Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 37: The Tigers’ Defense is What We Thought it Was/Brandon Wood and the Quad-A Player

Episode Date: September 7, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the Tigers’ predictably bad defense and the unpredictably bad Brandon Wood.

Good morning and welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily baseball prospectus podcast back in Long Beach, California and back with all of you after a one day layoff. I am Sam Miller in New York, New York. My co-host is Ben Lindberg. Ben Lindberg, I hope you won't forget to send a thank you note to Jason Wojtkowski for filling in so admirably on short notice. Nope, I will not. I was very appreciative. Yeah, I was too. And I think that's pretty much just about enough talk about Jason. Let's move

on. Now we're even. We both missed one show, so I feel a little better about that, that you do not have a perfect attendance record anymore. Yeah. No, just think how great we'd both feel if we both missed all the shows. And imagine how great the listeners would feel. Jason and Ian have done a great job. I would pay to listen to Jason and Ian talk to each other. I mean, that's an odd couple right there.

Yeah, you can listen to them individually on their own podcasts, but together. If you're a clever editor, you could actually listen to them together. Yes, you could make a mashup. What do you want to talk about tonight? Well, there weren't a lot of games last night, and Bobby Valentine didn't say anything, so I want to talk about the Tigers' defense. Okay, and I want to talk about Brandon Wood. All right. You didn't say good evening, by the way.

No, I didn't. Are we turning over a new leaf with greetings? No, I didn't. Are we turning over a new leaf with greetings? I know my inconsistency annoys you. Okay, I'll start, I guess. There's no particular event that made me want to talk about the Tigers' defense, but I guess I am kind of heartened by the fact that the Tigers' defense is what we thought it was. Because predicting baseball is usually such a fruitless exercise.

And even the people who are good at it are really bad at it. And really the only standard that people are held to is whether they're better than just guessing, and in many cases they aren't. And many, many things have not gone the way that we thought they would go, but the Tigers are really bad at defense, which is something that was kind of a popular spring narrative. A lot was written about the Tigers and how they appeared to be very bad at defense. And they are. And really it's the difference between there being a second-place team and a first-place team. I guess they're only one game behind the White Sox,

so you could say that a lot of things are the difference between first place and second place. But it is maybe the most notable difference in that the pitching has been good. They have the third lowest fair run average in the American League. The offense has been good. They have the fourth highest true average in the American League. And the defensive efficiency or the park-adjusted defensive efficiency or however you want to measure it has really been bad it's been the worst uh in in the american league um i guess on an on a case-by-case basis maybe it hasn't been quite as disastrous as people thought

uh miguel cabrera and his move from first to third was the subject of a lot of hand-wringing this spring. I wrung my hands a little bit. I said that, you know, it would be sort of an unprecedented move for someone at his age to kind of go the other way on the defensive spectrum and actually last a whole season. So he has not been a total disaster over there. But the defense just kind of has been as bad as we thought it would be. And I guess I don't know what my question is. If it were a few years ago, I would maybe ask whether this would prompt some sort of defensive renaissance among teams.

But we've already seen that happen uh and whether it was the rays or the mariners uh defense was very in vogue for a while um and it was kind of the the hip new way for teams to improve from one season to another was to sign brend or, you know, someone who couldn't hit but could really field. And the Tigers just kind of completely went away from that and said, we will sign a bunch of sluggers and put them in positions where they probably aren't very well suited and they'll just hit enough to make up for it. And they really haven't. And they've been one of the year's more notable disappointments. If they manage to make up this one game deficit and sneak into the playoffs in some way, I don't

know that we will ever remember the 2012 Tigers as a particular disappointment. But if they miss out, we probably will. Do you have any comments? Sure. I'll go two quick places with this. One, I don't know that I, well, I think that maybe the problem actually isn't the defense so much as there was a sort of delusional optimism about the offense. You'll recall in the first few weeks of the season, people bringing up the possibility of a 1,000-run offense, which is a standard April conversation about the team that is considered the best offense in the league. And a 1,000-run offense, of course, happens every 10 years or so.

And the idea that the Tigers had a historically great offense was a bit interesting in the first place. You could see why they should have been better than they are, but it also probably there was a little bit of over-optimism about the Tigers, and then also they have probably underperformed a bit offensively. In fact, they certainly have underperformed a bit offensively, and you could just as easily say, I mean, I don't know which stats you're looking at. I pulled up the first thing that showed up on my internet, and it looks like they're maybe 30 or so runs worse than average defensively. And so you could say that those 30 runs, the three wins, are the reason they're not in first place.

You could just as easily say, though, that if they had scored 646 runs instead of 616 runs, which would have made them just the fifth best offense in the American League, so nothing spectacular, they would have also gotten those 30 runs back. So I don't know that I really see the Tigers defense as being all that notably bad or all that significance, even in the context of a close race. There's one other thing. Davy Johnson, when he was, I remember this from our Davy Johnson conversation a couple days ago when I was reading up on Davy Johnson, when he was managing the Mets, one of the things that burnished his stat head credentials was when he put Kevin Mitchell and Howard Johnson at shortstop on days when Sid Fernandez was starting.

And the idea, I think, I'm pretty sure I remember this. And the idea was that Sid Fernandez struck out so many batters that you could really afford to punt at defense because there weren't going to be that many balls in play. And you get this great bat in the lineup. And I don't have a huge point about this but it's sort of curious that uh or interesting that sid fernandez struck out 8.8 batters per nine uh at that stage in his career which of course made him a very good strikeout pitcher um but the tigers this year have struck out 8.3 batters per nine and if you remove the

softest part of their bullpen you probably get pretty close to 8.8 and that is the highest rate in the al well exactly and they are the highest rate in the al um tied or or up by percentage uh you know by uh decimal points um and so you could just as easily say that the tigers uh decision to punt defense is actually a savvy awareness of their pitching construction and that they are carrying on Davy Johnson's legacy. Or you could say that the interpretation of Davy Johnson's moves in 1986 looks pretty naive now when you really think about it. The difference between an 8.8 per nine strikeout pitcher and a 6.8 per nine strikeout pitcher is probably like one ball to shortstop every four games and probably not even a ball where Kevin Mitchell and a typical shortstop make a

big difference. So it's kind of strange. Anyway, that's all. It's interesting how the stat head stance on that has changed dramatically. Oh, yeah. For a while it was defense doesn't matter, and then for a while it was defense matters a lot. I don't know if we're kind of in between or maybe closer to the second now,

but if you look back at some sort of state-of-the-art sabermetric thinking from a decade or so ago about defense it now looks very dated well we should it seems like half of the show that you and i do is throwing out ideas for stories that we think would be good but not actually following through on them and it would actually i think be interesting to see whether it makes any sense at all to customize your defense differently for different members of your starting rotation because my suspicion is that the um the difference between even joel pinero and jared weaver for instance is probably microscopic over the course of a couple games, but maybe it's not. It seems like it'd be a pretty easy thing to research.

All right. Speaking of players who played behind Joel Pinero and Jared Weaver, Brandon Wood is not in the news right now. It's September. He is not apparently going to get a call up to Colorado. He is not on their 40-man roster. I did a quick Google News search to see what Brandon Wood is up to, and the top results are a man in Maine named Brandon Wood

who had a son named Blaze in Marshfield. That was the news? Yeah. He made the birds and dads. A left fielder named brandon wood in a collegiate summer league homered and a high school soccer player named brandon wood had an assist for owosso high so not a big brandon wood day um but jason parks wrote about him and uh wrote about his development his prospect and why he failed. And I just want to,

more than anything, I just want to recommend that people read that. That's one of my favorite pieces that we've run in a while. And it was fascinating to pretty much, I think, everybody that Jason talked to from the scouting side comprised pitchers who had faced Brandon Wood or had been teammates with Brandon Wood. and it was really fascinating to hear their perspectives on him. And I'm going to give a couple of quotes. One said that, quote, he had good hand-eye coordination, great hands, and fast, loose wrists, but it was his pitch recognition and reaction.

At the higher levels, that breaking ball doesn't pop out of the hand, the arm speed doesn't slow down, and the fastball is never middle in. Each guy has some sort of ceiling when it comes to reaction time or time it takes for pitch recognition. Another source that faced Wood on multiple occasions suggested it was always known you could beat Wood with stuff, either velocity or a sharp breaking ball. If you could put a fastball above the hands, he would struggle to find it. If you could drop a sharp hammer, Wood wouldn't be able to track it and would swing over it. The best quote was, unfortunately, I didn't have stuff or a sharp breaking ball, so Wood killed

me. And of course, the idea of the quad A player has been debated and got a little bit of attention this year when Kevin Goldstein wrote about it. And I sort of remember Kevin saying something along the lines that a quad A player might just be a guy who hits mistakes and gets every level he goes up, sees fewer mistakes. And the idea of, I think that we probably tend not to see the nuances of players, of sort of different ways you can be successful enough. The idea of a player who is good at hitting mistakes and not good at hitting other mistakes is a very complicated thing and it's hard to identify. And I imagine that if you go trying to identify those guys, especially probably at the higher levels, you would get a lot of false positives because of small sample sizes and such. But it is interesting to me.

Everything about Brandon Wood's failure is interesting. absolutely blows my mind that a number three prospect in baseball America can be so much less successful than a player who goes undrafted at the same age. And I mean, that just, I can't quite ever appreciate that. That's incredible. And so anyway, Wood is 27 this year. I wrote earlier that this year I wrote about the idea of age 27 as the last chance that you have to have people talk about you. And once age 27 passes, no matter how good a prospect you are, nobody talks about you as a post-hype guy anymore. And people were talking about Brandon Wood as a post-hype guy, even this spring. And they will never do it again because he hit something like 250, 300, 400

for the AAA Colorado Springs Sky Sox. He was worse than his team average. And he is not in the news even in September. So that's, unfortunately, the probably end of Brandon Wood's relevance. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I mean, so in hindsight, according to some of the people Jason spoke to,

there was always a clear route to getting Wood out or there was always sort of an obvious weakness that could be exploited or that we should have maybe been able to tell would be exploited at higher levels. And I mean, that's something you often hear from scout guys and prospect people who can kind of talk stat guys down a bit because a stat guy will look at a box score or he'll look at a line on baseball reference and see some incredible strikeout rate or some enormous home run total. And it will take the prospect guy who's actually seen the guy play

or spoken to scouts about him to kind of douse those hopes a little bit. I guess this year maybe it's Darren Roof, the minor league home run leader, who has 38 home runs for double A Redding in the Philly system and is not really a prospect or not a good prospect because he's 25. So I wonder, I mean, in hindsight, maybe it's easy to say that about Brandon Wood, but obviously no one was saying that about Brandon Wood at the time. No, you're right. At least publicly. Even the very respected prospect people who would normally be the first to kind of inject some reality into the discussion were all for Brandon Wood and thought that his skills would certainly translate.

I wonder why that is that he fooled everyone. Yeah, and it is, I think it is more complicated than those quotes that I read. And I think Jason would probably acknowledge that it's more complicated than anything that anybody told him. I mean, the fact is that Brandon Wood is, right now he's 27, and he can't hit AAA pitching. When he was 22, he could. And AAA pitching has not gotten better. It's actually probably gotten worse in the last five years. I think that it has become really even less of a stuff league than it was before. And Brandon Wood probably doesn't see a lot of good stuff in the PCL right now.

And so his struggles clearly go beyond good high fastballs and hammer curveballs. He simply didn't get better from age 21, 22. And I think 90% of the time when we talk about prospects that succeed or fail, what we're really talking about is people who get better after 20 and continue to get better. And that is, uh, that's what scouts do. And that's, what's really, I think the mystery that I don't, I don't know why Mike Trout is so good this year. Everybody knew he was going to be a star, but I don't know why he is peaking at age 20 when nobody else does and i don't know why brandon wood peaked at age 20 at an obviously much

lower level and i don't know why jeff mathis peaked at age 20 um it's very mysterious and it's part of the brandon wood story as well and maybe someday soon we will do do DNA testing and we'll be able to figure out when exactly a player will peek. And then we'll know everything. Finally. Yes. That's it. Bye-bye.