Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 516: What You Missed at Saber Seminar

Episode Date: August 18, 2014

Ben and Sam talk about Ben’s weekend at Saber Seminar.

Feeling so sad and you're all alone and blue, that's when you're learning the game. That's when you're learning the game. Good morning and welcome to episode 516 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com. How are you, Ben? Very well, thank you. Excellent.

I want to let you know that I have been keeping an eye on the Diamondbacks headlines. Okay, I wondered. Yeah, we haven't been talking about them much, partly because we've had guests, partly because once the genre is established, you really need something to break free of the genre or reboot or reboot the genre or, or whatever the case may be. Um, I will, I will say that I've noticed that the editor of this headline contest really

seems to be training or attempting. I, he's not doing a very good job, but attempting to train these guys to just say what happened, you know, like he, he's really quit, quit rewarding

the creative and just started going with the most direct one. Some of the recent winners, Marlins Big First crushes D-backs. D-backs wake up late. Arizona salvages game two.

Long ball dooms Diamondbacks to extra innings loss uh this one might be the most this one is incredibly straightforward trumbo powers d-backs to second straight victory yeah that is yeah there's not a lot of hidden depth to that one mustachios for rbis sink d bags no more no remorse yeah no no they just not winning uh it's the same seven people basically are submitting these although one one fellow whose last name is Beeman has started submitting as Beeman without the A in his name. So B-E-E-M-N. Sudden change, like Snoop Dogg going to Snoop Lion, I think.

So there have been a few good ones. Not a ton of great ones, but a few good ones um some of my favorites uh mr beeman in fact uh suggested wounds over miami which is like a moon over miami reference yes except for they it doesn't really rhyme uh and it you had to make it plural uh and that's not a really very timely reference anyway. But no, I mean it's fine. It's timely enough. Wound over Miami maybe. Wounds over Miami. There are, you know what I'm saying. I was at a Denny's last week and they sell something called a moons over Miami. Yeah. Scrambled egg sandwich. and they sell something called a moons over my hammy.

Scrambled egg sandwich. You are really giving us an indication of how high class you are. This is the first time you've been exposed to the moons over my hammy? There are no Denny's in Manhattan. This is a new experience for me. I went to a Denny's. I only go to Denny's when I am on trips for Grantland. I went to a Denny's at scout school and I went to a Denny's this past week when I was in Connecticut for rookie camp ESPN orientation. So I get to go to Denny's when I travel for work. Yeah, that's a good dish as far as Denny's dishes go.

Two knotted games with the second one tight until the 12th. What's that, Mike? That really flows off the tongue. You don't know who won either one. You don't know anything about the games. just know you know they played a double header is pretty much what you know and i guess you know one went extra innings but no no indication of whether this was a good day or a bad day two dotted games two dotted games with the second one tight until the 12th it's also three columns i mean it's a very long headline i'd probably be more likely to click on that one, really. I mean,

to find out what happened. It's kind of a nice teaser. I wouldn't click on the Trumbo hits a homer one because I know what happened. Two teams played a baseball game and you'll never believe what happened next. That's basically what that one is. What weird thing happened in this game.

Same person who did that, who is an original contributor, a regular contributor, for a different game was, how bad it is, which is like how sweep it is, except without the pun or anything. How bad it is. It's like Fernando Abad in that game or something. Maybe there's something to it that we don't know. Could be. I liked this one.

Subtraction by add, parenthesis, isn, close parenthesis. So it's supposed to be subtraction by addition, but Addison doesn't rhyme with addition, so he wasn't quite sure how to handle that, so he put isn in parentheses, but then you have subtraction by add which isn't a thing uh that one really falls apart it was a nice idea i actually like the idea uh other than that none of it works uh royals deck d backs house cards. House of cards is in quotation marks.

I thought they must be playing the Cardinals. Right. But then how did the Royals get in there? I think that what that is is that he started with Royals, deck, D-backs, and he thought that that was the essential thing to get in. Like once you have Royals, deck, D-bags, you can't backspace and change the verb. You're stuck with deck. And so then you think, well, what goes with deck?

As though deck is the crucial part of that headline. Royals is the crucial part of the headline. Royals is the detail that is unique. But he thought deck was the unique part. And so then he had to come up with a deck pun and house of cards is in the news and so he put in quotes with capital letters so we know it's a title house of cards royals deck d-bags house of cards interestingly he he did capitalize house and cards but not d-bags which is definitely a proper noun uh and then one that i actually

genuinely did like uh was a from a guy named dax who who offered i'm assuming somebody named barrett was playing and he offered d-backs barrett lee win no i actually don't like that i'm thinking about it how do i say it out loud? D-bags Barrett Lee win. No. I think we'll have to have this editor on. That's actually a good idea. So anyway, it goes on. I just want people to know it does go on.

There is some play index research in the Facebook group that I wanted to highlight. A listener named Darius Austin, who I believe used the coupon code BP to get the single year subscription for a discounted price of $30. He posted some Play Index research that I thought was somewhat interesting. It was in the same vein as some of the other meaningless things that we fixate on.

So he noticed that Sergio Romo's whip, his walks plus hits over innings pitched, is below one, and yet his ERA is over four, well over four. So he was interested in how many times this has happened. So he looked to see guys whose whip was under one and whose ERA was over four with a minimum of 20 innings pitched. And Romo has over 45 innings pitched this year already. So there are only four guys. No, that's not true. There are only, yes, no, that is right.

There are only four guys who have ever done this in a season of 20 or more games or innings. It may have happened for a streak of innings longer than that. But for a complete season, only three other guys have ever done this. Dutch Leonard in 1942, Julio Navarro in 1970, and Tim Spooniebarger in 2003. All had ERAs over four with whips under one, but all of their ERAs were barely over four. Romo's is 4.34, so if he manages to do it, and he's already pitched more innings than any of them did in their seasons in which they did this. So this is kind of an effectively wild-ish thing that's happening here. This would be historic. He has a whip of.985 with an ERA of 4.34.

So I guess I have two questions for you about this. One, does the fact that he plays in a low scoring environment Both era-wise and ballpark-wise Make this more or less likely? Probably more, right? Because home runs aren't down dramatically But hits are So that would, right? mean hits are hits are down somewhat so that would seem to make it more likely he is let's see he's given up uh 6.7 hits per nine innings

he's walked 2.2 and uh he has given up eight home runs in 45 and two-thirds. So you're saying more likely? I think more likely. Yeah, because the type of pitcher who would do this would be one who gives up a lot of home runs. And if hits and walks are generally down but home runs are up, you would expect a greater discrepancy between a pitcher's whip and ERA. Yes. Basically.

The other thing, and I don't know if this makes sense actually, but the other thing is just simply that whips below one are very rare in any environment, and ERAs above four are quite common in any environment. So really, the thing that keeps most pitchers from doing this is they don't get the whip below one. And so to have an environment where it's more likely that you'll have a whip below one simply broadens the field of pitchers who are going to qualify for this. Second question is, knowing what you know about the case at hand and the man involved,

Second question is, knowing what you know about the case at hand and the man involved, which is more likely, that his whip will go over one or that his ERA will go under four? Hmm. Well, his whip has been under one in three of the past four seasons. Yeah. And was barely over one last year. So I would think that he could maintain that part of it fairly yeah but his era was never above 4.34 i mean he's presumably worse now right uh his fit for instance is i guess his fit is mainly driven by his home runs

but his fit is like like badly badly a worst. And his walks are higher than they have been since his second season, which was 2009. And his hits are, you know, his career rate. His strikeouts are much lower than his career rate. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that, you know, it's hard to keep a whip below one. And he's not that good a pitcher at this point. Or he might be, but he hasn't been. Actually, he pitched today, earlier today, so the stats that I was looking at are slightly outdated.

So he threw an inning on Sunday, and he allowed one hit, and he struck out all three guys he— or he struck out three out of four guys he faced. So his whip is still below one. So basically one bad outing will push his whip over one. However, he only needs three more innings to get his ERA below four. Yes, it's now 4.24. Yeah, so both—yeah, so three more innings—three and a third.

So ten more outs and it will be below four. This is a tough one. He's both directions tough. Something to watch. Yeah, good research by Darius. In fact, nine outs will do it.

Okay. Yeah, if you have other interesting play index research that you have performed, please feel free to join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild so that everyone can enjoy it and maybe we'll talk about it. All right. Ben, you went to Saber Seminar this weekend. Sure did. But you didn't have Denny's while you were there. I did not have Denny's, no. Interesting.

You had a perfect chance. Yeah. No, no Denny's. I think once a week is pretty much my Denny's quota. All right. So we're just going to talk about what you saw, I guess. Sure. That's the plan.

So I guess we'll see whether you have enough to talk about. Yes, we'll find out. so I guess we'll see whether you have enough to talk about yes we'll find out yeah so this is I mean this is I think my favorite baseball certainly conference of the year or event where

people who like baseball gather but no actual baseball is played although I did go to the Red Sox game on Saturday night with some friends of the podcast like Mike Farron and Russell Carlton and Dan Brooks. So that was fun. It was a good game.

But the conference itself is great, and Dan is probably listening, but I'm not trying to butter him up in saying that it's just a really well-organized event with a lot of really interesting speakers from a number of different disciplines. And it all flows very smoothly in this two-day event where there really are no dead periods at all. And every talk is interesting for some reason. So I would encourage everyone to go next year if you didn't make it this year. So there were lots of, there were people from really every kind of background. There were a lot of Red Sox representatives, people from the scouting side. Tom Tippett spoke from the analytics side. There was a Red Sox intern panel. Ben Charrington spoke. Jeff Lunau

also spoke. John Farrell spoke. One of those people was not a Red Sox person. I'm aware of that. And there were doctors speaking about injuries, and there were people speaking about scouting, and there were people speaking about pitch effects and projections and just a whole host of things that you would expect. The title of the Sabre seminar is officially the scouting and science of baseball.

So that kind of includes everything and everything was included. But for me, the takeaway, I think, and there was a lot of interesting Sabre metric research, the kind of, you know, cutting edge stat stuff that you would expect to see at a conference like this. But for me, the emphasis was not on that. It was on the human element, I guess is a decent way to put it,

or these sort of human factors or soft factors. And there were a number of different talks that focused on this and presentations that focused on this and presentations that focused on this. And the consensus seemed to be that maybe we're getting closer to the point where there are no huge advantages to be gained just from looking at numbers, or at least that it's getting harder and harder to do that for teams to get an edge because every other team is also looking at similar numbers and possibly doing similar analysis.

And so to differentiate yourself, you have to move into these areas that have not been traditionally under the Sabermetrics umbrella. And so Jeff Lunau's talk, and it was kind of interesting to see what Jeff Lunau would come out and say, because the Astros, as we have talked about, have been in the news for reasons that are not all that flattering to the Astros lately. And so he came out and seemed kind of aware of that and didn't want to play into the Astros

stereotypes that we have talked about. And so he talked about applying research more so than actual research. He said, you know, you all know about the Astros analytical approach and that's been talked about and that's been covered. So instead he wanted to focus on how that has been adopted by players, by the coaching staff and how there's been some resistance to that. He mentioned the shifting, and of course the Astros have shifted a whole lot this year. I don't know what the updated stats are, but last time I saw some, they were either close to or at the top of teams in shifts this year. And he mentioned that this is something that they've wanted to do for years, and they did start doing it a few years ago.

And early in the year they were among the leaders in in rate of shifts but that it tailed off during the year and that by the end of the year they were like in the middle of the pack or below because either the coaches or the players kept coming up with reasons not to shift so uh you know a certain infielder would say that he didn't like it. He wasn't comfortable turning the double play or he wasn't sure where to position himself. So that would be an objection. And so they'd say, OK, well, we'll shift, but not when this guy is on the field. And then a pitcher would say, well, I don't like it. You know, you're taking away a certain pitch

from me or you're making me pitch a certain way. I'm not comfortable. And so, okay, we'll shift, but we won't shift when this guy's on the mound. And they kept coming up with cases where they weren't going to shift. And so eventually they ruled a whole lot of those cases out. And so they have gone to this new approach, he said, where they're really trying to get everyone on board instead of mandating this from the top down. They sat all of their pitchers down for an hour in spring training this year, tried to walk them through the thought process, show them all the evidence that they have that this works, anticipate any objections they might have and have answers to those and they they built this whole model that they or you know some sort of

program to display how this works or why it works or some kind of spray chart tool that they could use to convince the players that this works and and so there was this idea that that this stuff doesn't work unless you get players to understand why it works. And someone gave an example of a player who doesn't just accept what his pitching coach says. He always asks why his pitching coach is telling him to do something because there's a lot of money at stake for these players and they don't necessarily want to make a major change or drop a pitch or add a pitch or change their delivery or something unless they understand what the rationale is.

They're not necessarily just going to take the coach's word for it or take the front office's word for it. So that was a big focus of Lunau's talk. And then... Wait. So when you say that last year, as they got this feedback from the players, they ruled a lot of them out. You just mean that they quit shifting in kind of deference to the players,

or they actually ruled out the wisdom of those shifts? I don't know if he said this, but did he say that in any of these cases the pitchers have these concerns, and then they looked at the numbers a different way and said, oh, well, yeah, okay, I can see why that makes sense uh not to ship no uh no he didn't say that maybe that happened but he didn't mention it happened right this was all all player driven not not player objections making the front office realize that they had uh done something wrong and and he mentioned similar examples like um when he was with the cardinals

and mitchell lichman who's a sabermetrician that we talk about all the time he and lunao uh when lichman was consulting for the cardinals and this was lunao's first year and they went in and had a meeting with tony larusa and they were trying to talk to him about bullpen usage and leverage and uh you know i guess jason isringhausen was the cardinals closer at that time and they were trying to tell him when you should use your closer and leverage index and all that stuff and and larissa had all of these objections about players you know thinking their role is one thing and not being prepared to come in at certain other times or you know not getting saves and how you convince players that it's okay not to get saves when they're paid for

saves. And Luna was not ready for that at that point. And he had this consulting background and he said he expected to just come in and show a PowerPoint and everyone would accept it, which is what he did in his previous work. And that didn't work so well in baseball. So that was a big focus of his talk. And then Charrington's talk. Wait, wait, wait.

Yes, yes, go ahead. Do you, just based on the experience that he described, do you have a sense that it would be easier to try something like this with a team that is winning and therefore you might be able to say, look how well it's working. We're winning a ton of games and everybody will fall in line because of that.

Or would it be harder to do it with a team that's losing because the stakes are low and it's not as significant if you botch something. Yeah, I would guess harder with losing probably. Yeah, I would too. Maybe the players are more concerned about their own performance in that case or it's harder to convince them to do something for the good of the team when the team is not going to win no matter what they do.

Yeah, and it might be, I don't know how baseball organizations are, but I think in a lot of organizations, it might be that you then start to see everything through a negative frame when you're kind of griping about your bosses as everybody does and as we all do. It doesn't actually need to necessarily be rational. If you think that your company sucks or not your company sucks, but that the results aren't as good as they could be, then you find reasons to complain. So maybe I would think it would probably be a little trickier. And later the same day, coincidentally, Vince Gennaro, who's the president of Sabre, gave a presentation about almost exactly the same subject. And he has a business background. He used to be an executive for Pepsi. And he talked about exactly the same thing about trying to get this buy-in and not have this top-down approach. Because if you just say

that this is how this organization does things, and if you're with this organization, you're going to do these things or we'll get rid of you. Then players will, will resent it or sort of band together and maybe they'll grudgingly go along with it, but they'll find little ways to sabotage it or they won't, their hearts won't be in it. And there'll be this us versus them mentality. And so he,

he talked about, you know, the importance of putting it in a framework that players and coaches can understand and, you know, will be willing to listen to and accept. And so that was a big thing. And then Ben Charrington spoke and his main focus was,

he talked about projections and it was kind of interesting because, you know, was he talked about projections. And it was kind of interesting because, you know, we've talked about how the Red Sox exceeded their projections, their own internal projections last year. And this year they have done the opposite. They had projections that, you know, said they thought they'd be a pretty good team. And he mentioned that, you know, a lot of their players are underperforming their projections. And so something he and also Tom Tippett mentioned was how hard it is to just accept that that might be random, that you can't allow yourself to be complacent in that way. Like you and I, there are no real stakes. We can say that someone who's underperforming

will just bounce back to his typical level and maybe he will, and maybe he won't. But if he doesn't, we don't really lose a whole lot. But with a team, you can't afford to do that. And so you have to dive into these players' stats and into other factors and see if there's something that's causing this underperformance. Even if in most cases you conclude that there isn't, you have to kind of do the work to see. And so Charrington was talking about how a lot of the Red Sox hitters have underperformed their projections this year and that one of their focuses has been trying to, you know, more so than improving the projections themselves, trying to

find ways to make players perform up to the upper range of their projections one way or another, whether it's finding ways to keep them healthy and on the field or doing off the field stuff to make them more comfortable. And I guess the catch 22, which someone mentioned is that if you consistently find ways to do this, you can't do it indefinitely because if players outperform their projections one year, then the projections will improve the following year and you can't, you know, you can't keep outperforming those projections. And so then the key is trying to find players with other organizations that are not focusing on whatever these ways of getting them to optimize their

performance is, and then saying that we can transplant them into our organization and apply whatever these methods are and these programs are, and then we can get them to exceed their projections. And of course, he was pretty light on specifics, on details of how they are going about doing this. But that was kind of his point, that the focus should be more on finding ways to optimize players' projections off the field, somehow keeping them healthy, keeping them happy, off the field somehow keeping them healthy, keeping them happy, more so than on improving your projection a tiny bit more than it is already. And this was, you know, Russell Carlton gave a somewhat related presentation. He talked about the things that teams do to teach their top prospects or any young players life skills.

And he sort of surveyed the audience and he asked the audience at what age they had learned to, you know, whatever, write a check or open a bank account or do laundry or change a tire. Some of those things I still don't know how to do. You just learned about Moons over Miami. Right. So his point was that there is an advantage to be gained from teams, you know, not only drafting effectively, but also making sure that once these players are in your system,

you have all of these support systems set up to optimize their performance. And this is something that he's written about at BP and maybe even talked about with us before. And so this was, I think, the takeaway from the conference. Although there was some interesting stats stuff that was presented, I think the bulk of it was this idea that there is a lot of off the field stuff, that there's all this stuff that might not traditionally have been defined as Saber metrics, but that it is important.

And that as all of these teams get smarter and they all study the same stats and look at stats in, in much the same ways that the advantages are going to shift from databases and spreadsheets to these other factors. And it's kind of hard to pin down the specifics of what they do. Russell surveyed a lot of front office people and player development people about programs that they have put in place to teach

players all of these life skills and teach them how to make food for themselves and buy food and purchase healthy food and all of these other things. And it seems like a lot of teams have programs in place to teach those things and do those things. to teach those things and do those things. But that was, I think, the more than any other one thing that was probably the focus of this conference. I just am now starting to think that this guy actually doesn't even know about the Moon over Miami

original reference and is only playing off the Moons over Miami Denny's breakfast, dinner item. That could be. Actually, the Denny's menu says what it is a play on. Denny's doesn't trust its audience enough to get the pun, so the menu explains why it's called that. So even if this person initially saw it at Denny's, he would have seen the explanation there too. I don't know. I'm not sure that I would trust

that he would consult a menu before using it. But in this case, he would have the plural of the first word correct. However, he would then think he was making a very clever pun turning Miami into Miami without realizing that he was simply undoing the original pun. So, okay, so basically the theme of the conference was basically acknowledging that there's, you know, a limit that has somewhat close to, I don't know that it's been reached, but that there's a sort of a stagnation in the amount of data that you can collect or that you can collect that anybody else can't collect. And therefore, it's much more about being the organization that has the best process in place to use that information in a way that acknowledges the reality of the human beings who actually produce wins on

the field. So I guess it's about incorporating the humans into the data and incorporating the data into the humans in a way that doesn't kind of assume that it's going to go smoothly and it doesn't assume that there isn't untapped potential in these players that the numbers on their own by themselves won't necessarily show you. Is that a fair summation? Yeah, I think so. And there was a lot of interesting other stuff. Jeff Sackman from College Splits did some interesting work with college statistics, which are just a real pain to work with, to not only the different levels of competition and different divisions and different teams within those divisions, there's a lot of variability in the talent level of those teams, where you can have,

you know, a Division III team, maybe the best Division III team is capable of holding its own in Division I or something, but the division as a whole is really weak. And not only that, but adjusting the days of the week because the Friday and the Saturday lineups are so much stronger than the weekday lineups. And so even within one team, a weekend starter's stats don't mean the same thing as a weekday starter stats and and so he came up with this clever way to use summer leagues as kind of a control or an additional data set to get a sense of how good these players are independent of whatever college team and division they play in so that was cool and um there was i And there was lots of lots of good stuff. Dan, Dan presented some some framing stuff and talked about Jose Molina a lot. So naturally, I enjoyed that. But but yes, I think if there was any one unofficial theme of the conference, it was it was that.

Did you come away with any story ideas or I guess research ideas that you can do? I hope so. I'm going to be recapping it in maybe more depth even than we've talked about or I'll be putting these thoughts to virtual paper at Grantland tomorrow, Tuesday. But yeah, there were some things that I would like to look into. I took a lot of notes. It felt like being back in school again because we were at BU in a BU auditorium where students would take classes. And I was taking lots of notes.

I also made a Ryan Webb, Matt Albers joke in the Q&A at the end with Dave Cameron. And it got a pretty good laugh. Really? I'd like to think a knowing laugh, not laughing at me but laughing with me. And I met a lot of listeners. A lot of listeners introduced themselves, which was nice. If I met you and talked to you this weekend, thank you for saying hello. You talked about the media?

Yeah, I was on a media panel and then also on a Q&A at the end with Dave. Okay. You didn't have to make a presentation, though? You just answered questions? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okey-doke.

Yes Okay Okie doke Okay so send us some emails For Wednesday at podcastatbaseballperspectives.com I already Plugged the coupon code once In the show but I'll do it again Coupon code BP

Go to baseballreference.com Subscribe to the play index using that coupon code To get the discounted price of $30 On a one year subscription We will be back with a new show tomorrow