Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 289: From Our Inboxes to Your Ears

Episode Date: September 18, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about extreme tiebreak scenarios, home run robberies, the winningest and losingest players, Mike Trout, and more.

I'm a driver, I'm a winner. Things are going to change, I can feel it. Good morning and welcome to episode 289 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Howdy. Hello. It's Wednesday, so it's the listener email show. Do you want to start with emails? You picked out some emails. I have a couple emails. Yeah, let me lead with one and then we can go in whatever direction we want.

But I want to lead with one just because it's more of an update. Zach emailed us about a week ago or three days ago uh and he said that he just discovered us a few months ago which explains his question um why he's asking this question long-time listeners will will think it sounds familiar uh he uh emails um someone asked you about extreme shifts and that got me thinking about what a team could do. Are there any rules about what protective gear defenders can use? How close can a fielder stand to the batter's box? Are there any rules against purposefully distracting the batter? This is, of course, almost identical to the question that led to us discussing,

over the course of multiple episodes, the defender wall, which was probably one of our, I don't know, most distinguished moments, distinguished being kind of a value neutral term in this sense. And so, of course, Zach, I replied that Zach could listen to our conversation in episodes. Well, I don't know what episodes they were. But he reminded me that I actually have had an update to this that I've been planning to do and I've forgotten to do it. Now, as you recall, our compromise was that the wall would probably be quickly shut down because it would be a threat to the umpire. But we also discussed the possibility of a defender, say the shortstop standing directly behind the pitcher's

release point and like kind of just doing jumping jacks or throwing his glove the, you know, the pitcher's release point and like kind of just doing jumping jacks or throwing his glove or, you know, doing all sorts of things to kind of get in the way of the batter's, you know, vision. And while I was researching the box piece, I found a rule that actually prohibits this. The rule is no fielder shall take a position in the batter's line of vision and with deliberate unsportsmanlike, act in a manner to distract the batter. The offender shall be removed from the game and shall leave the playing field. And if a balk is made, it shall be nullified. So that definitely prevents the standing behind the pitcher idea.

And I would say probably explicitly outlaws the wall. So the wall is now a dream dead. It's sad. I'd love to see that called someday. Yeah. Well, I mean, who wouldn't? This is one of those classic rules where you just wonder if it's ever been called. Yeah, and we wish we could look that up, but we can't.

All right. Well, I can go or you can go. Well, a bunch of people have actually asked me how my pickles turned out, and I promised to offer a brief review. So I guess I'll do that now. Very brief. Yeah, they were above replacement pickles. a brief review. So I guess I'll do that now. Very brief. Yeah. They were above replacement pickles. They were better than the pickles I would get just walking into a grocery store and selecting a jar at random. But I want to improve

my process. I already have a second generation of pickles in production right now. I like my pickles barely legal, really, like almost indistinguishable from cucumbers. And I left these in too long. The recommended three days was too long, too much salt. So I'm going to learn from that. And if you go to our Facebook group, and this is great incentive to join our Facebook group at facebook.com

slash group slash effectively wild, you can see pictures of the pickles in progress and also the completed product. And there are now other listeners who are documenting their own pickle making process in our Facebook group. So it's now become, it's become a thing. I've inspired others. All right. I'm dropping out of the pickle conversation. It's become a thing. I've inspired others. All right. Okay.

I'm dropping out of the pickle conversation. If you'd like, you can keep having a dialogue with the readers. You can even do it while we're recording, but I'm out. Okay. All right. All right. Can I read the first real question? Uh-huh.

All right. Miles says, consider the following string of abysmal end-season records. And then he lists what looks to be about 13 losing records. Well, I guess 12, 11 losing records, and then two that are very slight winning records. But overall, 13 very poor seasons. These are the records of every major league team that Adam Dunn has played for, including both the Reds and Diamondbacks in 2008. From the beginning of his career until now, with the White Sox presently at 58-88, Dunn is in the middle of his umpteenth

September of meaningless baseball. How did that happen? Is Dunn the recipient of colossally bad random luck, or has something about his distinctive skill set helped bring upon this horrid fate? Maybe his slug-only performance only appeals to teams that were going to be bad in the first place. I'm curious where Dunn fits in among active players in terms of individual winning percentage if such a thing can be calculated have any current major leaguers suffered losses more often than done um and i wonder what journeyman would surprise us for being close to the top um his money is on mike napoli incidentally for that um so i had our sets sets guys actually run a sort of proxy for this. We don't have team records for all the days that they're on the roster,

but we do have records for all the days that they play. So basically players' individual winning percentages in their career. And so I filtered for a minimum of 800 career games, active players only. And so that gives us 100 or so players. And I want you to guess who are the losingest players. Wow. It's hard, huh? It's actually really hard.

Because the thing is when we talk about how hard it is to predict more than two or three years in advance unless you actually really force yourself it's actually hard to remember players careers beyond two or three years in the past you like there are players who i looked at on this list and thought him and then i thought oh yeah well he was on this team and this team and this team and i only think of him as being on the team he's currently on and maybe the one before that. Or maybe like one in the past. But guys are changing teams constantly and you just sort of blank on them. So anyway, yeah, go ahead. Okay, I will guess Gary DeSarcina.

No, active, active. Oh, active. Gary DeSarcina is an active. He's active by like senior citizen standards but he is not an active baseball player uh okay so you all right so this is doesn't cover historical players at all this is just people who are well adam dunn is historical but no it's it's active they're active everybody's active this is an unambiguous word. Okay. I mean, I guess the odds are that it would be a bad player, right? You think so?

Probably. The difference between a bad player and a good player is like three wins a year in actual performance. So the odds are it's someone on bad teams. Yeah. But the odds are slightly higher that the team would be bad if the bad players... Also, 800 players. I mean, we're talking about 800 games minimum. So, you know, to play 800 games, you don't have to be great.

But, I mean, I'll give you... There are a couple of bad examples. Like, you were never going to guess, but Ronnie Cedeno is number three on the losing his players. He's not a particularly good player, but there's also some very good players, I would say, even on the top ten. Well, then there's no way I can guess this, really. I don't know. I'll say Jamie Carroll. Jamie Carroll is on the list and he is actually uh

he's like probably 20th from the bottom jamie carroll has a 462 winning percentage in games he plays all right so that's you know you got the bottom 20th percentile so once i are you once i guess someone who is actually eligible uh i i had a pretty decent guess not not a bad not a terrible guess keep going I want you to guess this this is too good not to guess people put serious work into this alright

Juan Pierre Juan Pierre is he's actually quite Juan Pierre has a 490 winning percentage so close to the median yeah okay

how about John McDonald John McDonald are you sure John McDonald has 800 games played yes he does and he has a 489 winning percentage. He's two spots ahead of Juan Pierre. Only Carlos Beltran is in between them.

So John McDonald, terrible guess. All right. Well, I don't know where to go from here. Why don't you start going for some Royals? Or maybe some Pirates. Yeah. Okay. Number one is in your wheelhouse.

Number one is a guy that you talk about a lot. I mean, there are probably not eight guys you talk about more than number one. Really? I mean it. And not for good reasons. For negative reasons. I'm trying to think of who I talk about a lot. They're all really bad players who haven't even played 800 games probably.

Francoeur? Francoeur is not going to be that high. Francoeur has a 470 winning percentage. So he's probably 20. He's four behind Jamie Carroll. So he's about 25th or so. One spot ahead of Todd Helton. One spot below Mark Kotze, two players we spoke about on the same episode. Mark Kotze, winning player, though.

Winner. He is a winner. He is a winner, he just hasn't won. Yeah. Gosh. Is the player I talk about a lot a pirate or a royal? Was a pirate. Was a pirate. Here goes Ben Lindbergh's rabid Googling.

What did you just Google, pirate? Yeah, I ended up with like blackbeard so that didn't work oh okay Ryan Doman you got it Ryan Doman Ryan Doman is the losingest player active player in baseball

with a 378 winning percentage in his career he has 327 wins and 539 losses in his career. Spectacular. I mean, what is that? That's.377 times 162, and I forgot the equal sign. Hang on. That's going to be a 61-win season on average.

He has averaged 101 loss season in the games he has played. That is how bad he is. So I'll give you the top 10. I'll add that to my repertoire of Ryan Domet facts. Yeah, so number one is Domet. I'm going to skip number two because he's a surprise to me. Number three is Cedeno. Number four, John Buck.

Number five, Ty Wiginton. Number six, Greg Dobeno. Number four, John Buck. Number five, Ty Wiginton. Number six, Greg Dobbs. Number seven, Brian Roberts. Number eight, Austin Kearns. Number nine, Josh Willingham. Number ten, Jeff Kepinger. And then 11 is Billy Butler. So that's probably how far you have to get a star unless you, Brian Roberts was a star for a while. But number two is, and quite a bit worse than number three although better than domit obviously is david de jesus so that kind of surprised me uh so i mean de jesus has been on a lot of teams and so for that reason i i never think of him as being stuck on a loser but de jesus has been a loser uh so napoli is actually actually the eighth best winning percentage among active players.

Number one is Jeter by quite a margin. How many of the top ten are Yankees? Number one is, number two is, number three is, number four is, number six, no, sorry, number seven briefly, and that's actually it. Russell Martin's like 12, Granderson's like 14, Melke's like 15. Do you want to take a swing at a high one and see how you do? A high one that I haven't named, a non-Yankee? All right.

How about, I don't know, Brian McCann? Brian McCann's like 30th or so. Jeter cano swisher euclid's um the best non-yankee is orteez ryan howard where's orteez orteez is like 12th ryan howard ryan howard winning his player and then uh number the then the next best is Yadier Molina. And then the next best is Nath. We should put this in a Google Doc or something somewhere for people to look at. Sure. I would say the surprise on here, the surprise would be probably, if not Melky, Placido Polanco is very high.

Okay. And you don't think of Polanco. very high. You don't think of Polanco and like if I told you Placido Polanco and Greg Dobbs, you wouldn't intuitively know which was higher. Like in this day and age it wouldn't sort of naturally come to you but Polanco's top 20 and

Dobbs' bottom 20. Okay, so yeah, put this online somewhere and I'll link it in the Facebook group or in the blog post comments or something. Okay. Do you want to read yours? Sure.

Okay, I have a couple. So the first one is about home run robberies. It comes from Kevin in Boston. He says, I was reading Ben's post on Carlos Gomez's home run robberies this season, and I noticed that all five plays came at Miller Park. This could be just a coincidence, but it seems reasonable that outfielders could make more of those plays at home where they might have a better sense of where the wall is and how the outfield plays.

Do you think fielders have an easier time robbing home runs at home between home run saves and other boundary plays? How many runs do you think the home team gains over the course of a season just by knowing the geometry of its park uh so i asked baseball info solutions um about this do you care to hazard a guess about the percentage of home run robberies at home versus away um well a home team is more likely to hit a near home run. So theoretically, there would be more opportunities to rob home runs if you were the visiting team.

That is true. But on the other hand, the visiting team bats more often because they play the top of the ninth every time. So then theoretically, you might actually have more opportunities if you were the visiting team. So I'm going to call that a push, and i will say that for defensive purposes alone uh i'll give the home team a yeah it seems seems like a very reasonable hypothesis i'll say i'll say 62 apparently uh it's almost even it's just over 50 percent uh of home run robberies since 2004, which is how long they've been tracking it, have been made by a fielder for the home team, so there is no clear advantage, they told me.

Hmm, bummer. I was kind of hoping for 54%, because that's the standard home field advantage. That's right. I assume it's even lower than that. I don't have an exact percentage, but good question. I like the theory from Kevin. I was persuaded there before I got the answer that it would be higher than that because it kind of seems like it should be, but it's not. And then the other question that I can answer comes from Matt. He says, how great would it be if five teams were to tie for the last wildcard spot in the American League? I don't know if this is even possible given the remaining schedules, but a mini playoff between teams like Texas, Cleveland, Baltimore, New York, and Kansas City would make for fantastic drama.

A team might have to play three single elimination games just to win the right to play in the single elimination wildcard. Do league rules even address this possibility? And how might they handle a five-team playoff? So as it happens, I wrote an article about this last October as I was thinking along the same lines that Matt was. And on MLB's website, you can find the tiebreaker rules for three- and four-team playoff scenarios, and they're incredibly complicated, and they make your head hurt just to read them. And so naturally, I wondered about the five-team scenario, which is not on the website. So I spoke to Katie Feeney, who is MLB's senior vice president of scheduling and club relations, and I asked whether there was any contingency for a five-way tie. And she said that there is not. She said, to be perfectly honest, considerations for tiebreakers do not go that far. It's not there anywhere.

It's probably something that would have to be determined. So I asked her to speculate about what it would look like. So I asked her to speculate about what it would look like, and she kind of said it would look like the four-team scenario, but just more complicated, and you'd have to work out some things that have never really been worked out. And she said it would probably take a minimum of three days to sort it all out. You mean to play them all, not for her to sit in the room and do the math right yes to to actually determine the winner of the tie breaks that seems that seems light that three days seems light uh yeah although i guess you're gonna you probably just flip a coin yeah figure out someone someone's gonna get a buy right yes and you're not gonna do something like complicated round robin so everybody plays an even number of games right she said

once you design the designations you'd have to have a b c d and e teams that's hard to say because i don't know if they decide to do it like the three team and have b play a at a and have c play the winner if you were doing that you'd have a, B, and C, and D. You have A hosting B and C hosting D on the same day, and then the winners play each other. And whether or not if you have to go to an E, if E gets to wait until both of those games are over and then play the winner, so that's what you're talking about, she doesn't have an answer for that. She said people would have to talk about that to see if that was fair. Yeah, that seems unfair because then four teams would have to win three games and one team would only have to win one.

I could see giving one team a one-game advantage if you had to. One team plays two, one plays one. But to have all four have to play three and one only have to play one seems impossibly unfair. Yeah uh so i don't know what the odds are but it it's probably more likely that that baseball will cease to exist before this happens then then that we will actually have to to figure out the answer to this it doesn't intuitively feel that unlikely but then on the other hand uh it never happens like it never even ever seems close to heaven like no have we we've never had a three have we uh

i don't think so i mean a hundred plus years and we've never had i mean it it seems like it should be happening the fact that it hasn't is really more evidence than you need, that it's just not going to. All right. Good stuff. And then didn't you ask, didn't you try to find out what would happen if there was a 30 team? That was my initial question when I called her,

and I was worried that she was just going to hang up on me. I think she basically said that there was no contingency for a five-way tie, so I didn't really even have to go into a 30-way tie because clearly there's no plan for that either. A 30-way tie, though, though well like a 28-way tie would actually be pretty or i guess a 28 might be tricky but like a 16-way tie would be like remarkably simple you get the number does not dictate the the difficulty of it it's sort of like sorry i should say that the the highness of the number doesn't dictate the simple, the, the difficulty. It's really the, the primeness of the number, right? You know, you want to have, you want to have a, a number that has lots of, you know, ways

to divide it. And then if you have a prime number, you prefer smaller, I guess is the way to do it. Mm-hmm. Uh, all right, good. So, uh, back to me. Yeah. All right. uh all right good so uh back to me yeah all right so this is a this is a quick one because this is a question that has been asked by many people but it's never been asked by of me and so and i don't know if it's ever been asked of you so i want to answer it once for the record uh from jeff given

the chance to go back in time and see one game which would you choose and why do you have one uh nope so here's my thinking i have i have three different ways of answering this uh my first answer and the one that i think i would stick with is september 13th of 1986 when the braves played the giants uh nothing happened that day except that I went to my first game. And I would love to go for nostalgia purposes and also to just, I find it sort of fun to go places that you went as a child and see them as an adult and, you know, it's such a different perspective. I remember three things about that game.

And looking at it now, I see that two of them are wrong. One, I remember it being 5-1. It was actually 4-1. I remember Dale Murphy hitting a home run and me cheering, not realizing that he was the visiting player. And he did hit a home run and I presume I did cheer. And I remember Jose Uribe getting in a pickle between third and home. He was in no pickles whatsoever.

What I don't remember and I see now is that Will Clark let off that game. But I think that would be as good a game as any. I would like to see – 1980s baseball was such a huge part of my growth as a human, and yet I've seen so many games since then, I don't even really remember what it was like. And I would love to see a 1980s game, to see the speed, basically to see how different the speed was compared to what it is now, and then just to kind of revisit and, you know, go and look at myself.

This is a pretty egotistical choice. I'm not saying what game everybody should go to. I think I'd like to go to the Spahn-Marischal game. Is it a 16 innings, 1-0? Assuming that I could forget the outcome, I would enjoy it more, I'm sure, if I didn't know how it was going to end. So if I could somehow know that it was going to be significant, but not know how it would all turn out, that would probably be pretty high on the list. Yeah, I thought about that one. I thought, wasn't there like a 23 inning, one nothing game with the Mets in some, sometime in the eighties, I think I thought about that. And I thought about the 33

inning or whatever minor league game there was. Uh, my number two is the Jackie Robinson's first game just for historical value. It would be amazing. And I don't see how you can find fault with that choice. But my number three one would be the final game of the 1913 World Series. And that one, because I don't know who won. And if I'm picking a game, I would want it to be significant, but I would want to also not know the ending. I'd want to actually enjoy the suspense.

So I would love to see early century baseball again just to see how different it was. I have a hard time accepting that Babe Ruth actually happened, that I feel like he's a hoax. And I feel like if I saw what the game was actually like, it might explain some things about that. So that would probably be my third choice. Okay. So are you sticking with Spahn, Marshall? Yeah, I think so. That's off the top of my head.

Okay. All right. Let's see. Ed says, Madison Momengarner failed a stat head or just dealing with disappointment? I think the answer is neither. I think that the win is pretty much disregarded by almost everybody in the industry right now. I think that for the most part, writers and newspaper editors and people who put out box scores care about the win. But sense is that oh virtually nobody in baseball cares about the

win right now and brian sabian was asked about the win on um knbr not that long ago he was asked you know when the last time they looked at a pitcher's record in trying to make any sort of decision and he said be honest with you it's been a long time. It's been a number of years. And Sabian is nobody's idea of cutting-edge stat head. But, you know, it's just not a going concern. I feel like it's more common among players. Yeah, I don't get that sense, to be honest. Well, I mean, it must because you still see managers leaving pitchers out to finish the fifth inning uh i mean i guess i guess in as much as they still get paid for it by like

arbitration uh you know that sort of stuff or as much as it still shows up on their card and they they know that that's part of the historical record maybe they want them but um i mean but you can find a pitcher almost every day saying that wins aren't that important. You don't hear them talking about their war very often. Those guys stand out, but it seems like almost every pitcher will say that wins aren't that significant to them right now. I hear a steady drumbeat. them right now i i hear it it's not like you're a steady drumbeat it's not like you have to be a stat head to understand the the concept of why that particular stat is not not the greatest um so i don't i don't know anything about bum garner specifically but the fact that he doesn't value the pitcher win uh doesn't really influence my opinion that much mean, the anti-win stats stance might be something that has filtered down

from stat people, but it's perfectly understandable without understanding any kind of advanced statistical perspective. I don't even think Dylan's requires a response, but I want to read it because it's interesting. Dylan says, do you think a player can get ejected in the middle of a play? The only feasible scenario I can come up with would be during a home run trot. Say a player goes yard, and as he rounds first base, he very explicitly yells at the umpire or says some unfavorable things about his mother. He gets tossed, but does he score first?

Does the player that replaces him get to finish the trot around the bases? I don't have an answer for this. I also don't have a better hypothetical for this, but I like it. So I just wanted to put it out there on the record. Do you have anything to say to Dylan? Uh, no, not really. I guess, I don't know. You could, you could theoretically get ejected as you're attempting to feel the ball. If you, I don't know, give everyone the finger and yell something nasty. Right? You could just, you know, you could say something about the umpire's mother as you're circling under a fly ball. Yeah, I mean, but, you know, not really. I guess you could imagine a situation where a player gets ejected while the ball is live, if not sort of, you know, he's not necessarily expected to be fielding it.

But, you know, if he slugs a base runner in the mouth, you might see the umpire. But I don't think they would. I think that in virtually any case other than the home run instance that he gives, it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't get ejected after the play is over. But the home run seems conceivable, and I don't know the answer. Well, players have gotten injured during home run trots and been replaced by a pinch runner who finished the trot, right? I think. Hasn't that happened? Pretty sure that's happened.

You're pretty sure? Yeah. pretty sure that's happened you're pretty sure yeah i i'm so i that's more confident than than i am i i've never heard of that i've i maybe it has i mean we could ask larry larry would know yeah uh okay is there anyone i will google it if you'll let me. Well, the last question is one for you. So you can Google if you want. But Bill asks about comparing Trout with historic greats. And his question is about defense. My understanding is that defensive metrics go back only so far, 10 years or so,

and that base running metrics require play-by-play data that goes back farther but not way, way back. If those assumptions are correct, if even one is correct, how do we compare Trout with, say, Lou Gehrig or Hannes Wagner or even the young Willie Mays, given that a non-trivial component of Trout's overall value comes from defense and base running? And you have something to say? I can say something about that. I just googled the home run trot thing, found a thing about what happens if a home run is hit, but the batter gets injured and is unable to run out the bases. A substitute runner is allowed to finish the run.

There's rule 510C1, which says if an accident to a runner is such as to prevent him from proceeding to a base to which he is entitled, as on a home run hit out of the playing field or an award of one or more bases, a substitute runner shall be permitted to complete the play. And there's a little story here that involves our pal Gabe Kapler. This rule covers both the batter and base runners. A situation similar to this occurred in a game between the Red Sox and Blue Jays in 2005. Gabe Kapler of the Red Sox was on first base when Tony Graffagnino hit a home run. Kapler went down with a ruptured Achilles tendon between second and third base. Graffagnino waited on second base while Kapler was loaded on a cart and taken off

the field. Alejandro Machado entered the game as a pinch runner and finished the trot to home plate in Kapler's absence so that's not quite the same since he was a player who was on base during the home run it is it's the same rule it's the same rule yeah okay so that's that uh all right so as for the trout thing i feel like we i feel like we're underplaying the the fact that it's gabe capler it is quite a coincidence it's one of the three guests we've had yeah how about that that's kind of that's a nice that's that's awesome we should have him on again to talk about that particular play it has has practically happened to you, and you didn't even remember. So as for Trout, there are defensive stats that go back far more than 10 years,

and the same for base running metrics. They're not the same stats, or they're not using the same data source, but they are defensive stats, and they are used in Warp and the various wars. So Baseball Perspectives uses fielding runs above average, which goes back to 1950. So that's essentially the same system for 1950 as it is for 2013. So that's the same level of reliability today. If you go way back, like Baseball Reference uses defensive runs saved from BIS from 2003 on. Before that, they use Total Zone.

And I think Fangraphs does the same when UZR, before UZR started, also uses TotalZone. And TotalZone kind of differs based on what year you're looking at because, you know, whether RetroSheet includes the hit location or whether it's just sort of an estimated thing based on where the batter hits the ball and all these things. So the data sources change, the stats sort of change. And I think what really changes, and I was talking to Colin Wires about this before we started recording, is just the spread of defensive performance according to those stats. The spread would be smaller for earlier years than it is now.

And he wasn't willing to say that one would be more or less precise. There's no objective measure of defense that we can really compare them to. So that's tough to say, but there would be less separation between the good and bad guys for the earlier years than there would be for now. And base running, if you go back very far, I think it just takes into account stolen bases and caught stealing and maybe even just stolen bases because there was a time before caught stealing when that wasn't even tracked so so it wouldn't account for base

running skill uh you know other than that just just advancing on hits or balls in play or anything. So what that means with how we can compare Trout with those guys, I mean, if you're looking at a career and comparing, you know, Willie Mays or Hannes Wagner, Gehrig to Trout's career when Trout has played longer, it doesn't seem that much less reliable to me, but just looking at a single season, I guess I would trust it less. Like if you were comparing Mike Trout's, you know, age 20 or age 21 season to some, you know, pre-play-by-play players age 21 season, I guess I would be slightly less confident in the the earlier players war rating um so i guess that's that's all i have to say about that uh yeah you'd be i mean you'd be less but presuming that it's a good defender and to to reach 10 or 11 war level you usually have to be, it seems as though the older metrics probably decrease their chances of reaching the highest. Yes, true.

So arguably if you took the 10 highest wars at age 20 and 7 of them were pre-1950, then highest wars at age 20, and seven of them were pre-1950, then probably one or two of those would get a one-win boost with more modern metrics if we had them. Well, that was an email show. We'll be back tomorrow with a regular show. In the meantime, email us for next week. Podcast at baseballperspectives.com. And that's really all I've got to say. Okay.