Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 343: Some Questions Asked

Episode Date: December 6, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the high-strikeout era, baseball with soccer scoring, unintentional walks and reaching on error, and more.

From the wonderful world of sports, we bring you Home Run Derby, where each week, the leading home run hitters of the major leagues will compete in a home run hitting contest. Good morning and welcome to episode 343 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. We are closing out the week with an email Friday. And this is not an email that we're going to answer, but I don't know if you saw, Ben,

did you see the email from some PR person who was trying to get us interested in low and in the dirt Ken Griffey Jr. and me, baseball star's former best friend exposes extortion and destruction and blistering new book i did not did i well i don't i i've gotten it multiple times maybe it came to to my account and not the podcast account but i just can't imagine a uh a uh as a scandal book that has less of an audience? Like, who is out there that just wants to read dirt on Ken Griffey Jr.?

Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't seem like they're finally going to get that guy. No, I mean, I think I would be much more interested in reading a tell-all book by Ken Griffey Jr.'s best friend about A-Rod, maybe. Sure. But not about Griffey. I don't want to see anybody say anything bad about Griffey. No. Yeah.

Go ahead. Yeah. No, that's it. That's the whole story. Okay. Well, I had an epiphany today while I was... i think i figured out what kind of players i like or what characteristics of players i like because i was writing about aoki yeah uh and i found myself falling for him i love it i was actually mad because that broke when my when my pupils were dilated. Yeah.

Aoki and Mujica are both guys I consider my guys. Yeah. And I couldn't write about either one of them. Yeah. So I think for me it's either, and I was thinking about Hannigan and Gentry because he wouldn't let me talk about them and why I like them. Hannigan and Gentry because he wouldn't let me talk about them and why I like them. And I think it's either players who do something unique, like they have one skill that is better, that no one else has, or they just have something that they can repeat and it just sets them apart from all the other players because most players

kind of you know are all just sort of a mass of of skills that are mostly the same and they have the same skills to a greater or lesser degree but people who do one unique thing are interesting and then i guess i like the the players who do something that just isn't captured by the stats that we usually look at and i don't know whether what that says about me that i like that that i i don't know like i like to feel superior or something for knowing those things about them or or what but uh but i think that's what it is yeah i also am uh am – the constant for my favorites also is generally one tool guys, people who are extremely good at one specific thing. And I think this has come up occasionally in email shows when we respond to some of these questions because I feel like people like specialization in sports. And baseball is a sport that has very little

specialization. But when I look at a guy like Nate Fryman, for instance, who is really great at one thing, he's been at 1,100 OPS against lefties every stop of his career and can't do anything else. I just feel like there's got to be a way that you could leverage all these one skills and hide all the other stuff and make a better baseball team. I like a vision of the sport in which there's more specialization rather than less. Yeah, me too all right so uh we're going to answer some questions um most of them are going to be from a guy named sean who gave us three questions and uh they're all good so um the first question is

in this new age of baseball where strikeout numbers are through the roof, who is the true benefactor? Is it the borderline pitcher who might otherwise be toiling away in AAA but is now able to hold down a roster spot? Or is it the strikeout-prone hitter who offers value in other areas and is no longer looked down upon because of his high strikeout rate? Or does anyone benefit any differently than they did before? Or does anyone benefit any differently than they did before? Well, this makes me think of one time that I was talking to Colin Wires when I was about to go on Clubhouse Confidential and talk about rising strikeout rates. And I think a lot of people have the idea that if strikeout rates are rising, then a player who makes contact is more valuable. And I was talking to Colin about this idea, and he thought it was the opposite,

that a player who strikes out a lot is better adapted for a high strikeout era, and that the rising strikeout rate tide raises everyone's strikeout era and and that that like the the the rising strikeout rate tide you know raises everyone's strikeout rate it's not like the according to to him it's not like the the contact hitters strike out less or that their strikeout rates will be affected less by a rising league average rate um and so a player who already is in the mold of a player who can succeed when there are a lot of strikeouts around and, you know, takes walks and hits homers or whatever,

will be able to survive the decreased contact better than someone who depends on contact and would be affected by that disproportionately. Yeah, so the question is, do the changes in the game adapt to the way the style is being played? Like if it were the case that, you know, as strikeouts rose, that ballparks would be built more to favor them or that rules in the game would be built kind of with, you know, accepting that strategy and, you know, maybe, you know, adapting to that strategy, then you could see it. My personal theory is that it's not exactly contact hitters. I don't think it's contact hitters, people with a natural contact ability that benefit. I think it's hitters that have a different contact strategy, particularly a swing early in the count strategy. Because the way I see it, basically, in a kind of general way, the sport is like a whole bunch of six-year-olds chasing a soccer ball and wherever the soccer ball goes, they go. And so if everybody is striking out

a lot more, the strategies will go, uh, we'll, we'll try to counter that. That will be, um, the way the game changes will be to counter, you know, the, the, the largest threat. And if the largest threat is the high strikeout, high home run hitter, or the high strikeout, high walk hitter, perhaps, maybe we'll just say the three, two true outcomes hitter, then the strategies of the game, the way the pitchers develop, the way the pitchers are selected to defeat them, the way that catchers call pitches, will all be, the way that defenses play, will all be geared toward battling that, right? Because that's, you're going to get your most money battling three true outcomes hitters if there are more three true outcomes hitters. So almost by definition, whatever approach goes counter to the prevailing defense will have some sort of edge.

So in this case, I would say that pitchers are more likely to throw strikes know to throw strikes early in the count maybe knowing that hitters aren't going to swing as much um and uh you know maybe defenses are more prone to uh to play uh in positions that are reflective of a sort of a more swing from the heels style of batting and so the the hitters that are swinging for line drives early in the count seem to have an edge, would have an edge. That's my theory. Okay, that makes sense. And what about pitchers then?

And, of course, the other, I mean, it depends what we mean by benefit. If the question is who benefits in the game that we're watching, that's one answer. If benefit is who has a 15-year career, whereas they might otherwise have been overlooked, then yes, it's definitely the Rob Deere type, right? I mean, there are probably dozens of guys who never had careers who would be making a few million dollars if they were playing in a in an era that forgave them their sins the way that this one does um so for pitchers um huh i

guess i don't know i huh i haven't thought about that yeah um neither have i i don't know. I haven't thought about that. Yeah, neither have I. I don't know. But Sean's suggestion, you know, is it the borderline pitcher who might otherwise be toiling away in AAA, that doesn't strike me as right because it's not like because pitchers on the whole are more effective you you you would just call up someone who's not as good because relative to the other pitchers he's still not as good um yeah strategically i'm not sure what the answer is i think in a larger sense that the pitchers that benefit the most are sixth inning relievers who are in much more demand in this environment than they would be, you know, in an environment where everybody was, you know, trying to Greg Maddux it out there. You know what I mean? It feels like I know that strikeouts don't actually add pitches the way that it sort of assumed that they do.

But still, don't you think that the three true outcomes mode of baseball is part of the reason that we see shorter outings by starters and more specialization? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if that's true. I haven't thought about that. I don't know. Okay. Number two't thought about that. I don't know. Okay. Number two, more from Sean.

With Mariano Rivera set to retire, and Derek Jeter most likely retiring after the 2014 season, I got to wondering, is Derek Jeter the ideal hitter to have against Mariano Rivera? I've always heard commentators say right-handed hitters have an easier time hitting Rivera's cutter because it cuts away from them rather than in on their hands and of course Jeter is iconic for slashing singles and doubles down the right field and first baseline it seems to me Rivera's cutter would play right into Jeter's wheelhouse yet fans never got to see the two face each other uh sure that sounds possible um I mean it's true true that right-handed hitters hit better off of Rivera. They still hit terribly off of him,

but I think the difference is about 60 points of OPS or something. So, sure, Jeter's a high-contact guy, and I don't see why not. You've been watching rivera your entire life you've seen uh you know a huge number of basic of the base hits that he has allowed what is the sort of classic base hit against mariano rivera well i don't know when i think of it it's kind of the just the blooper that falls in and i guess that's kind of cheater I mean he hits hits a lot of I don't know he doesn't really hit bloopers but he just sort of he hits a lot of soft line drives over the second baseman or you know over that gap there so sure I you know we get we've probably been asked, I would guess, 10 times about having a skills competition in the All-Star break and what skills you would like to see.

And we might have answered it once. Normally, we don't answer it. And frankly, I'm not that interested in a skills competition in the All-Star game. I find baseball skills to be incredibly boring divorced from the context of the game and my go-to example of this is that nobody watches sprinting on tv you know nobody's like watching the the the you know pan am games uh even though it's super fast people running against each other and yet we're all sort of obsessed with the idea of carlos gomez and brett gardner running and i don't know why so i find baseball skills to be boring. I find people throwing to be basically boring unless

there's a runner to measure them against. And so, you know, I'm not into a skills competition. However, it is interesting that baseball has virtually no sideshow industry. There's, you know, there was, you know, there's the home Run Derby, and there used to be a sort of more interesting Home Run Derby where, like, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays would be in an empty ballpark on Saturday afternoon, like in the classic Home Run Derby. But, you know, like, you know when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig tried to hit against the 17-year-old girl way long ago? Like, that's,'s like good sideshow stuff

and you used to have this because i don't know maybe it was because you had the negro league so you had like almost parallel leagues that could play against each other or maybe it was because there was this sort of uh line between majors and minors and amateur was so kind of shaky that um there you could have weird matchups but I mean it does seem like it would have been nice if at some point in the last 15 years somebody had put Jeter and Rivera against each other and figured out a way to make it interesting like a like a skins game for baseball there should be some sort of off-season like weird off-the-wall off-season matchups where you get to you get to you get get to, you get to, you get to choose the

matchup and, and you get to choose the, the rules. Like, like, like John Boyce is breaking Madden except with real people. Like we get to decide what the weirdness is. Yeah, I guess. Well, first of all, those two strike me as probably the, the last two players who would ever agree to do that. Um, but. Well, the problem is they get, we got to start paying them a lot less. The first thing we do is we cut their pay to like $30,000 a year. We do that and we have a lot more fun. Right, yeah, because players used to have regular jobs during the offseason

and they would barnstorm and everything because, you know, not for love of the game so much as because they just needed to make a living um so sure yeah if we went back to that i'm sure players would would be willing to do all sorts of wacky stuff would you um would you pay to see mariano rivera and derrick jeter face each other right now? Like, would you pay a dollar? Sure. A dollar, yeah. Would you pay $6?

Yeah. Would you pay $9.50? No. Okay, so somewhere between $6 and $9.50. So now we just have to figure out how many Ben Lindberghs are out there willing to pay $7.25. I'd be curious to see them face each other for a full season and know what would happen. One at bat wouldn't be worth a lot to me. No, one at bat wouldn't be worth a lot. You'd have to make a 60-minute show out of it somehow.

Yeah, right. a 60 minute show out of it somehow yeah right what i mean they went there was also when in the 80s there was the the saturday afternoon thing where like steve sacks and randall cunningham would be doing like water polo against each other it was super weird it was like people from various sports playing various other sports against each other um so that I always didn't really like that much. But I like the spirit of it. I just didn't like that. I'm higher on the skills competition than you are, I think. Well, it's true that I wouldn't want to watch those players

do those things exclusively, but we know them from baseball. but we know them from baseball and so watching them do you know a sprint or a throwing competition or whatever is is a different context it's interesting um if Brett Gardner were just a sprinter I wouldn't care how fast Brett Gardner ran and whether he could run faster than you know Billy Hamilton or whoever but because we know them from their baseball skills and we don't really get to see those things and we don't get to measure those skills against each other it would be interesting to me once a year but why i mean first of all like so let's just imagine we'll limit it to running okay so you have gardner and hamilton um what are you trying

to answer you're trying to answer who is faster at running just just who's faster running it's the fastest man in baseball in a non-baseball context like they're going to be what is the race uh I don't know maybe they maybe they just both run home to first or something have you never seen either of them run home to first? Uh, I have. I mean, these are the most clocked athletes in the world. That is what they, they do. They run for men with stopwatches. Yeah. Well, I don't time them usually, but so yeah, if I, if I worked for a team and could just look up times on everyone, then that would satisfy my curiosity. Oh, my gosh. So you want them to – you actually want them to create an entire event in All-Star Weekend where people would have to be flown.

I mean think about the carbon footprint of this event for one thing. But people would have to be flown into a foreign city cincinnati probably they'd probably have to fly people to cincinnati so some some years and make them run just so that you don't have to take out the stopwatch that you bought that you paid for that you went and got 30 out of your bank account to buy a stopwatch you don't even want to use it so now you're gonna make now you're gonna make brett gardner fly on his one day off of the year uh i'd have to give him some incentive i guess i don't i don't know maybe running's not the best example but throwing throwing accuracy

maybe how many times did you hit the target or something? You know what I think about a lot, Ben? I keep coming back to the fact that Kevin Goldstein recommended different stopwatches to us. I'm not sure what that means. Yeah. Do you think that he hates one of us? He may have been trying to sabotage one of us, yeah. Just one of us, though one of us though i don't know actually i think he may have given me some abuse for this i i thought i bought a stopwatch that

was recommended by either him or jason but then i feel like he gave me some abuse for the stopwatch that i had at scout school so maybe i misrem, but, but the whole basis of his complaint about my stopwatch was that like it required one additional button press. So I don't know, as far as I'm concerned, if it, if it keeps the appropriate time, uh, that's pretty much what I want it for. All right. So the third question from Sean, how differently how differently if at all would baseball games be managed if league standings were constructed as they are in soccer three points for victory one point for tie zero for loss with no threat of extra innings pitchers wouldn't need to be saved for an epic 18 inning affair so i would have to think managers would go to their bullpens with

less hesitation maybe bring in a handful of pitchers in succession over the course of only a couple innings based on matchups. At the same time, maybe teams wouldn't need so many bullpen arms and could use those roster spots on extra bats on the bench, thus freeing up managers from keeping subpar hitters in the entire game because they don't have adequate enough replacements to make it worth pulling starters. I think that whenever people talk about ending extreme extra innings, and I think there's a semi movement going toward this um and maybe it's maybe the movement is because it seems like other sports have all over the last 15 years moved toward this not basketball but other sports have um they um

you know brandon mccarthy i know has you know complains when a game goes past 14 or so. Tango doesn't like it. He thinks that the fact that most of the crowd is gone by the end and therefore they have left unhappy is evidence that you shouldn't have a game that goes longer than the paying customer wants it to go. I think, though, that this underestimates the impact on strategy that it would have because, as Sean suggests, pitchers wouldn't need to be saved for an epic 18-inning affair. I think that's a huge, huge part of what dictates pitcher usage right now. If you didn't have any chance

of a game going 10 innings, I really feel like we would see the all bullpen pitching staff within five years. Yeah, possibly. That could be right. I don't know. I mean, sorry, I just want to interrupt real quick. Because you think about how managers are so risk-averse with their backup catchers where they won't even let their backup catcher pinch hit because maybe there's an injury that knocks their starting catcher out of the game and they won't have a catcher, which just never happens. I mean, you go hundreds of games without your catcher being knocked out by injury and you're worried

that it's going to happen in like the next two innings. And you have, you know, usually you, you could theoretically put somebody back there, uh, even if you had to. And so what, even if it did happen one out of 200 times, so you'd lose a game that you're 50% likely to lose anyway. It's a tiny, tiny thing. And yet managers, like many managers, will just absolutely refuse to pinch hit with their last catcher. And so if they're that risk averse with something that is almost, you know, almost never going to come into play, just think about how much it's weighing on them as it is with pitchers, where that's actually a really significant thing. And it's a legitimate a legitimate threat i mean managers actually do run out of pitchers as it is yeah you're right that would that would change things quite a bit and are we are we both against the the movement to limit limit extra

innings well i'm against it for i'm against it for enjoyment reasons. Right, so am I. It's the only thing I like about baseball, really, is the possibility that it might never end. You know, when I was a kid, I really loved playing games. And I was the youngest kid, and so the youngest person in the household. And so I wanted to play more games than anybody else wanted to play, and nobody else really wanted to play games with me. And so once I would get a game going i never wanted that game to end so i my strategy in games has always been to be winning but not win like i like to i like to take every piece on the board but never actually you know get checkmate because then the game's over and they're like okay i gotta go do chores so i think that that it might be a psychological thing that I, once a baseball game is interesting, I never actually want it to end.

It makes me sad that it will. But also, I mean, the aesthetics of extra innings to me are so much more interesting than in the rest of the game. I mean, the tension of not knowing what's coming and the sort of growing sense of fatigue and just the way things get weird. It's why baseball is interesting. If you took away everything after the 14th inning, I would guess that there's probably, what, 20 innings out of the entire baseball season that are beyond the 15th or beyond the 14th. And those 20 innings probably make up 50% of my enjoyment of the sport. I sort of had the same thing. Like when I used to play Monopoly, like there, there comes a point in a Monopoly game where you know that you've lost and there's really no coming back from it. And you might as well just stop then, uh, and start a new game or do something else and i would just go to any length to keep the game

going and just yeah i would i would like mortgage myself to the hill and just like offer my opponent ridiculous terms in order to hang on to like one property so i could just make one more turn around the board and even even the reverse even when you're winning yeah when you finally hit that finishing blow there is a there is a sort of a sense of death that comes when you actually defeat somebody at a board game it's horrible yeah i felt bad all right uh last question uh is from eric um eric hartman uh i would like to request a hot take debate on the merits of intentional walks. Or as Eric writes, international walks.

I would like to request a hot take debate on the merits of international walks, counting the same for a player's stats as an unintentional walk. I would like Ben to argue that they should count the same and Sam that they should not. That is my request. All right. I guess my argument that they should count the same is that it would be difficult to

separate. It would be difficult to separate the cases where it's a result of skill from the ones where it's not. Right. Because there are, you know, there are players who get a lot of intentional walks because they're really good hitters and pitchers are afraid to face them. And that seems like it should be counted as part of their value. The fact that they scare people into putting them on base is valuable. There are then also people who just happen to bat eighth in the National League, and they get walked so that the pitcher can face the opposing pitcher, and that's just a consequence of where the manager puts them. It's not really intrinsic to them.

But it would be tough to to separate that you'd have to you'd have to discount it for certain players more than others i feel like and it's yeah and it's dependent on you know lineup and all these things so so that's my argument well the argument for why they shouldn't count is very obvious and and it's it's it's 10 letters it's Barry Bonds he he's a horrible man he should he shouldn't be allowed to to breathe the same air as us let alone be glorified with uh with the value of an intentional walk I mean there are there are you know scores of times in his career where uh opposing pitchers just simply decided that he was just too despicable a human being to face on an even playing field, and they simply allowed him to leave their site.

And we're going to say that that's part of what made him great? No, no. That was hot. Hot! No, I mean, the thing about it is that, besides the number eight hitter exception, which, you know, that is something that is complicating when you're trying to evaluate players and that actually does mislead i think from time to time but there's two things statistics do right one is they tell you what happened and the other is they tell you

with you know they help you estimate what's going to happen and the intentional walk uh as a means of measuring value is true a player who's really good and gets those intentional walks was valuable, even if it's a different kind of value. If the other team is scared of him, that's just as good as if he's simply good. But as a way of measuring skill, which is how we predict the future, they aren't. they aren't useful for predicting skill and so um you know they if you're if you're looking at obp or if you're looking at really any sat uh that tries to forecast um you know how good a player is likely to be next year um it's yeah it's probably a pretty good idea to i, certainly if you're measuring plate discipline, I find myself lazily looking at players' walk rates.

Like Prince Fielder, this came up in, I think, in the Prince Fielder transaction analysis, actually, where Prince Fielder's numbers were way down this year. And his OBP was way down and his walks were way down. And it looks like a really pretty damning thing that his walks are way down. And you think, well, he's losing his eye or he's losing his patience or something like that. And so then you look at his plate discipline stats and you see that he's swinging just as much and they're pitching him more or less the same way. And then you realize, oh, well, he used to draw 30 intentional walks and now he's drawing five because there's a left-handed batter behind him or a switch hitter behind him. It's the first time in his career he's ever batted with a switch hitter behind him. And that's the entire extent of it. And if I hadn't been writing

the transaction analysis and gone the extra two steps because I was doing that, I would have come away thinking that Prince Fielder had lost his plate to Swin or was losing his effectiveness as a batter. But it's not that. It's simply martinez that's the entire thing so uh so yeah that's why it shouldn't count in however you're planning to count it well we do have uh in our in our sortable stats at baseball perspectives we have unintentional walk rate and i do i do look at that and and i guess i'd be even quicker to to discount it or disregard it for pitchers right because i i guess if you're a pitcher who gets himself in trouble a lot or i i guess you you might be more likely to to have to issue intentional walks um but like like ronald belis, who just signed, who's non-tendered by the Dodgers and signed with the White Sox, had 10 intentional walks.

Unbelievable. It's crazy. He led the major leagues with 10 intentional walks. His entire comment in the BP annual is about that. Yeah, so he pitched 68 innings and walked 10 intentional walks, and he had 28 total walks. So that really changes his walk rate he you know he walked almost four per nine and that seems like a lot but then you subtract those 10 intentional walks and he had 10 intentional walks because he's a ground baller and Don

Mattingly liked to to set up the double play with him pitching. And that annual comment that you're referencing says that none of those intentional walks led to a double play. Four of the intentionally walked runners did come around to score. So that probably wasn't a great idea. But you can't really hold that against Belisario. So for him, I would be inclined to discount that.

What about, what's your stance on a related statistical topic uh reached on errors because that's one i was writing about with aoki today uh and i i like the move a lot for the royals and and aoki is uh he's a higher obp guy than than anyone on the royals except for for Billy Butler over the past couple of seasons. And his OBP is, you know, he walks a decent amount and he makes good contact and he gets hit by pitch, hits by pitches pretty often, like two and a half times the league average rate. But his OBP does not factor in the fact that he reaches on error all the time, more often than any hitter. Over the last two seasons, he has reached on error 27 times.

And if you just added those 27 reach on errors to his OBP, it would raise it 22 points. So he'd be a.377 OBP guy instead of a 355 OBP guy. Of course, if you add the reach on errors to his OBP, you'd have to add it to every hitter's. But I calculated what the difference was there. And even if you added reach on errors to every hitter's OBP, Aoki's would have risen by 12 points relative to league average, which is a lot. And, you know, it is a skill to some extent. Like, he gets all these reach-on errors because he hits a ton of ground balls. He hits the most ground balls, highest ground ball rate in the majors. And he's a speedy guy. And I don't know, maybe he hits the ball hard or something and so he gets all these reach on errors and with certain guys it might not be skill i mean some errors are just you know just

errors but there's there's definitely some signal in that noise there like right-handed right-handed hitters who pull the ball on the ground and and require a longer throw from the third baseman or shortstop have a higher reach-on-air rate than left-handed hitters and, you know, ground ball guys and speed guys. So there's something to that. Yeah, no, I think that counting reach-on-air for the hitter is totally legit. I think that all OBPs should include it. And basically my my thinking is like the first five that you get are all basically flukes. And, you know, whether you have five one year or five or one is basically totally random and, you know, whatever. But that's

the difference between five and one is you're going to do such a small thing to your OBP that it won't actually really matter. It's just part of the noise in baseball. But once you get beyond five, it's all skill. And five might not be the number. But once you get beyond whatever number, it's all skill. And batters should get credit for it. All right. End of week.

All right. End of week housekeeping. You can rate and review us on iTunes and subscribe to the show on iTunes, and we hope that you will. I enjoy reading the reviews and sending some of them to Sam. And you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild, which is ever-growing and ever-improving. And you can email us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.

So we hope that you enjoy your weekend and rejoin us for another show on Monday. 343? Mm-hmm. Okay. Go. I'm not going to'm not gonna just go when you command me 3, 2, 1

go what is that? why can't you just do it? 3, 2, 1