Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 43: The Under-the-Radar Reds/Was Anthony Rizzo’s Scouting Report Wrong?

Episode Date: September 17, 2012

Ben and Sam talk about why they haven’t talked about the Reds more often, then discuss whether Anthony Rizzo has proved his critics wrong.

Good morning, good evening, welcome to episode 43 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California, along with Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. We are recording this late Sunday night after an eventful weekend. Ben, I sort of met Vin Scully this weekend. What did you do that was so friggin' special? I played tennis with BP alum Jeremy Greenhouse. I watched Crazy Heart.

Okay. I watch Crazy Heart. Okay. Crazy Heart is the Jeff Bridges one. There's another one that – there's a movie that Robert Duvall made like 25 years earlier that's very similar that if you liked Crazy Heart, I would really recommend. It's in a similar vein, but I liked it quite a bit more. Are you going to tell me the name of it? I am. I'm looking it up right now.

Do you have something you'd like to talk about baseball? Oh, and Robert Duvall is in Crazy Heart. Yes. Baseball-y? Do you have a baseball-y topic? I do, and it's going to make one of our fans slash commenters very angry, I think. Okay. It is about the Cubs. is about anthony rizzo specifically and we had a comment from a commenter named guido 565 that is g w e e d o h uh and he or she yes or she she tabulated all of our topics from the first 42 episodes of Effectively Wild, which was very flattering. It reminded me of when Craig Robinson kept track of

what Jason and Kevin drank on Up and In. It was the same sort of obsessiveness. And his finding was that we had talked about the Cubs three times already but we had neglected the Reds since our very first episode when we talked about Aroldis Chapman and he was a Reds fan and he was not happy so we're going to talk about the Cubs for the fourth time now and continue to neglect the Reds well my topic is the reds oh excellent now did you cave to the pressure yeah no totally okay i will do anything anybody said if some if you think i'm doing something wrong uh and you tell me i will fix it and it really doesn't matter how insane you are i will fix it i will uh i have no spine well i guess that's probably a good thing for the podcast because I was just going to antagonize him further,

and now we have you to mollify him a bit. Let's do mine first. Okay. I actually am – it's so in response to that comment that in fact the topic is that comment. He pointed out we haven't spoken about the Reds since the first show, and the Reds are a very good team. They have the second-best record in the National League.

They're going to go to the playoffs. They might win the World Series very soon. And I just wonder why you think it is that we haven't spoken about the Reds. What is it about this Reds team that has made them not topic-worthy, do you think? I guess, I don't know, the lack of stars? What do you mean they have Joey Votto? Yeah, but he's been on the DL for a couple months. That's a thing you could talk about.

Why didn't we talk about Joey Votto coming back? I don't know. Maybe we should. Maybe we should. I don't know. I wrote the Reds chapter for Baseball Prospectus 2010, and I praised them for their drafting and how they were building a winner

and it was going to be sustainable and they were going to be the class of the NL Central, and then they kind of didn't make the playoffs last year. And that kind of took away from that momentum of what they were building and now it seems that they are back with that same sort of core, older and better. Whatever happened last season they have overcome

and been very good again this year. And I don't know why it is that we don't talk about them. Maybe because they've had a fairly comfortable lead most of the time that we've been podcasting. Yeah, I think that the day that we started episode one, I think they were 82% likely to make the playoffs and quickly rose after that. There really hasn't been much of a narrative to the second half of their season. It has been a pretty simple coast, I would say say and they're currently 11 or 12 games up um so there's not a whole lot of drama involved so that's probably i mean i'm sure that's one reason yeah and small sample size there's 42 episodes we talked about them once they're, yeah. My theory is that it has to do with that nobody ever wants to talk about Bronson Arroyo.

And it's hard. I mean, we could have spoken about the Reds and just avoided Bronson Arroyo, but you never know when Bronson Arroyo is going to pop into the conversation when you talk about the Reds. And it's a scary thing knowing that you might talk about Bronson Arroyo is going to pop into the conversation when you talk about the Reds. And it's a scary thing, knowing that you might talk about Bronson Arroyo. Have you ever talked to a PitchFX expert about Bronson Arroyo? No, tell me what it's like, because he's crazy. I can't figure out anything about him. I remember talking to Jeremy, since Jeremy is on my mind.

I talked to him about Bronson arroyo once and it was like it was like talking to a veteran about some horrible campaign pacifying bronson arroyo's pitches is apparently it's like running the gauntlet for a pgx analyst yeah the tunnels in vietnam yes he uh he many pitches, and he throws them from all sorts of different angles, and classifying them is apparently the ultimate challenge for any guy looking to make his chops with PitchFX. Well, somebody should do it this year because he is, I mean, there's really, it doesn't seem like there's that much different about him from last year. I mean, his sort of his margins from year to year are so slim,

and yet he can allow 40 more runs one year than the next without really anything tremendous changing. I mean, he has a much better strikeout to walk ratio this year, but, I mean, it's like he struck out, you know, three tenths of a batter more per nine and he's walked like four tenths of a batter fewer per nine because the numbers are pretty small for him. He just throws strikes and gives up home runs and hopes that he gives up fewer home runs. Um, his BABIP is actually higher this year, So it's not even a matter of that. It's just, I mean, last year he gave up 46 home runs

and this year he's going to give up half as many. And if you can figure out why that's happening and nothing else really about him is changing all that much, you can probably get a job somewhere. Also, if you can figure out his baseball reference sponsorship, which is from like a, it looks to me like a gym equipment company and the um the the text though all the text is is a quote from the sun also rises the quote is romero never made any contortions always it was straight and pure and natural in line

romero had the old thing the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure. And so do you think you know what that means? I guess it's some sort of reference to his delivery. I'm trying to figure out what is straight and what is contorted. I mean, the contortion could be his motion. The straight could be his fastball, I suppose.

But the purity of line through the maximum exposure, I don't know what that would be. So do you think the Reds are... Maybe the guy meant to sponsor J.C. Romero's page. What? He meant to sponsor J.C. Romero's page. And that's why it doesn't make sense. Obviously, the answer to this is anything can happen in the postseason,

but do you consider the Reds to be a legit contender? Are they an elite team in the National League? I guess they don't. Yeah, actually, yes. I'm going to revise that, yes. I think so. They have a strong lineup, and they're efficient. They don't have that strong lineup.

I mean, with Vodda. It's a pretty weak lineup. It's a strong staff, so it's a pretty weak lineup. I kind of like the Todd Frazier. That's all it takes for me. And the Ryan Ludwig surprise season. Yeah, I like them in the playoffs i don't love them they wouldn't be my favorite i guess but other than the nationals um they're up there i know the secret sauce has

been basically um discredited or tossed out or whatever but do we still believe in the the value of a top flight bullpen because their bullpen is, I don't know, it's darn close to historically good. I don't know. I don't either, but it feels like we should. I mean, their bullpen, I mean, they are not quite the Orioles, but they're outperforming their run differential by five this year, and their bullpen is about 60-some runs better than the median in the National League. So that's without even getting into the leverage factor. I mean, it really is the sort of thing that harkens back to 1990.

And the staff is interesting because they are one of the lowest strikeout staffs in the National League. And they're also the second lowest walks. And I don't really think about the Reds. I've always kind of thought about the Reds as being Bronson Arroyo and some kind of wild fastball types. But I guess it hasn't really been that way for a couple years. And this year they really are almost like the Twins. I mean, they're not like the Twins. They're nothing like the Twins.

Nobody's like the Twins. But it's not a staff that you generally think of as playing real well in October. But as far as rotation, bullpen is great. And I guess rotation are most polar opposites. You're still thinking of them as the Edinson Volquez Ritz. I guess I am. Yeah, I am. Anyway, Anthony Rizzo.

So, Anthony Rizzo had a very big day yesterday. He hit two home runs. One of them was a grand slam. And he is now hitting 300, 352, 491. He has 14 home runs in 300 plate appearances. So he has been very good.

And Anthony Rizzo has kind of an interesting backstory in that he struggled mightily in his first call-up to the majors. It was a short call-up, but it was 150 or so plate appearances last season. He hit 141 without a whole lot of other good stuff. And the worrisome part of it was, I guess, that some scouts or scouty types expressed some concerns about his ability to hit fastballs that are fast. Buster only said something that came from an anonymous evaluator that said, my concern for San Diego is that he is HeSocJoy. Any fastball that starts with a nine is a problem for him.

And RJ Anderson wrote a blog post for us last July, kind of looking to see if this was true. And it was true at the time. In a small sample, he had struggled very much against fastballs over 90 miles per hour. The league as a whole does a little worse on fastballs over 90 miles per hour, as you'd expect, but he did much worse, a much bigger split. And so scouts were concerned about this. And RJ also quoted a report that said, one scout who has seen Rizzo throughout his career put it best by saying, I've seen him hit for average and I've seen him hit for power, but I'm left wondering if he can do both. So he has done both in 300 plate appearances this year. And I looked at the fast ball splits a little bit, and he is hitting perfectly well on fast balls over 90 miles per

hour. Better, actually, than against slower fast balls. He's hitting 313.500 average slugging against fastballs under 90 miles per hour. And above 90 miles per hour, he is hitting 342 with a 596 slug. Although if you go to 95 miles per hour and over, it's not so good. So he's had this kind of long route, I guess, for a 22-year-old at least, in that he was traded twice. And usually it seems to me it's not such a great sign if a prospect is traded multiple times really this early in his career. I remember reading some things about how many times Edwin Jackson has been traded before the age of 30 and how really no one who's been traded that many times at that young an age has turned into anything special. I think it's always some cause for concern if a prospect is changing teams a couple

times. Do you think that the Cubs were, I mean, do you think it's a steal now in retrospect? If you look at the trade from this past January, which was him to Chicago for Andrew Kashner with a couple other minor leaguers involved. I mean, do you think obviously his value was low after that terrible first introduction to the majors. And now it looks like things have panned out. Do you have thoughts? Yeah, I like Kashner a lot too, though. I wouldn't call it a steal right now because there's a lot of story to be written. right now because there's a lot of story to be written.

I wonder, I don't know, when, I guess the scouts' opinions matter more to me, but the, I don't know, I kind of feel like there's a tendency when a guy is struggling to break down the component parts of his game and point out the parts where he is struggling and say, oh look, this is the cause. He's not hitting inside pitches, therefore that's what's making him be bad. When I think it's often just the case that he's struggling overall, and that is one of the manifestations of his struggles. And so the fact that he wasn't hitting pitches over nine or over 90 when he was doing poorly, I mean, I guess, I don't know, maybe the splits are more convincing than that. But bat speed is an interesting thing because bat speed is one of the, there are, we've talked about this before, there are skills that you're able to develop, like maybe pitch recognition or the ability to throw a change up. And then there are skills that you're essentially born with, like running speed and arm strength.

And I feel like bat speed is usually one, it seems to me, just about the most important thing they look for other than maybe body. And I think that's partly because you can't really, there's a mechanical aspect to it, but you can't really teach bat speed all that much. And so it would be interesting to, if Anthony Rizzo has actually developed bat speed, my hunch is that, well, I don't know my, my hunch, I don't know if it's my hunch. My guess is that the problems are probably overstated a bit and that the success he's had is probably, I don't know, still to be, still to be proven over a larger sample. That's interesting because a lot of times when a guy is struggling, people say, well, look at why he's struggling or how he's doing it.

And if a scout says he sees a problem, then people lend a lot of weight to that. And people think that the stats mean more if the scout sees something troublesome, which is probably true. But if bat speed can be a small sample thing, just as much as a 141 average can be, that's a little scary. Because then how will you ever know if a guy is going to have long-term troubles or not if bat speed is something that can come and go um which it would as you say be kind of surprising if it were that seems more like an innate thing that if you don't have it you're in trouble so yeah that is interesting yeah um, I suppose there's probably more to look at with Rizzo. I

mean, it's always possible that he's cheating, that the 90s that he's facing now are not the best pitchers throwing 90s, maybe seeing more predictable 90s. I mean, I guess there's all sorts of ways that you could still consider this an open question. I think that, I don't know, I was pretty high on Rizzo before this year, and I'm pretty high on Rizzo right now. But the demands on a first baseman offensively are much greater than even he has probably produced, and he'll still need to grow somewhat. Well, Jed Hoyer was even higher on Rizzo than you were, I assume. Traded for him twice.

Yes, so that's working out well. Remember when Rizzo was hitting a million home runs in the minor leagues and Brian LaHare was hitting in the majors? Remember when Adrian Gonzalez was traded twice before he was ever a good major? Yeah, that's true. Brian LaHare, I almost forgot his name earlier when I planned to say something about Brian LaHare. He has hit something like 220 since the end of April

with no power or anything. You know who's really into Brian LaHare? No. Steph B is really into Brian LaHare. Still? Yeah. Really, really. That's loyalty.

Yeah, that was interesting because he was off to such a hot start and people sort of bought into it a little, at least more than they do with the usual one-month wonder. I guess because he hit well last season in a small sample also. I mean, he's got – he played 114 games this year, and he's got a pretty good line. So does the split between good and bad, is that more convincing than the overall line?

I mean, he's got almost the same line Rizzo has. They're almost the same. I mean, it's a little bit different distribution, but 348 OBP to 336 and 463 slugging to 447. Yeah. And LaHare's got just as many plate appearances, so. That is true. Although I guess I'm reading day-old stats.

You read more recent stats. Yeah. Earlier for Rizzo, but yeah. It's weird how we split the season. Yes, a lot of people expected that the Cubs would try to trade him after that extremely hot month. Maybe they did. I'm sure they did, and I'm sure everyone said,

that's still Brian LaHare. Yes, and it is still Brian LaHare. Yes. All right. And it is still Brian LaHare. And he will be Brian LaHare tomorrow as well when we record another podcast. Maybe we'll talk about him. Maybe we'll talk about the Cubs over and over and over. But in the meantime, have a good day, and we'll be back.