Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 279: You Have Questions, and We Have Answers to Some of Them

Episode Date: September 4, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about PED placebos, deceptively bad seasons, advanced stats in fantasy baseball, and more.

I got miles and miles of the email style. Miles and miles of the email style. Good morning and welcome to episode 279 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. It's a Wednesday email show. Ben, how are you doing? Very well. Great. How's the family? I don't know. I should check in on them. All right. Who's reading today? I've got everything in a document, so I'll do it. All right. Good. Go for it. All right. I guess we can start with the two that we both did at least minimal amounts of research for. The first one comes from Patrick, who says,

In August, Pete Cosma had seven walks and only four total bases over 55 plate appearances. How rare is such a feat, having more walks than total bases in a month or a half or a season? This has to be somewhat common in truly awful players, if not also your three true outcomes players. Cosma only has two outcomes, it appears. So these are my favorite kinds of lines. I sort of think of them as the classic Ricky Henderson line, late career Ricky Henderson, where he was hitting like 210, 370, 310, you know? Like somehow was getting all these walks walks even though basically the only way you could hurt you is by drawing a walk and then stealing second and stealing third um so i just looked at

by season i i didn't look at by month or by half because it turns out there's you know enough to get a decent response uh if you just look at the season so i looked since 1980 for players um i started at half as many walks as total bases, and there were 403 of those. So then I went to 0.6 walks per total bases. That gets it down to 168. And at this point, you've got Bonds at the top with three seasons. You've got Ricky Henderson seven times. And then you've got kind of guys who are terrible, like Walt Weiss and Darnell Coles. And you've got guys like Derek Barton, who you think of as like low slug walk guys. So anyway, then you have at.7, there's 60 players.

At.8, you're now down to nothing but basically part-time players. The most home runs, any of the 35 players who had.8 walks per total base, the most home runs anyone had was three. That was Justin Maxwell, who is both the most recent player to do this as well as the home run leader for people who've done this. So then you get to 0.9 and you're at 19, and only one player has more than 200 plate appearances, and it's still on the list. And then when you get to more walks than total bases since 1980 there are only nine 1.2 there are now two gorman thomas in 1984 and john jaha in 2000 john jaha is the only player

by the way since 2000 to have more walks than total bases and so that's 1.2. Jaha, though, just completely blows everybody else out of the water. In 2000, he had 1.6 total bases per – sorry, walks per total bases. He had 33 walks, 21 total bases in like 150 plate appearances. And he had – this is his line. This is maybe my favorite line I think I've ever seen in this genre. He had 175, 398, 216. So there were 442 hitters that year with 100 plate appearances or more, and Jaha ranked, I think, 40th in on-base percentage and last in slugging.

So 442nd in slugging. Wow. That's a crazy line. It's a beautiful line. So that's the answer to that. The answer to that is nine in 33 years have had more walks than total bases. All right. Good answer. We got another factual question from Dustin who said,

Hey, guys, was wondering if you knew the origin of the around the diamond move that the infielders perform after a strikeout. If you don't know where it came from, perhaps you could theorize on possible reasons, legitimate and hopefully also completely ridiculous that this came about. So I looked this up in my trusty Dixon baseball dictionary and I looked up around the horn, which is kind of what it's typically called. And it's a very old one. And there's no specific origin. But according to this dictionary, it dates back to the late 19th century, not even that late in the 19th century.

1877, the Chicago White Stockings were on tour and may have been the first team to do this. 1977, the Chicago White Stockings were on tour and may have been the first team to do this. So I assume it was kind of a barnstorming thing, which will maybe relate to a question that we are going to talk about later in the show. Just as a way to generate interest. It's visually interesting to see players throw the ball around the horn and maybe they did it in a kind of flashy way. But do you know where the saying comes from, where that phrase comes from? It's very obvious when I read it, but never occurred to me. No, Ben.

Don't tell me. Okay. The etymology. The term is an old nautical one referring to the long yeah to the long voyage between the atlantic ocean i know i know that much yeah i just don't know why it went around why did it go to baseball well it makes sense right it's it's going the long way around to get to a to get to a destination that's closer to you right it's like it's it's uh going from the atl the Pacific without the Panama Canal. So you have to go around the tip of South America at Cape Horn. So it's like going all the way around the diamond to get the ball back to the pitcher,

which you could do more easily just throwing it to him directly. At the risk of embarrassing myself, with the reward of potentially embarrassing you, isn't Cape Horn is... I thought Cape Horn is... No, you're right. Yeah, okay. with the reward of potentially embarrassing you. Cape Horn is, I thought Cape Horn is, no, you're right. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I don't know. Fair enough. You think I get my Cape of Good Hope and my Cape of Corn confused?

Please. Yeah. All right. I'm the one who's embarrassed. I was reading from the book, so I could have just blamed it on Dixon if that was wrong. Okay. Heath asks, imagine that a Biogenesis-style clinic were to be run by a con man who claimed to be injecting players with state-of-the-art undetectable PEDs, but was actually administering a harmless placebo.

Then imagine that the records of this clinic were to be leaked to MLB. Would any action be taken against the players implicated? If you believe that no action would be taken in such a case, and given the wealth of evidence on the placebo effect, even if there is very little on PEDs and performance in baseball, would an MLB team looking for an edge ever consider setting up or causing to be set up through a third party such a fake clinic in order to make its players believe that they were being illegally enhanced and that is from heath in london all right so let's just first stipulate that there is a good question here and then there is a silly question here we will answer both uh but the first half of it um is basically if you get caught doing

something you think is is peds and it's not, then are you in trouble? And I actually had this question for Jason Wojcicki when he was writing his great piece on the arbitration process, because there was a point in his piece where he sort of stipulates that, you know, presuming that Biogenesis was actually selling drugs and was not just conning them and selling soda water or something. And so I asked Jason again tonight to sort of reiterate what he told me then, and he says, this is classic criminal law hypothesis. Basic gist is that a person thinks he's smuggling drugs into the country

and takes a bunch of steps to hide what he's doing and then gets caught. Oh no, but they're not drugs. And the core answer is that a crime, a violation in this case, requires a bad act. And this is Latin, I guess, mens rea. Typically we deal with situations where the bad act is undisputed and the state of mind is in question. Did he intend to do the bad thing? Was it negligent? Was it reckless? But the bad thing is rarely actually in question. But where you intend to do a bad thing but don't actually accomplish it, there's no crime except for where it's expressly a crime, attempted murder, for instance. So there the law has made the attempt in itself a bad act,

because the act beneath the attempt is so bad it needs extra deterrence. There isn't a crime of attempted drug smuggling, though, and the CBA doesn't contain a prohibition on trying to do peds so uh so that answers that and that's a fascinating uh answer and i guess it makes sense because the test i mean theoretically the first line of defense in this is drug testing and a fake drug wouldn't show up in your drug testing i it wouldn't shock me if if bud tried to suspend a player anyway for attempting to to cheat uh and then you know rolled the dice that he could get away with it. But as the rules are, as the rules stand, there's no rule against it. Now, as to the second half, I would think that if we're, well, I mean, goodness gracious. If a team is really plotting this severely to take advantage of the PED rules,

you would think that they would start by spiking Josh Hamilton's post-game meal with testosterone and getting him caught, or just selling him real drugs, arranging to sell him real drugs. There are all sorts of ways that you could maybe imagine a team doing something crazy and weird, but that you would never actually think a real team would ever do it. In this case, though, my understanding, what I've read recently, is that the placebo effect strangely wears off. In fact, as odd as the placebo effect itself is, what's even stranger is that it seems to wear off rather quickly in patients so i don't think it would actually work anyway

well how does this uh relate to fightin necklaces this is uh they're they're kind of peds that are placebo they're not they're not banned although you could ask why they're not banned since presumably they they improve your balance and your circulation and your whatever they do because they don't give you cancer or whatever people think steroids give you yeah i guess isn't that nobody's worried about the children yeah i guess that's true i would yeah i'm worried about the the children's's reasoning skills and belief in logic if they believe in necklaces that help you get better at things. But no one's worried about that. Shall we move on? Yeah, sure. Okay. Dan Brooks, regular listener, wants to know.

Oh, I guess I need to read this because you didn't see this one. I have what you sent me. He said. listener wants to know i i guess i need to read this because you didn't see this one uh i have what you sent it to you too i have what you sent me he said i didn't yeah i didn't say there's okay build up okay all right so dan brooks says uh in regards to weird ballpark features they basically just can't injure anyone otherwise they're fair game i mean fenway's left field makes the gameplay totally different rocket line drives that might be homers turn into singles, pop-outs turn into doubles. Oakland's foul ground, Yankee Stadium's right field.

So the question is, what would be the weirdest thing you could build into a ballpark that would still be considered baseball? Like, could the outfield slope down? Could you have a 550-foot center field? I was just curious where you think they would draw the line. So you can answer that. You can also, since I didn't really prepare you for that, you could also just tell me what the kind of weirdest thing

that you could imagine clearing the bar that would actually appeal to you in any way or that might appeal to a team in any way it would be. Yeah, well, if you think of all the things that have actually been done over the years, I mean, if those things hadn't been done and you proposed them to me, I would probably say that those things would make it seem not like baseball. You know, like having a giant wall or having really, really shallow fences or having a ballpark that's a mile high

or having moving fences, which Bill Beck tried once. I mean, having a hill in center field is not only is it not only is it beyond the bounds of what you would normally say, but it's also completely pointless. So once you accept a hill in the middle of center field and a flagpole, there's a flagpole on the hill, right? Yeah. And right. And Yankee Stadium used to have monuments out there. So all kinds of crazy things have actually been done. So what I came up with for something that would not be too crazy to happen and would maybe help a team, I think, and I don't know whether this is against the rules or not, but if you got rid of the base paths, can you do that?

Do you know? Just have grass. Like the dirt itself? Yeah, just have grass there. I don't know why you wouldn't be able to. I mean, it probably says somewhere, but no, I could see getting rid of the dirt. Yeah, so. What is the dirt for? The dirt's dumb. I guess it's aesthetically, we're used to it, so there'd be some sort of revolt probably, but. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I guess it's aesthetically we're used to it so there'd be some sort of revolt probably but yeah I mean I don't know I guess it's to show you where the baselines are maybe it's better traction which is the point of getting rid of it if you have a slow team that doesn't steal bases or something then take away that advantage from the other team and just have grass there and and I was talking to a friend who who on some all-grass fields as an amateur

and said that it was really weird and that it takes some time to adjust to. There's no dirt in a lot of those artificial turf fields in the 80s. There was no dirt. It was just all carpeted. There'd be dirt around the bases only. Another thing that you could do that I am pretty sure Bill Vec did and wrote about it is have really dramatic differences in the height of the grass on one side of the infield. Like if you have a guy who doesn't have a lot of range on one side of the infield, then you let the grass grow really high in that lane so that this ball

slows down and he can get to it and then you can have short grass on the other side of the infield so that's something that that i could see happening or uh maybe having having different surfaces for outfield fences like what if you just had a rubber fence in the outfield and the ball just bounced like crazy off of that thing i feel like that wouldn't be that wouldn't be so outlandish that it that it would be immediately you know uh it wouldn't it wouldn't inspire a revolt you could do that and you'd have people who weren't used to playing the bounces off those fences yeah all of first off um i think dan's idea of having a sloped outfield, if you imagine an

outfield that's sloped toward the foul lines and so the ball actually was sort of falling away from the fielders, is more creative than anything I managed to come up with. I like that. I wish I'd come up with that. But all of my ideas have to do with the outfield walls. That'd be kind of dangerous, depending on the slope. Depends on the slope, yeah. But no more than a hill and a flagpole right right uh and a pitcher's i mean you know you have a mound a pitcher's mound in in basically you know more or less the field of play

so uh that's pretty dangerous too and we accept that uh the bullpen you know i'm talking about the bullpen um in some parks um so mine all have to do with uh the wall and there's basically four ideas that i that i could imagine doing uh you know with the outfield wall uh one is to have uh to basically have a team decided you know what we're just not going to be a home run team we think home runs are dumb we think and you know i i don't particularly i find home runs to be one of the worst parts of the game they take away away all the suspense of the play. I don't like them. I don't like home run highlights. I don't like home runs.

So if you decided to have 80-foot walls the entire way around, like basically you're playing in a Thunderdome or something, and it's like just – I don't know what a Thunderdome – I have no idea what a Thunderdome is. Yeah, I'm going to look it up. That's a Mad Max movie. Are there tall walls and the ball can't escape? Yeah, I think so.

I'm thinking of like arena. I think the Thunderdome looks like a big jungle gym. Yeah, I think I was thinking of arena football maybe. Anyway, so you have that and basically everything's extra bases. Nothing's ever a home run and you could build it seems like you might be able to build your team to some degree around that and you know sort of reclaim the game from home runs another is everybody likes triples everybody likes home runs so uh i think we've mentioned this once before but uh basically turn the uh take away the outfield walls and uh create kind of like uh like stands that are elevated and there are like kind

of like a pier, almost like a pier. And the ball would roll forever if it got past the outfielder and the outfielder would have to chase the ball through the pillars and track it down and the play stays live until the ball is retrieved. You need to have a lot of space, more space than most urban areas have, but that seems interesting to me. to have a lot of space, more space than most urban areas have, but that seems interesting to me.

One is having basically no wall, having a line where it becomes a home run, but almost like courtside in an NBA game where the fans sit at ground level. So basically there is no – any ball that rolled out there would just roll right into the crowd and be an automatic double. You can imagine that. You can have a grassy knoll. It can just be a grassy knoll and once it reaches the knoll, it's out of play. Anyway, the last one, the one I actually like a little bit is you have two columns of seats that go out into the field of play, maybe 50 feet and it's a it's only enough for maybe like four people per row and it's in left center and right center and it divides the

outfield so like the left center fielder in the right and the center fielder couldn't the left fielder in the center fielder couldn't even actually see each other like they would have this wall in between them and the fans would get to sit right in the middle of play those are premium seats charge those would be incredible can you imagine how fun that would get to sit right in the middle of play. Those are premium seats. You could charge a ton for those. Those would be incredible. Can you imagine how fun that would be to sit out there? You could charge a ton for them, and if it lands there, you could have like a 320-foot home run,

but it would be such a fluky thing that it would land in the crowd there. So that's the one I'm going with. I'm going with fingers of seats that actually go into the field of play. Another thing, if you think about it from a home field advantage perspective, and this is not a change to the field of play, but what if you got rid of dugouts? We already have ballparks without bullpens where people warm up on foul lines. So what if you got rid of dugouts?

You just had people sitting on a bench. Obviously, you would have the visiting players getting taunted the whole time they wouldn't feel like they had a safe place to go back and hide they'd feel exposed the whole time maybe that would maybe that would kind of accentuate the home field advantage so that's i don't know that yeah i don't know that it would be that much more enjoyable for the home team. No, I don't think the home team would like it. They wouldn't be taunted, but they would be bugged a lot. Yes.

They might be bugged just as much. Yes. Okay. All right, this one comes from Lee. Are you guys surprised that advanced statistics haven't really made their way into fantasy baseball yet? The huge majority of fantasy leagues still use the standard categories including wins, RBI, runs scored, and batting average. In a game like fantasy baseball where the entire concept is drafting

and maintaining a team with the best players is determined by statistics, why hasn't there been more of a movement towards using stats that are at least slightly more accurate, such as a simple change like using OPS plus instead of batting average? such as a simple change like using OPS plus instead of batting average? I've been in leagues that were stat-heady and the categories were all stat-head categories. And the problem is it's not that much fun. It definitely is more kind of realistic in the way that you evaluate players.

It reflects the way you evaluate players more realistically. players it reflects the way you evaluate players more realistically but the thing about advanced stats is that there's not quite the same level of like okay basically what it would come down to if you really want to take it all the way is you just have war right you'd have war your league would be war and that's what there are war leagues right there's every kind of league there are but you yeah yeah there there i'm sure there are there should be and it's probably not that bad but you can't actually watch a war be created you can't root for a war when you're watching um you know like one of the great things about fantasy baseball is that like let's say you have manny machado uh on your team it's not just that you're watching when Manny Machado

comes up to see if he gets a home run or whatever, but four batters before Manny Machado, you start thinking about, okay, well, I want to have runners on base. Is it like, oh, there's two outs? What's the best time for this inning to end so that he's going to have a chance to drive in runs and have a chance to score and have a chance to steal bases. And when you do a war league or really anything like a, if you did a true average league or whatever, you wouldn't really, like you're getting it more realistic, but you're taking away all of these details that make the game,

the fantasy game fun. It's like, I don't know, it's like taking a board game and saying, well, if all we're doing is rolling dice to see how lucky we get, why don't we just play war? And you simplify and you take all the story out of Monopoly or out of this, all the story out of, um, out of, uh, you know, the game of life or Candyland or whatever. And you just turn it into flipping core cards and seeing who flipped the higher card. And it's kind of boring. It's, it's not that much fun you you need to be able to root for all the stupid things even though they're stupid

even though you know they're stupid you need the stupid things to make it a rich experience and to keep from getting bored so i think that's probably why it hasn't happened yeah i was always pushing when i played fantasy i was always pushing for slightly more sabermetric stats. Like I would want an OBP league or I would want K per nine or whatever. But yeah, there's probably a level at which it becomes a little too abstract or too context neutral, I guess, to enjoy it quite as much. It is kind of counterintuitive that you have people using advanced statistics to project traditional statistics now. I mean, people devote a ton of time to research and projecting stats that we don't look at for actually evaluating performance because of fantasy.

And someone asked me in my chat at BP last week whether I blamed fantasy for the fact that advanced stats haven't been embraced even more quickly than they have. And I don't really. I think, if anything, fantasy has been a big driver of advanced statistics. It's been a kind of a gateway for a lot of people to that. So I don't know. I guess I'm, I'm slightly surprised that, that a sabermetric sort of league is not more prominent, but, but not particularly. Yeah. In response to the question you had in your chat, it feels to me like nothing demonstrates

the arbitrariness of a lot of traditional stats like playing fantasy. I mean, you really do get a sense of how little wins capture, uh, you know, performance or how much RBIs are context dependent. And so my guess is that a lot of people have learned without having to be beat over the head with it or lectured or indoctrinated in any way. They have learned quite naturally what the least telling stats are simply by playing fantasy. So my guess is that it's helped.

Mm-hmm. All right. This one, let's see. Let's do, I guess, Rick in Seattle wants to know, will Mike Trout wear an Angels hat on his Hall of Fame plaque? It seems pretty likely he will. I mean, they're not going to trade him in his first six years. And even if you think that

he leaves after that he's going to be at you know 40 wins you think there's zero chance that they trade him if it becomes clear that that there's not going to be any chance for an extension and you're getting to within a year or two of his free agency still don't see that no i mean there's greater than zero but probably less than one. I mean, they would have to be, they would have to have a complete shift in the way that they look at themselves as an organization. And I think as long as they're owned by Arti Moreno and as long as they're located in LA or near LA, wanting to be LA, I don't think that's going to happen um so no i don't i could see him trading him i may like if it were if they were having this year in four years i could see him trading

him at the deadline but they're gonna they're gonna go into every year that they have him thinking that they're a contender uh so no i don't i don't it's almost impossible for me to imagine them trading him all right so in that case know he's going to get at least six seasons with them. Yeah, and it's sort of on... At this pace, that's half a Hall of Fame career already, at least, if probably more. And it's sort of, even if he goes somewhere else right after that,

even if he doesn't sign any extension at all with the Angels, it's not necessarily certain that he's going to play anywhere else for more than six years. And it's certainly not necessarily given or even likely that he'll produce 40 wins for any team, any one team, unless he goes to just one more team for the rest of his career. But on the other hand, it will be, what, 27 when he hits free agency? So he could conceivably be in a peak that we can't even imagine at that point. It's not inconceivable that he will win four MVP awards in a row. It's not likely, but it's not inconceivable he'll win four MVP awards in a row for whichever team signs him.

I mean, certainly he's better than Bonds at this age, but Bonds through his Pirates years was already Hall of Fame level. I mean, I think he had something like 35 wins produced for the Pirates. So he was super-duper-duper elite. I think two MVPs and a second-place finish in three years in a row. And it's inconceivable that he would go in as a pirate so I would guess that there's

maybe what 15% chance that he doesn't go in as an angel? Maybe higher than that? Yeah I'd go a little higher with that I don't know it might be different if he played for some small market team that had little chance of resigning him but the angels have as good a chance as anyone financially.

I guess the only thing you could say is that maybe it's not likely that he'll have a whole lot of postseason experience in his pre-free agency years for the Angels. I don't know, if you look at how they're not very successful right now and they've got a weak farm system and it's conceivable although it's almost unimaginable to think that you could have prime mike trout and not not make the playoffs at some point uh you you could come up with a scenario where they don't before he hits free agency and maybe he leaves because of that because he wants to go win a world series somewhere and he hasn't had that experience there and and then he goes and becomes a postseason hero

somewhere else and no one thinks of him as an angel anymore but but yeah i would i guess i would still take the angels over the field yeah he's never we're never gonna love him any more than we do now either so for some sort of like i don't know when you think about the people who are going to be voting in 22 years or so uh maybe more than that maybe 26 years they're they're us it's you and me and that you know it's mainly going to be writers who are in like their 30s right now or so and are going to have very, very nostalgic memories about the summer of 2012 when they got in way too many arguments about an MVP award. They're going to have all sorts of warm, fuzzy feelings about him in an angel's hat and remembering what he did. Narrative-wise, I think it's going to carry it too.

Okay. Patrick says, and this is the same Patrick who asked the Cosmo question So two in one episode Good work Yeah, is there any Good work, Patrick Is there any metric intended to give hitters credit for the distance they hit a ball? I find it frustrating that players hitting a ball 390 feet to dead center

Only to have it caught on the warning track are rewarded in no way statistically Relative to the player that hits it 10 feet further and watches it crest the wall uh etc etc uh so is there is there some of it is accounted for in ground ball fly ball rates but is anyone making a more concerted effort to reward players proportionally to the distance which they hit a ball or penalize pitchers um didn't somebody didn't somebody quiz us once on batted ball distance? Yes. I don't think we ever answered it. Yeah, you answered it via email and were not correct.

But yeah, people have looked at this because the data, I guess, from MLBAM, the play-by-play data includes batted ball distance, or it includes a point where the ball was fielded, and so you can come up with a batted ball distance from that. And if you go to baseballheatmaps.com, you can see a leaderboard of the people with the highest fly ball distances. They also have, like like ground ball leaderboards, but that's kind of weird because you don't really know where those balls were fielded because it's marked as the place where the

fielder first touched the ball. And so it could have just kind of rolled for a while before someone touched it. So if you look at fly balls only, the guys, I mean, the top five on that leaderboard are Carlos Gonzalez, Miguel Cabrera, Paul Goldschmidt, Pedro Alvarez, Adam Dunn. Interestingly, Juan Francisco is sixth in front of Chris Davis. metric tied to that, I guess. But I think it has been shown to have some kind of predictive power. If a guy increases his fly ball distance, that will show up in his other stats. And of course, teams are looking at more sophisticated stuff based on hit effects and looking at the hit angle and the speed off the bat and not even factoring in whether it was fielded or not just looking at you know how balls do that were hit on on that

angle at that speed typically and maybe a guy has had bad luck and has had some of those fielded but kind of guys have hit effects based run values that you can look at independent of the actual outcome. Yeah. I think we talked about at one point how we thought that there would be, uh, outcome independent stats for hitters in not too long. If we ever got any, we're near that kind of access to hit effects and that there are probably teams already that are basically treating every at bat as a percentage of a

hit based on the likelihood of, of the hit landing fairly at the speed and trajectory and direction that it's gone. And it seems to me that that would be very controversial if you rolled that out to a mainstream audience. I know that even, well, like Kevin Goldstein, I think, has always been kind of suspicious of using FIP in Cy Young and MVP kind of arguments because he thinks there's a certain point where you just have to quit imagining what could have happened and look at what did happen. And so I think if you brought out the hitting equivalent to FIP using these advanced metrics, I think there would be a lot of pushback for a number of years. But I

certainly would be very, very interested in it and I think it would take about 20 minutes before a lot of us started using it for our fantasy teams. To predict RBI. To predict you, exactly. Alright, last question. This comes from

Mark. He says, I was just looking at Ken Griffey Jr.'s fangraphs page and noticed that toward the end of his career, he had 230 plus home run seasons with negative war 2005 and 2007. It looks like this is largely because his defense at that point was remarkably bad based on those fangraphs numbers. And those years were, I think, still relatively offensive environments in the grand scheme of things I doubt anyone else has a 30 home run season with negative war but my question to you is what you think is the most seemingly awesome season that had a dreadfully low war he mentions Juan Gonzalez he mentions Joe Carter and he wants to know if we

have any others yeah there's a few there's a few dozen 25-homer negative war seasons. I didn't look at 30, but there's one that stands out as the all-time greatest. I don't know if you have an answer, and I wonder if it's the same as mine. It probably is. Well, we have discussed the Dante Bichette season, right? The 1996 Bichette season where he hit 31 homers and had an impressive impressive looking slash line and had negative war and warp well i have a different bichette season oh okay which one was yours

in 99 uh he hit 34 homers drove in 133 and had negative 2.3 war which is the all-time record for negative war by baseball references model for 25 or more home runs by a fairly good margin and the thing that's interesting about that one is that the rockies actually immediately well i guess you could say immediately cashed it in although they they kept bichette doing basically the exact same thing for you know eight years before that uh but they traded him after that and it's it was that was kind of like the big test of Coors Field when Bichette left and everybody wanted to see what he was going to do. Lo and behold, he was a lot worse, but not actually really much worse.

His numbers seemed like they dropped a great deal. I remember at the time thinking, ah, see, he's been exposed because he hit 11 fewer home runs and he had 43 fewer RBIs. But in fact, he had a higher OPS plus. So in Cincinnati and Boston the next year. So there are, I just searched quickly on baseball reference

just because it's easy to search. And there are a bunch, there are a bunch of 30 home run seasons and 35 home run seasons, or at least a few. And all of the low ones are kind of what you'd expect. They're defensively limited players who had low averages and low on-base percentages and just kind of hit a lot of solo home runs.

So, like, the number one worst 35 home run season, according to baseball references, Dave Kingman's 1986, when he hit 35 home runs and he hit 210 with a 255 on base percentage and slugged 431. And then there was Tony Armas in 1983, 36 home runs with a 218, 254, 453 slash line. So there are a bunch like those. Like there are even some, there aren't any negative war 40 home run seasons, but there are below average 40 home run seasons like Adam Dunn's 2012.

He hit 41 home runs and hit 204 with a 333 OBP and of course no defensive value. So that's kind of the profile, I guess, of, you know, it's a guy in a good home run park who doesn't contribute anything on defense, Doesn't make contact. Doesn't get on base a whole lot. Just it's a whole lot of home runs. Dunn does get on base a whole lot. Yeah. I mean,

except when he hits 200, he gets on base a lot for a 200 hitter, but that's true. Yeah. So in the last, uh, since the Reds traded Adam Dunn, he has,

uh, he's averaged 32 homers a year and has been worth cumulatively 0.1 war. Yeah. So that's the profile. White Sox, good home run park, and and done does nothing but hit home runs and walk. All right. So that's it for this show. Send us emails for next week at podcast at baseball prospectus.com. Please.

Ah, okay. That's, that's twice as good. Um, and, uh, rate and review us on iTunes.

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