Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 490: Announcements and Aces

Episode Date: July 11, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss their new jobs and the future of the podcast, then talk about how ace starters are defined.

You never wear a stitch of lace, your powder's never on your face, you're always wearing jeans, except on Sunday. So please don't ever change, now don't you ever change, I kinda like you just Good morning and welcome to episode 490 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. Hello. Hello. Anything you'd like to discuss? Mmm, nope. Anything you'd like to discuss? Nope. Anything you'd like to discuss?

Well, we have some announcements to make that relate to our livelihoods. We both have or are about to have new jobs. This is my last day as an editor and as a writer at Baseball Perspectives. It's been two years since I signed up for a two-year stint, which means that that stint is over, and I am stepping down to take a job as a staff writer at Grantland. And what that means is that you also have a new job. Your job is editor-in-chief of Baseball Perspectives. Yes, I have your job.

Congratulations. Congratulations to you, Ben. Thank you. It's a big deal. It's a big thing. For both of us. Yeah, it's bittersweet, very bittersweet. Yes.

A lot of bitter. A lot of bitter in this sweetness. Yes, definitely. But, you know, such is the case. Everybody leaves. Everybody leaves eventually. That is the case, yes. I'm taking a break from writing my farewell post,

which will be up at Baseball Prospectus today. So I will try to put my feelings in there. But BP has been a big part of my life, and it's hard to leave, and I've loved most minutes of it. By the way, Ben, nobody cares right now about what you're saying about you and what you're saying about me. That's true. I just want to know if there's going to be episode 491. People are probably wondering what this means for the podcast. So I'll say, I mean, I wanted to end it.

I argued that this was a logical stopping point, that we should go our separate ways, and you wouldn't hear of it. You just put your foot down. You threw a little tantrum, really. It was unbecoming of you. Somebody has to care about our listeners, Ben. And it's always been me.

And you insisted that the show go on, the podcast continue. It's not exactly how it happened, but it happened that way. The podcast continues. Sort of. I mean, yeah. It continues. I would guess, though, that without having an announcement ready to make, I would suspect that in about two weeks we'll have another announcement that will have to do with the nature of the show. Perhaps. Perhaps we'll think about a format change.

What I'm saying is that it strikes me as unlikely that it will be a daily podcast come August. But I think it will be a podcast come August. It will, yes. Grantland already, of course, has a fine podcast, the Jonah Carey podcast, and I like doing podcasts. So I'm happy to continue as long as you are, and BP is nice enough to continue to have me do that and my my new bosses at grantland are nice enough to let me continue to do that so so we will continue to do that yep and that's that again yes you too job thank you congratulations on the uh on the podcast

congratulations on the ongoing podcast yes i'm excited to see what you do with the place. There's no one who would be better for that job, I don't think. I think that you would be better for that job. Hang on. I'm muting. Here comes a plane. I'm muting. Okay.

Keep talking. Oh, well, I'm no longer available. So in my absence, certainly you are the best person for the job. And I look forward to it. And I think you will work wonders with the place. I still haven't figured out how to upload photos, though. Yeah, you're really going to have to figure out some of those things. Two and a half years.

Yeah, you never needed to. No, I've done it. I know how to do it, but I have to read the whole instruction sheet because I've done it about three times. And so each time, it's like a 45-minute investment for that one photo.

Well, if you want, episode 491 can be a tutorial on the Baseball Perspectives content management system, if that would help you. Hang on, are you still going to publish this thing? I guess. I don't know. If you'll let me have the access to do it, if you're not afraid that I'll go in and wipe out everything.

I still have access to McCovey Chronicles. Yeah, I guess I probably do too. Yeah. Guest posts there. If we were going to start vandalizing, of course, we would start there. That's right. Yeah. Well, I'm happy to happy to continue doing the recording and uploading.

Anyway, so we got that out of the way. Hopefully everyone is relieved there was a small scare there for a moment where maybe you thought the podcast was over but it's not no alright my topic is it my topic

yes normally it would be my topic but you indicated that it would be yours alright so I just sent you a link. You've probably seen this link already. This is the results of Sky Kaufman's second annual Who's an Ace survey. And so Sky created a Google Doc with, I don't know, 100-ish, 110-something maybe, starting pitchers throughout baseball.

And you just voted on which were aces you could have voted i guess not aces the the um the phrase is number one starters and you could have voted for all of them if you wanted and you could have voted for none of them if you wanted and um so we've we talked um we talked about i don't know maybe a month or two ago about his survey last year but the results were old and we hadn't really thought about it very much. And so I had some general thoughts about some of the biases that might show up in a survey of this sort, but we didn't really have the timely information or the backup information to justify a conversation.

So now though Sky's done it again, we have up to the minute results. And so two days ago, I took these results as they were yesterday, which is, there've been like 30 votes since, but I had a good sample. So I took those and then I correlated them to a whole bunch of different statistics and such to see what were driving it. And first, though, I just wanted you to look at it and tell me what jumps out at you. Which ones surprise you or which players do you think are too high, too low? Or if not too high, too low, at least surprise you with how high and how low they are. All right, I am looking at the list.

The names at the top appear to be the ones that I would expect. Maybe I'm sort of surprised that Yu Darvish is number two. I would expect to see, say, Felix be the number two, but the vote totals are almost identical. Actually, Kershaw is the clear number one, and then two, three, four, five are pretty much exactly the same. So I guess I'm sort of surprised about the more recent additions, the guys who haven't been at this level for as long such as number nine Masahiro Tanaka obviously this was before the injury news but I'm sort of surprised that that many people would put him that high just because generally you hear people say that one of the the main

criteria for for being an ace is that you have had to be an ace for a while, that you can't just be a one-year ace, that part of being an ace is being a number one starter year in and year out. And he has only had half a year in. So I'm surprised that he is that high, that he is above, say, Max Scherzer or Cliff Lee or Zach Greinke, all of whom I think I would probably put above him just based on track record. Interesting that Johnny Cueto is number 15. We've talked in the past about how Cueto's kind of underrated, maybe, because he's not tall, because he doesn't strike out a ton of guys. But going purely on how many runs he's allowed, he deserves to be higher on this list, I would say.

I don't see a whole lot of people who stand out to me as being way out of order. It looks reasonable to me. Justin Verlander at number 19 so he has fallen quite far quite fast i wonder where he was last year on this list do you recall i don't recall um but you know one or two i assume yeah it's interesting because it does seem like you can uh you lose your ace status it seems to, you lose your ace status. It seems to me you lose your ace status more quickly, sorry, more slowly than you gain your ace status. So, like, for instance, you know, Verlander has been, you know,

one of the, like, sort of half dozen worst starting pitchers in baseball this year among people who have kept their jobs. worst starting pitchers in baseball this year among people who have kept their jobs. And yet he has only gone from, you know, the number one or two last year, I assume, to number 19 this year, you know, ahead of some guys who are really super good. Whereas meanwhile, like Scott Casimir, has been absolutely an ace this year, completely acey this year, and yet could only get 10 votes. He has one quarter as many votes as Verlander. And although I guess you might say you might counter with CeCe Sabathia, who I assume last year, I would imagine last year was probably a top 10 or so, even with his struggles, and has fallen down to number 44 with only three votes.

So maybe you would say Sabathia lost it quickly. But Sabathia's had two terrible years in a row. Henderson Alvarez is another guy who, for instance, I didn't vote for him. I wouldn't vote for him. I don't expect a lot of people to have voted for him. But he only has two votes. And you compare that to guys like Matt Cain, who hasn't pitched like an ace for two years,

gets 11 votes. Or Jared Weaver, who hasn't really pitched anything like an ace for two years, gets 14 votes. You figure there's some reputation bias that goes in here. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's exactly what I would figure. Yeah. Gio Gonzalez gets 18 votes. You know, hasn't been an ace for two years, really. Hasn't been even close to an ace, I wouldn't say, for two years. So yeah, reputation clearly has, reputation is clearly part of the, I don't

even say it's a, well, it depends what you mean by bias. If we're saying, do these match up perfectly with performance, and anything that skews it from performance is a bias, then yes, that's a bias. But if what we're talking about is a subjective measure in which the reputation of the guy is part of the calculus that people use. I don't know if you'd call it a bias so much as a variable. Mm-hmm. Sonny Gray, 25th. Sonny Gray, 25th.

High, you think? Low. Low, you think? Yeah. Oh, interesting. I don't know. Below, well, he's below Verlander. He's below Samarcha.

Yeah, he's pretty good, but he's got an ERA of three in a pitcher's park. I mean, it's nothing super special. He doesn't strike a ton of guys out. He wasn't an elite prospect a year ago. I think that's a big thing. I have not yet finished inputting these, but I hypothesize, and I don't know the answer to this, but I hypothesize that prospect status, even 10 years earlier, is significant to how many people consider you an ace. And Gray was enough of a prospect that he will get ace credibility, certainly,

and he does have people who say he's an ace. But Gray was not an elite prospect. He was not a top five, top ten prospect. So why do you think Scherzer is not higher? He's 11th. He's under Cliff Lee, under Tanaka. He's the defending Cy Young winner. He has double-digit strikeout rates for the last three years. He's an all-star this year. What about him is not AC? Is it that he doesn't go deep into games? Does he not have AC inning totals?

Does he not have AC inning totals? Well, he's only really had one elite year for run prevention. And, I mean, if you look at, I mean, he was always disappointing until last year. So I think that Scherzer deserves an ace vote. But until last year, there was always sort of an air of disappointment about him, that his ERA never matched up with his promise in peripherals. I don't really know, though. Scherzer is one that not only do I think is too low, but I don't know how to explain him being there.

It does seem low based on the standards. I'm surprised that he's behind Cliff Lee, although I don't know, who else are you surprised he's behind on there i'm surprised that david price is number three and is actually now on sky's updated list i sent you the two days ago one but on an updated one is number two and that one i don't quite know that i mean unless only uh peripheral peripherals fetishists vote on this, which is fine. I am one of those. I don't quite know how to justify that. He's had one really clearly above average year in the last four.

And it was great. He won the Cy Young Award. But that was three years ago. Not last year, but the year before.. Since then, he's been pretty good. Before that, he was pretty good. There's certainly nothing wrong with voting. I think I voted for David Price, too, when I did this. But to be the maybe ninth or tenth or eleventh name on this list would have made more sense to me than seeing him be the number two name on this list it's hard to imagine he gives up a lot of runs it's just sort of like a fact of david price's life is he gives up quite a bit more runs than you would expect from the second best ace in baseball

he also has a brutal postseason record by the way which is not insignificant to subjective conversations like this it's hard to imagine not voting for Felix. What possible reason could you have not to vote for Felix? Well, yeah, I don't know. He's the, in my mind, he's more or less the definition of an ace, right? I mean, he's among the best pitchers in baseball every year for a long string of years, and he's pitching about as well now as he ever has. So I don't know, you know, maybe, I don't know whether some of these votes were just not taking the exercise seriously or something, but he's outnumbered.

Clayton Kershaw has nine more votes than Felix, which suggests that someone considers Kershaw an ace but doesn't think Felix... Winning percentage? Could it be winning percentage? Could it just be that some people say, hey, he's won 15... Wow, this, by the way, is total nonsense, but he's won 15 games once in his career. Felix Hernandez, 10 seasons, although he'll win 15 this year. Probably. Maybe. Well, that could be it.

That could be it. Yeah. Otherwise, I don't know. You're right. I mean, he's one of the – he would be like probably the third or fourth name that I would put on on mine he might be the second at this point I think he'd be my second

he'd probably be my third he might be my fourth so Kershaw is the number one I would probably go Chris Sale and Jose Fernandez at least equal to and maybe above Felix. Those would be the two other guys that I would consider ahead of him.

Maybe Wainwright and then Felix. And those would be my top five. And then, wow, that one's loud. And then Darvish would be sixth. But anyway, I'm not recording in the usual location. I can tell. All right, so anyway. Recording on the tarmac somewhere.

All right, now we're going to go to my spreadsheet. All right, so I'm going to give you, first I'm going to give you, I'll give you six stats, six numbers, six columns. And I want you to rank them based on how important. Well, you just tell me what you think the most important and what you think the least important would be for an exercise like this in your mind. Okay, so this is just 2014. Okay, war, by baseball references measure, wins, ERA, ERA+, strikeouts per nine, and fit. I would say, well, wins, least important.

Most important, probably war. Since we're using baseball reference war, we're incorporating run prevention, we're incorporating innings pitched, so that would probably be my top one. Well, win correlates the least strongly to these votes, which is not that surprising, especially in a one-year. Even people who take wins very seriously, probably not as much in a half of a season. I don't think that many people are looking at who has eight wins and who has seven and making a decision based on which is better.

But the strongest correlation is actually not war. The strongest correlation is strikeouts per nine. So there's a clear, I mean, considering that strikeouts per nine are clearly less valuable to a baseball team than war is, that would seem to be a bias of, you know, something that, here comes another one, something that's skewing these. highest correlation. ERA plus is the third highest. And then war and ERA are basically even fourth and fifth, and then wins comes last. Okay. So, Ks per nine is the most valuable in the short term, or the most correlative, I should say. All right, so next I'm going to ask you the same question, but since 2012, so now you have three years of data. I don't know how much that changes the way you look at these things, but I'm going to

give you the same six plus innings as well. So total innings since 2012. I'd like to think that wins would still be least important. I wouldn't be shocked if it weren't, but wins above replacement sort of should be the most important, I would think. It's not a trick question. I don't even know the answer yet. Oh, okay. Well, I'll stick with the same answer then. Okay. Wins is not the lowest, but only because innings is the lowest. What's interesting is that wins, maybe this isn't interesting, maybe this makes sense.

I don't know. Wynn's actually has a lower, Wynn's since 2012 actually has a lower correlation than Wynn's in 2014. So that's kind of interesting, isn't it? Yeah. And then the highest is now FIP. So not strikeouts per nine. Strikeouts per nine, actually, the correlation is essentially unchanged,

whether it's one year or three. Actually, it also slightly goes down. The other ones all go up considerably. So FIP is the new leader, and it goes up by a lot. ERA Plus is number two, and it goes up by a lot. ERA plus is number two and it goes up by quite a bit. And ERA is number three and it goes up by quite a bit. And war, actually

sorry, ERA is number four, war is number three. So, war is now the number three. So, I don't know that, I don't have a problem with that. FIP over war. It's like at the levels that most of us are capable of interacting with these statistics, FIP and war are more or less equally valid. I mean, I guess war has the benefit of having the innings attached to it. But, you know, that seems reasonable to me. So FIP wins out. Winning percentage, by the way, this is also interesting to me, wins has a fairly low correlation, but winning percentage is actually considerably

higher, which both of those things are almost the exact same stat, just rephrased, really. And yet, one has a much higher correlation.. So if you go 18 and 11, you're not considered an ace, but if you go 18 and 8, you are, more or less. And as for the other things that I looked at, velocity, average force seam velocity average force seam velocity has a fairly healthy correlation of 0.26

which is lower than most of the other things I named but still significant although not necessarily saying that's what's driving the voting velocity is obviously going to be correlated to good pitching. In fact all of these things are going to be correlated to I'm not saying that any of these things are going to be correlated to... I'm not saying

that any of these things are driving the voting so much as they correlate to the voting. And so there's some aspect of both things at play probably where to some degree it's driving the voting and to some degree it's just coinciding with excellent pitching, so swinging strike percentage. Height is 0.16 correlation. Weight has virtually no correlation, which is interesting to me. Yeah, you'd think there'd be some, if only because there is some to height. Height and weight are obviously related. Yeah, and so then that makes you think that i mean in almost all the tall guy is usually going to be the heavier guy and so that makes

you think that there's actually a negative either bias or something negative in performance about being fat about being weighty um and if i limit it to uh to only players who got votes, because about half the players didn't get any votes, and then you'd think, well, are they really telling you anything? They don't even matter. You just throw them out. I mean, it's like including you and me in there. If you just do that, virtually nothing changes. So that's it. That's what I've got for you. Oh, by the way, my big outliers in the results, as far as I was concerned, for guys who are too low, are Iwakuma, which it seems weird to me that Tanaka can come in

and in 16 starts or whatever finish ninth. And Iwakuma could arguably have been the best pitcher in the AL last year and is also very good this year and only 21st. So that struck me as low. So it's the contract? Yeah. East Coast bias? No, I would think that it's the amount of expectations, the height that he had

coming in. And of course, Kyle Osh, who I didn't vote for, wouldn't vote for, but of course lots of people got votes and almost everybody got more votes than Kyle Loesch, despite him being much better than a lot of the pitchers above him. And I'm just, to me, the reason that I look at this exercise with interest is specifically to see the difference between Kyle Loesch and David Price, who, I cannot stop saying, have the same ERA plus over the last four years are you upset that Willie Peralta only got one vote is that you no he's been pretty lousy

over the last month so I'm not too upset Alvarez has been so good though Henderson Alvarez has been so good I'm surprised he didn't get a little bit more love Price by the way has moved up from 120 ERA plus to Kyle Loge's 118 ERA plus over the last month that I've been talking

about this on the podcast. So it's not exactly the same anymore, but it's basically the same. And yet, one of them is considered the second best pitcher in baseball, and the other one is like the 70th. Four years, Ben. I'm talking about four years here. Doug Pfister, four votes. Seems low. Wait, that's low, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, because Doug Pfister last year had a better, he had what, the ninth best fit in the American League, I think? And he's pitched well this year. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, that's a good one. I think and he's pitched well this year yeah you're right yeah that's a that's a good one

any others Dan Dembrowski must not have voted for him Yordano Ventura only nine does that surprise you at all yeah oh Michael Walk

at 11 surprised me that is a little surprising do you consider the ace debate a productive debate or discussion?

I've never really... I don't consider baseball to be a productive discussion. Yeah, but by the standards of baseball discussions, I've always thought the ace debate was kind of a particularly meaningless one. It's kind of, I mean, it's like the MVP debate where we're not necessarily arguing about who the best player is. We're arguing about our definition of what an MVP is. So you have some people who say it's the best player, and then you have other people who say it's the player who was most valuable to a playoff team or made the difference between playoffs and no playoffs.

And there's just no point in arguing because you're not arguing about the same thing anymore. Ace, ace is kind of the same sort of thing, right? Some people say that an ace has to be someone who has been at that level for several years. Other people say, if you're an ace right now, if you're pitching at that level right now, that's good enough. Now, if you're pitching at that level right now, that's good enough. Is that because I mean, to me, if I were asked to vote on who my aces were, it would just be it would be probably the pitchers that I project to be the best pitchers. Right. For for any period of time, I would think for for the rest of this year, for next year, for whatever period it is. I don't know that I would consider what a guy did four years ago or something. It's just who are the best pitchers, right? Who do I think are the best true talent pitchers right now? I'd kind of rather

talk about that than talk about which ones are aces. Yeah, well, it's clearly an unproductive debate, but it's not a destructive debate, and so that seems fine to me. The reason that I like it is that we like to, it seems like we like to talk about overrated and underrated, but we don't ever have particularly good rating systems. And I like an exercise like this because it creates a baseline level of how rated a player is so that you can start to explore who is truly over- and underrated and why. Great. Okay. So we'll link to the results of this survey on the Baseball Perspectives blog post

and also in the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. in the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. Please send us some emails for next Wednesday's listener email show at podcast at baseball prospectus.com. And please rate and review the podcast on iTunes. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. If you're relieved that the podcast is not dead, that the podcast is continuing, show us some love with an iTunes review.

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And good luck, Chief. Thanks. Good luck to you. There's a big plane. Yeah. Picturing you in the field from North by Northwest this whole episode,

you're just running around talking to me and this plane is circling. Can't hear you. Okay. All right. We'll end it here all right we'll be back with a new show on monday