Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 283: An Upper-Minors Inefficiency/The Slippery Definition of Performance Enhancement

Episode Date: September 10, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about whether teams should step up advance scouting in the upper minors, then discuss the difference (or lack thereof) between the PEDs MLB bans and the procedures it allows.

Good morning and welcome to episode 283 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller, doing another morning recording today. How are you? Good, how are you? Okay. Oh, what was it? Oh yeah, Juan Uribe. Yeah, he hit a lot of homers.

You're not planning on talking about Juan Uribe, are you? No. When I went to bed, he had three and three at bats, so did he end up with three? Yes. Okay, so I just wanted to mention Uribe. How could you sleep not knowing whether he got a fourth that's not worth staying up for well i thought about

staying up for it but i thought there were going to be two at bats i couldn't stay up for two i i could have stayed up for the next one and if i had somehow made it to the next one i would have been able to stay up till the fifth one. But the thought of two was too overwhelming. It's weird how that works. Anyway, so Uribe was terrible for the first two years that he was on the Dodgers. He was below replacement level. And this year he's been pretty good. He's a better than league average hitter.

Even before yesterday he was. And he's shown very good defense at third. And he's something like a three-win player so far, or maybe a little bit better. And it just, it occurs to me like sort of how it is that if Uribe had had a great, you know, this really good year, his first year, and then had two bad years, I feel like Ned Coletti would have gotten credit for the signing. It would have been like, oh yeah, he got a good performance out of Uribe, and then of course these things are always harder to predict down the road,

and it didn't turn out, but most free agent signings don't turn out at the end. Instead, though, it's the opposite, which is like he was terrible, terrible, and then he's good, and I feel like Ned basically gets no credit in people's minds for Uribe. Like, Uribe will always go down as a terrible signing. And in a way, you can sort of understand that because it's not like Ned, like, looked at Uribe and said, oh, yeah, we can scout this guy and we know that in three years he's going to be good. Not two and not one, but in years he's going to be good not two and not one but in three he's going to be good i mean it's totally like just complete chance when the guy is going to be good

and when he's going to be bad and that timing sort of makes a big difference difference in how we probably assess some of these moves he was like roughly a three win player the two years before he signed with them uh yeah again depending on, depending on what metric you're looking at. I've seen people, I mean, people have certainly discussed how the deal looks a lot less bad now. I don't know whether they're giving Coletti credit retroactively or just sort of saying that he's been bailed out by a fluky year that no one could have seen coming,

whereas really we probably couldn't have seen the last couple of years coming either. So, I don't know. Yeah. Can't predict what, can't predict baseball or want to rebate. Yeah, this season is much more predictable than the previous two. I mean, based on what he had done recently at the point that they signed him. So, yeah, in fact, I mean, it feels like Ned was more of a victim of the surprise

than a beneficiary of the surprise. Anyway, it turns out to be like, you know, sort of, it's not going to be a good signing. He's going to end up, you know, if you count the replacement level against him, it's going to end up costing, you know, $10 million a win or so end up you know if you count the replacement level against him it's going to end up costing you know 10 million a win or so if you don't count the below replacement level against him which i don't know why you would that seems too generous never mind anyway juan aribe how about baseball about that all right what's what's the topic real topic uh sort of josh hamilton a little bit okay mine is uh an

inefficiency i guess it's an inefficiency episode i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go into any greater detail until i start talking about okay fine uh all right geez well mine's a little mine's a little hard to mine's a little complicated and hard to talk about. Okay. Is yours? No, I don't think so. So you go. Okay, so we've talked before about how teams should spend their money nowadays,

now that there are caps on the amount that you can spend on the international market. One in rebate. Yeah, right. Or, you know, in the amateur market, there are fewer ways to pour a lot of money into an area other than free agency. And even free agency is not so appealing now because there are fewer free agents available.

So we've talked about where the smart teams or the wealthy teams can try to put their money to gain an edge on their competitors. And one thing that we've talked about and other people have talked about and Russell Carlton has written about is the minor leagues and how you could spend more money on nutrition and making sure that every minor league affiliate has the same spread that a major league team has. And maybe that's worth a win over a year or two when you make a player, you know, better nourished and stronger and healthier, and he develops better and becomes a better player for you. So that's one possible thing.

I was thinking of something similar that also involves spending in the minor leagues. And this kind of occurred to me when I was reading Buster Olney's blog entry this morning, which is on the aura of Billy Hamilton. It's basically about how Hamilton's speed affects the game and makes fielders rush their throws. and it's such a weapon and everyone's scared of it and wants it for themselves. And one quote he had from Hamilton, he talks about how Hamilton goes into the alley between the dugout and the clubhouse at some point in the middle of the game when he starts to think that maybe he'll be put in. And they have a track there where he can practice running. And they also have a book that lists the delivery times of the opposing pitchers, which is something that I

think all big league teams have available. And so Hamilton says that's not something we had in the minor leagues with a smile. So this makes me wonder why you wouldn't have something like that in the minor leagues. And it also then reminded me of an article I read a couple of days ago by Evan Drellich, who is a Red Sox beat writer for MassLive.com and the Springfield Republican. Red Sox beat writer for MassLive.com and the Springfield Republican. And he wrote about how there's really no advanced scouting in the upper levels of the minors and that reading a scouting report is a big adjustment for a player who gets promoted. That all the data that's made available to major league players is not something that guys even in AAA are familiar with. league players is not something that that guys even in triple a are familiar with um and so he kind of he kind of says that it could be an advantage to a team to institute that stuff in the upper minors just because the players will then be prepared for it when they get to the majors

and it won't be such an adjustment and they'll be used to using that data and applying it somehow, which makes sense. And he quotes the Red Sox pitching coach, Juan Nieves, who says he's a proponent of increasing the amount of information available in the minors, who says, quote, I've always believed that even in AA, AAA, they should be doing a lot of scouting reports on guys just for the fact of teaching guys when they come here so it doesn't become a different language to them. AA and AAA, I think, is very important. So that's one advantage in that guys will be more prepared to make use of that data when they get to the majors. But I feel like the bigger advantage is just making your players perform better when they're in the upper minors,

just making your players perform better when they're in the upper minors, which in turn makes them more attractive as trade targets if you want to use them that way or however you want to use them. They're just more valuable assets if they have access to scouting data that other teams don't and their opponents don't. Say Billy Hamilton, say the Reds AAA affiliate, you know, provided this information to Hamilton and he knew the times of all the opposing pitchers, maybe his efficiency rate in stealing would be higher. largely based on his speed, that seems like a pretty valuable thing. If you could make Billy Hamilton a better base dealer in AAA, then he's more attractive to other teams that might want to trade for him.

So this seems like an area where teams could get better. They could not only ease the transition of their minor leaguers to the major leagues, but increase the value of their minor leaguers before they get to the major leagues and maybe inflate their value to some extent and trade them away because they have an information advantage over all their opponents. I mean, all the words you say make sense, and I don't have a reason to dispute what you're saying it doesn't it doesn't ring quite true to me like it doesn't feel right and i don't know why i like i like i said it all makes sense but this whole time i have this thought like nah i don't know i don't know why i have that thought i mean it could be because um uh well i don't know i I have that thought. I mean, it could be because, well, I don't know.

I mean, there are, I don't know, I'm not sure how much the advanced scouting reports help players. I mean, I think they help some. So certainly, like, if they help some, then that would be a benefit to those guys. to those guys. It feels to me like the advanced scouting reports are fairly simple. They're pretty simple things usually. They're not a ton of information. The goal is to make them not a lot of information. You're basically just telling the briefest story about the opponent um it's not it's not like a real sort of advanced level of information and so that makes me a skeptical that players are having a hard time adjusting at the big league level again i mean you're quoting people who who say it is and so like i don't have a reason to argue with those people but i mean it just

doesn't feel like it's that hard an adjustment uh to the advanced scouting that major leaguers are exposed to and it also doesn't necessarily feel like you're going to have that big of an advantage in the minors you might get some little bit of statistical advantage but then you you water that down with the fact that players that opposing teams aren't necessarily scouting your players' stat lines predominantly. They're scouting their abilities and that maybe those things show up whether or not their performance is completely optimized. So I don't know. I mean I feel very ungenerous right now because it does feel like you've made a compelling case.

I'm just not emotionally sold something like hamilton uh i mean that would kind of play into him getting better jumps or picking better times to go and seeming like he had better base running instincts even if he didn't so that seems like something that a scout might pick up on even if he didn't. So that seems like something that a scout might pick up on, even if he's not looking at Hamilton's stolen base success rate, he would, you know, see Hamilton picking a good time to go or getting a good jump or something because, you know, theoretically he's looking at this information that no one else has access to. So I feel like either way, that would be a positive reflection. I don't know i mean

i don't want to pretend that it's it's gonna like turn some triple a filler guy into a top prospect or anything it's it's it's not that big in inefficiency but it's it could be something uh could you could you maybe argue also that that the benefit is actually forcing players to do this themselves? In fact, that they're learning the game? The point of the minor leagues in a lot of ways is to have them learn the game at progressively faster speeds and to learn it progressively more complex levels. If they're having to do the mental calculations themselves, it's like the you know, it's the teacher man to fish, right, instead of giving him a fish.

You know, if Hamilton's got to study the pitchers a little bit more because the advanced scouting isn't there and he's never seen the guy, or if they have to study the pitchers a little bit more, or if they just have to be kind of more adaptable, if they don't have necessarily a rigid game plan going in against a pitcher, and they're having to adapt and to, you know, sort of deal with surprise. It feels like that might make them worse players that day, but it might make them better players long term. Yeah, that's possible. Although, I guess in the in the give a man a fish scenario, if you do continue to give the man the fish forever, he will be well fed. So if you continue to provide those stats forever, as teams do, maybe you wouldn't miss out on that much.

In this article, Brandon Workman says, I don't think there's any way to imagine some of the differences up here compared to the minor leagues as far as the game and then as far as off the field too. So we can't even imagine it. So that's my rebuttal. You can't imagine how big a difference this would make. What do you think the with a smile was supposed to communicate? I'm not sure if it was. I mean, I'm genuinely not quite sure what the with a smile

was was telling us i know it was there for a reason i don't think it was i don't think it was him like pretending that they didn't have that data in the minor leagues where was it like do you think it was sneaky like he was sort of like like a conspiratorial smile yeah i guess so or i don't know maybe it's just he's a he's a rookie who's just happy to be in the major leagues and this is one of the things that he's excited about um gregariousness just a gregariousness that they're communicating yeah uh so anyway i don't know it the article mentions like clay buckholz uh becoming a convert to swing percentage by count, which is something that he didn't used to use because he didn't realize the utility of it,

but now he looks at it all the time and presumably adapts his approach accordingly somehow. Okay, one more thing. I'll go one more level here in my criticism, or not criticism, because again, you've done fine. But it seems like, again, one of the goals of this scouting, of the advanced scouting is to avoid – is to give them useful information without overwhelming them, right? And it's in the minors. You're just never really facing guys.

Like if you're in the majors, you might face the Tigers 19 times a year, and so you're going to see the same guys over and over, and it's not that much data. It's a lot of data. It's too much data, but it's not that much. Whereas if you're in the minors and you're switching levels and everybody else is switching levels and a lot of players are going to be on three or four teams a year because they're moving up levels, and everybody else is switching levels, and a lot of players are going to be on three

or four teams a year because they're moving up levels. It feels like you might be getting so much data because basically every player you face, you're going to have to learn from scratch all this advanced scouting information. And the data that you do get might be less useful. all this advanced scouting information. And so the... And the data that you do get might be less useful. Yeah, because the players are changing, they're developing, they're being coached. Smaller samples.

Smaller samples, uneven competition. And so it feels like if there's sort of a give and take of this sort of information, the give being that it gives you useful information, the take being that it clouds you with noise, that when you're dealing with the minor league circumstances, that the noise gets huge. The noise just gets insane and it might not be useful because of that. Yeah, that could be. Yeah, I feel like there would still be some things that could be useful.

Like a pitcher's time to the plate might change. It probably changes somewhat as he works his way up the ladder. Yeah, the pitcher's time to the plate, I don't even see. I have a hard time seeing how that's useful for Billy Hamilton in the in the first place he goes every single time i mean he does he goes every time he's on first base without fail unless the batter swings on the first pitch or there's a runner on second he's going so in hamilton's case specifically uh it's hard for me to imagine why this matters to him. Maybe that's why he was smiling. Oh, it could be. Okay. All right. So Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece in The New Yorker this week about PEDs

and about the sort of weird space that they share with genetic, not modifications, but genetic advantages. If you're born with certain genetic advantages, then you essentially reap the benefits of steroids without having to put anything into your body. And he gives an example of, I think, a cross-country skier in Europe whose basically blood behaves as it would as bicyclists try to dope themselves into having their blood behave. It carries more oxygen or something like that. And this happens just naturally, and he's basically a Superman when it comes to this sort of stuff. And you don't necessarily

think about this as much with baseball. But in fact, baseball players are all almost without fail born with a set of circumstances that you and I were not and that no matter how much we practiced growing up that we permit lots of kind of medical procedures or improvements to the body that are as kind of significant as drugs and might even actually be drugs, but that we allow for reasons that might strike you as arbitrary and are worth examining. And so I'm going to read a passage where he brings baseball into this. Baseball players have, as a group, remarkable eyesight. The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum tested close to 400 major and minor league baseball players over four years and found an average visual acuity of about 20-13. That is, the typical baseball player can see at 20 feet what the rest of us can see at 13 when he looked at the dodgers he found that half had 2010 vision and a small number fell below 29 flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye eyesight can be improved in

some cases dramatically through laser surgery or implantable lenses should a promising young ball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, baseball says yes. Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the body. It turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self, but when it comes to drugs, Major League Baseball draws the line. An athlete can't use drugs to become an improved version of his natural self even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful and is something that like testosterone is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone available by prescription to anyone virtually anywhere in the world so um i said this was about josh hamilton

and it sort of is i think about i, I feel like we watch our baseball players and we want to believe that they got there through something other than blind chance, that they got there through hard work or through, you know, a combination of people working together toward this one goal that made it all possible. And that's really what we're cheering. We're cheering achievement that was, you know, driven by will. I mean, that's what the montage in every movie is, right? The montage is never guy is born better than us. The montage is always guy self-actualizes and perseveres and achieves through will and perseverance, right? And so then you take Josh

Hamilton, who is obviously a natural talent. He's a good athlete. He's got good bone structure. He's got good size. He was an elite high school athlete. He gets drafted first overall. And then he disappears for four years where he doesn't play any baseball.

He doesn't do anything to take care of his body. He is not coached. He is not seeing faster pitchers. He is not learning how to hit the curveball. He is not progressing slowly up single, double, and triple A. He is not doing wind sprints. He is not lifting weights. He is just doing drugs. And he comes back and he is almost the same player he was always supposed to be. It's like sometimes you see a graph of the stock market throughout uh throughout like the last century and like there's a trajectory and the trajectory goes pretty pretty flatly upward and then like there's this place during

the depression where it just drops to zero and then when it recovers it's right back where it was supposed to be all along like there was no lingering effect long term it was just in the short term and you look at josh hamilton wonder, like, if that's what all the ball players are, if they are essentially 99.999% born and that all the narratives that we assign to their improvements or all the writing that we do about, you know, how much they overcome or all that we just sort of project onto them about working hard and having hashtag want, if that's almost completely just eyewash and the basic fundamental point is that they have genes that replicate the effect of steroids naturally. And so this makes me wonder a couple of questions.

One, why do we like baseball if that's all it is what is it about watching people who were born better than us perform at a level that's sort of actually hard to measure whether it's better than they should be or not uh what is what is appealing about that do you think and is that why you and i are so into front offices and why we're so into watching how teams are built much more than actually watching how the players kind of play? Uh, well, I, I don't know. I mean, I, I do enjoy watching the players play. Um, I, I think, the players play. I think, first of all, I don't want to discount the degree to which pretty much all baseball players have worked incredibly hard to get where they are. As you said, that doesn't mean that anyone could work that hard and get there, but maybe part of their

genetic gift could be that they have that intensity and that desire to work harder than everyone else. It might be a mental and a psychological fortitude as much as a physical one. I don't know. I mean, we enjoy watching baseball that's played at the highest level more than baseball that's played at lower levels, right? But we set a limit. We say even if steroids can make you better, we don't want to see that. We don't want to see baseball played at its highest level. We do want to put some artificial limits, or you might call them natural limits, on how high the level of baseball can be played. It was played, arguably, it was played at an extremely high level for about a 15-year period.

And when we found out why, everybody revolted. It's really hard to draw a distinction between the things that he brings up. When I read it, I tried to come up with a difference between the things that he mentions that are allowed and the things that aren't allowed. And you kind of can for like Tommy John or a medical procedure that just fixes something or replaces something that broke. You can make the case that it's not giving someone an ability that he never had. It's just restoring the ability that he originally had. And maybe that's a distinction between, you know,

inflating what you were born with. But I don't know that you can draw that distinction between LASIK and PED, because if you're taking, I mean, if you're having laser surgery, which I did, and if you're having laser surgery to improve the eyesight that you were born with, even if you were born with, you know, what most people consider perfect vision, I can't, I really can't come up with a difference between that and injecting yourself with something to be stronger, have more stamina or whatever it is. I don't know. I mean, the only potential difference, I guess, is the health risk. And

some people do justify their discomfort with PED use by mentioning the health risk. And I mean, if we knew for sure that there were no health risk, and there are certainly people who will tell you that if you use this stuff under a doctor's care and in moderation, there is no significant long-term health risk. If everyone accepted that and no one thought that steroids would cut your life short or give you some terrible disease down the road we i feel like we would still have this this prevailing discomfort i don't think that's yeah like the bicycling if i'm if i'm understanding this correctly when bicycle i mean bicyclists basically just take their own blood out and then put it aside and then put their own blood back in.

They do a lot of doping as well. I believe if I'm understanding that, that part of it actually involves no chemicals at all. It's just taking your own blood out and then putting your own blood back into your body. And that doesn't seem like a dangerous thing. I mean, if a teenager wants to do that, that seems okay with me. Yeah. So I, I don't know. I can't explain why that bothers people. It, it, I mean, it, it, I think it probably bothers me less than maybe the typical person, but I guess the fear in baseball particularly is that it breaks the past from the present and that you have to, you know, because a big thing that draws people into baseball

is the tradition and the people who played before and their statistics and comparing them to present day players and, you know, modern players taking PEDs screws all of that up. And so much of the analysis that we do is based on looking at what happened to previous players and aging curves and all of those things. And, you know, if people start taking PEDs and, you know, changing the paradigm or the baseline, then we can't use those comparisons anymore. And that's annoying as analysts. But as people who want to see the best baseball played, I don't know, I guess the only fear is that it would unbalance baseball in some way, that the ballparks would suddenly be too small and batters would suddenly be better than pitchers if you assume that it helps one disproportionately. seem like it's that it seems like it's a more instinctive uh discomfort with with there being advantages that some people have over others and not having a level playing field but i think you know gladwell gladwell and epstein who he quotes for a lot of his piece uh make a pretty good case

that it's not level as it is not even close to to level. So do you think that in the next, I don't know, 50 years, 100 years, do you think that the baseball's PED rules and policies will reflect this nuance at all? Or is it always simply going to be whatever drug seems like cheating to whatever, whatever drug seems like cheating to you know whatever whatever you know basically like some drugs will be declared cheating and some drugs won't and some procedures will be declared cheating and some procedures won't but that it will be to some degree arbitrary and to some degree chance which ones get painted with those brushes or do you think that like baseball will ever actually grapple with what performance enhancement actually is and do anything to sort of resolve these nuances i don't think or should they i don't even know if they should who knows i don't think there will ever be just open

season do whatever you want um but i do think that the the line of what's acceptable is going to continue to shift just because a lot of these things that players are doing now will eventually probably become part of what the general populace does people are going to start you know taking human growth hormone or testosterone or whatever it is people already are and if those things prove to be beneficial and have, you know, have good health effects, then it'll be hard for people to maintain that outrage about players taking something that they're taking themselves. So I feel like as these things continue to filter down into the normal people, as opposed to the elite athletes who are willing to, to take the cutting edge risk

in order to improve their performance, that, that that line will keep moving and what's acceptable will, will keep moving and more and more things will become acceptable, but there will probably always be another new thing that is not acceptable, at least temporarily, you know, uh, people, people probably won't be comfortable with cyborg baseball players when that becomes a possibility. So there will always be a new thing. But I think it'll probably always be complicated and somewhat inconsistent. Mm-hmm. All right.

Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, I agree that policies will change and that some things will become legal and some things will not. I just wonder if what we're talking about will ever be a factor in deciding which ones are and which ones aren't. are always going to be kind of dictated by what is essentially like the emotional response that we have to them and not by any of the kind of logical implications that we're trying to grapple with. So that's, I guess, what I'm trying to get at. Is the drug policy ever going to get smart or is it always just going to be emotional? And maybe that's the way it should be. I don't know, but we've made our listeners think about it.

Yeah. Maybe some of them are higher ups who are controlling the drug policy. I don't know, but we've made our listeners think about it. Maybe some of them are higher-ups who are controlling the drug policy. We've also made them listen to us talk about Wanner Rebate. So maybe they'll do something about that. All right. We'll be back tomorrow with the email show, right? Yeah, and we need some emails. So send us some at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.