Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 47: Is the Alex Anthopoulos Honeymoon Over?/Why Can’t We Figure Out What Works in the Playoffs?

Episode Date: September 21, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss whether Alex Anthopoulos is taking too long to turn around Toronto, then talk about why we can’t find the secret to success in October. Also, Sam drops his wedding ring.

Good morning, good evening, welcome to episode 47 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. I'm with Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. I'm with Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. Ben, did it trouble you at all to find out today that darn near half our staff had never heard of Gangnam Style? It troubles me a little bit just because every website and the internet has been linking to those videos nonstop for the last few weeks. Otherwise, no. Yeah, I guess it shows how committed we are to baseball prospecting that we are not distracted by such petty things. Do you want to talk about baseball?

Sure, let's do that. I want to talk about Alex Anthopoulos. talk about Alex Anthopoulos. And I would like to talk about your piece today, yesterday in your world about playoff aces. All right. So neither of us has caught World Cup or World Baseball Championship qualifying fever. It's strange when you go to MLb.com there are and you click on news there are a lot of news about the pennant races interspersed with news about countries that have baseball teams that

i didn't know have baseball and they're playing games yeah don't spoil anything i'm taping them right okay uh so alexanthoulos, shortly before we started recording, I read a article that was critical of Alex Anthopoulos, which is not something I'm used to seeing. He has kind of been the darling or one of the darlings of the internet for the past couple of years, uh, based on the things he says and the moves that he makes, uh, which have been generally perceived as very smart and having a good process and all those, uh, fancy new GM terms. Can I interrupt you real quick? Yes, you can. Uh, I know about the moves he's made. I don't know that much, to be honest, about what he said.

What has he said? What is his style? Well, I mean, he obviously when he took over, he hired a million scouts, which is not something that you normally see from maybe a guy who's perceived as a numbers guy, but he is, you know, he's that style of new GM who talks about blending stats and scouting all the time and just kind of, I don't know, he sort of talks the sabermetric party line almost, or at least the multidisciplinary party line that is common to the new breed of GMs and which tends to get you endeared to people who write about baseball on the internet. So anyway, he has acquired a very good reputation over the past few years, and now suddenly it seems like there's some backlash against him, against the Blue Jays.

People are apparently upset about his handling of the Unal Escobar situation and possibly having let him off too easy. I don't really want to get into that, but he is also getting criticized for just how the team is doing and how he has constructed the roster. Greg Zahn, who is an analyst for Sportsnet, said that the Blue Jays clubhouse is consequence free and called Anthopolis a sabermetrician, a bean counter. The same Greg Zahn we should note who predicted Jeff Mathis offensive breakout this year. Yes, exactly. So Anthopolis kind of downplayed it, but apparently this is at least a narrative

in Toronto these days that people are a little frustrated with him. So it's been almost exactly three years since he was hired. And that reminded me of a Bill Feck quote, which everything does, which is, it has always been my belief that you have three years to produce a winning team after you come to town. If after that time you haven't come through, I suspect that the value of entertainment and publicity and promotion will fall off very substantially. So the Blue Jays in 2010, his first full season as GM, finished 85 and 77. The Blue Jays this year are 66 and 81. So if you want to play that

extremely simplistic game that politicians play, where they say, are you better off than you were three or four years ago and use whatever facts supports their case? In most cases, you could point at the Blue Jays record and say, are the Blue Jays better off now than they were when Alex Anthopoulos took over? That would not make him look very good. Do you think that now that he's been there three years, that it's fair to judge him for the lack of success at the major league level? Obviously he has built an impressive farm system. There are things to be optimistic about, but the results haven't been there really at the major league level. So do you think his reputation should be at all tarnished,

or is it too soon? I think that there's probably some element of this is a reaction to the Orioles. There's always been a sense that the AL East was the haves and have-nots, and the Rays had somehow managed to bust through in an extraordinary way, but they were still the outlier. And now that the Orioles have managed to get into a playoff position this year, the Blue Jays are really the only one who hasn't been able to figure out a way to leapfrog the powers. And we've talked about the Orioles so much, but there is a certain element of any single season that is to a large degree probably out of the – that was my wedding ring. I don't know if you heard that.

I have no idea where it is now. All right, ladies, Sam is married. It's in the garage somewhere. Anyway, totally disrupted. There's an element to any season that is to some degree out of the general manager's hands. And if you think that three years is the point where a GM should have a team that is his own, that is probably fair. But I think to judge any GM on one year of performance is not fair. And that's essentially what you're doing. If you're saying this is the first year of Anthopolis, then you wouldn't necessarily say that this year is definitive. It hasn't been a good year, obviously,

but it's been a year that's been badly disrupted by injuries. Now, on the other hand, you could say that it's been a year where he's gotten a shockingly great season out of Edwin Encarnacion, a player who he wasn't even responsible for bringing in, and that there are various things that have gone right for Toronto. But, I mean, largely it's been a year that has been disrupted by injuries, where the Blue Jays have underperformed their run differential, where some things haven't really broken right for them.

But I don't think it's a worthless roster by any means. And I also can't really think of a deal that he's made that I didn't like. And I just have, I mean, I guess, well, you know, even the Napoli for Francisco trade, I thought made a lot of sense at the time. And so I'm not even going to hold that against him. So, you know, I would say that I'm not turned against him by any means. So I would say that I'm not turned against him by any means. Yeah. I mean, at the height of the Anthopolis love, kind of after all of the excellent prospects they acquired and getting rid of Vernon Wells, I remember Kevin Goldstein basically saying he seems to be very smart and he seems to be doing very smart things, but hold on, folks, you know, he hasn't won anything yet.

So he was kind of taking the contrarian view, which maybe now is becoming something more of a mainstream view in that that success hasn't been there yet. And I mean maybe it is unfair to label him a failure in any way, but maybe it's also unfair to put him in the same class as a freedman or someone like that who has actually translated what seems to be a good process into good results. Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, there's multiple tiers that we talk about when we praise a GM. And I don't think that not being in the very, very top tier with the most exceptional GMs means that you're a failure. As you wrote earlier this year, there's a lot of smart GMs

and being a smart GM does not guarantee you success anymore. But I would certainly say that he is a GM that I would be perfectly happy to have as my team's GM, especially if my team were, for instance, like the Dodgers and he were replacing a guy like Ned Coletti. And, you know, I would hope that this meme does not catch on to the point where it becomes hard for him to keep his job, because I think he deserves certainly a few more tries. Although I don't know that the Blue Jays are necessarily in a good position to compete either. I imagine that we can have this conversation and through his will have not won anything just

because of the structural disadvantages that Toronto faces. Okay. You wanted to talk about me. Yeah. So I really liked your piece today. You wrote about aces and the idea, the sort of a long accepted conventional wisdom that a team with a dominant ace has an advantage in the postseason. And you had Colin devise a numerical means of testing this, and what you found was that there was virtually, well, there was less than no correlation, I think, between having the best ace in your series and actually winning more games than your opponent.

And this surprised me because if, well, I guess it surprises me that in a larger sense, it surprises me that we have not zeroed in on even a single variable that we can connect to postseason success. Yes. And it surprises me that this is not one that would show up because the fact is that October baseball is not the same as April to September baseball. There are more innings given to the top of your staff. There are more starts, a higher proportion of starts given to your ace. And it seems totally intuitive that it would benefit a team to have a Justin Verlander at the top of their rotation. And so I guess what I want to know is, do you think that there is, why do you think it is that October baseball so closely mirrors regular season baseball in results, despite the fact that it's in many ways, in many ways,

I mean, I didn't name all of them, but there are a lot of ways. It is a very different game. Yes, that is a good question. I don't know. I wrote in the article that, you know, we try very, very hard to find any hint of something, of some kind of element of team construction that would give someone an advantage in the playoffs because it is the time in the season where we look at stretches of three or five or seven games and we try to predict who will win, which is not really something we ever do for the first five months of the season. And, you know, it's kind of frustrating that we can't come up with some secret sauce, as we used to call it. Even the secret sauce that we used to cite has now been retired when we found that it didn't really predict how well a team would do. So every theory that's been advanced, and you're right right many of them are very persuasive um you know it it would

seem to make sense that having an ace that you could uh rely heavily on would help you um and it i mean a lot of the other theories that people have advanced whether it's teams that play small ball or teams that finish the season strong or teams that have a good defense or a good closer, whatever it is. You can make sort of compelling arguments for all of them, and then they all turn out not to show very much. And Colin, who has looked at this issue much more than I have and more intelligently than I have has basically reached the conclusion that there's not much more we can do than say regular season record is the best predictor of postseason

success and that to try to drill down to any deeper level and isolate one element of performance is just a futile exercise. I don't know why that is. Obviously, we are dealing with smaller sample sizes. We're dealing with better competition. But I don't know exactly why it wouldn't help to be able to rely on a good pitcher at the top of the rotation. I guess I cited some examples of teams that didn't really have a dominant ace at the top of the rotation, but they did have strong rotations. Such as the 2005 White Sox, who had four starters who all made a lot of starts and made good starts. And none of them was dominant or struck out seven guys

even per nine innings but they were all good and so it's understandable I guess why a team like that that has three or four very good starters would be just as likely to succeed as a team that has an ace since having an ace doesn't guarantee that you have a good second starter or third starter. There's other ways that you could look at this. You could kind of look at a top heavy rotation as opposed to a more evenly distributed rotation, which is a little different than just looking at an ace alone. But I think Colin tried to look into that too and again, didn't find anything compelling. Interesting.

I was going to suggest that rather than just looking at the ace, maybe the difference between the top three starters and the bottom two might reveal something because that's really, I don't know, a bit more of a complete picture of what a team's rotation is going to be like in the postseason. Yeah, I think Colin looked into that a bit and didn't immediately see anything that jumped out as a real effect. Okay, so two questions for you. One, do you think that we will find a secret sauce at some point in the next, I don't know, 16 years?

Because you cited the small sample, and each series is a small sample, but we're not really dealing with a small sample. Colin looked at what? How many years did Colin look at? Since 95. So that's 17 years of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of games. Yeah.

So it's not really a small sample. This has had plenty of time to show up. So the two questions are, do you think that we will find something in the future? And do you personally, looking at this team this year's likely playoff teams, have a pick that you think is likely to do well in the postseason because of their roster? Do you have a sort of a gut sense of what matters in the postseason? I would guess that someone in baseball or someone's in baseball working for a team or teams has some inkling of what works better in the playoffs.

I would bet that someone has studied that, someone whose job it is to discover that information and has come to some more meaningful conclusion than regular season record is the best we can do. I'm sure there are things that people have found, and perhaps we too will find that on the Internet someday. I'm guessing, though, that it's not that sizable in effect and that maybe it wouldn't be so significant that you'd really construct your regular season roster in such a way as to make it suitable for the playoffs. That's

kind of the suspicion. Mad Fientist Well, can I interrupt though? You looked at the playoff odds changes of the trade deadline trades. They're making trades. They're giving away things. They're taking on salary for trades that increase playoff odds by 1% or 2%. If you would increase your playoff odds by 1% or 2%, certainly you would do something to your roster that would increase your postseason odds by a few percent, especially if you are in a position like the Nationals or the Reds were, knowing that you were likely to make the playoffs, right? Yes, assuming that whatever that thing is that gives you the advantage

wouldn't put you at some sort of disadvantage over the course of the regular season. Yeah, but by July, I mean mean there are plenty of teams in the 90 percent uh per playoff odds by by late july yeah uh i think if if teams thought there was a real advantage they would try to exploit it um so as long as it's not the sort of thing where you'd be either i don't know tying up too much of your payroll payroll by trying to capture this postseason advantage and costing yourself in other areas. If that were the case, maybe it wouldn't happen. But you're right.

It doesn't have to be a big advantage for teams to still try to exploit it. try to exploit it um i i guess i would just kind of pick the nationals as the best team or the most likely team to win out of the national league even without steven strasburg uh by the way the reds became the first team to clinch a playoff spot but we shouldn't talk about that tonight they did i think so yeah because the nationals did as well as well yes um and so i think i would choose the nationals and if it weren't for uh the whole league strength thing i would probably take the nationals overall um it seems to be the opinion of colin who has studied this that the disparity between the leagues is still significant enough that you probably wouldn't pick a National League team, even if it's the best National League team.

He, in his chat yesterday, picked the Rangers and the Nationals, which is what his, he's working on some World Series odds to complement our playoff odds, and that is what they suggest, that the Rangers would be the favorite. And the Rangers were kind of the inspiration for my piece about aces, because as well as Udarvish has pitched lately, they haven't really had the dependable ace type all season.

So I'm going against the ace theory. And I guess I would take the Rangers and the Nationals. You, Darvish, is having a very good start as we record this podcast. And he has been extremely ace-like for a while. So I think, anyway, regardless, end of show. It's the weekend. I'll talk to you Sunday night. I'll talk to all of you Monday morning.

And we hope you have a very pleasant weekend.