Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 478: All the Questions of a Thousand Dreams

Episode Date: June 25, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about the Diamondbacks, then answer listener emails about David Price’s peripherals, favorite batter-pitcher matchups, evaluating defense, and more.

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This is how late night talk show hosts start their show. Did you hear that story about the thing? And then you say, no, I didn't. And then I tell you. You've got like slides ready. Right. I've got those little black cards with something glued on the front of them, which seems like a really primitive way to display things on TV. Are you going to toss this to a man on the street that you conducted earlier today?

I might. I might. So the thing about the Diamondbacks front office, there's a story by our pal Nick Pecorro at AZ Central Sports about how Tony La Russa is still learning what his job is. He's had this nebulous job for a month or so and it sounds, and maybe he's just not conveying what he does very well, but it sounds like he doesn't really know what he is doing in this job or where he fits in in the hierarchy. He says, I think the most critical thing is this job has never been done anywhere,

so I've never done this job. So we're a month or whatever it is into it, and I've done it every day, and my responsibilities are getting more crystallized in my own mind. You simplify it. It's who's playing for the Diamondbacks, and secondly, it's how they play. That's kind of the responsibility that I've been given, And I'm going to share it with people in the organization. We're going to look at who's playing and we're going to coach them. And then he talks about the trade deadline. He says the delineation of responsibilities is not crystal clear here or beyond here. So he says if teams want to trade with the Diamondbacks,

with the trade deadline approaching, he says if they're interested in talking to the Diamondbacks, they can call either one of us. That's either him or Kevin Towers, and we're going to talk to each other. As a matter of fact, there was one gentleman who called and left a message for both of us which i think is the smartest thing but but we're going to communicate and we are communicating um it's interesting because you know you get to a certain point in your career if you're as successful as tony larusa has and uh you get a job with a you know with an organization an organization. And you're sort of in a position where you can kind of dictate your terms. You don't have to take any jobs and most people would

be thrilled to have you around, or at least a lot of people would. And so you can go one of two ways. One is you can be absolute power. You can come in and basically say, I ain't doing this unless I have all the power. And then you can come in and basically say, I ain't doing this unless I have all the power. And then you could come in and you could just fire everybody if you want or build chocolate fountains in the lobby, do anything you want. The other way is that you could come in and say, well, I'll come in and I'll just, I'll mosey around imparting wisdom, but I'll come in when I want to. I'm not going to work. I'm certainly not going to work weekends. I'm not going to do anything that would ever be real responsibility and could come down on me. I'll just be the sage that you pay more money than you would think a sage would get paid to dispense wisdom with as little impact on my life as possible.

wisdom with as little impact on my life as possible. And when you can do one or the other, basically, when you're Tony La Russa, when you have that power, most people don't get those choices, but he gets both of those choices. And when he came in, I think that we all sort of assumed it was the former. And but I'm not sure that that was necessarily clear. It was sort of hinted that he would have a lot of authority. But, you know, authority is not the same as responsibility. So, like I said, I didn't read Nick's article. Nick maybe answered those questions. Or maybe right now it's like I'm one season behind on Game of Thrones and saying things that are dumb. You're ahead of me.

So I have to wait for Nick's article to go on Netflix, unfortunately. Right. Yeah, I don't know whether those questions were answered. It doesn't seem like they have answered them themselves at this point. But it doesn't sound great not great that you have to uh get the word out through a newspaper reporter to the other teams that they should ccu i know this this podcast is better organized it sounds like than the diamondbacks front office like they should they should create address. Yeah, shared email address.

Decisions at diamondbacks.com. We still occasionally get email, though, meant for KG and Park. I guess maybe there's the risk that they'd be getting like Josh Burns' brochure from REI because Josh Burns ordered something. Maybe they can figure out what their roles are by counting up the number of people who start their emails. Kevin and Tony or Tony and Kevin. That'll tell them

who's in charge. Go trade for Ryan Webb and Matt Albers. Right. They should have a closer by committee with those two guys. I would love that. All right. Well, that's our opening monologue. I hope the studio audience laughed. So now we are doing an email show. Many of you sent us emails at podcast at baseballprus.com we will answer some of them let's start

with this one from from Josh who says Ben and Sam comma Sam and Ben the well no wait just a second now when people address us as Ben and Sam Sam and Ben which comes first the Ben

yeah the Ben and Sam still came first I know you were trying to take this up a level but you answered nothing josh says i watch most i watch most blue jays games so i've been watching brett lorry the last few years it seems every game or so especially in the last calendar year he makes at least one spectacular looking play but when you examine the defensive stats, he's certainly above average, but not elite. Obviously, there's some bias here, but my question is more general. Is it more likely that defensive plays that look spectacular simply look good, but are not necessarily good plays, or is it possible that being athletic enough to compensate for poor positioning, for instance, is undervalued?

positioning, for instance, is undervalued? So I guess that's kind of two separate questions. When you see a play that looks spectacular, are you confident that you can tell that it actually was spectacular and not a product of poor positioning, for instance? And does that differ by depending on your vantage point, whether you're watching on TV or you're watching at the park? Well, unless you are really, really in tune to the team and to everybody in the league, you're never going to be able to say whether the positioning was poor or not. I mean, there's a reason that that guy was standing there uh you know there was or at least the the default

assumption is there's a reason that guy was standing there he's standing there because that's where they determined the batter was slightly more likely to hit it and if a ball doesn't go there that's not you know an indictment of the positioning um because a lot of balls that a guy who is slightly more likely to hit in one direction, uh, hits are not in that actual direction. So, um, so I would say as far as positioning, no, I would, I would never make any conclusions about positioning, about a player's ability to position on my own. Um, I'm, if I were really dedicated to a team in a way that I'm not right now, um, and you know, really haven't ever been, I might decide at the end of the year that I had an idea on it. Uh, but otherwise I would, I would just trust that that's something that only advanced metrics can pick up. And, um, and even that I would be, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I would say that's something that only advanced metrics could pick up

and wouldn't necessarily be all that easy to isolate. As for the other parts, if I can see the replay and everything, I feel okay kind of assessing how a player looked. But no, generally, if it looks good, I assume it was good. You can see through, sometimes there's extra motion that makes it look good that you can see through. So there are certainly plays where a player will do something that looks acrobatic, but particularly upon reviewing it, you can see that there was flash that wasn't necessary. There was a sort of a, the player had slightly more time than you might have concluded based

on his ending position, that sort of a thing. But generally, if I see a play that I think, wow, how did he make that? I give him credit for it. a play that I think, wow, how did he make that? I give him credit for it. Yeah. And I mean, it does seem like this could be an area of opportunity, especially once the new tracking data comes out where teams could identify guys who are not good at positioning, but are good at everything else. And if such guys exist, if there are guys like that, I don't know how many there are.

I mean, I wonder what the range in positioning talent is because you would think that if there were a guy who were not naturally good at positioning, a team would notice that and would instruct him where to stand as we sometimes see coaches do or players do to other players. So I don't know actually how much of an opportunity there is here, but if there were a player who were just terrible at positioning, but good at everything else and was athletic and had a quick first step and could run far, great range, then you could see that with the new MLB advanced media data that is coming out soon. And you could take that guy and position him well, and then suddenly you'd have an above-average defender who,

according to the zone-based metrics, was not an above-average defender. So I don't know whether there's really an opportunity to leverage that or whether teams are already too aware of that or teams have already corrected for players' natural deficiencies in positioning. But that's something that people could possibly look into. Well, last week we had a question about all-star voting, why teams devote the effort they do to driving votes, to trying to get fans to vote for their players. And I wondered whether teams had done any research into the economic benefits of having an all-star

or having a high-profile all-star vote drive. I emailed the brewers about this because they seem to be the most enthusiastic about this, creating videos and trying to get everyone to vote for their players. And Tyler Barnes, who was their VP of communications, got back to me. And I had asked whether there was any specific research they had done, whether they attached any sort of dollar value to this. And it doesn't sound like they have, at least that they were willing to tell me. He said, we do put a great deal of effort into activating all-star game voting, activating all-star game voting, both online and in person at Miller Park. While

we haven't specifically quantified the value of having a player voted in as an All-Star, there is without a doubt a reward for all parties involved. First, we know that the players appreciate the effort, especially when the fan vote results in one of them being elected as a starter. We also know that fans in Wisconsin enjoy the opportunity to be engaged in the process

as we see the evidence over and over again. This is not one of baseball's larger markets, but fans here have demonstrated that they can and will support the Brewers at a high level on par with virtually any other market, large or small, and that becomes a source of pride for fans and their organization. So sort of nebulous, but I mean, there's probably something to it. If I were in charge of a team's marketing, I would probably do the same sort of thing. I might want to see if I could attach any kind of research and data to it in case it turned out that we were wasting lots of time and money here, but it probably makes sense. I mean, look, if you did what there is no research in the world that

would convince you not to do this it is it is inconceivable that there would be research that would tell you that it's not cool to have a player from your team make the all-star game and to have all your fans like enjoying the things that you're doing yeah i was thinking of it as like a an opportunity cost or something, but I guess your marketing people are hired to market, so what else would they be doing? Yeah, I mean, you might do some research into whether marketing. Yes, you could fire your whole marketing department.

Okay, this question comes from Justin. When David Price came off the DL in 2013, you could tell he had a new approach. He came to throw strikes, like a lot of strikes, and he started forcing contact or forcing strikeouts. And since coming off the disabled list, his strikeout rate is way up. This season, Price is still doing it, but you can tell scouting reports have his opponents more prepared. And now Phil Hughes is riding on the same train. As we've discussed on this podcast, we devoted a whole episode to Phil Hughes, and he's throwing many more strikes than he ever has before. He's not walking anyone. So Justin wants to know, why isn't everyone doing this? Is it as simple as they can't throw strikes?

What kind of stuff, other than great control control makes a pitcher successful with this plan? And three, it's obvious that this new version of Phil Hughes is better than the old, and it doesn't seem to be just park factors. Is the new version of David Price more valuable than the old? So is there anything that stands out to you as saying that either why guys don't throw more strikes? I guess maybe, I don't know. I speculated with Hughes that if his, his swinging strike rate or his chase rate wasn't that great, if he wasn't, wasn't getting guys to chase outside the zone, then throwing pitches outside the zone wasn't really benefiting him very much. So maybe that's part of it. If you're not getting guys to chase,

then maybe there is more incentive for you to just throw pitches in the strike zone because at least you might get a called strike. Whereas if you throw it outside the strike zone, you might not get hit as hard, but you'll just walk everyone and you'll put yourself in unfavorable counts. And then eventually you'll have to come into the zone and then you'll get clobbered because the hitter will be expecting it. So maybe that's it. I don't know. I mean, Hughes was never before a real control artist. Like we never, we never really thought that Phil Hughes had this in him.

So I don't know whether we can, I mean, would anyone have pointed to Phil Hughes and said if he wanted to, he could, he could have the lowest walk rate in the American League. He could just walk people like Cliff Lee walks people. It kind of, kind of came out of nowhere. I don't know whether it's a mechanical thing or just completely a mindset thing, but it doesn't seem like it's something a lot of guys could do automatically, at least not without getting hit hard. But I don't know, that would be my guess that maybe it would make sense for guys who don't have swing and miss stuff outside the strike zone. So it seems like there's a lot of guys who, I mean, Hughes and Price are definitely the two kind of breakout cliff leads of the year.

But it seems like there are a lot of guys who have really incredible strike-at-the-walk ratios, and some of them like Price, who's not having a very good year for him. Well, yeah. I guess that was question three. We're not there yet. Hang on. Okay.

Okay. And Brandon McCarthy, who has a really good strike-out-to-walk ratio and a lot of really bad surface numbers. surface numbers. And so I, I started to, I had this, I, this sort of general impression that, um, that FIPS, uh, aren't correlating to ERAs as well as they used to. Cause there are like these, like, as we've talked about, there are these sort of FIPS superstars, like the kind of Joe Blanton mold of guys who just throw strikes. Um, and so by doing that can basically put together pretty good strike-out-to-walk ratios, but they get burned for other reasons.

And so I looked. I actually had this hypothesis, so I looked. I took the FIPS and ERAs of, you know, like everybody who'd pitched like 80 innings or whatever every year over the past, you know, X number of years, and it turned out to be a completely wrong hypothesis. The correlation between ERA and FIP is basically exactly what it has been. As a whole, the leagues, ERAs and FIPs are basically holding to each other for predictive

value as well as they ever did. So that sort of surprised me. Talking about price, because price is having by some measures, like by sort of the kind of... I mean, I'm a Koji Ohara junkie, so in my mind, he's having the greatest year of his career. He's my favorite player to watch right now and all that. He's also having the worst year of his career, probably. I guess his rookie year was probably worse.

It's interesting because his rookie year, he struck out 1.9 batters per walk and had an ERA plus of 98. This year, he's struck out 10.2 batters per walk and had an era plus of 98 and this year he's so i got 10.2 batters per walk which i think is the second highest or maybe the third highest in history um and he's got a 100 era plus so uh he's essentially the same there have never been two more different pitchers in style than david price now and david price in 2009 and there have essentially never been two more similar pitchers in terms of raw output than David Price now and David Price in 2009. And that's really interesting.

He's allowing a ton of home runs. And so that one question that you always have with the guy who allows a lot of home runs is whether he's unlucky on fly balls it's it's only been you know 16 starts it's probably not quite soon enough to say that he is definitely more prone or extremely prone to the long ball um but you know i mean if you were a person who was only loosely engaged to sabermetrics, you would probably be looking at this and going, well, that didn't work. I guess Moneyball was dumb.

And I don't know if that's right or wrong yet with Price. We don't really know. But, I mean, clearly he's the most curious case of a pitching line in baseball right now right yeah and right gabe kapler tweeted one of his handwritten photographed notes that he that he cleverly uses to get around the twitter 140 character limit about price and how we should stop the nonsensical narrative that David Price is having a down year. He cited his career high strikeout percentage, his career low walk percentage, his FIP, which

is as low as it's ever been, his ex-FIP, which is fantastic. And he says his BABIP is higher and his home run per fly ball rate is higher. And so maybe those things will normalize and maybe the the more sustainable aspects of his performance are what we should be looking at but yeah so it it seems i mean those things are sort of the classic right the classic flaws of the fit ball star though too yes i mean i'm pro price i i mean i'm definitely on team david price but um i could certainly see why somebody would say you know he's he's gone too far i mean i haven't looked at him enough to say that he has or hasn't but i can certainly see why somebody would say you know yeah if you if you do nothing

but pound the strike zone you'll never walk anybody um and uh if you do it the strikeouts are slightly harder to explain but i mean if you do it the right way you can probably you know miss a lot of bats because guys will take a lot of pitches um to let you get ahead of the count um but you know if you're if you're too dedicated to this idea if you don't work the edges if you don't work the corners um if you don't waste pitches um then what happens is you end up giving up more line drives and home runs mean, that's a totally plausible cause and effect hypothesis of how pitching works. So if you had told me that David Price had increased his, had gone from a guy who struck out eight and walked three per nine to a guy who struck out ten and walked one per nine,

well, I would think one of two things had happened. Either he had gotten insanely better with his stuff or he was pitching differently and he hasn't gotten insanely better with his stuff. He's just pitching differently. And so when you know that he's just pitching differently, well, you can start thinking about what are the consequences of pitching differently? What are the unintended and what are the intended consequences of this? And the intended is that, you know, he gets more, he doesn't put guys on base, and he's a different kind of pitcher, he's efficient.

But the unintended, of course, is that there's probably more pitches in the middle of the zone than he intends. Yeah. So he's getting a career-high chase rate, which I don't know whether he's throwing a different selection of pitches outside the strike zone or whether it's that he's not throwing as many outside the strike zone and so guys aren't prepared for it um he's also getting it looks like a career low percentage of contact on pitches in the strike zone so he's missing

bats that way too but i mean it seems like this should be testable right we should be able to tell is is home run per flight ball rate correlated with whatever walk rate zone rate something right i mean that would show up it seems like yeah ben if i and if i know you when i wake up in the morning you're gonna have emailed me a link to your article and i'm gonna edit it and it'll be up at about 8 30 eastern that might very well happen. I've been meaning, I've been sort of half committed to the idea of having David Price as a topic for like the last month and a half, but I just didn't think we could really do a full episode.

So huzzah to the person who asked this question and got us a nice 13 minute chunk. Yeah, pretty good. Okay, let's do one more before play index segment. This one comes from John, who says an extension of one of our topics from last week, and our discussion of Tony Gwynn versus Maddox and Gwynn's incredible success against Maddox. Are there any batter-pitcher matchups that demand changing to them on MLB TV? What are your top three? So the question really is, we already discussed our MLB TV must-watch players, the guys that we would change channels to see if we knew that they were coming up or pitching.

they were coming up or pitching. So is the appeal of a batter-pitcher matchup solely the sum of the appeals of the two players, or is there a multiplier effect? Is there some sort of exponential increase in appeal when one guy faces another guy. I would say in most cases, my interest in the at-bat is proportional to my interest in the hitter, just independent of who the pitcher is, and in the pitcher, independent of who the pitcher is. Because I don't know, I don't think a whole lot, maybe I don't think enough about whether certain pitchers are good matchups for certain hitters and vice versa. Whether one guy's, you know, his main weapon is a curveball and this guy is a great curveball hitter, that kind of thing. Maybe I should pay more attention to that. But for the most part, I don't really think of that so much.

So unless there were a, unless there were one of the, one of the like head-to-head matchup stats that are particularly interesting that we've talked about. What's the one that we always talk about? Ray Durham and Mariano Rivera. Well, yeah, that one. Goldschmidt and Lincecum. Yes, right. Romo and Ricky Weeks is a favorite. Yes, that's the one.

So, yeah, so if it's one of those and we're interested in finding out whether one of these guys actually owns the other guy, and when we see one more plate appearance, we'll get a tiny little bit more data about that, maybe come a little bit closer to making a decision one way or the other. That increases the interest. But in general, do you find that you are particularly intrigued by any matchup? No, you're right.

I agree with everything you said. I really love to see Bryce Harper against high velocity. I think that his swing, there's something that happens visually with his swing against an elite fastball and he's so fast and uh his bat speed is so fast um that i i really love to see that so i would switch over for um you know for harper against kimbrough that sort of a thing um harper against chapman uh and i mean obviously of course those are those are intriguing players on their own. But I'm just saying that I would give them a little bit of a bump, even more so than. And otherwise, the matchups are a little bit like fun facts. If they if there's some sort of,

you know, interplay between the qualities of the two subjects, if it's, you know, a 20 year old pitcher against a 40 year old superstar hitter, um, that would be interesting. If they were both 20, that would be interesting. Uh, that kind of a thing. Um, but generally I agree with you. And generally I would say that it's mostly just multiplying the value of each player involved in the equation. But I have a question for you. Who is our generation's equivalent of Gwyn and Maddox? Who is the hitter and the pitcher who you think of as being particular? Because the thing about Gwyn and Maddox is that they both had reputations for being thoughtful, smart.

They were playing chess, to use a cliche, and everybody else was playing checkers. So is there anybody in this generation who you think of the same way? Is there a possible hitter-pitcher matchup where you would want to watch 30 in a row to see how things changed? Or do you even think we...

I don't know. If I had talked to see how things changed? Or do you even think we like, I don't know, if I had talked to Ben Lindbergh in 95, would I even have, would we even have identified Gwyn and Maddox at that point as being as special as they, you know, as they obviously were? Hmm. I'm trying to think of who the, who the most cerebral, cerebral pitcher is, or who has that reputation. I don't know. I might enjoy watching someone like Mark Burley, for instance, try to survive 30 straight plate appearances against a good hitter, see what he did to try to counteract the fact that he throws 85

but has good control and can put the ball where he wants to. I don't know. I'm having a hard time thinking of a current Maddox-like pitcher. Do you have one? I don't exactly have one. I mean, I like this. This is going to sound so banal, but I like watching Kershaw pitch. But, I mean, Kershaw seems to have, uh, seems to be more, um, deliberate,

more sort of, uh, intentional about what he's doing than the average pitcher. Uh, and I don't know if that's actually true in the way he pitches. Um, I, I think I tend to overvalue, uh, the ability to hold runners on. I think if a pitcher can hold runners on, that I then transfer that to his whole game and think, well, he must be smart. He can hold runners on. But Kershaw seems to me to be the guy who will be dissecting for a long time beyond just his great stuff and his great command

and his great everything. He seems like a guy who will, I don't know if we'll ever actually, like, learn through him the value of his sequencing and all that, but we'll try. There will be a lot of people who write about it. So Kershaw and then, you know, Votto is sort of the classic cerebral hitter. Although, for all of, I don't know, I know that Votto is interesting and thoughtful and knows a lot about hitting and knows a lot about hitting and thinks a lot about hitting and has these weird kind of amazing things

about the foul balls and the pop-ups and all that. But when you watch him, it's like, oh, he's just swinging at the ball and trying to hit it. He's trying to stay within his swing and put good wood on the ball. It's not like you watch him and there's no sparkle. There's nothing actually. He doesn't levitate. He's just trying to stay back and hit the ball to left center.

That's pretty much the story. And maybe that's what I would have thought about Gwyn at the time too. I'm not sure. All right. Play index? Sure. This is a pretty lame one, to be honest. Okay.

But there's a reason that I decided to go with it, even though it's kind of lame. So you don't like our listeners? No, I have a small meta point to make at the end. Okay. So tonight, I'm looking it up. The White Sox box score tonight. Alexi Ramirez went two for four. He scored two runs.

He hit a double. He stole a base. Good game, right? Oh, he also walked. No, he didn't walk. Of course he didn't walk. What am I thinking? But he had a good game.

That's a good game. No doubt about it. But he also, that game, pushed him now to over 100 plate appearances in a row without a run batted in. And so that got me wondering about the longest streaks without a run batted in. So I used the streak finder to find the longest game streaks without a run batted in. And when it displays this, it also displays the number of at-bats they had. So it's easy enough to just click the at-bat column, sort by at-bats, and then there you have your answer. So I have the list of guys who have had 100 or more at-bats, not plate appearances. So I'm slightly cheating, because I

think Ramirez has like 97 at-bats or something like that, but he now has 103 plate appearances, I think. So I'm slightly cheating, but these are the guys who have 100 at-bats. So I'm just going to read them real quick, and then I'm going to ask you a question, and then I'll tell you a couple things, and then I'll ask another question. All right, so here are the guys with 100 or more at-bats since 1998 without an RBI.

Chris Duffy, Sam Fold, Miguel Cairo, Shannon Stewart, Tony Campana, Sean Burrows, Jordan Schaefer, Will Rimes, Marco Scudero, Willie Tavares, Omar Infante, Cleet Thomas, Eric Young, Juan Pierre, Niger Morgan, Felipe Lopez, Eddie Perez, Donnie Sadler, Ramon Santiago, Mark Loretta, Andres Torres, Cesar Crespo, Tony Gwynn Jr., Ramon Santiago, Omar Vizquel as an old man, Danny Espinosa, Andy Gonzalez, Ryan Terrio, Ruben Tejada. Do you notice anything missing in that list?

Clutch players? A single good player. Not one good hitter in the group. Just a bunch of chokers. It's not. But, I mean, they're all bad. Just a bunch of chokers. It's not. But, I mean, they're all bad. They're virtually all bad.

I mean, a couple of them had some good years here and there. Some of them had long careers. But not one power hitter in the group. Espinosa kind of has some power. Espinosa is the closest one, I would say. You could sort of, I mean, you know, Marco Scudero later in the year, this was 2012, early 2012, by the end of the year, he was like,

you know, playing like a batting champ. So you could make the case that Scudero could hit. You know, Omar Infante had a good power year when he was like 20. But, you know, he's not a power guy. So anyway, these are not generally good hitters. They're not power hitters. And I find this slightly interesting He's not a power guy. Anyway, these are not generally good hitters. They're not power hitters. I find this slightly interesting because this is a totally flute situation.

Like Alexi Ramirez, for instance, before his stretch started, he was among the league leaders in RBIs. He's batting sixth on a, you know, fifth and sixth a lot of days on an American leading team. He's, you know, he's not doing that badly during the stretch. It's not like he's mired in a seven for a hundred stretch. You know, his numbers have gone down, but he's, you know,

this is not the worst stretch of his career. It's a total fluke that leads to this happening. So I was surprised that there were no good hitters who fluked their way into it. And to give you an idea of how fluky this is, Chris Duffy, who did this in 2006, at the end of 2006 and 2007, he hit 314, 375, 392 during his RBIs stretch, which is significantly better than he hit in his career in the rest of those two seasons.

I mean, he was not a 314, 375, 392 hitter at all. And yet, for the 24 games in which he hit 314, 375, 392, he didn't manage to get a single RBI. And so that sort of shows you what a fluke this kind of a thing is.

And yet I was surprised that no good hitters had fluked their way onto this list. So that was what surprised me. So I've already told you Duffy was the best hitter in a stretch like this. Let's see. The longest stretch without an RBI in this time period was Juan Pierre, who's 185 plate appearances or 185 at-bats. So that gives you an idea of how far Alexi Ramirez still has to go. But it is definitely something that you can pay attention to.

I would encourage you to pay attention to it. Everybody should pay attention to this. Some guys, their stretch lasted three years because they were that bad. But most of them, it was just a couple, you know, basically a month when everything went against them. And I was sort of hoping that I would find a guy who had no runs and no RBIs in the stretch this long. That didn't happen. In fact, there's only been in this entire same time period, only one guy, Humberto Quintero, I believe, is the one guy, has had a streak of 100 at-bats or longer without a run, which is slightly interesting because you don't really think about it,

but you're much more likely to score a run than you are to drive in a run in any given plate appearance, but yet you're at the end of the year you sort of have the same number because you can drive in two at once or three at once or four at once. You can only score one. I don't know. That's something I hadn't really thought about.

The reason that I went forward with this and I bring it up today, besides giving everybody something to watch in White Sox games, in company games, is this. So the RBI, we don't care about the RBI. You don't care about the RBI. I don't care about the RBI.

It is a besmirched statistic. It is outdated. Nobody cares. So yet, and yet, there is this weird way that the trajectory of the RBI in popular culture and the trajectory of the pitcher win and the trajectory of the save goes down. While at the same time, the ability to do searches like this and for anybody to have these statistics at their fingertips at any given moment and to really be Elias, essentially, is going up. And so it lifts all stats up with it. And so in this weird way, Alexi Ramirez plays in an era where nobody would care about an

RBI-less streak, and yet he's the only one who plays in an era where it would be noticed at all. I didn't discover Alexi Ramirez's RBI-less streak. Some White Sox beat writer did and tweeted it out, and that guy probably had play index. So I was sort of wondering, I guess, the question I was having. I was thinking, when I was thinking about Alexi Ramirez and his streak, I was wondering

is he the last guy for whom this will be acknowledged? Is he the last guy whose RBI-less streak will merit a mention? Or is it just the opposite? Is it only beginning? Are we going to pay more attention to RBIs and saves and wins

in the future than we ever have just because we pay more attention to all stats. Will there ever be a death to the RBI or the win or the save when we have so much information at our fingertips? Are we doomed by our own advanced awareness? Yeah, probably. I mean, a lot of people still care about those stats, still think they're meaningful. More people who follow baseball closely think that than not, I would guess still.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm glad that those stats are recorded. I'm glad that we can look them up in part because of this kind of thing. Like this is a cool stat. It's trivia. It doesn't really tell us anything about Alexei Ramirez's ability to hit in the clutch or even his ability as a player. But it's interesting. One of the nice things about baseball is that we have 100 years, over 100 years of data that we can do these sort of searches and we can say this is the first time that's happened since x year and it's it's cool

it connects you to two players of a previous generation and fans of a previous generation and i enjoy it just take it for for what it is like i wouldn't i wouldn't see that stat and say, oh, RBI, get out of here. We discredited that stat a while ago. I would say that's a cool stat. I enjoyed that stat. So yeah, maybe that will prop up these stats that we have discredited, keep them alive, keep them in the national consciousness

just because they've been around forever. So do you think if uh if our if our grandchildren are doing their podcast together uh in 45 years or whatever um and some somebody has a streak like this and they bring it up in the play index search will they refer to it as a as an rbi list streak or will we just say will our grandkids just say, well, he's gone 45 games or whatever without a run scoring hit? Will we just describe it as a run scoring hit instead of a stat? Will we describe it as the thing that didn't happen or did happen instead of actually putting capital letters at the front of each word and putting it and, you know, calling it a stat? it and calling it a stat.

No, probably not. Because if we started referring to it as a run scoring hit, then someone would turn it into RSH. It's just easier to talk about it that way. I would actually prefer, I would think that somebody would probably turn it into a R lowercase U SH. And just because everybody, it seems like everybody who follows baseball loves rush, you know?

Yeah. Cause Geddy Lee loves baseball. He does love baseball. Yeah, that's true. I'm actually not that surprised that a good hitter has not had a streak that long. Cause the, the key to not having that streak is to drive yourself in, right,

is to hit a home run because that's not dependent on whether you come up with guys on base or you come up first in the inning or third in the inning, all these things that can vary over 100 at-bats, and you might just not have a whole lot of opportunities to drive guys in. And it varies based on the lineup, the team you're in. I would guess that most of these at batless streaks came in in lousy offenses that just didn't put a lot of guys on but if you're a hitter who hits home runs then none of those things matters and if you're if you're a good

hitter then you will almost certainly hit a home run at some point in every 100 at bat sample. So you almost couldn't be a good hitter and make that group. It would be difficult. I think that's an interesting point. The way I was thinking of it was that if you look at the longest hit list streaks, for instance, just at bats without a hit, you'll find good players on there you know joe morgan i think had like an over 48 or something and josh donaldson just had like an over 37 or something but that's really only measuring one thing did you get a hit or did you not get a hit and as you point out getting an rbi can happen in a lot of different ways and you basically need somebody who is disadvantaged in all those different ways so doesn't bat you know probably at the you know in the middle of an order, doesn't have the

ability to hit a home run, and isn't generally good. And so all these things have to kind of conspire. And so you're really sort of dodging RBIs in this scenario. So yeah, I think you're right. That makes sense. Good point. Okay. So please support our sponsor and gain the ability to do cool queries yourself by going to baseballreference.com. Also kind of lame ones. Some kind of lame ones every now and then. Not everyone is brilliant, but that's the fault of the play indexer, not the play index. So go to baseballreference.com.

Not that I'm saying anything about you, but just other people. Use the coupon code BP to subscribe. One-year subscription, discounted price of $30. If you use that coupon code BP, please do. Let Baseball Reference know that you're listening and treat yourself. All right, let's wrap up with a couple quick ones. This one is from Matt Trueblood. He says, why are Major League Baseball clubhouses so often morose after games?

It's not universal, but it seems that the majority of postgame interviews and pressers are almost funereal. Funereal? Is that how you pronounce that? Yeah. Sure. Reporters ask questions quietly, gingerly, and respondents sound defensive, but also often solemn or even depressed. Whose fault is this?

Are players and coaches needlessly consumed with the outcome of every single game, or are writers taking it all too seriously, or what? It seems like this is one industry where enthusiasm and joviality should rule the day, but it just isn't so. Why? So there's a... That's a good question. I don't so why so there's uh there's a question i don't have any idea that's a really good question he's right there's i mean i if you could survey players and and this is i assume mostly referring to a losing clubhouse i mean if you're winning

clubhouse you are in better mood you have the the music on not that not that well but but even those i mean even those interviews there it's not as though i mean they wouldn't but it's not as though they're dousing each other with champagne i mean it's it's it's very like business like and you know you answer your questions the the player answers his questions they they usually answer it in i mean a pitcher usually will answer the questions in almost the same tone, whether he wins or loses. It's a pretty, and it's a pretty chillaxed tone. Maybe that's unwritten rules. Maybe that's an extension of not bat flipping, is not being too jovial in the clubhouse after

you beat the other team. But you, I mean, they do douse each other with champagne when the game is important. So maybe it's just a product of each game not mattering all that much. Although you would then expect that the losing clubhouse would not be all that upset because each game, each loss doesn't mean all that much. So it seems like it's mostly a peer pressure thing. You're expected to look sad because you lost. I mean, some players are extremely competitive. They are legitimately upset.

Maybe they had a bad game. Maybe they lost in a particularly heartbreaking fashion. were to survey every player in the clubhouse and get honest answers from them, that their actual mood wouldn't be all that different from its normal state. Yeah, I think the one thing also is that when you see the scrum interviewing the starting pitcher, what you don't appreciate is that 22 of the 25 players have already left like that's an empty locker room you know they just don't hang around and mostly i i mean mostly i know the angels locker room and the angels locker room opens later than any other locker room and clubhouse in the in the sport i mean they they keep it closed longer than any other clubhouse in the

sport they flout the rules, the regulations, in fact. And so they're really empty usually by the time you get in there. But there's this sort of weird like everybody wants to go home kind of feel to it. The reporters want to go home. I mean the reporters have a lot, especially in night games, they have deadlines. They're down there to get their quote as efficiently as possible and so there's not it does not exist to provide a scene it exists to provide the quote that you know he's gonna say and that you know if like he he's he's got one hole basically in his story and he needs to get it filled uh so yeah, I mean if you sort of appreciated how quiet the rest of the clubhouse is by that point usually just because it's empty then it makes a little more sense.

Okay. I've starred a couple other good questions that we will get to perhaps next week. Please send us more at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Please join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild now with a over 1520 members and you occasionally lurking on your wife's account i i you know when you when you blew my cover i i thought, yeah, that's karma for my almost daily mention of Astro Lounge. Right. Yeah. So I, I watch you still listen to. Yeah, I haven't lately because we've been using it so much on the podcast. I haven't had to, but, but I, I will still habitually listen to it.

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