Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 495: What We Would Put in Our Player Manuals

Episode Date: July 18, 2014

On the podcast’s second anniversary, Ben and Sam banter about several subjects, then talk about what they would include in a team’s instructional manual.

Hi, Ben. How do you think it's going so far? We haven't made any obvious mistakes yet. I don't know that we've really hooked anyone yet either, but people are still probably reserving judgment at this point. Probably. I feel like we do have a long future ahead of us, though, so this is a good start. I hope so. I think we'll look back at these last few minutes very fondly. Good morning and welcome to episode 495 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, about to be a writer for Grantland.com, joined as usual by Sam Miller, editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus. Hello, Sam. Howdy, Ben. This is a milestone episode. This is our second anniversary of the first episode of Effectively Wild,

which you went back and listened to, and not only did you do that, but you tweeted the link to that episode out so that other people could listen to it, which I'm not on board with your decision to do that, but you did. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It was nice, short, digestible. There were some good lines in it. You sounded awful. I don't mean you sounded awful.

You sounded like a knowledgeable person and a friend of mine, but you sounded awful. You sounded physically crushed. Yes. That's how I sound normally in my daily life and i had not at that point realized that i should put on a podcast voice of some sort that other people might i might be willing to listen to yeah no i'm excited about the two-year anniversary because uh probably two more years of this and you'll learn how to record without messing up and having to have us re-record the first 15 minutes again yeah that just happened it's a little uh a little bit of

an inside joke between the two of us it's particularly timely at the moment um but as we did i would say that was i think that was a pretty to be honest i think it was a pretty weak first 15 minutes yeah we didn't record. Yeah. And as you pointed out, our second year was more productive than our first year. We had 249 episodes, was it? As opposed to 246 in year one, which must be because we recorded on holidays. Russell filled in on July 4th.

I don't know. What else? We didn't miss any days. We're the Ironman of baseball podcasts. Yeah, so there's 260 or 261 weekdays. What, 260, you know, three-ish weekdays in a year so uh you know if we're greedy uh you know we could not two six three two sixty one if we're greedy we could theoretically end year four on a multiple of um a thousand i'm greedy i've never really had to struggle with that particular sin

greed yeah especially not as it relates to recording more podcasts. Mine's more sloth, some occasional gluttony, not a lot of the greed in my life. All right. Well, we have some banter to get through before we get to whatever today's topic is. So I want to provide an update on something we talked about a couple of days ago. You asked me how high I thought pop-ups go, and I provided an off-the-cuff estimate of a hundred feet. I was not satisfied with that estimate. I was trying to, I was trying to transpose buildings of various heights and numbers of stories onto baseball fields and trying to mentally picture where a ball would be in relation to those buildings, I was not satisfied with the result

of that exercise. So I emailed Professor Alan Nathan, who's the physics of baseball expert, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Illinois. And he's done a lot of ball tracking and trajectory tracking work with TrackMan and other technologies. And I thought he would be the perfect person to ask. So he got back to me and he said, just an educated guess, certainly over 150 feet,

possibly as high as 180 feet. He said that an interesting thing to do, which he has not done, would be to measure hang time on high pop-ups, which would give us a better estimate of the maximum height. But it does sound like I underestimated the height of pop-ups, and that got me wondering about the expression home run in a silo, which you will often hear broadcasters say. after a particularly high pop-up. I did not know how high silos are. I've seen some silos. I don't know whether the silos I've seen are an accurate representation of the whole population of silos. So I did some research and there's quite a wide variation in heights of silos. Silos can be as low as 30 feet and they can be as high as 275 feet, which would suggest that if Alan's

estimate of 180 feet as the maximum height of a pop-up is accurate, then there are certain pop-ups that would not be home runs in certain silos. So it all depends on the silo. It usually does. a silo. It usually does. Right. And you have an update on the opposite thing, not balls being hit in the air, but balls being dropped from on high in the air. Yeah, I've got a couple of updates about that. These are thanks to a couple of readers who replied to our conversation on Monday or Tuesday, I think, about players catching fly, baseballs dropped out of planes and such things,

also grapefruits dropped out of planes and such things. So Guido565, frequent commenter on the site, writes, I believe the incident Sam might have been thinking of that resulted in injury was the Guinness Book of World Records catch of a ball dropped from 800 feet from a blimp in 1939, caught by Joe Sprintz. It was supposedly traveling 154 miles per hour, a figure that Guido565 is disdainful of, and was caught such that it, quote, broke his upper jaw in 12 places, fractured five of his teeth, and he was rendered unconscious.

That's absolutely what I was thinking of. I got a huge amount of my information from ages six to 12 or so from the Guinness Book of World Records. So I'm almost certain that that is a fact that lodged into my brain. So yeah, he's probably correct. a fact that lodged into my brain. So yeah, he's probably correct. Smitty also notes that a different person named Smitty notes

the Phillies had a ball dropped from a helicopter in the Vets stadium debut back in 1971. They wisely used backup catcher Mike Ryan. He caught it after a bobble. Only 150 feet though, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it. I am very comfortable saying

I could catch a baseball dropped 150 feet. I might even go so far as to say I could catch it barehanded. That's only, I mean, that's half as high as certain silos. That's true. I have another update too. I have an update to something that never made it on the air. A couple days ago, we were trying to record and you had some internet problems because you were in a small airport. And I didn't end up being on that show. You recorded later in the day when I was unavailable. That's why that happened. That's why that happened. Yes. And when we were trying to record, I started to tell something that people could pay attention to about Xander Bogarts, who it appeared was challenging the modern record

for modern, my term, modern. I think in this case, modern record is like since 2000, which is super modern. The super modern record for games played, sorry, longest streak of negative win probability added games. So the longest streak without having a positive win probability added. The record was Eugenio Velez, I think it was 42 or 44 games. And Bogarts was, I claimed, at 28. And so that was going to be something that people could watch for.

And that's not a record I want to see broken, and so I would have said root for Bogarts to do something. And in fact, I have actually reexamined his game logs, and I find that in fact, in the last day before the All-Star break, he did have a positive win probability added and i bring it up only because of how delightful it is uh in this game he went over three uh with a double play uh but he did draw a walk and he did uh hit a sacrifice fly and one of his oh for threes one of his o's uh was uh he reached on an error and um this was a blowout and so the

ground ball double play came when it didn't matter and the other outs came when it didn't matter and the walk and mostly the walk came when it sort of mattered and so he ended up with a win probability added of 0.005 he contributed one two hundredthth of the effort for that win. Probably, I would guess, one of the worst positive win probability added batting lines of the year by anybody. ever again, ever again. I would go so far as to say that he will never in recorded history, unless I'm jinxing it or creating an incentive for somebody to say this, but he will never again be used in the same sentence as Eugenio Velez. That was inspired by... Tomorrow somebody will.

Somebody will do it just to make me look, just to grind at me, someone will say. Did you hear about Sam Miller saying that A.U. Henny-Ovalez and Xander Bogarts will never be used? Oh, I guess he lost, and I'll feel like a dumb fool. There will be a Facebook comment exactly like that in the Facebook group today. And that was inspired by a listener email from Michael who wrote to us about Bogarts' epic slump. And that was where you took that. And one more update about Luke Scott. A few days ago, there was a listener email. We were talking about which players we didn't think would be good fits culturally in Japanese baseball. We were speculating wildly about that. You concluded that

John Lackey would not be a good fit because you couldn't envision him eating noodles, which was as good a reason as any. I mentioned Luke Scott as a candidate, and you pointed out that he was already playing in Korea. And after we had that discussion, Scott was fired from his Korean league team. He had an argument with his coach in which he reportedly called the coach a liar and a coward. And then he committed possibly even the greater sin of speaking to reporters and complaining to reporters about the way that the team had handled his plantar fasciitis. So Luke Scott is now available to any, any NPB teams that would be interested in signing him. Although I would guess that there won't, won't be many of those. I do like a lot of Korean food, but I will say that Korean noodles are not my favorite Asian noodles or even close to it. I have one more thing as well, if I may. Bring this banter full circle. I knew I remembered this from, shockingly, three years. I remember this tweet from three years ago

from Kevin Goldstein, who noted a six-second pop fly by Brett Gardner and said it was, quote, pretty impressive. So I don't know if that, I would guess that's not the outer limit of pot flies because he didn't say stunning. And I occasionally will time a pot fly and I feel like seven seconds is not necessarily unheard of. unheard of. Goldstein also that month had a home run that he timed at 6.52 seconds,

but that was not a pop fly. That was a high home run. Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, maybe Alan can refine his calculations. So what is today's topic? All right. So today, and lately I've been thinking a lot about teams ways, their self-described ways, you know, Cardinal way. We talked about it. Yeah. And twice today I read long pieces that were essentially about fundamentals. One of them was Eric Malinowski's piece on Tomomansky. Did you read that by chance?

Nope. I was on a boat all day. Did you read that by chance? Nope. I was on a boat all day. Well, it was very good. It was at Fox Sports, and it was a long piece about Amansky's legacy and his rise and the profits he made in about some of the mystery. It sort of talks about some of the urban legends about him and sort of just what he's done over the last few years. He did not talk to Tom Amansky because Tom Amansky dropped out of the public eye and hasn't done an interview in like a decade.

Thanks for not calling it long form. You know, I would say that one of my pet peeves is when a person dislikes a particular term and continually uses it to complain about it. To me, it's just if you don't want it said, just don't say it, Ben. Just let it go. You're strengthening it. You know you're strengthening it. Every time you bring it up, you strengthen it. It will never pass my lips again.

The other thing that I read was a 1980 piece in The New Yorker by Roger Angel. Never been comfortable saying his name. Angel. I don't think it is. I think it is. I know that Carson Sestouli does not pronounce it as such. Well, I'm not sure that's any guide.

Hang on. Checking. How do you pronounce his name? Angel. I don't buy it. I i found it angel angel angel anyway i think i i think you're wrong ben okay uh so anyway um so raj raj uh wrote one of his long baseball pieces in 1980 for the new yorker he was in spring training in florida and wrote about just about every team it was a wrote one of his long baseball pieces in 1980 for the New Yorker. He was in spring training in Florida and wrote about just about every team.

It was a remarkable piece, actually, to read. It went forever. And he actually managed to write about just about every team in the Grapefruit League. But I found it because somebody had pointed me toward it because there was reference in it to a Mets way. And the Mets were the one team in my article on team ways that had never used the term and never articulated the word way after their team name. And in fact, their general manager that spring was a new general manager, Frank Cashin. And he was talking about how they wanted to

do what the Orioles had done with the Oriole way. While he's shuffling papers, Angel spots what he recognizes are diagrams from the Brewer way, which was a rip-off of the Oriole way. And the general manager says, we want people to be talking about the Mets way. Anyway, a long portion of the piece is about the Brewers manual. The Brewers, I don't know if they called it the Brewers way or not, but the Brewers manual, which was modeled on the Orioles manual, which is a seminal piece in the genre of player development manuals and team manuals. And he got it. He got a copy of it and he quoted long blocks of it. And so I got to, you know, 35 years later, 34 years later,

I got to read this pretty sort of detailed look at what ball clubs' ideas of fundamentals are and what they think needs to be taught. And it got me thinking that these are 34 years old. I'm sure a lot of teams' manuals still look a lot like those. A lot of them are based off the Orioles way, even if they're generations late, or generations removed, I should say. I started thinking about what I would put in a manual if I were to put together a team manual today. It might be all the same stuff, but I kind of think it's not. I, I feel like most kids today who make the majors are playing so much baseball with adult coaches. I mean, that's what

they always talk about when they talk about Tommy John surgeries. That's the big difference is that kids don't play, you know, on the, you know, on the sandlots anymore. They have adult professional, you know, professionalized coaches, uh, and they're playing, you know, 150 games a year instead of 16. And, um, I know that that's not the same necessarily as getting good coaching. Um, but I would imagine that they have a pretty good idea of, of the quote unquote fundamentals and probably, you know, 110 pages of the Brewer's Manual, probably a large portion of those instructions are well-known to any kid of any skill these days. The other thing is that foreign kids are assigned when they're 16 and put in complexes under the team's tutelage.

So they have many years to sort of learn how to play the game. Of course, older fans today, as well as older fans in every previous era, would insist that players today don't care about the fundamentals. Yeah, and Angel did too at the time. I mean, he expressed those very views, and of course every generation feels that way. But my guess is that that's exactly wrong. By the way, I is, I just want

to quote real quick from it, a description of what a manual does. The manual makes vivid and absorbing reading for it breaks down and explicates almost all the broad physical movements, the minute technical adjustments, the offensive and defensive patterns, and the easy or convoluted strategies of the sport. It contains lists of players' responsibilities categorized by position, reminders about the basics of the game, corrective drills, do's and don'ts of running and throwing and hitting, and mottos, essays, photographs, and tactical diagrams. I think that a major league player looking through the book for the first time might be startled at the variety and number of difficult and subtle maneuvers that he has somehow mastered

in his lifetime in the game, while a fan, this fan at least, is alternately flattered to find how much baseball he knows already and embarrassed about how much he has overlooked or never understood. So obviously, I mean, you know, a lot of this stuff is, you know, simple and a lot of it is maybe worth writing down anyway. But I just thought as a means of, as a quick discussion, very quick, I don't think we have to go long on this. I wanted to know what you would put in a manual that you think probably isn't in a manual or certainly wouldn't have been in 1980. What sorts of things would you think

would be put in a manual? And so I've got a couple of ideas and maybe I'll think of a couple more, but maybe I won't. So one thing that I would think would be in a manual these days or that I would put in a manual if I were to make a manual, I would put it, is a very clear and well-divided off-season schedule, a training regimen for the off-season. Because I hear all the time about how players, they go off in the off-season and it's kind of like wild land for them. Some of them go back to their gurus that they've been using since they were 11.

Some of them are sort of inactive. Some of them are throwing. Some of them are not. Some of them are lifting. Some of them are not. Some of them are going to Venezuela and playing another 200 at bats, and some of them are not. And it seems to me that there's a, um, that

particularly with pitchers, uh, rest should probably be the amount of rest that you need in a year should probably be kind of codified and made official. So if I had pitchers in my organization, I would want to have their year pretty much scheduled for them from their first day that they leave to the first day that they come back. I would want to know or to really guide them on what sorts of workouts are appropriate for that time, what they should be doing, when they should be throwing, how hard they should be throwing, how far they should be running, et cetera. And I know, I know, I mean, that doesn't happen. There have been a couple times where I've talked to a team about a particular player and said, Oh, you know, have you talked to him

this offseason? And they go, Oh, yeah, well, we had one of our coaches checked in on him in, you know, December. And that's it, they don't really know what they're doing. So that's one thing where I would think that you could have a whole chapter on offseason training. So that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of. Another one that I would think, another one I would think would be perhaps, wait, no, I've forgotten what another one I would think was. So that's one. Maybe dealing with the media would be one.

I was going to say that. And I'm sure players do get guidelines or some sort of handout or or something social media policies or or wrote responses for interviews you know the kind of the kind of sheet that crash davis gives new glouche or something but but yeah that yes might be they do they do they do role playing i know that when there are new players that go in like an instructional league they'll do like role playing exercises and know that when there are new players that go in an instructional league, they'll do role-playing exercises and all that.

And so I don't know. Maybe that doesn't need to be made explicit. But on the other hand, maybe it does. Maybe you really need to have a pretty clear sort of directions on what you're looking out for in an interview. What should they expect from them? Because I feel like a lot of probably what goes into those role-playing things is this presumption that the reporter is trying to trick you,

and most reporters are not trying to trick you. A lot of reporters are really incompetent, and a lot of them are neither incompetent nor trying to trick you. A lot of reporters are really incompetent, and a lot of them are neither incompetent nor trying to trick you. They're there for very good reasons, and yet you don't necessarily know that guy. I mean, not everybody is the local beat writer that you have a relationship with. So probably having some guide on what's appropriate

and what's not appropriate to share and what kinds of appropriate to share and, um, what kinds of categories of reporter and story, uh, might be, um, they might be dealing with so that they have a sort of idea of how much they need to be on guard might be useful, might not be. Um, so, uh, those are two, um, uh, catcher framing I think is, uh, would certainly be worth a chapter, and it was a chapter in the Brewers one, or it was an essay in the Brewers one that Angel saw, but it wasn't as detailed as I think we now know.

It didn't talk about, for instance, not dropping your head when you catch the ball. It was much more simply about forming a perimeter around the ball and also you catch the ball. It was much more simply about forming a perimeter around the ball and also not dropping the ball. Um, there's sort of a whole essay written by a coach on it, but it's, it seems like it's not as, uh, detailed as we now know from Mike Fast's work and your work and other people's work, but your work, um, dropping the ball seems surely self-explanatory. Yes, it is. And, uh, In fact, it's so self-explanatory that Angel writes, quote, anytime a ball is dropped, the text murmurs as an aside. Quote, the umpire's tendency is to call it a ball.

So even Roger said the text murmurs as an aside. So those are some. What do you think? Well, I was going to say just a primer on not stats, but the resources that are available to players, I would say. You know, not like this is how you calculate FIP or anything like that, but just I don't know whether players know how many resources are

available to them, either speaking to the coaching staff or speaking to the front office. They might not know. We can get you statistics on pretty much anything you might want to know. A lot of players have, you know, like the Bloomberg iPad tool that lets them watch video against, from their previous at-bats or from other players' previous at-bats against other pitchers. And so they know that, they know that any video I think is available to them, but I would, I would, you know, maybe emphasize that, that there's a limitless resource, that if there's any information that you think would be helpful to you as a player, we can provide it to you and maybe give some examples of things

that other players have found helpful in the past or give some quotes from some of the more statistically savvy players who've acknowledged the potential value in this just to, just to, you know, let players know what's out there and that they can seek out these things and find these things and that maybe it could give them some sort of edge and not seem overly intimidating. I'd have, I'd have something about that, you know, ways that you can improve yourself as a player by making use of information that didn't used to be available to players. Another one I had, that's a good one. Another one I had that was the one that I was thinking of and

forgotten. And that's why I sounded so weird a few moments ago, is really making clear to players when they need to tell a trainer or a physician about pain, like sort of helping them understand and distinguish the different kinds of pain, and really to make it very specific. Because I feel like right now it's not just that they're trying to lie so that they can stay on the field and help their club. They're playing with some degree of pain or discomfort all the time. And so then it becomes very difficult for them to then say, oh, nope, this one requires me to go tell an authority figure.

requires me to go tell an authority figure. And I don't know that they get the best communication about the proper way to handle discomfort, you know, minor discomfort, the sort of day-to-day discomfort that can very easily be an injury that they are ignoring or not paying enough attention to. So that would be something, you know, sort of talking about how to listen to your bodies or whatever.

Mm-hmm, yeah, that's a good one. Do you remember early on in the show's run when I used to correct your pronunciation like a jerk when you would mispronounce a word? Are you going to correct primer? I was going to wonder if I should. You may. I guess you don't have to because I knew as I said it that I was maybe opening myself up to that. I probably would have let it pass except for I feel like you're mocking me by silently letting me say Angel over and over.

You might be right. Maybe you're right about that. I've always heard it Angel, but maybe everyone has been mispronouncing it. So sure, Primer. Primer, there we go. Okay. All right. All right, so that's what should go on a manual.

If anybody needs me to write it, a team, a major league team, I will. And if anyone were to come calling for you to do that, would you do it from scratch or would you get every copy of previous ways you could get your hands on? I guess you wouldn't because we don't think you need to put all of that detailed fundamentals information in there. No, I think a lot of it. I think a lot of it I would. I think a lot of the fundamental stuff is important, but probably not as much of it as used to be. Or maybe it wasn't.

Or maybe it still is more than ever. Who knows? I mean, so they, let's see, one of the things is that there are 23 diagrams of cutoff situations, of different cutoff situations. And I think those are useful. Like that sounds sort of wacky, but in fact, I believe that there are 23 and that they all have value. And so like, that's a fundamental and guys need to learn that. And my guess is that maybe a kid growing up in the 60s would have known like six of them. And maybe a kid growing up now might know 17 of them, but you really need to know 23 of them. My favorite of the fundamentals that he notes was on page 17, or sorry, on page 33, note number 17.

Fundamentals don't stand in someone else's footmarks. I read that in your BP unfiltered post on that, and I was sort of puzzled about why that was included. What do you think the, what's the significance of standing in someone's footmarks in the batter's box? Well, you, I guess it's that you should have a particular foot signature in your swing and that if you start sort of letting yourself slide into somebody else's foot marks, it's just that it's not yours. It's uncomfortable.

It's slightly wrong. Yeah, maybe. I might have something. I don't know if it's a fundamental or not, but I think I'd include something about the count, the importance of the count. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What hitters hit in certain counts, how much better the outcomes are on certain counts,

and also what we've learned about the dimensions of the strike zone on various counts, how the strike zone is so much smaller on 0-2 than it is on 3-0, and how it fluctuates from pitch to pitch, and maybe what the optimal uh first pitch swing percentage is or or that that kind of thing something something like that i would i would probably include that's a great one i like that one okay all right so that's it much better than my dealing with much better than my dealing with the media one which was simply a stalling tactic

while i tried to remember what i was thinking yeah i was going to mention that too that's that's a good one to have in there okay so that is the end of this show and of the first two years of effectively wild shows please send us emails at podcast at baseball prospectus.com for next week's listener email show if you have a suggestion for episode 500, some guest you'd want to hear or something you'd, you'd want to have us do. We, we have not decided what we're doing.

So that'll be next, next Friday. So if you have an idea in mind, let us know at the Facebook group or either via email at podcast, baseballperspectives.com or at the Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. Please rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes and please support our sponsor baseball reference. Go to baseball reference.com. Use the coupon code BP when you sign up for the play index to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back next week.

Roger Angel. Roger Angel. Roger Angel. Roger Angel. Roger Angel.