Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 335: Your Questions, Our Answers

Episode Date: November 22, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about switching positions between batters, specialist scouts, risk-averse skippers, a team of top prospects, and more.

I know that I'm a broke girl with Swiss positions, Swiss positions. I know that I'm a broke girl with Swiss positions. Good morning and welcome to episode 335 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. How are you? Hi. Good. Can I note real quick that we ended the Wednesday show, I believe,

with me asking if you knew of any teams that had hired McKinsey, the consulting firm. And somebody reminded us that the Astros GM, Jeff Luno, spent five years working there. And another listener wrote to say that when he worked at mckinsey um he the listener uh they did a lot of work for sports franchises including mlb teams nothing game related mostly marketing uh spend sorry mostly marketing spend effectiveness and dynamic ticket pricing projects of course he could have just been saying that. But I trust him.

Okay. Jeez. Gotta be careful what you believe. Strangely hostile response. Yeah. All right. So today is the listener email show. I've picked out several pretty good ones again this week.

So I guess I'll just start reading them. This one comes from Gabe. He says, I have started the book, Dollar Sign on the Muscle, which is now available from Baseball Perspectives. In the first chapter, they mentioned that the Orioles had a specialist scout,

Bill Wareley, who focused exclusively on pitching. Does that still happen today? If I were specialist scout, Bill Wehrle, who focused exclusively on pitching. Does that still happen today? If I were a scout, I would want to be one someday. I would think I could offer more on scouting a prospect for an infielder because that's what I was as a player. Would teams get better insight on a player if they had specialized scouts, or would that mean an increase in scouts needed

and organizations could not afford the extra payroll? I'd like everybody to ask a lot of scouting questions, because I get to sit back on those and just listen to Ben talk about scout school. Right. Yeah, I don't think scout school helps me answer this one. I think there are specialist scouts. I don't think their job description, I don't think their business card would say pitching scout or hitting scout. It's not that specific. And I think scouts are encouraged to be able to scout all players just because it's much more efficient. efficient. But I think that there are people whose opinions about either pitchers or hitters or certain types of players are valued more. I spoke to a scouting director once and he was

telling me that he has certain guys on his staff who, if he wants an opinion on a pitcher or something, they're interested in acquiring this player, he will delegate a certain scout. He won't just assign it randomly. He'll say, I value this guy's opinion about pitchers more than this guy's. And so in a way, there are specialists. there are specialists. And as for being able to scout a prospect who played the position that you played, I guess there might be something to that. But from what I've heard, you're sort of encouraged to forget what you knew as a player or what you thought you knew as a player. At least I've heard some scouts say that that was sort of the first thing that they were taught when they were taken under someone's wing

or something was just sort of, you know, forget whatever you thought about evaluating players as a player and sort of relearn all of that information. So I don't know. I could imagine being more comfortable evaluating things that you did, but I don't know. Again, it's sort of like being a hitting coach or someone. You don't have to be good at hitting. You don't have to have been a good hitter yourself to teach it, and you probably don't necessarily need to have been a pitcher or a good pitcher

to scout pitchers either so i have i have a question for you i i i don't know how hard it is to be a scout like i know how hard it would be for me or you to be a scout uh because we don't have anywhere near that kind of uh you know like understanding of of what the game is like at that level right so it would take a lot of years of observation and learning and listening, and it would be something that you would pick up as a skill. But for the average major league player or even minor league player who plays, say, past the age of 30 at these high levels, are they all pretty much qualified from day one to scout? Or is it a thing where it's a very particular skill set slash personality type that only a few are chosen for this? Do you think that almost every player, if they were willing to spend a year being not that good at it maybe, could be an average scout by the end of that year?

I would say probably not. Really? I mean, I think they'd certainly have a leg up over you and I, you or I, but yeah, I don't know. I mean, they're players who just are really naturally talented and they don't analyze what they're doing or what other players are doing. I mean, I'm sure they must have some sense of which players are better than other players, right? Because they faced pitchers who were harder to hit. But I don't know.

I think it's sort of a mindset that certain people are cut out for and others aren't. I mean, obviously, there's the interest level. You have to be really dedicated to want to do that. Um, but I, I don't know. I mean, uh, you can, I mean, uh, well, we're announcing it at BP today that, that Zach Mortimer, who's been one of our, our prospect staff members for the last year or so, has been hired as a scout. And he was a player. I mean, Zach is... I didn't know that. Yeah, well, he played in college.

I might have known that. Yeah, he's basically college age. I think he's 24. So it's not as if he already has years of scouting experience built up, but he is, he's a scout at age 24, which is, I think, uncommon, but not unprecedented. So obviously, they must feel that, that he picked up something as a player or was just predisposed to be able to tell which players are good um so i don't know i i doubt you could just take all of his teammates and have them be just as good at it as as he is yeah well i'm not uh yeah okay fair enough but um yeah but that that's not the

that's not what I was positing. I mean, I was positing the, you know, like, could you take of the, you know, of the, you know, 25 players who are currently on the Cardinals, could you take all 25 of them? I don't know. I mean, it sounds like you think no. So that's fine. Yeah, well. I don't know. I'm asking because I think you would know better than I would. So that's good to know.

I don't know if I would. Yeah, I don't know. You hear certain players talk about players who are super perceptive, you know, like how players will talk about, like, Barry Bonds being able to read pitchers, just look at them once and know that they don't have the confidence to throw a certain pitch or pick up on pitch tipping or something. And I don't know that every player has that kind of perceptive skill. And obviously there aren't many of them who would want to be on the road and not getting paid a lot, looking at players all the time. Yeah.

All right. Okay, let's do this one from Matt Trueblood. Why doesn't the better defensive corner outfielder on a given team change the position he plays based on the handedness and tendencies of the batter at the plate? And Matt actually brought some interesting data to the discussion here. Good for him. Yeah.

In 2013, batters pulled 10,240 fly balls, of which 3,112 left the park. They hit 17,849 fly balls to the opposite field, of which 518 left the park. Batters were less than half as likely to hit flies to their pull field and have them stay in the park as to hit them the other way and have them stay in the park. I'll acknowledge that it's likely that the pulled flies, even the ones staying in the park, are likely to be hit harder on average. But the league's line drive rate to the opposite field was higher than the same to the pull field. So on balance, it seems like you'd want the better, rangier anyway, of your defensive corner guys playing the batter's opposite field as often as possible. There are exceptions to this rule. Jose Bautista, for instance, is a different kind of hitter, but most guys are actually fairly typical in this regard. I know that corner outfielders are selected for

offense, not defense, at least in a perfect world. I know that corner outfielders are selected for offense, not defense, at least in a perfect world. I know that learning to play both angles and make constant transitions would be somewhat difficult. On balance, though, I think teams are giving away outs by failing to make sure that their best defenders get the most opportunities to field the ball. What do you think? Well, you couldn't do it every batter because it would quickly be outlawed, I think. I don't know. I mean, if you could do it fast enough, maybe, but then you don't want your outfielders running literally a couple of miles in a game unnecessarily. So, you know, if they went at a leisurely pace and it slowed down the game at all, they would just outlaw it.

It would, I think, you know, if it weren't outlawed, it would be outlawed by, it would be un-outlawed by unwritten rules. Like, it would just be one of those things that you don't do. So, you could do by inning, though. It seems like it'd be pretty easy to do this by inning, looking at, you know, the four guys who are coming up. And you could probably do that. I don't know why nobody's done it. It'd be interesting to see because there probably would be enough data to look at this to some degree, but it's conceivable that changing the position you play might have some effect in your, you know,

sort of getting used to the light and the angle and the perception each night. I mean, it'd be interesting to see after guys change positions in the middle of the game, how they do the next inning. You might be able to, you know, create some sort of range stat that looks at that. But it does seem reasonable. It does seem like the sort of thing a defensive coordinator might start dictating. I mean, it feels like, I mean, here's another one. What if you have a guy like Mike Trout, for instance, hypothetically, you know, he's a plus plus outfielder. But hypothetically, he might a plus-plus outfielder.

But hypothetically, he might also be a plus-plus shortstop. We don't know. He might be an elite defensive shortstop. Or if you don't buy that, maybe Angleton Simmons is an elite outfielder. That seems reasonable. We know he's got an elite arm, and he can chase pop-ups, and he's smart. So maybe you start switching your shortstop. You have two shortstops and one's good and one sucks. Based on whether it's a fly ball hitter or depending on the situation, if it's a situation where extra bases is a bigger

deal than a single or double play is a bigger deal or something like that. You could conceivably just treat all seven guys as like all, all roamers. And you, you set them up just like you would set up a, you know, football defense or something. Well, I don't really know if you would do that for a football defense, but you know, basically they are all, they're all positioned, you know, for the situation, but that's even crazier. Midway through that, I started thinking this isn't very good. Well, yeah, that takes all the same objections that you would have to the first idea and makes them much more extreme and probably important. But yeah, it does seem like something that at least in certain cases you would want to do.

And it's true that, as Matt says, corner outfielders are not usually great defensive players. Most teams probably don't have that great a mismatch in defensive skill between right and left field. I mean, there are some teams that do. If you're a team that has young Carl Crawford in left field or Brett Gardner in left field or something like that, then yes. But I would guess that most teams, there's not an enormous difference.

And then once you factor in that, as you said, the angles and the light, and maybe it takes some time to adjust to that, maybe that kind of washes out some of it. I guess what I was sort of getting at, and like I said, I gave up on it midway through, but I like the idea of just getting rid of the idea of positions, of embracing the idea that positions are a social construct and that besides the catcher who has to be there and besides the pitcher who has lots of rules that actually require him to face batters and to do things, the rest are just fielders. There's nothing inherent about playing shortstop. You could play shortstop from left

field if you want to. And so I like things that break down the positional construct and have everybody moving around and doing whatever they want to to feel best. Now, I bring this up because Mike Bowman from Grantland and Crashburn Alley recently came out in favor of outlawing the shift. And he promised to write about it, and I'm sure he did, and I didn't see the follow-up. But he thinks that you should really strictly restrict how far players can roam from their position and that you shouldn't be allowed to have three guys on one side of the infield because baseball is two guys on one side of the infield because, you know, baseball is two guys on one side of the infield. And, you know, it creates sort of an unfair defense or something.

And so I guess it's like a philosophical choice that we never really had to consider until like right now. But right now we do have to consider because baseball is um you know it's at least it seems like at least going to consider doing more extreme things that change the way the game looks and that changes you know the way that you envision nine men on a field um so we all have to be in favor or against um against this this idea so so which is it? What are you? I think I like the anything-goes approach for now. If every team starts shifting all the time

and no one ever gets a single, then maybe you have to do something about it. But for now, I say do whatever you can to get an edge do you think that there are many people who are on um like uh bowman's side or do you think this is a is he actually is his conservative uh idea actually the radical one i think it is uh because i don't know i could see some old school traditionalist types thinking it's silly to be shifting all over the field. But it's also something that's always been done, at least occasionally. So, yeah, I would think that he would be in the minority there.

It's also if you're switching corner to corner from better to better, it's kind of a constant reminder that you're bad at defense. I guess if you're a left fielder, you kind of know that already, but if your team deems it important enough for you to walk back and forth across the field every batter because the other guy is so much better than you, it's kind of demoralizing. No? Yeah, sure. I agree. It's kind of demoralizing. No? Yeah, sure. I agree.

Yeah, I wouldn't like that. All right. Let's do... Michael says, Yesterday, hang up and listen. Had an interview with a high school football coach who almost never punts or attempts field goals and almost always attempts an onside kick after scoring. However, the conventional wisdom in football at any level is to do these things very

rarely. He uses this approach based on cost-benefit analyses, both formal and informal, that suggest that the advantage of the low-risk strategies and the disadvantages of the high-risk strategies are overstated, etc., etc. Is there a baseball equivalent? The best example I can come up with is how managers use their bullpen. I think having a bullpen full of pitchers who almost never go more than one inning isn't the optimal way to manage a bullpen, but any manager who tried a different approach would be risking his job. This doesn't seem quite as open and shut as the football examples.

Can you come up with any better examples um i think that's probably the the best example is the like the closer on the tie game on the road thing or just only bringing in your closer and save situations is probably the best example as opposed to you know it, it's, yeah, it is the best example. And it's interesting because when I saw that Grant Lynn thing on that coach and when I also heard that coach on Hang Up and Listen, a lot of the language that he was using about why coaches don't do this and, you know, what his fears were or, like, sort of what the response has been, it actually sounds almost like it's

taken from things that people were saying about closers early in the post-Moneyball world. I feel like this was just an accepted idea that managers were too risk averse because they were going to have to... It's a lot harder to explain why your unconventional thing doesn't work than it is to explain why your conventional thing didn't work and I don't know if that's true anymore it feels like baseball has become a fairly safe place to to do to do you know somewhat unconventional things it's the it's the it's the the teams that are too conventional that get made fun of, not the ones that try weird things. I actually think that the reason that they

don't do the closer stuff, the reason that we understand that they don't do the closer stuff has really changed. We don't really talk about them being cowards anymore and unafraid to talk to beat writers we really talk a lot more about the idea that the um the players themselves really crave that um predictable role and that you would have a hard time uh with your clubhouse and that you would have a hard time um you know perhaps getting optimal performance and and truthfully, it is somewhat of a factor. You don't want to have your best pitcher warming up and not coming into the game. That's fairly well understood to be a bad thing to do.

And so the predictability of bullpen rolls does have that at least one benefit. So I think that's the best example, but I'm not sure that, that it is necessarily still a great example. Yeah. And, and the other example I was thinking of is similar. The idea that you can't take out a starter who's pitching well, um, because you know,

what we, we talked about it a lot during the playoffs about managers seeming to have slow hooks and not really factoring in how much less effective a starter is each time through the lineup. But it's still seen as sort of unacceptable to take out a starter who's, you know, who's cruising along, even if he's about to face the lineup for the third time, he's thrown a bunch of pitches. So that, that I guess is partially this, partially the risk aversion and not wanting to get second guessed. Uh, but also I guess more of a, an interpersonal thing where you, you couldn't possibly win, you know, 15 extra games a year by doing this, but someone might say, you know, lineup, you know, not having the kind of wacky, unconventional, optimized lineup that, you know, we know adds a few runs a year, but nobody would ever think to do.

I mean, we don't even have that conversation anymore, really. We don't even talk about optimized lineup. We just sort of accept that the super radical one isn't going to happen. But even that, it's not – I don't think it's a fear of being second-guessed thing at all. And I mention that just because when Jose Bautista batted second this year, it was sort of shocking how uncontroversial it was. I mean, he's clearly their big power hitter. He would never have batted second in virtually any other generation.

I think that I did that thing on number two hitters, you know, putting your best hitter in number two. And the closest comp I could come up with was Eddie Matthews in 1959 and that was because they had Hank Aaron. That was really weird, but it wasn't even a story. It wasn't even a news story. It wasn't like he had to answer beat writers for four days about whether it's going to

work or not. He just did it. There was a blurb that day and they all moved on so i don't know that there's a a real like uh uh i don't know that there's a there's there's ever going to be like a huge response to to some of these little tweaks there's not i mean the thing about the not punting and doing onside kick every time is that it's like more radical than almost anything you could do in baseball well i don't even know what a like even if you get away from from good strategies what would be a an equivalent

thing to do in baseball like batting your when i batting your batting your pitcher lead off to get him out of the way like here's something like if you had some crazy idea that you should yeah at your pitcher lead like third so that he's protected or so I don't know I don't even know what would be an equivalently radical idea yeah I was thinking that also when when I was listening to that interview he's I mean what he does is like almost not even football anymore he's he's like taking away I mean you know like he has no need of of kickers like he doesn't punt he doesn't do field goals he's he's making positions redundant irrelevant and just sort of getting rid of of very common plays i i was trying to think of a baseball equivalent to that and i couldn't really

come up yeah forfeiting any game you're down by six, maybe. Like if you decide that it takes more out of your team than it does good, if you forfeit any time you're down by six and you just walk off the field, it's the first inning and you're like, we're done, boys. Like that would be maybe equally radical. Yeah, that would probably be more radical because at least he's trying to win. That's the goal of his unorthodox strategy. You know what surprised me about that is I didn't realize that there weren't lots of coaches doing this. I was under the impression that high school coaches and maybe even college coaches were doing this all over the place.

I see Bill Barnwell's tweets all day, and he's always tweeting about not punting, and I figured someone had listened to him. Someone's doing it, right? I was tweeting about not punting, and I figured someone had listened to it. Someone's doing it, right? I was shocked. I mean, it's sort of like that Malcolm Gladwell story about the girls who did the full court press all the time. And you're like, wow, why isn't everyone doing this? And then a bunch of people are like, no, no, everyone does this. Even the teams they were playing in the tournament, they were doing this too. I don't know why Malcolm Gladwell didn't say it.

I don't know if that's true either. Maybe people were just defensive. But yeah, I was sort of shocked that this coach is the only one that's doing it. I was vaguely under the impression that the punt had fallen out of fashion among almost everybody's heart. Yeah. I was also wondering kind of why he wants to talk about it because it's sort of the Billy Bean money ball trap where once you tell people about it, you get a personal reputation boost, but people start copying you and your stuff doesn't work anymore.

So I guess the benefit to him is probably, he's something of a national figure now. Presumably he'll get a job out of it or get a book deal out of it or something. But if everyone else copies him, then it won't work as well anymore. All right. Let's do this one from Joe. Come on, Ben. He's in a completely different place than Billy Bean.

He has such a different set of incentives you're wondering why the regular guy in Arkansas who's now on like the Today Show and is considered a football coaching genius you're wondering why he wanted recognition I was also wondering like I wondered whether you know an NFL owner listening to that interview would think we should hire this guy like is that one thing that he does enough to make you think that he could coach at a higher level or is it just well we should steal his idea and do it because his idea is you know you don't need someone with specialized skills to implement that idea you can you can just copy that idea from him. I guess the fact that he does it and was an

original thinker and brave enough to do it is a good thing. But I wondered whether he would get hired for a good job because of that or just kind of have someone else steal his idea. I guess it's... I think there's a tradition of high school coaches doing really radical things and then getting hired as college coaches. So my guess is he'll get hired as a college coach. Okay. This one's from Joe. I was listening to your podcast the other day on the Twins Farm System. This got me thinking. If we take the top prospect in all of baseball at each position and put them on one team, then pit them against MLB teams, how do you think they would fare? I don't know if we've answered this one specifically. We've answered a lot of, if you took this kind of player and put them in the major leagues, how would they do?

We've done that pretty much from every level to like from T-ball to, I don't know, AAA. I don't know whether we've done top prospects specifically. So the thing about top prospects is you're not necessarily talking about the most major league ready prospect. So at certain positions you could have a guy in A-ball or something who has the highest ceiling but is not ready at all. So you'd have a bunch of those guys, and then you'd have a bunch of double AAA people

who are about to be promoted. My guess is that, is this asking for just one game or a season? Because my guess is that the depth of the prospect team would be significantly better, but that they wouldn't have quite the starting lineup or necessarily the one starting pitcher. Is there any prospect who is currently qualified for prospect status that is a top 20 pitcher, do you think?

I doubt it. I don't really remember. I don't remember who's got prospect status. Walker has prospect status. He might be. Maybe. Maybe. At times, certainly, there have been.

I don't know if there's anyone right now. Yeah, well, like a year ago, there were like six. Yeah. So, I don't know. so uh i don't know i would say i would take the prospect team i'd take the prospect team uh over uh in one game i'd take the prospect team over the median major league team and in a season i'd take the prospect team overall but maybe three or four teams hmm uh yeah I don't know if I would because I feel like you'd...

I mean, half of the roster would be people who are not really even close to the majors, right? I guess most top prospects... Yeah, I'm not taking the top prospects. I'm getting to pick one player from each organization. Or basically, I'm choosing my team. I'm not just taking the top 25 prospects because, yeah, I don't want a 17-year-old in the top. If you did do what Joe is asking and took the top prospect at each position, man, I don't know.

Maybe that would be – It's hard to even know. We would have to look. We would have to look to see because that would be all – we would just be answering a question about age based on their age. But if I get to pick my minor league dream team, Then I would, what I said. Okay. Okay. All right.

Let's run it. Let's run it. Let's get somebody to run it. Yeah. Okay. Last one. I think I did that once with, I did that once comparing the futures game roster

to whatever the terrible team at the time was, comparing Pocota projections or translations or something, and I think they came out better than the terrible team. Yeah, I was going to do this too at one point. I planned to do it, and I started building up the roster and got distracted. All right. Good question. Yeah, last one from Eric Hartman.

If a team was very determined and the player was all right with it, would it be possible to keep a player's contract terms a secret so we wouldn't know how many years it was or how much it was for? I recall that being attempted with John Farrell's contract with the Jays, but as a manager, it's obviously a very different scenario. Well, I think that the problem is that, if I understand this correctly, teams, because of the luxury tax threshold implications and because of arbitration and because of all these things that depend on their salaries being known, I think that a player's contract has to be known by all the other teams and by the players association.

So there's just too many people to keep it secret and there's people who have no incentive to keep it secret. I mean, the Braves have no particular incentive, for instance, to tell a reporter what Jeremy Guthrie's contract is. But they also have no incentive not to. And so if you're close to somebody on the Braves or on the Orioles or whatever, they know it. They could probably tell you. With managers, I feel like it does happen. There are managers, I think, whose salaries are not on COTS and certainly GMs. We know very, very few. I tried to find out one time what the median GM's salary is and there's like two or three that

are public I think. So yeah, it's hard to do. It's also possible, like some teams have to actually report their financials for various reasons. Like I just read, I forget where, that the Mariners have to report their financials because of some public finance thing with their stadium or something. So I imagine that those contracts might actually be part of the public record. Well, it actually, I mean, it used to be the case that no one knew what players were making. those contracts might actually be part of the public record. Well, it actually, I mean, it used to be the case that no one knew what players were making. And Marie Chess was one of the people or maybe the person who was most responsible for bringing, you know, shedding some light on that area and did a lot of digging and developed sources who would tell him these things.

So I actually remember that he wrote about this earlier this year in one of his few columns that I think didn't have any digs at sabermetrics at all. He said the way the system worked and still works is that once a club and a player agree on a contract, the club submits the details to the commissioner's office and the player's agent provides the details to the union. The designated people in each office then compare the details and if they are the same, the deal is done. So as you said, a lot of people get these details and it would be difficult to really clamp down on them. But it used to be the case that no one knew and no one wanted to share this info. He says at that time,

and he's talking about like beginning of free agency, 70s, no one, not club or league executives or players, there were no agents, or union officials leaked salary information. That stuff was treated more secretly than classified government reports. Clubs didn't want their other players to find out what a particular player was making because it would, how could general managers lie to player X by saying, how can we pay you that much when we're only playing player Y this much, which apparently they actually did.

But players were also equally reluctant to have their salaries known. And he tells a story about Phil Necro signing with the Yankees as a free agent after the 1984 season. And his $500,000 salary was reported in the Times by Chess, and he was furious. And he called the Players Association to complain that his salary had been leaked. And he called the Players Association to complain that his salary had been leaked. And so eventually people just got so good at finding leaks and uncovering this information that it was just sort of announced as a matter of course. And I think the AP still is, I think, the main source for contract info and just sort of churns out all of the contract info as it comes. So I guess it would be very difficult to make it secret again. But it once was that way.

If I were a player, I probably... I mean, there's no upside to a player and everyone knowing what he's making because if he's making a lot then that just sort of makes him a target and fans complain complain about how much he's making and uh if he's not making much he doesn't really get anything out of out of that so i'm sure they'd they'd probably all be happier if we didn't know any of that information but the the cat is out of the bag. All right. So we are finished for the week.

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