Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 493: Listener Emails for Your Off-Day

Episode Date: July 16, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about the All-Star Game and answer listener emails about All-Stars vs. Snubs, overly long-term contracts, teaming up on Trout, and more.

I know there's an answer. I know now what I'll have to find by myself. A doobie doobie. Good morning and welcome to episode 493 of Effectively Wild, the daily baseball podcast at Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, soon to be a staff writer for Grantland. You are Sam Miller, editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus.

How is that for an intro? Yeah, that's good. If it's at Baseball Perspectives, don't you think we can just continue saying the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives? Yeah, we probably could. Say, you know, with Ben Lindberg from Grantland. Yeah. Something like that.

I think we can do that. It is still hosted by Baseball Perspectives. Yeah, exactly. How was your All-Star game experience? It was okay. You had some good tweets. Thanks. You're welcome.

I counted the entire time. I was counting. Oh, right. You were counting cheater references, right? Well, I was, but not only that. I decided that wasn't telling. So I counted every reference made to every player. Uh-huh.

So any time a player was named, I counted. Did you see any of the game? Or were you just marking names in the spreadsheet the whole time? You'd be surprised, but actually the naming of ballplayers in a game in which they're playing happens quite a bit. Yeah. So it happened quite a bit. I have, I don't know, what do I have?

I probably have 600 check marks maybe. Check marks, that's how you did it, huh? Did you write down every player in baseball with a blank line next to their name just no if if a non-ball player if a non-all-star was named i didn't i didn't bother and okay i didn't i i do have to figure did anybody not play i think there were pitchers who didn't pitch, right? Batantes didn't pitch. Oh, Houston Street didn't pitch. So amazingly not named. Those poor guys don't get named.

There was nobody who was named during the game who didn't get into the game. No check marks for Tony Gwynn on there either. No checks. That's right. Very good. Yeah. So how many? Okay, so if this is not spoiling the article that you counted for, I would love to know the count of Jeter references.

I don't, I'm not sure. It's probably not spoiling. I mean, it is spoiling. It probably doesn't matter if I spoil, but just for the sake of having options, I'm going to choose not to reveal that yet. Okay. Will this counting article be up today? Well, it's supposed

to. That's the thing. I mean, you know, it's 9.15 and I usually go to bed at 9.45, so something's got to give, Ben. Well, this is the job that you've signed up for. Yeah. I think I'll get it. I think I'll get it done. I have to do another thing too, though. So it's going to be crazy night.

Tell me about it. Uh, uh, Paul boy, by the way, uh, also counted Jita references, um, independently of me. Um, he didn't of course count michael brantley references uh but he did count jeter references some people might have seen that and i i will just note um that if you've seen that that is not the same as as what i counted because uh for a couple reasons one paul so far as i can tell was counting pre-game as well you know almost entire pre-game show was dedicated to Jeter. So his number, he bowed out in the fourth inning,

and his number was already much higher than mine was. The other thing is that he counted, as did I, he counted camera shots on Jeter separately. But I chose not to count any camera shots where Jeter was the center of actual action. So only superfluous Jeter shots. So not montages? I counted montages, yeah.

The montages in the post-game show seemed to get out of the director's control. They became self-aware. They said, we're going to show you a short note from Derek Jeter and then they showed like a five minute did you hear that when he said we're going to go to it he said like oh no someone someone frantically goes yeah and then there was the montage and then there was a few minutes of talking and then a commercial and then like the same montage again or at least part of it uh well I uh no montages count what i'm saying is that like when jeter was at bat i didn't count that so every shot during his at bat didn't count when he

was you know fielding a ball i didn't count that when he was running the second on a wild pitch i didn't count that so uh different different parameters i counted a bunch of other things i counted how many uh how many innings jeter was either the intro or the outro, like the first or the last shot coming out of or going to commercial. I counted slow motion. I counted Jeter and Trout together. I counted captain

references and I think that's it. That's all I counted. Decent game though other than the too much Jeter and the Wainwright stuff and the no-gwin or whatever complaints you had about the broadcast. The actual game was decent. The Wainwrights, you say the Wainwrights stuff, like that was a bad part. That was a good part, and that was a colorful part.

Yeah, I suppose. I don't know. I was on Twitter, so I was tired of it already by the fourth inning and then it changed and it came back full force once once he recanted his initial statement tim burke who you know is bubba prog says that there were 93 mentions of jeter on the fox deportes broadcast uh So apparently I'm definitely getting... Oh, interesting. Burke has 100 for the Fox broadcast.

And I... I don't. You don't? Slightly fewer. So we're going to have to have a recount. Okay. So that's the All-Star game. Now we have a day with no baseball. Okay. So this is the listener email show. We got your listener emails. We will answer some of them

now. This one comes from Adam in Dallas. Hypothetical time. You are a right fielder in major league baseball. Your team's pitcher is throwing a perfect game in the bottom of the ninth, but this isn't your average perfect game. The starter has struck out the previous 26 batters, and your team is up by 10 runs. Oh, hang on. I gotta introduce. I gotta interrupt real quick.

I'm looking at some of Bubba Progg's data, and he includes crowd chants, because that's part of the and I debated whether or not to count crowd chance and I decided not to there you go good I'm glad the difference is accounted for

alright so he might also be counting the Jordan ad I'm not sure so the scenario it's the bottom of the ninth your pitcher is throwing a perfect game you're the right fielder. The starter has struck out 26 batters. Your team is up by 10 runs.

The ball is hit, and you are camped under it well into foul territory. Think O.co amount of foul territory. What do you do? Catch the ball, ensuring your pitcher gets the perfect game or let it drop to risk the perfect game, but giving the pitcher a chance at something truly spectacular. Does the number of strikes on the batter at the plate factor into your decision?

Would you ever consider doing it on anything but the last out? And I think this question might be more interesting and maybe slightly more realistic if we're talking about a 21 strikeout game, maybe. If we're, let's say he has 20 strikeouts on 26 and it's two outs in the bottom of the ninth and you are deep into foul territory, do you drop the ball to get the 21 strikeout game that you personally have wanted to see for some time? Well, I can tell you that as a person, I mean, as a person who's, who's rooted for 21 strikeout games, you know, who's rooted for 21 strikeout games, who's seen pitchers at 15, 16, 17, 18 late in the game, I'm always miserable when this situation comes up and the guy chooses to catch it.

But of course, I'm also miserable when the third baseman fields it and doesn't throw the ball away. And there's only a certain amount of engineering the defense is allowed to do or should do. I think if it were... So this is a perfect game, and also he has 20 strikeouts. And a foul ball will not affect the result, but will give him a chance to lose the perfect game. I'm assuming that there are two strikes. If it were three, he asks, does the number of strikes on the better at the plate factor

into your decision? Yeah, well, it should, if it were, if it were a three Oh pitch that the guy hit foul, I'd catch it. Yeah. If it were a two Oh pitch, I'd catch it. I'd catch it. Yeah. If it were a 2-0 pitch, I'd catch it.

If it were a 1-0 pitch, I think I'd probably catch it. And if it was at least the second strike, you know, so 0-1, 1-1, 2-1, I would let it drop. And probably 3-1, I would let it drop. I'd hope to have the foresight to ask the pitcher what he would like me to do in this situation. It does seem like this is a living will sort of situation. Yes, I would not want the responsibility for making this split-second spur-of-the-moment decision that could affect this pitcher's legacy forever to fall to me.

So I'd have a little mound conference before this last out. Do you think that there are any things like this that you and I should go over so that we know the other's desires in case we don't have time to... I mean, because sometimes we're able to message each other in the middle of a podcast, but sometimes you're not online. That's true. I don't know. If I'm taking a trip tomorrow or today, people are listening to this.

So if anything were to happen to me, I would want you to end the week on a multiple of five. I'm taking a trip tomorrow or today. People are listening to this. So if anything were to happen to me, I would want you to end the week on a multiple of five. Just so you know that. All right. Other than that, I'm not sure what else. Okay. Okay.

This question comes from Dan who says, suppose you were to put together two 25-man rosters, one from a pool of all-stars and the other from the top players who didn't make the all-star team. What would the probability be of the non-all-stars winning? I don't doubt that it would be less than 50%, but is it 49, 45, 40? I imagine that they would have to play a series of games to get full use of rotations, benches, and bullpens. So maybe the better question is if they play 100 games, how many would the non-All-Stars win? Derek Norris today, when talking to Susan Slisser, wondered aloud how many games the All-Star team would win

if they were together for the whole year. So it's a similar question, but it's a different question, but it's a similar question. So I guess we can answer both of those. Yeah, so he didn't offer an answer. So an all-star team, the all-star team against the, I guess for want of a better word, snub team, and the all-star team against basically the league average team

minus all of their all-stars. Yes. basically the league average team minus all of their all-stars. Yes. So the snub team, I mean, nobody gets snubbed anymore, really. Right. Joe Richards. Every player who's good at baseball makes the all-star team, seems like.

Yeah, pretty much. That's true. But, I mean, that's not actually true, right? No, not quite. There are a lot of great players who didn't have a great first half or the other ways that you don't make the all-star team. So they're not necessarily snubbed, but they just were unavailable or they were injured for half the season. I mean, Chris Sale almost missed it, for Pete's sake. He didn't because the fans voted him in, but he would have.

And Chris Sale is one of the three best pitchers in baseball. So it can certainly happen. Strasburg didn't make it. For instance, I don't know who else jumps out at you. Bryce Harper didn't make it. Buster Posey didn't make it. Joey Votto didn't make it. Buster Posey didn't make it. Joey Votto didn't make it. Dustin Pedroia

didn't make it. You can put together a really good team. I'm not actually sure that... I'm not 100% sure. I'm pretty confident that the All-Star team would win. But I'm not 100% confident that the All-Star team would win.

I've just named enough good names that I'm somewhat hesitant to say automatically. But yeah, the All-Star team would win. Let's say home field advantage worth of games. They'd win 54%. I'll go a little bit higher. If we're talking about a full Full season I would say

I'd say 56 But yeah Kenley Jansen didn't make it As far as I can tell No It's hard to know at this point Right I can hardly keep track of who's an all-star anymore.

Did Madison Bumgarner make it? The teams are announced, and then the week after that is just this guy dropped out, and this guy's replacing him, and then that guy drops out, and this guy's replacing him, and I don't even try to keep track anymore. Bumgarner did make it, by the way. Mm-hmm. But, yeah, you can put together a pretty good team. I don't think you'd be able to.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think that if you took somebody who had been missing for the past, you know, eight months or whatever and just plumped them down in front of that game, that hypothetical game we're talking about, I'm not sure they would be able to tell which team was which. Maybe at the beginning of the game they could, but otherwise, personnel-wise, they'd be awfully close to indistinguishable.

Right. I think you'd have to watch the entire game to be able to tell basically certain parts of the team i wonder what the what the biggest difference would be in terms of you know bullpen starting rotation starting lineup where the biggest gap would be between the all-stars and the the snubs i would i would guess that like the the snub relievers would be just about as good as the all-star relievers probably not a big difference there um well there's never a very big difference between relievers but i will that the consensus top six in the reliever leagues this year were Kimbrel, Chapman, Jansen, Holland, Rosenthal, and Uehara.

And almost nobody went ahead of those six in almost any league. And four of them made the All-Stars. And two did not. Okay, so how about All-Stars versus... Klippard, by the way, pretty close to consensus number seven. Did make it. Joaquin Benoit was very high, did not. So Jake McGee was very high and did not.

So yeah, you're probably right, although I think that the relievers are... At least I think the relievers would be better. I think you could maybe... I maybe almost see the starting pitchers being... Because if you don't get your wins... Good relievers are closers, and they get their saves, and saves are a huge part of how you get to the All-Star game. But if you don't get your wins,

it's pretty easy to not get your wins in a half of a season. And if you don't get your wins, you mean it's pretty easy to not get your wins in a half of a season. And if you don't get your wins, you usually don't make the all-star team. So I'm not sure that starting pitcher wouldn't be where the gap was the smallest. Yeah, that could be. It could be, probably not. So, all right, so then how about not snubs? How about just all-stars versus whatever the other thing we said was?

Versus an All-Star-less league? I would say like 130 wins in a full season. Really? Well, it's because it's an All-Star-less league. You've taken the 90 best players out of the league. If it were against a league, and that might be slightly low. It's just that you're pushing the boundaries of what any baseball team can do. If it were against the league as constituted with those all-stars, like there were just clones made, then I'd still say a high 100 teams,

like 118 to maybe up to 124. Maybe. Yeah. If you took the if you took all the all-stars out, how many above average players do you think you would have on your roster? You'd still have some, right?

Yeah. How many players are average? Those are good questions. Yeah. right yeah uh well so you have how many players are average that's a good question yeah uh that's i don't know how many players are above average i don't either but but you'd still have some above average yeah let me ask you this let me ask you this just curious let's say that you had this roster this all-star roster and they were playing a full season uh how much would they be hurt by the fact that the good players all come out in the fourth inning or or would it help over the course of a long season with the value of being able to do that and having the depth in which nobody ever gets tired uh you have insane backups at every position in case someone gets hurt all the pitchers are only throwing one inning at a time.

And you have enough where basically you can have an all-reliever pitching staff, but they're the best starters in the world. Would they be better or worse over the course of a full season if they played like a regular team or if they played like an all-star team does with roster substitutions? I wonder because we always talk about the idea of doing the all-bullpen rotation and just not having a starting pitcher, just having everyone go one or two innings

and whether maybe that would be more efficient if teams could actually conquer the various obstacles to doing that. And if they are playing by all-star game rules, then they're already doing that, and they're getting that advantage, not just keeping guys fresh and maybe not getting hurt, but also not having the times-through-the-order penalty, and yet having great pitchers even in the late innings, despite the fact that they're doing that.

So I would say it might help or at least be a wash. Yeah. Still got lots of good players who come in. And plus, I mean, the All-Star starters are not necessarily even the best players on the team i mean you know sometimes they're they're derrick jeter so maybe in that case it's it's a good thing that the starters are not in the full game yeah okay uh all. Let's take this question from a different Adam who said, as I ponder how my Reds are going to craft their payroll around the $25 million they'll owe to the 220 hitting Joey Votto in 2021. Of course, 220 hitting Joey Votto will still probably have a

350 on base or something, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on the maximum length of a contract you'd be willing to sign a player to, maybe for a 25-, 28-, and 30-year-old player. Also, what do you believe will be the tipping point to scare teams off from giving non-Troutian players super long contracts? I wonder whether it will be a player we've already seen signed. I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. If it were Howard plus Verlander plus, I don't know,

maybe Mikel Cabrera's contract, depending on how that goes. But even just, like, if you're a team who's considering extending the best starter in baseball, say, and you have the justin verlander contract in your mind you might you might be certainly i i think we'll see less of the extending or signing players before you have to the the two years before they're actually free agent type of extension i i don't i think that what we'd likely see is teams just demanding a little bit more of a discount for the risk.

Yeah, sure, or that. So I don't, is there a, I don't know if, it's hard to say if there's a maximum length. Is there a certain year beyond which you would not go certain number of years for for let's say uh i mean these are the condition is that these are non-trout players but if you if you had a 25 year old superstar and you expected them to age normally, follow whatever the standard aging curve is, is there a number of years at which you would draw the line? No, not really. I mean, if the price was right, there was some discount for my risk.

I mean, I'm all in favor of the 15 or 20 year deal for pre-arb guys as long as you get a good enough discount. So not, I. So not really. The way things are now, there's still not even, there's no red line. I mean, I would rather have almost everybody for less. So I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, every time somebody signs a long deal,

It's hard to say. I mean, every time somebody signs a long deal, we fight the instinct to just sort of say the same repetitive thing about the deal, which is that it's a whole lot of risk. It makes them better in the short term, but it sure is a whole lot of risk, and drawing a red line, I don't want to then in my head think that I have to say the same thing about any deal that goes beyond that. But all long deals are generally worse than short deals. And you take them on because you have to or because you're dumb or because you get some sort of discount for your effort. And in the first and third cases, it's understandable. And in the first and the third cases, it's understandable. And in the second one, well, we all make mistakes. Right. Yeah. It's right. There's no real way to answer that without considering the contract because if the money comes down far enough, then any number of years makes sense. Maybe you're paying him $1,000 in the last year and you'll sign him to a Bobby Bonilla

contract. I don't know. But that's a hard one to say that there's a certain number of years that you wouldn't go beyond. All right, let's do this one from Scott in Pelham, New York. Watching the World Cup final on Sunday, it was amazing how quickly the German defenders would double team and sometimes triple team Lionel Messi when he controlled the ball on the German side of the field. Throughout the tournament, Messi appeared to be orders of magnitude better than almost all his teammates and opponents, not unlike Mike Trout. Baseball's batter-pitcher matchup is celebrated as an individual confrontation, but what if the rules could be changed to allow double-teaming of Mike Trout?

What would those rules look like, and how could they successfully neutralize Trout, as well as the German side shut down Messi in the final? So basically there's seven defenders on the field at any given time. And so let's say you face the field at any given time. Let's say you face 40 batters in the game. There's cumulatively 280 defenders. I guess the equivalent would be if you were allowed to add defenders to certain plays so long as you subtracted them from others and kept a balance.

When Trout was batting, you could have, say, 12 defenders. When the pitcher was up, you could have, 12 defenders and when the pitcher was up you could have say 2 plus the pitcher and the catcher and just set him up in shallow left center and right center and pray that he pops it up or strikes out which is the problem is that

you know so much of Trout's damage I mean obviously Trout gets lots of hits but if you take out his home runs I would assume this is true i think this is probably true it might not be but i think it's probably true i think if you take out his home runs he's probably a negative value hitter right like if you if you just made all his home runs out just yeah yeah or just remove them they just didn't exist uh-huh uh i don't know what he would hit at that point but he he would probably be i don't know maybe trout maybe he wouldn't quite be there but like michael could die or probably would be or some you know a lot of hitters

probably would be trout my trout does enough that maybe he wouldn't but trout's the best hitter in the world um but anyway the point is that you can't do anything about those home runs unless you had, unless it was, I don't know, maybe you could, maybe you could, if you had 12 defenders, maybe you could just be obsessive about pitching to the ground ball or something, but probably not. So I think Trout would actually still be a pretty good hitter without home runs. I think he would. Although, let me see. So he would, for instance, his slugging percentage would be, I'm not going to count the home runs as outs. I'm just going to count them as they don't exist.

His slugging percentage would be 375. So yeah, wow. He's really good. Yes, pretty good, yeah. But anyway, the point is that a lot of that value comes from the home runs and you can't do anything to defend those. So yeah, wow. He's really good. Yes, pretty good, yeah. But anyway, the point is that a lot of that value comes from the home runs, and you can't do anything to defend those, no matter how many people you put there. So it might actually not be worth it.

But anyway, that's what I would think that the rule change would be that would allow you to do it. I don't think that you, I mean, otherwise you just intentionally walk him. The closest thing to a double team is the intentional walk, right? Yeah. Joe Posnanski has, when Joe Posnanski hates the intentional walk for, you know, aesthetic and competitive reasons as much as anything else. And I think that he's noted, I think, that he's noted the difference between that and, say, double teaming a defender. In the one case, you're still having to defend him.

You know, he can still beat you. You're doing everything you can to defend him, but you still do have to stop him. An intentional walk is just not. Okay. You want to do play index? Yeah. Sure. Okay, you want to do play index?

Yeah, sure. So this was in response to a question that was asked by James, who says, I never thought the Braves could find a more harmful spot in their lineup for B.J. Upton until they moved him to the leadoff spot. So my question is, in terms of a catch-all offensive stat, who had the worst offensive season at each spot in the batting order, subject to a minimum number of plate appearances in each spot obviously i'm imagining some replacement level middle infielder atop the list for the second spot of the batting order but i'd be interested to see where pj upton's 2013 falls um so i did this i was curious too i thought

this was a interesting thing to ask so i I did this for each spot in the lineup, but instead of doing OPS or something like that for all of them, I did the stat that I thought was sort of the best indication for the lineup position as best I could. So I have slightly different standards for each spot. for each spot. But I went back to 1988 to, one, avoid having to go to old boring baseball, because those guys have names we don't know. And also just to somewhat smooth out the offensive environment. Obviously, there's a big difference between 2000 and 1988, but at least it's somewhat smoother than if you go back to, like, 1918. So here we go.

So leadoff hitter. I went with on-base percentage for leadoff hitters. And the worst on-base percentage for a leadoff hitter since 1988 is Angleton Simmons last year, which is surprising because Angleton Simmons was not an offensive zero last year at all. He had good pop. He never strikes out. He had a good second half. And I was shocked to find that, in fact, he batted leadoff more than 300 times.

300 plate appearances was my minimum. And he had a.256 on-base percentage, which is the worst in modern baseball history. base percentage which is the worst in modern baseball history um if you look at where he how he did in other spots of the lineup batting second he had a 361 on base percentage in 84 plate appearances batting sixth he had a 412 on base percentage in 35 plate appearances batting seventh he had a 349 on base percentage in 86 plate appearances. Batting 8th, he had a 301 on base percentage and like a 450 slugging percentage in 135 plate appearances. So this is one of those

rare cases where a guy is so much worse in one spot in the order that probably everybody around him is convinced that he can never bat leadoff. I was going to ask you whether that would be enough to convince you that he could not hit leadoff. He's only hit leadoff one time this year.

Well, I just generally wouldn't want him to bat leadoff based on his skill set. But I don't think it would be enough to convince me. No, not 300 plate appearances, especially because they're also grouped together by time, and that could be a confounding variable if he was simply figuring things out and figured them out after he left the spot. So, no, I would not consider it to necessarily be a factor.

Although, if there was any position in the lineup where you would think it might be that some players are better or worse suited, or that I guess that the preparation and mental aspect of batting there would affect them, it would be first or eighth. So, you know, I probably would lower the plate appearance threshold

to make a decision like that in the leadoff hitters case. But no, I'm not ruling out Angleton Simmons' mental fortitude or anything like that. Nope. Yeah, not without knowing anything else. Not without him saying so, for instance. Number two spot also went with on-base percentage. Jack Wilson in 2001 had a 255 on-base percentage. Jack Wilson in 2001 had a.255 on-base percentage, but this was his rookie year, but he did lead the league in sacrifice months.

And so I would almost guarantee you that despite his 0.1 war that year, if you looked really closely through the newspaper archives of the Pittsburgh whatever, Pittsburgh Gazette, Post Gazette, Pittsburgh Post Gazette I think for that year I bet you can find an example of his manager saying that in fact he was the team's most valuable player one of my favorite things about the summer is seeing who gets described as perhaps the team's most valuable player. I especially like it on teams where there is another player who is actually the league's most valuable player or in contention,

but he's not the true MVP. No, the true MVP is almost always somebody who plays multiple positions or can pinch hit or became the long man when they really needed depth in the bullpen. It's always somebody like that, and I love it. The little things. The number three spot in the order is Junior Felix. I went with OPS for this.

Junior Felix had a 638 OPS in 1992. Two things about Junior Felix. One is that he was in my favorite internet post of all time uh which was by grant brisby and all it was was an image of like a triangle like almost like the like the recycle reduce reuse triangle you know where it's like Junior Felix and then Felix went into Felix Jose and then Jose went into Jose Cruz Jr. which went into Junior Felix

and it just went eternally so that's one thing about Junior Felix now that I've noted that that was by Grant Prisby, I don't know if I said that so the thing about Junior Felix is that he actually probably was the third best hitter on his team that year. Despite having the 246, 289, 361 batting line. These are the top nine on that team.

The nine regulars on Baseball Reference. They are the OPS pluses of these nine. 72, 78, 89, 64, 70, 88, Junior Felix's 82, 78, and 63. 63 was Hubie Brooks. I'm pretty sure he was the cleanup hitter. And he hit 216, 247, 337, or at least he he was the cleanup hitter um and he hit 216 247 337 or at least he was sometimes the cleanup hitter uh big acquisition for them um maybe the previous year von hayes

was also a big acquisition for them i think he hit fifth and hit 225 305 326 louis soho was the best hitter he had 89 opiates plus and louis soho was of course that's not that's not a sentence that anyone wants to hear about their team no and let's see soho uh that year batted most often second um so at least they had him up in the order and then the second best hitter actually by OPS Plus after Soho but before Junior Felix was Luis Polonia. Oof. Yeah. So, in fact, they did have their three best hitters batting 1, 2, 3 in the lineup. Well, that's good.

At least the sabermetricians weren't mad. Yeah. All right. Cleanup hitters. I went with fewest home runs. And it's Alan Trammell who hit three home runs batting cleanup mostly full-time in 1989 and i uh i'm glad i went with home runs because we have a contender ben there's a contender this year uh there is a cleanup hitter out there who has only one run and

he has already cleared the 300 plate appearance threshold wow do. Do you know who it is? J.J. Hardy. It's not J.J. Hardy. In fact, we were talking about all-star snubs, and if Garrett Richards is the consensus all-star snub in the American League, I sort of sensed by the amount of columns that this guy was the consensus snub or maybe one of the consensus snubs in the National League. Does that help? I don't think I read a single all-star snub column maybe one of the consensus snubs in the national league does that help i don't think i read a single all-star snub column this year casey mcgee oh okay uh one home run out of the cleanup

spot so he's got to hit two otherwise we have a new record so this is a thing to pay attention to everybody all right number five uh spot in the batting order i went with slugging percentage tim wallach slugged 311 uh in 1992 for the montreal expos incidentally casey mcgee in 2011 was fourth uh the fourth worst in in modern history in this so he's all over this but wallach that year um you know, obviously batted fifth pretty much full-time for the Expos. And the Expos' fifth spot in the Expos' batting order overall, total, in total, all the people who batted fifth,

had fewer total bases than any spot in the lineup, which is really an accomplishment because they also had, I mean, they had seven more plate appearances than, you know, the number eight hitters. And, of course plate appearances than the number eight hitters. And of course they're the number five hitters. But they had fewer total bases than any spot in the lineup besides pitcher. They also had the lowest on base percentage. So lowest on base percentage

and lowest slugging percentage for any spot in the lineup was their number five spot. Next week's play index segment can be telling us whether any other team has done that. Sure, yeah, could be. Number six, I'm just going OPS now from here on out. The number six spot in the lineup, Gary Carter in 1988,

had a 593 OPS. We also have a contender here, Dom Brown, currently at 578, 15 points lower than Carter, needs 58 more plate appearances in the sixth spot if he gets them and doesn't improve. He will have the lowest OPS in modern history in the sixth spot of the order. Number seven spot, Curt Manwaring, 574. And number eight spot, Alfredo Griffin, 513. Also, by the way, Alfredo Griffin also has the lowest isolated power in history for the 8th spot at.029 in a different year. Two different years where he set futility records for the 8th spot. Like, of all the worst hitters in history arguably the two worst seasons

were by alfredo griffin who played forever and was himself an all-star yeah yeah alfredo griffin i've enjoyed looking at his baseball reference page before, that seems like the page of a player who couldn't play today. Or who could not get that many played appearances today. Baseball has changed, I think, too much for Alfredo Griffin to do what he did. You think so? I think so. He came up a lot when I was doing my Uniesky-Bettencourt most consecutive sub-replacement level years. Because he was the previous.

He had five years in a row of full-time play. Sorry, no, he had five years in a row of full-time play with negative wars. But, you know, Uni did it. Yeah, Uni did it. Alfredo Griffin, looking at his defensive stats he has a below average career fielding runs above average at baseball prospectus uh he has he has like positive nine defensive war or at baseball reference so that's quite a bit better. Maybe, but he did win one gold glove. Yeah, and rookie of the year.

Yes. You know the story of his all-star appearance, right? No. Somebody had to bow out of the all-star game like the day of and he just happened to be in town. That was literally it. It was like he was in town, so they put him on the

roster. He was having a terrible year. Well, I don't know. Maybe the world is still safe for Alfredo Griffin, but I'm skeptical. That's the end of the Play Index segment. Good work. Thanks. I like that one. So go to baseballreference.com, use coupon code bp to get the discounted price

griffin played by the way how do you do i did not bat came in as a defensive replacement for cal ripken and then was pinch hit four before he could bat which is fitting i mean he was considered an all-star level defender yeah so i So I guess they let him play, they let him do his all-star thing. Mm-hmm. Is that fair? Yeah. I saw someone, and I don't remember who now, suggest that if we want to keep the every team has to have an all-star rule, and yet we also want to make the game count, then the all-star should be chosen by how much they actually help the team so that if a bad team had, say, a guy who would be a really good pinch runner or a really

good fourth outfielder or something, he would make the team, even though he is not necessarily the best player on that bad team, just because he'd give the All-Star team the best chance to win. That's the Alfredo Griffin recommendation. Okay, so use the coupon code BP to subscribe to the Baseball Reference Play Index. Get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. We highly recommend it, as always. Let's take this question from Brett, who says, The rapid improvement in the technology used to track pitchers and fielders means that recording players' contributions to their team's success with close to warp, war, win shares, and other composite measures. Hall of Fame voting.

Most of last week's topics on the podcast dealt in some way with your legacies, and rightly so, given Friday's announcement. Something you may not have considered is that you may be members of the last generation of baseball writers who will debate the Hall of Fame credentials of the players you've made a living covering. We can't know if Chase Utley produced more for his teams than Todd Helton, Robbie Abreu, or Gary Sheffield. The answer for Buxton, Russell Correa, and their contemporaries is going to be much, much clearer. So who do you think might end up being your Jim Rice or Bruce Suter or Jack Morris, the player you vote for because he seemed like a Hall of Famer,

and you're Ron Santo or Bly Levin or Alan Trammell, the player you don't vote for because he didn't seem like one, and you're Bernie Williams, who's Joe Sheehan's pick, or Dale Murphy, who's Joe Pesnanski's pick, as the player you'd happily vote for if you thought he had a chance. So that's a good question, I is is stack cast or or whatever motion tracking technology comes to the fore is that going to kill hall of fame debates will we not have to have them anymore because uh we can just add up the the wins above replacement and actually

be confident that they are that they are correctly appraising the player. Well, I'm pretty confident they're correctly appraising the player already. I mean, with the exception of pitching, where there's disagreement about how much to credit the pitcher for various things that happen behind him, you see some decent differences in career value for pitching on that. If your model uses FIP, it's going to come up with something different than if your model uses ERA, adjusted for defense, and so on and so forth. So that actually, I don't think a system is necessarily going to fix that.

That's a philosophical question. But otherwise, I feel pretty okay that by the end of a career, we have a pretty good handle on the guy's defense. But yeah, we're already basically, I think we've already, I think we've talked about some aspect of this before, that it's both kind of,cusable. It's sort of like when we do our Hall of Fame ballots for BP, we being me and the staff, not you. Not me, no. On the one hand, it feels inexcusable to use anything other than basically a warp leaderboard to fill it out

because I can't really justify anything other than that. And on the other hand, it feels pointless and boring and no value added if we're all doing that. So you kind of end up doing that and then sort of tossing in like the 11th guy instead of the 9th just so that there's a little bit of flair to your ballot. But otherwise, that's what you got. It's already kind of boring. I can see, though, to answer the question about who my Bernie Williams or Dale Murphy would be,

I'm voting for Buster Posey, certainly. And it seems conceivable that he could be just short at the end of this as a catcher. Catchers are already fairly low in general, and things happen to their careers that cut them short. Maybe he's not that great after 33 or something. He missed basically a full season in his prime. But no, he's definitely in as far as I'm concerned. If he has any sort of career going forward, I'm putting Buster Posey in.

So he's probably that guy for me. Yeah, when we have done those bouts in the past, it's, you know, look at Jay Jaffe's system or something. And Jay Jaffe's system is largely based on war. And, I mean, it's almost entirely just based on whether guys exceed or don't exceed whatever the established war baseline at that position is among hall of famers and and there's always uh like the edge cases the guys who maybe are within a few wins one way or another of whatever the baseline is and and then you can kind

of play around with it and maybe you you think that player was a good clubhouse guy or whatever. I don't know. Whatever the criteria you use to push a guy a few wins one way or another, you could argue in favor of him. But yeah, I mean most of the debate right now is people who don't trust war or whatever the win value statistic is versus people who do, right? That's basically the debate we have right now. It's someone saying there are three different wars. They can't even figure out how to calculate it. Why should I trust that stat?

And then there are the people who do trust that stat more or less. And as time goes on, there will be more and more of the latter and fewer and fewer of the former. So yes, I would expect that debates about player value will become less interesting if you consider them interesting now. But I don't know. There are more ways to make them interesting by talking about how those players arrived at that value than we currently have, which is the good thing deadspin just posted a video of all 100 times

cheaters name was mentioned on the fox oh you got scooped so you could have saved yourself all that trouble i could have saved myself all that trouble i it's i'm happy to get scooped late. Yeah. They're counting pregame. Oh, well. Yeah. I wouldn't want to count pregame or postgame in my official count. Yeah. Anyway. Okay.

All right. So that's it for today. Someone will be back tomorrow. Maybe we will be back tomorrow. Sam will be back tomorrow. I'll be back tomorrow. Queen Charlotte Island's cell phone and internet service allowing. And please send us emails for next week at podcast at baseball perspectives dot com.

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