Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 513: The 1994 Strike Season Revisited

Episode Date: August 13, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss what baseball lost because of the 1994 strike.

Good morning and welcome to episode 513 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, a writer for Grantland.com, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Hi. Hi. Good to be here. Yeah.

What comes next? On your show. On your show. It's good to be here on your show. Thanks. Thanks for joining me. You're welcome. Mm-hmm to be here on your show. Thanks. Thanks for joining me. You're welcome. Hey, Ben. Yeah. I learned something while I was at Aerocode Games. What's that?

Well, I'm going to email you real quick. So the one I just sent you, not the first one I sent you, but the second one I sent you, it should be a link to an MLB.com article. Yes. Open it up and read me the first sentence. I want to see if you also. Ray's minor league outfielder, Josh Sale, has been suspended again. Exactly.

Yes. It's pronounced Josh Sale. Everybody knows Josh Sale's name is Josh Sale. It's pronounced Josh Sale. Everybody knows Josh Sale's name is Josh Sale. It's pronounced Sally. Now that you say that, I feel like I know that. S-A-L-E, Sally. Yeah, that sounds familiar now. So Josh Sale is in the news today. So I'm just, this is a public service. Everybody now can hear it in the correct pronunciation. Okay. Another race suspension, although it's the same guy in this case.

Did you just say that that's another racist pension? Another race suspension. I see. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what to make of this one. In a way, generally speaking, I don't know the kid really well kind of a thing. Like, totally missed the chance to support him, so probably intentional. And then Kevin Kiermaier rips him pretty hard in a series of quotes.

And I get the instinct, and I'm not sure that it's the wrong instinct. Sally, by the way, has been suspended for the second time for what is presumably a drug of recreation. I get the instinct, but the first time a guy gets popped for a drug of recreation, I think, what an idiot. What a moron. What's he doing? He's got this huge career. He's got people who rely on him. Get your act together. Get your life together. But then the second time it happens, then I start thinking, boy, addiction is really, it's tough. It's tough.

We don't know the story at this point. We don't know if he's just a guy who likes to party or if he's got a real addiction. And so it's weird because even though getting suspended twice is twice as bad a screw-up as getting suspended once, the second one makes me – I get more uncomfortable about ripping the guy's attitude or whatever. On the other hand, it seems like people have had issues with sally's makeup forever and kiermeier presumably knows him um and joe madden despite what he says also presumably knows him and so if they're that maybe they're better judges of the situation than i am

of course they're better judges maybe maybe but yeah i think that, I think that's probably the right way to look at it. Yeah. Oh, good. Thank you. Okay. All right. Anything else? Nope.

So I sent you another link. Man, so many links. Okay. And so this one was written by Dan Simborski for ESPN. And, of course, yesterday, Tuesday, was the 20th anniversary of the first day of the 1994 strike. Yes. And I don't know. Do you remember that strike very well?

Not really. I was aware of baseball, but I wasn't following it on a day-to-day basis at that point. It wasn't a tragedy in my young life. I don't remember if it was a tragedy for me or not to have the season canceled. It probably was, but it wasn't such a big one that I remember it being that. But what I do remember is that the season was completely bananas up to that point. You had this feeling that this was going to be the greatest season of all time. This was really the year that offensive numbers exploded. And so you were seeing, you know, plenty of guys on record type paces. And you also had in the midst of this, Craig Maddox

on a record type pace as a pitcher. And there were just incredible things happening. And you had this feeling that, that amazing things would have happened. And I know that there's a tendency for us to compress history and to remember the more dramatic moments as bigger than they were and to overstate maybe how significant things that were happening at the time felt at the time. This is always a problem when we remember history. But 1994, I don't think this is me deluding myself. So Sports Illustrated, for instance, two weeks after the piece ran, the strike happened, they ran a piece, which I remember from the time, in which they pretended the season had kept going

and tracked all of these records to see whether it would have happened. And I forget what the headline was, but there was clearly a sense, even then 10 days after the strike began, there was clearly a sense that we had lost something great. And this article that they wrote was somewhat, mostly to be funny, but all the same, it gave you an indication of how many things were worth paying attention to in the Expos had a good farm system and that was the year that their farm system had come together. After the strike, as we talked to with Jonah, they weren't able to keep that group together. That was basically their last season that they got to keep them together, maybe partly because they lost all the revenue that they would have gotten if they'd won the World Series. The Expos that year had a team that had been a top four farm system by Baseball America for seven years in a row.

Wow. Which is incredible when you think about what sort of talent. And they were the best team in baseball, too. They were the best team in baseball that year, yeah. So imagine how excited we would be about a team that was gelling after seven years of being you know the the totally top farm system we would just be so excited i didn't even realize that at the time but it's impressive that you could go seven years without either having it fall apart to the point that you were no longer ranked that high or making the playoffs or you know being doing something

with all that talent yeah right what it's it yeah, it's impressive or it's the opposite. Yes. Of impressive. And so anyway, to get to the point, so Dan Zimborski was able to do better than that, that Sports Illustrated writer imagining the final month could do. that Sports Illustrated writer imagining the final month could do. He ran Zips, his projection system,

to project some of what might have happened in 1994. And I sent that to you. And I also got the Pocota rerun for 1994. And I looked at some of the same questions to see what our results would have been. And so I have a few of those. Cool. So you're looking at it, yeah? Yes.

All right. So Matt Williams had 43 home runs and he needed, of course, 61 in the final, I think, 47 games. Yeah, 47 games. And at that point, he was getting like 4.4 played appearances a game. So he basically had, why did I say those numbers? That makes it seem like I'm going to do math. Ignore the fact that I said the played appearances. 47 games to hit basically 19 home runs to set the record.

And so Dan says that the majority of them say that he would have finished with something like 56 home runs, but the simulations also show a 36% chance of Williams hitting at least number 61, which is a really good chance. Way, way better than my method. way, way better than my method. Using Pocota and using a simple, what is it, a binomial distribution, is that what you call it? Yes. Using Pocota and a binomial distribution calculator,

we have him with a 4% chance to tie and a 2% chance to break the record. And so Matt Williams, I mean, one of the reasons it would have been so interesting to see Matt Williams break the record years before Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa is that Matt Williams was not a particularly legendary home run hitter. He was much more like Roger Maris. He and Maris had almost the exact same career warp, 41 and 43. Williams didn't hit four home runs in his career. Like Maris, he never hit 40 in a season. And basically the pace he was on at that point would have taken him to 61. And

so he had no padding, he had no give. This was like the greatest four months of his life and he would have had to keep the greatest four months going into the next greatest two months of his life to break it. And so Pocota thinks that he would have hit, you know, Pocota thinks he's a guy who would hit a home run every, like, 15 or so play appearances, which is what he usually hit. And that wouldn't generally get him there. That's why it's a hard sell. So, I guess that really the question that we have to answer is whether we think that we have to answer is whether we think that Pocota is likely to understate the likelihood of an outlier performance in general. Because, like, I mean, I use the, I mean, a binomial distribution looks for outlier

performances given a known rate of a thing happening. However, it doesn't incorporate the fact that your projection is wrong and that your projection has missed something. And that seems to be what a lot of outlier results come from is that we don't just see a lot of lucky spins, but we see various circumstances that conspire to make the guy better than he is or worse than he is, right? So, I don't know, 4% or 36%, that's a huge difference. Yeah.

Do you come down anywhere there? I guess it's not that different from our discussion of Dakota rest of season projections and whether we can beat those, right? It's like the question of whether Williams was doing something special that year. He was at the peak of his powers and, you know, whatever combination of experience and perfect timing and reflexes that he had that year made him truly a more talented player than he ever was at any other time. Or maybe he was just especially locked in mechanically for whatever reason that year.

And so maybe that's why he hit all those home runs. Maybe it wasn't just a bunch of balls flukily going a few feet over the fence or whatever. It was him actually being better. But would he have continued to be better? I don't know. I guess if a guy hits 43 home runs way above his career rate, does that make it slightly more likely that he is actually doing something different and that you should expect him to continue to do that differently?

Because it doesn't seem like the population as a whole would yeah i have to i i actually think that it's something slightly different that we're talking about um the way i'm thinking of it is more like okay so so pakoda gives me a mean it gives me an average and when you plug that average into a binomial distribution it is hard to get it up to an extreme outlier situation. There's 150 plate appearances or whatever is a long time to keep a fluke rate going. And so that makes sense to me. But now, so imagine that instead of that mean, let's say there were 10 Matt Williamses. And at the bottom you have the 10th percentile guy is going to hit no home runs, because that's part of what Pocota does,

is it looks at historically what all players have done before them and finds all the different career paths the guy can take and then averages them together into a sort of a mean. And so imagine that there are 10 guys, 10 paths that Matt Williams could take in terms of true talent level. And one of those paths is that he shoots heroin that night and never gets another hit. And one of the paths, so that's 10%.

10% of the time, sorry, 10% of the Matt Williamses just never get another hit. And then 10% of the matt williams is just never get another hit and then 10 of the matt williams is hit 85 home runs because they're insanely good right and um so the average gives you a a guy who uh is unlikely to get there and so you would you know the average you would look at it and say okay he's got a 4.3% chance. But we know for a fact that he's got at least a 10% chance because there's one guy in his 10 who hits 85 home runs. And so does this make sense? The average kind of dilutes the power of the outlier.

Yeah, although probably less than that makes it sound because there probably isn't a 10%, you know, there probably isn't a 10% Matt Williams who hits 85 home runs. Right. But hypothetically, you might have a case where there is, and yet in his mean projection, you would have, you would still end up with a 4% chance of him breaking the record, which is impossible, right? That would be a contradiction. And so what I'm saying is that maybe, just maybe, the method that I used, not really, I don't even want to say Pocota, because Pocota might simulate this and get a totally different result and might get something like Dan's result.

Or Dan's result might be wrong. But the method I used of taking the mean performance and then just basically running a series of coin flips for a season and not incorporating all of the different ways that performance fluctuates maybe is undershooting it. However, I do have to say it seems unlikely to me. 36% seems very high. Yeah, if you had asked me to guess, I would have, for whatever it's worth, I would have guessed closer to Pocotas, probably maybe a little higher than Pocotas,

but not a whole lot. My suspicion, and I haven't looked, but my suspicion is that in an entire career, 17-year career, very distinguished career, my suspicion is that Matt Williams never again hit 18 home runs in 47 games. Uh-huh. Just a suspicion. I don't know that that's true. He might have. He did start the next year very, very well.

He was, if you added his 1994 season and the start of his 1995 season together, you'd get, he would have been within spitting distance. He hit, let's see, 13 in the first 36 games, and then he broke his leg and so at that point he would have needed five in 11 which is a higher pace than than he had been hitting but anybody could hit i mean any literally any major leaguer could hit five home runs in 11 games caleb joseph could do it caleb joseph could do it yeah but probably won't't. So that's part of what makes Maris Williams interesting is that he started so hot. But then he broke his leg, and when he came back, he didn't hit many. So my guess is that this would have been a daunting challenge for him.

I also like the alternate universe where Matt Williams, who nobody thinks of as a juicer, and yet he is. He actually was caught buying steroids, $11,600 worth of HGH steroids and other drugs in 2002, long after this. I like the idea that he would have been – I don't know if I like the idea. It's sort of a depressing idea, but it adds a twist. All right. Let's see. What else does Dan write about? Dan does not write about Tony Gwynn.

I did do Tony Gwynn. Tony Gwynn was hitting 394 and had 400 and what? How many plate appearances? I don't know. How many plate appearances? He had 458. Yeah, he had 458 plate appearances. He basically needed 50 more plate appearances to qualify. He needed to add

six points of batting average to get the 400. You want to guess what Tony Gwynn's chances were? I'm trying to think if it would be higher. I'll say higher than Williams, but not by much. 7%. Yeah. This is actually much lower than Williams. than Williams. And so Pocota, Pocota interestingly, and I think that you can see why this is the case,

Pocota didn't think that Tony Gwynn was anywhere near a true talent 394 hitter. It projects a slash line of him, for him, of 312, 361, 419. And if you look at, so he's hitting 394 this year. The year before he hit 358, so this might seem absurd, but then the year before that, 317, year before that, 317's hitting.394 this year. The year before he hit.358, so this might seem absurd,

but then the year before that,.317, the year before that,.317, the year before that,.309. Tony Gwynn was a regular batting champion earlier in his career, and then what maybe people forget is that at 30, he sort of hit a three-year stretch where he wasn't as good he didn't win any batting titles for four years he had the three lowest basically the three three of the four lowest batting averages of his career uh and then uh things went crazy after that um he won four batting titles and in a five-year period from age 33 to age 37,

he hit.368. So I think knowing what we know now, it's clear that Tony Gwynn was much better than what Pocota was reasonably assuming. However, Pocota didn't know what was going to happen after that. So it thinks that he was a 3-12 true talent hitter. He was old. He was slowing down.

He wasn't doing as much. So it gives him like a half of a percent chance of doing this. Gwyn, I found no fewer than three cases. Basically, if you assume that Gwyn would have taken, say, five games off over the course of the final 45 games and get, say, 150 at-bats, he would have needed to hit 420 to break that record or to top 400. Three times that I found, without looking necessarily all that hard, but three times I found of him hitting at least 420 over at least 150 at-bats,

including the previous season when he had hit 426 over 200 at-bats. A couple years later, he hit 429 over 170 at-bats. And even the next year, he started the next year, he didn't quite get to 150 but he started the next year hitting uh 447 in the first uh you know dozen games or so first 50 at bats so uh i think that this one undersells his chances i think that it's probably fair to just knowing that he had to hit 420 over the course of 150 at-bats puts it in perspective. I mean, he did do it three or so times in his career, but he didn't do it almost all the other times. And so it is really hard.

It's probably harder than we realize. Being at 394 is actually what number? Okay, so let me ask you this. What number do you think you would have to be at with 150 at-bats remaining to be a 50-50 chance? Because I think we think 400. I think most people think if he was at 401 that he probably would have done it. He coin flips chance. I would guess that it probably would have had to be something like 413 maybe.

Yeah, I was going to say like 420 maybe. I mean because knowing what we know that he was an almost 370 hitter over that five season stretch, even if we assume that he was say a 350 actual true talent hitter over that period maybe um if you gave him a if you gave him a 20 point cushion and and he just hit his regular 350 over that final 150 plate appearances that would be that'd be close i guess and and he was maybe even better than that. So yeah, if you spotted him 15, 20 points, I'd say he'd have a decent shot. Tony Gwynn, by the way, I remember reading the day he died, I remember reading an old article about him in Sports Illustrated,

and he said, this was in 1984, he said, at least for me, hitting 400 is impossible. So, we got close. Yeah, he did it over longer than a season stretch. Yes, he did. All right, all right, all right, all right. Let's see. By the way, I forgot to mention, Griffey had, according to Pagoda's numbers, about a half a percent chance of tying or breaking Maris' record himself.

All right. So, and one more from me, and then we'll finish off with the experts. Chuck Knobloch, do you remember? Do you know even? See, this is probably the kids of today probably don't even realize that Chuck Knobloch, do you remember? Do you know even? See, this is probably the kids of today probably don't even realize that Chuck Knobloch almost did something great. Do you remember what Chuck Knobloch was doing?

What was he going to do? Chuck Knobloch was on pace at the time to break the doubles record, which has been even more impenetrable than the home run record, I mean, obviously. But nobody makes a real run at the doubles record. And usually someone will be around May or so, and then they'll hit, you know, seven doubles for the rest of the year.

Machado last year. Exactly. So nobody ever tops 60. And the record is 67. Knobloch had 45 already in early August, 109 games. And so needed 22 doubles in whatever, 49 games. And Pocota likes his chances much less. He needed more doubles than Williams needed home runs.

And Pocota actually thinks that he's less likely to hit a double than matt was to hit a home run and that's probably that's probably a fair assumption i mean doubles are flukier and it's not like knob block was ever a doubles king before that in fact the year before in 700 plate appearances he hit 27 and the year before that, in 700 plate appearances, he hit 19. And he never again topped 36, never led the league. This was a total fluke, it seems. It didn't at the time. At the time, it seemed incredible.

But Pagoda gives him a 0.1% chance, a 1 in 1,000 chance of breaking Earl Weaver. Earl Weaver? Earl Weaver? What's that guy's name earl oh earl webb earl webb yeah uh earl webb all right last one uh the expos i i didn't do anything on this too complicated but dan complicated. But Dan did, so I'll just read what Dan wrote. Coming off seasons of blah, blah, the Expos stood at a 649 winning percentage on 105 win pace. It wasn't smoke and mirrors. The team was first in the RA, third in runs scored,

only a single player on the wrong side of 30. That's incredible. 24 players that were 29 or younger. Yeah, that's amazing. Jeez. I guess that's what you'd expect, a team that had the best farm system for seven years to have. I'm going to go reread Jonah's book today. I'm so excited about this X-Bows team.

Zips projects this dominance would have continued with a team averaging 101 win finish in the simulations and a 12% chance of winning the World Series, both tops among MLB teams. That's interesting that it's only a 12% chance of winning the World Series because that would imply, because there was no wild card at the time. Well, there was a wild card. There was no wild card play in game. So that means that they're a 1-8 chance, and this gives them a 1-8 chance. So either Dan just uses the default

and treats the postseason as literal coin flips, or he thinks that despite this, that the Braves might have beaten them anyway. The Braves were, what, 5.5 back? I don't know. Something like that. So maybe he thinks that the Braves might have pinched off some of their playoff odds

by winning the division. The most likely simulated worlds, although I guess then they would have been the wild card anyway, probably. Yep. So that seems low to me. The most likely simulated World Series featured Montreal, led by Larry Walker and Moise Salou, taking the series over the New York Yankees,

which would have been the third consecutive World Series championship for Canada. A World Series for the Expos might have done a lot to reverse the franchise's fortunes. Alright. That's it. So maybe we should postpone the listener email show to tomorrow, which we probably should have mentioned earlier. But we did get one 1994 strike-related email that maybe is relevant now from Eric Hartman,

who cites Dane Perry's article about this for CBS Sports and other people's articles about this, and he says, that does sound like a lot to lose, so I was curious if this is anomalous or if every season would have a similar list of accomplishments in play with seven weeks left in the season. Can you think of a season that had the least interesting pennant race on both a player and team level that would have been better to cancel than 1994? I guess the...

What about this year? Right, yeah, I mean, so that's... So we've established that, okay, Gwyn was going after this record, Williams was going after this record. It was unlikely that either of them would have broken it or achieved it if the season had continued. So in a way, we might have forgotten about those seasons if not for having them end when they did. If they had just finished up and Gwyn had hit 375 and Williams had hit 50 homers or something, then they wouldn't be talked about all that much. But because they were interrupted when history was still possible, we talk about them all the time.

And, and of course, the Expos would have been a good, a great story. And it might have changed the history of the franchise. But it wasn't like the Expos were a historically dominant team, they were, you know, on pace for 105 wins, probably wouldn't have even gotten there. So, you know, there's a... And if they hadn't contracted, or if they hadn't moved, I should say, we wouldn't know that this was significant. This would have just been like an attack that never happened. That's true also, yeah.

So is this the sort of thing where we remember it more because of how it ended am i ruining 94 i said at the beginning that this is not the case that it is just how we remember uh maybe it is i mean like if this season ended right now um we would be upset. We'd be deprived of some pretty good pennant races. I guess there's no real historic player performance just because of maybe the offensive environment and how we're interested in counting stats and everything and counting stats are down and rate stats are down and so no one's really challenging any records.

So there's that i guess and and there's no team on pace to be the best team ever or anything so we're we'd be losing some some good pennant races and some good team stories and that's probably the case with most seasons i would think i mean there's not always someone on pace to do something amazing in mid-August. A couple of other things that were happening. Frank Thomas had a shot to win the Triple Crown. He was very close to the leaders in all three. Jeff Bagwell and he were both on pace to top 100 extra base hits

for the first time since 1948. Both were on pace to top 160 RBIs for the first time since 1938 and could have even topped 170. Craig Maddox had a 1.56 ERA, and in the offensive environment he was doing that in, he was on pace to set the modern record for pitcher war. Other than Thomas, maybe those things wouldn't have been a big deal to us. They wouldn't have been, I mean, they didn't even exist, one of them, yet.

But nonetheless. Total bases and everything, that's something that just would have happened a little later just because of the offensive environment. Yeah, yeah. a little later just because of the offensive environment. Yeah, yeah. But I'm just saying that there were, besides the records, I feel like it was, the game, everything that was happening felt novel at the time.

Now, it felt novel at the time partly because this was all new. We were just getting into the offensive boom. We hadn't seen anybody put up numbers like these. It was scary to look at Jeff Bagwell's line at the time. It was like, what? This is the greatest. I mean, it felt like it might have been the greatest batting line ever at that point. point um and we hadn't seen you know pedro be insane and and uh in in such a hitting environment too so uh so like the just the individual performances were shocking so i think that

this this now becomes slightly harder to say but i think that it was a great season anyway i think we would have felt like it was a great season anyway i think we would have felt like it was a great season regardless of whether these records had been broken but also i mean a a good chase is almost as good as the record being broken we haven't had a real 400 threat what's the last real 400 threat we've had i mean just getting to august with a guy hitting 394 is can make a season yeah so i don't know that you need the records to set this season apart yeah i mean i agree that it was an above average season what will this season be notable but if this season ended today what would we talk about?

Like, what would we say we lost? Felix Hernandez had some weirdo streak going that takes four minutes to describe. Like, he has seven innings with two or fewer runs, but only earned runs for 16 straight games. Maybe Mike Trout's first MVP. Maybe. Or Jose Abreu's season and it's not like his season maybe Abreu's season

it's not like even Trout's season is unusual this is basically his season he's having the same season he's had for the last two years people barely pay attention to Mike Trott anymore. Yeah, maybe he should say something interesting once in a while. Kershaw, I don't know, but Kershaw missed time. He's not going to set any records. He's having almost the exact same season he had last year

from a traditional stats standard. It's not like, maybe if he hadn't missed any of that time, he might be threatening 27 wins or something like that, but he's not. Talk about Oakland winning their first World Series potentially or their first getting to it. Yeah, it's just that they've been to the playoffs the last two years. This is not like the Expos exactly. Maybe the Royals, the first place Kansas City Royals.

Maybe the Royals, but they're not running away with it. They're clearly not a dominant team. All of these things are fine, but 20 years from now, you're just talking. Probably not, unless the Royals failed them make the playoffs for the next 20 years again. And this is the closest that they came, then people would be talking about that. Yeah, as you note, some of the things that we remember, we remember them partly because we can imagine what would have happened and partly because we know what actually did happen. And so for Gwyn, for instance, knowing that he went on this incredible batting average run makes it even more compelling. And knowing that the Expos had that horrible future makes it more compelling.

And so we don't know. Derek Jeter would be deprived of retirement gifts. This is the best reason for a strike. We should stop the season now. Yeah, we should all strike. Yes. All right. Okay.

All right. So we'll do a listener email show tomorrow instead. So you can still send us some emails. We could still use some emails at podcast at baseball prospectus.com please support our sponsor baseball reference go to baseball reference.com subscribe to the play index using the coupon code bp to get the discounted price of 30 on a one-year subscription we will be back tomorrow