Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 473: Never Stop Asking Questions

Episode Date: June 18, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener email questions about players who take pitches, catcher defense, spotting terrible teams a run, tool grades, and more.

I wish I had a lot of answers, cause that's the way it should be. There are all these questions, being directed at me. Just can't find the time to write my mind the way it wants to be. Good morning and welcome to episode 473 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. Hello. Hi.

Hi. Hi. Listener email show. Yeah. I issued a challenge last night for people to send better questions, and they responded to that challenge with some excellent questions. Anything to say before we begin? No, but I guess thank you to everybody. Yeah, sure. I had a couple things just in response to our Tony Gwynn episode yesterday. We briefly discussed whether his death

would dissuade players from using tobacco, chewing tobacco. I saw two instances of that today. One was by a player I had never heard of, Nick Wagner, who is an Angels draftee in the 31st round of this year's draft. He tweeted, And similarly, Addison Russell, who is a player I had heard of,

said that when he walked into the clubhouse, the first thing he did was take the seven cans of chewing tobacco in his locker and throw them out first he opened them and then he dumped the tobacco in the trash can good for him yeah um good for even the guy we don't know good for even the non-famous guy doing something good for him too sure who shouldn't probably shouldn't have been chewing anyway, right? Because prohibited. What do you mean? At lower levels. Maybe he was a high school guy. No, he was a college guy.

Anyway. Maybe he just did it. Not everybody who chews tobacco does it because they're a baseball player. Some people just do it. Maybe he does it while he's driving his truck. Maybe so. It doesn't bend. Jeez. Good for him.

Mm-hmm. That's good. Okay. Another thing was we got a comment from someone on the podcast post yesterday, and this is something that I've heard often, but he said he didn't typically hit laser beams, that's Gwyn, or moonshots, but seen regularly, you would start to see the pattern and realize that he absolutely meant to softly slap the ball right through the 5.5 hole. And it would happen again and again and again, and as the pattern dawned on you, you could only shake your head in amazement.

There was nobody else who could hit it where they ain't like number 19. So this is something you hear often about Gwynn, that he hit it through this particular hole in the field and did it over and over and over again. And I'm wondering what you think Tony Gwynn would have hit in the shift era. Do you think the teams would have closed up this hole against him? Uh, no, I don't. I mean, they probably would have, right. But maybe he would have gone somewhere else then. Yeah. I mean, uh, I, I don't think Tony Gwynn necessarily hit it there

because he was incapable of hitting it anywhere else. Uh, or uh if i do think that i'm not going to allow myself to think that because that ruins all the fun yeah uh no i mean you watch like did you watch you i assume you watched the this week in baseball yes tony gwynn video segment and uh what one of them was in that hole the other ones were all over the field. He hit a home run. He hit a line drive up the middle. He pulled a line drive. I mean, he did hit that hole more than most people did. But, I mean, he was the guy who would hit it wherever people were not standing, I think.

I mean, that's what it felt like. So, yeah, I mean, he's the very opposite of a guy who you would take a defender out of position to defend. Yeah, that's probably true. Yeah, maybe you could shade him in that direction, but it's not like shading is anything new. I'm sure the defenses did try to shade him. But no, you wouldn't leave any part of the field. I mean, just imagine if they left a part of the field completely unattended,

and they left it there for for a year i would guess he'd hit 470 i'm not i i don't i actually am not exaggerating i think if they tried a shift a a uh a shift that left one position completely undefended for an entire year 470 yeah okay well when we've talked about this in the past We've said that we don't know if this is an ability That many players have But if anyone had the ability to place the ball somewhere It was probably Tony Gwynn So, sure

Okay, and another thing I promised an update on that Stanton home run I wrote something about it I linked to it in the Facebook group So if you can find it there It was not, according to Home Run Tracker, one of the lowest home runs ever, either in terms of the peak height that it reached or the vertical angle that it took off the bat.

And, you know, it looked lower on TV than Home Run Tracker said it was, but maybe that was a deceptive camera angle. I don't know. Point is, it probably wasn't a historically low home run, but it was a historic, at least in the history that we have of these things, which goes back to 2006, it was a historic combination of a low home run and an extreme opposite field home run, which is, it's not a combination that has been done in recorded history the way that Stanton did it. Typically when you hit a very low line drive home run, it's going to your pull side. It's, you know, if it's a right-handed hitter, he's pulling it to left field. Stanton did it right down the line to the opposite field and I looked for examples of other home runs that had been as low or roughly as low and had gone

to as extreme a part of the park to the opposite field you know close as close to the foul line and there wasn't one the closest one and it wasn't really all that close, was Giancarlo Stanton. So he is the closest comp to himself. And even he wasn't that close a comp to that home run. There was one that was very close by Justin Morneau, which was hit in 2006, which was his MVP year. And it was described as a low line drive down the left field line. And he's a, or down the right field line, I guess.

He's a left-handed hitter. And maybe that was close, but we can't tell because that was ancient history as far as online video archives are concerned, which is kind of crazy. We can't look up a play from 2006 or 2007. from 2006 or 2007. It's just shrouded in the mists of time, unless you happen to tape that game for some reason. And of course it's somewhere.

It's buried in the MLB archives somewhere. But for you and for me, that game might as well have been 1906. You are so ungrateful for what you have. We have gotten much, much more in recent years, and I am grateful for that. But it's strange to think that less than a decade ago, those games are just inaccessible to us. We can look up a play-by-play log,

but we can't just go watch it. Ben, I just saw somebody on Twitter refer to Ryan Braun by a nickname. A nickname that isn't a nickname you have heard. It's a nickname that I don't know if this guy invented it or what, but he is now taken to calling Ryan Braun our fraud. Is that like a takeoff on a fraud? I'm pretty sure that it's a takeoff on a fraud, which is itself aoff on AROD, which is itself simply a takeoff on the name Alex Rodriguez. So is this the worst nickname of all time?

I mean, is there anybody who's going to look at that and know instinctively what that refers to in any other context? Some columnists i think would probably go for that in fact i'd be surprised if that hasn't been used in a hot take at some point r fraud let's see r google yeah i am all right let's do the uh let's do the emails the science that r fraud cited was incorrect at best this is best. This is a hardball talk commenter from July 22, 2013. This has legs. We have another one. Are you going

with rfraud now? Those seem to be the only ones, but comments aren't always picked up by Google. I assume that they live in comments and message boards. I assume this is like the new Slender Man

taking over the internet. Well, I will not be adopting that new name. All right, and final thing, just because we talked about it a couple times on the show and we got some listener emails about it in the past, the Mike Trout strikeout rate crisis when Mike Trout appeared to be striking out a whole lot and people were wondering whether it was real, whether it signified something.

Since the last time we talked about that, which is, I don't know, maybe a few weeks ago, I think Trout has struck out something like 12 or 13% of the time, like half his career rate, something like that. And he is, you know, hitting like trout. And as you tweeted earlier, he might be having the best season of his career. Okay. Yep. Uh, all right.

So questions, we got good questions. All right. Um, let's take this one. Uh, this one's from Mark. He says teams expend a huge amount of getting, teams expend a huge amount of effort getting their players into the All-Star game. When successful, does this really benefit the team in any way? Can you tell us about what the impact of playing in the All-Star game has on the players' performance for the remainder of the season? The second part is one of those regression to the mean questions that are impossible to

entangle when when people always say that the home run derby screws hitter swings up in many cases it doesn't if you look at all home run derby participants and whether they hit more homers before and after i think maybe there's some some tendency for them to hit more before the home run derby but again it's because you you get selected for the home run derby because you're hitting a lot of home runs and and you are likely to regress from that point so same thing with the all-star if you if you have a great first half you get elected to the all-star team odds are more often than not you're going to decline more often than you improve thereafter. But hang on before we go to the first part.

So there is though, I was thinking about this the other day. These guys go from basically mid-February and in some cases even earlier than that to early October and in some cases even later than that without ever getting two days off in a row. And I mean, we have jobs. We know how nice it is to have days off and how we live for three-day weekends and such. And you can just imagine, like, it just must be so hard to not have any, even if you have the world's greatest job, it must be exhausting to not have, you know ever have two days in a row off and uh so i was

actually wondering whether i don't i don't think that you i don't think any effect would be big enough that you could tease it out but i was wondering whether how big the advantage is for the player who doesn't get selected to get three days off in the middle of the season. And, you know, again, the effect would probably be too small to ever see it. But, you know, with mid-season projections, you could look at whether all-stars underperform their projections more than non-all-stars or whether the difference between the second half and the following year's first half is different than for all-stars or for non-all-stars. So you could imagine looking at that, but I doubt you'd find anything.

But it is an interesting question. And then, of course, you'd have the potential for some sort of confidence boost of being an all-star and of seeing yourself in a different way and of walking around like a big shot. And that, of course, you'd never have any chance of finding. But it's conceivable. But I would bet that, all things being equal, if I were a general manager or a manager of a baseball team, I would be stuffing the ballot box for all other teams.

I would be stuffing 14 teams' ballot boxes. And I would be doing everything I could. In fact, I was actually thinking i i had this uh conspiracy theory earlier in the year and wondered whether um whether any manager has ever rigged his rotation early in the year so as to have his ace pitching the sunday before the all star break because that way he's not eligible to go and not only do you then give him three days off which he so desperately needs, but you can maybe bring him back slightly earlier too,

a couple days earlier, because he didn't have to pitch in the All-Star game. So if I were a manager, I would probably do that. I would probably look for some random off day in April to rejigger my rotation so that he would go on the final Sunday of the first half. rejigger my rotation so that he would go on the final Sunday of the first half. Yeah, and there's been some research by Russell Carlton and Mitchell Lichman about the effect of having a day off. So maybe you could sort of apply that to the all-star break, or maybe it's analogous where there is some slight boost to getting a day off here and there. So maybe getting a few days off is an even bigger boost.

So that leads into the first part of the question, which is, does stumping for All-Stars benefit a team? Because this is the time of year when teams are really putting a lot of effort into getting their players elected to the all-star team they're really burning a lot of calories here i mean earlier earlier today i saw a a mock attack ad that the brewers put out again against uh yadier melina and in support of jonathan lucroy which was kind of entertaining um but the brewers are you know they put a ton of effort into getting all-stars elected every team does this just you know builds marketing campaigns around its around its best players and tries to get the vote out so i wonder whether this is is it blind uh you know rah-rah rooting stuff like hey we, we should just support our best players? Or is there some economic motivation for this?

Have teams done the research and said that having an all-star in this high-profile national televised game leads to some amount of revenue, some number of caps and jerseys sold, some number of new fans converted. Would you guess that this is based on any hard numbers, or is it just it feels like a thing that you should do? Well, no, I think the benefit is in the push. There's no benefit, I would say, to having your player in the All-Star game. I don't think there's anything to that. It's not like anybody's going to be watching the All-Star game and be like, they're pirates. That's a new team. And then send a check to

them. But I think that the push itself is basically a way of advertising. And so it's a way of advertising the team and getting everybody excited about the team in a way of um it's a way of advertising and so it's a way of uh advertising the team and getting everybody excited about the team in a way that is uh not forced that doesn't feel like marketing that doesn't feel gimmicky and that is fun it's a community among your fans and so anytime you have an opportunity to create a community among your fans i think that's really good i don't think that the all-star whether they make it is completely irrelevant. But if you have this push and you get everybody excited, like the Eric Sogard nerd power thing is probably worth dozens of minutes of cable ad time. So I don't really know how much that's

worth either. But yeah, if you were a marketing thing, you definitely would think that this would be a good way to do it. Yeah. I think it's fine. I mean, as long as you quit thinking that they mean it. Like, look, when a team is like, let's get our guys to the all-star game, and then they list, like, Nick Punto, well, if you take it seriously, then you're just going to get mad at them. But once you get past the fact that they are not a, this is not your church,

this is a business, they have no obligation to act in particularly good faith, and they're just trying to have fun and make money. So once you get past that and it becomes quite rational, then go ahead and have fun with them. I wonder if there's any benefit to making your players feel supported. I wonder whether players care whether their team launches an all-star campaign and tries to get people to vote for them or not. Because players have some stake in making the all-star team, right?

It raises their personal profile. They might make more money as a result of it down the road. Maybe they'll get more endorsements, that sort of thing. So I wonder, because you hear the opposite when there's an arbitration case and the team points out all the players' flaws, then you hear at least that maybe that player is less happy with the team. Maybe he's less likely to stick around. Although once when I tried to look into whether that was true,

I couldn't find any evidence that it was true. I wonder whether there's an effect in the opposite direction where if the team is especially good at boosting the player's accomplishments, he feels happier on that team. That's a good point, too. Although if he makes, I mean, that $50,000 bonus is coming out of the team's payroll. But yeah, no, I mean, that's a good point. That's probably a part of it too.

I wonder. Maybe I'll talk to some marketing people and see why they do this, why they think it's a good idea. Talk to Giambi. Yeah, that's always a good move. All right. This question comes from Alex who says that he is a baseball and cricket-loving Welshman who now lives in New Jersey because he met his now-wife when he came to New York for the 2009 World Series. Wow.

Beautiful baseball story. Phillies and Yankees? Yes. I'd like to hear a matchmaking story of Effectively Wild. When is the first Effectively Wild marriage going to happen? People who met in the Facebook group, bonded over their baseball podcast choices, spent their life together. If you have such a story, please let us know.

So Alex says, and I think maybe we've answered a variant of this question before, but he says, would you include a hitter in your lineup who always makes an out but also always sees 15 pitches per at-bat? He's a league average fielder at any position you want but not a pitcher. You cannot pitch hint for him until the eighth inning or later. And he asks, if the answer is yes, where would you want him to bat? If the answer is no, how many pitches would he have to see as a minimum for you to consider? We answered a variant of this question that was, like, how many pitches seen would you exchange in order for a run scored, right?

Like, would you rather have a 40-pitch first inning where you make the opposing pitcher work a lot, or would you rather have a 1-0 lead in a quick inning? And we took the 1-0 lead. So this is on the individual hitter level. This one is interesting, too, because there's a—well, for two reasons. One is that it would add up. It's not one-nit bad. It would add up.

So it would be, you know So over the course of a game, it'd be 60 pitches. That's half the starter to get four outs. And the difference between presuming the run instead of presuming the out, well, the run is the abnormal event, but the out is already the normal event. So basically, you're getting 45 pitches in three at bats, basically one of which would be you know a single or a double on average and the other two would be outs anyway so two-thirds of the time it doesn't change anything and then you know that extra time so yeah it is a is basically like a one walk slash one extra out worth uh you know 45 pitches and probably i'd take i think i'd take the pitch guy

especially because he's a league average defender. Right, yeah, I think I would take him. I mean, you could almost be, if you're, well, probably not. But if you're, what, did we say what position? He says he can be any position except pitcher. So he also asked what position would we want him to be, presumably shortstop or catcher or something. Or catcher, yeah.

So a league average shortstop or a league average catcher could almost, well, what is that? If you hit 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 as a league average catcher, do you have any sense of what your war would be if you were a shortstop? I'd be guessing, I don't know, like probably like a negative four. Yeah, I was going to say four, but like if you told me it was seven, I wouldn't be shocked. And that puts things in, I don't know, now I don't think that this pitch count thing

could possibly be worth seven wins. Four maybe over the course of a year, four maybe. Yeah. Certainly not seven though i mean 40 yeah but 60 pitches i know it's up you'd use it more than half of the starters allotment for a measly four outs so he so you're i mean how on average how deep would the opposing pitcher go do you think if you had this guy in and And, of course, he wouldn't get four. Yeah.

That's against the starter. Two or three against the starter. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, cut out an inning or two. I mean, he's going to face the—basically, on average, he faces the starter twice. He basically takes an average. The league average pitches per inning is something like 15, right? Yeah.

So he probably adds like 20 if he sees him twice he probably you know he adds 22 pitches to his total but of course he's also making outs both those times so uh i i don't know an inning and a third that it that it puts on the bullpen but bullpens are good. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, this question's getting more complicated. I'm now saying I wouldn't take it, and I'd be happy to see the math that shows otherwise,

but I'm saying I would not take it. I guess once you get into the bullpen, there's not a huge advantage to making the reliever work because, I don't know maybe maybe there is but if this guy comes up against your closer or your eighth inning guy he's still gonna finish the inning probably yeah the if you were if we were talking about nine game series that teams played against each other with no off day then i think you could make the case a lot easier. But these guys get out of town

before the pitch counts really start adding up. Good question. I like this question. This guy would be the most boring baseball player ever. I'm glad this guy doesn't exist. Oh my gosh, you're right. It's true. No one would come to your games or watch your games

when this guy was in the lineup. So there would be some economic cost to that also. But at what point, I mean, okay, do you think that it's conceivable that the pitcher would just start beating him or intentionally walking him? Because if he wouldn't... Oh, yeah, sure. Right, I mean, intentional walk. I mean, I guess that doesn't quite include the value that he brings as a league average shortstop. But, I mean, no pitcher is going to intentionally walk.

Well, I guess, I mean, the condition is he's an automatic out. So, I mean, I guess this is kind of a conflict where if he were intentionally walked, he wouldn't be out. So maybe this is a... Oh, right, right. That's one of the reasons why this player could not exist. An intentional, right. And An intentional walk would not actually replicate the chances that a normal person would have of getting a hit because it would then make it automatic that, yeah, okay, so that doesn't actually make sense.

Never mind. That's the part that doesn't make sense. All right. Okay, well, since we're talking about hit by pitches, this question comes from Stephen Shaw. Well, since we're talking about hit by pitches, this question comes from Stephen Shaw. I want to say that I am new to thinking about baseball with a sabermetric mindset. I played college and semi-pro ball for several years, and one thing always bothered me about the on-base percentage calculation. Hit by pitches are... Hits by pitch?

Hit by pitches? Hit by pitches. Yeah, okay. Hit by pitches are figured into the calculation And although I understand for a true on-base average This variable is needed I do not feel it is appropriate to include this in OBP As a way to evaluate a player

From my experience, the batter has little control Over hit by pitches I realize that some guys, more so in college than in the pros Crowd the plate or take one for the team But this seems less likely to happen The further along players advance in the game. I have read that a player's hit by pitches actually do stay somewhat consistent from year to year, but it seems to me that to more accurately evaluate a prospect, management

might want to pull out these hit by pitches when using OBP to choose a player. Please tell me if I am totally off on this. So there was a post by Ryan P. Morrison at Beyond the Boxscore that I found just googling this question. It came out earlier this year. And he was citing the hitting stat correlation tool that Steve Staudt built at Hardball Times, which tells you the year-to-year correlation of all manner of hitting stats. correlation of all manner of hitting stats. And from 2007 to 2013, according to this tool,

the year-to-year correlation for hit-by-pitches-per-plate-appearance for hitters with a minimum of 300 plate appearances was 0.62. So pretty strong correlation from year-to-year. pretty strong correlation from year to year. Not as strong as the correlation in walk percentage, which was 0.75, but not all that far off either. So there's certainly something to it. We see the same guys often at the top of the hit-by-pitch leaderboard every year. You're Carlos Quentin and Shinsu Chu and Starling Marte. These guys have a hit-by-pitch skill, if you want to call it that. They stand close to the plate. They wear something that makes them more prone to hit-by-pitches,

whatever it is. It is a repeatable skill, not quite as stable and consistent and repeatable as walks, but pretty repeatable. You can kind of count on it. Now, maybe in the minors, I don't know whether that would be any different. Pitchers have worse control, so I don't know. I mean, they walk more guys and they hit more guys, I would assume. Or maybe not because the hitters

aren't as good. I don't know, but it seems to me that it's a valid way to evaluate a hitter. You certainly wouldn't want to toss it out. Maybe you'd want to, if you want to get really granular about everything, you could separate out the walks and the hit by pitches when you're doing a projection. But it's certainly something that you should take into account. Yep. Okay. A couple catching questions. This one comes from Steve.

Which takes better stuff from a pitcher, a called strike or a swinging strike? We answered that recently. At least the swinging strike rate tends to be more predictive, right? A future swinging strike rate than the called strike rate is a future called strike rate. Yeah. And then the real, I don't know whether that means better stuff i guess depends how you define stuff but but yeah probably so the related question from him can a catcher influence a better swing through something like body or glove position

uh i would i would say to a slight extent um i've seen this happen i wrote an article once about eric kratz the the backup for the phillies at the time and for the blue jays now who who did a thing when i was watching where he he pounded his fist into his glove inside on the batter and then moved to the outside part of the plate uh as as if to confuse the batter about where the pitch was coming in. And I've seen or heard the same sort of thing with certain catchers will stomp on the plate. You know, they'll try to be very loud as they move around to give the batter the impression that they are setting up in a certain place, and then they will stealthily try to set up outside or inside wherever wherever they were not making that

that decoy noise so sure uh maybe there's something to that or you know maybe if the if the catcher knows that the hitter is peeking at the glove position or something maybe he can exploit that in some way i wouldn't i wouldn't expect it to be a huge effect. Another catching question that we got from Eric, who says, on Tuesday, Ben wrote about Glenn Perkins' criticism of Jasmiel Pinto's defense and pitch framing. In the article, Perkins also mentions that Pinto has a big league bat. If a catcher was only good at hitting or defense slash framing,

what stats would you use to determine when his positive impact wasn't worth what he did in other areas is there an offensive or defensive baseline that could help determine when a catcher's liability in one area is too detrimental to keep him in the lineup and that was kind of my point in the article is that teams have to decide where the the break-even point is so So Perkins was somewhat surprisingly publicly complaining about Pinto's lack of framing ability, and he was sent down by the Twins, at least in part, because of his defensive shortcomings.

And so they evidently decided that his pretty good bat didn't make up for the defense. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we've talked about, say, Jose Molina, who's the great receiver but is not hitting at all. Still no extra base hits, by the way. So I think it's probably a pretty simple equation. It's run saved and run scored.

You just have to add up the numbers, really, and find out whether he's coming out ahead or not once you figure out how far above average or below average he is defensively and offensively. So that's about what it boils down to. Have you adjusted Molina's warp for his framing this year? I have not. What is Molina's warp?

Do you know? I don't, but I can look at that while you look at the other. Okay. All right. What have you been up to lately? What have I been up to? I've been looking at Jose Molina's extra strikes added. No, no, I don't mean, I'm just making small talk. I know. It's negative 1.2 So he's roughly 12 runs Below replacement level And he is 11 runs above average framing wise

Above average though So Above average yeah Is what we use for that So I guess he's just about breaking even Just about yeah So He's also not a good blocker uh but that's part then that's

theoretically part of his warp but uh theoretically but uh uh maybe it is is it i don't know if it is he's i don't know either he's negative 1.2 in blocking runs. However, once you include some regression for what we suspect to be his true talent at the plate, nobody really thinks that he would hit this badly over the course of a season. Probably. Probably not.

Okay. You want to do the play index segment? Sure. Let's do the Astros one first. Saving a good question for after playros one first. Oh, okay. Well, I'm saving a good question for after Play Index. Okay, yeah, no, I'll do Play Index. Yeah, okay.

So, people, you know, actually, I was going to say, people have been talking about the All-Star game. Those people are us. Yeah. We're talking about the All-Star game. And we're talking about All-Star players. And I started thinking about Josh Donaldson, who last year was so incredible and didn't make the All-Star game. And we're talking about All-Star players. And I started thinking about Josh Donaldson, who last year was so incredible and didn't make the All-Star game.

And so Playindex has one thing you can do is you can filter for players who have or have not ever made an All-Star game. So I wanted to see what the best seasons are by a player who never made the All-Star team. So not the best seasons that didn't make the All-Star team, but the best seasons by players who never, ever managed to make an All-Star team. And so I got that list, and Donaldson is number two on it. And I had sort of suspected that what I would see is guys who had really amazing second halves

was one thing that I thought we'd see. And really amazing defense, because defense does not get you to the All-Star game particularly, would be one thing. And then just sort of guys who were generally overlooked. And so here are the five, and I'll just give you the basic profiles of each of their seasons. The fifth best is, I'm going to start from the top. So the best is John Valentin. This is by war, by baseball references,. So the best is John Valentin. This is by war, by baseball references war.

The best is John Valentin. And Valentin was better in the first half than he was. No, he wasn't. But he was really awesome in the first half. And this is how good his season was. He hit 284, 384, 529 in the first half. So a 920 OPS. 14 homers.

He was a plus 23 defender at shortstop. And that was his third year in a row where he was like plus 15 or better. So I mean, this was not a one year blip. He finished ninth in MVP voting that year. So he was not overlooked by baseball. But he didn't make the All-Star game. Josh Donaldson is number two. Donaldson last year was better in the first half as well. Quite a bit better in the first half. Had a 920 OPS or 910 OPS. 16 homers. Also a very good defender, so that's holding up plus 12 defender at third base. And he also finished fourth in MVP voting, so he was also not overlooked by baseball.

Number three, Bernard Gilkey, who was also was also i think maybe better in the first half or maybe not no he wasn't better but he was very good he had an 880 ops uh 16 homers uh 10 steals he was also a very good defender plus 23 that year and baseball recognized him as well he finished 14th in mvp voting that year and then here's where that we're gonna have our little twist small twist a gentle twist you don't have to hold on or anything like that. The number four is Nick Marcakis. And so Nick Marcakis in 2008, I believe, it was his third year. He was an established good player, but not a superstar yet. This was probably the year that made him a star, a fourth-round fantasy pick or whatever. And he was also better in the first

half that year. He had 301, 402, 493, 14 homers, 9 stolen bases in the first half. Clearly, all-star caliber first half. He was a plus 22 defender, so that holds up as well. And yet, he received no MVP votes at all. So no all-star, no MVP votes. And so then you click over to Nick Marcake's page, and in his entire career, as you know, he has no all-star, no MVP votes. And so then you click over to Nick Marcakis' page, and in his entire career, as you know, he has no all-star games, but he also has no MVP votes in his entire career.

And so that got me wondering, is Nick Marcakis the greatest player ever to not get a single all-star appearance or a single MVP vote? So I did a new search to look at career war for players who never made an All-Star game. Do you know who the best player never to make an All-Star game is? Usually Tim Salmon is the one cited, right? It is, yeah. Tim Salmon is almost always cited.

Kirk Gibson has a little bit of a case. Kirk Gibson's interesting because he won an MVP award but didn't make the All-Star game that year. But actually, by baseball references, reckoning Tony Phillips is the correct answer. a by a pretty healthy margin but you can make a case for any of those three um and uh you could almost you might be able to make the case that eric chavez is the best uh peak player uh who never made an all-star game because he was a he was an mvp vote getter year in year out six six gold gloves in a row, I think. Silver Slugger a bunch of those times. How do you win Silver Slugger and gold glove and not make the All-Star team?

It's a question that really will never be answered. But he did it. He did it in 2002. Okay, so now I want to see if Mark Cacus is the best. So he is the 36th most career war for a player who's never made an All-Star game. But he's only ninth for All-Star game and MVP vote list players. Number eight, Randy Velarde. Number seven, Casey Blake.

Number six, Rick Dempsey. Number five, Stan Javier, which is kind of shocking to me that Stan Javier is that high. Number four, Bill Bratton. Number three, Bob Bailey. Number two, Jose Valentin. But all those guys are only seven wins in total. The most, Jose Valentin, not John Valentin, by the way. John Valentin and Jose Valentin

are right next to each other on this leaderboard. Right next to each other. Easily confused for each other. But we're now, we've switched from John to Jose for this leaderboard right next to each other uh easily confused for each other uh but we're now we've switched from john to jose for this leaderboard so jose valentine is only seven wins ahead of marquegas it seems very very very plausible that nick marquegas can produce seven wins in his career without ever getting so good that he gets an mvp vote or an all-star appearance so i think he's got a real shot at number two but number number one is going to be tough. Number one, 10 wins, well, not that tough,

but 10 wins ahead of Nick Marcakis, still active, no All-Star games, no MVP votes, 33.7 career war, roughly twice what Jim Rice has probably. I don't know. Do you have a guess who the best player to ever not make an All-Star team? And he's still active, or and he's still active ben he's still active and he is a guy who um uh is uh i don't know when he's a free agent there's an impression that he's undervalued and makes you wonder maybe we're the idiots because he never gets paid very much

punto uh you're on the right track it isto? You're on the right track. It is not Punto, but you are on the right track. You don't want to guess again, do you? No. It is Mark Ellis. Oh, right. Okay. Mark Ellis, 34 wins, and he's still active too, so he could still put a little space between him and Marquegas.

But Marquegas has a pretty good shot at this. The question is, it's really much more whether he can manage to never get an MVP vote, because there are a lot of guys on this list who finished 27th one year. There's always some writer who wants to give you the Jeremy Affeldt vote. He'll probably lose it on that, but maybe he won't. There you go. All right. Good one.

So please subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. We've heard from some of you who have done this. Some of you have done this and sent us some interesting Play Index queries, which we always enjoy. So please support the sponsor, and please support yourself by subscribing to the Play Index. Okay, let's wrap up with a couple good quick ones. This one comes

from Stevie, who says, if creating a baseball player were akin to creating a character in an RPG and you had skill points to spend, how would you spend 300 points on the five tools on the 20 to 80 scouting scale? Would you do a 60 in each tool, 80 power, 80 contact, and below average speed? Could a 250-point player make the majors? What would his skill breakdown have to be to make it? 50 point player make the majors what would his skill breakdown have to be to make it seems to me that uh like clearly the best player with 300 points would just be a

an 80 contact 80 power 80 field guy with 30 arm and 30 speed right is there a better way to allocate those points than that well you you't. You could not possibly be in 80 field with 30. Right, that's hard to do. You'd have to be the best positioned player ever. You'd have to have some kind of preternatural ability to sense where the ball was going to be hit, and you'd have to have incredible hands so that you would never flub a ball hit to you.

And even then, I don't know whether you could do it. You'd basically have to be a second baseman too. Yeah, probably. Or a first baseman. So 80 power, 80 hit is a given. There's no proportion

by which arm and speed could... Well, arm in particular, but the others could be as worth spending on over those two. So 80 power, 80 hit, and we have 300, did you say, to spend? Yeah. That's too much. That's 60s. Right.

So then he asks, could a 250-point player make the majors? Yeah, 250 is a roll five player. I mean, basically basically that's a average player a 250 guy is a is a just 50s and everything well yeah i mean the 250 guy gets paid 14 million dollars a year basically right now so all right well so if you 300 is our cap we're doing 300 or 250 is our cap we're only spending so. So do you still do 80-80? What do you do? 80-80?

If you do 80-80. 30-30? How bad does the guy, I mean, if you have an 80-hit, 80-power guy, and he's 20 and everything else, does he still get a roster spot at least? Just as a, I mean, he'd be the best pinch hitter ever. He'd be... He'd be the best DH ever. Yeah, sure.

Isn't David Ortiz a 20-20-20 guy? He's 20 speed, 20 field. We don't know his arm, but probably. Probably, yeah. So David Ortiz is that, except he's 70-70. So make David Ortiz 80-80. And yeah, you'd have the best hitter. You'd have a guy who basically was Babe Ruth, but in David Ortiz's role.

Yeah, so if you have... So all you need then is, if you have, what is it, 60, 160 plus another 60. So, I mean, if you had 220, then you could be a star, at least in the American League. So how low would you have to go and still without making it impossible for a guy to be a viable big league player um i don't know i mean if you're i've gotten to i've gotten i think i've gotten to the to the limit of my understanding of this question i mean even if you're a 60 60 hit power guy you could be a an above average dh yeah you'd be billy butler right so so you could go pretty low you wouldn't need this many skill points to to have a useful player

no i mean if you well so what's billy hamilton uh 80 80 what 80, 30, 30 or something like that? Yeah, I don't know. 80, 30, 40, 30, 30? Maybe he's an above average fielder. Maybe he's a 55, 60 or maybe. Maybe and then I don't know. I don't really. I mean his arm is, I don't know what his arm is. I don't know. I don't really, I mean, his arm is, I don't know what his arm is. And his, yeah, I don't know, something like that. Like 30 power and 40 hit or something.

Yeah, it's hard to say. But we take power and we take hit over everything. So that's the answer to this question. And then what's your third? We've talked about this before. I take speed because i think that speed is not that useful in isolation but it makes everything else better and so right so speed is always my next and then and then i yeah it's i mean that's that's going to be built into the other categories though right i mean that's going to be built into your your hit. If you're a guy with great speed who can beat out infield hits and bumps, let's do the Astros one. Okay. All right.

This question comes from Eric Hartman, uh, who asks how many games would the worst team in baseball say the 2013 Astros win if they started every game up one,0. So there's two simple ways you can do this. There's one really simple one that isn't that accurate, but still is kind of interesting because this gave me another opportunity to use Baseball Reference Play Index. They have a team's record by whether or not they're leading in each inning.

So basically, you can find out if a team is leading after six, how often do they win? If they're trailing after five, how often do they win? And so the Astros in 2012 and 2013, which were basically the same level of bad, they were, in 2013, they were 13 and 13 when leading after one inning. And in 2012, they were 20 and 20 when leading after one inning. So both are exactly 500. Of course, that's not the right answer because

they might be leading by 10 runs after one inning, not one run. And also, after one inning is one inning closer to the end. So they only have to survive eight more innings. And so that's an advantage too. But it's good to set that to know that basically any number that I come up with that's higher than 500 would be wrong. And so 500 is our outer limit. So the other easy way to do it, though, is simple. I just looked at what they did last year and imagined adding a run to every game. So they won 55 games.

So those 55 games they would have won as well. They would have won all 55 of those games by one run more they uh they lost eight extra inning games so they would have won those eight games because they would have ended the game up by one so now we're up to 63 and they lost 29 one run games which is itself amazing they lost one-run games, and so those 29 games would go into extra innings. And so now we have to figure out how many games that go into extra innings do we think the Astros would win. What's your hunch of what the Astros of 2012 and 2013 would be worth in extra innings?

I don't know. 38%. Okay. So they played 42 extra inning games from 2011 to 2013. In those 42 games, they only won 10 of them, so about 23%, 24%. So if you attribute that winning percentage to the 29 games that they would be playing extra innings, they would have an extra seven wins. So that gets them to 70.

So the Astros of 2013, if you spotted them a run every game, would win 70 games. Okay. All right. Although here's the thing, though. They didn't actually play 29 extra inning games, of course. They played like 10 extra inning games, I think. And no team ever plays 29 extra inning games. And so it seems like there must be some force that preserves games.

Well, I guess actually there is a force that makes one-run games more likely. Oh, yeah. So I've actually forgotten to factor in the bottom of the ninth factor, where teams that are winning don't play the bottom of the ninth. So actually, some number of those games that they lost by one run, the opposing team didn't bat in the bottom of the ninth and had the Astros tied it by dint of having one extra run. In some number of those games, the other team would have won. And so in fact, they wouldn't have won

as many as I said. They would have won fewer than 70. So if you spot the Astros of 2013, one run at the beginning of the game, they would have won fewer than 70. I'd guess 68. And they actually won how many? 55. So that's almost a quarter more wins than they actually had. And of course, this isn't actually that hard to really figure out. I mean, a run a game is 162 runs.

162 runs, that's how we calculate warp and war and all those things. We would just divide it by 10, basically, and say 16. And so in this scenario, we would say that the Astros would have won 71. So it gets us to about the same answer. Somewhere between 68 and 71, I think. Okay. And I think that probably my number's a little low because I don't think the Astros' true talent

in extra inning games was 23 or 24%. Even though we got a pretty good sample over the course of three years, I think that's probably unnaturally low. I agree. Okay. Well, I agree. Okay. Well, I don't know. Not every

bad team would have the same distribution of... No, they would. They're robots, Ben. They're all robots. Okay, good point. All right. So that's it for today. Hey, we had another player break his hand punching something.

Drew Pomerantz broke his hand punching a chair. Do you get the sense that more baseball players hurt themselves punching things than players in other sports? I do. Partly, I think it's because there are, well it's all hard surfaces if you unlike a football locker room which is just a bouncy palace no the football locker room though is just that's the end of a half it doesn't come at your lowest moment you know a baseball pitcher a pitcher is pulled from the game at his lowest moment true like it would be like if they went to the locker room after every turnover uh-huh and and like they all had to run to the locker room like right yeah the other thing is that

there's this bat man they have this bat in baseball that carries a lot of force uh and when you hit it and pomeranz didn't hit anything with his bat, but the other day I saw a gif of Chris Sale taking a big swing in the tunnel with his bat after a bad outing. He just pulled a bat and then went into the tunnel and took a huge swing at something. And I just thought, I would rather the guy throw 185 pitches every game than go into the tunnel with a bat and start slamming things for his help.

And it sort of shocks me that teams don't... that some teams don't outlaw this. Yeah, maybe teams should just hire a bouncer who just... His only job is to prevent players from punching things. Mm-hmm.

Or when you pull a pitcher from the game tranquilizer dart you just shoot him no manager doesn't even come out he can't even have a minute to get his blood pressure up you don't jack it maybe you don't even want him to know that it's coming that the end is coming you just dart right in the neck take the ball and put him in handcuffs, maybe. Yeah, I guess if it's a sport with sidelines, there are fewer objects that can be punched, fewer things you can hurt yourself on. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Have you ever hurt yourself punching something? No, I haven't injured myself punching something no yeah yeah i don't think i've ever

been so angry that i couldn't control the thing that i was hitting i probably i punched pillows now and then but i i knew what i was doing all right uh so that's it for today please send us more excellent emails for next week at podcast at baseball prospectus.com. Some of the ones we didn't get to, we might get to next time because there were a surplus. There was a surplus of, of excellent questions this week. Also,

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