Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 301: Dusty Baker’s Future and Joe Maddon’s Perplexing Move/Favorite Prospects from Scout School

Episode Date: October 7, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about two managers in the news, then discuss a pair of prospects Ben saw in Arizona.

Make you move, buddy. I'll hurt you. Whatever you take it as you see it. It's just, you know, like the homeboy said back home, we just chillin'. Make you move. Good morning and welcome to episode 301 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. the podcast from baseballperspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. 301 is not a significant number in baseball, and thus we have no significant guests. It's a significant number

for this podcast, though, because it wasn't always a certainty that you would make it to 301. No, it's true. Since about, what, episode 20 or so, I declared that 300 would be my last that I felt like I had 300 in me. Yeah. Empty threat. Yeah. Well, honestly, and I mean this sincerely, not, not snarkily. I think it's the emails that have kept me interested. I feel like if the emails didn't bring it so reliably, I would probably have checked out emotionally, but I, I feel like something's happening here. Yeah, if not for the feedback is a big part of it.

I like talking to you, but I probably wouldn't talk to you this much if other people weren't listening. Yeah, good point. All right, so what do you want to talk about for 301? I had a quick question about Dusty Baker, and then I thought I could talk about my two favorite prospects from the first week of Scout School since people have been asking me about it. Joe Maddon. It came down to either Joe Maddon or the big news about how the Girl Meets World spinoff, Boy Meets World spinoff, has axed the older brother character. But I think I decided Joe Maddon instead. Okay. Well, my question, I wrote something that's up at Baseball Perspectives today, Monday, about Dusty Baker and his firing and his future and the modern manager and how he should survive. Can I pause real quick?

Okay. Since, not the show, don't hit pause. Okay. okay uh since it seems like uh whenever a manager gets fired there's always some former player in the organization's history that fans rally around as a potential manager yeah like like with the angels every like like three-fourths of angels fans want darren urstad to to manage the team can you think of a red who who would who would be the most natural person to rally around? The first thing I was going to say was Sean Casey, but he's more of a tiger, I guess. Is he?

No, Sean Casey is a red. Yeah, he's the mayor of Cincinnati, right? So, yeah, Sean Casey. Yeah. First name that came to mind was Chrisris sabo for absolutely no no reason whatsoever uh-huh uh from what i read the the favorites are are not those people they're like like jim riggleman is being mentioned yeah i have a uh yeah i have a i have a prediction every year that i have with a friend like a little competition that i have with a friend where we try to predict the first manager hired in any season. And we've been doing this since 2001, and we have never picked a manager who was ever hired.

Like not just that year, but ever. But Hal Morris Morris Angel's organization Hal Morris would be a classic red yeah that's not a bad one um so my question for you I guess is whether you think well alright so would you pick Dusty

in your sweepstakes for for a manager to be hired again do you think Dusty will get another chance he wants another chance oh yeah Dusty will get another chance I've always thought chance. Oh yeah, Dusty will get another chance. I've always thought that Dusty, I've never been a big Dusty fan, having been a Giants fan from 93 to 2002. I lived through some of Dusty's best years, but I always sort of was mystified by the mythology of Dusty. I mean, I did a post one time for the score about his manager of the year vote totals

versus Bruce Bochy's, and it's completely disproportionate. I mean, it's sort of like any time, basically any time Dusty Baker has a winning season, he finishes second in manager of the year voting, and I've never quite gotten it i mean i understand he's a players manager which and he's a media members manager yes well certain media members that's true but i mean once you allow the the players manager component of it then you

acknowledge that you know a portion of it is not going to show up in the sorts of things we see, but it always seemed like his reputation far outweighed, at least to me, based on what I saw, his actual contribution. But because of that, I think that it's almost certain. I mean, he's not an old man either. He's relatively young. He's 64. You're kidding me. I'm not.

Goodness gracious, does he look good. He's 64? I think so yeah i guess so i mean he's been managing for 21 years he's had some health problems recently but uh he says he's healthy enough to manage and he wants to manage but i don't know i i wouldn't i certainly wouldn't be surprised if he gets another chance somewhere but i I feel like in a larger sense the time of a manager like Dusty Baker is passing. I feel like if you get fired after winning 91 games or whatever, you're almost certain to get another job. I mean, at that point, it's basically just an organization moving on. It's not an industry rejecting you.

Yeah. Well, although couldn't you say that if you're fired after a successful season then it's even a worse sign about you maybe it's an even bigger red flag especially if you have a season left on your deal and i think he's gonna make something like four million to not manage the reds i suppose you could look at it any way you want. I don't know. My philosophy, I guess, is that I don't think there's any reason for a team to settle for someone who's less than a good tactical manager. I mean, I understand the value of the non-tactical stuff, and he seems to be someone who provides that or in certain situations can provide that

but I feel like there are enough people out there who could provide that and also not kill you with with crazy lineups or not using the closer and tie game on the road or whatever you know bunting with position players and whatever the whatever angers sabermetric sort of people about Dusty. I just think that that's passing. I think the people who are known for being particularly bad at making those moves aren't going to get chances. I think the future is people who will work with the front office. And that's not necessarily Joe Madden or, you know, new school innovative guys. It could be someone like Clint Hurdle, who is an old school guy and was a veteran manager and a longtime player and then and was willing to adopt the Pirates original approaches this year when Huntington came to him and said,

we want to do all this defensive positioning stuff. He said, OK, I'll I'll help you implement that, whether he was happy about it or he was just doing it because his boss said so he went along with it and embraced it and the clubhouse is happy and and the stat guys are happy so I feel like that's that's the future more so than than Dusty Clint uh Clint Hurdle and Dusty Baker called for sacrifice bunts essentially the exact same amount of times this year for for for what it's worth mean, I don't really know. Like, what is Dusty's – what is the knock on Dusty? I mean, he abuses pitchers because of a couple guys from 10 years ago.

Yeah, that's not even true anymore. Right, exactly. So, I mean, what exactly specifically is the knock on him? What does he do that's different than any other manager? I mean, he doesn't use aroldis chapman in you know a tie game when he's at when he's on the road nobody does there's like two managers who do and even those guys only when it's like koji wahara who's like a relatively recent closer usually i mean i don't know i i not that i've ever been wowed by by dusty's tactics or anything but

arjun anderson's long felt that felt that his tactical skills are kind of unfairly knocked and that he actually does things that are tactical, like particularly in the way that he uses his roster, that kind of don't get the credit they deserve. I think RJ would probably defend him as indistinguishable from Clint Hurdle. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Maybe tactically. I just feel like the willingness to kind of work with a front office like that and let the front office sort of implement a plan, an unusual plan. I mean, Dusty spent a lot of the season, it seemed like, trying to persuade Joey Votto to stop walking. stop walking and you know that's not good that is not good well maybe it is who knows i mean it doesn't seem good now maybe in 2017 we'll think that it

was good but you're right i i like to watch joey vato walk it's one of the great parts of the game to me is watching joey vato walk there's not there's very few things as pretty as joey as a joey vato walk i agree all right uh is that all you're gonna say about dusty because if so we should just segue into into joe madden yeah sure so um joe madden um is coming under some fire for his his managerial decisions in this postseason um rob nier wrote a post with the headline, Fire Joe Maddon, which I don't think he actually believes, but Joe Maddon has the same initials as Joe Morgan. It makes for a good headline.

And so MGL, in his blog, wrote about the decision to play Delman Young as the DH in this postseason, even though they're facing right-handed starters. And I'll quote him, before the game, Madden decided to use Delman F. Young as the DH against the righty starter Lackey, rather than his regular and excellent lefty DH Matt Joyce, the one with a career Woba versus righties of 360, not the other Matt Joyce, you know, as opposed the one with the career woba versus righties of 360 not the other matt joyce you know as opposed to young with a career woba against righty of 309 but being the cerebral celebrity that he is he had some very good reasons quote from joe madden if you want to break it down

sabermetrically there's absolutely different righties that he's been that he's better against than others i'll concede the point right now the thing is with delman oh actually this is a quote i should note this is a quote from zachary levine on baseball perspectives i could have just started with that it being on our site the thing is with delman right now i believe that he is kind of locked in and i think he's had really good at bats against some tough right handers also if you really want to break down all of our right handers there's going to be different right-handed pitchers they're all going to have difficult moments against delman's really demonstrated the ability to come through in key moments at the end of the season and i believe in that kind of stuff beyond the numbers

um and so an mjl response i think i just threw up in my mouth reading that and concludes that that decision alone was about uh four percent of a win uh that Joe Maddon cost his team which is a massive um decision tactically speaking so um I'm just curious Maddon has done other things he um has kind of been sort of strangely averse to platoon advantages from both the pitching and offensive sides in this postseason uh he left David Price in an extremely long time against Boston in game two. And I was in the Oakland press box when David Ortiz hit an eighth inning home run against Price to make it seven to four. And it was like kind of weird how like it seemed like every writer in the press box looked up just as the ball was sailing over the the foul pole for a home run and

like everybody like as one went wait is it wait is david price still in why is david price still in like everybody was kind of shocked it was like it was like like it was like a rumor spreading in high school that like a girl had gotten pregnant or something just everybody was like why is david price still in why is david price in? And so Madden has been unconventional. And when it works, this is like Joe Madden genius, right? This is like kind of what he builds himself on. But the idea of playing the hot hand in particular is the sort of thing that managers sometimes get mocked for as being statistically unsound. And so I just wanted to get your feelings about Joe Maddon in the postseason,

whether you think that he gets, whether he deserves extra leeway for these sorts of things, or is his brain just as fallible as the rest? Yeah, so that's MGL's contention, I think. And when we say MGL, we're talking about Mitchell Lichman, who's a sabermetrician and one of the authors of the book. He says basically that Madden is a good manager, but because he's kind of eccentric or unorthodox, we tend to give him too much credit

and assume that he never makes these mistakes that most managers make, whereas, in fact, he maybe makes them less often than others, but he still makes them. So I guess I buy that. I always wonder whether he's just not really giving us the full explanation in his explanation. Like with the platoon stuff that that you're talking about there was there's the whole the dank's theory right that right uh that it's there's a reason there's an underlying reason in the numbers that is maybe coming from the front office or from some sort of analysis that's saying that it it makes sense to to you know give up the platoon advantage against whatever it is pitchers who are reliant on their change-ups

and that's a favorable matchup even if you're giving away the platoon advantage. And there was some suggestion that there's something like that going on with Young, right? Like something with sliders or what was yeah well the background that is that uh d-rays bay pointed out that um young had put about twice as many sliders in play this year off of right handers than matt choice and uh i talked i sort of got into that a little bit with them and Jonah Carey, who was also making that point. And that's a tricky thing because, I mean, that's suggestive, right? You look at that and you say, oh, well, okay, so Young is clearly not overmatched against right-handed sliders, which, to be honest, surprised me because if you'd asked me to say something about Delman Young,

I would have guessed based on his profile that he probably is terrible against right-handed sliders but he's not he puts them in play he also swings at them way more than than Joyce which you might consider suggestive as well but I I don't know I I kind of feel like there's this on the one hand I I do want to give Manning credit because if let if we assume that that's maybe a piece of evidence he looked at, it is evidence, or at least it's data, and it's a little bit more in-depth analysis than just a strict platoon split. On the other hand, you're really splitting the data fine to look at that, and it seems worrisome and unless it's something that was true of young and in previous seasons i did they look at that at all do you know or i i don't know

and maybe maybe tampa did and maybe it's a maybe it's something where they the the rays have looked at it in you know in huge data blocks looking at comparable hitters or something like that right but i mean generally speaking i would say that the danger with a guy like Madden who gets this reputation, and it always sort of felt like the danger with Lurus, and really truthfully, it's the danger with pundits in general. Anybody who kind of gets this reputation as being smart is that you start overextending your kind of perceived wisdom right this idea that you're gonna you get overconfident in your conclusions and i would say that a hundred sliders um against right handers

um is exactly the sort of uh sample that you would really want to be careful about thinking that you have any insight into. Yeah, it's like not suggesting that the Rays did. It's a more sophisticated form of the same mistake that that other managers make. Right. Just looking at looking at an 0 for 10 against a pitcher or something. It's diving deeper into the data, but, you know, too deep or not deep enough for making the same small, simple mistake, if that's what's going on. Yeah, exactly.

There's sort of a novelty to it that can maybe convince you that it's smart. But exactly, as you say, you've got the same data problems that you have if you're just looking at he's 3 for 13 against the pitcher or something like that. Yeah, so I don't know. against the pitcher or something like that. Yeah. So I don't know. It's kind of hard to imagine him making those mistakes and yet being so smart sometimes. I mean, it seems like he's not susceptible to a lot of those errors that managers make. But then for him to just say that he's playing the hot hand or something is just the most typical mistake that managers seem to make. So when he says it, it almost makes me think that there's some deeper reason that they don't want to give away.

But it's very possible that I'm just giving him too much credit. It's also possible that we're making too much out of one decision I mean generally speaking you want to look for a sound process that is consistent in its methodology but I mean the fact is that you know and once it gets to the postseason he only really gets one shot at this and there's probably a lot of, there's probably a lot of details he's considering. Um, and he has to essentially make a decision with imperfect information. He's to some degree, he has to guess, he has to guess who's more confident, who's more,

you know, I mean, hotness is both something that you should mostly avoid, but probably not totally ignore. Right. It's not, it's not a hundred percent irrelevant. Um, you know, Matt Joyce had a completely awful September. Is that data? It's data. It's just not data that you want to base everything on. And Joe Maddon, unfortunately, he doesn't get to make a thousand decisions and, uh, hope that they even out. He's got to decide one day, like it's one day that, that everything is riding even out he's got to decide one day like it's one day that that everything is riding on and he's got to decide and it's it's hard probably for any decision that you

make in a one day uh sample to to maybe necessarily hold up to scrutiny yeah i don't know i'm not giving up on him or anything like that i tend tend to I think that I think that with with Madden there, I Madden has I feel like I have so much respect for Madden that my tendency is to want to find the reasons that he makes the decision instead of finding the reasons to criticize them. finding the reasons to criticize them. And that's probably the philosophy that we should have for all managers and that we don't have enough. So I actually don't feel guilty about having that, that tendency toward men. I think that like, ideally I would like myself to have that attitude toward more managers because, because they really do have, I mean, they usually do, when you get them candid, they usually do have pretty good reasons that you, or at least they have one reason you didn't think of. They reasons might be garbage but there's almost always something that you didn't know um and it's probably the fallacy is on our end imagining that we know everything that they're

considering yeah good point all right uh what were you going to talk about you're scouting uh yeah so you're a scout now i am not a scout now can i ask you one question about scouting okay um on a 2080 scale i was wondering how would you rate the recurring joke that i've been using about the 2080 scale Um, probably like a solid 65. I like, I like it. All right. Uh, so people are curious about this. I mean, we both know that, that people really like prospects and people really like reading about prospects and listening about prospects. And we, we don't usually supply that information because we don't usually have it. So people have been asking me what players I've been seeing and what players I've liked. So I figured I'd mention one position player and one pitcher who are maybe my favorites from this first week.

And maybe not the best prospects. Like I've seen some name brand prospects kind of in short bursts. Like I mentioned Frazier and I've seen, I saw Michael Inouye for a couple innings and Trevor Story and Billy McKinney and a few guys like that. But I think my favorite prospects so far were two people that I had not been aware of before I came down here and I'm not a prospect expert by any means and prospect experts would have been aware of these people but I was impressed by them because I hadn't really heard of them and we saw so much mediocrity early in the program and the reports we were writing were all like fringy major leaguers bench guys utility potential uh org guys and then we saw some people who were a little more exciting than that so the first the first guy i really like the position player is and i'm not sure how you

pronounce it but first name is uh gioscar i guess it's like oscar with with a k and then with a gi in front with a it's like a geo and an oscar combined the k is in in place of the c yes uh so gioscar amaya uh he is he's a 20 year old venezuelan uh he is a cubs prospect and he's a 20-year-old Venezuelan. He is a Cubs prospect, and he's a second baseman, which kind of, I guess, makes you worried because there aren't really that many great second base prospects. But he was really impressive. The scouting bureau that runs this program is a part of Major League Baseball, and so all the teams that we go to see kind of are very accommodating

when we go to see their park. They arrange everything so that infield practice and outfield practice is right before the game so we can watch that first. And he immediately stood out in infield. He doesn't have an incredible arm, but his transfers is really quick and he turns a double play really, really quickly. And he made this like shoe top flip play that was almost a glacius-esque in infield. Uh, and so all of us

were kind of pressed up against the fence watching him in infield. And then in the game, he, uh, made two diving plays at second that were pretty impressive, and he looked really good at the plate, and he hit a home run. And he's not a tiny guy. He's listed at 5'11", 175. So everything we saw from him that day made him look like a really exciting prospect. He was just the most impressive person on the field. Just the most impressive person on the field. So then I went back to my hotel room and I looked up his stats.

And it was not what I was expecting to see. So he spent the whole season in Kane County in the Midwest League. That's A-ball. And he played 117 games and 516 plate appearances. He hit.252,.329,.369 with five home runs and 22 errors at second base. He stinks. Yeah, so that's what I would have concluded if I had just looked at his stat line and not seen him play. And it's not really, I mean, 20-year-old in old an a ball is not like especially young for the league it's not like he was playing against much much older players or anything um so so i kind of wonder i guess either way it's sort of a valuable lesson right it's either the guy who's

whose stats are misleading and his he's gonna put everything together and he's just sort of raw and he's going to break out any season now. Or he's the guy who you just happen to see him in a game on the best day of his life or his tools just don't translate against tougher competition for whatever reason. So I wasn't really sure which one of those things he was. I mean, the, the instructors here were, were pretty impressed by him too. So it wasn't just, wasn't just me and the other people who don't know anything. Um, so I asked a couple scouting people with teams about him and just mentioned that I saw him and liked him and they both were really enthusiastic about liking him. Uh, and one of them said that, like I said, I kind of had a prospect crush liking him uh and one of them said that like i said i kind of had a prospect crush on him and one of them said that he did too and then the other one

showed me part of the report that he had filed on him and he said he was going to be a future everyday player so uh so if i was fooled by him then then I guess everyone was fooled by him. So I don't really... Yeah, and if he had not made the Iglesias-type play, would it have changed? Do you think it would have gotten the same attention? Maybe not quite the same. That was pretty impressive. But all the other things he did were also pretty impressive.

So even before he made that play, people were like starring him on their little scorecard just based on the way he was fielding and throwing. He just kind of looked impressive. So that's my name, I guess. So that's someone that I never would have looked at his stats and said, this guy's going to be good. Although he did hit a little bit in the lower levels, it seems like.

So I don't know. Maybe there was something going on last season. But that's my position player guy so far. And the pitcher is Brandon Bonilla of the Bonilla-Binillas. He is Bonilla's son. He is Barry Bonds' godson. And he was... Wait, so that means that... Does that mean he's Willie Mays' great godson? I don't... Can you do great god people? I'm not sure. I'm not sure if you can do that.

So he was the starter for Grand Canyon University. We went to see a college game a couple days ago and that was our first amateur scouting experience and they'd been telling us that when you go to an amateur game high school or college it's it's totally different from from pro scouting and pro scouting everyone has been signed everyone has been drafted, everyone convinced some scout at some time that he had some sort of chance. Whereas when you go to an amateur game, there might be one guy on the field who could be a prospect if you're lucky. And the whole process is different where when you go to a program, you're looking for players who can make it and you're looking for reasons why they can make it. And when you're going to an amateur game, you're looking for reasons why they can make it um and and when

you're going to an amateur game you're just kind of crossing guys off and saying oh he he has no chance his his swing is ugly or whatever he has no stuff um and so that was kind of the case in in this game that the two starters were sort of the only interesting guys and one of them was barely interesting but but this one brandon bonilla uh was very impressive and i think he's he's uh he's 19 he's a junior i don't think he's eligible until next year but uh if i were someone who followed amateur prospects, which I'm really not, I would keep an eye on him because he's very large. He looks a lot like David Price. He's got kind of the same height, same build. He's a lefty. His pitching motion in stills, I'm looking on Google Images, looks a lot like Dontrell Willis. Yeah, that was my comp. When I first saw him, I said Dontrell,

and my instructor preferred Price because he kind of looks a little more like Price, and Price was just pitching that day, I guess, so he was kind of on everyone's mind. But yeah, Dontrell was the first guy I thought of. He kind of has a really long pitching motion. He gets his arm really extended far out there, and he's 6'4", so he finishes way out in front of the mound, which seems like a good thing. And he hit 95,

which is impressive. So I gave him a present 6 fastball with a future 7, because it looked like it had some movement, and I figured maybe he'll get a little stronger. He's got the good bloodlines, and he looked athletic and looked sort of like he was still filling out. We didn't see his breaking ball because the team just wasn't throwing breaking balls that day. They were throwing fastballs and change-ups, and he also threw a splitter. It just looked pretty good to me. so i i like him brandon but yeah but ben did you shake his hand because as we know from previous episodes you can't scout a guy without shaking his hand i did not shake his hand no but i have been i have been told that that's

important firm handshake and you want him to look you in the eye um it's interesting actually that the the comps i know that uh there's sort of a thing where scouts will comp same race like race to race like if they're putting a comp on a a black player they will choose a black player and a white player they'll choose a white player and i know that some people kind of make fun of that um like i think on up and in kevin and jason would always make fun of that and Like I think on up and in, Kevin and Jason would always make fun of that. And my impression of it was that it was sort of a subconscious thing that scouts would do. And I know there are certain people who will go out of their way to do like, you know, one race to a different race so as to counteract this tendency. At scout school, I've been told explicitly to do this um i don't know

whether it's my instructor or whether it's the whole bureau's policy but like if i see a white player i'm supposed to put a white comp on him weird yeah well super weird yeah so i was gonna ask what your opinion of that was because it's super weird it is weird at the same time you can like the explanation of it like sort of makes sense in a way like the the idea is that you're putting this comp on a player for you know your scouting director who's reading the report he's never seen the player and you want to convey what this player looks like. And so you want to basically get as close as you can with a physical resemblance because you want the guy who's reading the report and has never seen the player to sort of be able to picture that player in his head. player in his head and so but you're but you're you're giving data you're giving information that is that is that is a social construct has no particular value and can only prejudice other

people that's why i not all not only will i not do a same race comp i actually won't comp a guy against the same position so like this guy i would only call i would probably comp him with todd frazier well if i do that i won't i won't graduate from scout school i have no choice yeah that's interesting we'll have to i i mean i'm it is interesting because i i didn't realize that it was something that people were actually instructed to do i thought it was just kind of a you know like a lazy thing like oh right i called him don tro willis yeah right uh but at least for me so far it's been actual instruction to do that um so i don't know it struck me as kind of strange but i could yeah kind of understand the rationale but yeah i don't know yeah can i can i go back to joe madden before we leave sure i have i ever

talked about umbrella man on this podcast no don't think so so the director errol morris did a thing for the new york times online once about umbrella man umbrella man was this guy on the uh on the zaparuder film in the jf cannon jfk assassination who's holding a black umbrella. And this guy, it's so weird that he's holding this black umbrella right in front of the spot where JFK gets shot because it's not a rainy day. He's the only person in the entire thing with an umbrella. He looks super duper suspicious and he's right in front of the killing, right? They put guns in those umbrellas sometimes, didn't they? Well, I'm going to get there. So, so of course there's no reason for him to have an umbrella. It's incredibly suspicious. And so for years he was the center of conspiracy theories.

And one of the theories was that he was a, a signal, um, that he signaled the shooters. And the more radical theory is that, yeah, he actually had a gun in that umbrella or he had like a poison dart to sort of paralyze the president. And so you think about this from every angle and you can't possibly come up with any rational reason why this guy would have an umbrella. And so of course, of course he's part of the conspiracy. Of course he's part of the conspiracy. Of course he is. And Errol Morris talked about how, in fact, he was there, and this came out many years later in 1978. The umbrella man actually came forward and testified. And he was actually out there with the umbrella as a protest of JFK's father, who had been a supporter of Neville Chamberlain and this black

umbrella was actually supposed to be a a quiet heckling of JFK for his father and so the point is the point Errol Morris was was making and that that I was trying to make with Madden is that there is always always an explanation you have never considered. And so, yeah. So that's the Umbrella Man. Everybody should look him up. Umbrella Man's great, and Errol Morris is even better.

All right. So that's it for today. Send us some emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com because it's the only thing keeping Sam going. So you need to send us some more emails. And we'll be back tomorrow.