Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 36: How Not to Solve the Yankees’ Problems/Bobby Valentine Says Some More Strange Things

Episode Date: September 6, 2012

It’s an all-AL East episode, as Ben and substitute co-host Jason Wojciechowski discuss a counterproductive proposal to fix what ails the Yankees, then talk about the latest Bobby Valentine controversy.

Good morning and welcome to episode 36 of Effectively Wild, the daily baseball prospectus podcast in New York, New York. I am Ben Lindberg. This is the part of the podcast where I normally say that Sam Miller is in Long Beach, and Sam Miller is in Long Beach, as far as I know, but he is not joining me today. He had a family obligation that kept him away from the podcast today. He will be back tomorrow. Joining me today is Jason Wojciechowski, which I hope I just pronounced correctly. He is an author of Baseball Perspectives, where he writes the In a Pickle column. He also writes for the Platoon Advantage and Beanball, where he writes and podcasts about the A's. And he is also a lawyer, which will come in handy if Ridley Scott sues me over the gladiator clip I used in yesterday's episode. Jason, hello. Tell the people where you are.

hello tell the people where you are uh like physically geographically i am in los angeles i am probably i'm probably about 20 miles north of uh sam miller's on the fit uh-huh uh and do you want to tell us where you are mentally or spiritually or in any other uh i i am i am um on this plane i think is the most important part okay uh are you recording from anywhere unusual like a car or a shower no i'm recording from the the second i'm recording from the cat bedroom which is why the the the dear listeners may have heard a yowling noise about 45 seconds ago. They did. That was two cats fighting. Like, literally, I had cats fighting at my feet.

In their own bedroom. They have a bedroom. Yeah. Well, they've claimed it. Ah. Okay. Well, if I visit the Long Beach, Los Angeles area, I will not be staying in the guest cat bedroom because I am deathly allergic to felines.

Oh, that is unfortunate. Yeah. So, you, I assume, have a topic. I do have a topic, but I kind of potentially have two topics, so maybe you should go first with, or say what your topic is. Okay. My topic is the yankees and desperation so that leaves me uh that was not one of my two topics i think my topic is is bobby valentine

okay that's one of your two topics you haven't yeah do you want to announce both of the topics i don't want to reveal what the other one was. Maybe you guys will talk about it tomorrow. Okay. All right. So I guess I will go first. The Yankees have been losing a lot lately. They lost all of their 10-game division lead yesterday

and then gained a game of it back last night with a win over the Rays. But two nights ago, when they lost the last sliver of lead and moved back into a first-place tie with the Orioles, Kevin Long, who is the Yankees hitting coach, had some interesting comments about their offense, which lately has been sputtering a bit. And his suggestion was more bunting. He said, we've got to get back to the basics, we've got to start doing some things, we might start having some guys bunt that you don't normally see bunt. That might have to be the case right now until we get it going.

And then he gave an example of a situation where he thought a bunt might have worked. And this reminded me of a quote from Bill Beck, because I am now reading Beck as in Wreck, his classic autobiography, which I'm embarrassed to say that I had not read before. It is every bit as good as people told me it was. And Bill Beck spends a lot of the book talking about how he kind of wanted to get rid of Lou Boudreau, the Indians Hall of Fame player manager. He wanted to get rid of the manager part, not the player part.

And so he wrote, My main objection to Lou was that he managed by hunch and desperation. You ask Casey Stengel why he made a certain move, and he will tell you about a roommate he had in 1919 who had demonstrated some principle Casey was now putting into effect. You ask Lou, and he will say, the way we're going, we had to do something. If there is a better formula for making a bad situation worse, I have never heard of it. So that sort of seemed to be the Kevin Long solution to not hitting, was to do something, even if that something was something that

we normally think of as being counterproductive to scoring runs. And so last night after the Yankees won a game, or I guess before the game, Joe Girardi kind of dismissed that. He said, that's not really our approach. We're not the Bronx Bunters, and we really never have been. And he went on to say that it's not their cup of tea, that they are a home-run hitting team, and to bunt would be a bad idea. So that's, I guess, why he is the manager and Kevin Long is the hitting coach

and is in charge of not so much the strategic aspects of hitting as the mechanical parts. But the kind of dissatisfaction with the way the Yankees score runs is nothing new. I wrote about it in June after a Sunday night baseball game where the broadcaster spent much of the game talking about how the Yankees were too reliant on home runs, even though at the time they were hitting just fine and winning. And I looked at playoff teams that were as reliant on home runs as the Yankees and found that they had actually held up better in the playoffs than teams that score runs in other ways.

But this just doesn't seem to go away. Anytime the Yankees lose a game or don't score in a game, you hear the people talk about how they are too reliant on home runs yet again. So I don't know how to make this go away. Do you think it should go away? Why won't it go away? Do you think it should go away? Why won't it go away? Why does this persist that people blame the Yankees woes on the high percentage of their runs that are scored via the home run? Well, because they kill rallies, obviously. Yes. It is such a rare thing that the A's have

experience with this kind of thing that I do have to mention that I saw a complaint today that the A's are hitting too many home runs, and thus that is why the offense has struggled against the Angels. So I just want to get that out there because this is like a once-a-decade kind of thing that the A's get accused of hitting too many home runs. But I assume it's a perception. I've always assumed it's a perception that home runs come in bunches

and can be stopped. You know, how do you stop a guy from hitting a home run? Throw the ball low. And so if it's that simple, then when you run into pitchers who can do that and you don't have ways to counteract that because all you do is hit home runs, you're going to lose. And that sounds great, right? I mean, did I just convince you? Yes, even though I wrote about how that wasn't the case.

I'm now questioning my conclusions. Exactly, because it sounds like common sense. It sounds fantastic. And we all know that columnists and announcers love their sort of common sense or their baseball common sense or whatever. And they don't actually love data. And so it does. It sounds good. It sounds like something that should be true.

And it just happens to not be true. And I mean I'm not sure I get why it isn't true. And I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I get why it isn't true. You know, I do get that it isn't true, but I don't know if I know why. And maybe that's, you know, just a stumbling block. If they can't understand why, then they just can't believe that it's true. My theory for why it's true in the playoffs. Obviously in the playoffs, all teams, no matter how they score runs, tend to score fewer runs because the opposing teams are better, the opposing pitchers are better.

So yeah, as you said, it sounds persuasive. If you're facing better pitchers, better pitchers allow fewer home runs. If you're reliant on home runs, then you won't hit as many and you won't be able to score in other ways. My theory was that good pitchers do allow fewer home runs, but they also allow fewer hits and fewer walks

and every other bad thing that a pitcher can allow. And playoff teams tend to be better than average defensively too. And so home runs are kind of the one hit type that is not really affected by the opposing team's defense. And so that's sort of an area in which a team that's above average defensively can't really take anything away from a team that scores so average defensively can't really take anything away from a team that scores so many of its runs on home runs, whereas a team that relies on stringing together a bunch of hits would maybe be at more of a disadvantage against a good fielding and good pitching team. So that was my convincing to myself argument for why that might be the case.

I don't know that that will convince anyone else. But the numbers seem to back it up for one reason or another. And the Yankees are leading the major leagues in Guillen number, which is what we at Baseball Prospectus call the percentage of team runs scored on the home run. team runs scored on the home run. It's now about 49.5 percent, and it was higher than that when I wrote about it at the end of June. It was like 52.3, so they've been a little less reliant on home runs as you'd expect just from a general regression thing, but that's exciting that the A's are getting that now because usually the A's problem is kind of not doing enough of anything offensively. Not scoring at all.

Yeah. Getting hit. In one or otherwise. Okay. What do you have to say about Bobby V? Well, it's more about what Bobby V had to say about himself today, or yesterday, I suppose. Wait, we're pretending, right? I listen, but I'm not in the mindset yet.

But so Valentine had, I guess it was multiple interviews, and I don't know, I think we can start by reading some quotes. The radio station host asked Bobby Valentine if he had checked out, and he said, what an embarrassing thing to say. If I were there right now, I'd punch you right in the mouth. Ha ha. How does that sound? Sound like I checked out.

What an embarrassing thing. And then here's my best part, my favorite part. That's stuff that a comic strip person would write. And what I can't tell is whether he means a comic strip person would write. And what I can't tell is whether he means a comic strip, like a character, like Archie, or whether he actually means like, you know, the artist of the comic strip. Later, reporters asked him, were you joking about punching that guy? And he says, of course, didn't I say say haha um and it is in fact right there in the transcript so he did say haha um uh the espn story says but valentine wasn't joking about defending the effort

he puts into his job um so it's all very serious uh he says if anyone in this room wants to question my integrity i will ask someone to referee a few minutes later i don't think physical violence is necessary for a 60-year-old. So he's just sort of, you know, wildly swinging around the room, not yet with his fists, but with his emotional state, I guess I would say. You know, there was a whole thing about showing up to the stadium, quote-unquote, late. He called the Oakland Coliseum stupid, which I take offense to. It is stupid, but I think only A's fans are allowed to call it that. And so there was kind of this whole thing, and it's yet another sort of Bobby V., I don't know, Firestorm, I guess, reluctant to make it too much bigger than it is, especially since the Red Sox are

completely out of the race now. It's not like earlier in the year where he's fighting with his players and they're still supposedly a contender. At this point, it's all just noise and amusement, essentially. So I don't know if I have... I know usually one transitions from here to asking the other person a question, and I didn't ever really come up with a good question. So what do you think about Bobby V threatening to punch the radio host? Should managers threaten to punch radio hosts?

I think in the abstract it's probably not the best idea. I think it's, I guess on the continuum of coaching moves, I would put it probably below bunting more in terms of hurting a team. Like worse? Worse than bunting more? No, not as bad as bunting more. Not as bad as bunting more. Yes. Okay, yeah, I agree with that. Yes.

I agree with that. And I did read that Ben Sherrington had a brief discussion with Valentine before last night's game. And we don't know what was said, but we can probably guess that he said something other than an endorsement of the mouth-punching comment. I don't know. I guess it's maybe Valentine just kind of realizes that his days are numbered at this point, with the number being however many days are left in the regular season. And not that he's a guy with the best filter under the best of circumstances, but now maybe he has relaxed his filter even a little further. Because at this point, I don't know, would you agree with me that his job is unsalvageable? It's hard to say. I mean, you know, I think Sam put it, or somebody at some point put it recently, they fired all the players. He's got a whole different team here.

on paying both his contract, and I think he has a two-year contract. I assume all managers get two-year contracts these days. But, you know, do you pay that money in what looks like it could be a, you know, rebuilding year anyway, or do you just give him the shot? What's the worst that can happen? Is he actually punches a radio host? I mean, and you fire him mid-year? I'm not sure that next year for the team is salvageable enough to worry about who's going to manage the team, you know, and maybe you give him a chance

to see what he can do with a clean slate, but, you know, in sort of Red Sox land, you kind of always have to worry about how you're going to sell things and how you can market it and the perception. So maybe – I don't know. But if that mattered, you figured they would have fired him already because what's the harm at this point in firing him now? But they don't want to do that, which implies to me that maybe they want to keep him. I don't know. talking about a new flare-up of some sort, a new controversial comment, a new clubhouse dispute, a new pre-game interview gone wrong, regardless of how it got to that point, I think it kind of has to stop. This is true. Managers have been fired in the past where general managers, when they fire them, say it's nothing against the person I'm thinking of is also a Bob, Bob Guerin.

It's nothing against Bob. It was just it became a distraction, this and that and the other, and we just had to make a change to remove that distraction, and we still like him and blah, blah, blah. And so you can always hide behind that whether you think that or not, whether you think it's his fault as a communicator or whoever it is. So you can't always go with the it's a distraction route and fire the guy. I mean you probably should be firing the radio hosts of Greater New England. But I mean that's kind of an interesting element because obviously, you know, you ask Bobby Valentine, have you checked out? You're trying to get a rise out of the guy.

You know, you're Jim Roaming at that point. And so, you know, I don't think it's a, I don't think that's a very cool thing to do. And I guess he sort of had a point about the other report, which was that he had arrived at 4 o'clock for a 7 o'clock game or something later than he usually does, and someone reported it, and his complaint was that no one asked him why he was late. And according to him, at least, he had a very legitimate excuse about travel and delays and picking someone up.

And I guess it's a legitimate gripe that someone might not have asked him what the explanation was before reporting it. Of course, I guess if you're going around threatening violence against media members, it sort of invites them to just report without asking you. That is an excellent point, yeah. He's kind of created some of his own trouble here. We don't really know managers' routines, you know, so there's this whole question of, like, was, you know, if he shows up at 4 o'clock, is that late? Like, what does Dusty Baker do? You know, I don't know. What is, you know, and Joe Maddon kind of got brought in because Valentine brought Maddon in himself.

Oh, Joe Maddon doesn't show up until whatever, and Joe Maddon has some snarky comments to make. But, you know, I'd be curious. and has some snarky comments to make, but I'd be curious. Actually, we ran that. The lineup card yesterday was stats that we want to keep. We should have a stat. We should have managers clocking in. That way we can know exactly how much time they're putting in at the park.

We should put little clocks on them or something and monitor their time. How much does Tony, or not Tony La Russa, he's not a manager anymore, but how much does Mike Matheny actually sleep? Yeah, managerial report times. That would be some interesting data to have. Yeah, I don't know. I think you want your manager to be good with the media, I think you want your manager to be good with the media and whether that's someone who's very entertaining with the media and can tell interesting stories and amuse people or someone who's just incredibly boring with the media but doesn't get himself into trouble. I think one of those two is what you're going for more so than the loose cannon type who might just say something crazy at any point I don't know it's it's not ideal so I don't know if it's a

firing offense on its own it wouldn't be I'm sure if if the team were having a successful season but on top of the team not having a successful season and all the other drama that we've had to read about and talk about throughout this year, I don't know. I can't see a second act to it, but we'll see. One more note I wanted to mention before we wrap things up. One more note I wanted to mention before we wrap things up. Our August 17th show, we discussed whether the Nats would bench Bryce Harper before the playoffs. He had been slumping for some time at that point. And we talked about the possibility that they might enter the playoffs without either Strasburg or Harper, since that show, Bryce Harper is hitting.333,.380,.742 with seven home runs in 66 at-bats. So I think it's safe to say that Bryce Harper will be playing

in the playoffs this season. Does he have an innings limit? I thought they might have put in a right field innings limit on him. Well, maybe, but if so, they haven't been as forthcoming about it. Jason, thank you for filling in on short notice. You are a regular listener to the podcast, and yet you still agreed to associate yourself with it for some reason. I don't know why you would have done something like that.

I'm trying to steal some of your shine is all. Well, thank you for joining us. With any luck, Sam will be back tomorrow, and we won't have to have an A's blogger filling in again. But we do appreciate his filling in this time and we will be back with our final show of the week uh on friday