Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 44: Sizing Up the Giants’ Starters/Rooting for Run Differential

Episode Date: September 18, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the Giants’ starting rotation and decide what it would take to trust Barry Zito, then talk about how they decide which teams to root for.

Little Hans says it's time to rock and roll. Bring the noise! Good morning, and welcome to episode 44 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus daily podcast. In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg, and in Long Beach, California, where the crickets are in fine voice tonight, is Sam Miller. Sam, how are you? Hello, good, great. Excellent. I'm feeling better just hearing your response to that question. What do you have to talk about?

The San Francisco Giants starting rotation. Okay. And I have kind of a nebulous two-part topic about rooting for teams that maybe shouldn't be winning and also uh how getting to know people on a team can influence how you feel about that team should we uh address bill johnson's uh complaint about last night's show uh sure why not so bill johnson listener bill johnson uh wrote in to say um of last night's show, I am by no means a Reds fan, but the first half of this thing was pretty lame. Second best record in baseball, 11 game lead in their division players over-performing everywhere on their roster, huge mismatch between Pythagorean record and the real thing. And you spend half your time

talking about what a flake Bronson Arroyo is. Um, and so I, um, uh, don't disagree. It was pretty lame. It was a lame segment. And when I walked away from the Honda Fit, I thought, well, that was lame. But it's interesting because... In fact, we said as much to each other when we started. We did, yes, we did. But I wasn't going to mention that because then people might have expected us to do something about it. But anyway, what's actually interesting to me about Bill's comment, which again I'm agreeing with, is that players really aren't overperforming everywhere on their roster.

I mean, as far as I can tell, Ludwig is overperforming, but not even really. I mean, he has a 130 OPS+. He had a 120 OPS plus in the four years from 2007 to 2010, and Petco killed him. But he's not way outside of his norms, and Frazier I kind of thought was a breakout candidate. Yeah, he was the guy that everyone sort of said, when he gets his chance, he will hit. Yeah, exactly.

And you really can't find a number on here that looks either out of place or unsustainable. You know, they're basically a pretty good team. I mean, they are a good team, and they're playing well. So I wouldn't say there's a real huge surprise in there. And as for their Pythagorean record, I mean, it's five games. It's not Orioles-ian. And to suggest it is would be to sort of diminish how good they've been.

They've been a good team that has basically earned their record. And I don't see them as a fluke by any means. And I think that was sort of what we were saying yesterday. It's hard to say much about this team other than they're a well-constructed roster that's having a good year and uh they should be a threat to go reasonably far anyway uh somebody else wrote in by the way to tell me that um the ernest hemingway line on bronson arroyo's baseball reference page is in reference to his leg during his windup. And I believe that is correct. And now I love it.

So anyway, Giants starting rotation to, I guess, a couple of places I want to go all very brief. One is Tim Linscombe has a 5.09 ERA. Barry Zito has a 4.21 ERA and I just wonder how long that would have to last in exactly that with exactly those numbers

before you would start Zito over Linscombe in a playoff I'm not sure there is enough time in the universe I'm not sure there is enough time in the universe I'm not sure that there is enough time before the sun implodes and takes us all with it for that to happen

I honestly think it might take me four years or more by which time Barry Zito will be very old or a player at all do you think there's any chance that The exact thing. Yes, by which time Barry Zito will be very old. No longer be a Giant. Or a player at all.

Do you think there's any chance that the Giants are considering that? Well, I mean, what, if they're in a seven-game series and they don't trust Vogelsang right now? Yeah, that's the other thing they have. You could ask the same question about Zito versus Vogelsang. Yeah, that I think is more realistic if he has a few more bad starts before the end of the season. Just because, I mean, he doesn't have anything like the track record of Tim Lincecum,

even though he has been, I guess, just about as good last year and the beginning of this year, but was always kind of a how-is-this-happening guy, where you were sort of waiting for something to go wrong. So, yeah, he wouldn't, I think, have nearly as long a leash. But certainly Barry Zito starting a playoff game is not something I would have predicted beginning of the season because he didn't even make the roster the last time the Giants were in the playoffs, right?

Right. It's interesting because the Giants just years ago were the provoked dangerous in a short series team because of their pitching staff. They have three of the same four guys and Vogelsang has filled in nicely for Sanchez over the last two years. And yet, this is a team where right now it looks like their rotation is a weakness. And that's more what I was going to be getting at. I don't know if you believe this. This is another question. Right now the Giants rank fifth in baseball in OPS+. They rank second in the National League in OPS+.

And they're 24th in ERA+. And I think that there's a great deal of park factor that is obviously factoring into that, because they're only seventh in the major leagues in ERA, as opposed to 24th in ERA+, and 18th in OPS, as opposed to 5th in OPS+. And so I don't know that I really believe that, but anyway, the point is that to some degree the Giants have actually become an offensive team as much as they are a pitching team. And Vogelsang has the ERA over 10 in his last seven starts.

But if you really want to cherry pick, you could make a case that all of their starters are right now in a little bit of a slump. And, I mean, you do have to cherry pick, but Matt Cain's last four starts haven't been good. He has 18 strikeouts and 12 walks in those starts. Madison Baumgartner in his last five has 21 strikeouts and 15 walks after having a five-to-one ratio for the year before that, and he has an ERA of about seven-ish in that time, and Timmy continues to be Timmy. He's got an ERA over four over the last month or so, and that's his good month. That's probably his best month.

So, I mean, I think, we generally, you and I probably are in agreement that a team that, um, backs into the post season is no less dangerous than maybe a team that, uh, is hot in September to get into the post season. Um, but do you feel any differently when it's the entire starting rotation or when it, when it is sort of concentrated in the rotation because it does seem to me that pitching, it's easier to believe that pitcher momentum is real because pitching is so much about feel, it's so much about health, and those are the two things that you immediately wonder about when Madison Bumgarner goes from five strikeouts per walk to 1.2 strikeouts per walk. Yeah, I mean, I think around this time of year, everyone brings up the article Jay Jaffe wrote a few years ago for BP

where he looked at September records and how they predicted how a team would do in the playoffs and there really wasn't much of a relationship. And I think that's probably true on the whole. But I would say that there's a difference between a good team that's going through a bit of a rough patch and a team that is not playing as well as it did for the rest of the season, because it's shorthanded. Maybe some guys are injured or some guys are not pitching well for a reason that is not just fleeting.

So I think if a team has a bunch of guys hurt or a bunch of guys really not playing well in a more than usual slump way, it could certainly be indicative of something. I think some teams obviously play well in September and keep playing well. Others play terribly and then suddenly play well again. But I think if a team either is missing some guys or has some guys who've looked shaky all year, you would have to maybe downgrade them,

despite that effect or lack of effect that we see for all teams. And I guess the Giants are not really the only team in that situation right now that could make the playoffs. The Dodgers right now, if they were to make the playoffs, are sort of without a number one starter of any sort. I guess Josh Beckett is their number one guy right now, with Billingsley out and Kershaw out and Lilley still out. The Yankees, CeCe Spathia has not looked like himself lately, so they are kind of without the ace type. The Orioles have never really had one,

or they had Hamill, I guess, and he's been hurt. So I guess there are a bunch of teams going into the playoffs or still contending for a playoff spot that do not have that strong short series rotation that everyone wants to see. Good point. Yeah. So I guess I will talk a little bit about something peripherally related to the Orioles. On Sunday night, I was on the BPXM show filling in for Kevin Goldstein, who, by the way, has not shown up to work for like two weeks now. No, he is normally very reliable, and I don't know what's happening. And Mike Farron and I were talking a little bit about teams that were not expected to do well or whose underlying stats don't suggest they should be doing so well

and whether you can root for them as a rational fan who believes in things like run differential, predicting team record, and good process being important and more important than results? Is it almost a betrayal of your principles to root for one of these sort of fluky teams or one season wonders that are kind of defying everyone's expectations and defying really what we'd expect even given their performance and and uh today if you're listening to this on tuesday uh our guest piece at bp is by the diamondbacks beat road beat writer nick ex-beat writer Nick Picoro, and he wrote about that same subject. And he is kind of wrestling with, you know, kind of rooting for the teams that go about it the right way or have performed in a way that would justify their records or even underperform their records versus the teams like the Orioles. And he wrote about it from sort of a more personal

perspective in that he's a beat writer. He gets to know players. He gets to know front office people. And he kind of feels bad for the people on a team that he thinks is well run or well built, like say the Rays, for instance instance who might miss out on the playoffs while say the Orioles might make it I don't know do you have any qualms about rooting for a team like the Orioles because of the way they've gotten there are you just kind of impartial anyway and aren't really pulling for one thing or another. And based on your interactions with players and executives over the years, have you felt that that has kind of colored your either analysis or your rooting interest or opinions about a team in some way?

That was a group of questions, some of which I won't get to. But I actually almost proposed this as a topic last week because I also find it interesting to root for or not root for the Orioles this year. Generally, my rooting interest tends to be one of two things. Either I like the predictions that I've made to come true, or I like to see the smartest team win, the team that I perceive as the smartest team to win, which is basically the same thing. It is basically saying, I hope that I am right. I like my view of the world to hold up. And I don't know if Nick quoted this, but about a year ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote similarly or spoke similarly, I should say, on the radio show, Radiolab, about this topic. And he said, I'm distressed by the injustice of the person who should win not winning. It is the only humane

position. I have a deep distrust and unhappiness with luck. And yet I don't feel that way about the Orioles this year. And I think that the reason that I don't feel that way about the Orioles this year. And I think that the reason that I don't feel that way about the Orioles is that there is a core part of me that loves the sport of baseball and wants it to thrive and to be a successful enterprise. And I don't think I'm alone in this. It seems like the baseball writers of the world spend an inordinate amount of time obsessed with things like ratings and attendance and parity and all these sorts of things that are meaningless to us and meaningless to the sport itself or the competition itself

and yet significant to the health of the sport itself or the competition itself and yet significant to the health of the sport. And so when it comes to a team like the Orioles or the Royals or the Pirates, teams that don't just lose for four or five or six or seven years but lose for an entire generation, that really feels like a stain on the sport. And I don't know that I totally feel that way because it's competition and it's a market and you have to have losers to have winners. But it feels like wrong that a team could lose so consistently for 15 or 20 years. And so I think that in those instances, it is always my wish that the status quo will be added and the team will win. I don't feel this way when I watch other sports. I don't think I don't root for the underdog in football because I don't care about football. And so that probably maternal instinct doesn't kick in for me, but with baseball it does. I think it's an instinct to almost justify our career choice or protect our career choice in that we want baseball to succeed so that we will have jobs and feel good about them.

Are you rooting for the Orioles? I think I am. Are you rooting for the A's? Less so. And it probably is because they have not had the long run of failure that the Orioles are, 26-7 in one-run games and miraculously winning, you would not feel the same way about their season. Oh, that's absolutely correct. Yeah, I think I am pro-Orioles.

I guess it's because there is an element of unpredictability to baseball in every season. One of the things I like best about baseball is how long the season is and how it does tend to weed out the teams that aren't actually that good. And yet there are always extremely unpredictable things that no one sees coming. And I like that. I am given to understand that in other sports, it is not as common for, you know, unexpected teams to do well. I don't know whether that statement is accurate because I don't know much about other sports. But yes,

I enjoy the Orioles winning somehow, and I hope it continues. Well, another somewhat related to this, and I'll try to make it quick, but I've also thought about making this a topic, but I don't know that either of us could talk for 10 minutes about it, is the idea that the Orioles are lucky, right? We believe the Orioles are lucky because they have not hit that well, They have not pitched that well, yet they have won a lot of games. And the A's, though, are also incredibly lucky. They had a team that I don't believe they thought had any shot of competing this year, and they're winning. And yet we don't really look at that as luck because it is a real product. It is a real performance.

There's true performance. They actually earned it. And yet, from a front office perspective, it is perhaps no less lucky. And that's sort of a weird pairing of different types of luck in baseball. And I don't know whether it's something that we should spend time thinking about or not. I don't begrudge the A's their success. The players absolutely earned it. I don't know, though, if the front office earned it so much. And I mean, that sounds like a diminishing statement,

and I guess it is, but I don't know. It's weird how luck manifests itself in different ways and how we um how we are uncomfortable with some of it and and other luck we're not uncomfortable with uh there is a quote in nick's piece uh from an anonymous front office executive of a recent surprise team who says i was watching our team, and it made me question everything. Do I even know anything about baseball? And then another scout who said, we feel like we need to understand this game and feel like we get it. And then the amazing thing about it is it confirms what we believe at times,

and then at times it surprises us. If it never surprised us, it would be boring. I cannot wait to read this piece. But then that same scout goes on to say, I don't want the Orioles to do well I don't want this nonsense to continue I really can't wait to read this piece So you should all go read Nick Picoro's piece

Which is on BP now And we are done here We will be back Hang on, you're going to post this in like No, you're going to post this in like 20 minutes Yeah, if you are an early adopter of episode 44, then it may not be up. So if you are a normal person on normal hours, unlike me, for instance, it will be up when you're listening to this.

If you listen the second it hits the internet, then you will have to wait a few hours. Goodbye, Ben. Goodbye.