talk about defined roles in the bullpen in a little,

he was a bit more emphatic about that, and he said that no matter what anyone tells him about numbers, and he knows the percentages of, you know, how many, what the conversion rate is for a three-run lead and all that sort of thing, and all the things that we write about closers and set-up men and relief roles that he will always believe that it really helps guys to have a defined role and to have a set closer just to minimize the uncertainty.

Like if you're going into a test in school, then the more you know, the more comfortable you feel, the less uncertainty there is, the better you'll do. And he feels that it works the same way with bullpens and relievers knowing their roles. and you just tell him that he's going to come in whenever the most important situation is in the game or whenever you think it is, then maybe that would just be the new expectation, that it wouldn't be the ninth inning. It would just be whenever there's a jam. I guess there's inherently more uncertainty about that than there is when you know what inning you're going to be pitching in. But I don't know.

It seems like it's still sort of a role. It's just a different way of of conceiving that role it seems that that uh I agree it seems like that role would be clear enough to the closer but then the there's a cascade effect where then you don't have the setup man in his eighth inning role and the seventh inning guy in his role and maybe the loogie in his role so you know you could maybe make the case that you don't get quite the roles for everybody else but yeah i mean i agree with you it seems it certainly seems like uh like if your role is to be our most important guy and get our most

important out that that would be a role that people would embrace yeah uh but yeah farrell was really good and impressive and was pretty open about certain things. Like someone asked him whether he thought Jose Iglesias' hitting was a fluke. And he said, oh, yeah. Which is kind of surprising that he would be that open about it. But he basically said that they thought that they sold high on him um so that was that was fun to hear groovy uh what do you want to talk about uh i guess uh sort of xander bogarts and young players okay and i'll talk about clayton kershaw

so uh since you talked for a little while just now, should I go? Sure. I just wanted to revisit because we very, very briefly batted around Clayton Kershaw's Hall of Fame odds a few maybe weeks or months ago. And I just think that you drastically, you in particular, I don't remember what I said. I'm sure it was reasonable. But as I recall,

you drastically undersold him. And I just wanted to see if you wanted to reconsider this. Because Kershaw is having a... I wrote a lineup card entry a few weeks ago that probably a lot of people didn't see.

But it was about how Kershaw had sort of broken through this parody of queries and sort of look at statistical leaderboards from our lifetimes, you basically find that there's four guys who are arguably – all four of them I think you could probably find somebody who can make the case that they were like the greatest pitcher of all time or something along those lines, certainly maybe top ten. And those four are Pedro, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, and Roger Clemens. And they're just so far ahead of everybody else. And they were all pitching concurrently, so it sort of dilutes the impact that any one of them had.

But basically, they all won. On average, they won like four or five ERA titles and four or five Cy Young awards. Since then, there's been really nothing of the sort. It's been basically a new guy has won the ERA title every year and a new guy has won the Cy Young every year. So we've had kind of this whole generation of of like mike messinas where there's like a little black ink and there's like a maybe a little hardware and i mean very very

great pitchers hall of fame worthy pitchers guys like holiday and and verlander and santana and lincecum lincecum yeah and um and but but no nobody who's been truly elite. And Kershaw is such a tough Hall of Fame case to project because it seems to me that he is, right now, he has broken through. He is better than any of those guys that I just named or Felix or anybody else. He's better than any of those guys really ever were. But he's also only 25. And so, like, I honestly don't know whether he's already, like, kind of punched his own ticket to Cooperstown at this point. I mean, he's going to have three consecutive ERA titles. He's going to have three consecutive ERA titles. He's going to have three consecutive whip titles. And he's going to have Cy Young, second place, Cy Young in a three-year stretch.

Now, he does have to keep throwing innings from this point on. He can't retire with 1,100 innings. But it seems to me that he's almost to the point where he doesn't really need to do anything else. He just needs to kind of hang in there as an average pitcher for another 10 years. But it seems to me that he's almost to the point where he doesn't really need to do anything else. He just needs to kind of hang in there as an average pitcher for another 10 years. And he might already be there because this peak that we're seeing is really special. And I feel like right now, people are like, this is, I don't know. I mean, Kershaw has sort of taken over baseball.

It's been an amazing thing, right? Yes. Do you want to reconsider? It would help if I remembered anything about what I said last time. Well, you said he had a less than 1% chance of making the Hall of Fame, as I recall. And I said, Ben, that's absurd. And you said, no, I don't care what the stats say.

I hate baseball. Yeah, that sounds like me. No, I think you said, if I recall, I think you said something like 25% or maybe 20 to 35, somewhere between 20 and 35. Uh-huh. I mean, yeah, he's incredible right now. He is just by far the best pitcher in baseball. He is just by far the best pitcher in baseball. And yes, he's having a season that is on par with all of those pitchers that you named.

But you mentioned Johan Santana as the example of a guy who... Shouldn't have said him. You shouldn't have said him. of a guy who who shouldn't have said him you shouldn't have said him uh i mean that's just another guy who if you if you look through his age 20 i mean even even like through his age 29 season uh or or yeah through his age 29 season he'd gone cy young finishes 7-1-3-1-5-3 uh from from age 20 or yeah age 24 through age 29 he was incredible every year now he never I guess uh no one of those years was quite as good as the year that Kershaw is having right now. But pretty close. And I haven't looked at all the defense independent stuff because Kershaw has been a low BABIP guy before.

He probably just is a low BABIP guy, but extremely low this year, right? I think last time I checked, um, I mean, he has a, a sub two ERA, uh, and he's not that much better than he's been over the last couple of years. I don't think he's, he has a, he has a two 73 BABIP in his career and it went from 2009 to now, it went 276, 279, 274, 271, and then this year 234. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, this is probably not his true talent, I would guess. His true talent is some mix of his last three years, which is incredible. three years, which is incredible. But probably, yeah. But partly part-aided.

I mean, if you're looking at, when you see his black ink, I mean, he's got, right now he's got, he has about the Hall of Fame average for black ink right now. He's 48th all-time in black ink at the moment. He's got, I mean, when you look at some great pitchers like Bly Levin basically led the league in, you know, three categories in his career, five, if you count innings and Kershaw's already like blown past that. And you look at like, uh, you know, Felix Hernandez basically has led the league in, you know, like two or three categories in his career. And Jack Morris,

like two or three categories, Mike Messina, like one, maybe two, if you count innings. And then here's Kershaw, and like just his whole page is black. But, you know, that is Park influenced. And, you know, if this is the first year that probably – The Dodgers have had pretty good defenses the last few years. Yeah. And so then this is the year that really like kind of blows everything out of the water.

But if it's just a BABIP thing, then it's just a BABIP thing. Yeah. And, I mean, there are no warning signs. He's never been on the DL. He wasn't overworked at a young age. He was pitching in the majors at a young age, but pretty conservative handling. Didn't go over 200 innings until he was 22, and even then just barely. So there's no reason to worry about him more than anyone else, really.

But, I mean, the Santana case is still very much a possibility for him. And I don't know what the odds of that are. But I mean, Santana had the same sort of stretch of dominance, and then he just got hurt and was done. Just that was it. There was no 10 years of league average. There was just nothing. So I don't know how high I would go. I mean, we talked about Trout's chances recently, and you wouldn't go as high for Kershaw as for Trout, right? You were very high for Trout. Yeah, certainly Trout is a much better bet.

Right. So I don't know. I guess I would go higher than 25 if that's what I said, but not that much higher. It's just not quite enough innings yet, I don't think. Not quite enough seasons, not quite enough innings where I'm comfortable putting him in right now. All right, so a few things to weaken my case. One, he's seventh all-time in baseball reference war through age 25.

And of the seven above him, number one is Burt Blylevin, Hall of Famer. Number three is Don Drysdale, Hall of Famer. Number two is Hal Neuhauser, who's a Hall of Famer but a Veterans Committee guy. And, you know, you look at his career, and he basically had a Kershaw-like run from 23 to 25. He basically had a couple of okay years after that. From the time he turned 30 on, he pitched 300 innings of league average ball. So that's from 30 on, right? So that's kind of like what we're fearing. And I think if Kershaw did that, then it was sort of disputable at this point

whether he could get away with that. So you have the three Hall of Famers. And then number four, Dwight Gooden, terrible precedent. Number five, Frank Tanana, terrible precedent. Number six, Brett Saberhagen, so, so precedent. I mean, Saberhagen is, you know, with a better narrative could have been in, but, you know, not great. So three of the six aren't in.

And Kershaw's baseball reference comps, which are not particularly statistically rigorous, but they're kind of interesting nonetheless, similar pitchers through 24. Number one is Vida Blue, who actually that kind of makes a lot of sense, and Vida Blue didn't make it to the Hall. And number 10 is Dontrell Willis. So there's that.

Yeah, so I think some pessimism or caution is still very much warranted, I would say. Does the fact that, see, Kershaw strikes me as, one of the things I love about Kershaw is that he does, he just seems like he does everything well. Like he seems like the Joey Votto of pitchers, where you just feel like he's completely in control of every action and he knows exactly what he's doing. Basically, he is the Yadier Molina of holding runners on and he just seems smart and in control. I don't know if that's basically an illusion. When I see a guy like that, I think he'll age better because he knows what he's doing. He'll adjust as needed.

But I don't know if that's an illusion and really all of this stuff is basically out of his control. It's either going to be his elbow holds together or it doesn't and his shoulder holds together or it doesn't. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be it. I don't know. I wouldn't – I can't know. I can't imagine. I mean, is Santana in consideration for you based on his peak? Or is he just out of the discussion now because he has no tail end? I think he came up just short.

I think he was like one or two years away. But he's just short. It's sort of distressing how close he came, but I don't think he's there. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't – it's hard to imagine a pitcher that I would give a higher percentage to than Kershaw, but even so, I feel like there's a pretty low ceiling on the percentage that I would give any pitcher because there could be a catastrophic injury that could just end it all at any time yeah it's I mean so Kershaw one

is going to win three straight ERA plus titles and like I said Cy Young second place Cy Young and Santana had won three straight ERA plus titles and won Cy Young third place, Cy Young. Um, and the third place he should have won. That was the Bartolo Cologne year. Um, and you know, led the league in strikeouts three times in that stretch and league in innings once. And so,

yeah, you're right. You're right. You're right. You're absolutely right. Sorry to be so depressing. I'd rather just, I'd rather just celebrate Clayton Kershaw instead of talking about the chances that he'll be done after age 28 or something.

But there is that chance. No, we need to talk through this anxiety that we always feel underlying every baseball game. So it's good. It's good that we talked through that. All right, go ahead. It's good that we talked through that. All right, go ahead. Okay, so Sander Bogarts, Alex Speier,

reported at 4 o'clock this morning that he would be called up today, that he will join the Red Sox for their road trip west. So this is another young, highly touted player coming up, and we've talked about this uh recently and it seems like we've we've acknowledged that there is a trend towards younger players or younger stars these days i feel like we've just kind of said that that was true um no i did i did research for uh thePN article. I actually did math. So remind me what you did. I looked at proportion, or not proportion, percentage of warp by age level relative to the entire league. So basically the percentage of the entire league's warp that had been produced by, I think the number I ended up settling on was like 27 or younger, but I actually did it for like, I did 23 and younger and 25 and younger as I recall as well. And I don't think I ended up publishing

those, but I looked at them as well. And we were seeing at least in the, uh, I guess I had gone back about 11 or 12 years and we were seeing peaks okay yeah so so yes if you if you go back that far uh then yes certainly so i i did the same thing this morning because i was thinking about writing something about bogarts and yet another one of these young players coming up at an extremely early age. And so there is, as you say, this is kind of a recent peak or last season really was a recent peak. And I did percentage of work produced by players 25 and under and then also 22 and under. and i kind of i looked at pitchers but also looked at batters separately because pitchers might be a little different in that teams are worried about abusing them at young ages so maybe they're they're not having them pitch as many innings

and maybe that could could skew things a little bit um But just looking at batters and the percentage of 22 and under, because it seems like so many guys like Trout and Harper and Machado and Puig and all these people, and last year was high. Last year was like 8.3% was batters 22 and under. That's percentage of batter warp. Wow. Wait, wait, wait. 8.3% of batter warp was batters 22 or younger?

Yes. That's incredible. Incredibly high? That's incredibly high. Right? I mean, doesn't that seem incredibly high to you? 22 and younger? It seems incredibly high, and it is incredibly high. Well, I mean, it doesn't seem incredibly high to you. Twenty two and younger. It seems incredibly high and it it is incredibly high if you don't go back.

It's not it's not like all time high, like something is happening that has never happened before. And it means that baseball is different than it's ever been. If you go back to the late 90s, mid-90s, late 90s, early last decade, it was very low. It was like 1%, 2%, 3% maybe. And Zachary Levine wrote a thing before this year about kind of the opposite of that, players 37 and older seen and enabled these players to stick around a lot longer and didn't leave spots for young guys. Or maybe teams didn't rush to promote those young guys because they figured they'd be productive until they were 38. But if you go back before that era, it starts to look not completely atypical. It's still high. And by the way, this year, it's lower. This was as of a couple days ago, it was 5.9. So down from last year.

Really? With Puig, Machado, Trout, Harper, and is Myers 23 or is Myers 22? Myers is 22, right? Let me see. I mean, Harper's been hurt, so he hasn't produced all that much. Yeah, Myers is 22. But, yeah, it's down, which is surprising, but it's down. So I looked for the highest percentages ever ever or at least since 1950 which is what we have and last year was was the fourth highest percentage so there were three years

yeah are we should i just guess sure until i get all four of them. I have like eight spreadsheets open, and I'm trying, so you can guess. Yeah, I'm totally kidding about guessing. Oh, okay. It would be absurd, but I want to guess, I would like to guess one year. Okay. I will guess, I will guess 70,

like 76, 77? 77 is right after last year. That is fifth all-time. Okay. So good guess. 77, yeah, I have the list of players who were young. 77, not really a lot of guys who turned into all-time great players, but they were very good at young ages that year.

Andre Dawson is really the only... Well, no, Eddie Murray. Eddie Murray is there in the top 10 also, but it's like Chet Lemon, Rupert Jones, and then Andre Dawson, Gary Templeton, Willie Randolph, Eddie Murray, Jack Clark, Ellis Valentine. Robin Yount is down a bit. But the top three that were higher percentages than last year were 56, 64, and 73. So I'll go in reverse order.

So wait, 56, 64. So 64, yeah, 64 is a big one. Okay, so anyway, 56, 64, and 73. So 73 was 8.3%, so just barely higher than last year's percentage. And that was Cesar Cedeno, Jeff Burrows, Buddy Bell, Gary Matthews, Dave Roberts, Rich Coggins, Daryl Porter, Greg Wazinski, Milt May, Bob Coluccio. So not the biggest names there, really. You go down a bit. Yeah, it's like Bill Madlock and Dave Parker and Dwight Evans are down there.

But yeah, no Hall of Famers in that bunch. 1964, you get Dick Allen at the top, who probably should be a Hall of Famer. And then it kind of drops off again. It's Boob Powell. Wait, Fregosi. Isn't Fregosi on there? Yeah, Boob Powell, Jim Fregosi, Jim Ray Hart,

Bill Frian, Tim McCarver, Tony Canigliaro, Nelson Matthews, Bob Bailey, Ed Cranepool. That's the top. Not a Hall of Famer in the bunch. No, not all that distinguished. Yeah, and go down a little farther, you get Jimmy Wynn, Bert Campanaris, but yeah, no particularly impressive names below Dick Allen. And then 1956, if I can find my spreadsheet. Okay, so here you get some pretty big names. So 56, you get Al Kaline, who was 21 that year and produced almost eight Warp.

Frank Robinson, number two. Hank Aaron, number three. So Kaline Robinson, Hank Aaron, and it's ages 21, 20, and 22. And then Luis Aparicio is number four. So not a bad top four. And then Rockyavito bill white and then roberto comente uh oh my word yeah uh don drysdale was 19 that year bill mazeroski was 19 that year harman killebrew was 20 that year uh brooks robinson was 19 that year um so that was kind of an incredible year uh do you think anybody was writing trend pieces about it at the time?

I don't know what 1956 was like. When you go back to the Google News archives, they're so limited that you can never really find all the good stuff. I wonder if this was a big trend piece about young ballplayers and how baseball has changed forever. I'd like to think so. I don't know what the pre-1950 status quo was, so I'm not sure whether it would have seemed as unusual then,

but the percentage was, gosh, it was really high. It was 11.1% of batter warp was produced by batters 22 and under that year. And really a bunch of inner circle, all-time Hall of Famers. And I don't know, other than that being a clean game at that point, or as clean as baseball ever has been, I can't really think of any trend that was around in 1956 that would explain why there would be a great crop of young players just like there would be in 2012.

So it seems like sort of just a cyclical thing to me where every 10, 20 years or so, there's kind of a great crop of these young guys. It seems like last year's crop certainly has more potential to be like the 56 group than the 64 or 73 group. I don't know whether I'm saying that just because I'm a person in 2013 and I don't have the perspective that I do on 64 and 73, but I don't know whether it means anything other than just a bunch of these guys happening to come together at the same time. I mean, that's 56.

That's like 10 strong Hall of Famers just at the top of that list who were all 20, 21, 19. So I think it seems even more extreme in comparison to the PED era, if you want to call it that, and what seemed to be a really low valley in these percentages, but not quite as crazy when you take away that era and look at what happened before then. So I don't know. I don't know whether to read any special significance into what's happening now or whether it's just a nice wave of young talent

that's happening to crest at the same time and we should all enjoy it while it's here. Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. By the way, the pitcher percentage in 56 was really low. It was 2.7% 22 and under in that year, which is really low. This year, it's 3.9, which is not particularly high either. It seems like there's more, looks like there's more variability from year to year, just kind of scanning that list. So it's a historic time. I don't know whether it's a meaningful time or just a thing that's happening, but it's fun either way. All right, so we'll be back tomorrow.

Don't forget to email us for the Wednesday show podcast at baseballperspectives.com, and we'll do this again.