Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 492: Revisiting April Aberrations

Episode Date: July 15, 2014

Ben and Sam revisit their discussion of early-season statistics to see whether potential trends held up.

Last April, where did you go? Like winter snow, I saw you vanish Good morning and welcome to episode 492 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast featuring me and Ben from Grantland and Baseball Perspectives. Still working on that. Yeah, I think you got our affiliations backwards there. I'm the one from Grantland, you're the one from baseball perspectives yeah i was saying that the two of us collectively represent the two of those organizations collectively we will we'll workshop some intros uh we're of course sponsored by the Play Index at Baseball Reference, a site that we both love, no matter who we're representing.

We are both big fans of the site, as well as the tool itself. So that's our sponsor. Ben, how are you doing? Okay. Good. So I wanted to correct something I said yesterday. something I said yesterday. When we were talking about the fella who caught a baseball thrown from the Washington Monument,

I insinuated that he might have died. Was that a serious insinuation? I took that to be humor. It wasn't a serious insinuation. Although I do, I thought that he had been maybe, I feel like I've heard of one of these stunts that ended in injury, like it broke his hand or something like that. And maybe it did break his hand. Maybe it broke this guy's hand.

I don't think it did. The reference that somebody sent me about this feat, which was accomplished by Gabby Street in 1908, does not mention anything breaking at all. But I thought I would just flesh that out briefly. So Gabby Street is the guy who did it, although while he is the one that everybody has heard of doing it, he is actually not the first person to have done it.

14 years earlier, a fellow named Pop Shriver did the same thing, 555-foot drop by his teammate, Clark Griffith. And there's also a couple of other stories that are sometimes lumped into the genre, and you may have heard of one of them or only one of them or all of them. But there was one incident when— There was a plane drop, wasn't there? There is. That's what I'm actually—ex exactly what I'm about to say.

A couple of plane drops. So one is 1915, which is, what, seven years after the Washington Monument episode, or maybe nine years, I forget what I said. Wilbert Uncle Robbie Robinson, who was a catcher at the time, became a Hall of Fame manager, arranged to catch a baseball dropped from a passing airplane in Florida at spring training. And according to the story, the pilot, whose name was Ruth Law, a famed aviator was flying overhead realized she had forgotten the baseball which was her only job uh so she according to the story instead grabbed a grapefruit and dropped the grapefruit he caught it the grapefruit sprayed all over his face and injured him.

The last airplane story is that the New York Times reported that Babe Ruth had matched the airplane feet, although I think his airplane was only like 250 or 300 feet up. And there's a picture of it and everything but uh a lot of i think a lot of babe ruth stories from the time even at the time were apocryphal yes i was going to say that i would like to see a picture of the grapefruit incident or preferably a video uh-huh if i were to believe that one fully. I don't. I cannot provide. No. That, I could draw it for you. Would that count? Sure.

Do something in MS Paint. Send it over. So Babe Ruth, according to the Times account, caught a baseball from a plane 300 feet up, took seven attempts, and according to the Times, quote, established another world record, which is not true. That part is certainly not true. I don't know, maybe it's the highest plane, but of course the Washington Monument is much taller. So yeah, real things. Seems like the time is ripe to bring this back, right?

I mean, it's been close to close to a century it seems like at this point maybe we the world is ready to see it again yeah how high do you think a pop-up goes 100 feet only huh i don't know someone will write in and tell us and it's the easiest thing in the world for somebody who's not us to do. I mean, there's seven second pop-ups, so somebody can do it in their head. All right. So now let me switch this around and get to this and get to the topic of the day. All right. The topic of the day, Ben. Okay.

All right. The topic of the day, Ben. Okay. Do you remember about eight days into the season when we talked about trends in the season so far, league-wide trends and whether they were real or just illusions? Like it was yesterday. So I thought we would go over those and see which ones stuck. Good idea. So I went back and listened to that.

I recorded the things that we had noted were new that year. Yeah, this was like eight or nine days in. So there were obvious sample size issues, but also eight or nine days is like a couple hundred games. So it's not nothing. It's a couple hundred games if you count each game as two games, two events, the home team and the road team. And I also recorded what you said at the time i was hoping you did not record that part unless i turned out to be right but yeah i mean you're smart people like you so

yeah they do now we'll see if they still do after you tell me what i said all right so we'll start with uh home runs uh i'll quote i'll, so we'll start with home runs. I'll sort of semi-quote myself. Home runs were way down. They were way down from last year, last year being 2013. In 2013, there were 0.96 home runs per game through April, or through eight days of April. I'm just going to say through April from now on, so everybody knows that.

So it was 0.85, which was the lowest rate since 1993. You noted that balls don't travel as well in the cold weather and home runs often start slow. We went back and forth on that a little bit. And then you ultimately concluded that you were blaming April. I will quote you here. I'm going to say small sample, not just small sample, but early April sample. So both small sample and contributing factor. It's taken out of context.

And then I asked you whether you felt the same about runs, total bases, and OPS, which were also down from the previous year, and you said yes. So let's remember some numbers. 0.96 was the previous year. 0.85 at the time was the home run rate, which was the lowest since actually 1992. I said 93, but since 1992. And since then, home runs have been up somewhat, but they have not nearly regressed to what they were at. It's now at.89 for the season. .89 for the season would also be the lowest since, well, it would match 1993. So we have the lowest home run rate in more than 20 years.

And as we noted at the time, even though we all know that offense has gone down from the offensive heyday, home runs have held a lot of their ground. Home runs, even in the pitching-friendly seasons of 2012 and 2013, were way up compared to the 80s and the 70s and the 60s and the 50s. So, in fact, though, home runs haveverted to, strangely, to the pre-home run era, which is, I guess, interesting. Now, of course, we're still, you know, a larger portion of the season right now is early season than will ultimately be. So it could regress further and could get up to, you know, if it gets to 0.94, that would be the same as 2011. So that would take it out of outlier range. But home runs are still

down. Do you have it? I'm not, I guess I'm not demanding you say anything, but if you want to, you may, but I didn't prepare you for this one. So this is home runs per game, right? Is there any possibility that maybe that is not the most accurate way to determine home run rate? Because there are fewer plate appearances in all those scoring games. Yes, because on base percentage is down slightly, not much. Well, let me tell you that. I can answer that for you. Okay, please do.

This year there have been 38.02 plate appearances per game. And last year have been 38.02 plate appearances per game, and last year there were 38.02 plate appearances per game, exactly the same. And in 2012, there were actually 37.9 plate appearances per game, so slightly fewer. And in 2012, just two years ago, two very short years ago, and I just want to, I'll just quickly interrupt to say that a lot of times when we will note a weird thing about this season and we start positing hypotheses, it's easy to try to think about the long-term trends and go, oh, what has

changed in the last 20 years? But these are specifically phenomena that were different from last year too. So there's been a jag, so to speak, in the stats. So just 2012 to now, two years, has been a big change. And so then you have to start thinking, well, what has changed in just two years? Well, is it possible that could we possibly get the first half, second half splits from last year? Maybe or at least the rate of some sort. I mean, it does seem like so home run rate has been up since we discussed it, obviously.

I would expect it to be higher at the end of the year than it is now, since we still have most of the regular season cold weather behind us as opposed to ahead of us. I would expect it to go up, but maybe at this point it might be deep enough into the season that we could say that it will not get to where it was last year or to where it has been recently, but I would still be interested to know what it was, say, at the All-Star break last year. I happen to have that in front of me. Excellent. And we didn't even pause for you to look that up. That's amazing. Ben, don't lie to the people. So yeah, so in fact, home runs last year in the first half

were about one per game. So they actually ended up being higher in the first half than they were in the second half. Home runs in the first half in 2012, 1.01. It's generally been around one. I will note that 2011, which is the one year that's been lower than the rest in recent history in the last 20 years, was just slightly, slightly higher, like two hundredths, two thousandths of a home run per game

higher in the first half. So that ended up being the lowest in recent history, but it was at 0.94 home runs per game, which as I noted is within closing distance for 2014. Okay. So then I guess that we can say that this is an aberration. we can say that this is an aberration. It is, yes. And just to note, runs are also down, although not very much from last year. Last year was a big drop, and then this year is just a tiny drop.

What else did I say? Total bases per game is also the lowest, and OPS is also the lowest since 93. But none of those will surprise you. We all know that offense is down, and it's down ever so slightly from last year even. All right, let's see. So now I'm going to switch to pitching. Because strikeouts were up, obviously strikeouts were going to be up,

strikeouts are always up, but as we noted, we were seeing a huge jump. And every so often there's a huge jump. There's been steady growth for years but um every couple you know every few years there's there's a real significant jump so it had gone from 7.5 strikeouts per game to eight strikeouts per game um and that uh you said that you would have guessed that strikeouts would be lower in April as far as seasons would affect things. And so you were surprised.

We discovered that April strikeout rates are actually very indicative, extremely closely correlated to season strikeout rates. So there actually doesn't seem to be a real April seasonal effect on league-wide strikeout rates. April seasonal effect on league-wide strikeout rates. And so for that reason, you were inclined to believe it and that this was actually a real jump. And it has continued to be higher than last year and therefore higher than any year ever, but the jump is not that big. It's 7.7 strikeouts per game.

7.7 strikeouts per game. So that's kind of in the middle. It went up kind of like we predicted. It didn't turn out. This is not a freak show year. It's just the same slow and steady climb that we've gotten used to. As I recall, I think we noted that it could have been because we were doing it just after each team's number one starter had pitched. And so it could have been that there had been a better than average distribution of pitchers to that early point in the season. Yeah, good timing.

So maybe that had something to do with it. Yep, maybe it did. All right. And now we're in a slightly more frivolous one. Caught stealing. Well, we're into slightly more frivolous ones. Caught stealing. Well, this is only slightly more frivolous. I think this is legitimate. But caught stealings were way down.

Quote, like way down. And as I noted, we had talked the previous year about stolen base attempts being down and how mysterious it was that people weren't stealing bases suddenly after years of slow and steady growth upward in that category, especially because they were so much more successful that you would think that if they were that successful, they would be stealing more, but they were not. And so this year, early on in the season, stolen base attempts were exactly the same as in 2013. The low rate in 2013, exactly the same.

However, the rate of success had changed dramatically to the point that base stealers were successful better than 80%, which has traditionally been an elite base stealing rate. The whole league was better than 80%. It had gone from 55% success, 21% unsuccess, to 61% and 15%. And so I'm going to look. That has actually essentially reverted completely. Oh, I should say, now I've given it away, but let's see if you were right or wrong. Oh, I should say, you... Now I've given it away, but let's see if you were right or wrong.

First, I'll give the results. So it's reverted almost entirely. In fact, there are two hundredths of a successful stolen base more per game this year than last year. 0.57 compared to 0.55. And the number of caught stealings is now back to exactly the rate of last year, 0.21, 0.57 compared to 0.55 and the number of caught stealings is now back to exactly the rate of last year 0.21 0.21 so as with strikeouts we've seen stolen base success rates going up steadily throughout history and we still see a little slow and steady march there but it's not a dramatic

leap forward and stolen base attempts remain, but they are slightly higher than they were last year. And I think that's somewhat predictable. I think last year was weird and just sort of freakish. So you said, if it's real, if it's real, you said, it could be that teams aren't prioritizing catcher arms. They're more interested in receiving or game calling. It could be pitchers neglecting base runners. It could be runners are faster. You'll say there's something to it that it'll regress a little bit back toward established. Sorry, a little bit back, but not all the way to the established number before it.

And I said, I'm going to guess it's all fluke. It'll regress all the way to the established number before it and i said i'm going to guess it's all fluke it'll regress all the way or maybe last year might be a little lower than we should expect so uh that's pretty much what happened i've regressed all the way and last year seems to be slightly lower than we should expect uh all right you did you have something did you just inhale yeah i'm just i'm not liking what this says about my ability to predict full season trends from the first eight days of the season uh-huh well nobody is checking to make sure that i'm accurately recording what's true could be checked it could be but well it could be checked right now but

i could also very easily go in and delete that file yeah I don't know that you could do you know where it is I don't I don't know not sure that you know where that is I do it's on the server I have to do that weird thing that we do with photos no it's not there it's somewhere completely different where are you hiding these we don't put the podcast on the BP server anymore because we don't want to break the BP server. See? See? I was right. You don't know where it is.

I don't know where it is. It's out of your reach. It's true. All right. Groundball double plays were way down, quote, shockingly down. Down by 20%, lower than any year in recorded history. There were 0.63 ground ball double plays per game. You said, what could possibly have changed so much

in one winter to make it go down? I would guess that there's not much to that. Sounds like a good answer. And it has regressed to uh basically totally normal levels it's uh i said it was at 0.63 the norm over the last five years has been 0.75 uh and this it's now back up to 0.74 that's a relief you nailed it got it you got it you got that the eight-day ground ball double play rate was not indicative of a dramatic change in the way the game was played. That's why they pay me the big bucks.

That's probably what caught Grantland's eye when I said that. Yeah, we did talk briefly about the possibility that shifting might have something to do with it because players were out of position when they had to turn the double play but we decided that a teams weren't shifting that much more than they were in 2013 and b how often does that really come into play uh it seemed like a unlikely new trend and it was an unlikely new trend so huzzah ground ball double play lovers they're not going anywhere do you like the ground ball double play lovers they're not going anywhere do you like the ground ball double play sure i do too so michael bowman and i well michael mostly my michael's sort of obsessed with the aesthetics of different double plays uh and uh we'll frequently talk about which

double play is his favorite or least favorite what's your favorite double play least favorite what's your favorite double play i don't know maybe like a a great catch combined with a great throw no no no no no no no no we're first of all we're only limiting it to ground ball double plays oh and and no freak show ones no no like no no no guy gets no No three unassisted, then the guy gets into a pickle. The guy running gets into, then he throws it a second, and the guy gets in a pickle. So no three, six, four, five, three, six, two, seven ones. None of those. I don't know.

I guess I just like a spectacular six four three a flip and a and a bare hand grab and and a scoop on the first base end so your favorite double play is a six four three i'm not asking for the most exemplary example of the of the genre i just want to know yeah but that i feel like that has the most potential for that outcome. The 6-4-3. All right. I don't know that you're really getting this exercise, but are you thinking like the one where the guy goes into the hole

and then sort of turns on his back foot and then flinks it sidearm? No, not necessarily. Like really up the middle more probably. Up the middle with like a behind-the-back flip to a bare hand. Yeah. Okay. No? Well, it's just that you're making it about a specific instance of the play that you have in mind.

You're talking about the aesthetic ideal within your aesthetic ideal. I'm talking like 6-4-3 or 4-6-3. What do you prefer? So are you saying 6-4-3? Yes. Okay. I'm a fan. My favorite is probably the 5-3

where the third baseman gets it, tags the bag, and then throws to first. Or the 1-2-3. I love the 1-2-3. No, I don't think so. Yeah, Michael doesn't either. No, I don't understand that one.

You don't understand it? What is so great about that one? I mean, it's the degree of difficulty. I mean, the catcher throw is impressive. It's not the degree of difficulty. It's the combination. The shift in game situation is more or more or less as as big as you can get it's the fact that the catcher is standing on a base that is not a base like i like that he's standing on a flat surface

but you can get a you could get a bases loaded six four three uh you could but unless it's one out, that's not as big of a change in game structure. It could be. Could be. Half the time it is, but half the time it's not. And then I also, I just like the way that the catcher has to clear the throwing lane. I think that's a, I always like to see a catcher clear the throwing lane.

Like I like to see them, you know. Do you like the 3-6-3? 3-6-3. If, no. Or 3-4-3? 363. Or 343? I don't like any. Well, there's no such thing as a 343. That would never happen.

There's a 363 and there's a 323. And I generally don't like to see the first baseman. It makes me nervous to see the first baseman have to race back to the bag because I know how hard it is to find the bag without looking. When you're pawing around with your foot trying to find the bag because I know how hard it is to find the bag without looking when you're pawing around with your foot trying to find the bag. You don't like that even though it's impressive. It's more difficult but it makes me nervous. Okay. All right and last one. Wild pitches were way up. Currently the highest rate in recorded history 0.39 per game. The average for many years had been.33 or.34. We were surprised somewhat to notice that there actually have been a lot of different ups and downs

in wild pitch rates throughout history for entire decades. They've gone up or they've gone down and not always correlated to overall offense. And we didn't really have a reason for why that would be, why the 60s would be a more wild pitch era than the 70s and why the 80s would be less than the 90s and so on. But regardless, wild pitches were at their highest rate in recorded history. You said April. I said not enough data.

So two different answers, but it's the same. We both ruled the same thing, but we had different precedents that we wanted to establish with our ruling. And regardless, it is completely back down to normal. Wild pitches are now at 0.35, which is slightly less than last year and just slightly higher than the six-year rolling average. So the only trend that really turned out to be significant was the decline in home run rate. Everything else just sort of maybe was directionally indicative, but not the magnitude. Yeah, I think that's exactly right that's i guess that's

probably what we what we should expect when looking at a trend after a week or so of the season yep probably maybe we shouldn't do that show next week next year it was a fun show yeah it was i like i mean what we we could do the show and simply you know decide that they're unlikely to be long-term trends yeah i mean that's what we do if we do it again almost everything we talk about is is a something that there's not enough data to say that it's a real thing but we're talking about it anyway and then responsibly noting that there's probably not enough data to conclude it's a real thing if we do do it again next year i'm going to be extra conservative though now that i know you'll be checking up on me in an even later show i won't want to make any crazy pronouncements

about april things continuing uh-huh oh yeah no that i mean you say that as though you're beating the system but that's actually what you should be doing. Like, you should be striving to get it right, Ben. Is previously not interested in saying things that were truthful? Yeah. Because you didn't know about it. I would check on me. Yeah. So, I don't know.

This sounds like you think it's a scam that you're pulling off, but it's actually just you doing kind of what everybody expects you to be trying to do in good faith. Yeah, I've been unmasked here today. All right. Anyway, that's the end of that topic. Okay. By the way, did you see any of the Home Run Derby? I saw a little bit of it, yeah. Yeah.

I saw a little bit of it I saw Cespedes and I saw Puig and I saw Stanton's Zero and I saw this is boring I saw I saw Non-Stop

the whole thing huh? the whole thing not Home Run Derby Non-Stop, the movie non-stop. The modern cinematic masterpiece. I'm off the clock this week, so I did not watch the Home Run Derby. But someone in the Facebook group, Scott Kramer, posted a list of the KBO all-star events. The Korea Baseball Organization has its own all-Star game coming up next week, I guess.

Better events, I know. Yeah, so they have a home run derby also, but they also have Bunt King and Perfect Pitcher. So would you be interested in either of these? There is a video online or multiple videos online. If you Google YouTube either of those terms, you can watch Bunt King and Perfect Pitcher. So Perfect Pitcher is basically what we, is one of the skill competition, competitions we talked about with Zachary.

It's, it's pitchers trying to hit targets in this case, upside down bats that are balanced behind home plate and they throw the ball and they try to knock the bat over and bunt king is a bunting it's the bunting equivalent of the home run derby where there is a target set up along the third baseline sort of like the target on a dart board with concentric rings and you are supposed to bunt onto the target or as close to the center of the target as you can. Any interest in bunting? Yeah, I don't think anything could possibly reinforce my point better than that. When they have decided to do a skills contest and what the best they could come up with or maybe arguably the second best they could come up with was people bunting to a little circular rug down the line

with virtually, I assume, no particular pressure on it. It's not as though their best pitcher in the league is even pitching to them, right? They get to choose their bunting pitchers, right? Yeah, that's just about the worst thing that's ever. And we should note that Korea does not have bad taste. They are all flair and color and awesomeness. So they're not trying to suck, and yet this is clearly a situation where they've gone astray

because that's what skills competitions do to people. I found a tweet from at myKBO, which is the Twitter account for my KBO.net, which covers KBO and Korean baseball. It's from last July 19th when last year's Bunt King competition was in progress. It said, KBO Bunt King colon. So far, don't think anyone's gotten a bunt to count for any points. Not a lot of fans at the stadium right now. So that's bunt king. Yeah. Nice try.

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