Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 452: The Exaggerated Demise of Managerial Ejections

Episode Date: May 19, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about the Dodgers and run differential and then discuss a surprising trend in managerial ejections thus far.

Safe! Safe! Safe! Safe! Safe! Safe! Safe! Okay, one safe, and they were tagged with the ball. You idiot, he was out when you were out of the base. All right, I've had enough. You're out of here. What do you mean? You can't throw an umpire out of the game. Yeah, all right. You're out of here.

Good morning, and welcome to episode 452 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. Ben, how are you doing? Okay. Did you do any play indexing this weekend? No, I was out of touch. The only baseball I saw this weekend was Syracuse Chiefs versus Columbus Clippers. Yeah, you told me about that.

You saw Emmanuel Burris? I did. That would have made the game pretty exciting, but he was on the bench. He was not starting. So I saw Stephen Souza and Justin Sellers and Adi Siriaco and a bunch of people who've, Mike Zagursky, people who've played like one game.

They were not not prospect rich teams although i i guess trevor bauer and danny salazar were somewhere on the bench yeah and they they uh that nobody plays in triple a anymore i guess no it was how it goes pretty bleak i think that uh i think i remember hearing that the Angels have a philosophy of basically trying to avoid having any of their guys go to AAA because they're not real prospects anyway. Everybody goods in AA. And then AAA, I guess it's not as bad where you are, but out here, AAA can just barely baseball in some parks. Right, yeah. some parks. Right. Yeah. I wonder how, how much the league quality has changed relative to, you know, AA relative to AAA over the years. Cause it used to be the case that, that all prospects would

go to AAA. I think, even though there were always some, some bitter veterans who were on their way down and thought they should be up, but it seems like, yeah, now a lot of guys skip it or, or a lot of the rich prospect talent is at AA. So I wonder whether that has changed the balance of power, the league quality between the two. Yeah. As do I. Anything else to talk about? Nope.

Okay. Well, I will just say before you give up on the possibility of banter that the topic i've brought it might last four minutes so so if you have anything that you want to talk about today's a good day to do it but you don't have to i have one thing i want to ask you though before we move on to the the four to eight minute segment um so the dodgers right now and and the chicago cubs right now have the same run differential. It's not the exact same runs scored and the same runs allowed. But the Dodgers have scored, I believe, three fewer runs than they've allowed.

And the Chicago Cubs have scored three fewer runs than they've allowed. And the Dodgers are, of course, in a little bit of a slump. But they're on pace to win 83 games, and they're still considered by many, or at least they were considered the elite team in the league. And the Cubs, of course, are playing to expectations. They're on pace to win, I think, 57 or 58. So basically you have one bad team that's playing at a 58 win pace and a very good team that's playing at an 82 win pace or an 83 win pace.

And they have the same run differential at this point. And so run differential is a tricky thing. You know, I mean, obviously, for one thing, you can go deeper than run differential. It's just it's only a slightly less blunt way of looking at a team's performance than record but when uh i i hear a lot of times when when a team is outperforming or underperforming run differential i hear uh oftentimes the the blowout uh defense of this team yeah uh which fits perfectly with the dodgers because they just got blown out twice by the diamondbacks this weekend and that that's really what changed things they lost by 10 and they lost by 11 i think and so the saying goes oh well yeah but you know they were they they had a couple of blowouts that

really skewed their run differential right uh and if not for that you know and you know well you're laughing so i guess i don't even need to ask you my question i i wanted to see what you thought of the blowout of the blowout defense yeah to me it's always seems sort of like the the cherry picking of an individual player's stats when you say that i mean it is the same thing if it's a pitcher and you say well he he had this he had this terrible start here in may and he had this awful start in april or maybe he had three terrible starts in a row and if you if you take out those starts he was you know he was above average he really good all year, but he had those bad starts. And so, yeah, I mean, I feel like maybe there's something to it

in that if you're in a blowout, maybe you do things to— you're not as interested in preserving the differential as you would be in a close game, so maybe you put in a position player or you put in the last guy in your bullpen or something, and maybe it's not, maybe it's not the most accurate reflection of, of your talent, of your roster. But I mean, bad teams get blown out more often too.

So it tells us something about, about the quality of the team, right? If they're getting blown out more often. Yeah. Well, yeah, although I think that part of it, when the blowout defense is brought up, it's usually a team that is otherwise good. I mean, it's used to defend a team that we think should be doing better than this. But I know I agree with you about that.

doing better than this. So, uh, but I know I agree with you about that. I think that generally, um, not getting blown out is a good skill to have because teams do come back from five down. And if, if you're a team that gets down by five and is all of a sudden down by 11, that's not a good thing for your future either. Uh, although it's, you know, not as bad as giving up those same six runs when you're up by two and you blow a lead. I mean, I feel like there's something that makes sense about it. The idea that teams shouldn't be judged on their least important innings, which is essentially what happens at the end of a blowout when a 12-6 game becomes a 17-6 game, as happened to the Dodgers last night. Those are their least important three innings of the year for them.

And so judging them too much on that makes sense. On the other hand, somewhat, those runs last night were given up by Chris Withrow and Chris Perez, who are key parts of their bullpen. So it's not like they, those weren't the Drew Butera runs. Right. No such thing. He doesn't allow runs. He did yesterday.

Oh, okay. Paul Goldschmidt hit a ball a long way against him. Oh, so Butera pitched again? Yeah. I was in Syracuse. I was out of touch. So that's one thing we didn't discuss when we were talking about whether Butera should be one or the other,

whether he should be a full-time backup catcher or a full-time reliever. Why not do both? He seems like the perfect candidate to be the new Brooks Kishnick or whoever. Just play, go both ways. Just do both things, right? Because he wasn't playing much anyway. He's not a full-time player, so he seems like the perfect guy to just be both.

Well, I mean, we don't really know how good he is at pitching. No. If he were good at pitching, then sure, he would be the perfect guy. I mean, a guy of his lackluster abilities in other parts of the game would be the perfect guy. I mean, a guy of his lackluster abilities in other parts of the game would be the perfect guy. Right. Probably. Anyway, but my second point on that, though,

and the reason that I am, I actually, despite the words I just said, I actually am sympathetic to the blowout defense with regards to the Dodgers, and really in a lot of cases at this point, because it can definitely skew a team's run differential disproportionately this early in the year, right? Because run differential is essentially, it's a rate stat. Basically, you take the run differential and you turn it into a winning percentage, and a rate stat can be skewed.

I mean, we're used to sort of scaling rate stats over the course of a year. But, you know, in the course of a quarter of a year, they can fluctuate wildly. And so I think that it's a pretty good rule of thumb to discount anything that is radically affecting rate stats this early in the year. that is radically affecting rate stats this early in the year. And so I actually do think that for the Dodgers, the two blowouts can be easily washed away in this river of games that will come. But right now, they're a huge portion of the runs that they've allowed this year.

I mean, they're like a sixth of the runs that they've allowed in you know two of the last three games and so uh so for that reason i am uh i actually i think that at the end of the year the blowout defense holds no power over me at this point in the year i think the blowout defense is pretty strong russell carlton wrote an article just a couple weeks ago for bp about run differential and when it's when it's, when we should start trusting it. And he found that there's a 0.7 correlation. He always likes to look for when things get to a 0.7 correlation. So it gets there around right now, around the 40 game mark.

The correlation is 0.7 between run differential as of today and run differential as of the end of the season. Um, so, so we're at that point right now. So point, okay. Yeah. So,

uh, so 0.7 is, is basically a 50% stability rate, right? Yeah. Right. More or less. Um,

and, uh, so the, but, but uh just out of curiosity what do you make of the other team in this fun fact is it conceivable they're good right now um i could buy that they're better than 15 and 27 i i don't think they're i don't think they're as good as the Dodgers They don't have By some accounts they don't have a single Player who could start on the last place Diamondbacks That's right

On the other hand the Diamondbacks just destroyed The Dodgers run differential wise Over the course of a weekend Yeah I don't know I'm not sure about the Cubs There was some bad news for Matt Albers While I was away, right? The Astros.

It depends what you think Matt Albers' goal is in this situation. Our wishes for Matt Albers. Well, are our wishes that he break this streak of games finished without a save? If it were just him, then I would absolutely want him to break the record, you know, to keep the streak alive. But since there are two guys, then you have to choose. You're either a Webb guy or an Albers guy. Right.

Well, if you're a— I'm an Albers guy. I think I'm an Albers guy. I'm rooting for Albers to never get a save and to finish games. So then this was good news for you this weekend, that the Astros signed kyle farnsworth and declared that chad qualls will be the closer yeah i have to look something up with farnsworth real quick because you know i i had that uh joke about how um if he's getting vengeance

on his former teams it's it's not working because he's got so many former teams and uh you, then when we were talking on Gchat the next day, you pointed out that only a couple of teams had released him. And in my head I was thinking, yeah, but a team that rejects you is a team that rejects you. So if they trade you, they've rejected you. And even if they let you go as a free agent, there's still a team that didn't bring you back. And I remember Kevin Mitchell was presumed to have a grudge against the Padres for the entire time that he was with the Giants, and he had massive numbers against the Padres.

They just traded him. It's not like they released him. But Farnsworth, if I'm not mistaken, Farnsworth might actually have been – is he one of those guys who had a non-guaranteed contract? Yes, the 45-day deal that Randy Wolfe rejected with the Mariners. They basically screwed him out of money, even though he was good enough to be on their team.

So that actually does make sense. This is the first team that's done that to him. Yes. And so I could see the vengeance thing. Although he's not very good. But we'll see if he elevates his game to back up the vengeance. All right, so the topic of the day uh do you remember when i uh when we talked about replay and what replay would change and i i wondered whether um with with basically no no real avenue for managers to get ejected i wondered if

the manager ejection would be uh would be extinct and And then I wondered even further whether managers themselves would die off to history if they were not in our consciousness screaming and spitting, or I guess more spittling than spitting, spittling at umpires. And so I looked at this for an article that I just sent to you that you haven't read and that you might not run. We'll see. article that I just sent to you that you haven't read and that you might not run. We'll see. But I looked at this to see whether ejections are down this year. And ejections are not remotely down. They're essentially at exactly the pace that they were at last year. And

they were very slow in April and have doubled the pace in May. We're talking manager only? Manager only. Yeah, manager only. There was one ejection in the first two weeks. And so we started at a very slow pace. And since then, it's been at a very typical pace for historical standards. And May is double what April is. And so in fact, managers are getting their ejections in just like normal. And I wanted to know, what do you think of that, Ben? That surprises me. And I remember, I noted when the first managerial ejection was, whoever it was. Renteria, it was Renteria. Right, right, right, Renteria. And then I speculated that maybe because of this replay thing, managers and umpires are just getting along better because now that that source of tension is gone, that you don't have managers stewing about some call that they think the umpire got wrong and they can't do anything about it.

Now they can do something about it and they find out that either they were right and the call is overturned or that they were wrong. about it and they find out that either they were right and the call is overturned or that they were wrong um and there was that tweet by joe madden where he says that it was you know like an era of good feelings between managers and umpires so so it surprises me to learn that the pace is not down well i uh i will i will note that april and particularly the first couple weeks of April, seem to always be a little slower, or always. I have three years of data. It seems to be a slower month early on because everybody's in a good mood, I guess. Nobody's on a wobbly chair in the first two weeks of April, and nobody's fed up with the funk in the clubhouse and all that. So it's not uncommon for April to start a little slowly. But yeah, this started much more

slowly. And so yeah, I mean, it did seem like that was going to be the case. And logically speaking, if we thought that ejections were an innocent byproduct of agents behaving in good faith, then they would be down, right? I mean, the thing that makes umpires so aggravating and awful and horrible for everything is like 60% of that has just been completely cut off. is like 60% of that has just been completely cut off. It's either been fixed or, if not fixed, at least taken out of their hands and put in some bureaucrat's hands up at league headquarters. So they really shouldn't be getting ejected as much. And so that makes you think that, well, one of two things. One is that, as has been surmised, that the ejection is stagecraft.

It's kabuki. I don't want to say that every manager gets ejected every time just for fake reasons to fire up his boys. But I do think that 98% of them know they're going to get ejected before they do. Before they step out of the dugout or before they say the thing that they say from the dugout. They're very in control. And there are games they don't want to get ejected from. And in those games, they don't. They get ejected when they want to get ejected.

And so if it's, I don't, there's a fine line between doing it on purpose for strategic reasons and just being in control of when it happens. But it's somewhere between those two things, I think, where we stand. And I think that's why we've quickly regained the ejection equilibrium. So I don't know if this trend will continue, but compared to last year. So last year at this date, five of 17 manager ejections, I think it's 17, five of 17 manager ejections had been balls and strikes. This year, 12 of 19 have been balls and strikes. So more than, you know, like it's 140% increase in ball strike ejections.

And, you know, maybe that won't keep up. Maybe if you go back multiple years, that wouldn't even be out of the historical norm. But it would absolutely fit the narrative that you might expect. If I told you there's all these ejections and you'd think, well, how's that happening? That's really the one place you have to go. So you have 12 of 19 are ball strike ejections. One was Bo Porter mad that I guess the benches have been issued warnings over a hit by pitch. One was an unreviewable call on on an attempted bunt or something like that because fair foul isn't reviewable until it gets past the base. And then I think that

pretty much the rest of them were actually managers arguing about calls that had been overturned or not overturned which seems weird because then i mean again it's like the guy who you're yelling at like he has no power this is like yelling at you know the cashier at mcdonald's because you don't like factory farming there were i mean there were a couple cases right where mlb just screwed up like the right replay wasn't available for whatever reason. It was like a John Farrell case. Oh, yeah, yeah. File a protest.

Write a letter. Kick Bud Selig in the shins. But the man standing in front of you is not in charge of that decision, right? Right. He doesn't like he's like he's been he's been neutralized. So it does feel weird that you would go after him. But I guess an umpire is an umpire. They're all umpires.

Yeah. So then does this suggest to you then that it is primarily a means of motivating the team, that you feel like you have to get thrown out, you've got to fire everyone up, that you feel like you have to get thrown out, you've got to fire everyone up, you've got to have everyone's backs and show the players that you're their advocate on the field and everything? Or is it just partially that

and partially just that managers feel like they have to do something to justify their presence and their salary? I would say it's one of three things, and I'm not sure which one it is, but it's either the firing up the troops or it's just that losing makes these guys mad and they will find the outlet for their anger. So, you know, like this is just sort of the pace of getting cranky. It's like basically 3% of managers, which is about how often a manager gets ejected from a game,

about 3% of games, 3% of managers, you know, given the ups and downs of a season and the fact that at any given time some team's in a six-game losing streak and some team's 12 games out of first and some manager's on the wobbly chair and some teams 12 games out of first, and some managers on the wobbly chair, and some guys just sick of that strike zone and is down six to nothing. There's always going to just be guys getting mad and cranky and letting off steam. And they kind of know where the line is,

and they don't care. They get to a point where they're happy to go past it. And I don't know if they do it to fire up the the guys or just because it you know it feels good and they're not you know they're human they're not totally in control of of of themselves uh their emotions at all time and then the third is that in fact what we've been seeing uh throughout history uh is mostly about ball strike counts that basically guys are always mad at ball strike counts. Basically, guys are always mad at ball strike calls all the time. Every manager is sitting there fuming at ball strike counts all the time. In fact, over the course of history, these other calls have been the

outlet by which managers could scream their fury without broaching. Because, you know, according to the rules, theoretically, there's no wiggle room on ball strike arguing. If you do it, you're out. And it could be that without the outlet of being able to run out on the field every once in a while and give a guy the what-for, they just leave it all on the home plate umpires. There was a thread at Tom Tango's site, tangotiger.com, a couple of weeks ago about how and why the rate at which MLB managers get ejected is just incomparable to the rate in other sports.

You know, equivalent people, people in equivalent positions, head coaches in other sports, you don't, you just, it's a completely just fundamentally different relationship really between the major league manager and umpire and head coaches and referees in other sports. It's completely different and there were some some theories about why that is do you do you have any off the top of your head just why there's just this completely different relationship where we just see these guys run out onto the field and yell at each other and and one of them ejects the other one, and it's just, I mean, in what other sport do you see this? It's just, it seems simple, seems natural to us,

but if you were coming from fandom of some other sport, it would probably be pretty jarring. Yeah, it seems to me that the most obvious answer is their general irrelevancy in any given game, right? I mean, they're important to a team, but they're not all that important to the next three innings of any game. I mean, the pitching coach and the hitting coach are extremely competent. So, yeah, so, I mean, one of the main theories

is just that other sports don't permit these people to come onto the field of play. You just can't do that, which, I mean, it seems like it would be a much more reasonable system if managers were just not allowed to come onto the field and argue about these plays. It's sort of strange that they are when you think about it. I mean, you'd maybe it's that they, they have to come on sometimes for, you know, pitching changes and things. So, so it seems less transgressive when

they come onto the field for for reasons that are not related to actually making a move um but i mean it's it's really really strange with that managers can just walk out onto the field and argue and even after they get ejected they can just linger there for a while and they can delay the game as long as they'd like. It's a very, very strange system. There's, there's also the fact that there's like no, someone else proposed that there's just no, like other officials in other sports have lesser penalties at their disposal. They don't have to go right to ejecting someone because if, you know, in basketball, you can give a coach a technical foul or you can, you could get a, you can give your football team a 15 yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct or something like

that. There's no, there's no equivalent in baseball. You can't really like, you can't charge someone with a ball or a strike or something because the manager is arguing, so you have to go right to the ejection. But I think you're right also that there's really no effect on the game, which maybe says something about the importance of managers relative to head coaches in other sports. Maybe, but I don't think it says anything we don't already basically know though yeah right and it doesn't necessarily say anything bad about them i mean the managing part is sort of like the necessary evil that you put up with in order to get the the leadership part right yeah right and and in other sports sports, the play is always ongoing. The referee is holding the puck or holding the football, and he's controlling when the next play starts. So you can yell from the sidelines or something, but you can't just walk onto the field and delay it. It's not really allowed. Plus, if you're like in hockey,

if the head coach wants to argue, the referee has to skate over to the bench. The head coach can't pursue him onto the ice because he will slip and fall. And so you have to be sort of civil, I guess, to the referee since he is doing you the courtesy of visiting you on the sidelines. What about cricket, Ben?

What is it like in cricket? I don't know, but I hope many people write in to tell us. I think it's too civilized, isn't it? It's too dignified. I don't know. It's been a while since we've heard from our cricket audience. It has. So if you were restarting baseball from scratch tomorrow, would you just make it the rule that managers are not

permitted onto the field? Maybe for any reason. I mean, they could signal for pitching changes from the dugout if they wanted to. You would not? No, I don't have any problem with ejections. I mean, I don't know. Okay, fine. I do occasionally have uh the uh the gif i made once of like uh i want to say it was like charlie manual and bob davidson uh davidson and it was for my uh my profanity in baseball article and they're just these two you know men in their seven he's just screaming profanity at each other. In this dead silent stadium, there's like 400 people there. Just gross. That was awful.

So if I could do something to get rid of that image, I would. But no, I don't have any problem with the managers coming out and talking to the umpires. And even getting mad at the umpires seems fine to me. I don't know. I accept it because it's always been that way. But if I were redoing it, I think I might change that. I mean, is it like, so this doesn't happen in basketball or football. But, I mean, you see just as many belligerent coaches screaming from the sidelines looking, you know, wait,

they look way more fired up. They do, but they can't really do anything about it. They're stuck on the sidelines so they can yell and scream all they want and they can get a, they can get a penalty or something. What's your, what is your issue? Which part of this bothers you?

Uh, I think, I mean, I'm not terribly bothered by any of it, but I think, I mean, I'm not terribly bothered by any of it, but I think it's strange that baseball is the only sport in which the equivalent of the head coach can just walk out onto the field and argue for as long as he wants to. And he could get ejected from the game, but he could still stay on the field if he wants to. Right? I mean, he can delay the game as long as he would like to. It's sort of strange.

No? I mean, it's sort of strange. Where's the downside, though? Well... Like, what does it do? You're worried because it adds time to the game, or you think that it demeans the game, or it's undignified for old men to do this, or it, what, erodes the competitive quality of the game?

What does it do? I mean, mostly I'm remarking on the fact that it's unique and strange, but I think, yes, I mean, I think it does delay the game somewhat. I would rather see the game proceed. It's the only sport that wears hats, Ben. Do you have a problem with that? That seems logical to me. It's sunny out there that wears hats, Ben. Do you have a problem with that? That seems logical to me. It's sunny out there.

Need some shade. All right. Yeah, I mean, it's probably not logical that the manager wears a uniform as if he might be called upon to play at any moment. So that, too, is strange. moment so that too is strange the uh if you had uh if he could be called upon to play at any moment uh would all would all 30 managers be uh under the age of 40 would any team let me yeah would any team waste that roster spot uh even on a you know a tony larusa or a joe madden or somebody who was perceived to have great value uh or would every single team yeah i think hire somebody under 40

i think you'd have 30 player managers i think so yeah because again as i mean if you if we admitted the possibility that a manager could be such a tactical genius that he could give his team several wins a season just through the X's and O's, then sure, that would be more valuable than having a guy who could actually play. But assuming you can get a veteran mentor leader type who can motivate the team and can also contribute to the team actually scoring and allowing runs, then yeah, I would say all 30 would go for that. I would say if we... I wonder, maybe you'd get some grandfathered-in guys, maybe, if it just started next season all of a sudden,

and when you reported to spring trading, I don't know that every team would fire its current manager under contract. But I think maybe when that contract expired at least, I think they would switch to the player manager. Yeah, I don't know what the value of an extra roster spot is on its own. I mean, it's not like you're adding a great player. You're adding a roster spot, and that's probably worth...

I mean, what's a roster spot worth? A win? A half a win? I have no idea. And I think the perception, certainly among some in the game, is that a good manager or a great manager is worth more than a half a win or a win. And so, yeah, the question is whether it would be just... Because you can talk... I mean, managers are basically like closers, right? They're all unproven until their second day day in the job and then they're all proven right and so if

you can just talk yourself past that first day then yeah pretty much everybody who uh is under the age of 40 who gets hired to be a player manager would quickly achieve proven manager but in the meantime probably a lot of teams would feel uncomfortable because they would be hiring an unproven manager yeah but we've seen plenty of unproven managers get hired just a few years after retiring and we've i mean guys like jason giambi or someone who was nearly hired as a manager and and terry francona will say that he's like having another coach or you know you hear that sort of refrain often with the veteran mentor type who doesn't play all that much and just takes up the roster spot.

So, yeah, I think so. All right. I'm done talking. Okay. So please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com and subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. And we will be back tomorrow. Please send us emails for Wednesday's listener email show at podcast at baseballprospectus.com.