Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 439: The Email Answers You Asked For

Episode Date: April 30, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Jose Fernandez, the best baseball PED, a pitcher with perfect command, and more.

I got a question mark You gotta need to always take some shot in the dark I don't have to make pretend the picture I'm in Good morning and welcome to episode 439 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. Hello. Hello. Any banter?

Had some, but forgot what it was. Well, Greg Dobbs was designated for assignment by the Marlins, which I thought was funny because I don't know if we ever talked about it. I meant to bring it up for banter during a show last year, but I don't think I did, that the Marlins signed Greg Dobbs to an extension not only in the middle of the season, like they really felt they needed to lock up Greg Dobbs, but it was a Jeffrey Luria move that he negotiated Dobbs' contract without the knowledge of the team's GM or the team's president of operations. He went over everyone's head to lock

up Greg Dobbs in the middle of the season. And now the Marlins havelins have DFA Dobbs after 13 pinch hit plate appearances in which he batted 077 so a sad end to the the longer than I would have expected Greg Dobbs era in Miami the other thing I wanted to ask you was last week we did the show where we guessed what players career earnings were i wanted to ask you as soon as that plane flies by what you think freddie garcia will make in taiwan this season unless you already saw his salary he is now the the highest paid player in taiwan topping manny ramirez and i didn't have a great sense of, man, you have all kinds of vehicles passing by your house tonight. Manny Ramirez was the highest-paid player.

Now Freddy Garcia is the highest-paid player. And I didn't really know what the pay scale in Taiwan was. Do you want to guess what he is making this season or per month? I do. I do want to guess that um so he's the highest paid currently you don't know whether he's like a highest in history or is he i guess highest history highest in history because manny's not not there anymore right right i honestly like i say manny's not there anymore i actually have no idea like like you were like, no, of course, Manny's playing in Cuba,

I'd be like, oh yeah, that's right. Nothing would surprise me. I would guess that the highest paid player in Taiwanese history... I'm trying to think if you're asking me because the answer is interesting or because the question is interesting. Either is interesting. Well, if the question is interesting, it could be anything. You could have just started with the idea that the question is interesting. But if you're only asking because you already knew the answer and you thought the answer

is interesting, then it has to be either notably high or notably low. For notably low, I would have guessed like say 850,000. For notably high, I would have guessed probably 6 million. But I'm going to guess that you started with the question and that the answer doesn't have to be by definition interesting. And I'm going to guess $2.7 million. It's actually lower than your notably low guess. Goodness gracious. Yeah, which is, I suppose that's what inspired me to ask this. I don't know why I did. But yes, his deal is worth $56,000 per month. Wow.

Which over seven months, which is $392,000. So the highest player in Taiwanese history makes less than the major league minimum. That's interesting because Chris Colabello was apparently going to get a million from Korea. Right, and Japan pays players much better than they can make here. So I guess I didn't really know. Yeah, I guess I didn't know how to do the league to league translation,

but I mean, Chris Colabello money you wouldn't think would be near the top for whatever league he's going to be in. I wonder, did Freddy Garcia not get any feelers from Japan, from Korea? Maybe he just prefers Taiwan, wants to support their sovereignty or something. I don't know. But that was interesting to me. Sowan is not a place to go get rich playing baseball apparently so today is listener email show we have many excellent wait wait luke luke scott's in taiwan too uh-huh you'd think that luke scott would be make more than freddie garcia making at least freddie garcia money i mean right because luke scott wasn't i don't get the feeling that luke scott making at least Freddy Garcia money. I mean, right? Because Luke Scott wasn't... I don't get the feeling that Luke Scott was, like,

completely unable to get a job in the States, was he? I thought people went over there and did the Santori commercials because they were sort of cashing out. Like, that's the money move. You don't go over there because you have to take an 80% pay cut. I never got the feeling that's why you went over there, but Freddy Garcia did. Luke Scott is in Korea, I think. Is he?

Oh, yeah. That would make sense. That explains it. All right. so listener emails. Let's start with Scott, who says, If you could engineer a new performance-enhancing drug, which specific baseball performance aspect would be most beneficial to enhance, either as it relates to team success or individual career-earning potential?

Would it be one of the five tools or something far more particular? Mike Troutiness is a bit too broad a response for this question. Well, so I think that I have two answers for this, one of which is, I guess, within the realm of possibility. The other, it currently isn't. But I would say that the answer of the tools is that i would i would most want to add speed uh to a player now that's kind of weird because speed is in a way is the least valuable tool if you're the if you're a speed like you can't you can't really make the majors if you're a speed only guy whereas you can make the majors if you're a hit only guy uh or even a field only guy right but if you're if you're just a blazer guy, whereas you can make the majors if you're a hit-only guy, or even a field-only guy, right?

But if you're just a blazer and you can't do anything else, you find a different sport, basically. However, I assume we're already talking about major league caliber players, and if there was one thing about major league caliber players that I would want to improve, it would be speed. Because, I don't know, I think that speed really does show up. It has cascading effects throughout their game. And more than anything else, positional flexibility and the ability to move up instead of down,

or perhaps down instead of up, I don't remember which is up and which is down, or maybe it's left and right on the defensive spectrum, feels like in itself. Like if you could just take the average major leaguer and move him two spots up the defensive spectrum, that's like a win. It's really hard to get that sort of value and performance alone that you would get by moving a guy from first to third without a defensive downgrade or from from right to center and have him keep his his uh you know his his same skill level relative to that position so uh i would i would go speed

i'd say speed however uh so why don't you answer but if you want but i have another answer as well how much of that is speed i mean going from first to third first to third is not you're right first to third is not but arm strength and i don't know whether speed is the same as reaction time. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking more outfield. But yeah, you're right. Well, does health count?

So my other answer was going to be just to have a super strong ligament in your arm. Adamantium elbow ligament. And there was a great i don't know if you saw this but this was a um a fascinating thing that i learned recently uh there was talk by somebody some some pundit some columnist maybe i don't want to slander anybody but maybe joel sherman uh maybe uh saying uh speculating that like uh Johns were the result of fewer steroids, of fewer PEDs in the game. And somebody pointed out that, in fact, there are no hormone receptors in the ligaments.

And so, in fact, there is no effect. They just do not actually react with each other. I heard that. I heard that also. Hang up and listen. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Right. actually react with each other and so i hear that i heard that also hang up and listen yes okay um yeah right so okay those are those are our answers so yeah ligament okay ligament or shoulder though which if you could only pick if you had a uh if you if you had a uh you know jose fernandez and you could guarantee a healthy shoulder or a healthy elbow for the

rest of his career, which would you choose? I think I'd probably take the elbow at this point. It seems, I mean, the take on that was always that elbow or shoulder injuries were more difficult to repair. And I think they said at Sabre analytics on that injury panel that, that guys have actually had fewer shoulder surgeries recently, just because the outcomes are, are not great. And there's been more rehab. And, and so there've been fewer surgeries, but not necessarily better outcomes, but it, it certainly seems like the elbow ones are more common now. And even if most guys come back, it's still a year and a half until you're back at full strength, if you are.

So probably that. It was Joe Sherman. Yeah, sounds right. Okay. Okay. Eric Hartman says, I was listening to Friend of the podcast, Kevin Corain's appearance with Jesse Thorne. I listened to that also. It was quite pleasant, although you could also go back and listen to Kevin's appearance on this podcast. republished recently. In the intriguing interview, they go back to the very early days of scouting, where it seems people just tended to play hunches and tips from anyone who may know.

It seems like scouting then, pre-World War I, was just as infantile as statistical knowledge was in those days. So my question is, if you were running a team in, say, 1915, would you rather have a great modern- day scout or a great stats guy? We talked about what use it would be to be a great stats guy a century ago. We didn't talk about it a century ago, although it feels like it. We talked about it probably a year ago. And we weren't imaginative enough. I remember we were underwhelmed by the possibilities and we got some responses that were a bit more broad thinking. But all the same, it does feel like the lack of uniformity in statistics at the time would make it hard to do a whole lot. would make it hard to do a whole lot.

Even if you were a great statistical mind, it's not like there's going to be pitch effects cameras or anything like that. You'd still be doing pretty simple stuff. I mean, even the box scores, as I think people have discovered by Hack Wilson's missing RBI and stuff are somewhat unreliable. And, of course, at the minor league level, which is really what we're talking about, you're hopeless.

I mean, I would say there's almost no way to use statistics for 1915 player development or scouting, you know, using statistics then. Because, you know, the leagues then because, you know, like there's like the leagues were a total wild west, right? I think I disagree. I mean, I agree that that's the way it was. But if you were a modern day stats guy transplanted to that era, then you would recognize the importance of keeping good statistics and you could send stringers to games and you'd be the importance of keeping good statistics, and you could send stringers to games,

and you'd be the only team with good statistics. And as you said, you wouldn't have PitchFX or anything, but you'd have play-by-play stats. You'd have all the basic stuff that we have that doesn't require any advanced technology. You could set up a network, and there were fewer teams then, so it would be easier to collect that information. And you could, I mean, look how effective just recognizing the value of on-base percentage was

in, you know, 2000, right, when the A's did it. So if you were doing that in 1915, and you're the only team that maybe even knows that that's a stat um seems to me like that would be very important uh yeah uh i'm thinking more that it's not so much that it's hard to necessarily get statistics for minor leaguers or you know what i don't even know what they were back then you know independent leagues other, so much as it's hard to put them into context. You're not going to have the park factors for these fields. You're not going to have necessarily a great gauge of strength of competition. You're probably not going to know the age of every opponent that they played. I mean, all these things that we sort of take for granted

in putting stats in context wouldn't be available to you. But you're right. I mean, you definitely could separate yourself in that sense. I just feel like it feels like you're always reading sort of about some, you know, like, I'm not going to be able to come up with an example off the top of my head, but some Hall of Famer who, you know, like, was discovered because, you know, they needed a pinch hitter. So they, you know, pulled up the guy who won some promotion, you know, for selling newspapers in town. And he ended up being, being like Walter Johnson or something. It just feels like there was very little... I might be wrong about this.

I get bits and pieces of history, but it feels like great players were lingering in these unaffiliated leagues or non-major leagues for way too long. That's a constant story. This guy was there for six years before he finally got his contract purchased by the Yankees and won the MVP. So I don't know. I might be wrong. Who knows? I'd probably take the scout.

If the scout's strength is that he can go out and find players then i would take the scout because it does seem like that was a big part of it just just having a network of contacts and following up these tips and hearing about players so you know if if there were two guys and and they both had the same scouting skill but one of them was just better at finding players or hearing about players that guy would probably be very valuable at that time whereas now it's much much less so because it's very hard to find a player that every other team doesn't already know about um all right let's do this one from Kevin in Toronto. As I write this on Tuesday morning,

Moises Sierra of the Blue Jays is currently sporting an 067-097-067-163, that's his OPS slash line, with a paltry two hits, both singles, and one walk in 31 play appearances. Given this lack of production, would Sierra have a greater chance of reaching base if he went to the plate without a bat in his hand and tried to draw a walk or hit by pitch before being called out on strikes? How low would a hitter's OBP have to be

before it made sense for him to go to the plate without a bat? This is kind of one of your pet topics, right, as it relates to pitchers at the plate, at least. I've answered this, but I don't remember the answer. So I wouldn't expect anybody else to remember the answer either. But yeah, in fact, we're going to talk about pitchers hitting in a little bit. in a little bit. Oh, excellent. And Ian Kennedy, for a little while,

was walking in like every seventh at bat. And, you know, it's not like he was a threat. His bat did not present any sort of a threat. He's a terrible hitter. So I have to imagine that bat or no bat, the result would have been roughly the same. And he did swing sometimes, and so he cost himself some walks by actually hitting the ball. Yeah, this was 2012. He walked 11 times and 73 bats. This year, John Neese, who actually is the, believe it or not, I know this off the top of my head because it's something I just wrote for Wednesday.

John Neese is the current active leader for pitcher walk percentage. And so he walks about 9% of the time. And he's walked, I think, four times and aided bats this year uh i would think that you could put together a we i know i i there is an answer to this that we've known at one point but i forget what it is i think that i want to say that you can put together like uh a 110 obp or maybe an 091 obp without ever swinging if you never swing well so so the probability of of throwing a strike in any one pitch, I mean, that stat that we always cite about how pitchers, when facing pitchers who have a 3-0 count, only throw strikes 67% of the time, two-thirds of the time. Yeah. And, of course, that's a selective sample. It's pitchers who are going to 3-0 on pitchers, so probably not the best control guys in the league.

Yeah, yeah. But still, major league pitchers on the mound and throwing to a person who is under no circumstances going to swing and who all the incentives are for them to just throw a strike right down the middle. And so even if you bump that to 70, or, you know, even, I would say this is generous, but even if you bumped it to 75%. Yeah, right. I was going to say 75 also. So, so if you, I mean, is this is a probably a pretty simple probability thing, right? And each of the, each of the pitches would be independent probability because the guy doesn't even have a bat, so

you'd be just as likely to throw him a strike, just as likely to throw him a ball down the middle on 0-0 as you would on 3-0 because he can't possibly hit the ball. Hey, hang on. I actually had Zachary Levine answer this for me not that long ago, like three months ago. Oh, perfect. So I'm finding it's in two emails. But at 75%, it's a 4% chance of a walk. And at 67%, it's a 10% chance of a walk.

So if you believe it's 67%, then you'd have a 100 on base percentage if you never swung. If you believe it's 75%, you'd have a 40 on base percentage if you never swung. Problem is if you don't even have a bat, then there's no real reason for the pitcher even to throw it 90 miles an hour. He could lob it in. Yeah, but we've already established with the 3-0 situation.

Right, but that's, well, I mean, guys on 3-0 are still throwing the ball hard. They're still throwing actual pitches, whereas... I think, though, that a pitcher who swung on 3-0, even if it were a 65-mile-an-hour pitch tossed right over the heart of the plate, if that pitcher swung, he would get his neck wrung by his manager. I think that the pitcher on the mound can feel pretty confident that that's a freebie. I don't think that throwing 65 would help him.

I think that these guys are pretty good at pumping 88. There's a psychological aspect to it where there's a guy standing there with a bat, so you have to throw something that looks like a real pitch, even if you're sure that he's not going to swing. Whereas if you have a guy who's not even trying, then you're free to do anything. There's no unwritten rule

that you have to throw a legitimate-looking pitch. You could do whatever would make you most likely to throw a legitimate looking pitch you could do whatever would would make you most likely to throw a strike and i do feel like i don't know i mean you don't think that you've seen guys like warming up on the sidelines and just throwing hundreds of feet to some guy who's in right field and there's a guy at home plate and they're just throwing really far just looking at guys warming up in spring training just lining up along the baseline and playing catch. You don't think that just sort of throwing the ball as if you are playing catch with the catcher, that there would be no benefit in accuracy? No, I think from, from that distance and from that, I mean, you're elevated, you're on a

mound. Um, your, I think that your best chance of throwing a strike is doing what comes most naturally to you. And for them, having thrown literally hundreds of thousands of pitches in their life, I think that they're calibrated to a fastball. Not necessarily the hardest fastball. I think they can ease up. But I don't think a pitcher would throw more strikes, especially if it was once, you know, like a one-time thing. I mean, this is not a throw that they've made. They've never practiced this throw.

They've never practiced the 65-mile-an-hour throw home. So, no, I don't think so. I think that you would see a lot of funny throws if they tried to do that. I mean, look at guys throw intentional balls. You see guys don't really know how to do that. That's true. All right. Well, it probably doesn't make sense to not bring a bat then,

with the possible exception of JPR and Seabia. I feel like maybe he should look into this. But otherwise, probably good to bring one. All right, let's do one more from Fred in Kazakhstan, who asks, what do you think the batting slash line would be for the league against an average pitcher with average stuff, except that he has absolutely perfect control? I've always wondered how well batters could hit if pitchers never made mistakes so this is sort of control to control to any quadrant to control yeah i'm i'm guessing he means command right i mean if yeah if he has perfect control then he probably also has perfect

well no that's not true but he could well perfect control would i guess mean that he could throw a strike whenever he wants to it doesn't necessarily mean that he could throw to a pinpoint location every time. I think all of us right now has got a different idea of what average stuff is. We're all imagining different comps. One person is thinking Greg Maddox and another person is thinking Eric Stoltz. is thinking Greg Maddox and another person is thinking Eric Stoltz and we're all we so for that reason it's probably hard to give an answer that would be um that would ring true to everybody I think that a pitcher with perfect control and perfect command uh if he had anything like major league stuff would do great like phenomenally uh Cy Young uh unstoppable Yeah, I agree.

Because even if you, yeah, right, if you look at how hitters do when they swing at pitches outside the strike zone, it's very bad relative to how they do inside the strike zone. And this guy, I mean, he could do all the things that pitchers try to do, change eye levels and go inside and outside and hit the outside corner at the knees every time. And even if, I mean, I kind of wonder whether

or how well hitters would hit if they were facing a pitcher who just threw on the outside corner at the knees every time with pretty decent velocity. Yeah, without even moving. Right, so they know exactly what the location is, but it's at the location that is hardest to hit. Yeah, without even moving. I wonder what percentage of that guy's pitches, first of all, I wonder what percentage of that guy's pitches would be at the bottom left corner, you know, at that low outside corner, like right on the edge. And secondly, I wonder what percentage of pitches he would still throw outside the strike zone. Yes.

By choice. I would guess 12%—no, that's maybe low—16% outside the strike zone, and of the pitches inside the strike zone, 85% low and away. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, do you want to do the Play Index segment now? Sure. This is the Play Index segment brought to you by the Play Index. So I just wrote a piece i just submitted a piece about the mets who are hitless as a pitching staff this this season they're uh 42

at bats into the season and they have a oh oh oh batting average and i like these sorts of things when pitchers go a long time without getting a hit. And so I wanted to see what the worst hitting pitching staff ever was. So I used the Play Index tool. This is actually a... I'm misleading you with where this is going just for what it's worth. So I used the Play Index tool. I used the Team Splits Finder, which I don't think we've ever used. The Team Splits Finder, I went to Batting Splits.

I went back to like 1950 or something like that. And I chose by defensive position and filtered by pitcher only. And then I sorted by OPS. filtered by pitcher only, and then I sorted by OPS, and then I set a minimum plate appearances of like 100, so that I get rid of the AL teams in the interleague era, and then I

used ascending order, and I clicked get report, and the worst team ever was the 1965 Tigers, who had a 214 OPS, they also have the worst batting average ever, 080, 125, 090,.090. But 1965 was make-believe baseball.

There were no offense at all. So I went to the next team, which was the 2010 Dodgers, who were one point of batting average better, and they had the second worst OPS at.220. They had an.081,.132,.088 line. And had an 081, 132, 088 line. And so then I wondered who were their pitchers. So I went and I looked and there was nothing that interesting except one of their starting pitchers, a guy who sucked up 68 plate appearances for them,

was Hiroki Kuroda, who hit 036, 070, 036 that season. Two hits in 68 plate appearances, both singles and a couple of walks. And so then that got me wondering, do Japanese pitchers hit worse than American pitchers? Do Japanese-born pitchers hit worse than American pitchers? So do you, before I go on, do you want to posit any sort of hypothesis of how they would do and why or what you might expect to be a difference or not a difference, Enwa? I would guess that they're more successful bunters, probably, than just because of the emphasis on bunting and fundamentals in Japan. It seems like something where you probably wouldn't be able to get away with not being able to bunt as a pitcher. Since it seems like almost everyone is expected to be able to do that. As for actual production, I'm going to say no better. No better and no worse.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Hang on. I'm doing something real quick for the sacrifice. Okay. So in fact, they are, I would say, considerably worse. So I did a second play index search for this. Oh, no.

I just hit the wrong thing and now my tab. Good. I'm back. Wait. Am I? thing and now my tab. All right. Good. I'm back. Wait. Am I? Yes, I'm back. All right. So I did a second play index search.

For this one, I searched for all batting seasons since 1993 for anybody who played pitcher and was born in Japan. And so I got that report, and I copied it over into a Google Doc spreadsheet, which is extremely simple, and then I did a bunch of summing. And then I went back to where I was and searched for – I went back to the team split finder and searched for all pitchers since 1993, which you can do in the team split finder. You can also search by leagues. So I got all pitchers since 1993, so during the same time period, and-year period. Japanese pitchers are 21 points of batting average lower, 123 to 144, which is a pretty significant number. And the rest of their slash line is

also lower, but batting average is lower, so it probably would be. So their isolated power is about three-quarters as high, a little less than three-quarters, about 70 quarters as high a little less than three for about 70% as high so they are not nearly as strong or as powerful as American pitching hitters American hitting pitchers they're they're hit by pitch rate strangely is about 1 5th of what American born well I guess these aren't American born these are everybody else so yeah a one-fifth the rate of the rest of the league which seemed interesting there's sacrifice fly percentage oddly also about one-fifth or about one-fourth uh so

significantly lower sack fly and significantly lower hit by pitch. Their walk rate is about the same, negligibly greater. Their strikeout rate is a bit worse, a few more strikeouts but not a significant amount. They steal ever so slightly more bases, well not ever so slightly, but the numbers are so small that it's hard to say it's significant. And their bunt rates uh per plate appearance are essentially identical uh to american uh to non-japanese hitters so um there's a little bit of an issue here uh while we have 117 000 plate appearances by pitchers overall uh which is a pretty good sample uh we only have about 2 000000 by Japanese-born pitchers. A quarter of them are from Hideo Nomo. This might be skewed somewhat for that reason.

There's basically five guys who had extended careers and hit a lot. Nomo, you know, there's a total of, I guess, 38 players, yeah, about 38 players represented in total. And basically not one of them was any good. DiceK is the best. He has a 192 batting average, but no walks and no extra base hits in about 20 career plate appearances. And really, no other Japanese player in that time, not a single one, managed an OPS that was better than the pitcher's average. So that seems somewhat compelling to me that they're all below that even though the sample is a, is an issue, uh, every single one of them is below except ice K who's, uh, you know, one single away from being below.

Uh, so that's kind of interesting, I guess. Yeah, sure. I, I, would you, would you speculate about why it is? Is it just, you know, less athletic players or is it that they've they haven't faced pitching as good in Japan and so there's an adjustment there? Well, I mean

Japanese hitters generally are tougher to predict and tend to be more disappointing in Japanese pitchers than Japanese pitchers, right? Just in general? Yeah. That's a fair characterization of Japanese. I don't know. Yeah, I would guess it's a lack of physicality.

Most American-born players, American-born pitchers, are selected in part because of their size and athleticism. They tend to be big, strong guys. And the Japanese pitcher that you're thinking of right now is not a big strong guy so i would just imagine that they're just not quite as strong i mean most of the most of the effect shows up in the batted balls if you look at approach if you look at contact rates if you look at walk rates they're fairly consistent uh but when they hit the ball they just don't seem to hit it as hard. So they get fewer

hits on contact and they get fewer extra base hits per hit. And that seems to be as deep as you need to go, probably. All right. This question comes, oh, and so use the coupon code BP, which gets you a discount on the Playindex. If you subscribe for a year, you get that discounted rate of $30. So do that. There's a money-back guarantee if you don't like it, but you will like it. And it's constantly adding features. It's an excellent tool to have.

So next question comes from Kyle. What do you think is the essence or ultimate purpose of Sabermetrics? Some possibilities include to increase enjoyment in the game, to change the evaluation strategy of multiple aspects of the game, to question the norms and traditions of the game, to re-ask basic questions to learn more about what truly matters in baseball, and the acceptance of outside thinking to make improvements.

I am curious what fuels our passion for sabermetrics and why it has caught on so readily. What do you think, Ben? Well, the adoption of sabermetrics in the game, I think, is driven largely by the fact that there's a lot of money to be made. And I don't know to what extent that drives the public sphere of sabermetrics. I don't know whether a lot of people obviously have made it a career, have started out on the internet or just on their own time

doing sabermetric stuff. And now they work for baseball teams. and that's something that may not be the most financially rewarding option for them, but in terms of lifestyle and enjoyment, it's close to the top of the list. So for a lot of people who are writing about sabermetrics on the Internet, there's some financial incentive and just the lure of being able to work on something that interests you. I guess that leads to a question of why we find it interesting. But if you could divorce it somehow entirely from the career motivations and the financial motivations, then I'm sure it would not have caught on so readily

yeah I think the point of it is mainly to win to win baseball games it seems to me that baseball is a very it is in in action is in in the way that it is enacted is a very utilitarian it doesn't have to be

but is a very utilitarian sport and sabermetrics is a very utilitarian, it doesn't have to be, but it is a very utilitarian sport and sabermetrics is a particularly utilitarian expression of it. It seems to me that while it does not affect my enjoyment the way that the straw man argument accuses it of doing, it does put a focus on something other than aesthetics generally. As John Thorne once told me, sort of dismissively, not dismissively because John Thorne is of course a proto-saberetric mind and writer. But sort of conflictedly, he said, you know, the essence of baseball or the most important question of baseball is not, you know, who was a better baseball player, Dwight Evans or, you know, some other guy that you named.

And sabermetrics essentially is, that is the defining question of sabermetrics. It is completely directed toward the search for objective truth, and objective truth in this case is valuable primarily as a means of winning more baseball games and making more money. And I think that that is something that most of us feel. We feel a sort of strange profit response to being right about these things. And I think it expresses itself in fantasy baseball, expresses itself in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it just expresses itself in our feelings of smug superiority

and or unsmug superiority. You can be superior without being smug. But, yeah, I think that we all feel like we're, you know, that when we know things that are right and when we can exploit those things that we profit from it. So I think sabermetrics is essentially in a way that doesn't sound, that isn't nearly as depressing as this is going to sound, but it is essentially a business consultant's way of doing baseball.

business consultant's way of doing baseball. But you and I don't stand to benefit in most of those ways, right? I mean, if we find some, maybe from the smugness, maybe we both enjoy that. But in terms of being better at winning games, neither of us works for a team. Neither of us is going to work for a team so it's uh we don't really have any incentive to to have teams win better do we i mean no it's why do we care if they're if they're more efficient i guess we we have carved out careers writing about this stuff we have a a podcast that has made us rich and famous beyond our wildest dreams. But other than that, I mean, is it just, it just appeals to us on some

other level. Right. The profit is not that direct and it's not that literal. I mean, I think that this is something that it's, it's a, it's some synapse in your brain that responds to this that um i mean i i kind of wrote about this a couple maybe six months ago or so um about uh i don't remember what it was about but i wrote about how um baseball when i was six um was the way that like like there was even then when i got into it there was sort of a profit element to it because um I was six, I knew a lot about baseball. I knew all the players. I knew all their stats and I memorized their stats because it was a really cool parlor trick that I could bust out when I was at my dad's work or hanging out with my parents' friends. It made me feel like a grown-up and it got me respect and it got me kind of in the door with the grown-ups.

You almost just made yourself the subject of take me out to the ball game i don't know what that is you you knew the players and knew all their names what is take me out to the ball game it's a song it's a popular song oh that that bit of americana that's right. Anyway, so I think that there is a feeling, there is a reward to feeling like you've seen behind the curtain or that you're able to speak better. I mean, there are echoes of this throughout my life. There are echoes of this throughout my life. I remember being in high school and feeling like it was very important that I know more about sports because it felt like knowing about sports was sort of a social currency, like being able to win. In high school, so many conversations about sports are like talk radio arguments. These guys are like sort of – you're all yelling at each other

and you're all throwing facts. And if you win, you feel like you've won something. Like when Skip Bayless was talking about how he wins, how he does all his six hours of prep so he can win his around the horn or whatever. That's what it felt like in high school. And I think that there's – I don't know exactly what it is, but I think there's some part of your brain that values this knowledge. That's why it's rewarding to us.

I don't know what else it would be. I'm such a cynical person. I feel like such a broken and fallen person that I can't imagine a non-selfish reason that we do anything. So it's more like trying to find the profit to fit my existing worldview than maybe anything else. Yeah. All right. Homestretch Aaron asks, if Donald Sterling owned a baseball team, how do you think MLB or Bud Selig would have handled this situation? Sterling, of course, is the owner of the Clippers who was just banned for life by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver

after a recording surfaced of him saying extremely racist things in a conversation with his girlfriend or mistress or whoever it was, and he had a history of saying these things. So the question is, if there were a baseball equivalent to Donald Sterling, what would Major League Baseball, what would Bud Selig do? And there is, or there was, more or less a baseball equivalent. Jay Jaffe made that connection and wrote about that connection today at Sports Illustrated. Marge Schott, the Reds owner, said some very David Sterling-esque things, arguably worse. I don't know.

It's hard to compare things that are really terrible. They're all terrible. But Marge Schott had a long history of saying things, racist remarks, praising Hitler, how Hitler started out well is more or less what was her point. And so baseball responded to her by a less dramatic means than Adam Silver took, just sort of slowly forced her out. So they, Bud Selig, suspended her in 1993 for the 1993 season and also fined her and ordered her to attend sensitivity training, which evidently did not take. And she sort of tried to make up for it a bit by hiring some minority members of the front office and donating a lot of money to minority causes and apologizing for her insensitivity. But she did not change her ways.

In 1996, she came out with some more pro-Hitler comments and other comments. And she was then suspended by C-League again for two and a half years. So through the 1998 season. And then they sort of forced her out by threatening to extend her suspension and using that as leverage to get her to sell her controlling share of the team,

which happened in 1999. And then she was more or less out of baseball at that point. So if someone else came along with that, you know, that kind of behavior today, I would guess that baseball, that Bud Selig would act even more swiftly than it did, than they did at the time. even more swiftly than it did, than they did at the time. And certainly now that the precedent has been set, I suppose, by Adam Silver, I mean, baseball would look bad if it didn't do something similarly dramatic, right?

So if some owner came out and said the same things that Donald Sterling said tomorrow, I would guess that Bud Selig would say something very similar. Actually, you probably heard this week's Hang Up and Listen, right, where they were talking about this issue, and Mike Peska was talking about some things that Jim Crane has done, the owner of the Astros, and how maybe there's some hypocrisy in not criticizing those things

just because they have not surfaced on a recording like Sterling's did. So that would, that would be my guess that, that baseball would take a similar course of action. I will say this about Marge Schott. Everything you read, when she came in, she was good. You know, she built tremendous bullpens and got all the team to the world series. Everyone knows she was good at the beginning, but she just went too far. Yes. Good point. Good point. All right. There was one more. This is from Danny. He says, considering the national narrative surrounding the Marlins prior to the start of last season, has any player provided more value on the field and in the national conversation than Jose Fernandez has over these past 13 months.

I know this is impossible to quantify with just baseball numbers. However, attempts at value assessments often cite how the financial impact of each win above 81 can carry a dramatically higher return than those in the middle. Do you think it is the same as possible for an electric and dominating player on a team that wins 70-ish games? This is essentially the same question we could have asked about young Felix Hernandez. Although to me, the 2012-13 Marlins offseason narrative seemed like a special kind of rock bottom. So he's basically asking whether there's more value in a truly terrible team

and maybe a team with a terrible reputation as well as on-field results, whether it's as valuable to that team to have a great charismatic player who can kind of distract everyone from that story as it would be for a team that is actually competitive to have a player who can push them into the playoffs. I did a piece last September on casting unconventional MVPp votes do you remember that piece nope uh so it was like if you oh yes yes yeah if you wanted to pick somebody other than

cabrera and trout and you wanted to be like the the sort of attention getting uh voter who creates a brand new uh brand new uh reason to vote for somebody you could vote for these people and you know i think they were all they were all great players who had great seasons. And one of them was Fernandez. And I wrote at one point, more importantly, you might even argue, that is to say, you might even argue this because you are an MVP voter with creativity and ambition, that without Fernandez, Miami would have given up on baseball forever this year. And that Fernandez gave the city exactly one reason to continue its relationship with the marlins he might have saved baseball in miami he might not have but he might have come on writer do this you can totally do this um and uh yeah i think that um uh this is

one of those situations where uh like you could say that certain, like, if you start with the presumption that Trout has been better than Fernandez, like objectively speaking, he's been a better player on the field, uh, than Fernandez, you could very easily make the case that if Trout were there, that he would have been the most value. Like if you're, if you're saying that Fernandez is the most valuable simply because of these sort of weird circumstances that thrust him into into this mess iconic role for a team that um you know was otherwise wandering loss uh it's not like he's the only guy who would have been you know good enough to be exciting and then you're giving the award to cabrera because his teammates were better than mike trout's teammates yeah yeah, exactly. So you don't want to give the award to the narrative that creates,

or I guess to the environment. You want to give the award to the player. And so while Fernandez, I think that this is a reasonable argument this person makes. It's probably understated how important Fernandez has been to Florida baseball. And I'll just end it there, because sure. Okay. All right, so that's it for this week.

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