Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 523: The Bo and Baez Email Show

Episode Date: August 27, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about bat speed, umpire bias, and error bars and then Play Index about Javier Baez and Bo Jackson.

When there's contact, I can get on track And you never feel me lose my way Good morning and welcome to episode 523 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Howdy.

How are you? Okay. So today's listener email show, you're doing some play indexing as we speak. Is there anything else that you want to discuss? Unless you're planning on making it a topic tomorrow, we should probably just note the Mariners' decision to extend Jack Zrencik for a, quote, multi-year deal. Okay. Because I think we had him pegged for the wobbly chair. Yes.

And, you know, I don't know. It surprised me. It certainly surprised me that he would have stabilized his chair so quickly. Yeah, me too. I mean, I guess it's a lesson to future GMs who are on the wobbly chair that they should sign the best free agent available, and maybe they'll save their jobs. That's it? That's the only lesson well i don't i don't know what other lessons to learn i mean we don't know how wobbly his chair was internally publicly it it seemed to be among the wobbliest and if if that has, I mean, that's turned around very quickly. But publicly, I don't know that the perception had changed so much

that anyone expected him to suddenly get an extension either. So maybe ownership never lost confidence. Let's say they missed the playoffs this year. Right now they're about 50-50 to make the playoffs as a wildcard team, so about 1-4 to play a series. But let's say they miss the playoffs this year. What would you consider their playoff odds starting next season based on just what you know now?

season based on just what you know now? I'll say 30%. And do you consider the Mariners right now to be a well-run team? Not particularly. I mean, it's all relative, obviously, but of 30 teams, you would put them in the bottom half, yes? I think so. And it's not particularly, it's not exactly easy to see what great things happened to Seattle in the last year. Chris Young was a pretty great thing. Yeah.

They got Robinson Cano, which is not an easy thing to do necessarily, although I'm trying to remember where we were mentally at that time. At the time, it was like he blew everybody away, right? I mean, it's not like they wooed him exactly so much as they spent what a lot of people at the time seemed to think was an overpay, right? Am I remembering that correctly? Yeah, I think so. And we didn't necessarily think that.

But I mean, it was the highest offer that was reported by quite a bit, I believe. And anything else that they did? Anything else that has changed about the organization in the last nine months? They traded for Kendry's Morales. That was weird. Yeah. I guess you could say like Paxton and Zanino have emerged to some degree. So you could say that their farm system is paying off,

and that, of course, is part of what the front office did. Oh, they got the Austin Jackson. That was a nice move. I like the Austin Jackson move. Yeah, I liked their deadline moves quite a bit. Right, and so they held on to Franklin when it seemed like they were going to have to sell him for less than he was worth. They played chicken with the rest of the league, and they ended up winning that, I would say.

So that was good. You could put that on your resume. Yeah. Okay. It's on the positive side of the ledger. So I don't know. Yeah, it seems odd. But on the other hand, GMs make like between, I don't know, 800.

Wait, what do you think a GM makes? We've had this conversation, right? We looked it up once. I don't know that we have. I mean, it's not easy to find. Yeah, but we've talked about it. Anyway, they don't make much, so they're easy to fire. So even if he has a multi-year extension, it's like DFAing a reliever in late August is basically the equivalent of firing a GM with multiple years left on his contract.

So I guess maybe it's not even a big deal. Yeah. The multi-year element of it is usually just because nobody wants to feel like a lame duck. And so more than a true commitment it's a symbolic it's a symbolic statement to the gm but you know they could very easily fire him if they if they lost the next uh 41 games um they could fire him very easily right all right so we're back to not really caring that much about this we're suitably not wound up i guess yeah you sound you sound particularly not wound up tonight this is the least wound up i've heard you in some time

yeah you're right you sound like you're adjusting that are you adjusting the levels you seem distracted no okay okay so there were a couple play index research things that were done by people in the facebook group and i i've saluted some play index research that's been done in the last couple weeks and and people have timed their their posts about play index research it seems to coincide with the listener email show day anyway a couple people purchased play index subscriptions using the coupon code bp and they did some interesting stuff with their new found abilities so i will just summarize their findings quickly so andrew kleinman did a play index segment related to tim Lincecum. He was looking for pitchers who had made the most money

while having negative war or something like that. He wasn't able to do exactly what he had set out to do originally, but he did find that Tim Lincecum and Dan Heron appear to be the only two pitchers ever to qualify for the ERA title and produce negative war in three consecutive seasons. That's a good one. Yeah, that is, and I'm surprised because we've talked about position players who've done that.

Well, I guess the ones we've talked about didn't necessarily qualify for the batting title. We were talking about guys like who bet in court and. Yeah. But the, the whole point of, of identifying bet in court is that he had, he had,

and, and looking for a successor was that he had qualified, I think five out of the six years or something like that. So that was why he was, he was chosen because he kept on playing. So that was, that was interesting. I'm sort of surprised that that

hasn't happened before but interesting finding and another bit of play index research by andrew patrick who purchased play index a couple days ago and wanted to see how often somebody has had Tony Sipp's performance in the Oakland-Houston game Tuesday, or on Monday, I guess, where he walked four batters consecutively, unintentionally, without getting an out or giving up a hit. And he was curious how often that has happened, and he found that that is a very rare occurrence,

that it's happened only 19 times, that this is only the second time it's ever happened twice in the same season since 1949 when that happened. Before this year, you have to go all the way back to April 6, 2002, when Miguel Asensio walked four straight White Sox in a 14-0 blowout loss. Although he has the honor of being the only person to do it on exactly 16 pitches. That's a good one. That is a good one. Yeah. Good finding by Andrew.

No, two Andrews. So good findings by them. And please feel free to post your Play Index research in the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You have some Play Index research that we'll get to a little later in the show i can't wait i'm looking forward to this one good me too now so let's start with a question from dave in silver spring maryland who says is there any data available on hitters bat speed it's discussed all the time but is there any hard data on who swings the

fastest and if it correlates to production in any way? If the data doesn't exist, do you think faster bat speed would correlate to better performance? Who do you think swings the fastest? Which part am I answering? All of it? Yeah, any parts of it that you feel like answering. So, well, there's no public bat speed measures that we can access. So, uh, we don't know those things. Some teams measure it. Uh, I've been told. Um, and we, I think we've talked, I think at some

point, maybe around the, the, the one hundreds episodes, I think we talked about, uh, why it would be useful. It would be, uh, it seems like it would be a way of seeing how pitchers handled a certain pitch, for instance. I don't think it would be that significant to know that Giancarlo Stanton's bat speed is 1.2 miles an hour faster than Johnny Peralta's or whatever. than Johnny Peralta's or whatever. Because at this point, at this level, with that much data about their performance, you just sort of would trust that their performance works no matter what their bat speed is. I don't know that it's a strong correlation

between bat speed and success. There's probably some correlation between bat speed and certain skills,'s probably some correlation between bat speed and certain skills, but there are very good hitters who don't exactly have great bat speed, but their bat stays in the zone long. They have a different kind of a plane to their swing, perhaps. And so I think somebody told me that Adrian Gonzalez, for instance, doesn't have a particularly fast bat. I don't know if that's true. Maybe I'm misremembering it. But the point that the person was trying to make is that some hitter who I thought of who was good measured out to have a not very good bat speed.

think that it would be um it would be useful to see how their bat speed changes on certain pitches on pitches in certain parts of the strike zone or certain types of pitches or uh certain sequences of pitches i think it'd be a good way of gauging whether they were beat on the pitch because as it is now um uh if somebody throws a pitch to stanton i know whether he took it or swung at it. And if he swung at it, I know whether he made contact or didn't make contact. And if he made contact, I know where the contact went. And that's it. That's all I really know. And that's three fairly blunt questions that you're answering. You don't actually know whether he was beat and how badly he was beat.

And you might argue that on particularly off-speed pitches and fastball, well, those are the two kinds, right? Off-speed and fastball. You might argue that on all pitches, there would be kind of imperfect swings when he's beat. A good swing would be harder than a bad swing. And if you're seeing that he's consistently taking slower swings on certain types of pitches, it would give you kind of a more specific idea

that that's a pitch he's struggling with. So that's what I would think. Yeah, and there are some methods coming out that could do this. I don't know what methods teams use currently, but at the last couple of baseball seminars and conferences, Sport Vision has presented a method that they're, I think, tentatively calling BioFX or something that would track the path of the bat, and that's one of the things that they they mentioned that it would enable you to do is to see why a guy missed uh why you know was he late to the pitch or was he

timing it correctly but but swinging too high or too low and maybe one of those things would be a better sign than the other and that technology is still being developed. They're still sort of working that out. I don't know whether StatCast will eventually have the ability to measure bat speed. You would think that's a possibility. So this information will be out there, I guess, and it does seem like it would be useful. But, yeah, you could probably... For an interplayer, it would be very guess. And, and it does seem like it would be useful, but, but you, yeah, you could probably, it'd be very useful. Yeah, definitely. There's no doubt about it.

Yeah. I'm sure that you could infer bad speed pretty well just by looking at who hits the ball the hardest, or at least that would be, there'd be some relationship there. Do you think, uh, since, since Dave asks, do you think that anyone swings faster than Javier Baez? I think that Bryce Harper might swing faster than Javier Baez. Well, I wish we could answer that question.

In fact, I will say that I think that Bryce Harper does swing faster than Javier Baez. People are like running to their bookies with this information. Bet it all. On what? I don't know. No idea, but I have pertinent information.

All right. You actually answered this question via email, so let's answer it for all the people. So this question comes from Lee, who was listening to another podcast, and he writes that they attributed the Cardinals' success to the offense, noting that the Cardinals have won 80% of their games this season when they score four runs or more. have won 80% of their games this season when they score four runs or more. Given the present scoring environment, doesn't that corollary apply to most teams, good and bad? Perhaps 80% is a bit high compared to the rest of the league, but I would imagine that the Cards aren't doing anything too special within these parameters. Thoughts?

You looked up the answer to this. The answer is that the league overall is at 75%. So that would mean that, I don't know, the Cardinals have probably won like two more, three more than average. So there's nothing notable about that, particularly if you think that maybe the league average, including the American League and know teams that play in better hitting environments and who might have worse pitching so uh there's nothing remotely

special about this how high would it need to be knowing what i just told you how high would it need to be before you thought there was something if also like i okay even if there was something, I don't even know what that thing would be. Yeah. So you want to score four runs or more. Right. That's also not much help. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know what it tells you. Yeah, so I don't really know what you would do with it anyway. Like, I don't know if that tells you that... Does that tell you that... I mean, so if you knew a team won 100% of their games when they scored four or more, would that tell you that the team's success is due to offense? Pitching was good. To pitching, right.

Like, all you need to do is score, well, as it turns out, mountains of runs, basically, And you'll probably win. It doesn't actually say anything, so I'm not sure that I would draw a lesson from it regardless. I don't know. I never know how I'm supposed to react to those. Right. I just never know.

Mid-game, I sort of get why the broadcast would point it out, because you've just scored the fourth run, and they want to sell you on this being, you know, a bigger deal than it is. They're trying to convince you that news is happening in front of you. And, of course, I have an objection to that, too, but at least I understand. But I don't know what good it would necessarily do to tell somebody in a non-game situation, because I'm not sure what it tells me about the team. If they won 92% or something, I'd go,

oh, wow, that's probably a really good team. Yeah. Well, this is a variant of your least favorite sort of stat, right? We've talked about this before. Okay. Can this just put it in mind, Wes's question, which is totally different, but

you probably wouldn't answer it anyway, so I'm going to just read it. Wes says, imagine a universe in which a team goes unbeaten in the regular season with 162 5-3 victories. Knowing nothing else about their team, what odds would you put on their winning the World Series going into the playoffs?

Would that be enough to make a team an actual favorite, 51%? Yes. Yeah. It would make them almost a 100% favorite. Because if a team won 100% of their games, particularly if they won them by the exact same score, I would conclude that they knew how to do something indefensible and probably illegal, and that it was impossible that it was a fluke, and I would bet on them

to win every other game 5-3 going forward. So I would say that if they went 162-0, no matter what score those 162, I would probably bet on them to win the world series i would say that i would put their odds at about 98.5 or so maybe 99 and the only one percent that i would leave would be the acknowledgement that clearly something goofy is happening and therefore it is a kind of non-honest representation of probability because you don't know what levers are being pulled and what strings are being pulled.

And there's that 1% or 2% chance that whoever is doing this will decide to do the opposite just to do it. Yeah, and I mean, the principle of the question, it seems, is that Wes is trying to get us to come up with a scenario where we would actually favor a team in the playoffs. And, I mean, there is often a favorite. There's usually a favorite. No, no, no, no.

There's not usually a favorite to win the World Series before the playoffs. You'd have to win three series. So this is only... He's not asking if they would be favored in each series. Oh, I see. They would be the most favorite of the teams. He's saying they would actually be favorite against the field. So what would a team need to do, in your mind,

to be favorite against the field going into the postseason? 51% or better. Probably more than any team has ever done. Yeah, I think that's true. But how much more? They'd have to... ever done. Yeah, I think that's true. But how much more? They'd have to, gosh, I mean, they'd have to win 140 games. I don't know. Oh, yeah, I think I'd go at 126.

I think I'd pick them. Yeah, I don't even know if that would do it for me. Maybe. I mean, you know they're going to have home field advantage at least twice. You know they're going to be significantly better than the other teams. I mean significantly better, right? I mean if they won 126 games and only lost 36, like they just destroyed the good teams too, right?

I mean you'd have to –, okay, so the Mariners in 2001, they won 116 games, and so I'm just looking to see what they did against playoff teams that year. Who made the

playoffs that year? Alright, the Yankees, the Indians, and the A's. Okay, so against the a's they went uh wow against the a's they went like jeez they played the a's a lot i can't count this much six seven eight nine they went like ten and nine against the yankees they went jeez they played the yankees a lot too. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You don't have to count manually.

They're versus team splits at baseball reference. So 10-9 versus Oakland, 6-3 versus the Yankees, and 5-2 versus Cleveland. Uh-huh. So I'm not sure what i was supposed to oh yeah so you're adding you know a team that's even significantly better than that even you would think that they would just be beating up on every team i don't know why i brought that that thing i just brought up wasn't that helpful but 126 i mean 126 wins just like i sort of think that maybe once you get to that point, the improvements become even sort of like it's not a,

it becomes like a disproportionate amount of, okay. All right, so let's say you have to go from from 90 wins to 100 wins you have to improve by x units of goodness but to improve by a from 115 to 125 which is also 10 wins i think you'd have to improve by like 3x units of of goodness just because at that point you're losing so many games to to sort of luck and fluctuation and the sort of things that are indefensible i mean the only reason that the 126 win team should ever lose to anybody else is just that like you know baseball's screwy you know sometimes all the hits come with runners in scoring position it's like you can't like you you it's it's easy to get incrementally better than your opponents but at a certain point you just have to get incrementally better than than math and physics and luck and that's really

hard to do so to go from 100 and even from the mariners of 116 to 126 seems to me that you would have to be roughly, what did we say the All-Star team would win? I don't know. I think we had different numbers, but I forget. I think that you though would have to be better than the All-Star team at that point. Anyway. All right. 26 I'm saying, 50% or better. Okay. All right.

Let's do one more before Play Index. This comes from Dan, who says, just been listening to the podcast about Alex Gordon. This is the one where we were talking about Alex Gordon as an MVP candidate and guys whose a large percentage of their win value has come from defensive ratings and whether they can ever be solid MVP candidates. So Dan asks, he's wondering if this could be solved by war being produced with confidence intervals. Alex Gordon could have the higher war, but because his rating comes mostly from the defensive side,

he would have a bigger error bar. What do you think? So I feel like no one objects to the logic of this idea. The only possible objections really are just in its adoption or in its user friendliness, I guess. People like looking at one number and having to write every time you cite a war somewhere, having to cite a range would possibly turn some people off. It obviously, even now, just having multiple versions of war is the go-to critique of the whole idea of the stat for people who

don't like the idea of the set that is fodder for you know that's they take that as evidence that that no one really understands what they're doing because no one can even agree on one war so if we then take uh not only you know three different versions of win value stats, but then each measurement of each player also has uncertainty. And we can't even say what one player was worth according to one system necessarily. Then, of course, it further discredits it in the eyes of those people who are inclined not to credit it anyway. But that's probably not a great reason to do it or not to do it. It's sensible.

It would, I think, convey the fact that there's more uncertainty around a player like Gordon than a player like Trout, for instance. So it would be a bit of a challenge from a display standpoint. But otherwise, it kind of gets the idea across i i actually dislike it for the exact opposite reason um i think that it um it implies it actually implies more certainty but by adding like it it's like going, it's, okay, it's like saying that we not own, sure, we don't know exactly what his war is, but we do know exactly the confidence interval, like, it implies more specificity in a weird way, like, you're just piling on number, a new number on top of a new number on top of a new number,

with the implication being that we're getting closer and closer to truth here. But really the whole point is that there's just doubt, and it's good to not look at any of these as conclusive. They're just guides to sort of think about a player, not necessarily to be conclusive. And so the more specific you make the numbers around it, in a way, the more you're taking away the user's freedom to just sort of doubt them and to just take them as what they are, a non-conclusive estimate at what a player has done on the field. I know that used appropriately that this would not be a problem,

but I just think that the lesson that people would draw from them is that we have such a minute understanding of how all these numbers are related to each other and what the interplay is of them that we can not only give you a number to the tenth that says how much he's worth, but we can not only give you a number to the tenth that says how much he's worth, but we can also give you these other numbers that are even more specific and that are more complicated than people even really understand that tell you even

more, in even more detail, exactly what he's worth. And so that's kind of why I wouldn't like it. I think it's good for them to be kind of vague at this stage. Either way, we're talking about perception problems, right? That's the basis of the objection, not the actual idea? Yeah. Okay. Yes.

Okay, play index? All right. So I did this play index before tonight's Cubs game, and so some of these numbers are going to be pre-numbered, and some of them are going to be slightly post-game numbers, so you'll just have to go with me. So Javier Baez struck out, I think, four times. He struck out at least four times.

I'm not sure what he did after I saw that he had struck out four times. Javier Baez, yeah, he did. He went 0-4 with four strikes. He has now struck out four times in a game, four times in his career. He's only played 21 games. This is amazing. This is interesting. I've found that Javier baez has been a rich source

of fun facts um alex rodriguez for instance has struck out four times in the game four times in his career as has javier baez um so i went looking at what it means that he's struck out four times in a game four times in his career uh this early and so first off uh like i said i did this before the game so three through 20 was already the most in history through 20 games of a player's career um by a lot one other player had had done it twice that's esteban german herman uh no other player had done it even twice in his first 20 games. And it takes to game 50 before anybody catches up to him. At three.

Now, this is at three. This is before he got his fourth. So through 50 games, three players in their careers have done it three times. And those three players are Javier Baez, George Springer, and Danny Santana, who all did it this year.

Strikeout scourge. So Springer is the one who finally passes Baez with his fifth one at about game 75. So through 75 games of his career, George Springer has as many four strikeout games as all but 128 players in history. And that's a lot. He's way ahead of everybody else's pace. However, around 125, somebody else takes the crown from Springer. However, around 125, somebody else takes the crown from Springer. Springer, I don't think Springer's even played 125 games. But around game 125, somebody else passes him.

That person is Bo Jackson. So Bo Jackson struck out his four times in a game for the fifth time in game 125. And from that point on, he was just unstoppable. He was the absolute king of the four-strikeout or more game. He retired with 19. At the time, that was the second most in history. It's currently the fourth most in history, which is incredible because Bo Jackson only played 694 games. He basically played like four and a half full seasons,

and he has more four strikeout games than anybody you know almost anybody in history uh it took ryan howard who is the leader in this category to game 890 to match bo jackson uh and uh through 694 games which is how many bow had only five players in history had even 10. Bowe had 19. Only five had 10. Howard at 15 was the closest. So this got me thinking, because Bowe Jackson, you know, I don't think of him as being, like, the strikeout king. I mean, he struck out a lot, but he didn't play long enough to make any,

like, first of all, he hardly ever played a full season, and he didn't play that long so it's not like he has a bunch of strikeout records but when you look at bo jackson he struck out an insane amount of time and so i started adjusting i did all this by play index by the way i i'm not i'm not giving you the step-by-step of how i did this but all of this came from play index so um i i wanted to adjust for career uh for era. So Ben, who do you think of as the sort of, who's the first name in strikeouts in your mind? Reggie Jackson. Okay. Of the post-88 era, who's the number one name in strikeouts, Ben?

Adam Dunn. All right. So good. So Adam dunn has struck out in 28.5 percent of his bats i believe he's the all-time leader in career strikeouts i believe um maybe only al i'm not sure uh but he has struck out at 10 28.5 is a lot um and so who's another name you think of is right now mark All right, Mark Reynolds. See, compared to Dunn, Mark Reynolds is clearly the king. Dunn, 28.5%. Mark Reynolds, 32% of his at-bats.

31.90%. You might have said Chris Carter, who struck out in 33.8% of his at-bats, which is even more than Mark Reynolds. And one might say Springer, who's at 33%. However, you have to adjust for era, right? So Bo Jackson is at 32%, which is about just slightly, slightly, slightly more than Mark Reynolds. But during Bo Jackson's career, the league as a whole struck out in 15% of their at-bats, in Reynolds' career, 18.6%, in Carter's career, 19.4%, in Springer's career, 20.3%. So K+, K percentage plus,

strikeout rate divided by league average strikeout rate. Adam Dunn, actually, not so bad. He has a K plus of 160. George Springer, not so bad, believe it or not. K percentage, a K plus of 163. Bad springer not so bad believe it or not k percentage a k plus of 163 bad but not so bad mark reynolds 172 chris carter 174 javier baez before before game 21 so through the first 20 games of javier baez career javier baez had struck out in 42% of played appearances. He strikes out enough to be an impressive three true outcomes just on that.

Up to 44.4 now. Yeah. But during Baez's career, 20.3% strikeout rate. So Baez's K-plus is 206. This is impressive. I mean, that's like, what? That's like, that would be Albert Poole's best year of ODS+. Yeah, exactly. So 206. However, Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson actually had a K-plus of 212.

Wow. Yeah, he struck out in 32% of his played appearances. At the time, the league was only striking out in 15.1% of his played appearances, their played appearances. Bo Jackson, for his career, struck out as much as Javier Baez in his first 20 games.

And Javier Baez is like the most extreme thing I've ever seen. Wow, good play index. So there you go. Bo Jackson, man. So does this make you conclude anything about bias? Has it changed your opinion about him one way or another? Oh, you mean this, the play index, or this, like his first first 20 games he's oh yeah he's he's he's awful like i have i have i have like uh

i i would say that my hope for him has dropped to about i don't know 60 of what it was 20 days ago even with the home runs even with the right, the curiosity. If you extended his, his current line over a 650 plate appearance season, he would strike out 289 times and hit, uh, what 40, 49 homers. Um, so he would basically have, uh, or or no, 51 homers. Yeah, so this is the strangest line I think I can recall, probably. Just even, I mean, even over such a tiny sample,

and obviously you don't pay attention to what everyone has been doing in their last 20 games, you pay attention to Baez because it's the beginning of his career and he's one of the most highly touted prospects in baseball. Maybe someone else has had a crazier slash line over 90 plate appearances, but I kind of doubt it. This is really crazy. Let's see what, I'm going to see what Frank Kors... Not because he's Frank Kors or anything,

but I'm just curious what Frank Kors' slash line was through 90 plate appearances. It was 400-407-767. 17 strikeouts with no walks. That's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly, like he has demonstrated that he has perhaps the single best, the single strongest control of perhaps the single most valuable tool that a player can have, right? Like it's conceivable that nobody in baseball can hit home runs like he can hit home runs.

And that's the best place to start from. It's just that I would think that when you're talking about small stretches of games, the stats that have smaller numbers seem to me to be more prone to fluctuation than the stats that have bigger numbers if that makes sense like the difference between like seven strikeouts and seven home runs and five home runs is only two but it would make a huge difference in how we were assessing him whereas the difference between 40 strikeouts and 38 strikeouts is only two and it

changes absolutely nothing and so i feel like the home runs are less likely to keep pace than something like the strikeout rate is likely to keep pace he's also i mean he's 21 this is more or less what we were told to expect the call-up that craig goldstein wrote about javier baez is looks... I think he wrote it. No, he didn't write it. What did he write? Who wrote this one? Hang on.

It looks very prophetic is all I'm saying because it basically predicted all of this. Yeah, his plate discipline stats are also pretty fun. Mauricio Rubio and Jordan Gorosh. Kind of a crazy chase rate Stats are also pretty fun. Mauricio Rubio and Jordan Gorosh. Kind of a crazy chase rate and a really, really low contact rate when he does chase. And kind of not even all that much below average contact rate when he swings at strikes. And not even really overall that much higher a swing rate than the league average. But the chasing and the missing while chasing is problematic.

But it's kind of fun for now. Adam Dunn, by the way, is third in strikeouts on the all-time leaderboard. And because we talked about that once right we were both surprised that reggie jackson was still on top even oh yeah despite playing in a lower strikeout era uh by the way uh baez actually started off with uh he started out three times in six plate appearances in his first game and then he didn't strike out in either of the next two games. So he is currently on a 37 of 72. No, sorry, 37 of 76 stretch. So that's like the best two months of Craig Kimbrell's career, more or less. Fun.

All right. Well, good play indexing And again the coupon code is BP You should use it if you want to subscribe to the play index And gain the ability to look up interesting stats like this Did you see my other tweet tonight Ben? I did not Javier Baez tonight tied Tony Gwynn's career high

For his try guts with 40 That's good too You're getting a lot of material out of this Tony Gwynn's career high from first try guts with 40. That's good, too. You're getting a lot of material out of this. I'm happy for you. He's having a good month for me. All right. Let's see. Okay.

Well, there was another listener email related question that you were planning to answer via Playindex, I believe. Would you like to do that now? It comes from Ian from San Diego, who says that Eric Ibar's platoon splits are 276-318-383 and 275-311-388. Using the arbitrary benchmark of 4,000 plate appearances because Eric Ibar has just over that. Is anyone else remotely that close to even? I know you're not my math monkeys, but I always hear about extreme platoon splits and rarely hear about the opposite. Any insight would be great. So I just looked at switch hitters. We talked about reverse splits not long long ago and the couple of like uh each row and kelly johnson were i think the only two players of like the last you know long time who have reverse splits from the left side and there's theirs are extremely close but i just looked at um switch hitters to see if if

there was anybody who was closer and there's it's possible that there are there's nobody who is closer and it's it's possible that there are there's nobody who is quite so similar like in all three slash stats um you know because the average is the same the on-base percentage is the same and the same percentage is the same but if you just look at uh ops um john shelby had the exact same ops from both sides of the plate. And it looks like Ibarz is extremely close, but it looks like there are like three guys who are closer overall, older guys, and one of them is active, and that's Jose Reyes. And Jose Reyes' line is pretty darn similar from either side of the plate. So it is 290, 339, 439, 295, 350, 430.

And the OPSs are only two points apart. So there are people who are that close. I don't know. Switch hitters? Yeah. It's weird that they would be exactly the same as they are with Ibar. But it's not for sort of obvious reasons. It's not that rare.

Or it's not as rare. Shelby incidentally had 15 extra points of OBP on one side and 15 extra points of slugging on the other side. So you could actually argue that he shows more variation than Ibar did. So Ibar is close to the best, but other people are close to the best, too. All right. from Miles who links us to a 538 article, which so far as I can tell,

just sort of duplicates research that's been done a few times before, many times before about the, the changing size of the strike zone based on the count, how the strike zone expands when, when the batter is behind in the count or ahead in the count and vice versa when behind. And he wants to know what we think about this. Are we happy that this is a thing? He says, do we hate this?

It extends games by extending plate appearances. But I think there is some charm to the fact that the umpire is helping out the party that is struggling. The pitcher who can't get one over the plate or the hitter who can't diagnose a ball from a strike. This seems a ripe area to shorten games, but I'm not sure I'm ready to embrace the cold specter of robot umpires. The weird thing is that the general idea that people have about umpires, they do the opposite. They reward the pitcher who is in control.

They do the opposite. They reward the pitcher who is in control. And, you know, I mean, that's kind of what the basis of even of what framing is, right? Although maybe you could say that's just a visual thing. But, you know, they always talk about how, you know, a pitcher who hasn't been around the strike zone isn't going to get calls. The umpire's not going to bail him out. And yet it's the exact opposite. I hate it.

I completely hate it. If anything, I wouldpire's not going to bail him out. And yet it's the exact opposite. I hate it. I completely hate it. If anything, I would like to see the opposite. So the positive spin on it, I suppose, is that it makes the outcome less certain, I suppose, at that point in the plate appearance. Once it gets to 0-2 or 3-0 or something, there's a greater chance that this is not going to just end in the very predictable result, that it's not going to end in a walk, that it's not going to end in a strikeout. It gives the party that is at a disadvantage a helping hand and helps equalize things. So you could say that that's good, that at any given time, the outcome of the plate appearance maybe is less predictable than it would be otherwise. And so maybe that's a good thing.

That's true. Yeah, maybe it is. So there's that. You've swayed me. Although, I mean, once you get to 3-0 or 0-2, you are in a pretty deep hole even so. But it's not a totally automatic out, which it would be a little closer to being if there were no variance in the size of the strike zone. I mean, it sort of, you know, it kind of rubs you the wrong way just based on your sense of fairness. And there's no reason why a player should be penalized

for getting ahead in the count. As you said, the guy who's struggling maybe should be punished for that. And it asks a lot of players to adjust their expectations and their understanding of the strike zone from pitch to pitch, which of course they all do because they're conditioned to do that and they know this is a thing. But it's still added difficulty for them to have to factor in the count as they try to make these incredibly difficult decisions

about whether to swing at a pitch or not. They have to consider whether it's a count in which the umpire is going to screw them over potentially. So it's not fair, but maybe it makes baseball a little bit more compelling. That's my best argument in favor of it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. makes baseball a little bit more compelling. That's my best argument in favor of it. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. You think about it and... You came out swinging against this. No, no. You just completely convinced me. Wow. I'm on your side and it's not even your side. I wonder, so if you're Cliff Lee and you have, say, I don't know, 175 0-2 counts in the season versus, you know, Jorge De La Rosa and you have like 80.

That's almost enough of a disadvantage that Lee has on almost enough pitches that you could actually maybe see it affect his war. Yeah, you've written about count-specific stuff before with pitchers, right? Max Scherzer and how he's in certain counts more often than the typical pitcher or whatever your conclusion was. That was interesting. It seemed like a promising area for further research. You're not my editor anymore, Ben, so enough of this passive-aggressive. I expect the article on my desk by Friday.

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