Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 411: The Too Many Excellent Emails Edition

Episode Date: March 21, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about supercomputers, heartbeat monitors, players using stats, and more.

What is the primary goal? You should know, Professor. You programmed me. Come on. What is the primary goal? To win the game. Good morning, and welcome to episode 411 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller,

joined by no one else today because it's the Listener Email Show. And we got a ton of good emails. We didn't put out a call for emails until Thursday. And so we were running a little low and I put a note in the Facebook group and suddenly we have way too many emails that I want to answer. So we'll just start. The first one comes from Mark W. in Alexandria, Virginia. He says, with the Pirates' Russell Martin wearing a heart monitor, what questions does Sam want to ask the Pirates? over the course of this podcast that have subsequently occurred, uh, which I don't know whether that has anything to do with our prescience or

whether it's just the fact that we've done 400 episodes and talked about everything we could think of. And at some point, something we talk about will actually happen. Um, but you, uh, mentioned many episodes ago that,

uh, if you could see what one innovation, or if you could tell teams to do one thing for a year or something, you would want them to make all their players wear heart monitors so that you could see what was your main point that you wanted to see whether guys got nervous in clutch situations or something? Yeah, I don't remember exactly where we fell on this. But yeah, basically, I think that it was, I can't remember. It might have been Russell's suggestion or it might not have been. It might have been yours or it might have been mine.

It might have been Nick Wheatley Schaller's. I have no idea whose suggestion it was. But somebody suggested that it would be a way to measure sort of nervousness and to, you know, maybe it would be a way of approaching the question of of clutch performance uh if we can't reliably draw uh differences out of the performances that players have in such situations because of all the statistical noise involved uh we might be able to see different behavior uh physical behavior, physical response to stimuli. But now that I'm thinking about it, you know what I would actually, to answer this question,

what I would sort of like to do, and I'm not sure, I didn't read the entire thing, but he's not wearing it in games, right? This is about his. Well, so, yeah, so let me, that was episode 275, by the way, that we talked about that. Ken Maeda dug it up in our Facebook group. So Travis Sochik, the Pirates beat writer, who we had on, or Nick talked to on the Pirates podcast preview, reported that the Pirates new secret weapon is this heart rate monitor. It's like a compression shirt that you wear. You know, Russell Martin wears it under his chest protector,

and it has some sort of electronic sensor near the center of your chest that collects data that records your heartbeats and your energy consumption. It seemed to me he says that Martin typically wears it during his workouts and during a game also. So I think both. And it, the way that Martin talks about it, he's using it mostly as a, you know, like a fitness thing, just keeping track of how many calories in, how many calories out so that he can maintain his weight. calories in, how many calories out, so that he can maintain his weight. And it sounds like it's a totally optional thing that players or some of them have opted to do. And it's described as mostly a workout fitness benefit sort of thing.

But Neil Huntington also did say, kind of cryptically, it also can be used to monitor some other things that we can help them use to take the next step with their mental skills, which to me suggests that maybe he's thinking of something along the lines of what you were. Oh yeah, that sounds right. That sounds more or less like where that would be going. So anyway, then what I was sort of thinking in the last three minutes is I would be curious to see, and there might be nothing here, I would just be interested in seeing, but I would be interested in seeing whether his heart rate goes up before pitches where he swings. Because, you know, like we think that, okay, so it's a 1-1 count

and the pitcher throws a pitch and then the hitter decides whether to swing or not. But you could imagine that in fact the hitter might subconsciously, or consciously, but probably subconsciously, have already decided to swing or leaned swing or for some reason is prone to swing and that that might correspond or correlate to an increased heart rate as he anticipates that. And so I would just be curious to see whether batter's heart rates predict their next swing

the way that like horses getting agitated predict like summer storms or earthquakes or whatever. I'd be interested if like if if if you could actually and there probably wouldn't be any real value right because you wouldn't be able to see the other team's numbers no it wouldn't it wouldn't be valuable in the moment it would just be another way to learn about baseball players i mean i have no uh because of the job i have i don't actually have any power to put anything into play. I just want to learn about baseball players. I want to learn what it's like to play baseball by observing the actions of those who play baseball.

I feel like the one big blind spot that you and I have is that we will never know what it's like to be in that batter's box, to see that pitch, to have the ability to hit that pitch. Uh, all of that has formed us. And so any, anything like the heart rate to me feels like a good way to, uh, to sort of, well, I don't want to push it too far, but basically to get a little bit of insight into the body's, uh, you know, uh, physiology. It's, it's interesting to me that this story just came out because it was actually brought up at the saber analytics conference last weekend by kyle evans who's the the cubs director of video and advanced scouting um and he kind of downplayed the the utility of the idea and you never know when a when a front office executive says something whether he's being sincere or he's just dissembling, maybe the Cubs think it's the greatest thing ever.

And he's trying to convince people that it's not so that they don't use it. But his, his rationale for why it wouldn't really make sense. Uh, he mentioned that it has been used in other sports. He mentioned soccer specifically. And he said that, uh,

it's less useful for baseball because basically he said because conditioning is not quite as important that's pretty much what it boiled down to that he said that baseball players aren't endurance athletes in the same way so with a soccer player you would think it would be very useful to see whether a guy is just getting tired out when he's running up and down the field, whereas baseball players don't really have that problem so much. It's kind of quick bursts of exertion more so than endurance. So that was his reason. But, I mean, it sounds like a smart thing, even if it's just to maintain your weight. If it's really that accurate,

then that would be pretty helpful. Hey, Ben, while we're here, I think a couple of people asked us to guess which team bought the supercomputer. Do you have a guess? Get to that here. So we got three different questions, I think, about this. Matt Trueblood sent it to us initially. Aaron sent it to us. Someone else whose name I don't have down here, unfortunately, sent it to us. It was a story in The Economist recently about a team that purchased a Cray supercomputer, according to the company's CEO, and the team declines to be named. But he says that it exemplifies an organization that five years ago, most people would not have dreamed would need or even want a supercomputer.

And he also says that a team can use a supercomputer to process data in time to affect decisions during play, which is surprising to me, I guess. Like, well, you want me to guess? It's I mean, it's surprising to me that any team would do this because the thing apparently costs half a million dollars. and just talking to people from teams while I was at the Sabre conference, it seems like most teams have surprisingly small analytics budgets or non-existent analytics budgets. Maybe it's different for some, but the ones I talk to just basically have to beg to spend on any kind of data or infrastructure stuff.

So it's surprising to me that this would be the case. But I don't know. Do you have a guess? I mean, the only clue. You're not even giving a guess? The only clue. You just talked for like two and a half minutes and then you sigh and say, I don't know. We know you don't know. If you knew, you would have been quoted in the article.

All right. Well, I'm going to say it's the Phillies because it's like when my grandma finally got a computer, she wanted the best computer. She barely knew how to turn the thing on or answer an email, but she wanted the top of the line computer that everyone would be envious of, even though it would make no difference in her ability to actually use the computer. even though it would make no difference in her ability to actually use the computer. So maybe the fillies just dipping their toe into saver metrics for the first time have gone all the way in and think that they can catch up by buying the fastest computer. I think that that is the only answer you could have given that I would say is a terrible answer. I just don't think that that holds up. Although it is funny.

And I will forevermore think about the Phillies as being your grandma. Well, you're right. I mean, it's not easy to guess because generally you could go one of two directions. You could think, well, which team has a lot of money, you know, because this is a big purchase. This isn't hiring two interns, although it's not that far off, but I mean, it's only a half a million dollars, which is chump change for major league teams, but not the way they do their budgets. Somebody who controls a budget had to fight for that to be in their budget.

And so even though it's not a lot of money to the corporation, it is a lot of money to the CFO who's parceling this out. It's not an easy thing to convince somebody to do. So you could go with the rich team, the team that has a lot of money, or you could go with the team that has invested a lot. And those teams have tended to be the smaller market teams. lot. Those teams have tended to be the smaller market teams, so like the A's or the Rays would be kind of natural guesses for wanting to use this. It's probably not either of those. So I would guess that the Astros would make some sense, because the Astros are a decently sized market. They're spending way, way, way less than they could right now, presumably, carrying a $20 to $40 million payroll last year and this year. That's where they're presumably

sort of spending their money is they're stocking it away, socking it away, or they're hiring smart people. That's not a terrible guess, but I would think it's the Cubs, if I had to guess. Because the Cubs seem to me where those two things meet. And like the Cubs, I might get the details wrong, but the Cubs recently signed, like they hired some college coach who's like considered the best college coach in the country. And that's sort of a creative way to spend, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars because, you know, they had to pay a lot for him. I might be getting all those details wrong. None of that might be true.

But that's a thing that I sort of heard. So it seems to me that they're a team that probably also has more money than they're able to spend on professional baseball players at the moment. Well, I like my theory better. Sure. Do you have any theories about what this would be useful for? I don't know how things work. Yeah, I mean, the story says that other existing technologies could,

to quote, wade leisurely through information, helping managers make choices during the off-season, but the supercomputer can process data in time to affect decisions during play, which is, I mean, can you think of any calculations that you would have to do in-game? I guess if you had a simulation of just everything that's going on in the game and, you know, like you want to simulate

how a pinch hitter would do against this pitcher and you want to plug in how hard that pitcher is actually throwing on that day and what the weather is that day and who else is in the bullpen and just all of these different factors that you couldn't necessarily run before the game, maybe. But even then, how would you even communicate that information

to the dugout? Call down and I don't know. I don't know what it would be useful for, but presumably there's something. Is there a line of communication that is possible between the front office and the dugout in-game? I mean mean i would think you could call a clubhouse attendant and get him to relay a message but not you couldn't do that on every pitch no i mean you couldn't you couldn't do like you can't i am the the manager no you can't have a for instance in the game and you can't so uh like they're not yeah so i don't know it's hard to imagine anything that would be useful that could be reliably relayed but i don't i i don't have any idea what's possible i mean you could imagine building some sort of framework for pitch

sequencing involving uh you know all of the data on each pitch and incorporating batter's swing rate and all the various bat speed on each pitch and the spin and speed of each pitch that the pitcher's thrown and then all of the elements of game theory or whatever that go into pitch sequencing and you could imagine building a model that would say what the best pitch to call is but i mean i wouldn't imagine that's it i don't i don't think that the gm is good i don't think that we're anywhere close to the gm being able to tell the catcher what to call next yeah i in the middle of a game yeah it might not be in-game stuff. I don't know.

At the previous Sabre conference, Vince Gennaro, the president of Sabre, gave a presentation about pitcher similarity scores and grouping pitchers into different families based on all these different criteria. And he said it would take something like months to process if you didn't have access to some sort of supercomputer, which he did because he was consulting for a company that had that kind of hardware. So maybe it's just something like that. I don't know. Maybe someday someone will write a

book about it. Okay. We got two questions about pitchers hitting eighth. I will read the shorter one, which comes from Darren Padour in Auburn, Washington, who asks, can you discuss the theory of hitting the pitcher eighth? I just read that the Mets were actually thinking about this to get 9-1-2 to allow the third hitter to act like a cleanup hitter. This seems like pseudo-saber metrics to me and not real,

but apparently Tony La Russa used to do it all the time. Any evidence that this would work? And a listener named John sent the same question in, also prompted by the Mets. So it's been a while since I read a full study of this, but my understanding of it is that it's not pseudo-sabermetrics. It is not particularly consequential sabermetrics, but there's some logic to it, some support. I just Googled quickly at BP to see if I could find an article about it, and I turned up a guest piece from Tom Tango from 2011

where he just answered questions from our readers, and one of them was about lineup order, and he said, as for why it's better to bat the pitcher eighth, it's because it's more beneficial to set up the top of the order than to give the pitcher fewer times to bat. But again, we're talking about a two-run gain over the course of 162 games. And then he talks a little bit about the two-run gain.

He says, why is there so little gain? Because everyone eventually bats. It's like deferring your taxes. You can save only so much. If you swap your number two and your number six hitters, what happens? Well, that's a difference of 72 plate appearances. If your number six hitter creates 90 runs per 700 plate appearances and your number two hitter creates 70, the net effect is that you can gain 20 runs per 700 plate appearances, and 20 divided by 700 times 72 is two runs. So he says that the best way to set up your batting order is to put it in the optimal order and then tweak it based on the ego of the players,

because human impact is more important than leveraging two runs. So there is some statistical support for this. It's not going to make the Mets a much better team. And presumably if the number nine hitter is so offended by this indignity of batting behind the pitcher that he performs worse because of the embarrassment, then that could wipe out any of the value that the simulation would suggest. I think it's the other way, though. I would feel like there's more pride in batting ninth in this situation

than there would be batting eighth in front of the pitcher. Because of the American League and the way that certain managers in the American League have kind of branded the number nine spot as the second leadoff hitter, I feel like there is a breed of hitter that is seen as a valuable hitter because he can bat ninth. And I don't think there's necessarily anything real to that value. Like Tango said, everybody bats.

But it's been branded a certain way. And I feel like if you're saying, you know, we want you to bat, it's almost like you're telling the number the new number nine hitter you're part of the middle of our order you're part of our of our attack instead of just you're the last guy you're you're worse than everybody except the pitcher right it's very clear what you're saying about the number eight hitter it's much less clear what you're saying about the number nine hitter in that scenario yeah you, you're right. It's probably all about how you communicate it. Okay, let's do the baseball reference play index segment. All right. So, you know, last August or so, I became very obsessed with Yasiel Puig's

batting average on ground balls in play. And, you know, a lot of times if you see somebody has a really high BABIP, you'll go look at their batted ball profile and go, oh, well, he's hitting more line drives, or he's not hitting more line drives, and conclude that he's well above average, but he's hitting a lot of line drives. He's probably not that lucky, and if he is, then, you know, he's probably lucky. Right. And I think's actually there's actually like nothing to that theory i think like oh really i think colin wires wrote a piece about how if you know a hitter's babbit uh then then adding in his line drive rate doesn't really tell you anything over about over and above that um oh interesting yeah i'll have to i'll have to go read that colin would disapprove of this entire segment because Colin doesn't believe that the stringers who file,

who report whether something is a grounder or a fly ball can tell the difference between a grounder or a fly ball, let alone a line drive. Well, Colin can go play with the supercomputer that you think he has access to. Anyway, though, what I liked, I said that it would make sense to me, but I did not actually say the answer.

I came in on the cuffs. So anyway, what is kind of more interesting to me is to see what their Babbitt is on each type of ball instead of just looking at how much. So like if he's hitting, if he's got like a 500 Babbitt on grounders specifically and the league average on grounders is like 270 or 220 or 230, something like that, that's very easy to see the difference, right? And so anyway, Puig, it last early August last year had this insane BABIP and this insane batting line, and he had, so if you went and looked at his batted balls splits on Baseball Reference,

he had like a 470 BABIP on grounders. Or like at one point he had a 500 BABIP on grounders. And like I said, the league average is 230. And it fell to earth. It came back to earth completely. But ever since then, I've been sort of watching Puig. And every couple, I frequently go look at this split on Playindex to just poke around at things. And so this is the split. It's in Playindex's split finder. You can search by trajectory, by batted ball trajectory as

a split. And so I wanted to see, Puig fell back to earth. So Puig is no longer a part of this. You can put Puig away. He's done with this. But I was just looking at some of the extreme performances that players have had. And I particularly like to focus on ground balls when I do this because it's very hard to do anything with a ground ball that everybody else isn't doing. Like line drives, as Colin is fond of pointing out, line drives are hard to do anything with a ground ball that everybody else isn't doing. Like line drives, as Colin is fond of pointing out, line drives are hard to spot and they're, you know, they're, it's hard to decide what's a line drive and what's a fly ball. And so those aren't super reliable.

And also line drives aren't very common. Most hitters don't hit a lot of line drives. They'll hit, you know, a couple, a few dozen a year. And then fly balls are tricky because of course, everybody knows that Chris Davis hits fly balls further than Jose Vizcaino. And so it's not like you expect there to be some league average that everybody gravitates to. But it's really hard to do anything with ground balls except run fast. If you run fast, you'll get more hits. But otherwise, ground balls are more or less ground balls. I don't really believe that anybody's capable of hitting that hole between short and third. You're capable of hitting it a little harder than other people, but that's about it. And hitting it harder can actually be, in a lot of cases, can actually cost you because it

gets to the fielder faster and they have more time to make the play. So ground balls, I really expect most people to more or less gravitate toward the league average. So an exception is Mike Trout, who conveniently led the league in OPS on ground balls last year, which is exactly what you would think he would do. And he was very near the leaders in 2012 as well. And so that makes sense. But his OPS last year was 755 on ground balls, which is a very good OPS. 7.55 on ground balls, which is a very good OPS.

So, and it's like the 12th highest since 2000, which is when I searched since. So, but the highest in that time period is so absurd. And do you have a, does anything jump out at you as a, does anything, do you remember any like crazy, crazy BABIP years? No, not specifically ground balls. Okay, well, just crazy BABIP years generally. Does any jump out at you? Because there is one that I remember being a crazy BABIP. David Wright had a crazy one. Oh, that's a good one.

But no, not David Wright. So it's Matt Kemp in 2007. And Matt Kemp in 2007 had a 9.16 OPS on grounders, which is insane because that would have been like a top 10 OPS in the league if he had only hit ground balls. And it's 100 points higher than the number two in a decade and a half. The number two is 100 points lower, which is huge, right? Yeah.

And so, of course, at the time, you might have convinced yourself that Matt Kemp had this super secret skill and that he was really valuable. And, of course, all of his splits on grounders since then have been totally typical. He's like a 580 OPS guy since then. It was just a total freak year, total fluke year. Anyway, that's also not what I was interested in. That was just something that I found on the way to what I was interested in. What I really wanted to find was the highest isolated power on ground balls

because it's hard to hit a double on a ground ball you can do it but it's hard and you do see a lot of lines like a lot of guys ground ball splits for a season are like they hit 320 320 340 like you see that a lot you know they hit one double or maybe a double and a triple or whatever so i wanted to see how much power can you possibly have on a series of ground balls. So I searched since 1997. I searched for the highest isolated power on ground balls exclusively. I set as a minimum 75 batted balls. Don't expect anything significant to come out of this because 75 batted balls is nothing this is merely a in search of a quirk and uh so what i found uh first uh i'm gonna before i reveal the answer i'm gonna reveal two

other things that i found one there have been in this time period six ground ball home runs uh wow that's more than I would have guessed. Me too, right? Because they're all, I mean, obviously they're all inside the parkers, but you wouldn't, normally when you think of an inside the parker, it's a, you know, it's a ball. It's a line drive, yeah. It splits the gap. off of a beam in the wall, or two outfielders collide into each other, or somebody dives for a ball and it gets passed and rolls all the way to the wall. But these are all grounders. These are ground balls by Tim Bogar,

Tony Womack, Aaron Guile, Dave Roberts, Chris DiNorfia, and Andres Torres. So six ground ball home runs. So now you know that. That is a thing you can tell people. When was the Torres one? Do you know? I think 2010. I was hoping it would be MLB TV archive era. Maybe there'll be a highlight on MLB.com. I'd like to see what a ground ball home run looks like. Yeah, it could be. I'd be if i yeah i'd be interested to fact check all six of

these because it's conceivable that you'll look at them and realize that should you know i think that's a line drive or whatever could be a springer error or something but yeah it could be uh okay so that's one thing number two totally the opposite i wanted to i i took a quick little detour to see uh what the most fly balls anybody had ever hit without having a single one land in a season is. And the winner of this is Mickey Morandini, who in 2000 hit 106 fly balls. And every single one was caught.

There were no home runs either. And every single one was caught. There were no home runs either. So he hit 106 without a home run or a single, double, triple pop-up in no man's land. Nothing. Every single one got caught. All right. So anyway, the answer to this, there are two hitters who have ever had an isolated power in a season on ground balls higher than 100.

One is Richard Hidalgo in 2003, who had a marvelous 356-356-463 line on grounders. He had nine doubles and four triples. But the winner, the leader, the champion is Jeremy Bernitz in 1997, who had 13 doubles and three triples on ground balls. Good for a 122 isolated power, which is the same as... Do you want to guess who last year had the same isolated power?

Do you want to guess? Can you guess? Guess, Ben. Guess. What do you know about me? Oh. Oh, wait. I was going to say Pedro Guerrero.

It's close. You're on the right track. Who's your Pedro Guerrero? I forget. I forgot who's your Pedro Guerrero. Billy Butler. Oh, right, of course. Billy Butler. So there you go. And that's Billy Butler's isolated power overall. So Jeremy Bernitz in 1997 had the same power on ground balls as Billy Butler has.

Well, that segment accurately conveyed the experience of using the Play Index because you never get straight to the answer without any detours. No, there are always detours. And in fact, I found the Billy Butler fact as well by a very simple Play Index search, which is how Play Index is most commonly used in my household, where I just sorted 2013 hitters by isolated power. And that's another thing you can do. Not everything has to lead to a Jeremy Burnett's terminus. Some things can just be useful.

terminus. Some things can just be useful. So you can subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted one-year subscription price of $30. There is a money-back guarantee. You won't want to use it, but it's there if it convinces you to give it a try. So we highly recommend that. Some more more questions Dan from New Jersey says in Ben's synopsis of the Sabre Analytics conference it was estimated by Brandon McCarthy that 5-10% of current players know what FIP is how important is it for

players to be knowledgeable about the game do players just need to do what they are told by the manager and coaches or would there be a benefit to developing players who are aware of advanced statistics and research um so i i don't think it's important for players to know what fip is or really what any particular stat is but i did come away convinced by that conference that um well let's see if you if you find this About, I don't know, a year ago or so, we did a show on whether clubhouse chemistry is less important now because, guys, players don't spend as much time in close quarters as they once did.

They've got huge clubhouses, and they've got their own hotel rooms, and they travel to the ballpark in their own cars or whatever it is. And I don't know whether we really came to a conclusion on that. But at the Sabre Conference, Vince De Niro made the case that chemistry is more important than it has ever been because there's more capacity for players to improve themselves now than there has ever been. So he basically made the case that, you know, well, first he says that, you know, a big component of good chemistry is having players who want to make themselves better and, you know, want to improve and want to put the extra time in and show up early and do their research, which I will

follow him that far. And then he says that, you know, 50 years ago, if you had that kind of player, there wasn't all that much he could do to make himself better. He could, you know, 50 years ago, if you had that kind of player, there wasn't all that much he could do to make himself better. He could, you know, not stay out late and play hungover. He could get a good night's sleep. But there wasn't much access to information that he could use to make himself a better player. There weren't the kind of nutrition and workout programs that there are today and flexibility. There's just more available to players, whether it's stats or fitness stuff. There are just more ways for players to make themselves better

by putting the time in, by putting the research in. And therefore, he concludes that it would be more important for a team to have good chemistry, which would encourage more players to be like that today. Does that hold water for you? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know that I accept that there were actually fewer avenues to improve oneself in the past. They were simpler avenues, but not staying out and coming hungover seems to be a pretty – that's a significant one, right? Yeah, right. Just sort of generally being motivated to be good in your life, it feels significant in any situation even if there aren't – even if it doesn't mean eating like flaxseed breakfasts every

day or whatever they do. So I don't know. And not, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I don't feel like I know enough to answer that. I buy it. I think, I mean, players can still not show up hungover.

I buy it. I think, I mean, players can still not show up hung millions of dollars instead of a couple hundred thousand dollars or even considerably less. And so you would think that players today would naturally be 98% of the way to being fully motivated as is. And back in 1950 when I was like, I'm reading Jonah's book, and Jonah talks about a guy who gets traded or maybe picked in the expansion draft and doesn't want to go. He's like, I could go work at, and he goes and works at, like, a pen company. Like, he just quits in the middle of spring and goes and gets a job at a pen company, at, like, Scripto or something like that, pen company in Florida, because it's like it's the same money. He goes, I can go get the same money working at a pen company. Players today, they don't have that. They basically have an 18-year window to completely get rich beyond their wildest dreams. They know that that window is closing and they'll

never have another chance to make $20 million in a year. So I would feel like the motivation is already, in a lot of ways, is significantly stronger. And also players today have sort of been, I mean, most of these guys, whether they're Dominican or American, really, in two different settings. But in both situations, they've sort of been professionalized from a very early age. And I mean, these guys are practically, practically professional athletes at like 14, 15 now, you know, going to on the showcase circuit and everything like that, or, you know, staying in Dominican facilities. So I don't know, it's a different kind of ballplayer. So I don't know, I feel like I and I don't think that that invalidates Vince's premise I'm just saying I don't think I know enough about

any of it to answer yeah okay I think you're right um I I can buy that uh players can get more out of their natural talent now than than they once did and therefore it would be more important to be motivated but I would also accept that players are just probably more naturally motivated by the money, if anything, without having to have the chemistry component. That makes sense. Okay, so we got, I think, three questions on more or less the same subject. This one comes from Chris B., who says, thermoclines and sewer backups aside,

wouldn't there be some benefit to teams to ape their home stadiums at their spring training homes? Would Bryce Harper run into as many walls at the same speeds if Space Coast Stadium had the same dimensions as Nationals Park and he ran back to the same depth a few more times every spring. We basically got the same question from Anthony Lorenzo, who extended that premise to the minor leagues also, and asked us whether an entire organization should streamline ballpark conditions and dimensions throughout all levels. And then Alton also asked more or less the same question.

So there are some teams, I don't have a count, but there are teams that do this. I know that the Yankees have long done this at Legends Field and Tampa has the same field dimensions as Yankee Stadium. But do they do that for strategic purposes or it's cute right i i doubt it has anything to do with performance i'm sure it's more of a marketing branding thing in their case like they have the they have a little faux facade at the place too that's probably not to make the players feel more comfortable it's to make it feel more like you're you're seeing a yankees game um

and there are other teams that are doing similar stuff. I think the new Cubs park has the same dimensions as Wrigley. I think the Red Sox play in a spring training park that has the same dimensions as Fenway, something like that. So I could see that there would be some benefit to this, all else being equal, I would say it's probably a good idea. benefit to this, all else being equal, I would say it's probably a good idea. But I wouldn't say it's worth, you know, tearing down your existing spring training park and building a new one with the dimensions. I guess, you know, if you could economically move the fences around so that it's the same dimensions, then sure, might as well. Because I mean, the foundation of home field advantage, or at least part of home field advantage, we typically understand it to be that, right?

That outfielders will play balls off the wall better and they'll be able to judge balls better. They'll have a better feel for the batting eye at the plate or whatever it is. So presumably there could be something to that. Do we? I think so. Wait, really? Because the, I mean, home field advantage is essentially pervasive in all sports. And a lot of sports have uniform facilities.

So I don't know that that's actually true. I mean, that is hypothesized as one factor that might be at play but i thought that it was isn't it isn't it considered the that most of the advantage is some combination of home crowd and ref effect yeah there have been so many studies on it recently that it's kind of hard to keep track matt swartz did like a five part series at bp a few years ago and yeah there there does seem to be some umpire effect i don't know if it's a a crowd effect so much because haven't people done like looking at it by attendance and seeing if there's any difference and there wasn't or something i you know it's hard to it's hard to say um it is hard to say but i i um i would i would generally think that the advantage that you get from park familiarity would stabilize at about two weeks or so.

Yeah. And so it just doesn't really feel that important to me that you spend a lot of time familiarizing players with the park. The two weeks that they play in their home stadium will take care of that. two weeks that they play in their home stadium will take care of that. I do think that there's I always had a hypothesis about team because the problem with minor league facilities is not that their dimensions are different than the home ballpark. It's that the hitting environments and climates are incredibly different. So like for the Angels, they would go from uh oram before that provo which is at altitude in short season ball and so it was bananas it was just complete home run complete home run park and then cedar rapids uh although they've moved i forget where uh which was a pitcher's park in a

pitcher's league and then to rancho cucamonga which is uh a hitters park they've moved there too but a hitters park in like the most hitter friendly league and then to arkansas which was completely dead you couldn't hit anything out no matter what and then to salt lake which was at altitude in the pcl and i always had and i did a little bit of preliminary look at uh research into this and there were some kind of promising things and i never finished it up but i always theorized that hitters and pitchers were changing their style uh for each part knowing how easy it was to hit balls out or how difficult it was to get balls out and that's not something you would want you wouldn't want players uh whose ultimate destination is major league pitching in a major league park to be tailoring their swing for short-term numbers in games that don't count.

And so that seemed to be a disadvantage, that ideally you would have a farm system that was concentrated in relatively neutral parks or at least parks that are fairly consistent and fairly consistent with the major league park. And so I think that that's conceivably very important, but the things that matter are not the dimensions and the nooks. It's the altitude, it's the general hitting environment in the league, it's the weather, it's all those sorts of things. Plus there really isn't any way to streamline your minor league parks, right? Because teams are always switching affiliates or sometimes switching affiliates, and you're not going to tear down and rebuild the park every time you do that.

Yeah, and I mean, the league is so much a factor. I mean, if you're in the Cal League, you're in the Cal League. There's not much you can do. The Cal League's crazy. Yeah. Okay, last one. All right, let's um this one from uh jake who says you have unlimited money to create either the best scouting team in the league by say 10 or the best analytics team in the league by the same amount but not both in fact you'd have to commit exclusively

to either stats or scouting. So which do you take, all stats and no scouting, or all scouting and no analytics? Those are two very disparate questions. Yeah, well, maybe we should answer the first question. So 10%... Either the best scouting team in the league or the best analytics team in the league but not both either the best scouting or the best analytics but not both yeah um well i think i would at this point i mean scout we're considering scouting to be

pro scouting and amateur scouting i I assume. So I would do that one. I mean, presuming that the question is just, I mean, to me, the value that you get by signing, I mean, when you look at drafts and you look at, you know, how the number seven guy at you know how the number seven guy produces 80 career war and the number eight guy produces negative 2.4 career war you can see just how incredibly important it is to get that question right and right now uh right now uh cardinals aside probably um it does seem to be that the answer to that is is more in in scouting than in stats i mean that is the rays the rays for instance about it are as stat savvy as any team and have had wretched drafts for the last like five years um but that is what you that is what gets credit for the cardinals finding these guys in the late rounds, right? It's some sort of analytics.

It's part of it. Well, it's part of it. Yeah, it's part of it. So let's say that they are the best analytics team in the league, at least when it comes to analyzing amateur stats. Well, you'd have to— And it's enabled them to find Matt Carpenter and Alan Craig and all these people. Right, you'd have to believe that that's true. And right now the anecdotal evidence uh is centered around that but we're basically talking about four guys out of about

200 that were drafted that they hit on and um so far we haven't i mean the astros took um you know that brain trust with them and so far there haven't been any strong indications. And there are reasons to sort of dispute the narrative about the Cardinals. I mean, it's like Rosenthal is one of those examples, but Rosenthal was a position player that they converted. I mean, it's not like there was any statistical backing for why they might have picked him and why they would have seen him coming. for why they might have picked him and why they would have seen him coming. And Matt Adams, you know, hits, but everybody kind of thought he would hit. It was just sort of a surprise that he was able to handle a position

the way he's been able to handle a position. That wasn't considered a sure thing by most people at the time. So you're talking about, right now you're talking about a small number of hits. Right now you're talking about a small number of hits, and you would probably most reasonably regress that greatly and say, well, until it repeats for four or five or six more years, we're not going to draw any strong conclusions about it. Okay. Yeah. I guess it depends. To me, the answer depends on the timeframe a little bit. If we're talking about for a year, for a few years, for five years, I'd probably have the same answer as you. If we're talking about committing to always having one or the other, then I think I'd probably go with the analytics just because of what we talked about not too long ago, how it seems like analytics is sort of slowly annexing some of the territory that used to be scouting only yeah um so right it's a very different question if you

start looking at a timeline beyond five years i agree okay all right uh and oh give me a three word answer to this one from dustin he just wants to know uh you know how ian kinsler said that he i mean tongue in cheek probably hopes that the rangers go oh and 162 um dustin wants to know, you know how Ian Kinsler said that he, I mean, tongue in cheek probably hopes that the Rangers go 0-162. Dustin wants to know what the highest level, which would actually go 0-162 against a major league team. Oh, okay. So like... So he brought up a high school team. Mustang certainly would. Bronco certainly would. I grew up in a pony league town for all the people who were like,

I don't know what those words mean. We had pony instead of little league. So high school would, right? Certainly. He brings up not an average high school team, but a formidable team capable of winning a state championship. Oh, well, so if you had a pitcher who was good enough, if you had a pitcher who was a first-round talent, I don't think they would go 0-162. Because in 34 starts, I would imagine he'll throw.

I mean, I've seen some really bad pitchers throw shutouts. Well, maybe. If it was a good high school team, I would say no. If it was a bad high school team, I would say they would go 0-162. But I wouldn't think a short season team would go 0-162. I think a short season team would have... Do you remember when South Africa played the United States in the... I think it was the first World Baseball classic in 2006 and Clemens was pitching.

And as I recall, it was like scoreless in the sixth. I just remember just being like, like that game, although I probably am remembering all the details wrong, that game changed my opinion about baseball so much because there's not, there's not one player in South Africarica who could play low a ball and this was an all-star team of americans like an all-star team and for five innings the talent differential didn't show through i think i think clemens was throwing a perfect game with like 14 strikeouts but yeah so i don't think a short season team would go oh and i think they might go like two and 160 the higher you go the more likely you are to run into a major league caliber yeah um

so i don't know Any full season league I would say would win A game And yeah maybe you have it pegged about right How about the That Independent league team that Scott Casimir pitched for

Oh right the Skeeters Yeah That is it. Yeah, I don't know. They have Tracy McGrady this year. Well, I mean, Scott Casimir would have won one of his games. Somebody just drafted Tracy McGrady in one of my reliever draft pools. Yeah, we'll do more on the reliever leagues next week because we're just about wrapping up

All the drafts are winding down now So we'll have a post-up or we'll talk about it on the show Alright, so great questions I'm going to star a few of them that we didn't get to That I hope we can get to next week Please go check out Baseball Perspectives today, Friday Because all of the articles that we publish today are free, as are many of the utilities and tools on the site that are usually not free. Sam wrote a really fun article about the scenarios where the Astros make the playoffs this year.

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