Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 514: A Podcast for Your Thoughts

Episode Date: August 14, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Justin Verlander’s woes, switch-pitchers, empty averages, and more.

I just gotta get a message to you. Hold on. Hold on. One more hour and my life will be through. Hold on. Hold on. Good morning and welcome to episode 514 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com, joined as always by Sam Miller of BaseballProspectus.com.

Hello. Hello. So today we're going to do the listener email show that we intended to do yesterday but did not do. Exciting. Mm-hmm. A lot of good emails. Yes, and you have selected some this time.

Yeah, I'm going to keep it casual. I've got like 50 starred, and I'm just going to pick some. Okay. All right, so let's see. Oh, the first one I was going to click on when we talked about yesterday. This is a bad start. All right. First one. click on when we talked about yesterday this is a bad start uh all right uh first one uh well so benjamin writes uh uh in this week's jonah carey podcast matt gelb asserted that ben revere

is hitting the emptiest 300 in the history of baseball because of his lack of power or walks is he if not who does have the record for the emptiest 300 season of all time this is basically a play index question but we have a yes topic already so i uh i'm just gonna answer it so i think that um one thing that that you have to appreciate with revere is that he's playing in a in a different era uh than some other guys who've hit 300 if you hit he has a 308 326 365 line which admittedly isn't a hitter's park but if you compare that to somebody playing in uh you know say 1999 uh that line would be much worse so i think that um i simply am going to look at sort of the worst uh ops pluses for 300. So we have to decide when we're going to start counting. If we count pre-World War II baseball,

there's a guy, Lance Richborg, who in 1930 hit.304 with a better OBP and a better slugging percentage, but an OPS plus of 77, which is like backup catcher bad. So that would technically be the worst, but nobody cares about Lance Richford. In the modern era, I think you can make a good case for Felix Fermin,

who had an 85 OPS plus, hit 317, 338, 380 for Seattle back when Seattle played in the Kingdom, where you could hit. This was in 1994. In fact, this one in a way gets maybe extra credit because it was the strike short in season so he even only managed to stay over 300

for 411 plate appearances uh however he did hit 317 um you might say that the emptiest one should be closer to 300 so like you could say uh shantyogan, who hit.300 for the New York Giants and otherwise had an 86 OPS plus. You could say Placido Polanco would be a good guess, if you were guessing. He's had a couple of empty.300s. 2001,.307,.342,.383. Another good guess for the local era would be Juan Pierre. Although Juan Pierre, he did this in Colorado

and hit.327 that's the emptiest.327 I think we can say in history although Juan Pierre did supplement by leading the league in stolen bases although he also supplemented in a negative way by leading the league in caught stealing this is not a scientific way of doing it but I'm just going to go ahead and say that my answer is AJ Pruszynski and AJ Pruszynski in 2009 hit 300 on the dot. Uh, he only, since he's a catcher, he only had four, 504 plate appearances or 504 at bats, 535 plate appearances, which is just over the minimum required.

I think that's going to help him a little bit. And in a hitter's park, he had a.331 on-base percentage. He drew only 24 walks all year. He had a.425 slugging percentage with only 13 home runs. Although I'm looking right now, and right below him is Ryan Terrio with one home run, although Terrio could draw a walk. No, I'm going with A.J. Pruszynski. Oh, Daryl Hamilton is a good one.

I'm going with A.J. Pruszynski. Emptiest 300 in history. Okay, that's a good one. All right, you don't have an answer? Nope. 24 walks is a lot for A.J. Pruszynski. He said he had that season last year, way back last year, when he walked 11 times but that um but that was that was not

a 300 average he hit 272 297 jordan pacheco is a good one too because he did it he had that crazy empty batting average here in colorado he only hit five home runs and he only drew 22 walks and he hit 309 in colorado so that was a also a 93 ops plus but he even he only qualified for this by three plate appearances he was like the bare minimum that you could get away with and uh so that's a pretty empty one all right next question then uh is from matthew did i say who that one was from? I don't recall. Matthew is asking this one. In 1999, Josh Hamilton was drafted first overall. How about Freddie Sanchez? Let me see where Freddie Sanchez is.

Freddie Sanchez is not a bad hitter, by the way. And the year that he did it, he hit like 335. Well, yeah, he won a batting title that one year. Freddie Sanchez does not show up on the list of 200. In fact, Freddie Sanchez has only hit 300 twice. Believe it or not, amazingly. He has a career average of 297. And he's only hit 300 twice in 10 years.

That's actually pretty astounding. Yeah, he had a 293, a 296, a 292. But as you can see, Sanchez was a doubles machine. And in one of his years, he hit 344. So empty-ish, but not both years and above average offensive performance. Okay. All right. Matthew says, in 1999, Josh Hamilton was drafted. First overall, and was considered a generational talent with five elite tools. Due to his struggles with addiction, we'll never know what Hamilton could have been in those years and how it affected his development and aging. Jason Parks once said that if he could give any player a do-over, it would be Hamilton,

due to his Hall of Fame raw talent. Mike Trout was drafted in 2009 at age 18 and quickly established himself as a five tool the best player in baseball is it possible we have uh sorry it is possible we have begun to see trout's decline his defense is probably declining fair enough and he he once did maybe uh he is striking out more and hitting for more power is it possible trout wasout was what Hamilton could have been in those lost years? And do Hamilton's 2008 and 2010 show us what Trout could be at 29? We have no clue how substance abuse affected Hamilton's aging, so his decline could be more traumatic. Yeah, it feels like almost impossible to make any comparison with Josh Hamilton, right?

Well, it's unlikely that Hamilton's early years would have been like Trout's early years in that no one has ever had years as good as early as Mike Trout has. So in that sense, he's unlikely to have been that good. But he was, you know, I know i mean if any you're right however you know josh hamilton was you know some scouts favorite player he'd ever seen you know i mean he he got probably willie mays comps instead of mickey mantel comps or something like that but first overall pick yeah exactly so uh and i mean in a sense i, maybe, in a sense what Josh Hamilton has actually done is, I don't know, I mean there's no way of comparing them, but like kind of almost as impressive as what Trout has done. To miss four years of development and to... Be poisoning yourself for all those years.

Completely ruining your life. I mean, that's something that an accountant might not be able to come back from. And he's missing the four years when you're supposed to be learning the speed of the game and getting used to seeing pitching. I mean, I remember talking to, I think, maybe Brandon Beachy or maybe Sean Doolittle, one of those guys, about converting from pitcher, hitter to pitcher, and they said it's way easier to do it that way, that you can never do it the other way,

that it's practically impossible to do it the other way because once you've missed the opportunity to get all those plate appearances, you just can never make up the ground that everybody else has made up. And Hamilton missed four of those years. It's amazing. And then to come back and immediately be good, and not just good but to be the best player in baseball for months at a time is pretty staggering. Yeah. Yeah.

It's an incredible story. So let's just think though. Okay. So what does Trout do that Hamilton could have or couldn't have done? I mean Hamilton could never have run as fast as Trout. No. And that's significant, right? That's a huge part of Trout's game. It makes every other part of his game play up.

He's not the best defender. He's the fastest runner. That's what makes him a great defender. I mean, he's a good defender. He's a very good defender. But, I mean, the speed is a huge part of it. The speed is a huge part of his value. The speed is successful as a hitter. It's why he can have a bad bit of 380 so hamilton's never going to match that hamilton in those early years probably would have been playing center field though i would imagine

in that uh he was he was a center fielder in his his year with the Reds. He's played a fair amount of center field here and there subsequently. So you figure if he had come up when he was 21, 22, he would have had a solid four or five years of center fielding in which he probably would have been an above-average center fielder, if not a brilliant one. So that would have helped. Yeah, he could have. And depending on which website you go to,

he might have been able to even match Trout's defensive metrics. Trout had that one really incredible year defensively in his first year where he was near the top of the league in defensive metrics, and then he's been largely considered meh since then uh so yeah maybe he could have matched and the arm is of course i mean the arm would have been a huge weapon uh especially early on and trouts never was trouts is a if anything a little bit of a liability. Hamilton probably could have matched Trout's power, I would think. Yeah. I don't know about his hit tool.

I don't know. I mean, Hamilton is a guy who has a natural ability to hit the ball hard and no strike zone whatsoever, but we don't know how much of that is maybe from having missed four years of development. It's hard to say. But Trout probably has a much better control of the strike zone than Hamilton because he has better control of the strike zone than almost anybody. And Hamilton has worse control of the strike zone than almost anybody.

So it's hard to know exactly where their offensive weapons would come from. They're not particularly similar types of hitters they're not particularly similar types of players and it seems as as weird as it is to say this i remember rob nyer making this case when uh about people who want to credit like uh uh i don't know some pitcher who fought in world war ii with the two years he missed when making his hall of Fame case. And Nair said, well, yeah, but he also might have injured himself in those two years. And knowing what we know about Hamilton, you could imagine a sort of a Bryce Harper situation

where in a weird way, in a weird way, it might have been that he, have been that he, I don't quite know how to phrase this because obviously smoking crack is worse than playing baseball, but he might have been at a different kind of risk but a similarly high level of risk playing the way that he plays at that age. Yeah, maybe. Now, as for whether this is any kind of a guide for Trout's future, it's just impossible to say, right? I mean, we just don't know what Josh Hamilton, we don't know how Josh Hamilton got here. He took some weird road.

Everybody takes their own road. You would never say that any one guy's future is a destiny for any other player. I would say that Trout has demonstrated that his ceiling is higher than anybody you could name. Yeah, it wouldn't shock me if Trout ended up having some seasons around age 30 or so that resembled Hamilton's. around age 30 or so that resembled Hamilton's. I mean, it wouldn't be really surprising if he just played a corner exclusively by then and didn't run so much and maybe hit for a little more power.

And you don't have to stretch things too much to imagine Trout having, you know, like Hamilton's 2012 season where he hit 285 and slugged 577 and stole seven bases or something, you know, something like that could, Trout could follow that trajectory when he's 31. He won't necessarily be stealing 30 bases or hitting 330 or playing center or any of those things. So it's within the realm of possibility, but who knows? All right, so one fact and then one question. So Trout already this year on August 12th has had what would be the second best year of Josh Hamilton's career, which is pretty good.

Hamilton's got three top 10 MVP finishes, and this is arguably Trout's worst year. And it's August 12th, or 13th, August 13th. Okay, so here's the question. From age 29 to age 31, Hamilton's probably his peak. MVP votes all three years, all-star all three years. He hit 313, 370, 583. That's in a hitter's park, so 147 OPS plus, so round that up to 150. He produced 16 war, so five and a half per. From age 29 to 31, you've got to bet right now, over or under for Trout on that.

I'll say under. Yeah, I'll take over. I'll say if he's hurt, he won't, and he probably won't be hurt. Probably not, but yeah, I'm building in some risk there. Of course, Hamilton had his injuries in those years also. He was never really an Ironman. I guess a couple times he played 150-something, but in his 29 through 31 seasons,

he was 133, 121, 148, and he was still that good. So I don't know. That's a lot of production in the bank, though, and that's a long way in the future for Trout. Yeah, it is, because he's very, very young. All right, next question. Joseph asks, while reading an article about Ambitress pitcher Ryan Perez, it got me thinking about how teams use these pitchers.

Teams have them pitch with both hands during a game, depending on which side the batter bats from. This makes sense, of course, but it has me asking why teams don't use these pitchers. Teams have them pitch with both hands during a game, depending on which side the batter bats from. This makes sense, of course, but it has me asking why teams don't use these pitchers in a different way. What if, instead, teams had them pitch using only one hand the entire game? This would mean that, in theory, they would be able to pitch back-to-back games with only three days off before they went back-to-back again. You could do it every other day, too, and have them be your number three and five starter, and essentially you'd save all that money, right?

So I'm not aware of any team trying this idea before. Am I crazy? You like the ambidextrous pitchers. Do you think there's merit to this idea? Who doesn't like them? I think there would be if you had a pitcher who was not only and ambidextrous but also effective against hitters of either hand in this with either hand i think the the ones that we have now or you know uh the one that we have now that we're all sort of rooting for to get a chance at some point wouldn't be able to do that.

He wouldn't be effective if he just limited himself to one hand. The fact that he has that platoon thing going on is really the only thing that makes him interesting as a pitcher. Because, you know, from one side he's throwing whatever it is, low to mid 80s. It's just not, he's not, he's a non-prospect with one hand, probably with either hand, but certainly with at least one, at least if he were limited to either one. So it's the ability to switch, I think, that even puts him really on the radar. If you had a guy who was, you know, Joaquin Benoit or something from both sides and could limit hitters on either side, whether he was throwing righty or lefty,

and could just also get the advantage of being fresh after having pitched with one hand only, then that would be good. I think in that case, if you had a guy who was really effective with either hand, I think maybe there would be something to it then that you would want him to forego the platoon advantage on one day to gain the advantage of having him at full strength the next day. I think that might be worth it in that case, but it's unlikely because there are not a lot of those guys who can do that with one a lot of those guys who can do that with one hand, let alone guys who can do that with one hand and also pitch with the other hand. So I don't know that we will see it. Yeah, I think that, uh, I don't have a specific percentage here, but my

guess is that, um, that when we talk about the fatigue of pitching, like, so okay, so a pitcher right now can throw like 120 pitches without hurting his arm, right? That's a fair number. And then beyond that, we start to get scared. My guess is that he could only throw like 137 without the rest of his body being super exhausted and him hurting his arm anyway. Like, I think the fatigue is just not limited to the arm.

The fatigue is in the whole body. It's an incredibly exhausting thing to throw the way they do. Ankle mobility, for instance, is a huge factor in arm health. If you are wearing down your lower half and it's affecting your mobility in your lower half, then you're just as likely to get hurt. That's a huge part of where the strain comes in. So I just don't think that that guy actually could throw, could start twice. I think it would increase his capacity by a very small amount.

by a very small amount. In fact, I think you could make the case that for a reliever, it might not, that what I'm talking about might not really apply, that his body might recover more, you know, like it might, a reliever might not exhaust his lower half. Yeah, I was thinking of reliever. I don't know that, yeah, it would be a lot to ask a starter to do that. Oh, okay.

I thought the question was about a starter. Oh, maybe it was. I don't know. I mean, he said number three and five starter. Hmm. Okay. And so I just don't think it's realistic to expect a starter to do it, and you don't either. We are in agreement on that.

Yes. All right. Shall we move on to the play index segment? All right. All right, shall we move on to the Play Index segment? All right, so for the Play Index segment this week, we actually have a guest, a Play Indexing guest named Andy. Andy emailed us because he went to baseballreference.com, and I'm reading from his email, so this has been confirmed by him. He clicked on the Play Index button, and he used the promo code BP to get his discounted one-year subscription for only $30. And then he ran a Play Index query and he sent it to us.

And so Andy's here to explain what he did and then we're going to talk about his query. So do you want to go through your Play Index? Hi, Andy, by the way. How are you? Hi, guys. How are you? So you want to go through your Play Index and tell us what you found? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I grew up a Tigers fan and I grew up just outside of Detroit in Royal Oak. So I've always been a fan of Justin Verlander since he came onto the scene, kind of my adulthood, you know, favorite baseball player. And this has not been a good year for you.

Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So it's it's been a rough year. And seeing what Verlander's done this year, I think his war is at point five right now. You know, it's it's been a it's been a little bit of a stab in the heart. And, you know, it's it's got me and I think probably the rest of Detroit worried about what his future is going to look like. So it made me think, you know, has there ever been, you know, someone we would consider a great pitcher ever have basically a completely inept season in the middle of his career, not due to injury, but just due to being terrible. not due to injury, but just due to being terrible. So, um, so I used the play index and, uh, I looked at, uh, pitching season searches and I, and I did two searches. I did one where I, uh, started in 1969 and I looked at all all-star pitchers who had qualified for an ERA title, who were less than 35 years old, so I didn't grab too many end of careers. And I looked for seasons where they had a war of less than one.

So I was looking for, you know, full season pitching, people who had been an all-star but had a really bad year. And there's actually 291 results. levon hernandez makes the list five times actually um and then and then i took from 69 to now um the list of pitchers who were starters and uh had a career war war greater than 24 so i was just looking for, you know, more or less a list of the best pitching wars for the last 40 years or so, 45 years. So Verlander ends up 57 on the career war list. And I went through and I kind of compared the two lists and said, where is there anyone that we might consider an elite pitcher? You know, one of those surefire Hall of Famers who who hit this less than one war in one of their seasons.

And I guess the unfortunate result is no. So in the top 25 of career war, I found really the only thing that was in the right ballpark was John Smoltz had a war of.9, but this was in the shortened season. So he only had 134 innings. I guess he wasn't having a great year, but you'd think that another 100 innings or so, he might have bumped that well up above one. It's interesting, too, because Smoltz, I'm looking at it now, was having, I would say, a considerably better year than Verlander. He had an above-average ERA+. His peripherals were right in line. I wonder if he's being knocked somewhat by baseball reference giving a big defensive adjustment.

I think that baseball reference loves the Braves' defense of that era, so he might be getting knocked somewhat from that adjustment. Okay, okay. Yeah, so take that into consideration. Then it's even a bigger no. So really you have to go down the list quite a bit to pitchers who are kind of, you know, they're good, they're good, but, you know, they're not the people who I would have really hoped Justin Verlander, you know, would be at the end of his career, you know, which would be like Nolan Ryan

in my mind, right? So you got to get into the list of, I have Dave Steeb, CeCe Sabathia, to the list of, uh, I have Dave Steeb, CeCe Sabathia, Jerry Kuzman, Dennis Martinez, Vida Blue. These were people who might've had these kind of mid, mid career, uh, really poor inept years. Um, and I would say Dave Steeb kind of had, uh, had one where he did come back from it. He had like a war of 38 in the six years prior to having a poor year and came back with a war of 16 after that for the next four years. So he made a recovery and he didn't come completely back up to the level that he was at, but he did well. Same kind of deal with Jerry Kuzman and Invita Blue. They had some bad years and they were able to kind of pick back up a little bit after those bad years.

But again, they're not exactly the, the elite pitchers. And I guess in, in other examples, he sees the Bathia, you know, he fell off in 2013 and we kind of all know he hasn't really come back since then. So I guess he's an example of that, that somewhat mid career fall off great pitcher that, that never came back. So anyway, so it was, it was a little depressing, but, depressing. I was going to ask us as the effectively wild representative of all Justin Verlander fans, how how demoralized were you upon running this this query? I was I was a bit demoralized. I mean, I take into account that it's, you know, somewhat of subjective, arbitrary endpoints that I'm looking at here and whatnot, you know, so I'll take it all with a grain of salt, but it didn't, you know, it didn't give me a lot of, uh, uh, warm and

fuzzies, you know? Yeah. Well, this is what will happen if you get play index, it will make you hate your favorite team and hate the sport. I'm curious. I, um, I'm trying to figure out where uh which which filter you applied that kept dennis eckersley for making this list because eckersley before he became a reliever had um a mid-career collapse and i don't know maybe he wasn't good enough as a starter he was he seemed to have been you know fairly fairly elite not not quite verlander ish, uh, but you know, had some black ink and some Cy Young votes, uh, but doesn't show up. Uh, and I'm trying to figure out why. I think, uh, I think I use the, had to have 60% of his appearances as a starter. Ah, yes. To try to, so, so he must have not quite qualified for that. I was trying to eliminate relievers,

just to thin out the uh the query a little bit but but that that one got overlooked you know so just to uh to demonstrate the agility of playing x i ran a parallel uh search and i used instead of all-star as a uh as a filter i used hall of fame members so for that reason i had to push it back to 1950 to collect more Hall of Famers. And I looked at any Hall of Fame pitchers who had a war below one from ages 26 to 32 in a season in which they qualified for the ERA title. 50 there have been only three two of them were Eckersley um and even that one of those was in the strike shortened season and he came very close so so really you could even almost throw out one of those uh and then one was Gaylord Perry who in 1965 at the age of 26 had a basically a uh a replacement level season but Perry's interesting because he didn't get good until he was 27 he had a he had a good year at 25 before that he was a minor leaguer he was a late bloomer and so he isn't even a an example of a collapse guy uh he just hadn't caught really gotten it going yet

so verlander really is well i guess i was gonna say verlander is unprecedented are we how close do we all the three of us think verlander is to a hall of famer at this point uh he was he was certainly pitching at that level so if he if he doesn't make it it would be not because of his performance but because of the lack of longevity which i guess is i wonder how many examples there are of guys who had verlander like trajectories or were on that sort of path roughly equivalent and then had this this kind of season and then dropped off the map after that because of whatever caused them to have that kind of season so with with verlander maybe maybe it's just a a lack of stuff without any underlying evil there, or maybe it is this shoulder thing

that he recently disclosed and has been dealing with for a while, but whatever it is, I guess this is not a good sign. You could make the case that Sabathia is a good comp. Sabathia made it one more year before his collapse. And you could would the first name that i thought of and really the years line up pretty well uh is johan santana who uh i think both he and sabathia probably had certain i think certainly johan santana did sabathia is debatable had a better hall of fame case through age 31 and santana threw 117 mornings in his career

um so so far there's no indication that's going to happen to Verlander. There's no even indication that what happened to Sabathia is going to happen to Verlander. But it does kind of make you realize what a weird thing it is that guys like Rick Russell and Mike Messina aren't in the Hall of Fame because they're considered to have been um what do you call those uh what do you call it compilers yeah which makes sense if you're talking about harold baines but compiling is the number one skill a pitcher can have it is not like hitting the to me you should

get extra credit for having a low peak and pitching forever um because that's the thing that none of these guys can do yeah and i guess we should also allow for the possibility that verlander will pitch his way off of this list that he he is the only member of right now yeah if he if he comes back from this injury if if the time off does him some good and if in the last month to six weeks of the season he pitches like old Verlander, then he could sneak above that threshold. He needs a half win at this point. I think he came really close before his last start. I think he was up near a war of one.

I kind of worked on this play index for a couple of weeks. And I think I even sent it out when when I sent this out to you guys. I think he was at a war of one. And I said, well, this might be irrelevant after his next start. So I think the tide could swing pretty quickly and who knows, maybe could get to two with a dynamite end of the season. who knows, maybe he could get to two with a dynamite end of the season. And then I guess it doesn't erase the poor season that he's already had, but at least the statistics won't resent that. So best guess, both of you, will he clear the one threshold this year?

Will he be worth a half a win in the final six weeks of this season, which would basically project out to what, like a two-win player? Yeah. Maybe better, probably, if he doesn't come back right away. I don't know. I can't fathom what's going on that's causing this. I mean, he's striking out two and a half less guys, almost three less guys per nine this year. And I still haven't gotten over the idea that this is like a long,

lagging injury that he's fighting through and not talking about so i don't i i don't have a lot of hope to say he's gonna he's gonna come back and uh and turn the tide personally yeah he's currently got the 29th worst strikeout rate among qualifiers which is actually a little bit of an improvement from the last time I looked. But he is now slightly behind Aaron Horang. He struck out all three guys

in the one inning that he pitched last week. This week, so maybe that boosted his stance. Padding his stats. Yeah. A little bit behind Charlie Morton. Oh, gosh.

Well, for your sake. Fans just let out a big groan. By the way, I just noticed, and I think this is new. I think that I asked Sean Foreman about this. I might be mistaken. I might have asked him about something else. But I see now that there's a column under pitchers player value

section that has the park factor customized for the parks the pitcher threw in. So not just a park factor for their home ballpark, but for all the parks they pitched in weighted by how many innings they pitched in. Very cool. Yeah. Alright, well

for your sake, we hope that Verlander passes this one-war threshold. But it's something to watch. All right. Thanks, Andy. Appreciate it. No, I appreciate the time, guys. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Andy, from Pennsylvania, for that. All right. We're going to go on to the rest of our emails, or maybe one more, or something like that. Let's see. Asa asks about base running. Let's see, where was this one? Okay, he asks, which team in 2014, during another year or over a span of years, was best at preventing opponents from taking the extra base. In other words, who are the relay kings of MLB and is that number

a totally significant one in terms of moving the needle on team success? So Ben, Jason Votrichovsky actually queried this one time because he wanted to write about queried this one time because he wanted to write about this and he ended up writing only a very specific piece about the twins and preventing the base running the base stealing and so it was a limited look

but he shared the spreadsheet with us do you have any guesses for I guess any part of this before I give the answer well I've give the answer? Well, I've seen the answer. Oh, okay.

So, well, okay. So then the answer is that it turns out in 2012, the difference between the best team and the worst team at preventing base running runs. And so basically this would be every base running opportunity that is stymied or allowed is converted to runs just as we do for players base running runs so going first to third with one out is worth x number of runs and you know going from second to third on a pass ball is worth x number of runs and getting thrown out stealing is worth x number of negative runs right so that's

how we do that so this was applied to to teams defense and the difference between the best and the worst teams was about 40 runs 21 runs was the top and 19.6 negative runs was the bottom so that seems huge right that's bigger than i would have guessed i wouldn't yeah yeah i mean i wouldn't have thought that there was such a clear difference in the skill levels across entire teams that you would see it um like it's easy to figure out how base running runs add up relatively quickly but i just didn't think there would be that big a difference between the nine guys who play for the pirates and the nine guys who play for the royals because they're not really i don't know that like they're all good baseball players and this we think of as a as a secondary thing that they do and not the primary

thing that they do you wouldn't expect them to to to coagulate in groups that would show distinctly different skill levels and yet at least this year, and maybe there's not much year-to-year correlation, which would go to my point, but maybe there is, at least for this year, there was a huge difference, 40 runs. Now, those two teams, there were basically two teams that were way up at the top, and then two or three teams that were way down at the bottom. After the Pirates at 21 runs was the Rockies at 20 runs. And then from that point, you have to dip all the way down to nine runs

to get to the number three team. So huge, huge gap there. And so looking at the rest of the league, looking at the 25 teams in the middle, it's like a two win spread covers 90% of the teams or 85% of the teams or whatever. But this seems high. Doesn't this seem high to you? Yeah, it does. It's surprising to me that the Royals would be the last place team, even with Alex Gordon, who I would expect to be near the top of any list of base running runs preventers.

So, yeah, I would guess that it's something I've, it's probably not a, it's probably not a conscious thing. It probably wasn't the 2012 pirates being put together with stopping the run in mind necessarily, or training. I mean, I don't know, maybe they worked on it harder than everyone else did, but I wonder if we repeated this for for this year and for last year whether it would be consistent i would i would guess that the the true talent is is more in that to win range that most of the teams are clustered in and then maybe every year you you get a few teams that for whatever reason go outside of that range just because yeah i i stared at the list of teams for a long time and tried to find some pattern for which types of teams or which types of ballparks or which types of payrolls or success or anything like that and i couldn't find any pattern at all um

i don't know if you could but like the reds were really good this year, that year, and they were second from the bottom, and the A's were amazing that year, and they were fifth from the bottom. So meanwhile, other good teams were near the top, like the Nationals. So just in case anybody's wondering, the spread on the individual types of base running runs, so hit advancement runs are how often you take the extra base on a hit and this spread from top to bottom is about um 13 runs there from about i guess 14 runs from about five at the high end to nine at the low end negative nine at the low end uh ground out advancement runs guys advancing on grounders, is about, wow, that's a big one, actually.

That's 22 runs, and from 12 at the high end to negative 10 at the low end. And my guess is that that has to do with the double play pivots, right? Probably. Could be. This might be having to do with who has the best double play combination. And maybe, to some degree, that might be skewed by the type of stack you have. The Rockies were the top, and they were pretty ground ball heavy at that point, right? I think so.

I can't remember who's healthy on the Rockies. If you give me a year and ask me to name their five pitchers, I'll give you like 17 names, and then like five of them would be healthy. They're five pitchers. I'll give you like 17 names, and then like five of them would be healthy. Air out advancement, so tagging or not tagging. Smaller, it's about eight run gap from plus four to minus four. Other base running, which is basically wild pitches and pass balls,

is a tiny gap. It's like two runs. And stolen base runs. Twins at the top at seven. And, oh, you know, it's possible. Actually, Ben, now that I think about it, probably the Royals were first, right? If it's negative base running runs,

the Royals were probably the best. So that makes more sense. Much more sense. Although then the Pirates with the – that means that the Pirates with all their boot camp teaching fundamentals didn't work. That's right. Maybe they weren't doing boot camp yet. Anyway, stolen base runs, seven at the top and negative six at the bottom. Oh, yeah, and that's Yadier. That's the Cardinals.

So, yeah, we've cracked that code. Alright. Let's see. I'll try to find one last one. We already answered the one from Eric. Alright. Matt Trueblood says, I was wondering if you've ever given any thought or would care to

ruminate on the way the time zone in which one lives shapes your experience as a baseball fan. Matt always has very thoughtful questions, and I don't always like to read them all the way out loud. But Matt points out that if you live on the West Coast, you get these wonderful late night games in the middle of summer that you get to stay up for, and it nice and cool and you can sit on the porch and holler across at your neighbors and if you're in the east coast nothing starts before you like leave for like i mean what the first game of the day for you guys is after dinner that's that's insane to me yeah and matt said something in his email about asking me maybe not being the most representative of all east coast dwellers and that i'm a night owl person and for me it's always been great that baseball is on really late even when we even when we do this podcast as i edit i mean

we start recording this podcast at midnight often and it goes for a long time and then I edit and I upload and that takes a while. And as that process is going on, there's often a West Coast game still going, which is nice just to put on in the background. So, uh, and then every now and then there will be an extra inning game that goes on deep into the night as I'm writing or editing or whatever I'm doing. So I've always valued that West Coast baseball. For most people, that is probably more of a bug than a feature. If you actually want to watch West Coast baseball and go to bed at a reasonable hour so that you can get up at a reasonable hour,

you end up missing a lot of the end of Dodgers games and Giants games and Angels games and A's games. So for me, it's great. Otherwise, maybe not so great. But I don't, yeah, I mean, baseball always to me feels more like a nighttime activity than a daytime thing. Yeah, for me, it's the exact opposite. For me, I wake up and if it's a monday or a tuesday

that's a lousy day because there's no day game otherwise i pretty much immediately start thinking about when the first game is going to be and planning to to turn it on at 10 0 5 a.m uh uh in the morning um the other thing is as as matt also says, it's not just late night games. He says, I think this can affect how we consume baseball as much as when. A shift of an hour in your day can make a difference between watching on TV or listening on radio or catching it live or having to settle for highlights. And there's a few things here. One is none of the games were in the newspaper.

None of the results were in the newspaper none of the the results were in the newspaper for you when you were growing up and i mean even for us there would be probably a game a week where they just like they would just say game's not done yet and they'd put the paper out and then you'd have to wait a day to get the box score and that was the only way to get the box score was in the newspaper. So if you were scoring your own fantasy league like I was, you had to wait an extra day. And then you had to go find it in the agate at the very, very back where they have the college lacrosse scores. They'd just be tucked in this A's box score that you had to find.

box score that you had to find. And I feel like a large part of my relationship with the game, as well as a large part of my development as a person who liked to read a lot, was that I read the sports section every day. That was what got me into reading the newspaper. And if none of the weekday games would have been in the paper the next day and if half the box scores across the league hadn't been there and you didn't get a sense that you had the previous day's baseball action right in front of you to study for 45 minutes every morning uh before school um then i don't know if i i would have done that the radio thing is interesting too because i would we would have a seven o'clock game out here um that was the latest it would ever be is seven o'clock and i would have a 7 o'clock game out here. That was the latest it would ever be, a 7 o'clock. And I would have to go to bed before it would end.

But I was already into this game. I mean, I was invested. I had put money into the pot. And I was not going to leave before it was over. So I would sneak the radio into bed, and I would listen until it was over. And if the game were starting at 10, which is what happens to a Yankees fan when they're playing in Seattle, I don't think I would have thought, I'm going to stay up until 1 listening to this game. I think I just would have punted that day. Now, that's not the norm because home games are all on at 7 o'clock for you just as they're all on

at 7 o'clock for me. But there is a weird way in which like a quarter of your schedule just doesn't exist in your life and every game exists in my life or when you're a kid. And so there is a reliability to it on the West Coast where you know you're getting a game every day that maybe you don't get as a kid on the East Coast. As an adult, not a big problem, but as a kid, you don't get it on the East Coast. As an adult, not a big problem, but as a kid, you don't get it on the East Coast. That's a valid point. I always felt like we had it better, and I know that some East Coasters think that they have it better. What do you think? Just purely from a baseball perspective?

Yeah. For me, I think it's better for the East Coast schedule. For the typical person on the typical schedule, I can see the West Coast argument. I think there's something to be said for being able to see and ascertain the results of every game. That seems like a pretty strong selling point. ascertain the results of every game. That seems like a pretty strong selling point. Yeah, and we're also talking about this from the perspective, I mean, we're talking about this in an era that no longer exists. This will basically never be an issue again. A small part of it is. The fact that the games are played later makes it harder to follow.

But as far as not having access to the box score, as far as not being able to find out basically for a day what happened, that will never again happen. And also, as far as not, I mean, we no longer have only one game that we can watch, or I guess two. We each had two growing up that we can watch. Now if your team is, I mean, if you're a kid and the Yankees are playing at 10 p.m. because they're in Seattle,

well, there's 17 other games. There's never 17 other games. But there's like 11 other games that are all starting at a normal time and you can just fire up your MLB TV. So it's a different era. We're talking about how it affected us in an era that never will exist again. All right. Kids these days have it easy is what you're saying.

One last quick one. Eric Hartman asks, would you rather, one game only, would you rather have Clayton Kershaw versus the AL All-Stars or Kevin Correa versus the Padres? I planned to do the math on this. I still plan to do the math on this. I still plan to do the math on this. I expect that I will answer this with real facts, but what's your gut?

I think I would rather have Kershaw. I think I would rather have Correa. Is the difference between the typical MLB batter and the typical All-Star batter bigger than the difference between Kershaw and the typical pitcher? And I guess that difference could conceivably be bigger than the difference between Correa and the typical pitcher, which is probably not a huge gap. He's not that far below average. And then the Padres are pretty far below. So, yeah. Maybe you're right.

We'll have an answer someday. Okay. Bye. You didn't see my chat message. I did not. You didn't see my challenge. I did not. After this answer, you should ask me to play index.

Okay. How about you... Oh, Ben.