Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 447: The Oddly Underperforming Dodgers and the Exciting NL West

Episode Date: May 12, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the Dodgers’ perplexingly slow start and the NL West race.

The disappointed, all shuffle round in circles. Their black hearts look the same, with a picture and a name of the ones who broke their hearts. The disappointed, all shuffle round in circles. Good morning, and welcome to episode 447 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Baseball Reference Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. How are you?

Hi, Ben. Good. How are you? Very well, thank you. Great. Do you have any old business to talk about? Yeah. business to talk about uh yeah well uh about a week ago we went over our um our our minor league free agents draft at the time there were no players playing in the majors uh and it didn't

look real good there weren't even a lot of them who seemed to just still be playing baseball no uh but since then in fact uh three of our players have been promoted. Wow. Yeah, so. I was going to talk about the one that I knew about, but I didn't even know that there were two others. Yeah, so Reid Brignac was promoted to the Phillies. And Sean Camp, the pitcher, was also promoted to the Phillies, and he has pitched in some games.

I don't know if Reid Bruniak has. Yes, he has one played appearance. One played appearance. Okay, so let me check. But Camp had a couple of outings. He had like three innings on Friday, five through Friday. He now has three in the third inning, so he's faced 15 batters. But more exciting for me is Steve steve tollison oh yeah who uh who also was promoted to the blue jays

and in his first 16 plate appearances uh has six extra base hits and a 1500 ops that sounds likely to last. It doesn't need to last. As long as he's over 700 or whatever, he'll keep getting some plate appearances, and so this gives him a little padding. Yeah, we talked about the Blue Jays' second base situation recently, and we talked about how Ryan Goins had been demoted and Chris Goetz had been promoted.

Now Chris Goetz has been designated for assignment and the plan i i guess is is steve tollison and and brett lorry playing part-time at second and uh so things are so tollison and camp were your draftees yes and briniac was mine and things things are looking good for Brignac also. He was called up to replace Freddy Galvis, who had started the season 2 for 42 or something. And now Galvis has broken a clavicle at AAA. So Brignac may have some time. So, good.

We're both on the board. I thought Cody Ash was their, their third baseman. I guess it's utility work then. All right. Furthermore, the Rockies lost two out of three. And I don't know that we need to necessarily update the Rockies every night. But since I guess I'm on record saying they're going to collapse immediately, even though I don't feel that strongly about that,

I guess I'll give periodic updates. Although they did, I think they outscored their opponents this weekend. And on Saturday, Corey Dickerson and Charlie Blackman combined for three home runs, I believe, which was wonderful. And Byron Buxton hurt himself sliding. And I wasn't able, we talked about head first slides on this podcast, right? And whether they're worthwhile, worth doing. And I wasn't able to find out whether he was sliding head first or feet first.

Jeff Passan, I believe, tweeted the news and just said, sliding. You could see how a guy would hurt his hand. He re-aggravated it. You could see how you could hurt your hand sliding either direction. I just bring this up. I assume it's head first, but I don't know. But I just bring it up because while trying to find out, I was sort of searching the internet and found about like 500 people who also didn't know but just assumed it was head first and talked about how stupid head first sliding is now. Why do they let them slide head first? People got to stop sliding head first. And they all just assumed it was headfirst.

And it probably was. I assume it was. But it's interesting how we just automatically assume that anybody who gets hurt sliding must have gone headfirst. Uh-huh. I'm seeing something now. I'm looking at 1500espn.com. now. I'm looking at 1500espn.com and

it says Buxton may have re-injured or aggravated the wrist when his hand hit the ground while sliding feet first. Oh, there we go. According to Twins Radio Network. Ah, my instincts, my spidey senses were onto

something. Uh-huh, yeah. Groovy. Can't assume. Not when it comes to sliding. No. Alright, and other old business, Ryan Webb finished a game on Saturday. He got the win

in the Orioles' 10-inning win over the Astros. He did not get a save. So, as Matt Albers continues to be idle, Ryan Webb has now closed the gap on the career. Games finished without a save leaderboard to four, right? He has

79 career now. I thought Albers... 83? Oh, was it that? I thought it was like 92. No, he's got... Yeah, it's 83. Well, there you go. Yeah. And last bit of old business.

We talked last week, I think it was maybe in the lineup protection episode, we talked about whether it might be possible to predict improvements or breakouts by looking at how pitchers had been pitching to hitters. And this was inspired by Robert Arthur's article for BP recently about how pitchers had pitched differently to Albert Pujols even before his results started to suffer and started throwing pitches closer to the center of the zone because they were less afraid of facing him, presumably. And so we wondered whether this might be a good way to assess hitters even better than just looking at their stats, whether we should just look at how

pitchers are approaching them. And Robert Arthur did a follow-up article, which is up at BP today, Monday, and is free for non-subscribers, so you can go read it. And he tried to answer that question and he looked at the top 10 changers in zone distance from the center in 2012 to see how those players performed in 2013. And it looks like that the change in distance from the center of the zone does a pretty good job at predicting breakouts, or at least did last year. The top changer was Chris Davis, who, of course, had a huge breakout. And pitchers, oddly enough, started pitching as if they were afraid of him more, even before his hot September in 2012 when he hit a bunch of home runs. It was like mid-season 2012 it started. And so he looked at that,

and it was a statistically significant difference in the leaders. He compared their projected true averages according to Pocota to their actual results, and the predicted breakout guys are the guys who pitchers started seeming more afraid to face, exceeded Pocota by quite a bit. I'm looking for the actual number. I don't know. It was eight of the top 10 exceeded their projections.

And the only two who didn't were guys who got hurt. And it was collectively an outperformance of the projections by about 24 points of true average. And he looked at the top 12 projected guys by this method. You're giving away everything. Yeah, well, I'm not going to give away the guys by this method. Ben, you're giving away everything. Yeah, well, I'm not going to give away the guys for this year, but he also looked at the guys that this method would project breakouts for this season, and so far they also are exceeding their projections.

Charlie Blackman and Corey Dickerson. No, but to find out who they are, you will have to read the article. This sounds big. This sounds like a pretty important thing. No, but to find out who they are, you will have to read the article. This sounds big. This sounds like a pretty important thing. Yeah, pretty cool. Jonathan Sanchez, who you might recall was like my the minor league free agent pick that I was both

most out on the limb on, but also sort of bullish on, has a 67 ERA and AAA. How many innings is that? Like two-thirds. Okay. Yeah. I wouldn't put it past being more innings in his case.

All right. So what's your topic for today? Well, I figure I'm going to get ahead of the narrative a little bit. I figure this is going to be the week that everybody writes their their column about how the dodgers are are spinning and uh a bunch of losers yep uh blaming it on somebody i don't know who they're gonna blame it on right now it seems like puig is old news uh but they'll blame it on somebody and uh people will probably start talking about firing don mattingly again. Yes. Wobbly chair. Oh, gosh, wouldn't it be exciting if someone said wobbly chair? This is year two of our wobbly chair experiment. I'm eager to see if anybody picks it up.

But anyway, I thought I'd get ahead of it and have us talk about the Dodgers real quick. And not just the Dodgers, but the Giants too, because I don't know if you watched this series at all this weekend, but this was one of the greatest. I mean, this was really just a tremendously entertaining series. Every game was tremendously entertaining. And the race is really tightened up in a way that's fascinating. And I'm going to give you a couple of numbers that are in an article that I just wrote. But I want to tell you them because they're interesting to me.

On opening day, our playoff odds had the Dodgers nine wins better than the Giants. They thought the Giants were like the sixth or seventh best team in baseball, as I recall. But the Dodgers were nine wins ahead of them, which is a huge, huge gap. And because of that, they had the Dodgers as 76% favorites to win the division, to the Giants 15% favorites. So they did not consider this to be a particularly competitive division or a good race. And the Giants have completely closed the gap by playoff odds standards. I haven't seen Monday morning's playoff odds update, but eyeballing it and based on what it was at Saturday, I expect it to be just about equal with both teams at about 45% to win the division, about 89 or 90 win pace, and essentially in a virtual dead heat by these standings. in a virtual dead heat by these standings. So it's gotten really exciting really early,

and it's been good baseball. So a couple of, I guess first of all, I will, Tim Brown is even ahead of me. Tim Brown writing for Yahoo has a column about the Dodgers issues, and Tim Brown writes wonderfully, so I don't begrudge him this. But I'm going to read a paragraph. Okay. Six weeks into another year, starting all over again, they seem to compete only when the mood strikes them, as if the season were owed to them and no one else. It's why Mattingly held a clubhouse meeting three days ago

to remind his players of, as he said, where we're going and how to get there. And it's why they have a 20-19 record after Sunday's 7-4 loss to the Giants and haven't fared well in one-run games or extra inning games. Sunday's loss was another in 10 innings. And beyond that, with some exceptions, why they are outplayed and outworked by seemingly inferior teams. outworked by seemingly inferior teams. First of all, do you think that one-run games is a character test? I mean, I can see it being a test of something. Mostly luck, mostly random fluctuation, but I'd be fine saying it's a test of something. How do you feel about

attributing it to character? Not great. Mm-hmm. I don't feel great about that. Okay. Just, all right, so that's clear. Mm-hmm. All right, so what do you think about the Dodgers thus far?

I guess another way of saying it is they were projected to win 94 at the beginning of the year. They're projected to win 89-ish now or maybe 90 now. Do you think that there's any... When you were looking at this, do you think there's any reason to ascribe some sort of momentum to the direction they're going and wonder whether Pakoda is a little slow on the draw and that actually they're more likely to be at 88 a week from now than they likely to be at 88 a week from now than they are to be at 91 a week from now? No, I don't think so. I mean, we have our preseason expectations and we adjust them slightly as the season goes on. And eventually, if they keep

performing poorly or worse than we expected, then the projections will reflect that. But no, I think that's why we have these things, why we look at these things, so that we don't overreact to a month or six weeks of not playing up to expectations. Okay, so the Dodgers have essentially a slightly below average defense. Pretty much all the metrics agree on that. They have a slightly above average offense thus far, and they have a slightly above average pitching staff thus far. Their bullpen, once you get past Brian brian wilson uh has has been slightly above average and their starters have been above average although paul mahalam has not been uh so where's the problem here

yeah i'm i'm actually trying to find it i was looking at their baseball reference page as you were talking and and trying to find the problem and I mean, a lot of things have gone right for them more so than you could have expected. I mean, Adrian Gonzalez is hitting for power again in a way that we haven't seen recently. That didn't seem like something that was going to come back. Dee Gordon has been fantastic. And this was someone that people had all but written

off or had put into a utility role. And it seemed like in spring that second base would be the big problem where D Gordon was going to start and it was going to be a disaster. And he has been fantastic. He has been, was he even the debt? Was he even the second baseman on the depth chart at opening day? By opening day, maybe he was. I mean, the presumption was that Alexander Guerrero would play there probably. And Justin Turner was acquired. Yes. And Sean Figgins.

Yeah, right. So that seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. But, I mean, that's been a strong point. Gordon has been what we hoped Billy Hamilton would be. And, by the way, Guerrero in AAA has hit 341, 398, 588 in 93 play appearances. I didn't realize that Guerrero had made his debut. Yeah, yeah. Was that recent?

I don't know. I missed that. Look up when he played. So continuing with the things that have gone right, Matt Kemp has been very good, has been pretty healthy since coming back. I mean, he's played in 32 games. He's hit very well, much better than league average.

That's good. Puig has replicated his 2013 production almost exactly so far. And, I mean, Scott Van Slyke has been great off the bench. And, yeah, and you look at the pitching and and granky has been great and uh heron has been great and ryu has continued to be very good and and blue shield of california has been pretty pretty good also behind as you said other than brian wilson uh brand Brandon League has a sub-two ERA in over 20 innings. So no one could have seen that coming. One guy could. Yeah, Nicoletti.

Yeah, so it is kind of hard to see. I mean, obviously they were missing Clayton Kershaw for a month, and he's only made two starts, so that hurts somewhat. Kershaw for a month and he's only made two starts. So, so that hurts somewhat. Um, they have missed AJ Ellis, who's been hurt and Tim Federovich hasn't hit at all in his absence.

Uh, no one has really hit at all in his absence. So, so there's that there's a couple of significant injuries, but now Kershaw is back. And, um, I mean, it doesn't seem like there's there's a whole

lot of issues here carl crawford and andre ether haven't really hit but they're the only ones who haven't hit other than catcher and only one of them is neat i mean they're they're essentially you know you you could i mean as much as you can identify who the hot hand is just to say you can't. But, you know, you only need, it's not like you just named two guys who sound like they're full timers, but, you know, only one of them has to play. Right. And even Josh Beckett has been good. So, really, all the uncertainties that we had about this roster heading into the year if anything i'd feel better about them now than i would have in spring training so yeah so i don't

know i'm kind of looking at why they are why they are so close to 500 so far and it is kind of hard to figure it's i mean they are what four and seven in one run games they have hit a little worse with runners in scoring position and with men on than they had with with bases empty um i don't know if maybe they've pitched more poorly in in high leverage spots i mean not not really it doesn't look like, not particularly. So, I don't know, nothing really scares me, though. Nothing makes me want to re-evaluate. Yeah, no, I think you just put it very well in a way that I hadn't crystallized.

But, I mean, you're right, they had a bunch of, as much as they had improved their team over the previous 18 months and as many famous people as they named, there were still a lot of question marks that we had talked about in the offseason. And right now, there are very few question marks. The team, I guess you could say, if you're writing a column especially, you could say is a question mark because they haven't won yet. They haven't really put it together. And, you know, Brian say is a question mark because they haven't won yet they haven't really put it together uh and you know brian wilson is a question mark and the fact that they have to i mean they do it they have 12 pitchers so that's 12 question marks just by nature uh of the game um but yeah i mean there's all there are actually very few question marks

at this point in the lineup kemp is not the way he was puig is not the way he was. Puig is not the way he was. Gonzalez is not the way he was. And, um, and Gordon, so Gordon's been their, their, their best player by war. Um, and as you said, I mean, I wouldn't have bet on him getting 50 plate appearances, uh, this year. Uh, certainly not, not in December. I wouldn't have bet on that. So, I mean, is there, is it like, is he a star? I mean, so far, he's got, what, unless he stole one tonight, he's got 24 steals in 27 attempts. And he hasn't really, I mean, he's hit for good power for the type of player he is, I suppose. More power than anyone seemed to really expect out of him. And I don't know, without looking, I mean, I'm sure there's some sort of Babbitt thing going on here,

probably, to some extent. But it seems pretty real. A scout told me that he saw him in, in spring. And, uh, and he told me this at the time, not, not post breakout or whatever this is, um, that he before had sort of seen Gordon as a, as a triple a guy or a fringe guy guy or possibly a utility guy, but that he looked stronger and that he had sort of upgraded his projection for him and thought he could be maybe like a second division regular type guy. So not this yet, but some sort of real improvement.

So I don't know. It's been pretty exciting to watch, though. He's been one of the more exciting players in baseball. And AJ Ellis, that hole I mentioned, I think just started his minor league rehab assignment, so he should be back soon. So, when he's back, that will plug one of the few outstanding holes here. Their pitching has actually been considerably better in high leverage than in low leverage. So it's sort of strange when you look at all these pretty good or very good individual performances, and it doesn't seem like they have really the huge bad luck indicators that we usually look at for a team like this, and yet they are 20-19.

It's kind of confusing that they are not a little bit better than that, just looking at all the underlying stats here. I wonder if we look at BP's adjusted standings for them their third order winning percentage is 504 so they have pretty much played like the underlying underlying stats say they should have evidently and there yeah i was i was gonna see whether this was just pitching worse with runners on or hitting worse with runners on, and it's not that. I guess you could say they faced good competition because they faced the Giants seven times, and they've faced the Rockies a bunch. Well, okay, so I guess we think that they're still really good and that we find this to be somewhat mysterious,

but if I can shift gears a little bit. You mentioned the defense, and by park-adjusted defensive efficiency at BP, they are 18th out of 30 in that category, although you'd think that would show up in their pitching stats which seem pretty good still well and 18th out of 30 is like that's almost 12th out of 30 yeah it's not like there's a huge huge gap between most of the teams so yeah yeah so do you think that they have uh as a team with you know close to unlimited resources um they've been able

to you know add a lot of players and um even you know add players that we didn't even think they needed you know like six and seven starters and extra former closers and all that uh do you think that advantage is is is narrowing at all uh as we go into the like sort of as we start to approach the trade deadline um do you think that they still have places they can upgrade or are they at the point now where they've they've got an expensive kind of famous kind of uh you know established major leaguer at every position including like every spot in the bullpen and every spot in the rotation. So do you think that they could realistically even look to upgrade? Or are these guys all pretty much going to be, I mean,

does everybody they have have a pretty good hold on a job where the Dodgers just basically have to ride out what they have? Yeah, and it's not even really a situation where you have some hole in the lineup that's given to some high, high salary veteran type who you can't really dislodge or you can't really move even though he's not producing. Um, as we just said, there, there really isn't a spot where, where someone isn't producing except for injury spots or maybe for left field where you have a couple guys who you figure would probably hit at some point or you're not really going to upgrade over Ether and Crawford at the deadline. So, I mean, you could always go out and trade for a setup guy, I suppose,

although they have plenty of them, even though Wilson hasn't been effective. They have plenty of them, even though Wilson hasn't been effective. So there's that, but it doesn't look like there's really a spot in the regular lineup where they could improve significantly. Seems like more of an improvement at the margins thing more than anything. All right, so as for the Giants, we don't have to talk much about them, but I just wanted to note that when we talked about the Rockies and the amazing performances they've got out of guys who suck, the part differential between the Rockies and the rest of the league

has shrunk somewhat since 2000 and 1997 and some of those great years, but the difference between them and the Giants is still pretty massive. And so it's not necessarily quite so obvious, but if you look at OPS Plus, like we mentioned Brandon Barnes' obscene season where he's hitting.347 and has a slugging percentage higher than his OPS was and all that. His OPS Plus is.124, and Brandon Hicks, who is a 28-year-old rookie who spent all of last season in the minors and is a middle infielder has an OPS plus of 119 and that was before his home run on Sunday so that will go up I don't know that Hicks is actually any less or any more likely to be doing this

so even though the OPS the raw OPSPS is a big gap, it's just as sort of shocking. And then you have Brandon Crawford's 137 OPS plus. Crawford basically hasn't hit since college or maybe his first year in the pros really. And he's basically doing what And he's basically doing what Justin Morneau is doing. And you've got Mike Morse, who was horrible last year. And he's got a 149 OPS+, which is better than Morneau, and which is actually just about what Charlie Blackmon is doing. So again, even though it's 130 points of OPS difference, it's basically the same OPS plus.

So I mean, obviously the Giants are on 103 win pace and no reasonable projection system or analyst or assessment would think that they're going to keep that up. But I don't know how much you consider these performances to be huge red flags in the same way that I was paranoid about the Rockies lineup and their start. Yeah, not really. Not to the same degree, I don't think. By the way, just looking at Alexander Guerrero, by the way, played in those March games in Australia. Yeah, when they didn't need to have their pitchers and they had the big roster. Yeah, and he got one plate appearance.

I wonder, maybe it's bad benchies is the reason here. Is it like the 2013 Nationals disease where the starting lineup is pretty good, the starting pitching is pretty good, but whenever someone's out of the lineup, it's a problem because everyone else is not producing? Like last year with the Nationals when it was like Scott Hairston and Tyler Moore and all these people who just didn't hit a lick when someone was out of the starting lineup. And in 2012, they've been great and that was sort of if you wanted to point to one thing that made the nationals disappointing last year that was sort of it maybe maybe with the dodgers it's the fact that that justin turner hasn't hit at all that the replacements for aj ellis haven't hit at all, that Sean Figgins hasn't really hit, although he's walked a bit,

that guys like Mike Baxter have played. I don't buy it. I don't accept that. I mean, no team, I promise no team in baseball has had a worse bench this year than the Giants have. It's, I mean, it's not even, like, you know, Ethier alone or Scott Van Slyke alone has outproduced, maybe actually literally,

maybe literally has outproduced in total bases the entire Giants. The Giants bench, these are their OPSs. These are their five. They basically had the same bench all year, the same five guys. So Hector Sanchez, who plays some, has a 639 OPS. So he's doing okay. Joaquin Arias, 391. Gregor Blanco, 385.

Erre Adrianza, 470. And Juan Perez, 170. And all of them have played at least 20 games. And Tyler calls an 0 for 1. Probably not the problem either. Probably not. Probably Tyler Colvin 0-1. Probably not the problem either. Probably not. Probably not the Dodgers problem. Tyler Colvin's 0-1 for the Giants,

probably not the Dodgers problem. Well, I wonder if we will be seeing that Dodgers closed-door meeting from last week being used as a narrative milepost at some point in the season. When we look back and the Dodgers have played 600 baseball since that meeting, although they lost that night. They lost Sunday. I don't know.

Do they have it before Friday's game or before Thursday's game? Do you know? I think it was Thursday, but I'm not sure. Because then they lost three out of four at home to the Giants right after that. You need to have a new meeting. They probably will have a new meeting. Yes, they probably will. Just keep having meetings until you can claim one works.

I mean, Hanley hasn't even really hit all that well yet. I mean, maybe that's a reason why they haven't won all that much he's he's been fine but he hasn't been handly so that's ben i just realized that the mets pitchers still don't have a hit i wrote that thing two weeks ago they're over 61 yeah it's true well based on your scouting reports of those pitchers i'm not really that surprised john knee should have a hit john knees can really swing it yeah all right all right so long well i'm glad the i'm glad the nl west has been more exciting than we expected because going by those preseason projections it looked like it would just be a cakewalk and the Dodgers would win 90-something games, and that would be that, and there would be no race whatsoever.

Whereas now there is an exciting one, a three-team one even. Yep. All right. All right. Baseball Reference. Oh, yes. Please support it. Our sponsor, Baseball Reference Play Index.

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