Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 443: Looking at Lineup Protection

Episode Date: May 6, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about hustle and drug suspensions, then talk about how Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout, and Giancarlo Stanton have been pitched this season.

She's a must to avoid A confusing possibility She's a must to avoid Better take it from me Good morning and welcome to episode 443 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you? Excited to see what you've brought for us to discuss today.

I have a couple of quick things at the top if we can. Sure. Sure. Let's see. Did you see that we have a new entry in the hustle test or whatever? Remind me. With Troy Tulewitzki? No.

So Troy Tulewitzki and Grant Frisbee identified this for us. Troy Tulewitzki decided that he wasn't going to get in a rundown. He got caught in between first and second and just decided to stand there and let the guy tag him. It was pretty egregious if you're into identifying lack of hustle uh he just he just stood there like uh tauntingly almost uh refusing to move uh defiant yeah defiant yeah he conceded gave up you might say he quit you might say he quit on the game quit on all of us i'm sure someone will and uh so this seemed getting into a rundown doesn't particularly seem like hustle to me. It seemed like this is probably something that we can expect baseball players to do, to try to avoid being tagged.

It was like the second inning, I think, in like a three-run game or five-run game or something like that, but very early in the game. So I would say that in the hustle test, I would put this very early. This would be one of the easy questions. Yeah. Really, almost like in a polygraph test, this would be the equivalent of where were you born? This is just the calibration question, the baseline.

What country are you in kind of thing, yeah. That's what got Bryce Harper in trouble when he was benched isn't so much that he just jogged to first because a lot of people jog to first. What got him in trouble was that he peeled off before he even approached first base. He just turned back to the dugout instead of going through the formality of touching the bag, even if he's out

by many feet. So that, yeah, that seems to be the most egregious when you don't complete the motion, the movement, whatever it is. Even if it's futile, if you did, you have to go through the motions. movement whatever it is even if it's futile if you did you have to go through the motions yeah one of the things that i love to watch for in baseball is is actually the uh the guy who touches first uh who runs out the play but does it so slowly and and you're wondering like when where the sense of obligation kicks in that makes him uh finish route to first, even though it's like a 13 or 14 second time to first. I enjoy that. I enjoy like wondering what the sort of priorities are that require a guy to touch first, but to do it in 13 seconds. Wanting not to get benched, I guess.

Yeah, in such an exaggeratedly slow way. I saw a great one of those the other day. get benched, I guess. Yeah, in such an exaggeratedly slow way. I saw a great one of those the other day. But, so, okay, so, but Tulo, I guess, Tulo doesn't have any sort of, this does not contribute to an

existent narrative of Tulo as being a non-hustler, so he's probably safe, I would say for now. Yeah, plus he's in the midst of insane hot streak, so I don't know whether that gets you any hustle leeway, any hustle grace period when you're hitting like 600 over a period of, I don't know, like over 100 plate appearances or whatever the number is.

Yeah, I think it does. Yeah, I think so. And especially because Tulo's a little bit fragile. At this point I could see Walt Wise telling him, if it's not a home run, I just want you to stop. Yeah, just the less he has to move, the better. All right, second thing, did you see another Rays minor league pitcher? Yes, I did.

Was it Steve Geltz? Geltz, yeah. Yeah, so suspended for a drug of abuse, or was it a drug of abuse? RJ sent me the link. Let me see what it was. I don't remember whether it was performance enhancing or not. And I don't think that we've ever spoken about this on the podcast, but you have written about the, well, yeah, we have.

We had an entire topic about the Rays and whether this was part of their strategy to sign bad guys. But you wrote a piece recently about whether the Rays have a drug problem based on their drug suspensions, which were, what, the most frequent in the game? Yeah. Would you say the most by a considerable margin or was the point of it that it was pretty close uh it was a second positive test for a drug of abuse by the way for jelts um it was it was close for performance enhancing but it was a pretty pretty big gap if you count drugs of abuse so drugs of abuse being marijuana for minor leaguers mostly.

If you counted those for the raise, then they had a pretty significant lead on the organization with the next most suspensions. And if you just limited it to performance enhancing, which is mostly amphetamines but some steroids, then they were only slightly ahead but they were ahead both ways someone on the facebook group asked if we could look into this or asked whether whether it was significant and it was something that i had noticed too just sort of anecdotally

looking at news come across about so and so as minor leaguers were suspended it seemed like there were a bunch of rays and and there have been uh i can't i can't imagine how you would know that it's pronounced chelts instead of geltz i don't know pick these things up uh do you know what if his first suspension was while he was with the rays or or while he was with the uh with the angels i do not know that i don't either um all right and then the last thing uh quickly uh starling marty uh stole a base last night he was dead to rights dove head first but did the clever hand maneuver uh dodged the tag and uh and it was safe so that was was a clear win for the headfirst side. Mm-hmm. So, well, about the race thing, do you, I concluded that the performance enhancing stuff probably doesn't mean anything. It's not like they're encouraging their players to take them

or something, or that they're much more lax than another organization, I wouldn't think. But do you buy the interpretation that they have had more drug of abuse suspensions because guys who might tend to take those drugs of abuse might get bad makeup raps in the baseball community and the Rays are less concerned about that sort of thing than other teams or that they look at it as, you know, players with warts will go acquire the guys who might get busted on a marijuana suspension now and then because they'll come cheaper. We can acquire them with, you know, without giving up as much. Do you buy anything to that or do you think it's purely chance? No, I've always thought that it was a plausible explanation for the race. I mean, there's not evidence.

I need to see a memo. But yeah, it always seemed very plausible. And ever since the hypothesis sort of first came up, there's been plenty of evidence since to support it. It doesn't seem like this is just confirmation bias where we're picking them out i mean it it really does seem like you know half of the player uh behavioral problems in the game tend to happen to raise and they are not half the teams i don't know that i would go so far as to say that it's makeup though i don't know if you meant it that way or if you're just using a quick word but i think that uh that warts is slightly different than bad makeup yeah um i mean it's maybe it's bad makeup in the in the sense that you can get

suspended for a long time for doing these things and that's not good true true even if even if it's silly that you can get suspended for that under the current rules you can oh going this way huh we're going is this going to be your topic one of these days oh am i gonna go on a go on a rant about minor league marijuana suspensions yeah yeah maybe all right uh that'll be fun um all right so i wanted to talk about a few instances this year of lineup protection or lack of lineup protection. Generally, I think that we're in agreement that lineup protection is, you know, the idea of it makes sense in the abstract, and yet there's really no evidence that it shows up in any way, significant or even insignificant, and that basically pitchers pitch to guys the same regardless of who's batting behind them, other than maybe

if the pitcher is batting behind them. I know this is interesting, but generally lineup protection is used by writers to create narratives that don't exist. Is that a fair description of what you think about line of protection? Yeah, I think it's not the case that it makes no difference who's sitting behind you, but I think the studies have found that it makes no difference to your production, right? That maybe you might see fewer strikes or something, but it all evens out in the end because you might hit the ball less often,

but you'll walk more often. It doesn't make you less productive, I think, is what the research suggests. All right, so I wanted to just point out three examples this year of kind of counterintuitive lineup protection situations. First up, Miguel Cabrera. Miguel Cabrera was so good the last two years and there would always be a couple of articles written about Prince Fielder and how Prince Fielder was really an underrated aspect of his success.

And you heard about how he was batting behind Ryan Braun when Ryan Braun was the MVP. And then he goes to Detroit and Miguel Cabrera becomes the MVP. And Prince Fielder was seen by some columnists as part of Cabrera's success. And so this year, Miguel Cabrera has the highest zone rate of his career. Pitchers are throwing him more strikes, more pitches in the strike zone than they have at any point in his career during the PitchFX era. It's actually been going up over the last couple of weeks. It was already the highest a couple of weeks ago when somebody first noted this, and it's gone up since then. And so clearly

the lack of Prince Fielder has not made pitchers walk Miguel Cabrera more or even pitch around him more. They're throwing him more strikes than ever. And... Who is hitting behind Miguel Cabrera mostly? Victor Martinez. This is interesting to me. I'm using the line of protection hook to bring this up, but to me it's more interesting to ask whether pitchers are pitching to him more because they've identified that he is worse this year than he was last year. If that's the case, how quickly do you think that teams are able to spot this?

You and I aren't drawing conclusions about Miguel Cabrera's true talent level or short or long-term future based on a month of plate appearances. Do you think that teams are able to identify it much more quickly, and do you think that they act on that? Or is this a fluke, and do you think that basically teams would pitch Miguel Cabrera the same now as they did five years ago, one year ago, and two years from now. Well, I think it's likely that that is the reason that they're pitching to him more this year, that they think he's diminished in some way. And I would think that they would pick up on it pretty quickly if it's if it's a physical thing like if it's I don't know if if it's just someone whose timing is off or something I don't know whether that's even really something that you want to act on because that could change very quickly as we've seen with

hot streaks and cold streaks it doesn't seem like people who are on them at any one time are really more likely to continue to be on them than anyone else is. But if you're hurt or if you're clearly suffering in some way, and I know that people have talked about Cabrera and how he's swinging differently or he's keeping both hands on the bat when he falls through instead of sort of letting it go freely like he used to. he's keeping both hands on the bat when he falls through instead of sort of letting it go freely like he used to. That, I mean, if there is a problem, then teams should pick up on it right away. Right.

Because they are advanced scouting every series. And even if, even if a lot of teams are doing that via video now and not sending people, if someone is assigned to watch, you know, most of the pitches or most of the plate appearances of the team that you're about to face, and there's a guy who is hurt or is not performing up to his usual level for some reason, then if that person is any good, then they should pick it up, right?

Someone is assigned to do that. Yeah, I would think that there would be two tiers of this adjustment. One would be the advanced scouts. And yes, I would think that would be fairly quick, although not immediate, you know, faster than you could probably identify it statistically, but not immediate, not one series or one week or maybe even this quickly, but maybe. But then you'd also have the kind of in-game slash in-series adjustment where simply the first pitch of the game, the pitcher throws a pitch, and he and the catcher, even without really necessarily realizing it,

even without necessarily consciously realizing it, even without necessarily consciously realizing it, they see how Cabrera handles that pitch and it affects the way that they approach him with the next pitch. And if you beat him with a fastball in the first at bat, then it gives you a different sense of what you can do against him in the second and bat and I would think that that would be immediate and you know you always hear catchers and pitchers say that sort of thing like he looks slow on that so I called for another one that kind of thing yeah exactly and I think that some of it is conscious and some of it is probably unconscious I mean there's there's a little bit of intuition I would would think, when pitchers and catchers are working against a hitter that they don't even really realize they're doing. It just becomes sort of unconscious the way that you adjust to the hitter.

But yeah, they're watching his feet and they're watching how he's... It's almost like the difference between being on a fastball and being off a fastball from a hitter's perspective is almost like it requires a certain blink element where an experienced pitcher and experienced catcher can just see it even if you can't necessarily identify it. I don't quite know how to explain this, but it just looks a little different. It's like the uncanny valley where it looks 99.8% the same, but that 0.2%, there's just something that looks different to the trained eye and they can just sort of spot it. So yeah, I could see that being a very quick adjustment. How much then, I mean if you were looking at Cabrera's stats right now, how much would you weight this? How much would you weight the change in the way the league has pitched him? And I guess the question is that in any case, if you're a fantasy player and you're trying to decide how much stock to put into a guy's early season numbers, should you even bother or should you just go look at how the teams are approaching him

and assume that they know more than you're going to? And is it conceivable that that's actually the best information that we have as analysts? Yeah, I think one of our recent authors, our new authors at BP, Rob Arthur, has been doing a couple articles lately on how teams pitch to hitters and what kind of hitters tend to see a lot of fastballs or tend to see a lot of pitches in the zone. the pitches to poo holes have been and how that has sort of tracked with his performance and maybe even anticipated his performance a little bit in that uh teams seem to be less afraid of throwing him pitches in the strike zone or or were more willing to expand the zone because he seemed to become less disciplined as a hitter so yeah i think I think that's probably something that we could use more than we do. I mean, you have to be a little careful about the sample size, but that is a thing that

stabilizes pretty quickly because it's not really... More quickly. More quickly than anything that we're likely to look at from the player's perspective. Yeah, because it's not dependent on multiple parties or anything. It's just where the pitcher wanted to throw the pitch. And obviously you need a little bit of a sample so that you're not getting, you know, one starter who has terrible control or something or one guy who's Cliff Lee. So you need a little bit of time, but it is something that you can look at pretty quickly.

And yeah, if a team has a scouting report that says that this guy is not the same hitter as he was, then probably the quickest way that you could realize that is by how they pitch him. So yes, maybe it's something that we should look at more often. Yes, and thank you for bringing up that piece by Robert Arthur, the pools piece, because that's actually what inspired this topic. And it was a very very interesting piece and a very good one and so speaking of Albert Pujols this year Albert Pujols is batting

behind Mike Trout and he's very good and last year he was batting behind Mike Trout and he was not very good and then he wasn't there at all and Mike Trout was batting in front of I guess Josh Hamilton who was not very good, and then he wasn't there at all. And Mike Trout was batting in front of, I guess, Josh Hamilton, who was not very good, or maybe Mark Trumbo. But the point is that this year Mike Trout has lineup protection.

Last year he had no lineup protection or very little lineup protection. And he is seeing the lowest zone rate of his career, which is to say that the opposite has happened. Pitchers are pitching around him more, or at least they're pitching, they're throwing fewer strikes to him than they have before, even though he has line of protection. So you looked a little bit at Mike Trout's performance this year, his whiff rate, his sort of general strikeoutiness. And so I guess that it's conceivable, it's probably not just conceivable, it's probably the best theory that this thing that I've just cited about his zone rate probably has nothing to do with line of protection or lack of it or addition of it at all,

but is simply that Mike Trout is, pitchers are pitching to him differently. They're trying to get him to chase more, and he is chasing more. So what did you, when you talked to Mike Trout last week and when you looked at Mike Trout's numbers last week what did you conclude about his outlook for the season or his changing style I guess of hitting um well I couldn't tell whether it was one that was why I wanted to talk to him because sometimes you will look at these early season changes in strike and strikeout rate or in chase rate or swing rate or something, and you'll see a big difference from the previous year, and you'll want to know whether that's something real. And last year, I did that with Brett Gardner, who had been ultra selective and was suddenly swinging a lot

more, and he said it was a real thing, and his hitting coach said it was a real thing, so we knew it was a real thing. Trout has struck out more. He is at 27.5% strikeout rate right now, and career, he is at 21.1%, even including the spike this year. So that's considerably higher, and his contact rate is considerably lower. It's actually come up since I was looking at it. And so I asked him, because his contact rate was low, it was one of the biggest declines from last season of any hitter. And I asked him whether he was trying to maybe hit for more power because he had at that point. And so was selling out for power a little more and was trying to pull the ball and was okay with more whiffs and and he gave me sort of the standard mike trout cliche response about just trying to barrel balls and you know hit balls hard and guys

making good pitches and gotta tip your cap and if there was a real real change in approach he was not letting on and looking at his plate discipline stats on his BP player card right now, I don't see enough there to conclude that there is any real difference. His contact rate, it's come up. It was at like 73% when I looked at it. It's at like 78% now, and his career rate is 81, 82. So that's not big. And his O-swing rate, his chase rate is identical to what it was in 2012 and just a bit above what it was last year. So I don't think it's that big a difference. It looks to me like from 2012 to 2013, his zone rate went down quite a bit.

And whether that was because of the lineup protection or because people recognized that he was amazing all of a sudden, I don't know why, but that was a big decline. This year, it's actually a pretty small decline. Last year, he saw 48% of his pitches in the strike zone. This year it's about 46%. And he's barely actually chasing anymore. So it doesn't look to me like it's a big thing. I think when you factor in the fact that the whole league is striking out more and take that away from his increase, I think it's probably nothing really. Good.

All right. it's probably probably nothing really good uh all right well when mike trout uh is bad like right like when mike trout actually does collapse and become horrible i want you to tell me first okay i'd like you to be ahead of ahead of the game and i want you to tell me about three weeks before it happens yeah all right all right well we should we should look at his his own rate to monitor how teams are pitching him so we'll know all right so right, so third one, Giancarlo Stanton. Last year, you and I both wrote about what it would—I guess we wrote about what it will be like now that teams have no obligation to pitch to him or incentive to pitch to him at all. You wrote about whether the league would pitch to him.

I wrote about whether he would adjust to that or why he hadn't adjusted to that, I guess, a couple weeks into the season. But really, it didn't get out of hand. I don't think he had the lowest zone rate in baseball. I think he intentionally walked five times all year. They more or less did treat him like a normal hitter, a hitter who's dangerous and who would chase, but they did not turn the game into a farce as opponents had done to Bonds. So this year, it's a little, there's different circumstances, because now with Casey McGeehy, quote-unquote, protecting him, which, by the way, on opening night of the baseball season, Eduardo Perez did talk about how the Marlins had gotten

McGee, and so he would protect Stanton. He actually said, the Marlins went out and got McGee, so somebody who's capable of protecting Stanton is what he said. So that was great. But anyway, so there's no real difference, I would say, in the protection behind him. However, this year, Stanton's amazing. Last year, he was, you know, he's a pretty good hitter, but not, it was a down season. This year, he's been, you know, one of the most dangerous, terrifying hitters in the game. His strike, his zone rate has not changed. It's 41%, again, this year, which is one of the lowest in the game, but it hasn't changed from last year. And we got a question not that long ago asking why anybody would pitch to Stanton, essentially asking why he doesn't get the Bonds treatment.

Do you consider this a... The Bonds treatment is really only applied, it seems, once in history. Yes. And it's conceivable that, in fact, the Bonds treatment has been used enough. It's also conceivable, I would say, that the Bonds treatment has been used one time too many. That, in fact, teams were essentially acting against their self-interest and that they made Bonds considerably more valuable than he would have otherwise been simply because they were afraid.

I don't know what the answer to that is, but do you think that Stanton is making a push in this particular set of circumstances where the Marlins cleanup hitters have been so hysterically outdated? Is Stanton making a push for legitimate bond treatment? I don't know. It's a pretty complicated question you could probably try to figure out what the the optimal rate of pitching to stanton is but it's not something i could do off the top of my head he is he is leading the league in intentional walks with eight which is uh more than he had all of last season same Roughly the same walk rate overall as last year,

which is interesting. Yeah. But yeah, the intentional walks last year were so low that it was shocking. I mean, even if he had had a good hitter behind him, you wouldn't have been surprised if he didn't intentionally walk more than five times. I don't quite know how to explain that.

Yeah, that was actually fewer, that was his fewest intentional walks in his career, even though he was being backed up by Placido Polanco or whoever. He was intentionally walked more his rookie year in a half season with a lower OPS. Yes. Okay, so I suppose I'm comfortable saying that that was probably not the optimal way to approach him, although, I don't know i mean i'm generally against intentional walks they're generally not a great percentage play it seems like but but maybe that

was a situation where it's extreme enough that that you could understand it he's been great but he's been nowhere near as great as barry bonds so i don't know i mean at this point he's he has pretty much the same on-base percentage as he's had the last couple of years. Of course, the league OBP has maybe declined a little bit, 364, and he's slugging almost 600. So would you want to put him on base a little bit more, considering that whoever is behind him will probably not drive him in, given that he is a pretty good bet to hit a gigantic 450-foot home run right now. Maybe. Statistically, I would guess that the optimal rate is not that much more than it has been so far.

And it should be noted that McGee's actually hit well, and not just that, but every single person in the Marlins lineup has hit well. Every Marlin has an OPS plus over 100 right now, so that certainly has put some limits on what teams can do, flexibility-wise, when the whole lineup is hitting around him, guys are on base in front of him. Guys who have good batting averages are behind him. Alright, so that's it. That's the lineup protection episode. Alright, so you want to wrap

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