Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 6: Doorbell

Episode Date: July 25, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the fallout from the Ryan Dempster debacle and a fascinating factoid about the Phillies’ staff.

Welcome to Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives daily podcast. I am Sam Miller without a prepared intro, and this is Ben Lindberg on the other line, just back from a Wilco concert in Brooklyn. Ben, how are you doing? I may be a little hoarser than usual since I did some singing along. Oh, that sounds fun. I think we're going to need to hear some of that. But yeah, it was a very hipster-like outing. I wore a shirt that has some sort of plaid check pattern, and I was in Brooklyn, and I saw Wilco.

Did you see Dale Murphy? I did not see Dale Murphy, but it was a big crowd, so he could have been out there somewhere. We know he's a big fan. We do. So we have two topics we're going to discuss today. As always, we have not discussed our topics with each other, so why don't you blow my mind and tell me what we're going to be talking about today. I want to talk a little bit about the Dempster debacle and the fallout from that and whether anything will change because of it.

Okay. I will be talking about a single factoid about the Philadelphia Phillies. Okay. Do you want to do your factoid first? No, I want to hear about this Dempster debacle. You are my go-to guy for Dempster news. Okay. Well, yeah, because I wrote a review of the Dempster transaction yesterday that may never actually happen. Has that ever happened before? Have we ever run a transaction analysis for a transaction that did not go anywhere? Yes, we definitely have. I did it last deadline, and now I can't remember what deal, but it has happened. We just try to be quick, and sometimes we're a little too quick, but then once we do the work, we kind of want to show people that we did the work,

so we put it up anyway. I like it. I like having it because, to me, even a deal that doesn't happen is interesting and tells us a little bit about the players involved and the teams involved. So good job, Ben. Thank you. But the deal is not dead unless it died while I was at Wilco. As far as I know, it's just sort of on hold. And the issue seems to be that Dempster didn't really want to go to the Braves or the Braves weren't his first choice. He was hoping to go to the Dodgers, who it seems were more interested in Matt Garza. So Dempster has 10 and 5 rights, which means he can veto the trade. And right now he's just sort of sitting on it. So we don't know whether he's going to kind of pocket veto the trade and just wait till the deadline. He says he may wait right up until the deadline

to make any sort of decision. But it seems to be a combination of maybe not wanting to go to the Braves or that not being his first choice and hoping the Cubs will work something else out if he drags this out long enough. And the fact that he was maybe a little miffed that the deal leaked and went public before he'd even had a chance to accept or reject it. And of course, Frank Wren, the Braves GM, is not pleased that this deal going public has jeopardized it or helped to jeopardize it.

it um so i i wonder i can't think of an example of a previous trade that has been called off because the details got out before it was finalized can can you i mean there must be there must be some other example of something like that happening but i i can't remember a deal possibly dying just because it got out before it was done and because the player seemed to object to that. Yeah, none comes to mind that I can think of. I have absolutely no evidence of this whatsoever, but I always wondered whether the $5 million that Toronto threw Anaheim's way in the Vernon Wells deal was the result of about eight hours of Tony Regan's

being completely destroyed by the internet and sort of slumping back to the Blue Jays and asking if they could throw in a pittance. So I wonder then whether anything will change because of this. I mean, with Twitter and people posting at all hours, whenever any hint of news comes out, people are very quick to post anything they hear. And if it's not confirmed, they will just use some special language like they're hearing or it's not confirmed, but one source says or that sort of thing. And I wonder now whether there will be teams who look at this and maybe might have been more inclined to talk before and will be more cautious in the future.

There are certainly some teams who, even now, just really never leak anything. You never hear what they're doing before they do it. But I wonder whether some of the teams that are more inclined to talk or let some details slip before things are final will see this as sort of a cautionary tale and maybe run a tighter ship in the future. I don't know.

Do you think there's any chance that this will affect the news in the future, the way we get news or how quickly we get news or the news cycle? Or are we just so established in this sort of 24-hour rapid reaction pattern that nothing's going to change? You know, there's absolutely nothing that teams gain from leaking this information to reporters. And really, there's nothing that the world gains from it either. I mean, you get the information 20 minutes later, or you get it 20 minutes earlier. I mean, the only people who really benefit from it are the handful of reporters who have made a career doing this. And I mean, we're entertained by it, but I think that we wouldn't really even notice it. But anyway, getting back to my original point,

which is that teams have never had any benefit that comes their way from this information, except perhaps the bartering of information with reporters who are, you know, theoretically talking to other teams. of information with reporters who are, you know, theoretically talking to other teams. So if they've been leaking for years and getting progressively leakier, despite not having any real incentive to do so, I don't know how much a disincentive is going to shift the balance. They already are making a fairly, it seems to me, irrational decision to talk to reporters about their plans, and especially when the thing hasn't been inked. I mean, I was joking, kind of, I guess, about the Tony Regan's thing,

but I sort of had the same feeling when the Carlos Lee deal with the Dodgers sort of start-stopped. And, you know, I mean, I don't know how many GMs would be swayed by public opinion. But if you have a deal that you are making with the team and the team is sort of monitoring the wins to see whether it's going to be popular among their fan base, that would be really annoying, right? Yeah, I would think so. But I wonder whether there's no incentive. There must be some incentive, right? Yeah, I would think so. But I wonder whether there's no incentive. There must be some incentive, right? I mean, as you say, it seems very illogical for teams to keep doing this and putting their plans in jeopardy for absolutely no payoff. I wonder whether some of it is the person or persons who leak the news misjudging the person they're talking to. I wonder whether any of these leaks, in other words, are the person who leaks it sort of treating something off the record as on the record.

But if they did that, then that would probably be the last time that they ever got anything from that source, certainly. Yeah, I would think that it's not that so much as just there's a lot of people in an organization who have varying levels of access to the information and people like to gossip in any field. I mean, it's hard to keep leaks from happening no matter where you are. And some organizations are really committed to stopping it. And I mean, I covered school districts before I wrote about baseball. And so I was always trying to get information that was unauthorized and off the record. And the difference between one school district and the next was massive. So I imagine it's the same with baseball clubs.

It's just the culture that you set. And the Angels are very good at it. And other teams are very bad at it. And I don't really know what the strategic benefit is to each. But I think that would be an interesting thing to ask or to have Kevin ask one of his guests sometime, perhaps. Yeah. Well, I know. Yeah. Kevin, I mean, Kevin talks to people and people talk to him about things that haven't happened yet. And he's not really in the news-breaking business, so people know that they can tell him things and sort of gauge his reaction and see if he knows anything about anything else going on without worrying that he's going to rush off to Twitter and break that news. off to Twitter and break that news. But I wonder in some cases whether there's any sense that if a team leaks some information to a particular writer, they might get a more positive spin on it or get out ahead of the reactions if they leak it to a particular source who, I don't know whether he would alter his coverage in exchange for that information, but maybe they know just sort of floating it out there to see what the fan reaction is and be able to pull it back if there's some sort of revolt among your fan base.

I don't know how often that happens, but I don't know. I'd have to think that it's in some cases a little more than gossip, although maybe that is the main factor here. Anyway, would you like to tell us your Phillies factoid? Yeah, sure. So since – okay, in 1906, Cy Young had a 5.6 strikeout to walk ratio and he had an ERA plus of 86 now since that happened in 1906 no pitcher has ever had a strikeout to walk ratio of greater than five and an ERA plus worse than the league average but this year Joe Blanton has a strikeout to walk ratio of 6.4, and his ERA plus is 84. And after tonight's start, Cliff Lee has a strikeout to walk ratio just above five. And I'm

guessing, I'm eyeballing a little bit, but his ERA plus, I believe tomorrow will be either 100 or 99. So they have two guys who are in position to do something that hasn't been done in 100 years. And if you look at the rest of their staff, in fact, Roy Halladay has a 4-to-1 ratio and an ERA plus of 92, although he might not get the innings required for my parameters. And Jonathan Papelbon has a strikeout to walk ratio of 5.3. And he has a fairly mediocre ERA plus of 115, which is fairly mediocre for a closer in particular.

And Raul Valdez has a strikeout to walk ratio of 6. And his ERA is 5-2-7, so he has an ERA plus of 77. And even Cole Hamels, who has a very sterling strikeout-to-walk ratio and is having a fine year, is not having an outstanding year. And so it is interesting to me to see Philly's team that is leading the National League in strikeout-to-walk ratio, which I think if you only had the simplest stats at your disposal, you would probably pick those two numbers. I mean, that's not all you would want, but if you had only the simplest stats, you would be pretty happy to have those two numbers.

And yet they are, I believe, 12th or so in ERA and 11th in ERA+. So they're not actually a good pitching staff this year. And, of course, we know what other factors go into those things. Primarily the Phillies have allowed a high batting average on balls in play, and they have allowed an absolute ton of home runs. But it's interesting, and it makes me wonder, I mean, this is as far as I'm taking this thought, it's merely a factoid, but it makes me wonder whether the catcher is actually part of this equation.

Yeah, I just pulled up our defensive efficiency report while you were relating your factoid, and the Phillies are, as you would expect, very close to the bottom of that report. They are 25th out of 30 teams. So that certainly has a lot to do with it, I would think. I wonder, obviously, that doesn't really factor in what the catcher is doing as far as framing and pitch calling

and that sort of thing. That's something that our stats director, Colin Wires, is hard at work at adding into our stats. He's in the process of adding framing into our defensive ratings for catchers in more than a retrospective way, but actually in a way that will update in real time. So that's exciting. But yeah, I particularly wonder though, and I have no evidence for this, and it's just spitballing right now, but I wonder if it might actually be a factor of where the

catcher is giving his target. If the catcher, I mean, there is an equilibrium that you want. You don't really necessarily always want just strikeouts to walk ratios. You want to find the equilibrium where you are striking out batters and not walking batters, but also not simply feeding a steady diet of hittable pitches. And it's conceivable that this could be an example where the catcher is calling for too many pitches in the center of the zone, that he is perhaps too conservative when it comes to calling pitches in pitcher's counts, and so he is not calling enough breaking balls and change-ups when the pitcher is behind in the count. And it could also be a matter of not calling pitches that suit the

defensive shifts that the team is playing. Yeah, of course, if it were just a matter of getting favorable calls, then that would show up in the strikeout to walk ratio, obviously. So it probably would be more than that. That maybe is an interesting article topic, if that's something you want to look into to get that data on location and see whether, I mean, to do it right, I guess you'd really have to watch video and see where the target is, which is something that would probably take many hours of your life. Well, should we re-record this podcast so I don't give any of this away?

should we re-record this podcast so I don't give any of this away? We can just, I think, hope that no one else is, or that everyone else is too lazy to look into this before you do, maybe. You almost said we can hope that no one else is listening, didn't you? Well, I know that's not the case, because we are the number one sports podcast on iTunes, right? Shockingly so, I believe. Yes.

Okay, so that's our show uh and we will be back with with two more interesting facts on what day of the week will that be thursday thursday thursday