Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 612: What Life After Rules Changes Would Look Like

Episode Date: February 11, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to Russell Carleton about the possible fallout from rules changes intended to shorten games and increase offense, then Play Index replacement players and answer emails about breakouts and pitch clocks.

Good morning and welcome to episode 612 of the What would happen to this world? Well, I wonder what would happen to this world? prospectus hello hello how are you okay good and today we're taking a brief pause from our team preview podcast series which will be back tomorrow to do technically an email show we will answer more than one email but we also have a guest he is very familiar to most of you russell carlton writer for baseball prospectus hello russell. Wow, your greetings get more eccentric every time we have you on. I gotta have some calling card. Well, you wrote an article for just a bit outside the Fox Sports site that, as Sam points out, is a very effectively wild email-esque article. So we're going to talk about that and then we'll do a Play Index segment,

and then we'll answer an actual email so that this is technically an email show. And then we will be out of your ears. So this article is called What If We Change the Rules? And as you point out, there have been countless articles written about changing the rules recently, but most of them are just proposing that we do something because it's different from what we are doing currently. And therefore, presumably it will correct something that we want to correct, but no one actually does a study to see whether that's true, whether it actually will fix the problem or what unintended consequences

it might have. So you picked out a few things that people have proposed and you tried to do some gory math and figure out how big a problem they are and whether these proposals would actually fix those problems. So let's start with the first one. And this has been, what was this, a Ken Rosenthal proposal or recently at least? Tom Berducci, actually. Tom Berducci proposal. Okay, so proposal one, relievers must face three batters upon entering the game rather than one. So first, tell us what the prevalence of the one batter relief appearance is.

Yeah, it's actually, it happens a little bit more than you think. I did one or two batters because that would be below that, but it averages out to about one a game. But that's a little deceiving because they're actually clustered in certain types of games because by the time it's 8-3 or 12-4 or something like that, the manager doesn't bother bringing in a guy for one out. He throws the long guy out there for as long as he can suck it up. And then when you get to eighth or ninth inning, you see who has to

pitch. Um, so you, it goes to one, one per game. Um, and a lot of them take place, uh, in, in, in the middle of an inning. Um, I think I said like 85% of them take place in the middle of an inning and that's annoying because, you know, you got to do, okay, guy comes in from the bullpen, jogs in, takes his warmup pitches. You know, they play a song, everybody in this crowd goes, and then they start, uh, they start actually playing again and then he leaves and somebody else has to come and do the same thing. Um, so, you know, it's the sort of thing where it can, there are certain games where it can really lengthen it out. The thing is that those are the games usually that at those times, the games, you know,

within three runs and a lot of times it's within one run. So those are the games that are kind of really exciting. And, you know, that's just kind of draws it out a little bit and leaves us shivering with anticipation. I'm surprised neither one of you. I thought we lost you for a second. Somebody out there went, say it. That's so good though.

So you could say that maybe it's, I mean, I guess it depends on your perception. Maybe it's more annoying in that case because you're so eager to see what happens. Or these are the games that everyone is tuning in to see what happens. And then it's like, oh, you've got to pause and watch. So can we talk about that for a minute? Because I brought this up, too, in the piece that I wrote for Fox Sports a week ago where I was looking at why baseball is boring. And one of the things that I thought set it apart from other sports is that its commercials all come at the most boring part.

It's like the one moment where all the suspense has been dissolved is when they say, and now we're going to go away for three minutes. Go find something else to do. And it's like there is nothing keeping you there at that point. And I wondered whether in the long run that is like a huge knock on baseball

or whether it's more annoying when somebody comes in right when you're at your moment of most excitement and says, and we'll be right back to find out what's in the briefcase number 13 or whatever. So do you guys think that it's better to have them as cliffhangers?

Or do you think it's better to have them as just sort of boring, boring, boring, boring installments? Well, putting on my baseball junkie hat, I know that when they go to commercial like that or if I'm at the stadium, I'm sitting there nibbling on my fingers for two minutes watching a guy do warm-up pitches, which is probably a little disordered. But there are addictions that we choose. But I could see – and this just kind of gets into the casual fan versus the hardcore fan. And you could see somebody who just is kind of casually tuning into the game kind of going, oh, this is just taking too long. I don't care. I'm turning this off.

And there's not that steady flow of information to think about. And, you know, I mean, I love it. But, you know, maybe I'm just weird. I don't know. The cliffhanger seems to be a pretty proven form. It's been with us for a while. Yeah. I agree. I said in my piece that if they didn't have the cliffhanger in other sports, a screenwriter would have had to invent it for them.

Nobody invented it for baseball, I guess, until Tony La Russa and Rick Honeycutt got together. And I guess that is the baseball version. So, Russell, as you wrote, this might be more complicated to eradicate than just proposing that we do it. There would be some complications. Yeah. If you say that the guy's got to be in there for three batters, well, you're going to have to have some sort of allowance for, well, what if he gets hurt? Then you can't force him to throw more pitches. I mean that would be just mean.

But then I could see somebody in the back room kind of going, hmm, you know what? I'm going to send you out there for those two lefties. But when the righty comes up, grab your leg and go, oh, my leg! Oh, my leg! Oh, no! And fake an injury and then we'll, we'll go out there and we'll, you know, as mercifully get you out of there and, uh, we'll pull it, we'll bring in the lefty that we were going to bring in the, in the old days anyway. Um, so, you know, there's,

uh, uh, there, there's that, uh, that possible complication. And the other one that I thought of was, well, you'd also have to have something for, you know, what if the guy gets, gets ejected? You know, you can't, you can't keep going without a pitcher. And so somebody is going to have to go out there. Well, then you could run into – I could see somebody kind of going, hmm, you know what? I think now is a really good time to question the umpire's parentage. Ah, I know what I'll do. I'm going to go and I'm going to yell at him and question the balls and strikes and use all kinds of suspect adjectives, shall we say.

And and and we'll see if I can get thrown out of the game. And that way they can bring in the real relief pitcher that they want in. Or, you know, you could just get a lot more intentional walks, which, you know, everybody loves a good intentional walk. So, you know, you could there's there there will be workarounds and some of them are more likely than others, but, um, you're probably just kind of looking at, uh, a few more intentional walks would be the, uh, um, the actual counter move. And I, this brings up an interesting point because all of these are phrased as potential solutions for a decline in offense, which is apparently the reason baseball is boring.

Although, in my estimation, as people who read me a week ago might know, it is not. But regardless... Plug away, Sam. Plug away. Anyway, but all of these things, like, for instance, requiring pitchers to face three batters or stay in for a full inning, which is the next section that Ben was going to do, although I don't think he will now because you actually skipped ahead and covered that part too. Those are both things that would increase offense,

but increasing offense also makes games longer. So if the pitcher is giving up more hits and working around batters cautiously because he's being forced to face a right-handed batter or issuing an intentional walk which is the most boring time-consuming part of baseball those would be things that would add time as well i mean i'm sure there there would probably be a net gain of a minute or two or three whatever but uh all the same it's not um it's not quite like you're just chopping those minutes off. You're adding a few back. Yeah, you probably are. I mean, there's, but, you know, from baseball's

perspective, you know, I could see that they're sitting there thinking, well, you know, we've somehow gotten the best or the worst of both worlds. We have longer games and a decline in offense. You know, how did, excuse me, how did that happen decline in offense you know how did excuse me how did that happen and you know I think that what they want is something that even if it's a three-hour game or a 305 game or 310 or something like that you know if it's action-packed and everybody loves you know is on the edge of their seats for those three hours well then you've got a good product and then people are a little more forgiving you know know, you go back to the late 90s when, you know, it was silly ball time. You had actually games that were clocking in, you know,

15 minutes, 20 minutes shorter on average than they were now. And of course, runs were all over the place and it was, you know, teams were scoring, you know, roughly a run more per game than they are now. So, you know, it's strange because we kind of have proof of going, well, how can we get some of that magic back? And I think a lot of these proposals are an attempt to try and get that back. Even as late as 2009, we've actually added about 15 minutes worth of game time on average since then. This is kind of a recent problem that seems to have popped up. I haven't researched this. I'm just talking now in reaction to what you just said. But since 2009 kind of coincides with when the ball quit flying all over the place

and going out of the park. And although I guess there's still a lot of home runs, but offense is down, right? And you could sort of maybe imagine that in a world where, you know, Babbitt went up 15 points and home runs went out, say, 5% more often, there'd be more incentive to swing earlier in counts instead of trying to draw walks and work to count. And so you could see how there is not necessarily an inverse relationship between offense and time, right?

If the incentives are that batters would swing earlier in counts, that might lead to more offense but also lead to shorter games. Could be. Perfectly reasonable theory in that. Boy, let me get my calculator out. Hang on a second here. This is supposed to be the night that you're not writing an article. That's true. Hang up on us and go write an article right now. Okay. Proposal one, we covered relievers must

face three batters upon entering the game. Kind of conflated that with proposal two, which is limiting the number or eliminating the number of mid-inning pitching changes. Proposal three is the pitch clock. So what research did you do related to the pitch clock? Well, I didn't, I did a little bit of research and I found the, and this is where the time of game stuff comes in. And I, um, there's in pitch FX, you can get the, you can get a timestamp for each pitch and it's easy to just kind of go, okay, it took, you know, 22 seconds between those pitches. But the problem is we only have pitch FX back to 2007, 2008. And so I said, okay, well, we have at least pitch counts back to 1988.

And I only use 93 as my baseline. And we have just length of game. So I said, okay, this is a little crude, but I'll, at least shows the historical trend line. And I found that, you know, in, for a number of years, it was kind of 38, 37 seconds per pitch. And then around 2001, it dipped into the mid 00s down to about 36 seconds per pitch. And then again, in the last five years, it's gone all the way up to almost 40 seconds per pitch over the course of just those five years. So you kind of sit there and wonder, well, what happened? And I think that it's weird because 2009 wasn't all that long ago. And a lot know, a lot of the pitchers that are still in there,

were there in the game are still there. You know, that's not a completely new set of people. But I think the pitch clock is, you know, an attempt to try and get it at least back down to that, even that sweet 2009 level. So that was the research that I did on that. Um, you have, you know, if you set the clock at about 20 seconds, there's really only about 16 pitchers that actually, um, have an average, uh, time between pitches. That's, uh, that's less than

that right now. So it's just basically everybody's going to have to speed up and, you know, everybody's going to have to speed up. And, you know, there's guys who are, you know, 30-second guys as well. So, I mean, there's that. And, you know, other than just kind of ipso facto that guys are just going to have to throw faster, that would probably shorten the game. The question is, you know, what are the counter moves? What are the unintended consequences that go with that? Do we know when the pitch clock starts exactly when they start the clock? You know, I don't know. I know they did it out in the Arizona fall league and they're actually going to do it at double and triple a this year. And I don't know when exactly, um,

you know, kind of when that, that clock starts, is it when it, you know, the ball, I think it's when the ball hits the pitcher's glove, but it's, um, it, yeah, I don't, right. In the, in the, the rule book, the rule that has been on the books, it's kind of complicated. When I wrote about it last year and I looked at average time between pitches and everyone had these long time between it because it didn't start until the batter is in the box and is ready to receive the pitch. Something like that is what the language in the rulebook says, which if you actually observe that strict formulation of the law, then most pitchers are not taking 20 seconds beyond that point. beyond that point. Yeah, and I think some of the other thing that they did in the Arizona Fall League was in addition to yelling to the pitchers, hey, let's get going, it was telling the batters, hey, stop, you know, stepping out, adjusting your batting glove, your helmet, you know,

everything else that's going on. Keep one foot in the box and let's just, let's keep moving. And, you know, I know that pitchers got a ball called on them if they went over the pitch clock, but I wonder if there would be a complimentary called strike that would go along with that to kind of balance it out. Russell, if there was just every 45 seconds a random ball or strike was called and you don't know if it's a ball or a strike, how would that affect baseball? Oh, this is an email show, isn't it? Just, you know, somebody pulled a number out of a hat or something like that, and, you know, you can throw the pitch,

or you can take what's behind door number two. It would make for some interesting ratings. It's the Monty Hall problem. It's like you can choose the ball that you have or you can go for open the door and see if there's a strike there. Or you can take the physical challenge. The aggro crag. Oh, boy. Like half the people listening to that went, what?

Look it up folks um yeah i don't i don't know that'd be that'd be kind of fun um i don't know what to tell you sam there's no answer i could make something up i think i'll just go write a poem about Adrian Beltre. All right. So final proposal, the DH in the National League. Oh, no, no, don't say that. Don't say that. Don't say that. Shh, shh. Everybody will yell at you.

I said it. I'm just quoting you. Yeah, the DH in the National League. Yeah. Yeah, for that one, I looked and said, well, I think everybody kind of assumes that, you know, American League games have, you know, some fraction of a run more per game than than do National League games. So if you wanted to to to put the DH in the NL, well, then, you know, the NL would just kind of boost itself up to join the American League and overall offense would go up and the numbers would look a little bit better. But, you know, the thing there is that you have to realize that the guys who would then become, you know, the Cardinals DH or the Giants DH or the Dodgers DH would be guys who are already in the league right now because they would be the, you

know, kind of Evan Gattdis got a lot of play for this one. You know, he was kind of a, we know he can hit, but he's kind of sort of without a position and, and then Houston got him and, you know, are they going to DH him? Are they going to try him in left field? But, you know, that's the kind of guy where he, he's probably being hidden in the field right now at first base or left field. And so really what you're going to get is that the new people who are going to come in are the fourth outfielders that are, um, that are then, you know, put into left field because the left fielder is now the DH, um, you know, the utility infielder, because the third baseman is now going to be DH-ing or, you know, you can have some sort of platoon or, um, and, and so you're, you're really replacing,

instead of replacing pitchers with, you know, these big monster hitting DHs, what you're really doing is you're, you're putting more utility infielders into the game on a, on a consistent basis. You probably over time, you know, you could have, now that you would have 30 DH spots, you would see teams more willing to take a flyer on, you know, the guy with the big bat and no glove. Because, you know, even if they can't develop them or they don't have a spot for them, there's 29 other teams instead of 14 other teams that that could use him. So you might see more bat first guys come into the league. And, you know, over time time you would get more offense that way. Um, you know, some of these, uh, some of these knock-on effects are hard to predict, but, you know, I tried to figure out, you know, what would be the, the, the logical conclusion

five years out and what, what would the, you know, what would be the pressures on the game to adapt to? So, um, so I think that, you know, in the short term, yeah, you'd see some, some bump up, but it wouldn't be instant and it wouldn't be as much as people thought. And it might take a few years to fully resolve itself, uh, um, to get back up to where people are hoping it would put it. I wonder if you'd also see more defense first, defense first, first baseman. You probably would. Yeah. I mean, because a lot of those guys are being hit at first base right now. Yeah. And I also wonder whether, I don't know if this came up in your research into the one-out relievers, but it seems like you would see more mid-inning switches in the American

League because in the National League they're trying to get to the pitcher spot before they replace a pitcher, you know? And so it would seem like you would have more, I guess you would call them quick pitcher changes because you don't see the effect of them. You don't have to stop an inning to bring a pitcher in. And so if you had a DH, you might see more mid-inning pitching changes, which might make games longer. Oh, boy. You don't want that.

You are now a baseball ninja, Sam. Anything I do makes games longer. That's my spiritual gift. I make baseball longer. Well, for those of us who like spending four hours at the ballpark, we salute you. But, you know, I mean, I'm not everybody. So. All right. Well, I will link to this article in the Facebook group and in the blog post at BP if you want to go read it or look at the graphs. There are three graphs. Graphs are pretty.

OK, so Russell's going to stick around for a Play Index segment. Let's hear it. So Russell's going to stick around for a Play Index segment. Let's hear it. All right. So this Play Index segment was inspired by Mikey Pulley, who mentioned something in the Facebook group that somehow came to my attention. I won't say how. Mikey Pulley wrote something fun I discovered while working on the Rockies preview for B... Banish to the Pen.

Banish to the Pen. Banish to the Pen. DJ LeMayhew has accumulated exactly 0.0 offensive war, by baseball references measure, over nearly 1,300 played appearances in his career, which seemed interesting and created a conversation. So then I wondered, is this unusual? Is there a better example of replacement level? And of course, Russell and Ben and I all know that Willie Bloomquist is the definition of replacement level.

We will not top Willie Bloomquist, although Willie Bloomquist does not actually appear in this Play Index segment. But I wondered whether there was somebody else who could stand in for a replacement level. That was question number one. Question number two is, isj lume who notable so i did a play index search starting with the first five years of a player's career to see um who was at zero war through five years of their career and then so on and i uh because of rounding uh and because of the way play index works uh anything from negative 0.1 to 0.1 is going to count as zero for our purposes you all will agree that there is no difference between negative

0.1 0.1 and zero we're going to count all of them as zero so five years five years into your career players who were at zero include such notable baseball stars as Aramis Ramirez and Brandon Phillips and Willie Mopena, who's not really a star, but it's also a name and Andy LaRoche and Eliezer Alfonso and a whole bunch of other guys. Lots of guys through year five. The captain of this team is a fellow named Johnny Rucker,

who through five years had 2,500 plate appearances, double what DJ LeMayhood had and was at exactly replacement level. Through six years, we have Jose Bautista at exactly replacement level. Wow. We have Andy LaRoche again. We have Eliezer Alfonso again. Jesus Alou. And the champion is Alex Gonzalez. One of them. Don't know which one. Which one? Not sure.

This might be a cumulative thing. 2,400 plate appearances. And you've already noticed that I dropped from 2,500 to 2,400. This is an interesting thing because it's not a straight line upward for how many plate appearances you have. It's a hard number to land on. So Alex Gonzalez has actually fewer than Johnny Rucker had through five. All right, through seven years, the champion is Johnny Berardino at 2,800 plate appearances.

We have A.J. Hinch again. We have Andy LaRoche again, actually. Three years, he managed to stay at exactly the replacement level. Eight years, Max Venable is on here. Henry Blanco is on here. But our champion is Alfredo Griffin, 3,001. I'm going to call Alfredo Griffin our leader in the clubhouse for most replacement level player.

He will not stay the leader in the clubhouse. Through nine years, we have Damon Berryhill at replacement level, Paul Bacco at replacement level. years. We have Damon Berryhill at replacement level, Paul Bocco at replacement level, but crushing, crushing Alfredo Griffin at 4,514 plate appearances. Nafee Perez, he made it nine years into his career, almost 5,000 plate appearances, and still replacement level. Leader in the clubhouse, and I think at the end of this uh he is one of the names that we will agree has a claim on the throne 10 years darnell coles everybody remembers darnell coles ramon martinez the non-pitching one and desi reliford at 3300 plate appearances is the champ 11 years wes helms henry blanco again we said said him earlier. He's back. He left.

He came back. And the champion is Jerry Royster at 3,564 plate appearances. 12 years. Oddly enough, nobody. You have to go all the way down to a pitcher. There is no position player who made it exactly 12 years into his career at replacement level. If you go all the way down to Allie Reynolds at 900 plate appearances, he's the champ. 13 years,

Gerald Perry found replacement level at 3,500 plate appearances. 14 years, a fellow named Zach Taylor, who was a 1920s catcher. And I'm going to send his baseball reference page to both of you, and I think you will agree

he has the most replacement level face okay this is great radio here yeah yeah all right 15 years 15 years back with zach zach taylor again set got seven plate appearances in his 15th season, stayed at replacement level, 3,040. 16 years, it's Henry Blanco. He did it again. He found replacement level. 16 years, 3,087 plate appearances, Henry Blanco. And 17 years, Raphael Belliard with 2,500 plate appearances is at exactly replacement level.

So nobody with 18 years or more managed to be replacement level. There are four names here that I think we can call contenders to this throne. Raphael Belliard is the last player standing. He's the only one who made it 17 years or more at exactly replacement level. Henry Blanco is the most frequent person, and he made it 16 years and more plate appearances than Belliard before he was kicked out of the sport.'s got a chance to be at gerald perry at 13 years 3527 plate appearances is the most plate appearances in a career he retired after year 13 and so if you simply look

for career totals at replacement level he has the most playing time for a replacement level player. And Nafee Perez maxed out at 4,514. He is the only person to clear 4,000 plate appearances in his career at some point and still be replacement level on the dot. Who are we going with here? We got Nafee, Gerald Perry, Henry Blanco, Raphael Beliard. Who you guys got? I like Nafee. And Nafinds me of an article that King Kaufman Wrote in 2010 For Salon he called him Nafee Perez bad baseball hall of Famer and I will just quote

From the end of that piece most of those Who remember Nafee Perez at all will remember Him as the first major leaguer to be hit With an 80 game punishment for drugs Little did he know that Nafee Perez Would come up in an entirely different context on this podcast. For me,

his legacy will be his lousiness, the infuriating sight of his name on the home team's lineup card day after day, the greatness required to induce so much rage in so many fans of so many teams. I'll never forget Nafee Perez. He was the greatest lousy player I've ever seen. Russell,

who you got? Well, I think I'm going to go with the lesson that's embedded in there. You see how many catchers you mentioned there? A lot of catchers. Boys and girls, if you want to have a long major league career, put on a chest protector right now.

The problem is that probably if we looked at those same catchers who were terrible at offense and we looked at their numbers in the new CSAA stats that came out of PP last week, they are probably all great framers and now they're not replacement level anymore. I can't wait to get Zach Taylor's framing data. Yeah, they're all catchers. And I would actually, I think that simply being a catcher, like simply eating innings as a pitcher, is its own skill that doesn't get,

that isn't fully wrapped in to these players. Like I think GMs would generally say that an inning eaten or a game caught is more valuable than war gives credit to. And so I'm going to personally exclude all catchers. I don't think catchers should be in this. I don't think that Nafee counts because there is no way Nafee Perez was replacement level.

He was way worse. So I'm going with Raphael Belliard. To me, Belliard's the champ. Okay. By the way, we established how to deal with the alex gonzalez's in i believe episode 500 right one of them has accent marks and the other has no accent marks the one who played in 2014 the younger alex gonzalez is from venezuela so he has accent marks the older alex gonzalez who hasn't played for a few years now or since 2006,

no accent marks, born in Miami. So that's the key to distinguishing between Alex Gonzalez's. I just remember in 2003 when I was in Chicago and I was watching the, the 03 NLCS and it was the Cubs and the Marlins. And it was awful because the Cubs and the Marlins both employed Alex Gonzalez at shortstop. And so I, for the life of me, the life of me, I'd be listening to the game, and, oh, Alex Gonzalez is up. Well, who's batting?

Do you guys mind? I know this is super repetitive. I mentioned this in episode 500. I think it was one of my three things I loved about baseball, but I love it so much I'm going to say it again. One of the three things that I said I love about baseball is that Alex Gonzalez is a baseball reference comp for Alex Gonzalez but the other Alex Gonzalez is not a comp for the other one that's a good thing

all right well just so that this technically will be an email show I have a couple quick ones so this one kind of has a psychological aspect. Maybe Russell can answer it. It's from Patrick Dubuque, who wrote some really good player comments in the VP Annual this year. He said, today a certain Sam Miller gave a series of hot takes on Twitter regarding pedestrian safety and petty crime. I cannot disagree with these assertions. What were your assertions? That having a light or having a countdown? No, no, no, no. That if you are a sober adult with even a minimum amount of patience, jaywalking is almost always safer than crossing at

a crosswalk or intersection. Okay. So Patrick says he can't disagree with this. However, it made him curious. Is there a possibility that a pitch clock would create a similar twinge of anxiety in the pitcher and would this lead to an increase in mistake pitches if so what would you estimate would be the effect on offense league wide would it be perceptible you know actually funny enough this is something that kind of got left on the cutting room floor from my piece for for jabbo so it's uh director's it's topical yeah um i was going to write about it and then i just kind of ran out of time. But there's actually a principle in psychology called loss aversion, which many people are going to be familiar with. And the idea is that if you go past the 22nd clock or whatever it is, that you get a ball called against you. And you don't want to incur that punishment. So even

though, you know, you might not be ready and even though it might be, you know, foolish to throw the ball when you're, when you're just not quite set for that. And, you know, you run the risk of, you know, leaving a hanging slider right in the middle of the plate that somebody is going to deposit in the left field seats, which compared to a ball, you know, suddenly the ball doesn't look so bad. But that kind of countdown aspect does really crazy things to people. You know, you think about it, the best thing that the best comp I can come up with is you ever have a coupon for something or, you know, a free something or other that had an expiration

date on it and you didn't actually want the thing, but you're like, yeah, but if I don't use this, I won't be able to use it ever. So suddenly you find yourself getting a smoothie that you didn't want because you had a coupon and you're sitting there and three sips sips and you're like why am i drinking this i don't want this smoothie i never wanted the smoothie but i saved two dollars so so i want to know how often do you think a pitcher on o2 would just decide ask screw it and and take the ball and do as gamesmanship or something, really take their time, freeze the batter, stare in there, be intimidating, and do all that? Would it happen more than once in a year? Would it happen more than 100 times in a year?

I think you'd probably get, especially on 0-2, because the pitcher has some, I mean, half the time he's going to throw a ball away to try and get the guy to chase and try and make a perfect pitch because he has one to waste. And you can do stuff like that on 0-2. I think you would actually get – I don't know what would happen on every 0-2 count, but you would get some cases where a guy said, you know what? I just needed to take that extra moment to make my pitch and I knew I was spotting a ball, but who cares? Now it's 1-2. to take that extra moment to make my pitch. And I knew I was spotting a ball, but who cares now it's one, two. And, uh, I think that there would be a certain amount of, um, there would be a certain amount of gamesmanship that goes into that. And, um, you know, maybe, maybe guys are

trying to do the, I'm going to freeze you or anything like that. I don't think that it actually worked, but, um, I'm sure there are people, people who thought, who would think it would work. So I could actually see that being a thing. Do you guys know what this would mean for batters stepping out, calling time? I think that they're trying to clamp down on that too. But if a pitcher, let's say the clock is is going down is the batter allowed to step out and then let's say the pitcher took the ball and just decided that he was going to just stand there staring at the guy for 40 seconds and take two clocks with the time is the batter allowed to step out boy i don't know all right and further... Since we've answered that question.

Furthermore, just curious, Russell, let's say... Ben, too. Oh, thanks. Let's say the clock is going down, and you've really got to rush to get your pitch down. What do you think is the strategically soundest thing to do with that ball? You throw it off the sidelines so that the play is dead. You throw it into the stands.

Spike it. Actually, spiking it probably... You might see some pitchers do that. Well, that'd just be a ball, right? Well, that'd be a block. But... Do you think that throwing... Do you think it's worth risking throwing any sort of pitch in that situation?

If you're truly rushed, is it worth throwing any sort of pitch? I would go on the – even on a three-ball count, I would have to say there's a pretty big temptation right there to say, you know what? A walk is better than a home or than a home run. And, and there's probably, you know, some, if, if you're not getting set good, you know, one, one thing is that it might just, you know, flood the ball might fly all over the place, in which case it's a ball, maybe a wild pitch, and that's its own problem. Or you might hang it or you might just not execute the pitch properly. You know, I wonder how many pitches that, you know, a pitcher, either because he's rushed or just because he didn't hit his mechanics or anything like that, still managed to go up, still managed to make it to the plate as strikes or, you know, something that fools the batter. you know, something that, that, uh, uh, that fools the batter. Um, that'd be a fun,

a fun study to, you know, get some actual real life pitchers and, and, uh, um, just ask them to estimate that, um, and to get, you know, at least some parameter around that. And then you could, you could actually kind of take that and do some back of the envelope math to see, would it be better to just, you know, take a, take a bite envelope math to see, would it be better to just, you know, take a, take a bite out of the ball or would it be better to rush the pitch? Okay. I've got one last question here that is also sort of relevant to Russell's interests and work. It's from Eric in San Francisco.

He says last week's discussion of Corey Kluber got me wondering, do you have any ideas on how to distinguish a breakout season from a career year, specifically for players that have already had a few underwhelming major league seasons? Are there any indicators that you would use to posit that a great year was the first of many or instead that it was a peak performance? performance. Obviously, you can take age into account, but then there are weird ones like Chris Davis collapsing or Marlon Byrd having what appears to be an actual breakout of sorts at age 35. I'm thinking specifically of Lucas Duda as a test case. If you had to bet on either greater than or equal to 2014 performance or regression, what would you use to make that call? Can I answer before Russell? Because Russell's going to have the right answer. I would say that my

own personal instinct is for hitters, I believe power is the hardest thing to fake. And so if you have an insane extra base hit rate, that would be much more convincing to me. For pitchers, velocity is the hardest thing to fake. So if you had a velocity bump, that would be the hardest thing for me to disregard either one if they are a former top prospect and really

i would go like any time in the previous like nine years i would consider that relevant that would be harder for me to disregard uh the uh notably though the problem with the pitcher's velocity thing is that uh that means he's probably going to have Tommy John any second. Yikes. Um, yeah, I, this, you know, as a question I get a lot and the answer I always give is if, if I had the answer to that one, do you think I'd be slummeted at baseball prospectus? Um, I, I will tell you this. There are entire research departments with teams that are dedicated to answering this very question. You bring up the examples of Kluber or Duda, and they had their shining moments in the sun last year. And is that real or was that just an insane amount of luck and the the variables that distinguish that um they're very hard to come by and you know that

that is kind of that is one of like the questions um that i think that anybody who who does this either uh as an amateur or as a professional um has worked on at one point or another. And the fact that the people who have access to that information, i.e. the teams that have more information that have hired these wonderful analysts that have done all that stuff, the fact that they get it wrong a lot of the time tells you about how hard that question is to really crack. You know, personally, me, if I'm looking at a guy, you know, there's the obvious luck indicators. There's BABIP. There's for pitchers, you know, home runs per fly ball will regress heavily to the mean. And, you know, you can kind of look at some of the some of the more process outcome.

If you get to see a strikeout or a walk bump, you see a change in batted ball stuff. You can at least have something intelligent to say that, you know, the building blocks of what built this season are either fundamentally the same as they were in the past. And it was just, you know, insane luck or they were radically different. And then you start looking for what was going on different. But you can very easily overfit and say, oh, well, he was doing this. He was throwing a slider more last year. And so that's what's different and that's what caused it. And that might be completely bogus.

The sensitivity on those types of analyses are just awful right now. And frankly, it keeps the game kind of fun because if somebody had the answer to that one, I assure you they would be a very, very rich person. Or they would be making like $36,000 as an intern in some team. I mean, they would still be happy, but let's be honest. They would be making $36,000 in the internet stats department. Yeah, but if a win's worth $5 million, Sam.

You could also check out some of the stuff Rob Arthur has been working on with the pitcher approach to a hitter as an indicator of whether other players believe that the breakout is real or not, which could potentially tell you something about whether it actually is. But yeah, the short answer is we don't have a great answer for this. So that's it for today. Please remember to send us some emails for next week at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Thank you for joining us as always, Russell. Oh, thanks. I'm Zachary Levine.

I'm coming for your mark. I've gotten like two or three behind you now. So, and for people who don't know and don't follow Russell on Twitter, you should do that. A lot of people ask us how to catch up on baseball research, or maybe they're just getting into sabermetrics and they want to know what they should read. And Russell kind of curates the internet for everyone. baseball research or maybe they're just getting into sabermetrics and they want to know what they

should read and russell kind of curates the internet for everyone he will scour all the sabermetric sites every day and order everyone who follows him to read the standout pieces so if you don't have time to go to every site or set up rss feeds for everything just follow russell at pizza cutter 4 and you will have a good reading recommendation list So We will be back tomorrow With another team preview podcast Please join our Facebook group

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We'll be back tomorrow. I was impressed by how much research you did quickly for the Shields one. Well, he had like a five-day head start. We had that planned. Yeah, that's true. Although, I will say, I actually did most of that research day of. You're not supposed to tell your editor that.

I actually had my daughter write all my stuff. I just didn't pay him on it. I don't like having guests all that much, but I do like having... No, I...