Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 275: Listener Email Answers of Surpassing Wit and Clarity

Episode Date: August 28, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about rare plays they wish they would see, players wearing heart rate monitors, and more.

hey joey baseballs how you doing man hey not for nothing how great are the yankees doing oh forget about it how you doing good morning and good morning oh hi we didn't coordinate no we did oh we did i was just saying good morning oh well good morning hi uh hi this is episode 275 of effectively wild the daily podcast from baseball prospectus i am ben lindbergh also saying hi is miller hi um any banter uh no no banter today yeah i've got nothing serious Serious business only. Yeah. Okay, so it's listener email show. So we got a bunch. We picked some of them, and now we're going to read them, or hopefully you're going to read them. Are you going to read them?

Am I? Okay, sure. Yeah. All right. So, yeah, I'll read them. All right, so the first question is from Chris, who writes, Saturday was the anniversary of one of the stranger happenings in baseball. Tippy Martinez picked off three straight runners off first base

to get out of the 10th inning. The play-by-play of the game from the bottom of the ninth inning onward is remarkable. It's highly unlikely we'll ever see something like that again. The current major league leader in pickoffs is Julio Tejeron with eight. Indeed, three pickoffs or more by a single pitcher in a game has happened only nine times since 1916. So what feat that could happen in a game, but rarely if ever happens, would you most like to see? A pitcher striking out five batters in

an inning, a batter getting seven hits in a nine inning game five home runs by one batter in one game and inside the park jose melina home run uh and so that's the end of the question few few comments on the question one i have to admit that for my entire childhood i was not sure if tippy martinez and dennis martinez were the same person and tippy was his nickname because there was this weird era in the late 80s where sometimes tops would just randomly replace the name with the nickname so you would actually have like uh like there's a card where it's doc gooden instead of dwight gooden and there's a card where it's rock rains instead of tim rains and uh tippy martinez and dennis i assume two separate people i'm progressing as though they're

two separate people but for a while they were teammates and i was never a hundred percent sure that they i'm googling right now i'm not i'm still not sure yeah that's uh it was it was harder to get answers to questions like that it was you're right was, you're right, yes. Now I know. It took me 12 seconds. Tippi Martinez, real name was Felix Martinez, and he was born in Colorado. So, yeah, my entire life I wondered that, and now I know. Two, I corrected your use of only. It is a pet peeve of mine when people put only in the wrong part of the sentence.

Yes, me too. Three, a pitcher striking out five batters in an inning is a good example. Five home runs by a batter in one game is a good example. The inside the park home run by Jose Molina is a good example. A batter getting seven hits in a nine inning game means nothing to me. So now that I have criticized your email enough, it's a very good question. It's the perfect question. As soon as I read it, I knew I would answer it.

And so now I turn to you, Ben. Do you have an answer? I have a few. I'm not thrilled with any of them. And I'm sure I'll come up with a better one as soon as we finish recording. But I had a few quirky ones that have happened like once and not for a while that are kind of cool and that I would like to see. The first one is a walk-off catcher interference. Oh, gosh, that'd be amazing.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's happened. It would be amazing, and now you tell me it's happened, and I can't wait to hear. But on the other hand, it's not debatable. And so, in a sense, you could think of walk-off scenarios that might be more hot take inspiring than that. I mean, it would be pretty definitive. Yeah, right.

So it was August 1st, 1971. The dodgers beat the reds five to four it was the 11th inning um and willie crawford was at the plate and uh manny moda attempted a steal of home and johnny bench who was catching stepped in front of the plate to tag him uh catcher's interference walk off so also also a balk, by the way. I know this from my recent balk experience. If the catcher leaves the catcher's box in attempting to thwart a steal of home or anything like that, it's a balk. So they could have called a balk.

And I would argue that a walk-off balk in some scenarios would be even more controversial and interesting. Yeah. some scenarios would be even more controversial and interesting. Yeah. I, I envy your knowledge of some of the more obscure parts of the baseball rule book after, after you wrote that. The box stuff was really great. I have a whole list of Bach topics I want to get to.

There's a, there's a, there's one curiosity that I like, just a fun fact that has happened, I guess, once where a player, a shortstop played a double header and never touched a ball, never had a ball hit to him, never had an opportunity. And it was, let's see, it was 1976. It was Toby Hera. And that happened. He played a doubleheader and just never had an opportunity to field a ball. But which is cool. And I guess I'd like to see that. But it's the kind of thing where I wouldn't realize that I had seen it probably until someone told me. And then how interesting is it that i didn't see someone do something probably yeah the first well the first question i had is when was that even noticed because i'm not sure that the shortstop would have noticed i mean he did touch the ball every time there was a strike out yeah for instance and they threw it around the infield he touched it so it's conceivable that he didn't know and and you wonder when was that discovered was this a i don't

know was this was this like a was this did was this discovered four months ago when jeff sullivan decided he wanted to do a topic and went looking probably yeah uh i don't know i don't know whether that was noted at the time or not um and then the last thing that i i would kind of like to see and not that i would like to see this brought back that I would like to see this brought back, but I would like to see how it works in practice for maybe a game or two, is the old original single umpire system. I think the four umpire system,

according to this MLB page I'm looking at, was first employed in the World Series in 1909. So in the dark ages of baseball history, there would just be one umpire or two umpires. And you hear stories about the kind of liberties that players would take, and they'd hold on to people's belts to keep them from running, or they'd cut across from first to third without going to second because the umpire wasn't looking. cut across from first to third without going to second because the umpire wasn't looking. I'm not in favor of bringing this system back.

I am in favor of better umpiring, not worse umpiring. But now that we have instant replay and gifts, it would be fun, maybe just for an exhibition or two, to see what players would try to get away with if they could. I also feel like in football, it feels like there are a lot of gifts involving referees being running about and getting hit by players and that sort of thing. And by forcing an umpire to be mobile, you probably would get a lot more collisions

in a way that might be pleasing. So mine is more unrealistic than than i guess your first two at least but i've always i've really always been fascinated by the idea of what a baseball team would have to do if they had fewer than nine players on the field so so the thing that i would really like to see is some sort of situation where there's a brawl and 17 or more players get ejected on one team and they're forced to play with fewer than nine. I really want to see that in the worst way.

And I guess you could imagine, although I guess it would be harder, but you could imagine a situation with injuries and extra innings, but really then you would just see pitchers the next day starting pitcher playing third base or something like that to fill in, which would satisfy me. That's a fair compromise. If anybody's offering that, I would take it as a compromise. But I really do want to see how the defense would align if they had eight, if they had seven. So that's mine. I want to see a situation where 17 or more are ejected from a game. And it seems possible, but very unlikely.

It hasn't come close to happening. The other thing, and I don't have a – it's not a specific event necessarily, a specific achievement, but I'm really into watching pitchers who are unable to throw strikes who um who throw 12 or more balls in a row uh i'm fascinated by the psychology of it and surprised i would think that you would be you'd be so anxious on the pitcher's behalf that you wouldn't even enjoy this so anxious yeah so so anxious i mean it i it does i'm sweating my palms are right now sweating a little bit thinking about it maybe my favorite thing i i ever wrote was about derrick holland in the in the 2010 world series uh who threw i think

11 before he managed to strike and it was just incredible to watch him, and I always love watching this. It's important to me that the guy comes out of the bullpen unable to throw strikes, or starts the game unable to throw strikes. If it's kind of snuck into the middle of an inning, you don't notice it quite as much. But yeah, I really like the idea that the crowd grows extremely antsy by about the fifth or sixth one and it gets louder and louder and then the camera starts you know focusing really tight like the camera gets super tight on on on everybody and i just i i mean i really like i hate it i love it that's that's a that's a situation that i watch baseball to see. And I would like to see that taken to some sort of extreme level, like 24 balls, 28 balls, something like that. And it never gets there. I did a piece on the longest non-strike streaks by pitchers this year. I did that probably around January.

Yeah, January was the month of articles about pitchers not throwing strikes, as I recall. Yes. And I think one guy in the last 15 years has thrown 16 in a row, and I think 12 was the record last year. I would like to see it go longer than that. So that's a thing I'd like to see. Just to see, just because it's interesting. The vibe changes, the mood changes in ways. I mean, it becomes almost like a riot. It's weird. It's weird to see how everybody changes. I'd like to see pitchers playing positions more often

also. Yeah, me too. Just as a platoon matchup thing, just putting a believer in the outfield corner or something just so you can bring him back to face the next guy. Yeah, that had its moment in the 80s, and it seems like now it's just kind of, nobody does that anymore. I guess maybe you don't need to when you have eight relievers. Could be, could be. Although, on the other hand,

like Jonah Kerriman tweeted the other day about his favorite game ever, or something along those lines, and it was like a 22-inning game between the Expos and the Dodgers that was like a, I think it was 1-0, I might be wrong about that, but five pitchers on one side and six on the other. And you look at teams now, they run out of pitchers by the 16th inning. You know, Casper Wells was pitching in like the 16th inning you know casper wells was pitching in like the 17th or 18th um the other day and that never happened in in the 80s or 90s even with five-man bullpens you just you never saw a team actually run out of pitchers so in a way

the eight-man bullpen has uh actually made manager the seven or eight-man bullpen has made managers burn through their guys kind of a little bit more recklessly and run out of guys. So you could see it happening. You could certainly see it happening in extra innings. Although, I guess you couldn't really, because then you wouldn't be doing the platoon thing. It would only work if you were.

Yeah, okay, so maybe. Anyway. All right, great question, Chris. Good question. Almost enough to carry us through the entire show. Yeah. All right, so Derek asks, Great question, Chris. Good question. Almost enough to carry us through the entire show. All right. So Derek asks, he goes into a long lead in about choking and clutch and all those sorts of things.

Anyway, what I'm really trying to get at is the possibility of measuring who is comfortable in particular situations and who is not. I doubt players would ever agree to this, but wouldn't it be interesting to have guys wear heart rate monitors during the game? These devices aren't cumbersome, born as a watch, for instance, and shouldn't impede play with play. I imagine a baseline heart rate could be established for each player, and then that could be compared to the player's heart rate during different situations. By doing this, the post-facto assessments of a player's clutch

could be eliminated eliminated and we could get a real idea of who is nervous in high leverage situations and who isn't. And I just want to, before I talk about this, to the larger point, I'm not sure, or to, I guess, to the specific point, to the smaller point, I'm not sure that measuring heart rate would tell you who's nervous. I don't know that. I don't know that it's correlated. Yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways, adrenaline is exactly what gets you going. Adrenaline is a good thing. And, you know, I mean, I think a lot of my life is spent trying to avoid being anxious and avoid being stressed and avoid being sort of neurotic in the face of having to, to, you know, do things, but it's that

neurosis and that anxiety that also drives me and propels me. So I don't know that I'm not sure that it would necessarily tell you who's likely to choke. However, it would give you information. That's why I wanted to answer this because I do think it's realistic. It wouldn't surprise me at all. If, if you told me in 15 or 20 years or even less, maybe significantly less, that this was a common thing that teams were measuring. I mean, Ben knows I've been working on a long piece about clubhouse chemistry and whether it has a role in analytics for ESPN the magazine. And one of the ideas behind it is that we are moving

into an era where it's less about analyzing what we can measure and more about imagining what we can measure and sort of trying to expand the idea of what we can measure. It seems like to some degree that's what front offices are doing right now. I mean, that's what differentiates certain front offices is what they measure, what they think to measure, and then figuring out what to do with it. And so in a lot of ways, I think that it might not happen because the players do have a say in this, and they don't necessarily buy into a lot of these things. But it wouldn't surprise me if we moved into an era where heart rates were monitored, where a lot more personality traits and maybe even like Russell Carlton suggested sort of in a piece on chemistry, mood is monitored, measured. So it doesn't seem unrealistic to me. I think that, Derek, you bring up an idea that probably at least one guy

in one front office will hear and think, oh, that's interesting, and file it away. Yeah, I don't have that much to add to that. I'd love to see it. It would give us a lot of things to write about. It would be, you'd have some new forms of analysis that we've never had available to us, and that's always nice, but. Well, you're never, let's be real, Ben,

you're never going to see it. Yeah, I can't really imagine players ever going along with this. I mean, what's their incentive to agree to this? Well, it's completely unintrusive to them. What's their incentive not to go with it? Their boss says that it's going to help them win games, and it doesn't cost them anything, right?

Well, it might help the team win games. I don't know that it helps the individual player. I mean, I don't know. I feel like people just kind of instinctively don't know that it helps the individual player. I mean, I don't know. I feel like people just kind of instinctively don't. It's kind of an invasion of privacy in a way. Like an MRI? Well, I don't know. It's constant monitoring.

I wouldn't want to have my heart rate monitored while I recorded a podcast. I don't know. I can't imagine players wanting to give teams access to their internal states to this degree. I don't know. I'd like to see it. I'd love to know what Eric Gagne's heart rate was when he would come in and whether a heart rate monitor could even measure that amount of intensity. And I'd like to know what Mariano Rivera's heart rate is. Yeah, I think athletes are fairly open to this idea. I think athletes recognize that they are special machines and expose themselves to all sorts of poking and prodding that normal humans don't have to go through. It's sort of part of the obligation. If you tell them that it's for the good of

the team, I'm not saying certainly it would go over well, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a way to implement it. For all the concerns that we have about privacy in this world, I mean, the fact remains that over the last five or ten years, we have completely dissolved our own privacy. Like, completely. Like, every single thing that you would have ten years ago thought you didn't want anybody to know, people just post on their own on the the internet which is open to everybody so but there are clear benefits to those things like we we accept the fact that someone can track us through our cell phone wherever we go because we like cell phones cell phones are useful and we can check our email but i don't know what players get out of it i mean it's kind of an abstract thing to say that it will help the team because

i mean it will help the team by like getting rid of the guys who get nervous i guess and some of those guys are going to be players on the team who know they get nervous and they're not going to want the team kind of eavesdropping on on their on their anxiety i don't yeah well you certainly wouldn't sell it as a way of weeding out the wusses i mean you would you'd have to maybe you would maybe you make it like a macho thing like are you you're not nervous so what do you have to worry about i don't know yeah i mean i don't know it's probably would be more experimental at first and yeah i don't i don't know i it it at first and yeah i don't i don't know i it it seems to me that uh the the trend is toward more collection of information and so if you tell me that something some information is likely to be

useful uh to somebody my my inclination is to think that they will find a way to get it before long all right uh on to the next yep all right so this question is from Lillian, I believe, who is in Germany. And he actually prefaces with, this question can't be answered in a podcast. And he's probably right, because I actually want to spin the question off into something else. But in regards to catcher framing, he says, with the thousands of pitches thrown in a season, there must be at least a few pitches that are indistinguishable in movement, velocity, and location.

I'm thinking 92-mile-an-hour, fastball, outside corner. It seems like you see one of those every game. So if it's possible to gather a high number of almost exactly the same pitches on the corner of the strike zone, some will be called balls, some will be called strikes to some degree, depending on the catcher's receiving talents, et cetera, et cetera. So that's basically, I mean, you get where he's going with that, right? I mean, the idea is like, is this a way of analyzing things to really find exact, exact plays in baseball

and then comparing the different responses that players have to them. And I bring this up just because you told me kind of a little bit of the interesting behind the scenes of the Derek Jeter piece that you had at Grantland in which you compared Derek Jeter and Brennan Ryan on kind of what were attempting to be the same plays. And if it's okay, can you sort of talk about what some of the challenges were to that? Because I had a similar idea with Andrelton Simmons, and after talking to you I realized that, in fact, the idea of two exact plays in baseball is probably an impossibility, more or less.

an impossibility, more or less. Well, there was the constraint in that article that I was picking out two particular players. So when you put that into it, that really limits your potential pool of plays. So the first thing I asked Baseball Info Solutions was for a list of the closest, the most similar plays that Jeter and Brendan Ryan had made. And the ones they sent me were, I mean, they were in the same family of plays, but it wasn't like,

and this was just over a two-year period, it wasn't like they were, you know, in the identical zone at the identical speed, looked exactly the the same and they just went about fielding them differently they were you know like one was kind of deeper in the hole than another one or closer to second base and they weren't they were comparable but not not so similar that you could say that the only difference was the way that the fielder approached it um so i ended up just comparing best plays and worst plays which was something something Bill James had done with Jeter and Adam Everett several years ago. And kind of had a similar thing in the thing on catcher framing that I wrote for Grantland because I was looking for identical pitches to Jose Molina and Ryan Domet. And hoping to show that the only difference between getting a call and not getting a call in their case on those pitches was the way that they caught the pitch.

And that was also pretty difficult to find because you want to restrict it to the same pitcher handedness and the same count and the same type of pitch. And you're looking for borderline pitches because every catcher gets the strike right down the middle. So all of these things are lowering the potential pool of pitches that you can pick from. And I ended up with a couple that were kind of close but not exactly the same. But if you wanted to do it and you didn't put any restriction in about what players you were looking for,

you could probably come up with uh some pretty good examples i would think some but then here's the thing and this is where i think it becomes impossible is that so much of framing is about the catcher's expectations and so you what you actually need because you need to have the same target the catcher needs to have the same target that he needs to have the same expectation. The catcher needs to have the same target. He needs to have the same expectation. And it's really hard to know where the catcher's target is, for one thing, because nobody's measuring it. Or basically nobody that you can access is measuring it. And so you would have to look at each one individually, partly because the target is not necessarily really the target.

A lot of times the catcher, I mean, different catchers and different pitchers use more sort of specific targets. Some catchers and some pitchers, you know, there, there essentially is no target. You call for a sign that says a fastball outside, and then the pitcher throws it there and where the catcher's glove starts doesn't actually matter. Um, or I guess from our perspective, what we see doesn't actually matter um or i guess from our perspective what we see doesn't matter it's kind of an illusion and if the cat i mean even if you have the same target if the catcher is catching a pitcher who tends to miss kind of tailing away versus a pitcher who tends to maybe yank the pitch down he's going to be expecting a slightly different outcome. And I found that I sort of had, I mean, in a much simpler way when I was

thinking about how to do the Simmons, I thought, oh, well, this is easy. I'll just, you know, I'll just go through spray charts and find two balls that are in the same place. But, you know, if you're, if you're expecting a ball to be somewhere else, it's really not the same place but you know if you're if you're expecting a ball to be somewhere else it's really not the same thing if the outcome ends up in the same place so yeah it it is an idea that almost completely falls apart when you try to put it in play it's sort of troubling because it's a fun idea and it seems like it would be really useful you just there's really not a there's not a pool of plays that you can really do this with yeah i don't know how useful it is i think it would be fun but i feel like it would be useful if you're trying to convince someone that yeah

it's visually useful yeah really useful for showing somebody if you if you accept the premise that the way that a catcher receives a pitch can affect the call, then you don't necessarily need to show identical pitches. You can show the catcher catching almost any pitch. I mean, catchers will tend to do the same sort of thing, set up in the same sort of way, and receive the ball the same sort of way on most pitches. same sort of way on most pitches. And you can kind of extrapolate from any pitch to say that if this is what he does most of the time, then that would be good or bad on a, on a borderline pitch. Um, so I, I think you can, you can get a lot just by looking at people do the same things, even if, you know, even if it's not the same opportunity exactly. Okay. Uh, all right. This is going to be the last question, which means that we are not going to get to John's question on whether you should shift for the pitcher instead of the hitter, which is

a good question. We're not going to get to, uh, uh, Brian's question on baseball cards, which is a good question. And we're not to get to eric's question about whether baseball would be better if it were run socialistically or as socialism which i actually like uh so the last question is from scott uh who asked to the best of your knowledge has tommy john ever tried to cash in on being tied to tommy john's surgery his mad tommy john's magic elbow elixir, perhaps. I'm not aware of this, nor am I under the impression he's that sort of person, but maybe you guys are aware of something. We have an entire generation of fans who know nothing about Tommy John's career,

aside from the fact that he had this surgery. In his own way, he's one of the most famous players in baseball history. His name might be mentioned more than Babe Ruth's, certainly far more than Christy Mathewson's. This question came in really, really recently, so I didn't do any research on this, but I've never heard of any such thing, other than the fact that Tommy John won like 160 games or something like that after the surgery, which is a sort of way of cashing in on it, but no more than every other pitcher.

But, I mean, I don't know. It's sort of like – I don't know. Do you feel like Tommy John has any ownership over this? Have you ever kind of – do you link – I guess the question, do you link Tommy John and the surgery, or are they just two words that happen to be the same? Yeah, I don't really think of the picture most times that I think of the surgery. I mean, I don't know whether he deserves any of the credit for the surgery. You know, I mean, I guess it,

it took some, some adventurousness to, to undergo the surgery in an experimental technique. But, I mean— It is a brutal, brutal rehab. I mean, I think he deserves a lot of credit. Especially then. I mean— Yeah, you can certainly imagine a lot of pitchers that wouldn't have come back from it, that at the exact same time could have had the exact same surgery

and didn't make it through the rehab. It's a super tough rehab. I don't think people appreciate that. And especially if you're the first guy and you don't even know whether it'll work. There's no track record, so you can't tell yourself, okay, hundreds of people have gone through this and they've come back.

You have no idea whether it will actually work and you could be doing all that work for nothing. Yeah, would you feel weird if Tommy John were out there pimping his how would you how would you pimp the surgery i don't know how you would think the surgery but i mean he hasn't made it he hasn't made a big deal out of it i don't know how he would you're right it's true i mean what would you what would you do how would you profit from this i don't know i i mean it does seem kind of odd that his name has been taken from him uh i don't know if i mean it does seem kind of odd that his name has been taken from him

uh i don't know if he would have any trademark right to it i mean i guess if he tried if he tried to trademark it they would just call it the ucl surgery and then he would get nothing anyway right i mean his name is not his name is not inherently valuable in this so yeah i don't know and there's an element of him just being the right player at the right time. If if that technique had been pioneered earlier, someone else would have done it because pitchers like pitching and, you know, pitchers will do, it's kept his name in the kind of national consciousness, but I don't know that that's helped him. I mean, I don't know. Maybe it has. We can ask him to open his books and let us know.

Maybe he gets more invitations to, you know, card signings or something. Yeah, probably somebody out there who is listening knows whether Tommy John gets more for his autograph than a similar pitcher. Like who is a similar pitcher? Charlie Huff? Is Charlie Huff a similar pitcher? I don't know. What's fascinating is that Tommy John is a borderline Hall of Famer who I believe has more wins than anybody who's not in the Hall of Fame. I might be slightly off, but I think he does. Yeah, that's right.

And yet didn't make the Hall, didn't really get all that close. You would think that this surgery would have bumped him. I mean, he was on the ballot as late as four years ago. So, I mean, the name had plenty of time to get kind of yes famous i mean you you're it's sort of surprising that he didn't get a bigger bump than than he did for having the name that is so famous i mean you always hear like kind of the the hackish hackneyed uh argument against certain players oh it's the hall of fame you know it's a you got to be famous right and the kevin goldstein the kevin goldstein argument yeah yeah uh so you do what you do sort of wonder why what i'm a little surprised he didn't get a little bump that's all yeah he's a

he's a borderline guy as it is and you'd think that maybe someone would throw a vote his way just for kind of historical significance and putting a person who did something, did some sort of milestone in a museum about baseball. But so maybe that's maybe that's a sign then that he hasn't benefited from it. What did I'm trying to. So he peaked his last year on the ballot. I'm trying to, so he peaked, uh, his last year on the ballot, 31.7. So he wasn't even, he wasn't even halfway there in his last year. Um, so I don't know, maybe, maybe it's been a financial gain of some sort, but, and, and we'll remember who he is. It'll be a legacy thing. Uh, people will, we'll talk about him because of that.

So he can, he can can he can be happy knowing that he'll be remembered after he's gone sure all right that was fun let's do it again in a week we will