Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 39: Outdrawing the Astros, Wilin Rosario’s Deadly Defense, and the Comeback Players of 2013

Episode Date: September 11, 2012

Ben and Sam thank their listeners for being more numerous than Astros fans who watch the team on TV, dissect Wilin Rosario’s defense, and pick the most likely candidates for 2013 Comeback Player of the Year.

Good evening to some of you, and good morning to others of you, and good afternoon to the slackers. This is episode 39 of Effectively Wild, and I'm Sam Miller talking, silently listening. It's Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. Ben, how are you this evening? I'm doing very well, and we have to thank our listeners for something. We do? Yes. I feel like they have to thank us for something. Well, yeah, naturally, but we have to thank them for one specific thing, which is that

we outdrew the Astros recently. Wow. The Astros Sunday game drew a.05 rating in the Houston market, which means that it had an average audience of 1,092 households. And I'm not going to give away our podcast traffic because I don't want to make anyone jealous, I'm not going to give away our podcast traffic because I don't want to make anyone jealous, but I will say that we have had episodes that outdrew the Astros on Sunday. Have you made your pitch to Kevin Goldstein yet for him to come back?

You'd think they would consider just running reruns of Up and In at this point. They could get more listeners that way, I would think, for the rest of this season. at this point, they could get more listeners that way, I would think, for the rest of the season, than to actually show the estrus. That is not more than 0.18% of the market was watching the estrus on Sunday. Well, if I worked in Houston and I worked for a big metropolitan newspaper, I would right now be working on a Sunday feature about as many of those 1,092 people as I could find, because it really does. I saw that rating earlier today, and it does make me wonder who the people are who watch September games with the Astros. I know that I certainly as a nine-year-old, well, nine is a bad

example because the Giants were competitive when I was nine, but when I was eight and when I was 10, they were very poor in September. And I remember watching, although I was a listener, but I remember following every game through the end of September. And there was a point in my life, probably around 12 or 13, where I realized that I didn't need to do that, and it felt like a real loss of something in my heart when I moved past meaningless September games.

So I'm curious about who these fine, uncynical people are who continue to want to watch J.D. Martinez post-September call-up. Maybe they're not real people. How many TVs do you think there are in Minute Maid Park that are just on? That's true. TVs that are on in the Astor's office tvs of maybe friends and family and certainly there's one tv in the sports bar that's going to be on and there's one tv in a gym although i think it was a football game on on sunday so that may have dominated the the sports bar market but

is texas into football uh i think they're kind think it's growing in popularity there. Upstart. Yeah, getting into it. But yeah, that is an interesting question. I wonder how many real people there were sitting at home of that 1,092 watching that game. It has to be, man, it can't be a high number. It can't be higher than 1,092, so it is not a high number.

But it is probably – what would you guess? If you had to guess, what would you guess? 270? Like 400 tops? It's a city of a million. Two million. Two million people. Oh, we're jerks.

That's your topic. We're done with topic one. Well – Why isn't that your topic? You fight for a topic. Well, thank you for making Effectively Wild more popular than the Houston Astros. What a tremendous waste of a topic. This is like diving into first base. You just don't know how to.

Aggravating my calf at the same time. What are you? Seriously, can we just call it a... Do you have a topic? Do you want to talk about something else? It's probably less interesting than that one, but I wanted to talk about Will and Rosario. That would have been great to talk about tomorrow, but we can talk

about it today. I want to talk about 2013 comebacks. Tell me about Will and Rosario. Will and Rosario has 19 pass balls. Oh my goodness. Yeah, which is more pass balls than anyone else has.

And really more pass balls than anyone ever has except for catchers of knuckleball pitchers. I looked at the year-by-year leaderboard, and there are a bunch of Boston catchers from the 90s and earlier this decade, or last decade,

who had caught Wakefield all the time. And then if you go back a bit further, there are guys like Benito Santiago in 1993 and Gino Petrali on the Rangers in 1987. But they both caught Charlie Huff. So you give them a pass, so to speak, for that. A pass. Yes, I plan that. So really you have to go back, it seems like, to 1975. Ted Simmons had 28 pass balls

for the Cardinals and there were no obvious knuckleballers on that staff. So he had a bunch of pass balls this past weekend. He had, I think it was five pass balls during the first two games of a three-game series against the Phillies, and he was benched on Monday. And Jim Tracy had some pretty strong words about it. He said, the message has to be very clear, and that is you can't catch like that. It put us in a bad spot in two games that we had chances to win. We've got to be better than this. It won't work moving forward. It's got to be a hell of a lot better.

It's not fair to the club. It's not fair to the pitching staff. He went on for a while and then he said, you certainly don't want this to come to the point where it's a mental issue, where you create a problem for yourself, which you'd think his comments maybe could have created a mental issue, or they would for me if I were Will and Rosario. Anyway, I just, I mean, in the top 11 of the Astros that, or of the Rockies, sorry, that Kevin Goldstein wrote before this season, he said

that Rosario needed to work on his receiving skills, which now looks kind of like an understatement. So I wonder what you think the real impact of this is in that Rosario is a rookie and he's young and he is an above-average hitter. He doesn't do so well getting on base, but he has a lot of power. And so that part of his game is impressive, but he has a lot of power. And so that part of his game is impressive. And he has a very strong arm. He has a well above average cut stealing rate.

But he has this one thing he can't do, which is catching the ball, which is an important part of his job. But if you just look at 19 pass balls in terms of, say, run value, maybe that's four or five runs uh it's not it's not a huge amount but do you think that makes an outsized impact in that pitchers maybe can't trust him now and won't throw him certain pitches that they might throw to another guy and has this reached the point where you just can't play him if he's going to miss so many balls? Well, you're actually underselling it as well. Besides the 19 pass balls, he also leads the National League with 11 other errors. So he has been responsible for an awful lot of mistakes.

And he also has allowed 46 wild pitches, which, to put that in perspective, wild pitches, which, to put that in perspective, is double the number that Buster Posey has allowed in about 20 more starts. And it is about 70 or 75% more than Brian McCann has allowed in 20 more starts. So he does all of that quite poorly. And yet it's interesting that we are, that you veered this toward the kind of more mysterious part of catching when you mentioned the possibility that pitchers wouldn't be comfortable throwing him. Pitches, we really seem to have moved to a place in our baseball world where we are fascinated by the idea of what a catcher does beyond the sort of basic catching and throwing and so it would be interesting to know whether his pitchers you know have said that or will say that it would only be I don't know. My guess is that he probably can't catch anything,

and so they might as well. This past weekend, they were kind of low, but not really in the dirt or not particularly pass ball worthy. And he said some things about the lights in Philly and how there were shadows, and he put his sunglasses on and then he took them off again and he couldn't quite get it right. Uh, so, but you know, the Phillies weren't having problems with pass balls, so it was kind of weak. Well, he is correct me if I'm wrong, but he is basically then at this point he's Miguel Olivo, right? Because isn't Miguel Olivo also a low on-base percentage, high power, great arm,

can't catch anything thrown anywhere near him? And I'm now glancing at this. Miguel Olivo has led the league in pass balls four times. He has had double-digit pass balls six times. He has. And I'm sorry, he has also allowed 50 or more wild pitches three times and 49 another one and so that's I mean I don't know that does this mean that Rosario isn't going to be a star I don't know I mean Olivo had I don't know it's it's hard to say I mean Olivo had 23 home runs

in Kansas City a couple years ago and as a 30-year-old. As a 30-year-old. I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know how much. I really honestly don't know how much this matters. I mean, my background, of course, is following a team that has a hysterically outsized value placed on catcher defense. And I don't know that Mike Socia is a great model,

but I think that I feel pretty safe saying that this would be quite the controversy if he were in Anaheim. Yes. And, well, I guess, I mean, Tracy benched Iannetta, right? Didn't Tracy bench Iannetta over much smaller sins than this? Yeah, and it seemed like with Iannetta it was almost as much because of his offense, which was weird because he was a pretty good hitter other than the batting average. But, yeah, it seemed like they kept losing patience with that even after they extended him

and sent him down to work on not being the type of hitter that he is which is not so bad i wonder how much you can improve on um i just uh got sorry i got distracted uh i wonder how much you can improve on that at this point i mean there are i think there there's there are certainly skills in baseball that you expect to see improvement on that you can improve with a lot of work. And then there are others like throwing arm or running speed that are probably, you know, 90 some percent genetics. And, um, I don't know where this falls. I imagine that, uh, I would guess that there's technique involved certainly in catching a ball.

But at this point in your career, most of the technique would be on catching the ball, quietly catching the ball, you know, the way that you're supposed to catch the ball, not actually catching it. Right, yes. Like I would imagine. Whether you catch it. My guess is that Rosario just simply has trouble reacting to pitches. I mean, you and I certainly couldn't catch that ball, and that's why we're not catchers. That is literally the only reason that you and I are not catching the main inning.

You would think that Rosario, if he could hit it, he would be able to catch it, but maybe that's just not true. It'll be interesting to see if he does move. He has taken some grounders at the infield corners. I think he's played a few innings at third. I wonder how long a leash he will have, given that he has already been benched for this, whether it's something that they'll work on over the winter,

and if they don't see a lot of improvement next year, whether they will start to think about moving him somewhere else. Well, if he comes back next year and does not allow many pass balls, then we might talk about him as a comeback player of the year. You and I and the rest of the BP staff are right now, for the lineup card this week, writing about comeback player of the year candidates for 2012. And I just wanted to ask you who you think are contenders for that next year in 2013,

which is a way of saying who do you think is having a bad year, a suitably bad year this year, but that you're not pulling the plug on their career and you think that they have plenty of upside left for 2013. And we won't lie to our listeners, you did warn me that this was going to be your topic so that I could do some preparation for it because otherwise I would have sat here looking at leaderboards and making some sound while I came up with names. So I think probably the most likely candidate for a comeback player of the year is a guy who's just missed most of the year, um, as opposed to someone who has played the whole year poorly.

Um, just you think it just in general, in a theoretical, I haven't made a complete study of that, but just kind of glancing at the recent winners, uh, guys like Ellsbury or maybe Liriano, Tim Hudson a couple years ago, Chris Carpenter, Nomar. It seems like guys who weren't healthy and bad, they were not healthy. But you named five guys and you had to go back to Nomar. Are those just five that came to your head or are you looking at the list right now? I'm looking at the list. I do not. So what are all the guys in between?

Okay. American League, the – so the MLB award has only been awarded since 2005. Before that, it was a sporting news award. So since 2005, it was Jason Giambi who was coming back from various health issues Jim Tomei who also was Pena Carlos Pena Cliff Lee Aaron Hill Francisco Liriano and Jacoby Ellsbury in the National League it was Ken Griffey Jr. Nomar Dimitri Young Brad Lidge Chris Carpenter Tim Hudson and Lance Berkman. Okay. And actually, a few of those guys would not be bad candidates to repeat.

I guess no one has repeated yet. I don't know if anyone did back when it was a Sporting News Award, but I could see Berkman and Ellsbury and Carpenter would not be the worst choices in the world for next year. No, all solid. But I think my top choice would be Karl Crawford, just because he is still young or still in a sort of prime age. He has contributed very little over the last couple of years, and there's been sort of the whole story surrounding him about the contract

and falling short of expectations and he should be healthy uh around the start of next season in a new place um he won't be old and I could see him becoming something like the player he was which would make him a good candidate yeah that's a good one that's my that would have been the third one that I would have probably said. And I agree. I mean, even though Crawford has been pretty bad for a year and a half of play, it's still sort of hard to imagine him in your head running around being bad at baseball. He still seems like a guy who's going to be able to put up steals,

which play well in voting, and the league switch could help him. And I mean, there's all sorts of reasons to think that Karl Crawford could be a valuable part of the Dodgers next year. And certainly he's coming back not just from one bad season, but two bad seasons and not just an injury, but bad play. And so, yeah, the whole narrative fits. My I think that I probably my my top pick would have been if he assuming plays, would probably be Mariano Rivera. And from merely a performance standpoint, I also am not nearly off the Tim Lincecum train. And I think he'll get a lot of headlines next year if he's good again. Yeah, I could see Ryan Howard making a run at it he was on my list

for sure not that I think Ryan Howard will return to peak form or anything but I could certainly see him being healthy all year and racking up some counting stats that look sort of impressive I kind of as a sleeper I kind of like John Lackey. I mean, I don't know how much of his year and a half of being horrible

was injury-related, but I mean, I'm just sort of projecting that a lot of it might have been that he was... I mean, if you have a Tommy John surgery, you probably were pitching with weakness, even if you didn't really know you were pitching with pain for a while. And so it seems reasonable to me that he could come back and be some semblance of the horse type pitcher. And if he gets run support and wins 17 games or something like that. What about Dice K? I do not, I do not expect much out of dice k i think ricky weeks is uh is potentially a good one um and uh i don't know if closers get much love i mean rivera i

think would because of the story and because he's mariana rivera but brian wilson is a potential guy and high profile enough probably not maybe though i, he had just signed that big contract, and yeah, that's not a bad one. The dark horse candidate was Giovanni Soto, who I could see in a full year in Texas. He's been a guy who's had some kind of nagging injury issues at various times. He's not old. I could see him bouncing back to what he was a few years ago in Texas, which would be pretty impressive.

And of course, the darkest of dark horses. Nick Johnson. Roger Clemens. I like yours more. Alright, let's wrap it up. It was episode 30 something, you guys remember. Whatever I said at the beginning, 39. And we'll be back tomorrow with episode 40.