Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 419: The Return of the Mid-Week Email Show

Episode Date: April 2, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Mike Trout (as usual), clubhouse etiquette, the worst teams in baseball, catcher framing and unwritten rules, and more.

Don't give up on me, you're so unstopped. See you see you catch from above. Give me a better chance. Welcome to episode 419 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lundberg. Ben, how are you? Very well, thank you. We're not, well, I'm not the first one to complain about this, but I just, I don't think there's a worse thing that Bud Selig has ever done as commissioner than having no day games in the second game of the season. Yeah, it was a little strange. I looked at the schedule last night and was hoping to see one, but didn't.

Yeah, I think this happened last year or maybe the year before, too. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, presumably, you know, baseball gets higher ratings at night. And so, you know, probably they have financial incentives to have lots of night games. But I'm at a point in my life where I don't actually get to watch any baseball at night because I have family and children and work to do. And during the day, I can blow all that off and it's like why doesn't Bud Seelig think about those those of us who are baseball writers yes we should be his first priority really there's dozens of us we're on twitter anyway tweet stuff all the time no I mean even before I wrote about baseball that I was much more likely to watch a

game or at least follow a game during the day than at night because i was a terrible employee and uh that's what america is terrible employees so well yeah i used to feel exactly the opposite way because i was in school or uh or i had a job that i you know didn I didn't control the hours. And if it was sort of, I don't know if that was pre-MLB TV or when MLB TV wasn't so great or I was actually busy sometimes and I used to think I can't watch any of these games during the day. I don't want games during the day. Now I guess I have changed my tune.

So they should set the schedule based on when I am free. Well, you only need, like I said yesterday, you really only need one game to make me happy. I don't need 15-day games. Just one, I think, would get all of us through the day. Just one. How many games are the Cubs playing these days? I don't know.

35? I just made up a number. Okay. Made up a number between 1 and 81. That was my goal with that number. You succeeded. Yeah. I pretty much get there every time.

You give me two numbers and ask me to name a number in between, I'll pretty much get it every time. That's what I like about you. It's one of my skills. Yeah. All right. Okay. Emails? Call me an email all right um so our if we wanted to we could pretty much make every email show exclusively mike trout questions it seems like we get so many of them um i don't want to do all

mike trout questions but i'll do one uh. Kyle from Kalamazoo, Michigan says, if Mike Trout wound up putting up negative one wins above replacement every year for the rest of his career, how long would teams still be giving him a chance to play? Seeing Lincecum struggle and still getting a huge contract makes me wonder that Trout would have 10 years of negative war before teams gave up on him. People like Delman Young still get signed, which made me wonder about this. It does seem like the one benefit that Linscombe has is that you can be a pitcher and have poor performance but good peripherals, and you can't really do that as a hitter. The closest thing would be to be a poor performance and yet somehow look good to scouts,

which I guess was like Dayton Moore's original sin with Uniesky Betancourt. His scouts and he himself seemed to think he looked like he should be good, even when it was clear

he wasn't. It's not like you can hit, well, I guess you could. I mean, if your BABIP was really low and you were hitting a lot of line drives, you could have good, quote-unquote, peripherals as a hitter. But, you know, really, you're basically your numbers are your numbers. But on the other hand, you know, hitters don't break like pitchers. But on the other hand, hitters don't break like pitchers. And, I mean, if a pitcher has two bad months, half the league is sort of suspicious of him. Whereas a hitter, you just figure he's an Islam.

So I don't know. It goes both ways. So minus one war every year. Which means that he has to be playing a fair amount to get to that point, unless he's just, well, yeah, he'd have to play a bit. I should pull up my recent uni story to see if there's anything that informs this. Well, because he had, how many negative, it was like six straight negative war seasons, and was still playing and yeah with five of them in full-time play that in five other than one year where he only played 57 games he played at least 134 every year and uh negative 0.2 negative 2, negative.9, negative 5, negative 1.1 in 57 games.

Negative 5? Negative 2. Negative.5. Oh, okay. And then negative 2. Yeah, and it's not like he was starting out from a Mike Trout level either. Yeah, so I did, though, the reason I thought it might inform this is because when Drew Stubbs was one of my candidates to be the new uni,

I was looking for guys who could do this, who could manage to somehow stay in a lineup for six years despite consistent under-replacement performance. And so I went through some candidates, and Stubbs was one that I rejected because, as I wrote, his being right-handed hurts his chances of getting 500 plate appearances more than it might have hurt Uni. Left-handed platoon mates being easier to find in the outfield than at shortstop. So basically, even if Stubbs were horrible, he probably wouldn't be a full-time player. He would just maybe be a platoon guy who would get 150 at-bats a year and know be on the bench so i don't know if there's that's actually true that's a thing i wrote uh and while i was writing it i thought no evidence for this but i powered on um huh okay so well maybe I mean, I guess it depends a little bit on how he looks while he's putting up negative one more. Is he?

Yeah, presumably he's fat, right? I mean, it's hard to imagine. He's either fat or hurt. Right. He's fat. He's hurt. He's had some decline in true talent to the point that you can tell that he's no longer Mike Trout, athletically speaking. athletically speaking. I mean, he gets he'd get three years, right? Oh, goodness gracious. He'd get a lot more than three years. Yeah. I don't know, because I mean, I think he'd

get, you know, he'd keep getting chances indefinitely. People would bring him to camp. I mean, he'd always be there, but I don't know that he would get enough playing time to be sub-replacement by a full win for several seasons in a row. I mean, at some point, it becomes clear that he's no longer the same guy. He's not running as fast.

He's not swinging as hard. So maybe, you know, you'd bring him into camp and you'd hope that he did something over the winter to get back to being Mike Trout. But I have a hard time imagining a manager just sort of penciling him in day after day after day, season after season, based on what he did in 2012, 2013. And is Grady Sizemore not the comp here? Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about Sizemore. I mean, Sizemore is kind of the getting a chance guy.

Right, he had two sub-replacement years and then two years where he was nowhere, just completely not, you know, disappeared. So it's been four years since he was replacement level. And, you know, I mean, clearly he didn't start from Trout's lofty position and he had an explanation that would not make you feel optimistic. I mean, his problem is identifiable and it will always be a problem. I mean, it will always at least make people nervous about him. Ricky Weeks is maybe an interesting one too because he's

been sub-replacement for two years in a row. He's much older. He was never anywhere near the ballplayer that Trout is. And, I mean, he's much older. So, like, he's at an age where you would expect, well, maybe he will. Maybe he is in his decline years. But it's not like he had to – I mean, I guess he was under contract. But you don't get the feeling that he's going to be of the league uh against his will anytime in the next three years uh probably not no but wouldn't i mean that's because we haven't

really except for he was only briefly he's like one of those good or hurt guys right except for that one um what did he have like one season where he actually played and was bad? Yeah, both of his bad years were part-time. They were like 300 plate appearances and 150 plate appearances. Yeah, so it's not like we saw him be bad and healthy for a full season. So I don't know. I'd say even if you're Mike Trout, if you are playing full-time and you're sub-replacement level, I don't think you get more than three seasons to be a starter and dig yourself out of that hole.

I wish I could think of a good comp off the top of my head. I feel like there's obviously – There are no comps for Mike Trout, let alone... But, yeah, I would guess that if he were sub-replacement level every year without getting a positive number, I would bet that in the sixth year, he would still get 300 plate appearances. I mean, look how many chances Felix P.A. got. I mean, how can you not gamble on Trout when people are willing? I mean, every year I do the worst age 27 seasons and former elite prospects who are basically getting their last chance at age 27. And, you know, a couple of those guys are always in the majors

despite having never done anything, just because they were a top prospect six years earlier. Yeah, I mean, right, I think he gets a chance. He gets an invite to spring training every year. Maybe someone sticks on a bench. But Felix Pia, at least according to BP's warp, never had a negative one replacement season. Well, yeah, never had negative.

Well, reference has him at negative 1.9 in 85 games. Well, that's part of it, too. I mean, if it's all defense, then teams would maybe be more inclined to give him a shot. If it's just, you know, UZR or something saying that his defense was bad in a single season, then if he's still sort of hitting, he could keep getting a shot. But I don't know. I think it's hard to play enough to get to negative one. Somebody right now is yelling at their,

whatever people listen to this on because they have the perfect name in mind as a comparison. So if somebody is in your head right now, I would be interested in hearing it, so tell me. But it can't be a shortstop. It can't be a catcher because those guys have different rules. All right. This one comes from Gregreg in london ontario uh i've always been interested in the day-to-day work of a beat reporter but i haven't read much on what happens when they start on a beat when sam was with the orange county register and he first started on

the angels beat did he introduce himself to players coaches management on his first few days like you would any other job or did he just try to blend in and have people slowly recognize who he was? With baseball players, coaches, and managers being so busy, is it actually possible to get a few minutes alone to introduce yourself? Also, in Ben's case and now Sam's, when you talk to players for Baseball Prospectus, how do you introduce yourself now? Since you're not in a clubhouse every day like a beat reporter and they're not used to seeing you, is there a certain way you introduce yourself now? Since you're not in a clubhouse every day like a beat reporter and they're not used to seeing you,

is there a certain way you introduce yourself or do they even care since it's just another writer asking them questions? Well, I was never a beat writer, so I never had to do it. I was a non-beat writer who covered the team in a non-beat writing fashion who every once in a while had to cover a game and interview players like maybe 10 or 15 times a year. So I was never going to build like any solid relationship with them. Plus I'm terribly shy.

So I was never going to build a solid relationship with them. So I never did that. I just acted awkwardly until I started acting less awkwardly. But yeah, I mean, it's not that hard to get. It's very easy to introduce yourself around a clubhouse. I mean, they're not that busy. There's so much downtime. And you just go stand in the locker room or the clubhouse for the hour you're allowed,

and everybody walks past you. And you could, you know, if a hitting coach walks past you, he'll happily, uh, you know, shake your hand and, uh, the manager's offices open,

uh, during, uh, before the game and you could poke your head in and talk to him. Or so, you know, when you have your managers sit down with, uh,

you with every, you know, all the reporters have their 15 or 20 minutes before the game in the dugout. After his last question, you can just sort of hang out and introduce yourself with the players you can go up to them and introduce yourself or you can wait until after they have some

good game and the scrum is all around them asking them the post game questions and then you can just hang on like two seconds later and tell them who you are so it's pretty easy to do all that if you're interested in not being awkward and shy. Front office is a little harder. Like I would imagine that the GM would be happy to introduce himself to you

or to be introduced to you. But there's like scores of people in the front office. And they're busy and they're not there. Right. They're not in the clubhouse usually. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, uh, that's harder.

I don't, I don't know how, I mean, I would not, you know, I, I never had any sort of, uh, like relationship with the angels like that, where I, you know, knew lots of them and could just like, you you know like where they would recognize me and all that um I was much more like the ad hoc interview where like when I needed to talk to someone I would sort of go through the channels and try to get to them but um I didn't do a lot of relationship building there when I was there so for the second question I remember when we had Zachary Levine on once, we were actually discussing this before we started recording. Oh, yeah, Zachary saved me. He taught me how to do it.

Right, because it's tempting, especially if you are someone who just goes to games periodically, talks to players periodically, and maybe you're talking to the visiting team. And so these are guys that you might see, you know, once or twice a year to talk to. And so you think, well, do I even bother wasting time introducing myself? You know, while I'm reciting my name and affiliation, this guy's eyes are glazing over. So maybe I should just kind of stride up and start getting my question out. He's probably not going to remember who I am anyway. He doesn't see me enough for it to be internalized, so why waste the time? But Zachary had a better idea.

Yeah, no, that was my strategy initially for the first couple years was definitely that. I thought they don't want to spend one second more with me than they have to, and so I'm trying to race through it. And so I'd rush up, and I wouldn't even introduce myself. I'd just be like, you have a minute and start throwing questions at them until they got bored, which gets you about two minutes and then you leave.

So Zachary's method is very simple and not impressive. It's just like how grownups behave among other grownups. But you just, you go over to him. You tell them who you are, you say, I'm Sam Miller with Baseball Perspectives and then you put your hand out there to shake their hand. You do not wait for them to give you affirmation, you just assume they're going to shake your hand. By telling them right up front your name and who you work for, you're showing them that you're not some low-level guy who's afraid of who he works for or unemployed or anything like that. You're saying like, I'm proud of my affiliation, here I am. Then you

shake their hand. The key thing in dealing with baseball folks, there's two, basically. One is handshakes are everywhere. Everybody shakes hands with everybody. And so if you interviewed Mike Trout one time four years ago and he walks past you, you're shaking his hand. He's going to shake your hand. They just shake hands like crazy. Like the two most plentiful things in baseball are gum and handshakes.

So just don't even feel bad. Don't conserve your handshakes. Just shake everybody's hand all the time. It's like so much more awkward to not shake somebody's hand than to shake their hand in baseball. The other thing is with players, it's all first names. Nobody calls anybody by their last name. So you just call them by their first name when you're talking to them. You refer to them by first name when you're asking another player or the manager about him uh if you are talking to you know socia and you say uh is hunter playing today well he'd be very confused but if this were three years ago you asked is hunter playing today he will actually like like there will be a moment where he's like who who? You know, and then he'll sort of steer you back to calling him Tori.

So they will call each other by their uncreative nicknames. You know, their Smoltzies and their Jeffies and their Rusties. Whatever their name is with a Y on the end. Yeah, exactly. They'll call each other that somewhat, but they'll never call each other by last name. That's what I've found. So that's everything I know.

Yeah, that's enough, I think. And just asking a specific question I find is helpful. Just kind of coming in with some plan, making it clear right away that you have a plan. You're not just sort of fishing for a quote or aimlessly walking up to a guy and hoping he'll say something interesting. But you've actually prepared and you've looked up something and you're currently working on a specific story involving this player. That sort of thing leads to better answers, I think. I have not necessarily found that.

Because if you go in there with something in mind, they know that you have something in mind and they're suspicious. They're wondering, how does this frame me? Why is he asking me this? What's his angle? And I always found in any beat that everybody's thinking, what's this guy's angle? And you want them not thinking, what's his angle and I always found in any beat that everybody's thinking what's this guy's angle and you want them not thinking what's your angle

and so the more casual it is I sometimes find that that's better I mean a lot of times I don't know if you've noticed this but a lot of times players are like they want to peg you in on your story and so they're anticipating your question they're answering it when you're a third of the way through

because they're so zeroed in on trying to figure out your motives. I don't know. I haven't found them to be that suspicious. Maybe I'm just very disarming. I have a sort of a sinister brow. Okay. Matt Trueblood asks, simple question.

Okay, Matt Trueblood asks, Simple question. Put the six worst teams in baseball in order according to when they'll field a true talent 90-win team from earliest to latest. And he names those six worst teams in baseball. He says they are the Cubs, the White Sox, the Rockies, the Astros, the Marlins, and the Twins. So the order that they'll produce a true talent 90-win team.

Yes. And one of them might do it this year, just baseball being what it is. I don't know if one of them will do a true talent 90-win year. They might do a fluke 90-win year. Fair enough. All right. 91 year they might do a fluke 91 year fair enough um all right well i hmm i think i think i'll go with the cubs first i will too i also will go with the cubs first because they're not in the the depths of futility right now they are you know a rung above that and they also have an excellent farm system

with a lot of guys who are pretty close to the majors um so cubs um the thing is it helps to know what kind of timeline we're thinking of if we're thinking about like if you told me that the first one was going to be what say the cubs was the first one and then you told me the second one was going to be seven or nine years from now that changes things a lot well it could be 20 years from now it could be a 90 90 win true talent team is not something that comes along for every franchise often yeah so thinking in the short term of like oh well you know their number four starter is not very good it's probably the wrong way to think about this because they're all presumably many years off and yeah you're right it could be 20 years for some team so uh is there one that stands is there well let's put it this way i guess if the twins have the best farm system in baseball according to jason parks's ratings this year um the the astros are

very close to the top of the list would you put do you see an argument for white socks rockies marlins over those two based on the strength of their farm systems uh not the White Sox. I mean, if it were 85 wins, the Rockies might be my next choice. But yeah, I mean, it is not... I don't think there's any evidence existent that suggests 90 imminently. Not to say that it won't happen, but you just have to start making things up to get to 90

yeah um so probably not and then the marlins i just refuse i mean i just refuse a lot of people pick the marlins as a wild card team this year somehow um they do have some intriguing young talent, I suppose. They have a lot of intriguing young talent. Yeah. I mean, like we've talked about, if they had anything else on their hat, people would be praising them right now. Yeah.

So is that enough? Could be. I'm not doing it. All right. So let's go, I guess. I go Astros, too. Yeah. All right, so let's go, I guess. I go Astros too. Yeah, all right, okay. I go, I mean, the Twins are, God, the Twins are more likely to do it

in the next five years than the Rockies probably, but to me it just feels like the Twins are just so overwhelmingly likely if they don't do it in the next five years to never do it you know yeah that's true they just feel like like they have they get one one swing at it they might get there at least they have a shot but if they you know if they top out at 88 in this current push or 86 or 78 just never so i don't know i kind of i kind of want to say uh jeez do i have to say the marlins yeah i don't know i i kind of like the not easy no the white socks i'm gonna say the white socks yeah last huh i could see an argument for putting them earlier just because they, the market and I don't

know, I like the moves that they've made and the way that they've been run lately. So I don't know. I'll go Cubs, Astros, Twins, White Sox, Marlins, Rockies. Astros, Twins, White Sox, Marlins, Rockies. I'm going Cubs, Astros, Marlins, Rockies, White Sox, Twins. Last place Twins. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to play the... I mean, I don't think that they're better than 50% to get to true talent 90% with the core they have in the next six years.

So I'm going to bet that they don't do it then and that after they fail, as they're falling down the long slope, they'll never do it. All right. Let's do the baseball reference play index segment. All right, so this came up yesterday when I was watching the Marlins game and the person I was watching with read something on TV

at the end of the game that said, I think that said Jose Fernandez had thrown the highest percentage of strikes in a team's opening game than anybody since 1988. And he saw it very briefly, so I'm not sure if that's correct. But I immediately wondered, well, oh, so who was it in 1988? And so I started thinking of the pitchers who might have started an opening day in 1988 and going through them in my head. Oh, well, I'll just go on Play Index.

And so I went on Play Index and I went to the game finder for pitching. And I looked, there's a place where you can put, you know, you can limit it to games that players had meeting specific specifications in the team's first X games. And so I just changed that to one, and so I could see all the opening day starters in 1988. And there was nobody who was ahead of Fernandez or even close. And so I was very confused, and I think that the stat that they had probably was limited by the fact that pitch counts weren't real serious before 1988.

I don't even know if they were really recorded before 1988. So I think 1988 was how far back their database went. Yes, right. And so he has the most in the recorded era, which is much more impressive and which is what they should have said. And maybe they did say it. But anyway, that's not the point. So then I started thinking, oh, so Jose Fernandez threw 77% strikes yesterday. And I wondered, you know, partially what the most strikes, what the highest percentage

of strikes that any pitcher has thrown in a start is. But also, more to the point, I wondered whether there's kind of a, there's a, there's like sort of a cliff where you get to throw too many strikes, where like it just becomes problematic to throw so many strikes, and so I started at 70% strikes and started counting how many games starters had made where they threw at least 70% strikes, and then just started adding one percentage point at a time to see if there was a cliff effect. Because Fernandez had like nine strikeouts, right?

He was not only throwing strikes, but they were all sorts of strikes. He was getting chases and he was throwing in the zone, but getting swings and misses also. Yeah, and you have to do that you have to have good stuff to have to be on this list and to also have a good start yeah um so play one of the things that play index has and this is uh one of my favorite things and it took me a while before i started i i sort of got the hang of it, but you can choose once you can filter by, uh, players who have one stat in a written, a particular ratio of another stat. So for instance, you could sort by games where the strikeouts are five times the walks, right? That's, that's a stat you could do. Uh,

or, you know, home runs are three times the, uh, you know, one third of the runs if you wanted to do that. So I searched where pitches is greater than 0.7. Sorry, I'm going to say that again. Where strikes is greater than 70% of pitches. And just started searching one year at a time, going back to 1988 and limiting it to only starters and seeing what we got. And so the answer to my question is that there is no such cliff. The decline by percentage is very, very smooth.

You essentially lose one-third of your pool every time, and it's consistent all the way from 70% up to about 84%. There's 8,400 games where a pitcher has thrown 70% strikes, and it just goes down. So Fernandez is one of 358 pitchers to throw 77 percent strikes uh and uh 88 have thrown 80 percent strikes 80 uh 41 have thrown 82 percent strikes and then 82 seems to be kind of where it maybe accelerates a little bit um nobody has ever thrown 83 percent strikes and thrown more than 100 pitches in a game. Now, partly that's because there are very few games where anybody has thrown 82% strikes, and so that's an accurate way of looking at it. But it's also partly because if you throw a ton of strikes, you might complete your

game in 90 pitches. And so a few of those have happened. complete your game in 90 pitches. And so a few of those have happened. Um, so there are 28 at 83%, 23 at 84%. And then 85 is really where it ends there. Um, there are, once you get to 85%, there are 17 starts, but they are, uh, they're all short starts. The longest one was a five inning Tom Browning start, uh start where he was at 85%. So on the one hand, nobody's topped 85 in a realistic situation. On the other, there doesn't seem to be any point where the league's pitchers say, well, enough is enough, we can't do any more,

or we're going to have diminishing returns. It's a very smooth slope. But, of course, this leads to the inevitable final question which is who has the most pitches in a start without throwing a ball and it is John Tudor who in 1989 had a game where he threw 10 pitches all all of them strikes. And what's interesting about that is not anything I've told you yet because you can imagine, you know, 10 pitches is nothing. He probably just got hurt on the second batter or something like that.

It's sort of interesting, but it's really not interesting. What's interesting about Tudor is that he threw 10 pitches, all strikes, and faced seven batters. And they crushed him. He got yanked after giving up three runs, a home run, a couple of doubles, four hits, and they pulled him with nobody out in the second inning. So he actually got, he was throwing strikes and they were hitting them all, every single one of them almost. And so Tudor was pulled not just because he was bad in that game.

He hurt his elbow. He missed two months. And in Sabre's bio of John Tudor on their site and their bio project, There's a great paragraph of John Tudor describing himself at the time. And it really is amazing that this picture could exist because he just sounds so horrible. And he wasn't that horrible. He actually was still a decent pitcher. And this is him describing himself at the time. This is him actually describing himself at the time, not 10 years after the fact. My changeup is getting faster, which is a bad sign because it means my shoulder isn't allowing the proper deceleration. It was as if I was getting by on reputation.

I haven't been able to get the ball inside, so I don't have anything to keep hitters from diving on me. I haven't thrown a slider all season. I'm not getting the proper extension at the end of my delivery, so not only am I not getting the pop on my fastball, but I don't have my control. I have all these doubts storming inside me, and they all revolve around my 78-mile-an-hour fastball. I thought CeCe Sabathia last season was sort of depressing when he thought he was nowhere close to that. Yeah, yeah. So that's it. Okay, good. So people can go to baseballreference.com, subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted one-year subscription price of $30.

You can try it and see if you like it, and there's a money-back guarantee. But we don't think that you'll need it. guarantee but we don't think that you'll need it um if there were a way to uh if we had pitch fx data going back further enough and you could you could look at percentage of pitches in the strike zone instead of strikes then presumably you would at a certain point uh it would be a bad thing right i mean yeah because when we're just looking at strikes, then you've got guys who are getting chases and chases are good. But pitches, too many pitches in the strike zone. Not so great. OK. Coleman from Southampton says, Catcher framing is now mainstream enough that even old school broadcasters refer to it during games at times.

I'm surprised it isn't seen in a more negative light. refer to it during games at times. I'm surprised it isn't seen in a more negative light. Essentially, a catcher who excels at framing, let's say Jose Molina, tries to deceive the umpire in order to disadvantage opposing hitters slash gain an advantage for his team. This is no different from, for example, diving in soccer. Divers are referred to as cheaters by old school media types, yet framers are exempt from similar disdain. Why doesn't Molina lead the league and Do you have an answer in mind? Mike Fast has addressed this before. Did he? I don't remember. What did he say? Well, he thinks that framing and that the effect that a catcher has

is really much less about stealing strikes and really much more about not losing strikes. Yeah. It's more often less the Molina steal and more just the Molina, you know, the pretty Molina catch. I mean, it's basically that what they're doing is, you know, no different than, you know, hitting a ball that's pitched to them really hard. You're doing what you can do to do it as well as you can. So that it's not really about

deceiving the umpire but it's really about making sure that you uh do the best job to give the umpire the right look so that he can see that your pitcher threw a strike and melina's melina i don't know if you've pointed this out or if jeff sullivan is pointing out or if you both have pointed out but melina does seem to have some enemies. Like, I don't know if they blame him necessarily, but like one of you has done something on like the frustrating, this frustrated faces that batters make after Molina. Yeah, I did that. That was fun. And Molina, yeah. Yeah. And Molina is kind of extreme. So it does seem to me that most unwritten, one of the, one of the unwritten rules of unwritten rules is that it only becomes an unwritten rule when it starts to get too of how effective it is inspires catchers to go further and further to be more effective, then you could imagine a backlash for sure.

Yeah, it's hard to figure out unwritten rules, but you're right. I don't know, maybe with more attention, but I don't know if even the best guys are good enough at it for it to be such a constant thing that players are getting frustrated about that they would seek retribution um the other thing is that the other thing is that the umpire is the common enemy and there's nothing in baseball i can't think of an instance where it's ever considered uh bad form to mislead the umpire uh right i mean pitchers are constantly balking uh as long as they can just barely get away with it in ways that it's very deliberate and and kind of insidious

and the idea of diving and holding up a trapped ball as though you caught it is you know 100 accepted and we talked one time about uh whether whether uh whether a fielder could pull off a move where he he leaps you know for a ball over the wall and then just pretends he caught it and runs all the way into the dugout with the third out and whether that would be so egregious as to um to merit uh yeah you know retribution and somebody pointed out that an outfielder actually had done this had gone into the stands uh for a foul ball and the ball had landed like like 15 feet away from him or something but the umpire or maybe it bounced 15 feet away from him but anyway he uh the umpire called him out and and called the batter out and the guy just ran into the dugout with no ball in his glove and looked pretty proud of his catch.

I think you have to just appreciate that the umpire is not a peer of these baseball players. They do not care if you lie to the umpire. They don't like the umpire. Yeah. to the umpire they they they don't like the umpire yeah um okay this one comes from darius in norwich uk during the conversation last week or this is from a couple weeks ago about how you would react if the new major league baseball advanced media player tracking technology produced results that suggested andrelton simmons was a defender, and while I also found it hard to imagine how Simmons could be rated badly by any system, got me thinking about which players might

and what the technology might like and not like. The specific example that came to mind was Dustin Pedroia and the little hop he often does before diving for a ground ball. Pedroia has consistently graded out as an above-average defender by most metrics. Do you think the new technology would conclude that Pedroia was in fact wasting time that he could be spending getting to the ball when he did that hop and give him a lower efficiency rating because of that? Are there any other player defensive idiosyncrasies that you think will actually start to draw criticism because video tracking suggests that they are doing things poorly? In a more general sense, will the technology actually start identifying fundamental problems with a player's style, like a first step or the way that they catch? If so, do you think teams will start trying to iron out such movements or

concentrate on certain ways of doing things at a much earlier stage? Or do teams already do this to such an extent that it won't change anything? So I don't know how many players have very obvious defensive idiosyncrasies. It's not like when you think of how a player hits and he's got his own stance and everything. How many defenders do you really think of doing something differently? I mean, you might have guys who do a jump throw or guys who do, you know, they get down on their knees to field something, but there's not that much variety. For something like the hop, I don't know. I would assume that it would be basically like it is with hitting mechanics or pitching mechanics.

If it works, teams would be hesitant to tinker with it because you don't want to take away some habit that a guy has that he's been using forever and potentially screw him up in some other way. So if they were to determine that a guy was actually taking a bad first step or going in the wrong direction or something, then I assume that they would target that, that they would do some drills just having him take first steps over and over. Or if a guy were always getting to balls but dropping them when he got to them or something, that would probably be pretty obvious.

Like if a guy had great range and great root efficiency but made a lot of errors anyway, then that would suggest that, you know, I don't know, maybe his glove is in the wrong fielding position or something, and you would, you would do something about that. But I don't, I don't know how many instances like this there are. Yeah, you could see that there might be some balance between how quick your first step is, and how quickly you accelerate. So maybe you can take, you know, maybe your jump as a second baseman, like maybe Pedroia's little hop allows him to accelerate faster toward the ball, but at a small expense of how quick his jump is.

And so if the system is focused primarily, I mean, if we're looking more at the reaction time, which I imagine is one thing that if we have this, we will be obsessed with. Yes. Then we might overlook that in giving up a little bit of his reaction time, he might be gaining something in acceleration time.

Conceivably, I don't really know, but conceivable. Maybe it's like taking a little off the fastball or something to get better control, better come in. Yeah, but basically, I mean, it's hard to see how you could have it lie to you. I mean, it's just telling you how long it takes for them to get places. And it doesn't really matter what you're doing to get there it's not going to judge you on style exactly if you're getting there faster you're getting there faster and that's what we're we're all going to be looking at is how quickly you do the thing

um i do wonder about um i wonder how it's going to handle outfielders who play a ball on the hop. The route is going to be different if the outfielder thinks that he's going to have to play it on the hop or if he's worried about having to play it on the hop. If two outfielders might see the same ball and one goes straight at it and the other goes to cut it off, and I don't know how you compare those two decisions with this metric. This might be one thing where there's still a little confusion or I don't even know if confusion is the right word,

but inconclusiveness about the right way to play the ball. That's a small thing. Once you've built up a large enough sample, conclusiveness about the right way to play the ball yeah i guess it's a small thing it's once you've built up a large enough sample then you'll have so many identical plays or near identical plays that you can say that when a ball is hit in this position at this speed and a guy is this far away um x percentage of outfielders make the catch or attempt to make the catch or something and then you could you could tell if a certain outfielder is more tentative than the typical guy. Maybe you would tell him that.

But that seems like something that you would need some time. Yeah. Hey, before we go, I have one thing to note. Tommy Rancel pointed out to me that Mattbers uh finished a game but did not get the safe uh-huh oh okay oh wow boosting his lead his record extending his record and uh and keeping it intact as well which is the more significant thing so who is the challenger someone on the orioles i think i think it was uh ryan webb yes it was ryan webb right huh okay interesting we will we will keep an eye on that um yes we will uh we are keeping an eye on a lot

of things we we got an email that i won't go through right now but uh by the listener named john who has been diligently tracking all of our all of our drafts and bets over the couple of years that we've been doing this almost and has been updating us. And in the Facebook group, you can find files that people have entered with the drafts that we've done, 25 and under players and soft tossing pitchers and Rule 5 guys or minor league free agents and all these things that we've done over the years. So we are,

we are being held accountable for the things that we say, which is nice and scary. So that's it for today. Please send us emails for next Wednesday's email show at podcast at baseball perspectives.com. Please rate and review us on iTunes and subscribe to the show on iTunes. It helps us get the podcast in front of more people. And please join the Facebook group

at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild, which is now well over 1,000 listeners strong. We will be back with a new show and a new topic tomorrow.