Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 286: Picking Comeback Players for 2014/Top Team Improvements of the Past Decade

Episode Date: September 13, 2013

Ben and Sam pick potential comeback players for next season, then discuss Bill James’ list of the ways in which teams have improved over the last 10 years.

Come on, man. And with the local DBC news, LL Cool J with a triumphant comeback. For us, it's a long, long time. But tonight, don't call it a comeback. I've been here for years. I'm rockin' my peers.

What's up with the fear? Makin' the tears rain down like a cloud. Good morning and welcome to episode 286 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Hello, Sam Miller. Hi, Ben. Do you have anything to say to me?

No. Okay. Did you see Davey Johnson's semi-defense or retraction of his World Series or bust statement? I saw that he said something. I didn't really follow up on it. Yeah, so he said World Series or bust. I guess it was after the winter meetings or at the winter meetings last year. What do you suppose that means?

That doesn't seem to mean anything. It does. Yeah, I don't. It was just like a slogan for the team or something. Isn't that how every team? Yeah, I guess so. I don't know whether it was like an actual prediction or not. There may have been.

Because I remember the year before, I think he predicted playoffs or not. There may have been, because he, I remember the year before, I think he predicted playoffs or something. I'm looking up the quote right now. Yeah, I mean, if he, yeah, so he just said World Series or bust, that's probably the slogan this year, but I'm comfortable with that, which I guess makes sense given how they played last year. with that, which I guess makes sense given how they played last year. But his defense of that slogan now is that he never would have said it if he had known how the Nationals roster would come together,

which is an interesting defense. I also don't know what that means. Apparently he's upset about how the left-handed reliever situation worked out. He really misses Tom Gorzelany. So he's saying he wouldn't have said that on April 1st. He said it before he realized how lousy the front office was going to do? Basically. He sort of implied that, it seems like.

That seems quote-worthy. Yeah. Worth a hardball talk post. Yes. Yeah. I guess, I don't know. It wasn't really a prediction, but I guess that's why you don't make predictions before you know what the roster will look like. you don't make predictions before you know what the roster will look like.

But the, it seems like, yeah, it seems like that he was just figuring out a way to frame his, uh, passive aggressive complaint about his boss. Right. Yeah. That's all.

Yeah. That's all it was. Yeah. So it makes you, it makes you sort of understand why Davy Johnson, uh, has been fired from so many jobs where he seemed to be doing a great job. Yeah.

Uh, okay. And then the one other thing that we should mention, we should do an errors and omissions segment just briefly from yesterday about our A-Rod discussion when we said something about his appeal starting on September 30th, and we suggested that possibly he could be just kind of plucked out of the playoffs if his appeal were not upheld.

That is apparently not the case. He will have that appeal on September 30th if the Yankees are eliminated. If not, it will be held after the Yankees are eliminated. So there won't be complete craziness where he's in the lineup one day in a postseason series and then suspended the next. Unfortunately. in the lineup one day in a postseason series and then suspended the next unfortunately in fact yeah so it seems like in fact there is a that it's not just a coincidence that there is some sort of established precedent for not suspending players for the postseason yeah and unless

i mean i get like like you know melky was suspended for part of the postseason. So I wonder why his suspension, if this is the Major League Baseball's kind of desire, why didn't Melke's suspension get suspended at the end of the season and then picked up again at the beginning of the season? That's sort of weird that if you get suspended 47 days before the playoffs, they're happy to let you miss playoff games. But if you get suspended one day into the playoffs, they don't. I wonder why that is. That's weird. Doesn't this feel weird?

Doesn't that seem like a weird thing to you? It does. I guess it's maybe the uncertainty where a team, you wouldn't be able to have a backup plan if he's just kind of disappeared in the ALDS or the LCS or something. Whereas if it's way before the playoffs, you can come up with some contingency, I guess. So do you think if his appeal were scheduled for September 22nd? I mean, because the date of the appeal, I don't think is a... I think it was

sort of random, right? Isn't it kind of random? Yeah. Seemed like it. It wasn't like they were waiting for his season to be over, right? It wasn't like, well, we'll just let him finish this out. It was just like they couldn't do it before that, right?

I think. Who knows? I have a feeling we're going to be doing a... finish this out it was just like they couldn't do it before that right i think who knows i have a feeling we're going to be doing we'll do another one on monday i know it's on monday um okay uh so what's you what's your topic um comeback player of the year for next year okay and mine is going to be about the ways that teams have improved over the last decade. By the way, the A-Rod hearing stuff, it was an Andrew Marchand report for ESPN New York based on something a source said. So we don't know for sure anything, I guess. we don't know for sure anything, I guess. Okay.

So one of the things that I realized now that we've been doing this show for one year and two months is that we get to start recycling topics because baseball is just the same frigging thing every year. So it occurred to me today that last year we did predictions for who was going to be Come player of the year this year huh um what did we say episode 39 you don't remember this huh uh yeah i vaguely remember that but i don't remember who we said so uh we said a bunch of names uh your pick was carl crawford all right which. Which is certainly not embarrassing.

No. He's not going to win it, but he has come back to some degree. And I also had him listed high. And as I said at the time, it's hard to imagine him running around being bad at baseball. And he's not particularly bad at baseball. But he's not going to win. My pick was Mariano Rivera, which I guess could still happen. Yeah.

Seems like as good a pick as any. I don't know who's going to win this year. Do you know who's going to win this year? I haven't really thought about it. Is Liriano? Yeah, Liriano's a good one. And he would be a two-time winner. He's already won once.

He would. Yeah, he has. Now, they do one for each league, or they just do one? There's one for each league. You sure? Pretty sure. Omissions and errors is looming. Are you sure?

I'll look it up, but I'm pretty sure. All right. Other names that we had high are my number two was Tim Lincecum, which didn't work out. One for each league. Your number two was Ryan Howard. Really? Yeah. You said, quote, I could see him being healthy all year and racking up some counting stats. Oh, boy.

I don't believe that I said that. I'm going to go back and listen. Your sleeper was Giovanni Soto, because you thought that he could put up some numbers in Texas, but he didn't get to. My sleeper was John Lackey, which works out. And our darkest of dark horses, was roger clemens yours was nick johnson all right so anyway uh this year whole new crop of people who have underperformed but

who were not giving up on yet which is basically what the premise of this article is or this topic is guys who you still think have uh you know headline grabbing skills even if they haven't demonstrated them or if they've been absent for the past couple years so i think i asked you to come up with three names is that right you did do you have three names i have more than three names but i'll try to whittle whittle them down um okay it's funny that probably if the circumstances were different and the performance were the same ryan braun would be on my list well i figured we would have to talk about ryan braun because do you think that a a person who misses time for steroids is de facto ineligible i mean will voters i mean look it's not it's not andre scolarog coming

back from cancer you know yeah oh there are no voters right it's or there are but it's like it's who well there's yeah there's two different awards there's one is the players i think and the other one is the sporting news so i mean clearly there are voters. Clearly somebody is voting. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Okay, so it's presented by Major League Baseball representatives from MLB and MLB.com. Select candidates, and then there's an online poll. That was 2005 and 2006. Since then, the winners have been selected by a panel of MLB beat writers.

Nope. So, beat writers. So, yeah. Good information. Yeah, so I would guess that suspended players, A, probably should be ineligible, and in practice certainly are, although he also had some injury stuff and just wasn't playing up to his usual standards but but yeah is yeah is bartolo cologne a contender this year do you think uh i don't if it's beat writers i i guess i'd say probably not but nobody hates bartolo Colon. No.

Except, I think, maybe CJ Wilson, maybe? I can't remember. Somebody said something bad. But nobody hates Colon. I mean, they definitely hate Braun. People clearly hate Braun. But, I mean, I was just thinking that, like, if the suspension gets struck down, A-Rod is a candidate, theoretically. And if it doesn't, then he's a candidate for 2015, theoretically.

But I just don't know if steroids count. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So, all right, so I'm trying to pick my three. Probably one of them would be Johnny Cueto. You think so? See, he hasn't pitched poorly in the time that he's pitched, but he's only pitched like under 50 innings.

Yeah, I feel like if he had pitched like under 15 innings, I would have had him. It might be too many innings. Yeah, and if he comes back for the postseason i mean if he has a couple of like if he's in the bullpen for the reds in the postseason and you know has a couple of like high profile moments i i i did not i didn't even bother to write cueto down uh-huh okay all right well how about miguel montero montero i i is a good one and i didn't rank him in the top three because i'm not sure that he has the the way that he's good is not the way that gets attention so even if he goes exactly back

to to 2012 standards which makes him like you know an all-star player i just don't know that many people notice that i haven't looked. Is the winner usually someone who missed a lot of time or someone who played? This is funny. We had this conversation last year. We went through this long conversation in which you declared at the top, you declared that it was somebody who missed a lot of time. And as evidence, you offered five names going back like 18 years. And I challenged you on that point.

And I said that if you had to go all the way back to Nomar to come up with your five names, it wasn't very convincing. And then you listed them all and we talked about it. The other thing is that episode 39, we had three topics and they were 19 minutes total. Those were the days. So good to listen to. Also no no inflection in your voice just so so sad yeah don't go back and listen to all the episodes of this podcast maybe start i don't know where you should start but not not there um uh anyway uh so it's it's i don't know it's a split consider it a split, it's about half and half

Okay, so Matt Kemp, I guess Yeah, I mean, Kemp seems like the Really, Kemp seems like by far the most obvious name on here Because he's missed, yeah, he's, go ahead I'm not confident that he will be healthy next year either But yes, he's clearly kind of a classic candidate. And in the same old, Mark Teixeira. Yeah, I'd be a lot more confident that Kemp is going to bounce back, though.

I mean, Kemp's going to be like 26 or 27, and he should be good. Yeah. I mean, Teixeira, who even knows? Teixeira was already, you know, on a bad trajectory. Yeah, but so was, I mean, Kemp had the serious shoulder surgery, and then he's had a whole string of other injuries. And he's actually, he'll be 29 next year. Wow. That's a lot older than I next year. Wow.

That's a lot older than I just said. Yeah. My number was too low. Okay, but if Kemp is healthy, he's going to win it, right? Yes. So there's like a 60% chance that he's going to be healthier. Okay. Okay, so I guess has Sabathia been bad enough?

Yeah, I think he has. The problem is that he has 13 wins. So maybe he hasn't been bad enough to get into the conversation. But yeah, like a 4-6, 4-7 ERA. All right, so I'll go with Kemp Tashara and, I don't know, I guess Sabathia. Okay. No Albert Pujols, huh? Nah.

I feel like the problem with Pujols is that in order to— He'd have to be Pujols again. Exactly. Yeah. Right. If he's just really good, like he probably should be at this point in his life, at his age, then I don't feel like it's going to jar people enough. But on the other hand, I really came to believe that most of Pujols' struggles this year were foot-related. And he was really good the year before.

He finished 10th in MVP voting the year before. So I think I still am going to put Pujols on my list. I'm going to put Jeter. Wow. All he's got to do is hit 305 and he's on there. Yeah, sure. He's on there. Yeah, sure.

So I'll go Jeter, Pujols, and I'll say Josh Beckett for my third one. That's not a bad one. Billingsley is maybe not a bad one. Yeah, I just think Beckett's probably at his core a better pitcher at this point. I mean, Beckett was a Cy Young contender two years ago. core a better pitcher at this point. I mean, Beckett was a Cy Young contender two years ago. So, uh, Starlin Castro, or would he just, would people just chalk that up to his development rather than coming back? Yeah. I wonder if there's been a winner that young. It looks like probably, probably not in the last several years. He might, might be too young. So, okay, other names that are out there, Chase Headley, BJ Upton, Roy Halladay, Josh Johnson, Matt Harrison, Chris Carpenter.

Yeah, Carpenter's one once. Probably not. Still Ryan Madsen still. Yeah. I guess Andrus has not been bad enough and he's got the young thing too. Yeah, that's

I think we've named everyone who was on my list. Nick Johnson. Yeah. Still hope. Juan Rivera. I've been looking at I've been looking at AAA rosters for the, well,

I've been looking at triple a rosters for the last few days for some dumb reason that nobody needs to know. And it's, I'm seeing all these players who are so active that you haven't thought about and one Rivera is one of them. Yeah. I would not have been able to tell you where or what he was. Where is he? I think he's Arizona.zona yeah he is arizona mike jacobs still out there still kicking around all right okay well i look forward to rehashing all of these same things in a year when i forget again um okay so there's something that came up in a Bill James chat, his I think his most recent question and answer segment on his website. And I feel like I get I get more podcast topics and article topics out of just things Bill James said, than anyone else. I feel like everything he says is interesting in a way that we can discuss it

because he's, I mean, obviously he's a thought-provoking person, and he also works for a team now, which adds another wrinkle to it and yet talks kind of the way he did before he worked for a team. So there's just always interesting stuff to discuss that he says. He's also answered every question ever. So if he chooses a question from his mailbag, it's probably going to be something relevant and new. So someone asked him,

could you give some examples of ways teams have improved in the last 10 years? And I'm actually sort of surprised that he didn't say, because at the Sabre analytics conference in March, he basically said that teams haven't gotten smarter. He said there will never be a shortage of ignorance. We're just doing different stupid things, he said. different stupid things he said but he listed six things in response to this person that teams are now doing better or smarter or more efficiently than they were a decade ago so I want to ask you what your six things would be and then we would see whether some of them would be the same well i i don't have six but i have i probably have three okay i probably come up with three okay uh so and i don't know i could probably come up

with six but they would be i don't know what's i don't know what's not i don't know what would be a novel answer um so uh i think that the most obvious one is dynamic ticket pricing. That seems like such an obvious thing that it's almost unthinkable that it took this long for baseball teams to do it. And it's a fairly big deal. And it was just right out there. Free money. It feels like maybe that might be the number one thing that I would name for the last 10 years, basically. Okay. That is not on the board. Okay.

And maybe because he didn't consider it a baseball operations improvement, although it's something that helps teams if it means that they have more money to spend on players. But yeah, so that's okay. Okay, the second one I have is not really even fully thought out. But I mean, the fact that every team's bullpen is insanely good right now, that every team has like four relievers better than the nasty boys everywhere. I don't know exactly what to attribute that to, but I imagine it's not an accident. And I also don't think that you can just say, oh, well, you know, there's more good pitchers now than there used to be.

I would imagine that teams are, you know, doing a better job of identifying failed starters earlier rather than, you know, having them, you know, spend eight years or ten years as failed starters. I imagine that they're identifying them earlier and getting use out of them. I wrote a piece about Sean Doolittle in which I suggested that they're converting more position players than they used to. Maybe it's just a matter of not trying to force everybody to learn a change-up and throw seven innings. You sometimes hear not everybody should go to college. Some people shouldn't go to college. Some people should go to trade schools and become carpenters. There's nothing shameful about that.

You can have an awesome life as a carpenter. It's sort of dumb to force everybody into one bucket. Maybe teams have quit trying to force everybody into the starter bucket. So that's my number two one. You know how some people will say that hitters are just bad now? Like, have you heard that argument? Yeah, well, it's the Verducci. Verducci's argument is that this is all about hitters taking one-on-one pitches.

Yeah, I find that argument so unconvincing. I've heard it several places where people just say that hitters are, are worse or their approach is worse and they're just like dumb. They're just bad at hitting. It's, it just doesn't make any sense to me. Like baseball players are, are always getting better at everything. yeah i i agree okay uh and i guess my my number three one has nothing to do with with not not just nothing to do with baseball ops but nothing to do with the competitive aspect of the game but i think that announcers are significantly better now than they were 10 years ago that teams do not insist on hiring awful announcers um there are a lot of crews that i like and there are very few that i despise like it might be down to like three or four that I don't like at this point. And probably 10 years ago, especially on the radio side, 10 years ago it was like 28. I couldn't stand it.

Maybe you've mellowed with age. Could be. They are generally old men speaking to, especially on the radio, old men speaking to old men. So if I'm an old man now. Yeah. Okay. If you, if you come up with any others, feel free to shout them out. So, all right. He, I don't know that he was putting these in order of importance or just, just naming them as they came to him. His first one, 10 years ago, teams had a training staff of one or two people. Now we have staffs of people, trainers who speak Japanese and double as interpreters.

The trainers are half doctors now, some of them. They're veteran people who know the athlete's body better than a doctor does. Good one. Yeah, good one. Okay, second one. We are much more aggressive in using the options process To keep 25 players on the Major League roster Who are ready to play

That's true Yeah, this is a good one Ten years ago, if you had a reliever who had a tired arm You'd wait it out Now you DL him, call up somebody else And let the other guy's arm come back Which was something that we talked about And wrote about a lot with the Orioles last year

And Adam Sabzi wrote a good article about that which was something that we talked about and wrote about a lot with the Orioles last year. And Adam Sabzi wrote a good article about that, and Buck Showalter gave interviews about that. The next one, I guess, is a fairly obvious one. All of the information that is produced by our field, I don't know what he means by that, field, field staff, is mined by the operations guys and put to practical use pretty much immediately 10 years ago we knew something about where each hitter was likely to hit the ball we know a lot more now um so i don't know i guess that's just your basic we have better data now and know what to do with it uh 10 years ago we'd have a scouting report that said we'll use the change to right-handed batters on occasion Now we know how many change-ups and sliders and cutters and curves the pitcher throws to right-handers and left-handers

I'm always curious about whether improved scouting helps hitters or pitchers more Do you have a theory about that? I think that it probably helps uh hitters more yeah i would i would agree i think hitters usually have the information disadvantage i i also though that feels like sort of an odd one to include because that's not really that that just i mean that that's the data to some degree is being created independent of the teams, right? I mean, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's not like you go, oh, wow, the Rays are so smart for having PitchFX data.

Like, everybody has PitchFX data. Well, yeah, I guess it's rising tide lifts all boats. Everyone's gotten better. Yeah. Ten years ago, we hardly scouted the Far East. Now we've got scouts everywhere checking out rumors of a baseball player. The Dodgers got Ryu out of

some league that hardly existed ten years ago. So that's the expansion of the talent pool is a decent one. And then his last one, which I guess is sort of related, 10 years ago, the Dominican Development Leagues were just getting started. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that seems like a good one. Mm-hmm. Okay. What are yours?

Ugh, me. This isn't about me. Wait a minute. You didn. What are yours? Me? This isn't about me. Wait a minute. You didn't come up with your six? This is about you and Bill James. You don't have any? No. Oh, come on.

No, it's all you guys. This is the last straw. I quit. I don't need this. I mean, I already had a homework assignment to prepare for your topic. Yeah, but I did more than – I carried that one. You named like two guys. Barely.

Yeah. It's infuriating. You know what, everybody? Go to iTunes. Rate and review us poorly we need some one star reviews ben is not bringing it three star reviews three star not not one i'm the man who puts these things on the internet every day you guys would never even hear us talking if it weren't for in 14 seconds he's going to send me a message saying sound yeah and you you may or may not answer i i may or may not it's true i will see it though whether i answer it or not i will see it all right so uh if you have some ones that that

bill james and sam and not me didn't mention, send them to us at podcast at baseball perspectives.com along with your questions for next week's email show. Maybe there will be some discussion of this topic in our Facebook group over the weekend, which you can join at facebook.com slash groups, slash effectively wild. And there is a nice active little community of listeners there. And as Sam mentioned, review us on iTunes, hopefully more positively than Sam asked you to.

Yeah, I know. My sincerity can sometimes be hard to gauge. So just to be clear, five-star reviews, please. Yes, please. And you can rate and review and subscribe there. And I guess that's all that we have to say. Subscribe to Baseball Perspectives. We should tell people to do that more often.

And that's it for the week. So have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back with new shows next week.