Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 461: The Fantastic Phil Hughes

Episode Date: June 2, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about several stories, then discuss Phil Hughes’ success and whether teams should trade prospects more often.

Good morning and welcome to episode 461 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. How are you, Ben? All right. Prepared for another week of podcasting. I didn't mean it that way. I just didn't have anything else to say. Yeah. Okay. So do you have anything that you want to start with? Not a whole lot

I suppose we could Do updates of a couple of the things That we keep track of That only we care about Well let me I have a few things We talked about the We had a 3.0, swinging on 3-0.

We had a couple weeks where that was a thing. Yep. And I wrote about how it's not clear to me whether swinging on 3-0 is a stat head thing to do or a non-stat head thing to do because there doesn't seem to be a consensus among teams, among sort of stat-head teams and non-stat-head teams about which one they do, and it's all over the board, and it's interesting to me that a strategy hasn't developed that's clear one way or the other anyway. In this piece, I wrote about how the A's used to almost never swing on 3-0, and David Forrest was quoted in 2008 or something like that,

saying that if his guys swung three or four times all year on 3-0, David Forrest was quoted in 2008 or something like that saying that if his guy swung three or four times all year on 3-0, it was a big deal. Josh Donaldson was talking about how even if you hit a home run on 3-0, Billy would probably be unhappy with you for not drawing the walk. This year, though, they'd already swung on 3-0 like five times or something when I'd written that, so there was a clear uptick. Today, Sunday, Jed Lowry swung on 3-0 and hit a home run off Jared Weaver, and Jared Weaver almost stared him down.

It wasn't clear whether it was just Jared Weaver staring down a guy who had a home run, which is kind of common, or whether he was specifically b in, that an athletic had swung at three Oh, and he was shocked. Or if it was considered a, maybe a breach of unwritten rules because the A's were winning by three runs. That would be a stretch. What inning was it? It was like the sixth,

I think. Yeah. That seems like a stretch. There is a, that epic length, Tim Kirchhen article last week. Did you read that about the, the unwritten rules and swinging on three? Oh, is one of them when you're up by like five runs or so.

Three runs seems close enough that no one would be angry. Yeah, I agree. Since I wrote the piece, which was about two weeks ago, Josh Donaldson has also swung on 3-0 twice. So this seems, I mean, they're basically, I don't know what. I don't know what they were really doing when David Forst said three or four a year would be a lot. But if three or four a year was a lot, then this would obviously be significantly more. So that's interesting.

And the reaction to Lowry in particular, so far as I can tell, if you never swing on 3-0, ever, ever, in your entire career, ever, like literally, like Kevin Euclid, for instance, and Bobby Abreu, they actually went like a decade without doing it. And as far as I can tell, there is no difference in the way guys pitch you. The idea that you're keeping them honest seems to be not really true. Pitchers basically seem to throw on 3-0 more or less the same no matter what. They might be more careful with good hitters, but they won't be more careful with aggressive hitters. And the reaction to Lowry's home run, though, indicates that maybe Weaver,

maybe Weaver, maybe an idea for what Weaver might have been thinking was that you weren't supposed to do that. I was banking on you not doing that. And that would seem to indicate there might be some pitcher response to not swinging on 3-0. Anyway, that was a lot of stuff. It was kind of boring. So let's see. Dale Swain, Royals hitting coach, hitting in swing. Oh, yes, right.

I want to rate this on the gaff meter. Okay. Look, just because we're rating something on the gaff meter doesn't mean that it's a gaff. Right. It could be a one on the gaff meter. Yeah, sure. Is one the lowest? Is one no gaff, or do we have to have a zero?

I think you could just have just unrated. It's not at all a gaff. Yeah. Well, then that would mean that it's not on the gaff meter. Yes, you're right. So we'll determine whether this is one or not. All right, so Swain's explanation for why the Royals haven't been hitting is pretty simple. And so this is from Andy McCullough.

Gosh, you've got to be kidding me. Andy McCullough. I told him I was worried about mispronouncing his name. Yes, you did. Didn't even get close on the first try. Andy McCullough of the Kansas City Star says, as Swim scanned his new charges, he settled on one root issue. Quote, elevation, he called it.

Quote, we've swung at pitches down in the zone way too much, and from thigh high to the top of the strike zone, we're not doing enough damage, which is probably all true. It does have a little bit of a we're not hitting because we're not hitting explanation dressed up in fancy words. And really even a catchphrase or like an elevation is... I mean, you know, all the pitches you want to hit are generally up in the strike zone

and all the pitches you don't want to hit are generally down in the zone way too much. It does feel like a bit of an obvious explanation. I don't know if that... Probably not a gaffe, though. It's true. Probably not, right. I mean, it's, what do we expect him to say about why they're not hitting?

What is a good answer to that? I mean, probably that they're, I mean, that they're not swinging at good pitches to hit or hittable pitches, if that's the case, is a perfectly fine explanation, right? It doesn't really say, doesn't suggest a solution exactly, except to tell people to start swinging at those pitches. But it's about as good an answer as I would expect. I don't know. To me, it's like the scouting report that you see

in the first inning of a national TV broadcast. Right, a little bit, yeah. But we don't expect them to go into individual hitters mechanics and talk about you know how everyone's front foot isn't getting down in time or something i mean you know when you ask someone something like that then the answer often is kind of just we're not hitting because we're not hitting. I think you're right. I think this is a non-gaff, and I would leave it unrated. I would like a hitting coach. I think if you're a hitting coach and you have to say something

and you're not going to say anything substantive, but you also want to say something that's true, I guess, I might just say for any struggling team that they need to make pitchers throw strikes, get into hitters' counts, and do damage in those hitters' counts. I feel like that's true. That's simple. That's the basic strategy of baseball. It's never not true.

And yet, it doesn't quite seem so... It's not quite literally the definition of hitting in the way that what Swain said it almost is. Right. All right, one last thing. The Pirates were on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball this week, and this is an update of an article I wrote like three years ago before we had a podcast or you knew who I was.

The Pirates, by my reckoning, by my exhaustive research, had not been on Sunday Night Baseball since 2002. It was the longest absence from Sunday Night Baseball of any team in the sport. And so that streak has now snapped. The Pirates, they did it. They played on Sunday night. Cool. You'd think they would have gotten one last year at some point.

Well, the first two-thirds were all scheduled in advance. So I did double-check to make sure that in September there wasn't one, but it doesn't appear that there was one. Okay, and my update on continuing effectively wild stories we didn't mention on friday show that on thursday night ryan webb finished a game without a save which brought him into a tie with matt albers with 83 career games finished without a tie or without a save um and then the other story the uh the pitchers hustling on batted balls, hustling to beat out base hits story. There was another one of these this weekend.

Jeff Manship suffered some sort of injury, I think quadricep injury, running to first, trying to beat out a grounder. But I'm going to allow this one because this extenuating circumstances, it was the bottom of the 13th inning and there were two outs and there was a runner on third. So the, the winning run would have scored if he had beaten out this ball, but he did not. Um, and instead he,

he had to be removed from the game, but I will allow in that circumstance, I think Jeff, Jeff Manship's wellbeing was less important than that run scoring. I think it was either the same game or no, it was the game before that that my man

Reid Brignac got the walk-off hit. Racked up seven plate appearances. Racked up 13 plate appearances on the weekend for me. It's bad news. I do not.

I'm not rooting for extra innings games. Although I have Sean Camp is with the Phillies, right? But he might not be pitching anymore. I assume he's not. Because, yeah, he's not. He hasn't. Unfortunately, that would have been a good weekend for him to be in the bullpen. Yes.

All right. All right. So Phil Hughes is what we're going to talk about. All right. Phil Hughes, you know, is doing great. He threw eight innings against the Yankees and it's always dangerous to make

too much of, you know, especially one start narratives. But, you know, I have to admit, I was kind of waiting until he pitched in New York before I really said that he was new and improved.

He didn't vow vengeance on the Yankees like Kyle Farnsworth. No. I guess he did survive a start in Yankee Stadium without giving up seven home runs. Yeah, exactly. So he went eight innings. He struck out six. He walked two, allowed two runs,

lowered his ERA to 3.12. Probably going to be an all-star. Probably, it seems like at this point. And that was his first walk allowed in seven starts since April 20th. He has 56 strikeouts and eight walks. He's a phenom. I mean, he's an amazing thing this year.

And there's a couple of things that are interesting about this to me. One of which is that you wrote about Phil Hughes' compulsive tinkering before, I think before the season started, right? Just before the season started? Yes, it was in spring training when he announced what his latest change was going to be. And with, I would say, with a bit of mockery in your voice? Yeah. Yeah, I pointed out that, you know, he at the time he announced it was like late February, he said he was scrapping his slider.

He was going to go with the cutter and his curveball instead. And so I went through sort of the, I called it the 10 phases of Phil Hughes and I traced his pitch usage from year to year often accompanied by quotes from Phil Hughes explaining why he was making these changes and he has a long history really from the beginning of his time in the majors actually even before from his his minor league career of ditching pitches when he feels that they're not working and and picking up new pitches

or bringing back old pitches um and so yeah i i sort of i took this latest change to to be more of the same not necessarily uh because when when someone who has no history of this announces that they're making a change you you think well maybe we We've seen in the past the guy adds a new pitch and suddenly he's successful or something. But Phil Hughes is the pitcher who cried new pitch in that respect in that he's always adding new pitches or going back to old pitches. And it hasn't really produced the results for the most part. So I dismissed it. Yes.

So he said he was ditching the slider going to the cutter and that's what he's done he ditched the slider he's going with the cutter and he's not only gone with the cutter but he's going with the cutter a lot he's he's almost he's kind of almost ditched the curve ball too basically he's basically just slider cutter for seamer now right yeah and uh so first of all uh i don't know how much you've paid attention to Phil Hughes since he left your area code, but would you expect that this change will take or are we, you know, is it inevitable he's going to have three bad starts and then before you know it, he's going to have three new pitches? Yeah, that certainly is history that something will be

working well and he says, this is working well and I'm sticking with it. And then, yeah, he goes through a rough patch. And maybe one of his pitch types gets hit particularly hard, or he perceives that it's getting hit particularly hard, and he ditches it. So I would expect that, yes, if he has some sustained struggles, he goes through a rough patch, then maybe the same thing could happen. But then again, I assume that this was not a meaningful change. So maybe he has completely broken the pattern. I mean, I don't know.

I haven't looked, but it's hard to imagine he's had a stretch quite like this one. I mean, maybe there are guys like this happening all the time and I don't notice it. But, I mean, it seems like when you break out the 8 to 1 strike out to walk ratio, you know, for a two-month stretch, that's like probably more legit than all the other things, all the other good stretches he's had, right? other things, all the other good stretches he's had, right? Well, yeah. I mean, he did have a very good stretch in 2010 when he was an all-star also that season. And on, what is it, June 2nd, on June 2nd in 2010, he had a 2.54 ERA after, let's see, he had made 10 starts and he had pitched 63 innings, struck out 64 guys and walked 20. So not the same sort of elite Cliff Lee kind of control,

but he had been very effective over that stretch too. And there was actually an eight-start stretch in which he struck out 50 and walked nine, which is closer, which is pretty darn close to the numbers he has this year. Okay, so maybe it's nothing. He is throwing a ton of strikes right now. And one of the things that's interesting to me about this, and I don't know if it will

stay interesting, and I don't know if he'll keep doing this, and I don't know if he'll stay good if he is, but as we said, he's basically become a fastball cutter guy at this point. And he's also basically become a throw-the-ball-in-the-strike-zone-every-time guy. He's basically just pumping strikes in there. Yeah, he has, I think, the second highest zone rate in baseball after Nathan Evaldi, I think. And maybe the highest first pitch strike rate, something like that, I think. So it seems like he's basically become a reliever, but he's throwing full starts. And I always kind of wonder whether we need to rethink how complicated pitching is

and whether, in fact, we're going to see more starters who are more like relievers, who are simpler. Because it seems like this is so simple. I don't know. It feels like maybe people talk themselves into being more complicated than they need to. We all know that you need to have a third pitch and you need to have a third pitch and you need you need to

have a change up and you need to you know work the four quadrants and and all that but like what if you don't i mean well i well he theoretically he could be right i mean i haven't looked at his his strike zone profile but he's throwing all these strikes i guess it's theoretically possible that he's he's not throwing anything down the middle he's just somehow nailing all these strikes, I guess it's theoretically possible that he's not throwing anything down the middle. He's just somehow nailing all four corners. Yeah, I guess. But even still, even if that were the case, there's still another truism is, you know, like you waste a pitch on two strikes, for instance. And, you know, getting batters to chase is a big part of pitching.

Getting batters to chase is often the biggest part of pitching. Like Koji Ohara is the great strike thrower of our era, the Dennis Eckersley of our era. But even Koji Ohara, he doesn't actually throw the ball in the strike zone that much. He's not near the top of the leaderboard for pitches in the strike zone. He just gets guys to chase constantly, and that's a big part of pitching, as we all know. But maybe that's not either. Maybe it's just as simple as doing what, you know, if you have enough of a wrinkle and

you throw it hard enough. I mean, that's kind of what the cutter is, I guess, right? It's the pitch that you can throw in the the strike zone but it it both has movement and it is hard and therefore is is hard to hit yeah and all the other pitches that really kind of only have one or the other and so you have to get fancy and and trick batters but the cutter maybe that's what makes it kind of great when you can pull it off yeah yeah. Yeah. And he's, he's always had the reputation of a guy who like can't finish hitters off. That's always what people say about him, that he, he might get ahead of them, but he doesn't have the out pitch. He can't, can't finish off the plate appearance. I, I think I looked at the numbers at some point and I don't remember what I found, but this year on 0-2, batters are hitting.280 against him.

After 0-2, they're swing and miss pitch, out pitch, maybe you are more served by just throwing it in there because if you aren't going to get anyone to chase anyway, the pitch isn't going to convince someone to swing at a pitch way outside the strike zone, then maybe the best thing to do is just throw it in there while batters are kind of back on their heels because it's 0-2. All right, so one more thing about Phil Hughes.

That was a loud one. Yes. I don't remember if you wrote about this or if it was in the transaction analysis or what, but it was a fairly common sentiment that he would benefit from pitching in Minnesota from being in a pitcher's park he's one of the most extreme fly ball pitchers in the league and so you could very easily say that like no stadium in in the game was maybe less suited to him than Yankee

Stadium where you know lefties were able to elevate the ball against him and have it carry out. And sure enough, if you look at where he's pitched before this start on Sunday in Yankee Stadium, he had six starts in Minnesota, which is a pitcher's park, one in Petco, which is a pitcher's park, one in Kauffman Stadium, which is a pitcher's park, one in Comerica, which is a pitcher's park, or at least non-home run parks. They're all pitcher's parks if they're not home run parks.

Kaufman's kind of neutral, right? Not if you ask Dayton Moore. It's impossible to hit home runs. Or draw walks. Because it's so hard to hit home runs. Because you can't hit home runs, you can't draw walks. According to Dayton Moore. And then once in U.S. Cellular, which is a hitter's park, and that was one of his worst starts of the year. And he allowed half the home runs he's allowed this year were in that start.

And so I guess I always wondered when – I particularly wondered it when he was signed with Minnesota and it made so much sense. Why guys aren't constantly going to parks that suit them? And why, even more than that, why guys aren't constantly being traded around the league to parks where they're better? Because it's not just that, I mean, every pitcher's better in target field than at Yankee Stadium. But Hughes has a particular skill set where he would benefit more than most. And so it just feels like he's probably a win better to the Twins, a win more valuable to the Twins than he ever could have been to the Yankees. And you have to wonder why baseball can't kind of work out this inefficiency and get everybody in situations where they're going to thrive.

get everybody in situations where they're going to thrive. First off, I'm just noting that he's pitching a lot of really good pitcher's parks. That might be one reason that he'll regress and then be tinkering again in a month. Do you think that it's conceivable that a team would have a guy like Phil Hughes, who is 22, and say, well, he's great, he's perfect, but he's never going to thrive in our park quite like he can in another and trade? Or is this just always going to be too risk-averse? Yeah, I bet if we thought about it and did some research, we could find some sort of example like that. Maybe someone listening is thinking of something. But yeah, I mean, if you're the Yankees and Hughes was like the great hope of your farm system, which has not produced much in recent years, and he was one of the top prospects in

baseball, it's kind of hard for you probably to give up on that or to accept that that maybe he's worth more to another team even though he could be potentially worth a lot to your team and and you've got all the all your fans who get attached to him oh he's homegrown phil hughes and i mean i i was aware of phil hughes for years before he was actually on the yankees looking at his minor league stats and getting excited about him coming up. And when you draft a guy and maybe you have the scout who's still in your organization who recommended that you sign him and signed him and you invest all this money into developing him and you get attached to him personally and he's yours, you know, he's your prospect.

You found him and drafted him and developed him. Then it's kind of hard to give him up. That's probably part of the reason why we don't see more prospect for prospect trades. It's hard to give up on a guy like that. Probably that's, you're attached, right? So it's kind of hard to give him up just to look at it coldly and intellectually and say he's not the best fit for our park. This other guy would be a better fit.

Maybe we could help each other out. But you're right. It probably should happen more often than it does. It's weird. There's this weird incentive where if you're a GM, you almost want to trade a guy to a situation where he's going to fail. Because if you trade him to a situation where he flourishes,

then you look like an idiot. And most of the public isn't going to do that park effect math or whatever and figure out, oh, well, that's because he's in Minnesota. They're just going to assume that he would have flourished anywhere, that he would have gone. And so you actually kind of like, if you can, you'd like to trade him to a place where he's going to actually do even worse than he was doing with you. And then you look like a genius.

And I don't know how much that factors in to the subconscious or conscious decisions that GMs make. Maybe you feel like you can't get full value for him if he's been underperforming in your park. Maybe you can't make the argument to the other team that, oh, he's going to be much better for you. If he had been with you the whole time, he'd be much better. They're going to give up whatever it looks like he was worth based on his actual numbers, maybe. So maybe it's hard to fully leverage that ballpark fit. So I was thinking about this also with Oscar Tavares this weekend, because you hear all the time now about how teams overrate prospects and how it's so hard to trade your veterans on

deadline because nobody wants to give up their prospects anymore. They all have this sort of obsessive attachment to their own prospects. And I don't know, maybe the their own is the key there. Maybe it only works if it's their own prospects. But I mean, it does seem like if you were a really smart team and you were like the Cardinals and prospects in general had become overvalued, that you should think about trading Tavares, even though obviously he's going to have tremendous value and he's going to be underpaid and a potential superstar for the next six years. But every other team in baseball is able to do that math too.

They also know that he's going to be underpaid and a superstar for the next six years and presumably they would give you that sort of value in return for him and you know the cardinals arguably need taveras less than other teams because they have a lot of depth almost a problematic amount of depth uh in their of the players in the best situation for them to thrive. It's just, it's not really ever in any, I don't know, maybe it's just not in any individual team's benefit. Like it looks nice to us when everything goes perfectly and efficiently, but to the team it's just too much of a gamble for not enough gain, I guess. The RJ Anderson's piece about the A's and how the A's traded from a very good farm system

to even when they should have been rebuilding, and they traded a lot of their prospects and that's why they're where they are today. Made me wonder whether Billy Bean was sort of thinking that exact same thing because Bean has complained a lot over the last few years about how hard it is to get prospects or to get prospects for your veterans and how now you have to trade a guy with three years of service time if you expect to get anything good back for just that reason. So maybe Billy Bean just figured out, well, hey, if I can't get prospects, then the market must be crazy. I ought to be selling prospects.

And there was a story a few days ago about the Cardinals' outfield depth and how maybe they will start thinking about selling. There was a quote from John Mazalek who said, when you look at depth in baseball, it's a good problem to have, but I think we're starting to get to the point where it might become a problem. So even though it's a nice thing to have true depth in your system, at some point you've got to be able to play the depth. So that was related to promoting Tavares, but also to possibly trading some of their surplus.

But I think it's an interesting point about why players don't seek out these friendly environments themselves more often. And yeah, I wrote about how I thought Phil Hughes was a good signing by the Twins, both the terms and the fit for the park. And a lot of people said the same thing. And all of us were kind of looking at the fact that he had been more or less league average away from Yankee Stadium and that as a extreme fly ball, as people thought, not so much the extreme control. But he he's also I read an interview with him that Brandon Warren did a couple days ago. just comes from his mechanics and they didn't make much, they didn't make many changes to his mechanics, but for whatever reason, he just feels very comfortable and fluid and everything is working well right now. He also said, I wanted to go somewhere I felt would be a good fit,

both personally and with baseball. I felt like the Twins and Target Field kind of met every need and thing on the checklist. So he at least had this in mind, presumably, it seems like. And there was a quote from him earlier this year about how just the Twins clubhouse feels so relaxed to him after coming from the Yankees where there's so much media and attention and scrutiny. So it's possible that just temperamentally he's better suited for a more laid-back atmosphere or smaller media market um less less of a spotlight on every single move but it seems like he he had the ballpark thing in his mind also and you'd you'd think that if a player wasn't aware of that himself at least his agent would be that'd be you know his number one number move. If you're an agent and you're giving your player advice on where he should go as a free

agent, then you'd think that a good agent would certainly factor that into the recommendation because ultimately it's going to mean more money down the road. Yep. All right. Okay. So that's it for today. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference. Okay. So that's it for today. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com.

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