Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 457: Do the Astros Have a Perception Problem?

Episode Date: May 27, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss whether the Astros’ analytical approach has become (or could become) a PR problem.

Good morning and welcome to episode 457 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. 457, of course, is how many doubles Carlos Beltran will have when he hits another double. How are you doing, Ben? Pretty well. Great. So let's see.

Jeff Samarja, of yes uh won a game and uh also matched his season high for runs allowed at the same time uh and streak really got some publicity after we talked about it not because we talked about it but after we talked talked about it. It really did, and I'm actually going to now distance myself slightly from our own interest in it. Yeah. Because you're right, it got a lot of, I mean, there were various iterations of this quote-unquote streak where we publicized, you know, X number of starts with X number of runs or fewer and no wins and all these sorts of things. And ultimately, I find the whole thing to have been somewhat disappointing, slightly less than satisfying. There will be some fun

fact fanatics who will say that, well, history was made, and it's true. There are various filters that you can run that will make him be the only person who's ever done this. And it was an interesting streak, a somewhat moderately interesting streak. But I think that as the new Pitching Lines series that nobody reads on our site has shown, novelty is not actually what makes a fact fun. It has to be somehow, it has to strike you. It has to be not just new, not even just extreme, but it has to somehow capture

something elemental in the game. And I feel like he didn't quite get there. He was maybe three or four starts away from getting there. I think that it could have been, if he had allowed, say, eight runs today and gotten the win, I would have said that would have been a satisfying conclusion. And if he had gone four

more starts being dominant without a win, I would have felt like that was satisfying. But it feels like we, you, me, and everybody else basically identified this potentially interesting thing when it was still a few degrees shy of being interesting. And then almost as soon as we observed it, it disappeared. Yeah, I agree. Didn't capture my imagination. Steve Tolleson, on the other hand, very, very interesting. Homer today, I'm going to look up his current OPS,

Homer today, I'm going to look up his current OPS, but it feels like pretty much going to win me the minor league free agent draft. Seems that way. All by himself. Because he is now hitting.302,.388,.558 as an emergency middle infielder. So I imagine that he's got 225 played appearances in him this year. I don't see your team getting that many. And he's also got the pitching stats that he added. Yeah, really only takes one guy.

Strike it rich with one unlikely minor league free agent to win that draft. In this game, yeah. That's all it takes. All right. Anything else you want to update or should we move on? I guess we can give the obligatory Ryan Webb update. Ryan Webb finished a game over the long weekend. He did not get a save.

So he is now at 82 career games finished without a save, which brings him to one behind the idol matt albers and ryan webb got a games finished down nine nothing in the ninth the the lowest leverage of low leverage games should have been a position player in there but it was ryan webb instead guy just can't get any respect yeah um i guess are we gonna have to now update the um the position player pitching pace every couple days uh i'll mention it when when there is one there wasn't one but when there's not one is arguably just as significant yeah i think i'll spare people that changes the pace all right um so today we're going to talk about the Astros. One might even say that today this podcast will be an Astro lounge.

A reference to the classic Smash Mouth album. One of the first albums I purchased and I still listen to it to this day. So this is the second time today that you've said, I still listen to it. What does that mean? Because, I mean, there's a lot of albums that I think I still listen to, but if you actually looked at my log, it's probably been four or five years since it's ever actually spun. No, it has not been that long.

When's the last time you listened to Smash Mouth's Astro Lounge? Definitely this year, I think. Maybe not in its entirety, but I was listening to— Wait, wait, do you skip to Smash Mouth's Astro Lounge? Definitely this year, I think. Maybe not in its entirety, but I was listening to... Wait, wait, do you skip to certain songs? Yeah. What songs do you skip to? Although, it's pretty good all the way through, I must say.

Unlike many of the albums I purchased in my youth, this one has held up for me. Uh-huh. See, I remember the last time i listened to that album regularly would have been glad there was a time at least yeah no when i had so in a fall of 99 i think i listened to it for a few weeks uh it was on regular rotation and as i recall it was a lot of skipping to like the five six area like it was like five six seven i remember five of course was was all

star okay well then it wasn't that i'm just gonna go on the record right now saying i skipped past that so six six is the one wait is six the one or is four the one about how the president smokes pot oh stoned is yeah it's track eight yeah that's a good one. Yeah, I skipped to around that area. Yeah. It's not a good one, though. I could see, see, Fushu Meng I could see still listening to. Uh-uh. I mean, because that still holds up for what it is.

I mean, your tastes maybe have changed, but it is what we thought it was. But Astro Lounge is itself not what we thought it was. The later events in Smash Mouth's career put it in a whole new light. The same way that you can't listen to Fly by Sugar Ray anymore without hearing Every Morning. It is a fundamentally different song from a fundamentally different band than we thought at the time. Sorry.

I want to talk about this article that ran in the Houston Chronicle by Evan Drellich. It's a very long and very thoughtful analysis of the organization. In some ways it has kind of echoes of the Seattle Mariners piece that Jeff Baker wrote this offseason in that it's very well reported, very well sourced, looks at a lot of different things, and is about an organization that has sort of criticism from within and without about the way they do it and about their relationship to information.

In a lot of ways, it's not like that article at all. This one is, I would say, much less an indictment of an organization. And it's really much more a kind of looking at what this experiment has led to and how people have responded to it. I don't think this article has a point of view necessarily. It lets the sources speak for themselves. And it's very interesting. You've read it. I've read it. It's one of those articles that trying to pick one paragraph to read is very hard. There are about a dozen of them. But I will mash two together and say that this is the nut graph. Jeff Lunau's radical approach to on-field

changes and business decisions has created at least pockets of internal discontent and So I would say that that serves as the nut graph. countered. The Astros say resistance is just a part of the process, but no matter what the plan, they are presently in a combustible setting. So I would say that that serves as the nut graph. And then the sexiest quote, and this one is not by a named source, a lot of them are, but I don't think anyone's happy. I'm not, one Astros player said recently. They just take out the human element of baseball. Sorry, they just take out the human element of baseball uh sorry they just take out the human element of baseball it's hard to play for a gm who just sees you as a number instead of a person and then this is the quote that i i think is particularly strong jeff is experimenting with all of us and that's a pretty i mean you don't want when a couple weeks ago um when we talked about that Ken Rosenthal interview with Jeff Luna, when he asked whether the shifts are, as some have accused,

merely a means of collecting information for the future when the Astros are going to be competitive and whether they're not actually an attempt to win games now, but just to collect information. And I followed that up by writing an article about, and I, but just to collect information. And I followed that up by writing an article about, and I don't think that's true, I think that's probably not true, but I followed that up with an article about what you would do if you had full control of a team for a year and you wanted to use it to run experiments and collect information for later. And one of the first rules is that you can't be too obvious, that you can't put yourself in a position to be sanctioned by the league. But also,

you don't want the subjects to know that they're subjects. There's that observer effect where if they know that they're being watched and studied, that you can't trust the results anymore. And so it's really interesting to have this quote from this player who says Jeff is experimenting with all of us, where it sort of shifts the idea of, well, they're not just trying to save money and pool their resources for a time when it matters, but that they're actually kind of running this laboratory with players

who, you know, if they're thinking that way, certainly won't appreciate it. So I have a few topics about this that I can steer it to, but do you have any thoughts about this article that you want to start with? Yeah, I have plenty of thoughts about this article. I mean, I would say that based on this article, I'm not convinced, first of all, that this is really a problem, that it's a widespread perception problem, I think. You compared it to the Jeff Baker article. And I was more convinced

by the Jeff Baker article because you had current and former front office people going on record and talking about this, which is really rare. And in this case, I mean, Evan says it's based on 20 interviews with all sorts of players and executives and agents. But the actual Astro's negativity in the article comes from, I think, three quotes only, three sources. One of them is the anonymous current Astro that you just read. One is an anonymous agent who says something about how the Astros treat people like numbers. And then another one is by former Astro Bud Norris, who seems to have sort of gone on the anti-Astros speaking circuit this season. This is not the first anti-Astros quote that Bud Norris has

shared. There was a story earlier this year in March on MLB.com where it was about the shift, and Bud Norris was saying, from my understanding, they were just taking stats and putting it into a database. They did it more for a database. They were trying to get information to make their own new system. It was really confusing, and they didn't have any input from me or any of their pitchers. So clearly, Bud Norris has a problem with the Astros. I've heard that his issues with the Astros sort of started with the previous regime more so than the current one.

I don't know all the details, but that's my understanding of it anyway. He clearly has a bone to pick with them. But, I mean, it's only natural, I suppose, that a team that is trying some new and different things, as the Esters are, would get some pushback about it. And they've also maybe opened themselves up to it a bit by being very vocal about these changes. I mean, none of this is a secret. We hear quotes from Jeff Luna all the time, or, you know, everyone in the Astros, decision scientists, you know,

we hear, I mean, just the title decision scientists, I feel like probably opens them up for some ridicule possibly. But the fact is that they talk about these things all the time. They talk about the shifting. They talk about the tandem starting system. And they've been really, really bad. So when you come out and you talk about your new and innovative methods and you're winning 50 games, I could see how you could ruffle some feathers. And I've wondered at times why they want to talk about these things so much, why they want to make these people available for quotes, why they seem to talk more than most front

offices do. And I've wondered if maybe they're trying to put a positive spin on all of the losing. Because if they didn't say anything then the only story would be we're the team that wins 50 games every year whereas they're trying to talk about how this is going to pay off in the future and they're doing all these new and exciting things and that's that's a better narrative probably than the we lose every day narrative but uh it probably does does ruffle some feathers, does lead to some feelings in various places. Yeah, I mean, there's a sort of cynical explanation that one might offer

that basically it makes it look like, I mean, in one way of reading, the last three years or so is that the worse they do, the better it is. Like, look at how well our plan is going like if they won six you know if they had won 73 games or something they couldn't necessarily point to that and say like like look we've really burned it down and now we're gonna we're gonna build up so i don't think that is the explanation necessarily but uh but there is a way that that would basically inoculate them against criticism. Because if you're saying our plan is basically to be bad, which isn't what they say, but it's kind of implicit, then yeah, you can't. You're right.

And I don't mean to – we're talking about this article, and we're not talking about it because it's a big scandalous article. This is not like the Mariners won at to come out of this past three or four year period because it really is to some degree a battle over like the soul of baseball and competitive balance and whether we're going to, whether the league is going to base it, well, first off, whether this will work, whether this will be proven to be a viable strategy, and B, whether the league will accept it and whether the fans will accept it and whether other teams will accept it or whether some sort of response will be taken

to change the incentives in baseball, either officially or via unwritten rules. Because if the Astros win the 2016, 2017, and 2018 World Series, then what does baseball look like in 20 years? If that is established, if this is established as the way that you win, do you just constantly have teams 25 games a year? And really, I think this is a significant future is to figure out whether this works and what to do about it. And the story to some degree is about that too, although not quite so dystopian or whatever in its outlook. When we did our Astro season preview episode this year and we had Zachary Levine on, we had Evan on, the author of this article. episode this year and we had Zachary Levine on we had Evan on the author of this article and I asked Zachary whether he thought whether he thought the way that they have won or whether the

way they have tried to build a winner will sort of haunt them or follow them into the years when they are successful if they have those years as expected will when they're contending for playoff spots when they're winning playoff games, will everyone just say, well, they tanked for a few years. So it's, will it mar the achievement, you know, if they get to that point, having just totally burned it all down and not really tried to compete in the short term? Will people just say, well, sure, they, they threw in the towel, they got all those number one picks, of course, they would be good now. And I wondered whether that rep would sort of follow them into their more successful period. But yeah, that's not brought up so much in here. It's not, although it does. So in this quote by Lunau, we're not running for election here. It's not a popularity contest. We're trying to win big league games. We're trying to produce major league players in the minor leagues. If those two results are occurring, that's what we care about. So that does go to the question of whether popularity matters. And, you know, there's

this idea in politics that gaffes or scandals only matter if they confirm and reinforce a pre-existing narrative about that candidate. And the problem with the Astros being in this position that they're in right now and losing as badly as they've done and having so much conversation about the way that they're losing is that when, for instance, they don't bring up George Springer, well, every team plays service time games, but with the Astros, it confirms a narrative about how they don't care at all about winning, how they're crazy, crazy cheap,

and how they're sort of heartless in the way that they assess and or handle players. I mean, these are narratives that have been allowed to develop because of their strategy over the last three years. And so because of that, they stick to them. And so the question of whether popularity matters around the league, whether it matters if agents disapprove of them, whether it matters that Peter Gammons tisks them in

tweets, whether it matters that 29 other GMs are probably resentful that they could never get away with a 55-win season three years in a row, and Luno can. It's an interesting question. Does it matter if you have narratives around your team, Or ultimately, do narratives dissolve after one hot streak? I mean, you know, are narratives around a team as fleeting as, you know, like we see with George Springer, where after 30 plate appearances, well, he was a bust. You know, he shouldn't have been in the majors. They should have sent him back down.

He couldn't hit. He was a disaster. He was a flop. He was quad A. And then now he's, you know, super hot stuff, and nobody's talking about that anymore. So do narratives for teams flip just as quickly, or is this something where the Astros for the next five years are going to have to kind of be mindful of the way they behave, because they're always going to be on the defensive with everybody?

Yeah, I mean, well, it doesn't sound like they're, like they're going to be. Um, I mean, when, when Luna says, uh, or I guess Joe like characterizes what he's saying as he says, Luna seeks feedback from across the organization, but said feelings aren't high on his list of concerns unless they impact outcomes, which sounds like a sentence that would just piss people off, sort of, you know? Like if you are upset at the Astros for some reason and the GM says, we don't care about your feelings unless you do something about it, unless you stop playing hard, unless you leave, unless you refuse to sign an extension or re-sign with us, you leave, unless you refuse to sign an extension or resign with us.

He essentially says that, you know, it could be perceived in such a way as he doesn't care about how you feel as long as you're not going to act on those feelings. And then he just says, anytime you've got human beings involved, you want to understand how they're impacted. And the whole, I mean, all of these criticisms that the Astros think human beings are numbers or they only care about numbers. I mean, it sounds a lot like Joe Morgan talking about Moneyball, right? When he says, why would I want to read a book about a computer that gives computer numbers? I mean, it's the same sort of same sort of objection. And it seems overblown. I mean, I don't think anyone with the estrus is really reducing anyone to numbers or thinking that nothing but numbers matters. some could get to the point where it's bad PR that actually hurts them,

where, I don't know, one player has a bad experience and he says it's the front office. They don't care about you. They only care about numbers. And he tells his friend who's a free agent and that free agent doesn't want to sign there. But ultimately, I don't know. I have a hard time seeing it reach the point where it would really derail the rebuilding plan.

I mean, if they have the talent and they develop the talent, it seems to me like it'll all work out. And if this were, I don't know, if this were a team that were winning right now, people would be writing books about how they were winning because of shifting and tandem starters and all that, right? winning because of shifting and tandem starters and all that, right? So if they start winning using these strategies, then I would imagine that the perception would flip.

Yeah, I think that to some degree the tandem starters and the shifting and the only looking at players as numbers, that stuff actually is, I don't know if it's a straw man or not, but that benefits the Astros front office, I would think. Because then it turns into a progress versus tradition argument, and history generally judges the progress side pretty well. In fact, even if history doesn't we it seems like the progress side always kind of has the cool cachet and i mean if they can if they if this is about whether you know they can this this generation's billy bean can defend himself against this generation's joe morgan's that's going to look really good for them right and and a lot of this article is about that

it's about you know how the players respond to respond to the shift and the tandem starting and all that. And that doesn't really, I think, capture what makes the Astros different. I mean, what makes the Ast their career and their compensation, then it starts to get dicey. Because it's not really that cool to take money out of a 21-year-old's pocket or to to keep him down uh it i don't think that this case has been made well but it sort of hinted kind of this this idea that that maybe keeping them in the minors is like leverage to get them to sign an extension uh i think i think that's probably not true but if that sentiment is out there you know it doesn't look good. So there's really kind of two threads of how you could criticize the Astros. If it's just, oh, well, they shift more than other teams, that's never going to hold up, and that makes Lunau and the rest of them look smart. Unless what sounds paranoid, but just this whole lab rat idea

that all these players are just running on their little hamster wheels wheels while everyone in the Astros front office steeples their fingertips and, you know, records everything in a spreadsheet. Which, I mean, that sounds paranoid, right? And it's, I mean, I guess we've heard that now from multiple sources, but it sounds very far-fetched. It does. And there's a part where Luno says, um, that everything is harder when you're losing. I forget exactly what the quote was and he wasn't talking about what we're talking about, but, um, it does seem like part of the challenge of going through an Astros style rebuild is that everything is harder when you're losing and it's harder to get the players to buy

into your, um, you know harder when you're losing. And it's harder to get the players to buy into your system when there's constant losing. It's harder to get the media probably to buy into your shifting when everybody's losing. It probably actually is a lot harder to get everybody to buy in on all of these things. And you do need buy-in. And so that might ultimately be one of the things that would keep the Astros style rebuild from being a regular thing. It might actually be that for every loss that you add over 90, you have a less efficient development system or a less efficient big league club for some reason. It actually is hard to get buy-in when there's this omnipresent sense that none of the games matter because we're losing anyway and that the front office doesn't care about us

because they don't give us what we need to compete and that we're all doomed anyway because by the time a good team comes around, they'll probably kick us out for the hot prospect who's in AA right now, artificially in AA because they don't want to promote him or whatever. And it might just be that, in fact, you have to have a certain level of competence in order to keep the trains running, more or less. So I don't know. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if we've seen that with the Astros. I don't know if they'll ultimately see it. They're on a pace to win 60 games right now, which incidentally, which is better than 55, which is where they've been the last three years. It's still 60. Yeah. And I mean, you definitely need to have some tact when you do something new and different

and potentially threatens people. It helps to be able to convey it in a non-threatening way or, you know, to try to finesse how it's going to be received. Like when John Hart was telling me about a time that he offered an extension to Omar Vizquel, or they were working out an extension, and he thought a very team-friendly extension and a very long-term extension. And he said to Vizquel, you know, if we sign this, I don't want you to come back in here in a year or two

and say that we need to renegotiate it because it's too too friendly to the team and viscal said sure okay and then he went on to to become a better player and he was locked up at this lower rate and he did he came back in and he wasn't happy with his contract and yeah and so you do need to to worry about that sort of thing like if you are lowballing your players on these offers and thus far they've low-balled them to such a degree that they haven't even accepted them. But if they were to accept them and then go on to become stars

and be locked up to these very team-friendly deals, then maybe you have to worry about whether they will be happy and whether they will want to renegotiate or whether they'll feel like they they got taken by the team when they were vulnerable at an earlier stage of their career that sort of thing so you know if it's a widespread feeling on the astros that that it's not just bud norris and it's not just this one anonymous current astro but it's everyone in the clubhouse sitting there feeling like the front office is experimenting with them and doesn't care about them and thinks they're all numbers, that would be bad. That would be a failure on the part of the front office or the manager or the coaching staff.

Because even if you are judging them based on how they perform and how they produce, you still want to convey the impression that you care about them as people and you want them to succeed. So it's something that matters, right? Or maybe it doesn't matter if those players don't play any less hard because they figure, well, if I don't get a long-term job here, I'll catch on somewhere else. I still want to play my hardest so I look good to all the other teams. Then who knows, maybe they, maybe they give you the same effort that they would otherwise. Um, which is sort of what Luna is saying with the, the feelings versus

impact. But, uh, but all in all, you would, you would prefer that the team be able to, to convey what they're doing and spread their message in a way that that everyone would buy into but as you said maybe it's difficult with the the record as it is uh this is uh i this might be the last thing i have to say about this this isn't really about the astros um but it does have to do with the conversation we had about uh giving extensions to minor leaguers and or tommy john patients and whether they will see it as as too much profiteering on the club's part. Like if you can get to a point where the leverage is so overwhelmingly on the club's side that any offer is going to look suspicious. And Boris, in response to or talking about their offers to Robbie Grossman,

which had you heard about that one that was that surprised me yeah yeah no robbie grossman matt deming is in george springer boris said uh this is a boris quote i think the key thing is you got to be able to have the information to make a positive decision on them i view it as something you have to have very carefully analyzed because normally when they're offering it that early it is for for a very consistent reason, and normally it's not one that's value to the player. Of course, that's Boris. He's both smart and not shy about pointing out that clubs are self-interested, just as everybody else in this world is.

But that was a pretty clear statement of what we worried agents and players would think in this situation. I like the song Come On, Come On, which was yep i like uh i like the song come on come on which was track 13 and i like the song radio which was track seven i feel i feel like i might have skipped a six which is satellite and then gone from six on on out uh like track three i just want to see i don't want to have to play that when this is over well you will and then i can, I still listen to Astro Lounge. Anyway, I don't think the Astros will truly be outcast unless they give Matt Albers a safe situation, which still has not happened. Yeah. Sorry, I'm listening to Smash Mouth now.

All right. Are we finished? Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah. I know this song yeah good song alright this is relative to the smash mouth oeuvre no need

no need to qualify that statement let me ask you this I have one more smash mouth question for you do you have their third album? I'm looking at my Smash Mouth library here. I appear to have five Smash Mouth albums. What? I may have an undiscovered Smash Mouth album.

Nobody has five Smash Mouth albums yeah just which ones which one did you quit on gift of rock or did you go to summer girl did you skip one um looks like i have i have uh i have magic oh my gosh gift of rock is a christmas covers yeah i did not have that one okay so you have you bought it wait a minute Okay, so you bought a... Wait a minute. You have magic. You bought a Smash Mouth album in the year 2012. I acquired it somehow.

Something via money from a person who was offering it for money, I assume. Oh, I see. Perhaps. You have... I'm not going to say anything about that. I see it.

Okay, well, that is different. How do you decide what to listen to? I'm curious what to say anything about that. I see it. Okay, well, that is different. How do you decide what to listen to? Like, I'm curious what the decision tree is that leads you to the fifth Smash Mouth CD. Like, when you wake up tomorrow morning, is there actually a route by which you will be listening to the Smash Mouth album Magic? No, I think I was disappointed by all Smash Mouth albums that followed Astro Lounge. But I like Astro Lounge so much that each subsequent Smash Mouth album gets at least one play from me, just in case they managed to recapture that old Astro Lounge magic. What sort of day or what sort of activity is it that you like Astro Lounge to accompany? Anything.

The sunny day or winter day? Yeah, your classic California summer band, right? So do you do it in the winter when you're longing for summer, or do you do it in the summer when you're hurt? Really, any time the mood takes me, which could be year-round. Uh-huh. All right. All right. This will come up again.

I hope not. All right. So please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com. Subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Always, always adding features at the Play Index. This weekend, Sean Foreman added a new search option for walk-off wins and losses. So in the GameFinders,

if you want to search for walk-off wins and losses, you can now do that. Constantly updating the Play Index. I, as it turns out, by coincidence, yesterday started a piece about walk-offs, which everybody can read on Wednesday, I think, probably, and it required some research.

And just by chance, I think it might have been the day that it was added. And just by chance, I happened to notice, while I was sort of trying to figure out how to use Play Index, the walk-off button, and I clicked it, and it probably saved me two hours, although I did it wrong, and so it also cost me two hours. Like, it would have taken me four hours, but I did it in two, and now I realize that I could have done it in like four minutes. So it's not that you have such pull with Sean that you got him to add that option. Maybe he would have.

Just by chance. All right. So we'll be back tomorrow. Since we didn't have a Monday show this week, we are up to the listener email show tomorrow already. So please send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.