Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 40: The Phillies’ Return to 500/A Modest Bullpen Proposal

Episode Date: September 12, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss whether the Phillies’ recent run of success should affect our expectations for the team in 2013, then talk about a potential scheme to get drafted pitchers into big-league bullpens quickly.

Good morning and welcome to episode 40 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast in New York, New York. I am Ben Lindberg in Long Beach in the Honda Fit with the door open. It is Sam Miller. Sam, you are in the discussion. You have to be in the discussion. That's good. That was a good one.

Good opening. Good intro. Thank you. As Craig Calcaterra pointed out yesterday, it is in the discussion season when people discuss who is in the discussion for various awards. How do you feel about in the discussion as a concept? Well, in the discussion is probably an inexact way of describing what people want to say. Kevin Goldstein always used to bat back against people who would say, why isn't so-and-so in the discussion for MVP by saying, because he's not the MVP.

And he might be deserving of fourth, but if he's not the MVP, then it's stupid to talk about it. That was Craig's point as well, yeah. Yet I also don't mind pointing out that people have had better years than maybe other people have given them credit for. It's just that we have a very limited framework with which most writers like to present their ideas. All right. Well, we're both in the discussion for now.

We are. What are we discussing tonight? I'm going to talk about the Phillies. I'm going to talk about a stupid idea I have. Okay. Is it about a stupid idea I have. Okay. Is it a good stupid idea? Probably not. All right.

Well, let's talk about the Phillies first, and we'll end on this stupid idea. Okay. So a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the Mariners, who were kind of the hot team at the time. They had just won eight games in a row, and our response to that, I guess, was sort of a shrug of the shoulders, more or less. Since then, they are 7-9,

and just generally Mariners-y. And now the current team that is very hot and kind of holds the the crown as the hottest team in baseball is the phillies uh who have won 14 out of their last 18 games and i just read our are the the best team in baseball since the extremely arbitrary end point or starting point of August 22nd. Since when they are 14 and 4. Yes. Crazy how those line up. So the Phillies are now back to 500, which is somewhere they haven't been for quite a while.

And people are starting to talk about them as a very long-shot contender of sorts in that they are now four and a half games back in the wildcard race with one, two, three, four, five teams ahead of them. Or I guess they're tied with the Brewers, so four teams ahead of them. I don't know that we really need to discuss what their chances of making the playoffs are. 0.6%. Yes, roughly. But I don't know.

I guess a month ago, the Phillies were kind of a depressing team. They were old. They were old. They were sellers. There wasn't really a whole lot of optimism about their immediate future. Not a whole lot of help on the way very soon from the farm system, seemingly. And just kind of a team that looked to be entering a decline phase. Not clear how long it was going to be because they are a team that has money and may have a TV deal that will give them even more money.

So they weren't necessarily consigned to a decade of losing or anything, but there wasn't a whole lot of hope on the horizon. So now they're the hottest team in baseball since August 22nd. Does that change your opinion of the Phillies' kind of short-term future or the next season or so? Do they have enough around from the last contenders to stay competitive, or are they kind of going to have a bad year or two here? Yeah, we almost talked about this once when I asked whether the Red Sox

or the Phillies seemed like potential contenders next year, and the conversation went almost entirely to the Red Sox. And so I think that's the question that you have, right? And Dash Trahorn said yesterday, I believe, that if we've learned anything this year, it's that the Phillies, when healthy, are still a very good team because now Howard and Utley are healthy

and their starting rotation is healthy. They actually don't have Ruiz, I don't believe, right? Ruiz is out for the season? Yeah, Ruiz has been out for basically this hot streak plus a few weeks before that. And he's maybe arguably their best player. I think he was activated a few days ago. Oh, okay, so there you go. So I don't know.

I mean, yeah, I think that they're – well, they're in the discussion. I think that they won about a billion games last year, and I think that there's – I mean, you have to assume that we haven't actually seen that much individual decline, I would argue, for their players. Howard is probably roughly as good as he was last year, and Utley is probably roughly as good as he was last year. Just the missing time, of course, is a form of decline. Yeah, but Utley didn't play a full year last year either. And I think that there's wear and tear and there's age on everybody, and they are a frighteningly old team. You wrote at the beginning of the year that this was maybe their last year to be contenders,

and I wouldn't say that they're favorites for next year. I don't think that they have a very good core for 2014 and beyond. They don't have a good farm system. And they have a lot, a lot of money locked up. So I don't think they really have much flexibility. It's not a great team. It's not a position that I would really want to be in as a Phillies fan. But it certainly wouldn't shock me if they won 92, 93 games

next year. Yeah, I guess at the time I wrote that article, what a lot of people seemed to say, or at least Phillies fans seemed to say, was that I guess the normal rules about aging or the expectations for an older team are kind of different in the case of a team like the Phillies that has shown the ability to spend a whole lot of money and that they could kind of just buy their way out of the decline phase and just paper over their weaknesses with more strengths. and just paper over their weaknesses with more strengths.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a legitimate argument for a lot of big budget teams. But, I mean, they have $110 million, $120 million spent on five players next year, and they're not going to have a $240 million payroll. So, I mean, they are able to keep having those guys on their team, but I don't see much flexibility there. And those guys are kind of past their prime guys, mostly. Yeah, mostly, except for Hamels. And, you know, that's not even counting Papelbon. So, add another 11 or whatever he's getting. Yeah. Well, the timing of the Hamels extension, I don't know, did you think it was surprising at the time that kind of at the same time that they were selling, they were also extending or not?

I don't remember how I felt, to be totally honest. I don't know. Yeah, I guess maybe a little bit. But I mean, I think that's a case where you're, yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's hard to say. I guess I kind of want to contradict what I just said and say, well, that's a case where a lot of the financial burden is going to be way into the future. The real burden is going to be well into the future when they're going to have shed these contracts. I think that maybe what those Phillies fans were talking about when they responded to your piece is that a team with a big budget can have rolling bad contracts and you

shed them, uh, you shed a couple every year and you replace them with the backend of other deals that you had previously signed. And so you're just, you're just rolling one bad contract onto the other. And some of them are, you know, they're not all bad at once and you have some flexibility. I think that the Phillies' limitation, though, is simply that they don't have, I imagine, hardly any flexibility for the near future. And that's what we're talking about today. That, by the way, wasn't counting Rollins. So now we're up to seven guys and I think 135 million or so. Yeah, that is kind of a daunting prospect. And I don't know that a hot streak since August

22nd changes that a whole lot. No, although they have been playing good teams. But, you know. All right. Time to move on. You sure? Yeah. You ready? Let's move on in the discussion.

All right. So this is a dumb idea I have. a third round pick that the Angels took, maybe a second round pick, I think third round pick, that the Angels took in 2011, which was only a year and two months ago. He is a starter. He is not, I don't believe, considered to be all that close as a starter. I don't think that there's really any thoughts of him contributing as a starter next year. He moved up to double A for the end of this year, but now he is in the Angels' bullpen. Right now he's on the mound. He's on the mound as we speak. He was called up to be in their bullpen in September. The Reds have a similar player, Tony Singrani, who was also a third-round pick in 2011, was also a starter, has had very similar stats to Morande, and was in AA.

And they also called him up to join their bullpen. Morande struck out four of the first six batters he faced. I don't know exactly what he did today, but he was getting outs when I turned away. Singrani has struck out five batters in three pretty good innings. And then the Dodgers made Paco Rodriguez the first pick from 2012 to debut in the majors. He is also in their bullpen. And so my stupid idea is kind of related to these things. You take a guy like Mirande or Singrani and you know that the odds of him surviving six years or seven years or eight years as a starter are probably kind of long, right? I mean, pitching prospects burn out in all sorts of different ways. They get arm injuries. They just don't get good. And so, of course, those

guys are both starters because that's where they're going to have the most value. But, you know, I'm just wondering really what are the odds that they're going to contribute for the angels and the reds in 2019 and 2020 so um i wonder whether teams when they draft starting pitchers college starting pitchers in the first maybe three rounds guys who are pretty good um whether they should just immediately put them in the bullpen before they have a chance to get hurt and let them pitch in the bullpen for two years in the majors with basically no minor leagues. And I'm just a real disclaimer, this is a stupid idea. And so the intention is that I'm going to say the stupid idea, you're going to give me the reasons it won't work, I'm going to play devil's advocate, and then we will agree it's a stupid idea. So don't anybody kill me. But if it's all about getting the most value out of guys that you can before they hit free agency,

why not take advantage of the years that they're healthy and bring them up, put them in the bullpen, have them learn at the major league level, have them develop under the tutelage of the major league staff and major league pitching coach, and then transition them like Johan Santana into starting after they've got a couple years under their belt? Why not just do that immediately? Because when you draft Tony Singrani and Nick Mirande, you know they're healthy that day, and that's about the only day that you know they're going to be healthy. So why waste those days?

That is somewhat persuasive. I mean, I mean I guess I would have to know more about the process of developing a pitcher to say with any certainty whether that can impede a guy's development I mean your idea is that they would

eventually be starters yes but they're not ready to be starters yet both of those guys have further development to do to be starters. And so there's, that is definitely accepted. I am accepting that fact. They are not ready to start in the majors. However, I think both of these guys are probably ready to pitch and relief in the majors and probably do it pretty well. majors and probably do it pretty well. Well, I wonder whether if they do relieve for a year or two, are they any closer to being viable starters, uh, than they would be right now? I mean, you're, you're just kind of stopping the clock possibly on them, on their becoming starters. Um, so if you do think that they really do have a starter ceiling and they could be ready in say two or three years instead of using them right now and they would be so much more valuable as a starter for the last

three or four years that they're under your control possibly they would still be worth more than they'd be worth as a reliever because if they're a reliever for the first two years, then you have to either try to stretch them out in spring training or send them down to the minors. And really you'd think it would have to be a minors thing because you're talking about not just building up arm strength but perfecting pitches and learning how to sequence pitches and things that maybe you don't learn at all in the bullpen even if you are in

the major leagues with a coaching staff um because i don't know if i mean i don't know that the coaching staff is supposed to play the role that a player development staff does. I don't know that they have the time even to do that. Maybe they do. But I don't know that they could put in the one-on-one teaching time that, you know, a minor league staff could and whether they could at all approximate the experience of starting in a game and struggling and learning how to deal with that. Yeah, you're right.

We both have limits to what we actually know about developing a starting pitcher. There are probably multiple ways that a pitcher needs to develop. One is endurance. One is probably having a third pitch, which you might not use in game situations. One is probably learning how to pace yourself. One is probably learning how to deal with the grind. And probably, though, a pretty significant one is also learning how to face better hitters as you move up. And I think that that would be the one place where you would have a real advantage, because by the time you do start, you know how to pitch to major leaguers. You have to adapt, obviously, because you're now pitching in a different role,

but you've worked with major league catchers. You've learned to read major league by language. You've learned which pitches you can't get away with. And I think that, I mean, I think if you removed the possibility of just outright failure from the equation, I think that it's probably the case that teams would prefer to have their pitching prospects exposed to high-quality hitters as early as possible. It's just, it's hard to do that. It's hard to do that when you're developing a pitcher slowly over the course of years. I think that another argument against it, maybe a slightly cynical one, maybe not, but maybe a true one, is that if you assume that a large portion of these guys are going to have an arm injury at least once in the,

you know, two or three years before they're ready to start, you would rather them have that arm injury when they're in the minors and not sucking down service time. So that's probably significant as well. And we also don't know for sure that Tony Zingrani and Nick Mirande and any of the other ones are actually good enough to be effective relievers. Right. You do make them more expensive while they're in the bullpen. They're going to be making more money via arbitration and all those things sooner than they would otherwise. Yeah, that's true too. I wonder though, I guess among the many, many questions

that would have to be answered for this ridiculously stupid idea is we would have to know answered for this ridiculously stupid idea is we would have to know what the basically the survival rate is for top you know draft picks college draft picks taken in the top three rounds how many of them are contributing anything meaningful in six and seven years after they're drafted because if that is if they are producing a high enough level there that couldn't be made up anyway, then this is stupid. Even a stupider idea. But if they're not, if the norm is that one in six or something

is even in a major league rotation, then I don't know. I don't know, Ben. I wonder if there's... I mean, there's always a progression so that when you face more advanced hitters, you have faced slightly less advanced hitters. And it's kind of an incremental thing if you're going from college hitters to major league hitters or low A hitters to major league hitters. I don't know if you get the same learning advantage or whether the jump is just so big that it just becomes a stunting thing. Yeah, I'm going to say that the answer to that is probably no. And the reason I'm going to say that is because of Sean Doolittle and because of – Paco is a different case because I think Paco is a – he's a reliever.

case because I think Paco is a reliever and he might be in the majors to sort of almost to stay like Drew Storen was and some of these college relievers who come up immediately. Sean Doolittle was converted to pitching and pitched 27, I think 27 innings in the minors. 27 innings in the history of his pitching before they moved him to the majors. I think that when you're a reliever, it really is simple enough that that's probably not really a threat. I think that a reliever with stuff can just plop down in the majors. And I mean, there's obviously there's a learning curve. It's not quite the same as if you've progressed.

But, you know, they moved Sean Doolittle up because they wanted to take advantage of him while he's, while he's got the stuff and while he's healthy. Well, maybe we've just changed the game. Just, just now you and I having a discussion possibly has a, has a long lasting impact. I'm going to bet that we haven't. You never know who's listening. You do never know who's listening. I think in 20 years when it's an all-bullpen baseball league and everybody's a reliever who goes two innings, then this actually probably makes a lot more sense. So you're a visionary is what you're saying. You're ahead of your time.

more sense. So you're a visionary is what you're saying. You're ahead of your time. I just needed a topic idea and I was walking along the street and I thought this doesn't require any research. That's always a plus. That's what I am. Yeah. Okay. Well, I've enjoyed our discussion. Good. We will be back with another one tomorrow.