Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 420: Yost, Replay, Porter, and PEDs

Episode Date: April 3, 2014

Ben and Sam talk about Ned Yost’s tactics, expanded replay’s first few days, Bo Porter’s bullpen philosophy, and more.

Lost in this pleasure dome. Lost inside my pleasure dome. Yeah. Good morning and welcome to episode 420 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. Hello.

Hi, Ben. I'm about to do a flurry of typing, so ignore that. What's up? Well, the Red Sox salvaged their season. I don't know if you saw that. Wow, that typing is very loud. After the Red Sox opening day loss, Dan Shaughnessy declared Game 2 a must-win. And they did win it.

They beat Baltimore 6-2, so the season can go on. Well, that means that tomorrow is a must-win, too. Not necessarily. I mean, if they lose Game 3, maybe Game 4 is a must-win. Well, no. If you can't afford to lose a second game, then you can't afford to lose a second game. They're all must-win from here on out. Yeah, but maybe it's the psychological effects of starting the season 0-2.

It's tough to come back from that. Okay, so I don't really have a single topic. I have a few different topics today, so we can just work our way through them, I suppose. First one, I wanted to talk about this Ned Yost tactical decision that is getting some criticism. It was, well, the Royals have now lost two one-run games to the Tigers, and in both of those games, a reliever other than Greg Holland lost the game. In game one, Holland came in after the game was lost, and in game two he didn't come in at all because it was a tie game on the road.

But that's typical standard manager stuff. In the second game, there was a situation in the eighth inning where the Royals had been facing Max Scherzer, who had been doing Max Scherzer, who had been doing Max Scherzer things, and there was a leadoff double by Salvador Perez. Yost replaced him with Dyson, pinch running. Moustakas and Lorenzo Cain struck out, so it was two outs. And that brought up Alcides Escobar, and Yost did not pinch hit for him.

And that brought up Alcides Escobar, and Yost did not pinch hit for him. So our friend Andy McCullough spoke to him after the game, and Yost's explanation was basically that this early in the season you don't want to pinch hit for a guy because it's a sign of lack of confidence. Use the phrase, Ben. You want me to quote him? I want you to quote him. It's a good quote. Yeah, pinch hitting for guys gets in their dome. And you don't want to get in their

dome in the second game. He also said, until these guys show trends, that's when you start doing it. It's too early to start getting in guys' heads about pinch hitting, especially when you're struggling as a team offensively. But he also says we were going to pinch hit for Escobar in the ninth inning if it came up that the score was still 1-0

and they needed someone to hit a home run, but not in that situation. So this is one of those things where he said it's hard for fans to understand because there's something about the psychology of players that we don't know, that losing confidence, that knowing the manager doesn't have confidence in you in this situation is something that could have lasting ramifications. And he also makes a legitimate point that Escobar is not necessarily as bad a hitter as he was last year, because he was not a terrible hitter in 2012. But he did have Danny Valencia and Justin Maxwell on the bench as possible pinch hitters. And this is one of those

things where, I don't know, when the Royals missed out on the playoffs last year by four or five games, whatever it was, I think Ranney went back and counted up all the games that he blamed Ned Yost for. And if you did that, it was the difference between the Royals not making the playoffs. Of course, he didn't do that for every manager, so maybe if he did that for every team, he wouldn't have looked so bad. How many did he give yost credit for uh i don't remember but i think it was it was enough to to catch them up to whoever they trailed or no i i don't mean losses i mean wins oh wins okay um yeah i don't know it's it's it's a lot easier to come up with manager losses than manager wins, probably. Anyway.

I mean, unless you just start with the presumption that all of these moves are more or less self-evident and every good move should be made. The premise is that there is no reason not to make the optimal move, given that baseball is slow and moderately simple. But yeah, you would think that there would be all sorts of times where he brought in a pitcher who pitched well. So anyway, go ahead. So do you ascribe any value to Yost's explanation of this particular move. And I don't know, when you're trying to project the team heading into a season, do you factor in manager?

Because that was sort of a storyline with the Royals that, you know, they kind of have a competitive team, but maybe they don't have the guy who can get them there. Well, so who would have pinch hit? Who was the option? They had Maxwell and Valencia. And who was the pitcher? Scherzer.

Valencia is a right-handed hitter. Right-handed lefty masher. And Maxwell, of course, is also a right-handed lefty masher. And Alcides is a right-handed nobody masher. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, my initial response to that was certainly not to overreact to it. It didn't bother me. The phrasing of his answer didn't bother me, I guess I should say.

Because, you know, the difference between any two major league hitters, especially a bench hitter and Escobar, is exceptionally low in one plate appearance. I mean, it's very, very hard to tell the difference between two hitters over the course of one at bat. And if you are a manager and your job is to uh you know lead men and make an assessment of their characters and put them in positions to thrive uh it's hard to it's hard to fault them for prioritizing that to some degree

we'll we'll of course never know whether ned yost is correct or not but but it is explicitly his job to prioritize those sorts of things. Now, he might sensibly prioritize that by concluding that there's very little dome work going on and that you shouldn't pay much attention to it, but regardless, that would still be using that as a factor to make your decision, and Yost used that as a factor to make his decision. It's his job to use that as a factor to make his decision. And Yost used that as a factor to make his decision. It's his job to use that as a factor to make his decision. So it doesn't bother me. And the difference between, like I said, the difference between two hitters is very slim.

Now, I would say that the difference between what Escobar is going to be in a domed situation and an undomed situation, given Escobar's extreme limitations at doing anything offensively, would also be very slim. I mean, it seems very unlikely to me that Escobar could possibly be significantly worse than he is at the plate, and it seems very unlikely that he's going to be significantly better. But, yeah, I don't know. I think ultimately I would conclude that.

So I'm looking at Maxwell's because I would pinch hit Maxwell there if I were going to pinch hit. I wonder how many times Escobar was pinch hit for last season. I mean, you'd think that must have happened. Just as long as it's not in Game 2, you see. Game 2, as they say, is a must-not-pinch-hit situation. Clean slate, fresh start. In his career, Escobar's got a 640 OPS against righties,

and Maxwell's got a 710 OPS against righties. That's obviously overly simplistic. I guess all you need is a single there, though. All right, so if we're doing this, Maxwell's a 220 hitter against righties in his career. And Escobar's not going to be much worse than that, 254 against righties. And so, yeah, I mean, when you bring that up, I mean, I started with the premise that the difference is going to be so insignificantly small that it wouldn't show up in one plate appearance. the premise that the difference is going to be so insignificantly small that it wouldn't show up in one plate appearance.

Like, you know, I was thinking, like, maybe one in, like, 200 at bats, it would matter who was batting between the two of them or something like that. But, you know, now it looks like it could even be in reverse. I'll go through the motions with Valencia, but he's kind of a, he basically has a reputation for having one skill and then ain't hitting Scherzer. Yes. So maybe that shows that the Royals...

229. Uh-huh. 229. And in fact, 229 against righties and a worse OPS against righties than Valencia. Hmm. So... I mean, than Escobar. Sorry.

Uh-huh. So maybe that means that the Royals need a better left-handed bench hitter. I guess they have Dyson, who was running already. Can we now turn to ripping Yost for having the wrong reason for making the right decision? Because now we can conclude that he was unaware that Escobar was his best offensive option. Complain that he's making the right decision on the wrong grounds. But, of course, a single is not. You don't only need a single.

It'd be nice to get a double or a triple or a home run. This was not a walk-off situation. So, yeah. Yeah. All right. was not a walk-off situation um so yeah yeah all right and if you use and if you use maxwell there then you can't use him to pinch run for billy butler later in the game and there's some uh there's some there's some loss there i mean you know you're gonna do you want to make billy butler think he isn't fast in game two of the season i mean i, I don't know about that. I'm trying to think if there's a, I mean, you could imagine, well, I guess you have Valencia there.

I was going to say you could imagine that you wouldn't want to burn Maxwell to pinch hit for Moustakas against a lefty later in the game, but of course you have Valencia for that. So, yeah, I don't know. None of it bothered me, to be honest. The, the Holland one, of course, is a eternal bother, but that's, he, he just did what, like 28, maybe 30, maybe 29 other managers do every single time. I mean, there's no real point, uh, litigating against, against him specifically. against him specifically. We did get a listener email the other day about which manager's chairs are the wobbliest right now. And I wonder if...

I do a massive prediction spreadsheet contest against a friend every year. And one of our questions, this first manager fired, and it was extremely hard for me this year. It was much harder than usual. What did you decide? Gardy and Gibson. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah, those seem like pretty good picks. All right, moving on, if we could

just talk about the, I guess, the first few days of replay, just because we had Dan Brooks on to talk about the potential pitfalls of the system over the offseason, and now we've seen it in practice for the first few games, and it seems like the things that we were worried about have so far not shown up. The concern was that there was just going to be a challenge on any close play just because there are enough challenges and few enough mistakes in the typical game that the incentives would just be heavily skewed in favor of challenging whenever you had a doubt about a play. And we haven't really seen that. I can maybe look it up as we go, but it doesn't seem like the rate of upheld or confirmed calls has been way, way higher than the rate of overturned calls. We have seen some overturned calls, and I feel like it's going to be a while before I get sick of overturned calls.

Those are still really exciting, just to see a close play actually go the right way, whereas before we just would have had to live with it. So it seems like that's not that big an issue, or at least hasn't been so far. And you'd think that if it were going to be, it would be pretty quickly. I mean, if we were going to see just a crazy number of challenges, then that wouldn't show up. We wouldn't need a huge sample unless it's something that managers would do more and more as as time goes on yeah um right well you could imagine that as managers uh realize how many unused challenges they're going home to their wives with uh that they will be more liberal about using them but uh i mean i've watched an awful lot of baseball in the last three days and i haven't picked up any.

Like, there have been very, very few moves where I've, plays where I've thought, that's close enough, and that nobody did. I mean, very, very few now. Of course, we're talking about abuse, so maybe I'm not noticing the possibilities for abuse, the opportunities for abuse that have not been taken. But, yeah, it doesn't seem like there's a real abuse to it. I mean, I would say that the issues so far, none of which bother me because I don't, I try not to judge baseball too harshly. I just let it,

I just let it, I just let it, let it flow past me. I would say that one is that it makes the missed calls that do stand for whatever dumb reason particularly painful or particularly annoying. The Giants, I believe, have already had two missed calls go against them. One was that they had just used their challenge like 12 seconds earlier. Right. On a pick-off play or forced play at first, and it was not overturned, right? And then the next— Yeah, then there was someone scored and did not—he shouldn't have been safe, but Bochy couldn't challenge. day uh the first game of the season there was a play where the the second base umpire ruled that the fielder had come off the bag to uh to catch a ball and this was not a neighborhood play

this was this was one of those plays where the umpire like waves his arms to show that the the fielder has come off the bag you know and it was very it seemed extremely clear that he hadn't in fact come off the bag. I don't know if Bochy thought that he couldn't challenge it because it was sort of in the neighborhood of the neighborhood play, but it was not the neighborhood play. He could have challenged it, and it seemed pretty obvious that it was a missed call. I mean, it looked like an egregiously bad call in real time,

and then the replay showed it to seem to be not close. Anyway, it's dumb. It's really dumb that we have this system, this entire system with, like, 30 monitors. They keep showing the monitors. There's more than 30 monitors. There's monitors so that people can monitor the monitors. It's like there's just nothing but monitors in this room.

You have it staffed and you have all this infrastructure in place to get these calls right. Then they're like, yeah, but 15% are just going to get wrong for no reason. If the idea is that having the limit on the challenges is intended to create a sort of gamesmanship or a strategic element, is intended to create a sort of gamesmanship or a strategic element. The same way that you and I have acknowledged that there's something fun about catcher framing and about having an inconsistent strike zone because it creates this game within the game that even though we know it's an imprecise and a flawed strike zone, it does create the skill that certain players have. And so you can sort of accept it.

That's the idea. The idea is that by having a limit on challenges, we're going to test managers and make them more skilled. I can accept that. But that's not what it is. It's just to speed up the game. And so I don't know. I would just get the calls right. I would think that you should just take out those arbitrary limitations. The other thing is, and again, I don't mind this because I don't care if baseball games take forever. And I don't really care that baseball is more boring. It's just what I do.

I watch boring baseball for long periods of time. That's all okay with me. However, it's really boring when the guy comes out and stalls. And he just sort of ambles out in his slow walk and then talks to the umpire and is kind of glancing at the dugout and, you know, you're just sort of waiting, is he going to challenge? That is much more boring than they had led us to believe it would be. And this idea that it's speeding up the game,

I don't think it's necessarily significantly slowing down the game to the point where the average fan should notice it, but it is not speeding up the game. This is definitely slowing down the game. The idea that you're going to remove the manager arguments and therefore speed up the game by doing this, to me, seems to be clearly not true. Manager arguments were not this frequent, they were not this long, and they were kind of entertaining. So it is pretty boring, and I can see why a person who's not as invested in the absurdity of baseball and is actually invested in like the adrenaline of baseball unlike me would find this to be kind of their you know a little bit of their worst fear

yeah yeah I should get Evan Brunel to to lip read one of those conversations that happens during the stalling because I'd love to know what the manager is saying, like on the, either the first or second challenge of the season, Freddie Gonzalez went out and, and was talking and stalling and you could see him just, you know, periodically glancing into the dugout at the bench coach who was on the

phone, getting word from someone who was looking at the replay and he just kept glancing over there and glancing over there. And then eventually the bench coach gave him the thumbs down which i guess meant that the the call was incorrect and then he challenged so i'd love to know what he was saying while he was stalling um but yeah i wonder whether they'll crack down on that because it would be nice if it if you just had to make a snap judgment and not have to do this. And the thing about certain calls just not being able to, not being challengeable just because you've used your challenge already, that was, I think, our main complaint.

As happy as we were when the replay system was announced, that was our main complaint, that there was a challenge system at all. our main complaint that there was a challenge system at all. And so in that Dodgers or whatever it was, the Giants game, where he wasn't able to challenge, that ended up being a pretty crucial play. And because it was the fourth inning, the crew chief couldn't call for his own replay, which he can do after the seventh inning. So, yeah, so that's sort of silly. And maybe that will be changed too. It seemed like they were, they were open to using this season to gather information

on how well this worked and then revisiting it. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of change, but overall it's, it's a positive and it's nice and I like it. Okay. Last thing. Bo Porter had a quote. Evan Drellick got a quote from Bo Porter last week, I guess, about how Porter approaches bullpen roles. And Porter said, you know what your role is? When your phone rings and your name's called, go get people out. That's your role. Love that guy.

That's why you're in the bullpen. Yeah. Yes. So, right. So that's what we've been wanting and waiting for a manager to say. I kind of, I don't know, I kind of had a cynical reaction to it, I guess, which is that it's really easy to say that if you're Bo Porter and you don't really even have a closer. And you don't really even have a closer. Like if, you know, if Bo Porter were on some team with an established guy who gets saves and make millions of dollars and he takes over that team, would he have said that?

Would he approach his bullpen that way? I sort of doubt it. I mean, he's on a team now that, you know, has I guess Josh Fields got the save today. There's no established highly paid guy. It's just kind of a bullpen by committee by default almost. So if you're Bo Porter and you take over this bullpen, then it's almost in your best interest maybe to say that. I mean, on one hand, you have a team that's not spending a whole lot of money and they can keep prices down by not anointing a closer and getting him tons of saves and giving him the closer aura.

And he also kind of gets out of being second guest for not bringing any particular pitcher in at any particular time. And so that was kind of my take on that. But at the same time, I guess if it's going to change, this is how it's going to change, right? It'll be Bo Porter on a bad team setting a precedent for that. And we'll see whether he actually sticks to that precedent or whether he, you know, in the end just sort of picks a closer and sticks with him like any other manager. But this is, I guess guess how it has to happen um at the saber analytics conference brandon mccarthy was asked about how bullpen management will change or how it could change from the standard eighth inning guy ninth inning guy system and he said that it it has to start at

the lower levels because guys are used to having a designated role even like when they're in rookie league or something even when even before you know whether a guy has closer potential necessarily, you just give him an inning anyway, and guys get used to that the whole way up the ladder. And so he, he made the case that you'd have to change, you'd have to do a whole organization wide overhaul. And then once you established it as this organization's policy, then anyone who joined the organization would just live with it. They just know that this is what they're getting into and it's an established system and there's no point in complaining about it. So I guess easy for Porter to say this or easier for him to say it than some other manager. But at the same time, I guess that's what it's going to take for this to take hold.

I think that's probably true, but there's this line in Jonah's book about the Expos where he's talking about some guy that they traded for and he came over and was immediately miserable and terrible and I think threatened to retire. I might be confusing, conflating stories, but the guy who made the trade said that we learned then that you should never trade anybody who doesn't feel like it's a promotion to be traded to you. And, I mean, as long as you're talking about... It was Maury Wills, maybe. Yeah, it might have been Maury Wills. It might have been Maury Wills.

So I don't know. I mean, it doesn't seem, it seems impossible if you, you know, if you just declare that, you know, that the relievers have to do it your way and, you know, you're the boss and all that, that, yeah, they're not going to take it necessarily all that well. They're better at their jobs than, you know, probably you are as a manager, maybe even. But if you sold it to them as a promotion, if you were able to convince them it was a promotion, and if it didn't hurt them, like if you, so Kimbrel right now, for instance,

he's locked up forever. He signed an extension. So it will not affect his salary at all, more or less, to lose saves. I mean, it wouldn't anyways, Craig freaking Kimbrell, but, uh, you know, even if, even if he were, you know, like, you know, dependent on saves to, to convince people he's really good, um, you know, he's signed, it's not going to hurt him financially to, to give up saves. So if you sold it as promotion that he's going to be pitching, uh, when the team needs him most and you were just really on message with that. I could

see it taking. And so I don't know. I think that that assessment is, you know, it does provide a realistic path to ending the, you know, the strictness of the roles. But I don't think it's the only way is all I'm saying. I'll be curious to see whether Porter is the manager of the Astros when they're good. Because just so often it seems like a team will have one manager for the rebuilding years who's good at working with young players and, you know, getting them to have the right work ethic and all of that. And then once the team gets good and every win really counts, then they will replace him with someone else who's maybe a more tactical guy with a more veteran team that doesn't need to be micromanaged. So it'll be interesting to see whether he can do both and whether he's trusted to do both.

All right. Oh, last thing. Neither of us or no one at BP wrote about it. We didn't talk about it. Did you have any reaction at all to the new PED suspension policy? No. Okay. I feel like, I think we've talked about it enough.

I mean, not this one specifically, but I feel like your views and my views on PEDs and penalties are established. Yeah, I mean, I was perfectly... I think it's the... Yeah, I basically support whatever the players want. Mm-hmm. The only... My philosophy is it's the player's game, and until that gets ludicrous

or starts killing the market completely, we should abide by what the players want. They're the ones who should make the rules, more or less. Yeah, and I don't have any problem with it. It's what, first time is 80 games, and second time is full season. And I guess my only problem with it was, as Jason Wojcicki pointed out, 80 games is kind of meaningless. It should be 81 games, right? 80 is a nice round number, but it's not half a season. So that, and I guess the only other thing that people were mildly questioning

was the fact that players who test positive serve their suspension and then come back are still banned from the playoffs. Yeah, it's fine with me. Yeah? It's fine. I don't, I think it's fine. Yeah, no, the reason I think it's fine is because it seems absurd to me that the penalty, the severity of the penalty is dependent on the randomness of the date that you're tested.

That's true. If the penalty includes post-season when you're suspended in August, it should include post-season when you're suspended in April, just that it's consistent severity of penalty across the board. Okay, good. Yeah. And one other thing they added was just some sort of recourse for people who, I mean, there are false positives for these tests. And if you're going to slap a really, really heavy suspension on them, you have to have some mechanism for guys who didn't actually do anything to plead their case. So that is a possibility now also,

which is probably a good thing. All right. Good. So we're done. We'll be back with one more show tomorrow. I'll be making my MLB Now debut today. So anyone who has a DVR or is around MLB Network from four to five Eastern can see me talking about baseball. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com. Subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 for a one-year subscription. And we'll be back tomorrow.