Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 354: The 2013 Time Capsule

Episode Date: December 26, 2013

Ben and Sam pick the season’s biggest baseball stories.

Good morning and welcome to episode 354 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. This is our penultimate episode of the year. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. How was your holiday? It was good. Sleepy. Sleepy? You are sleepy now? Currently, at the moment. Uh-huh. Well, I thought that we could do a baseball, a 2013 time capsule episode. So I have selected the 10 stories from this season

that I think I would put in the baseball time capsule if I want to someday look back at the season and remember the stories that were, I guess, in the news the most or seem the most significant. Not necessarily the stories I am most interested in. In some cases, I was sick of them as soon as I heard about them. But I will name my 10, and there are several that I think that I felt bad about not including. So maybe you will have some ideas for what I have left off and what I should not have left off. Maybe I will.

I actually went back and looked at Effectively Wild episode titles to try to remember what the stories were. And mostly I think they were about three men in fields and four men out fields and baseball and ice. Did you go back and listen to uh effectively wild intro sounds to see if those were useful no i keep meaning i i meant all along to put those in a spreadsheet somewhere so i could remember what they were and not reuse them but i never never did that in turn yeah in. Intern. Um, uh, and I guess we should, should mention since we did the podcast about Masahiro Tanaka recently,

that, uh, that the news came out while we were on our little break that he will be posted and, and teams will have 30 days to negotiate with him starting today. so right now, MLB trade rumors readers who were polled think that there is a 39.2% chance that he will be a New York Yankee. Does that sound about right to you?

It does not sound about right to me, no. Lower? Much lower. I mean, I might say the Yankees are still the most likely but i would think so 39 seems quite high to me it does seem high uh they really who's your runner up who's your who's who gets the second highest in your in your view uh gosh, I don't know. Um, I mean, to me, it seems like they, they need, need him most or they could benefit from him most because without him, I don't think they would, they certainly wouldn't

be my pick as the favorite in the division. I don't even know if they would be a pick as a playoff team. Probably, probably not in the division. I don't even know if they would be a pick as a playoff team. Probably not at the moment. If they add him, then possibly that puts them over the hump, at least for a wildcard pick for me, maybe. But after they spent so much money on McCann and Ellsbury and bringing back Corotta and Beltran and just everyone that they signed this winter. It's hard to imagine them going into the season with, I don't know, I guess David Phelps as their fourth starter.

Like Michael Pineda as their fifth starter. You know that my question was not why will the Yankees sign him, right? I was stalling for time. I don't even know I I guess uh uh I don't know I I don't know uh I think I think the Cubs are gonna end up with him yeah the Cubs are are good I guess they're a good pick um I don't know. All the teams that have been mentioned as suitors for him, like the number two team on the MLB Trade

Rumors poll results is the Dodgers. I guess you would kind of put the Dodgers high on any list for free agents, but they have a lot of starting pitchers. I mean, Josh Beckett is certainly not someone you can count on, and Dan Heron is not really that safe.

So I guess, I don't know, maybe them. But the Cubs are a good pick. I could see that happening. All right. So, okay. So I didn't really bother to rank these. I don't think that would mean anything. So just in the order that I happen to write them down,

I think one of the top ten stories that I would put in the time capsule of this season is just money, is TV money and free agent spending. And you could conceivably put that either in 2012 or 2014, really, because 2012 is when we found out about the new national contracts late in the year. And 2014 is kind of when they kick in. But they sort of dominated a lot of the conversation this season, I think. There was a lot of anticipation of those contracts kicking in and what it would mean for free agency. And now we've maybe sort of seen what it would mean for free agency. And it means a lot more spending and probably breaking the record from set in 2006 of the most money spent on free agents. And then there's been a lot of discussion about broadcast bubbles and whether this will last and whether teams that are spending now with TV money in mind will regret it later if there's some sort of legislation that makes it possible for people

to opt out of sports channels and decreases the revenue that teams can expect from local TV deals. But just to the extent that it was mentioned almost constantly, whether you're talking about transactions or the future of teams or the future of baseball, I think that that is one of my 10. Two of them I think are teams and conceivably could have been even more, but I think the Pirates have to be on the list just for the fact that they won, which in itself kind of qualifies them, but also the way that they won, which was interesting. We talked about how they did that, how they signed a lot of castoffs from

other teams and people who were sort of devalued. And then they either benefited from fortunate bounce backs, or maybe they did something great coaching to turn those players back into productive members of society. So there was that, and there was kind of the whole analytics angle to their turnaround. So for me, they are one of the ones. And I think the Red Sox probably qualify. Maybe the world champions qualify in most seasons, but I think especially the Red Sox in that there was a lot to talk about with their bounce back too.

And whether we had put too much emphasis on their recent struggles and overlooked the talent that was on the roster and all the discussion of intangibles and clubhouse chemistry and beards. It was tiresome at times, but memorable, certainly. So I would put both of them on there. I would also, maybe the most controversial inclusion on my list would probably just be the shift. I think that was a big story this year, and probably will continue to be a big story. But the fact that shifts were used much more often, according to the people who track these things, that it was kind of a constant thing you would hear about on broadcasts or hear hitters complaining about or the fact that it was tied to the Pirates' success. about or the fact that it was tied to the Pirates' success. And I think it will be one of the more interesting topics of the next couple seasons because I would expect that as more teams begin to adopt it, and it seems like this winter, as we talked about, the late adopters of the shift are now adopting it and hiring special

coaches to implement the shift are now adopting it and hiring special coaches to implement the shift. I think once it becomes pervasive, we're going to see a really interesting sort of game theory fight back against it with hitters bunting. And someone sent me a list of all the plays in which a hitter had bunted against the shift this year. And I don't remember how many it was, but it was, I think, probably not nearly as many as we will start seeing in the next couple of years. The thing about, can I just say, the thing about the bunting is that

it's actually not that hard to defend against the bunt possibility. You just don't move your third baseman that far. Most of these, I mean, there's not a huge advantage to have your third baseman play where the shortstop is as opposed to in on the grass. The way to beat it is if players can actually hit the ball into an open spot of the field. And to me, it's not established that baseball players are capable of hitting a baseball within a 50 foot zone. And so it'll, it'll be very interesting for me, not because I care that much about the shift, but because I actually don't know how much capability that

the hitters have in hitting. Like, I don't know what it's like to hit. And so it'd be fun for me to see in the next few years, uh, if baseball players actually answer that question for us and show us how hard it is to direct a baseball. Yes, that will be very interesting. So yeah, so the shift and the responses to the shift, probably one of my top 10 this year and might continue to be one of my top 10 for a while. I think I have, well, you have to put Biogenesis on there and I'm just going to lump it into one spot on the list, even though it could take up more. You could put A-Rod and his own separate category

on that list probably, but I don't want to take up too many spots with PED stuff. So I will just, I will give that, and Ryan Braun and A-Rod and everyone else can fit into that one little box. And then I think replay. See, it seems silly maybe to put replay on now because replay is obviously going to be maybe an even bigger story next year. But it was a big story this year.

It was something we talked about a lot. It was something we analyzed and we said what system we would like best and what problems we had with the system that was announced. And it just sort of represented a major change to baseball. One of the biggest changes that we've seen lately. Although it was sort of slow in coming. So that was one of my ten. And then I think the last four are all individual players.

So one would be Puig. I think Puig has to be on there not only for his performance but for all of the all the ridiculous discussion that surrounded his performance uh and kept cropping up throughout the year and I would also put Jose Fernandez on the list for his performance and for his backstory and kind of for maybe what he symbolizes, what we've talked about throughout the year, how it seems like prospects don't bust anymore, or it seems like top prospects at least often come up and perform at a level that seems somewhat surprising. We sort of anecdotally have mentioned that. And I don't know if you saw recently Jeff Zimmerman wrote an article about looking at aging curves over the last,

I don't know, several years or the last decade or so, sort of the post-PED era. And his findings, which I think, you know, he mentioned some caveats, and it's sort of a smallish sample, and it's always kind of controversial what method you use to determine aging curves. But what he found suggests that the historical aging curve that we often think about that looks like a hump that goes up and then it goes down is no longer really reflecting reality. And that hitters and pitchers, players just sort of come into the league and perform at their peak right away and sort of plateau for a while and then eventually decline, which he posited could either have something to do with players being coached better or conditioned better and just sort of coming into the league as more mature products or teams getting better at determining when players are ready and not promoting them until they are ready.

And so that's why we're seeing that pattern possibly. But Jose Fernandez seems like maybe the best example of that trend, if it is a trend, in that he just sort of skipped the upper minors and was young and inexperienced and came in and had one of the best rookie pitching seasons of the last few decades. So he is one of mine. Matt Harvey is one of mine, both for his phenom status and all the attention that was paid to his performance

and also to the way it ended and the depressing reminder that that is always just a start away, no matter how well someone is pitching. And my last one I sort of went back and forth on, but I put Mike Trout on there, and I'm not sure whether he deserves to be on there he he definitely deserved to be on there in 2012 to me 2013 was in a way even more impressive in that this was sort of the year when we I guess to a greater extent we started talking about him as

his potential to be the best player ever, as opposed to just having the best rookie season ever or the best age whatever season. The fact that he got better when everyone figured that he was bound to regress at least slightly was one of the more impressive and fun-to-follow stories of the season. And, of course, you can kind of fold that into the Trout Cabrera debate take two, if you want to. You could also be a bit more generous and note that Miguel Cabrera also was supposed to regress and also got better and to some degree became criticism proof this year because he was much I mean he was better than we were giving him credit for I mean everybody acknowledged that Cabrera was really

great before and in his Triple Crown and all that he was really great but there was this yeah but you know I mean Triple Crown's nonsense and, you know, his adjusted stats aren't historically great or anything like that. But his adjusted stats this year are historically great. They're, you know, in the greatest, you know, right-handed hitter ever kind of zone. Yeah, when that ESPN analytics issue or whatever it was came out early in the year, and I had a few topics in mind for a bold prediction. And the one I went with ultimately

was that the Orioles would finish in last place, which did not happen. And the other one that I was kind of bouncing around was Miguel Cabrera will have a better season this year than he did in his triple crown season. And probably I should have gone with that one. There's probably a better percentage chance that that would happen than that the Orioles would finish in last place. Or that, I don't know what I said. The headline on the front of the magazine said that the Orioles will finish in last place. My actual copy did not say quite the same thing. But I did think there was a significant chance that he would be better just looking at his

sort of his, well, his stats other than his counting stats or the fact that he led the league in in certain arbitrarily selected stats he was not as productive a hitter in 2012 as he had been in the two seasons before that um so i wouldn't have bet on him being better just because he was going to be 30 and And if you looked at a projection for him, it was not better, but there was a decent chance that that would happen. And it did. I predicted at the beginning of the year, you might remember this, that Cabrera would be better, Trout would be worse, and Trout would win the MVP. I don't remember that.

It was part of my 10 predictions about Mike Trout's season. Uh-huh. Well, you got one of those three, right? I did. Well, actually, I put odds on each prediction. And so if the odds were less than 50%, I actually predicted that that would not happen technically. Uh-huh. But I acknowledge the possibility.

So I have like seven honorable mentions that I just barely cut. Do you have any that you want to lobby for? Well, first of all, did you remember that I wrote an entire article this year about Caleb Theobar? Yeah. Is that one of your top ten? No, but I didn't remember writing that. Every year you write a long article about an obscure middle reliever. Actually, I do too, I guess. But last year it was Tommy Lane. It was. And Tommy Lane gets a mention in the Caleb Thiel bar.

mentioned in the Caleb Thielbar piece. Anyway, I think that, so here's just what came to mind. I would say that jumping in the pool is not on its own one, but this was such an insane year for Unwritten Rules. I feel like this was the- Yeah, it's one of my cuts. I feel like this was the peak unwritten rules year in my memory. I feel like baseball is, I don't know if there's anything that comes of the unwritten rules, but it feels like it's escalating. It's getting amplified to a point where eventually it either cracks and all falls apart or, um, or I don't know. I don't know what happens. I don't know what the end game for the unwritten rules, um, gods are, but, uh, this was a ridiculous year for unwritten rules. Um, and my favorite, uh,

I'm, well, I, I'm stealing this from somebody else's work, which hasn't been published yet, but my favorite unwritten rule violation of the year was when the Giants, I don't know, someone hit the Giants with a pitch, and it was obviously unintentional, but the guy got hurt on it. It was totally, I don't know, for all I know, it was a slow breaking ball, and it broke his pinky finger or something like that, but it was a totally on him i don't know for all i know it was a slow breaking ball and it broke his pinky finger or something like that but it was completely unintentional and that launched a bean beanball war because he got hurt and that's so weird because like the the the the the violation took place outside of the control of the violator.

The violator did the act. It was agreed that the act was no violation, but then because of the unintended result of the act, the violator had to be punished. And that's my favorite. There's such a wonderful inconsistency to all of these things. The idea that they're making them up as they go that's what i guess is that it that is actually that's what is notable about this year is that

the idea that they're making it up as they go became completely unignorable most of these i mean there were dozens of made up unwritten rules as we watched so uh this is a great yeah i think there's there's gonna be a there's to be some sort of breakdown in them. It's sort of surprising that they've lasted this long. I don't know whether maybe the fact that they were so present this year was a response to some sort of general breakdown in them. Like the people who really think unwritten rules are important were reacting to

other players not thinking they're important by sort of doubling down um possibly but it's yeah it's hard to imagine the the fever pitch of brian mccann and diamondbacks and and the pool uh persisting all right uh so my second one is uh extreme defense um that's extreme x t-r-e-m-e just just in case anybody's i could tell from your inflection um i don't know exactly what the cause of this is maybe you'll be able to tell me but but this was an incredible, incredible year for defensive performances, at least according to Defensive Runs Saved. And if I'm not mistaken, and I'm going to do a little typing real quick. I wrote something about this on Unfiltered. I'll see if I can find it.

All right, so here's basically the fun fact, though. According to Defensive Run Saved, this year we saw the greatest... Oh, wait. I got to... Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.

Still typing. Okay. This year we saw the greatest season ever by a shortstop in Angleton Simmons. We saw the greatest season ever by a right fielder in Gerardo Parra, who was a plus 41 defender. We saw the second greatest season ever by a center fielder. By just one run did Carlos Gomez at plus 38 miss being the greatest ever at center field. And we saw the greatest season ever by a third baseman at plus 35. So essentially three positions set new defensive records. A fourth one missed by just one.

And we're not talking about first base, left field, right field. We're talking about some super premium positions in there too. Yeah, I found my post. This was from mid-September, but at the time I wrote that it was four of the top defensive run saved seasons ever. Four of the top five were players in 2013. Is that true? It was at the time. Okay.

I don't know. But Simmons, Machado, Gomez, and Parra, and the only other one was Adam Everett in 2006 at the time. I don't know if you're looking at different numbers than I am. I am, but the gist is, I like the way that I framed it personally. I liked it a little bit more. I think that the position thing gives it a little boost.

Yours is fine, Ben. Thank you. And, of course, when we're talking about defensive runs, save numbers, we're only going back to 2003. But it was sort of the case when you looked at any defensive metric, like even like fielding runs above average had four guys over 20 runs above average, which was unusual. But I mean, I don't know, when you're comparing play-by-play and batted ball sort of metrics to the estimated things that we have for years before that data was captured,

it's kind of hard to compare. But yes, it did seem like there were more extreme individual performances, and I don't know whether that has to do with positioning and players just being in better spots before the play begins, which allows them to get to more balls, or whether it's teams prioritizing defense or better instruction or just better athletes or what, or just kind of an outlier year. But yes, I agree. That was a major story. Do you remember that I also wrote an entire article about paper airplanes in baseball?

I do remember. And how 2013 was the year of the paper airplane? Yeah, so that should be on your list. I suppose I should mention paper airplanes and not go into it further. But that was also a fun article. There was a guy drafted named Tom Malone. And there's also a Tom Malone in, in major league baseball.

And, and it always amuses me which names get duplicated. Like, like Adam Eaton, there, there were two Adam Eatons and that's just not a, nothing, nothing common about the name Adam Eaton. I've never met another Eaton and, and I've never met another Eaton. And I've never met another Malone spelled M-I-L-O-N-E. I mean, that's not how you spell Malone. This would be like if there were

two Bill Millers that both spelled it M-U-E-L-L-E-R. And I just think there's something just really weird about that. You know? Definitely top ten. Time capsule. think there's something just really weird about that um you know definitely top 10 time capsule all right yeah uh koji uhara uh-huh okay um and uh partly because it was uh to me the the most fun story of the year the the coolest performance of the year um in many ways in some ways the most fun story of the year, the coolest performance of the year, in some ways the most impressive non-Trout,

non-Hernandez, sorry, non-Fernandez performance of the year. It's just something really wonderful and something that, I don't know, there are very few things that I root for anymore, but I root for Uehara, especially, I won't anymore, now I don for Uehara. You know, especially after, I won't anymore. Now I don't care. He's got his.

But before last year, I was definitely rooting for Uehara. Like, I wanted to see him succeed. I would have felt personally aggrieved if he had failed. So, but anyway, beyond that, though. There have been two big league Bill Millers spelled M-U-E-L-L-E-R. I'm kidding. William Hawk Miller, 1942 to 1945. No, they did not overlap.

They didn't. So, I mean, you know, with enough monkeys and enough typewriters, sure. But overlapping is even more impressive. But thanks for looking it up. You're welcome. But I mean, Uehara is also, he's on the vanguard of something kind of crazy, this strike zone pounding pitcher that didn't exist before five years ago. I mean, basically you had Eckersley was this huge outlier in like 88 to 92. And then since then, you've never really had a 70% strike pitcher.

You know, that was pretty much as high as anybody would go is 70. And nobody would ever really go higher. And in the last, you know, three, four years, we've just seen this new kind of pitcher that routinely tops 70, goes to 73, even goes to 75% strikes. You've got Uehara, you've got Mojica. People forget, but Mojica had such success this year. It could have been the subject of a thousand articles if he'd had three more good weeks. And you have Cliff Lee doing it as a starter. And you have Sergio Santos doing it in the second half. And you have Sean Doolittle and Jake McGee.

I mean, these guys just throw strikes. And it's a wonderful thing to watch. If you like statistical outliers, it's wonderful because you get these great ratios and everything. But it's also good when people complain about the aesthetics of the three-true-outcome sport that's developing. I think it's conceivable that this is the game theory backlash that we're seeing. And it's a pretty game. When O'Hara and when Jake McGee walk in, the game is very attractive. They're pretty pictures to watch, and you don't see walks.

You see strikeouts, for sure, but you don't see walks. And it's, I don't know, it'll be interesting to see whether we see in 10 years whether there's an 80% strike pitcher, whether there's 175% strike pitchers, or whether this is just a blip. But I liked it. And the last one that I would name is Scott Casimir. Just because, I mean, he was so out. He was so, so, so out of the game.

There was no way that Casimir was so out. He was so, so, so out of the game. There was no way that Casme was coming back. And anytime something like this happens, it's good because then there are 200 other guys who you now have to keep track of in your head because they might come back someday too. Okay. Well, I think we hit most of the big ones. I also had the Mariano Rivera retirement run on my discard pile. I didn't put it there because, I don't know, a player retiring due to natural causes does not seem like a top ten story. But in terms of articles written, it probably was. It probably was.

And I had the Dodgers sort of record run 42-8 in 50 games was one of the more exciting stories of the season, probably. I had Chris Davis on there. I had the endless Joey Votto, Brandon Phillips debate and RBI versus on-base percentage, which was awful the first time we heard it, but we heard it 800 more times. And I was tempted to include the Jeff Baker story about the Mariners front office because that's something I will remember when I look back on this year. But I didn't put that. There was a split second where I panicked not knowing what Jeff Baker of the Rangers had done.

Yeah. Actually, he had a pretty interesting year. I almost I almost wrote about him once, but I didn't. So he doesn't he doesn't make the top 10. But for a while there, he was having quite a season. OK, so that's it for today so we have one more show this week one more show this year it uh theoretically is a listener email show we haven't gotten a lot of listener emails this week uh apparently you guys are are spending time with your families or something.

But if you are listening to this on Thursday, before we record tonight, send us some emails so that we will have something to talk about tomorrow. And we'll be back then. That's a wrap.