Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 617: Dangerous Dodgers, Spray Hitters, and a World Without Moneyball

Episode Date: February 18, 2015

Ben and Sam catch up on banter and answer listener emails about the Dodgers, the shift, Moneyball, and more.

I could, but I won't be. You can, but not with me. It's all a mystery. Locked out without a key. Now I care, but I don't care. And I know that I don't see. Now I sleep, but I don't know. I know, but I don't know. Good morning and welcome to episode 617 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Bedlenberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Howdy. Hi. Doing a little different today. Making some noises.

Eating some ice cream and drinking some coffee. What flavor? It's going to be a good show. Normal coffee flavor. I meant the ice cream. Dulce de leche. Okay. You taking milk with the coffee as well?

A little cream. Well, I'm happy that we have reached the listener email show It's nice to have this little break in the midst of the team preview podcast series You can kind of relax a little bit No guests to impress or sound professional for Well, the email show was originally conceived of as almost like a day off And then in the off season, when we were only doing three episodes, it did not feel like a day off because each of us only had to come up with one topic. Remember when we used to have to come up with,

each of us came up with five topics a week? Each one of us. We came up with ten topics a week. It didn't last very long. Not very long, but still a lot of topics. And so the email show was one day we didn't need topics. But I don't know, I guess this off-season, because it was the longest show, and since it's easy to come up with one topic a week,

which is all you and I were responsible for in the off-season, in fact, the email show became the hardest one because it required some extra prep. And now it's back to being the easy day, the day that requires a little less prep or less thought, I guess, at least. Yeah. Well, it's the day when we have to get through a lot of important business because it builds up during this week when we can't talk about banter. And so all of these things pile up. So we've received, I think, three fat player photo nominations. Matt Albers signed with the White Sox. Barry Zito signed with the A's. What else? Oh, there was a bit of very old business that I wanted to get to. On episode 565, last October, we talked about Joe Madden. And at the tail end of our Joe Madden discussion, you brought up the fact that Joe Madden's wife was planning to...

Wine bar? was planning to open a gym of some sort and you asked me to put a probability on whether she would actually open the gym given that joe madden was going to chicago there has been a development in joe madden's wife's gym was the development development yes it was they developed they actually went through with the development they did so. So you put a, well, I put a 25% probability on her opening the gym. If we had known more, we probably would have put higher because I imagine that the gym must have been very much in progress at that point,

but we didn't know a whole lot about the gym. So I said 25% probability that the gym would open. You said 2% probability that the gym would open, but the gym has opened. To be fair, in my life, any plan involving a gym has a 2% probability of happening. I see. Yeah, so Jay Madden opened a place called Epic Boxing and Fitness Studio. It is the first Tampa studio to offer Spoxing, which mimics professional boxing. The first three rounds are done on spin bikes, and then athletes transition to the bags.

So it mimics real boxing? Yeah, it's like, you know, you throw some punches, you get on a bike and pedal furiously for a while, and then you punch the bag again. So it's good preparation for a real-life fight. And Joe Maddon owns a restaurant in Tampa, so we really underrated his ties to the local community. Did we not mention the restaurant? I knew about the restaurant at the time because i had at the time i had just very recently tweeted about his uh how he is more into spanish wines than italian i think

uh he's a you know connoisseur and uh in the press release about that restaurant he uh he talked about his affinity for spanish wines which i found like uh which i felt like was a a pretty good joke if someone wanted to develop it hiding in there. But I didn't feel like developing it. So what did you think? He would just close the restaurant? Or he'd continue to operate the restaurant but his wife wouldn't open the gym?

Well, the restaurant wasn't under his name and so it seemed like it would be pretty easy for him to leave and just be an owner of it, right? The fact that Madden owned the restaurant was not so far as I could tell. Like it wasn't a it wasn't a themed restaurant. There weren't, you know, Joe Madden jerseys up or anything like that. It's just a nice restaurant that he was an investor in and perhaps a wine consultant too.

Yeah. I hope anyone who's just joining us for the first time In a listener email show after catching on With our team preview series Will come to understand in time that these shows Are an acquired taste Spoxing Yeah so what else

There was some real news the strike zone Will perhaps be raised We've talked about the lowered strike zone many times So that is now being Discussed the Yankees The strike zone will perhaps be raised. We've talked about the lowered strike zone many times. So that is now being discussed. The Yankees retired every number of everyone who ever played with them. Hang on. Just real quick.

I just Googled Spoxing to see how much of a pre-established trend it was elsewhere. And the entire first page of results is Madden related. Well, it's the first place in Tampa. Yeah, but it might be the first place. You'd think that'd be on the cutting edge of fitness trends. Yeah, it might be the first place, period. It seems like maybe the first two. Well, never mind. Forget it.

Done with this boxing. Yeah, well, the Maddens are innovators. You know what I've been meaning to do? Do you remember the Hairstons article I did? I do. Let's see what I called that. So the premise was that at the time, the Hairstons were indistinguishable and that your life would be a lot simpler if you had simple ways to tell them apart. And so I went deep, deep into the Hairston family history to do a quiz on whether you could tell your Hairstons apart. I went deep, deep into the Hairston family history to do a quiz on whether you

could tell your Hairstons apart. One of the things that I unearthed in this investigation was that Scott Hairston is, I'm going to read this, Scott Hairston is the co-owner of an entire sport called sabaki ball. He owned the sport. He literally owned the sport. He owned the rules and the copyright or trademark or whatever. He owned it all, and this was a sport that they were trying to get leagues around the country playing. There was a long video, a marketing video, that gifts were generated from. So Scott Harrison is the co-owner of an entire sport called Sabaki Ball. In Sabaki Ball, teams of five players try to advance a ball across a field

and throw the ball at a defended goal. Movement is nonstop. Teams must be co-ed. And Stanford is going to be offering it as an intramural sport. A starter kit costs about $1,000. And Sabaki Ball was currently being played in these countries around the world. Alabama, Canada, China, Africa. Love the Africa as country.

Always like that. Nothing wrong with that in my mind other than the horrible offensiveness of it. And so I've been meaning for the last, oh, nine months to go find out how sabaki ball is doing, and I haven't. So someone can post on the Facebook page if they've played sabaki ball lately. Maybe they can integrate it with spoxing it won't be any less like a real fight so they should just spot spobocky boxing right it flows out the tongue it fits nicely in there spobocky boxing all right all right before we get to to emails, does any of these fat player photo nominations pique your interest? We got three nominations. One was Yasiel Puig.

Another was Pablo Sandoval, which seems sort of extraneous. I don't know if we really need to cover that one. Very fat, though. Very fat. Very, yes. Very fat though Very yes There's that famous diagram Of Pablo Sandoval's stomach That Bill Hentz talk made at SBN It's like a six

It's like a tree ring sort of thing Where it's like six layers of his stomach And it's a gif So it recedes and expands So you can see where he is On the Pablo Sandoval's stomach scale And it goes up to six. And I asked Bill where this current photo would place on that six-stage scale.

And he said eight or nine. Oh, wow. So. Yeah, he was fat. I didn't see the Puig. I didn't see the fat Puig. I'm sorry. I'll send you that.

There was also a Jose Fernandez one. I don't know if you saw that sorry. I'll send you that. There was also a Jose Fernandez one. I don't know if you saw that one. I'll send you that one too. You can take a quick look. Neither one is a smoking gun. The Puig, when Molly Knight tweeted, he's standing on a boardwalk by a beach, and he looks like David Ortiz because he's got big sunglasses on

and like a chin strap uh facial hair sort of thing and he looks large but quite muscular so yeah i uh i'm gonna go yes on puig no on fernandez f Fernandez is wearing one of those shirts that reveals every detail underneath and he's kind of pressing it against his body so there's visible lines

under there but I don't think it rises to the level. So now I don't think the lines, I think the lines are just wrinkles in the shirt. Well it depends which lines you mean. There's texture if you're saying that there's I don't think the lines, I think the lines are just wrinkles in the shirt. Well. Depends which lines you mean. There's texture.

If you're saying that there's topography to it. Right. It's pressing. There's contact. Yeah, there is. It seems like that's not convincing to me, though. That seems like it could be muscles. Guy's rehabbing from Tommy John.

Give him a break. Has the skinny face, too. Yeah, yeah. So do better. Look harder. There's lots of players showing up to spring training, lots of players in the best shape of their lives. No news on Russell Martin yet that I've seen,

but lots of other players are in the most shape. All right, so let's do some emails. Let's maybe take a Matt Trueblood question because it was something that I was interested in and considering writing about. And maybe I will write about it, but we can workshop it here. So Matt says, I'm a free market baseball guy all the way. I don't like caps on amateur spending nor competitive balance draft picks, at least the way those strictures have been implemented under the CVA. Competitive imbalance is obviously a threat to the game, but I prefer that teams be allowed to keep and spend their money according to their whims for the most part. But, one sentence paragraph, sometimes a team does get too far ahead of the pack.

The Yankees 15 to 20 years ago had so much money and so little restraint that they could outbid everyone for anything they wanted and more alarmingly, easily fade any mistakes, even big ones, that did diminish the competition in the American League. Are the Dodgers getting to that point? They're talking about going after Hector Oliveira to play third base, which apparently would lead to a trade of one Uribe. If the recent pattern holds, the team would eat Uribe's salary and turn him into an actual asset, even as they cast him aside. They did the same thing by offering the Marlins an eight-figure subsidy on Dan Heron and by swallowing nearly $20 million on Matt Kemp. They did something even tackier by signing Brett Anderson for $10 million. The biggest thing for me, though, might be that Erisbel Arwe-Barena, signed for $25 million in

February, was DFA'd in December and wasn't even close to being claimed. The Dodgers had to push a guy they invested hugely in off their 40-man roster 10 months after signing him, and no one could afford to even entertain calling their bluff. In essence, LA got to sign and handle him, I'm not pronouncing the name again, like a bonus pool guy, but without suffering any of the penalties in terms of signing restrictions or fines that would normally come with that. Have we reached the point where they have too much damn of putting a rule on the books to rein them in, but just that it's almost impossible to imagine a team being better positioned than the Dodgers are. And we've sort of talked about this before,

but it hit home for me even more a couple of days ago when the BP organizational rankings came out and the Dodgers were the number three system on that list. And I know they were top 10 on some other list. I don't know where they ranked on all the list, but good system, perhaps the top five system. And of course, all of the other advantages the giant tv deal the the new presumably smart front office the current roster that projects to be the best team in baseball or maybe the second best no no real powerhouse in the division to compete with you know just the ability to spend tons and tons of money. And kind of everything is coming up Dodgers right now, which is just fine because a few

years ago they were in a completely different, almost hopeless situation. So maybe they have bounced back and it's fine and they should just get to enjoy it for a while. I don't know that they have risen to the level of breaking baseball, but it is notable to me just how well set up they are. Yeah, they are. I mean, I feel like there's always a tendency to think that the world is coming to an end and that it cannot possibly persist this way for long.

And most of those doomsday scenarios don't happen. And so it feels a little premature to be that worried about the Dodgers, given that they haven't been to a World Series, let alone won five or six or whatever in a row. And I don't know. Do they feel as invincible to you right now as the Yankees used to? Let's say the early 2000s. I don't want to say in the late 90s because they won so many World Series

that you might actually have a distorted memory of how invincible they were. But in the early and mid-2000s, of how invincible they were. But in the early and mid-2000s, who seemed like a more cartoonish gorilla in the rest of the league? I think probably the Yankees. I don't know. It's hard to separate them from the fact that they were just coming off all those World Series.

But, I mean, they had everything that the Dodgers – well, they didn't really have everything the Dodgers have right now because they never, I guess at that point, they didn't really have the farm system. Maybe they did 10 years before that, but they kind of didn't need the farm system. It seemed like at that point, I think probably it was easier for a team like the Yankees to make the most of their resources. So even if they didn't have everything going for them that the Dodgers now have going for them, it probably favored them

just as much as all of these factors favor the Dodgers. So I don't think it's different. I don't think it's more extreme. Yeah, it seems to me that the Yankees at the time, if I'm remembering this correctly, they were spending like double what any other team was paying, right? Didn't they at some point have a payroll that was twice any other team's payroll? Am I misremembering that? Let me take a quick look at BP's compensation page, which goes back to, I think, 2000 and see where they stood there. Goes back to, I think, 2000 and see where they stood there. But, I mean, the gap was, I think, larger than the current gap is, which is what on the 2015 page the Dodgers are at $269 million and the Yankees are at $212.

So percentage-wise, not really all that huge a gap. Yeah, so like 20-ish percent. And then what's the median? I don't know. I will have to calculate that Or sort it But the Yankees in Well in 2000 They were very close

Evidently They were at 92 million in 2000 What about like 2003-2004 Yeah that was kind of when it got extreme Let's see And the Dodgers were second extreme. Let's see. And the Dodgers were second in 2000. Let's see.

2003, the Yankees were at 154, and the Mets were at 117. And 2004, the Yankees were at 185, and the Red Sox were at 129. So that's a big gap. That's like a third difference, right? So that's big. That's bigger than now. And 2005? You got 2005 there?

I can in a second. 2005, the Yankees were 210 here we go the Yankees were 210 in 2005 and the Red Sox were 125 so that's big they were they were yeah they were like 60% or something like that higher than the number two team and then presumably pretty much the same 2006 they were 201 Red Sox were 124 yeah okay so so there's that that's a factor um the the as um as tim britain noted in the essay uh for the red sox is in this year's annual the

floor of payrolls have risen faster than teams like the Dodgers and the Red Sox and the Tigers and the Yankees have. I don't know, it just generally feels like the Dodgers payroll edge is not as big as we maybe make it out to be. I don't know. I guess part of the reason that they're able to, that they've been seemingly spending non-stop for the last two and a half years, is that they weren't spending much under McCourt, right? Wasn't their payroll artificially low because of McCourt? So they had a lot of room to go before they were even back into the top tier. And of course, they've blown past the top tier and set a new tier.

But they were making up for lost time. And I don't know. I don't know. So it does feel like, I don't know. I think it's still at this point somewhat amusing to see how they choose to do all these things. If they started winning, then I would probably feel a bit more, I don't know, put out by it all. But right now, I don't know. They are kind of an underperformer at this point, aren't they?

And it's sort of delightful to have a team that spends a lot of money and is underperforming. Yeah, I guess. Anyway, I guess the question, though, but we're not exactly answering Matt's question. Matt's question is are they unstoppable and do they need to be stopped? Does some outside force need to stop what they're doing? they need to be stopped? Does some outside force need to stop what they're doing? And there isn't really any place where they're... Other than the draft, really, there isn't really a place where they're at a disadvantage. There's no counter, except for I guess that they have to pay a 40% surcharge on every free agent they sign. And that ought to matter, right?

I mean, not only... So I was thinking about Brett Anderson today, and they're paying him $10 million for a year. And they're really paying him $14 million because they have to pay the surcharge. There was that one week where all of the broken starters were signed to one-year incentive-laden kind of contracts, and that one seemed like the biggest reach to me. So how many teams do you think out of the other 29

would have given Brett Anderson, say, $4 million for a year? $4 million? I would say 18. Yeah, somewhere like a dozen to 18 probably would do that. And that's $4 million. They're paying $4 million just in a tax to do them. And so to me, the Brett Anderson move is the one that it feels like that you can only do that if you don't care, like if you don't really need his innings.

You're just, you know, it's house money at that point. And so that one is the one that kind of blows me away. Yeah. As I said to Matt, I wish I were the Dodgers somehow. So what would you do if you were any other team? I mean, is there a way to take advantage of this? Are they a bubble that you might be able to profit off of somehow? I don't know.

I mean, I don't want to make it sound as if there's some sort of baseball monopoly or something. And in the end, their chances of winning the World Series are not so high that you would even notice in most seasons. But I think, I don't know if there's any way to topple them by, I don't know, by making them play into their worst tendencies as a big market team that has all the advantages. I don't know if there's some way to get them to overcommit to something that will bite them in the end. It seems to me, I mean, as Matt said, it's if they make mistakes, they are more able to spend their way out of them than anyone else. So what do they have that the

yankees didn't have though five years ago prospects well they do at this moment because they invested but did the yankees do you feel like the yankees i mean the yankees were also drafting were were drafting uh guys who had slipped in the in the first round for signability reasons right and they were also um big players on the international market was there they were also signing huge japanese free agents i mean was there anything was there anything distinctly prospect averse about the yankees during those years well we'll we'll talk about the yankees when i am the guest on effectively wild i guess Yankees podcast preview. But one of the things I mentioned in that essay was that they've just had the worst first round draft returns of any team, except I think the Padres were like a fraction of a win worse than they were since Cheater.

And they haven't had a whole lot of hits there. So I don't know whether it's player development or bad drafting. There's also a tendency to maybe not trust young starters because they feel like they need to have players be ready right away when they use them. And there's the temptation to trade players at all times, which are not things that the Dodgers are not also susceptible to. So I don't know. Maybe the Yankees just haven't been disciplined enough, or they have been worse at it, or they've been unlucky. Yeah, and maybe the Dodgers have just been unlucky.

I mean, Jock Peterson was a $600,000 signing bonus who turned into an elite prospect. It's not like that was— to some degree it was an organizational decision because he was an 11th round pick and they spent a lot of money on him to get him to play. But still, 600,000, they weren't expecting him to turn into this. Urias is, you know, wasn't expected to turn into anything like this at the time.

And, you know, Seager, Seager's good. But again, it's not like, the other thing is that all those guys are Logan White guys, and they let Logan White go. So that's not certainly to say that they aren't strongly committed to prospects, but they – I don't know. They're just a team that's doing some things, and they hit some jackpots, right, at that level. I mean, I don't know, they're just a team that's doing some things and they hit some jackpots, right? At that level. I mean, I don't know.

I guess what I'm saying is I don't expect their farm system to be ranked number three or higher next year once a couple of those guys get promoted. And I don't expect them to be probably top 10 as a normal thing going forward. I think that they just happen to get in this place where it lined up, just like it did for the Rangers a few years ago, when they were the best team in baseball and had a great farm system, just like it did with the Cardinals a couple years ago, when they were the best team in baseball and had a great farm system,

or one of the best teams in baseball. It happens every once in a while, and then usually something unhappens it. Yeah, Okay. All right, question from Mike in Danville, California. With the implementation of extreme defensive shifts to combat pull hitters, have or do you expect player development to A, increase the value of spray hitting ability when drafting, or B, teach slash encourage slash develop more spray hitting techniques in the minors, it would seem that defensive shifts have the ability to reduce BABIP.

So a countermeasure would be the development of non-pull hitters that would increase BABIP. This is something you hear. Someone, who is it, Ruben Amaro recently maybe said that the Phillies were working on this in the minor league system. Some teams said that. Other teams have said that the Phillies were working on this in the minor league system. Some teams said that. Other teams have said that. Did you read Jeff Sullivan's piece a couple, I want to say a couple weeks ago, about hitters responding to this and looking at the hitters who did spray the ball more in response to the shift

and then the hitters who didn't spray the ball more in response to the shift? Did you read that? No, I may have missed that. So basically he took all the guys who saw a lot of shifts and he looked to see if they went the other way more last year and some guys did and some guys didn't and then he looked to see whether the guys who didn't actually did better and they did get some more singles the other way as you would expect and then they didn't get some home runs that they pulled as you would expect and as it they didn't get some home runs that they pulled, as you would expect. And as it turned out, it was just kind of a wash that Jeff's conclusion

was that you can bunt against the shift, that seems to maybe work, although that's mixed results too. But that going the other way as an approach is not actually that helpful to a major league hitter. It's really hard and you give up something to get what you do. And so you would either, we're basically talking about one of three things here. Are we talking about hitters who consciously decide to spray the ball at this level? Are we talking about player development where you're training guys from the moment you get your hands on them to spray the ball? The sort of the old, like the A's trying to teach them plate discipline in the minors kind of thing but for a new generation and then do you select guys who

simply naturally have more spray tendencies and so do you which one of those three i guess you think would be the solution and does any of them seem worthwhile to you yeah i i looked at i looked at how hitters adjust in various situations at grantland at some point this season and they don't very much usually most of them and i guess i would i would agree with what jeff found that if you have an established major leaguer who hits a certain way that i i don't know i don't think the evidence is necessarily strong enough that the shift is so effective that this would be beneficial to most hitters once you adjust for the fact that you're asking them to do different things and that might get them out of their rhythm in some other way and maybe they won't hit the ball as hard and

they'll be distracted and who knows what so i don't know that I would convert people who already hit a certain way. If you're taking raw material, amateurs, presuming that you can teach this at some level between, say, high school and college and the major leagues, if this is something that can be taught post-draft, which I have no idea how well it can be taught at that age or any age, but I can sort of see the wisdom in it there. But I still sort of feel like if you're going to do something to try to beat the shift, it seems like bunting is so much less drastic. I mean, when you attempt a bunt, you are totally giving up on hitting the ball very hard somewhere.

But if you can master that, which seems like it should be an easier thing to do than figuring out how to place hit or hit the ball to a certain spot on the field with a full swing, how to place hit or hit the ball to a certain spot on the field with a full swing, then it's just a much less drastic change in approach that seems like it should affect you less in non-shift at bats and could be just as effective, if not more so. I've never really understood why some hitters who sometimes put the bunt down against the shift won't do it all the time or as long as it keeps working until they stop seeing the shift so i don't know there were more bunts against the shift last year like something like double the number that there had been the previous season i would expect that trend to continue so i don't i don't know if I thought I had a hitter who had the natural ability

to be a really good spray hitter, and maybe he isn't a huge pull power guy and it wouldn't really affect him in any other area, then sure. But I'm not sure that I would remake my whole hitting philosophy with this in mind. I like Russell's explanation, or one explanation, for why players might not bunt,

even though they seem to be able to squeeze some extra value out of it, which is the kind of the golden ticket theory that you should save it for the moment when it will be most helpful so that you can really maximize. And so I like that, but then I wonder if we see that, like, I don't think we, yeah, I know Russell proposed that. Yeah, they're all just hoarding tickets.

Russell proposed that for David Ortiz, I think. Maybe that's why David Ortiz doesn't do it. But David Ortiz has been in the highest leverage situations imaginable. What is he waiting for? He's almost 40 years old. He's played in World Series games. Where is he going to cash in this ability? It's going to be his last at bat.

He's going to be like his Ted Williams home run. And he's going to just be so mad when someone tells him Updike's dead. Right. Yeah. Well, I don't know. So those are my thoughts on that. I'm not, I'm not sold on, on the contact hitter necessarily being the solution in this offensive context in the high strikeout era.

That's a little different. It's not quite the same issue, but the, the spray hitting thing, I don't know if someone has an inclination to be able to do that. And I don't know how many people do, even if you get them at a early age. I don't know how many people have that ability because some percentage of people who have the ability to just hit like they do now, just pulling balls or not worrying about which direction they're hitting the ball in, some percentage of those players probably couldn't be spray hitters, even if they tried from day one.

So it seems like you're reducing the sample even further there. And I don't know that the shift has such a drastic effect on enough guys that it's worth tampering with them to that degree. Yeah, I've been wanting to write about Colby Rasmus and his problems with the shift because there was an article about him late in the season when he was with the Blue Jays and he was basically saying that he tried to beat the shift for part of the year and it just went so badly for him. And then he never really, after that, he just hit into the shift.

So either way, I felt like he had a doubly bad year where he responded poorly to it and then gave into it, and both situations were awful for him. And I wondered if that was true, what he remembered. Anyway. Play index. Sure. So, Ben, what would you estimate Wade Davis' career ERA as a reliever is?

2.9. It's 1.65. And what would you estimate as a starter it is? 4.7. It's 4.57, so you were only off by one. So, Wade Davis, of course, very good. It's a big gap. And his Pagoda projection is probably the one that I disavow

more than any other. Most people, I think, on staff disavow the Corey Kluber. Some people are prone to disavowing the Jeff Samarja. I disavow the Wade Davis. One of these three, I feel confident one of these three is going to turn out right, and whoever backed that one is going to look like an idiot and feel silly. But anyway, Wade Davis, his projected ERA is like 3.5 or something like that. And I feel like we might have talked about it here. It's hard to project starters who convert to relief because you've got hundreds and hundreds of bad innings from them as a starter, and it takes a long time.

It takes a lot of seasons of 50 and 60 innings to undo that, and it's hard to know exactly which starters are going to take to the role change most. So anyway, long way of saying Wade Davis, better, I think, than his projected ERA, but that's because he's so insanely good as a reliever, and he was quite poor as a starter. So poor, in fact, that I wondered, does Wade Davis have the largest gap between ERA as a reliever and ERA as a starter? So I took all the pitchers since 1988 who have thrown 150 innings in relief in their career. They're about 750.

And then I took all the pitchers since 1988 who have started at least, pitched at least 200 innings as starters, and they're also about 750. And then I mashed them together, and that gave me 168 starters who have done both of those things. So I have an ERA for them as a starter and an ERA for them as a reliever. And Wade Davis has a 2.92 run difference between those two. And it is not the highest. It is the second highest in that time.

So I'm going to give you a chance. I'm going to give you a chance to guess who you think is the highest. He is active, and he is currently a reliever, not currently a starter. He didn't go the other way. And he is very good, and I wonder if you know him. What were the minimums on this? 150 innings as a reliever, 200 innings as a starter. Well, my guess before you said he was active was going to be Jose Mesa.

Where is he on this list? Anywhere? Let's see if Mesa. Yeah, Mesa is actually 68th right around the median, mainly because his ERA as a reliever wasn't that good And probably some of those late years Ruined him but he had a career ERA of 396 as a reliever which is Not so good

Huh That's a good guess Jabba Chamberlain I don't know if Jabba Chamberlain Has yes he does he is 92nd So he is actually worse, below the median. Jonathan Papelbon. Did Papelbon?

I don't know if the name says no. No. Andrew Miller. Very good. Good one. Not the answer, but very good. He is sixth, solid. As a starter, 5.7.

As a reliever, 3.38, because you remember he wasn7, as a reliever 3.38, because you remember he wasn't good as a reliever right away. So that's why. He's got a chance, though, to extend this. He could do it, you know, because he only has to get his ERA as a reliever down to about 2.6 in order to take the lead. And that doesn't seem that hard for him.

He doesn't have that many innings that he has to compensate for. He's only got 167 innings. So if he has two more years like this one, like last one, he might do it. That's a good guess. Glenn Perkins. Nice. He's right after Andrew Miller. You're getting your feet. All right. I'm getting the range.

Glenn Perkins is seven. Andrew Miller. You're getting your feet. All right. I'm getting the range. Spencer hits his seventh. Who else? Would it help if I told you what team he started on? Maybe. What about Troy Hawkins? Hawkins is number three. Right after Wade Davis. He has a 3-3-2 ERA as a reliever.

6-1-1 as a starter, and he has 910 innings. I don't think he's going to make the difference. He's going to pitch forever. Rafael Soriano? He probably doesn't meet the minimum for starter innings. Yeah, okay. I guess it wouldn't be, no, it can't be Ali Perez.

I don't think it would be. Probably. He wasn't very bad as a starter, and he hasn't been that great as a reliever. No, he's better in the median, but not by much. He's 65th. I wish I could get this, but I've come close enough on some guys that I won't feel bad if I don't. All right, one more guess. He's very good.

He is one of the dozen best relievers in the league, I would say. Jeremy Athel? No. He is 12th on this list, but he is also very much not one of the dozen best relievers in the league. Pretty good, though. Yeah, that is good. Oh, no, no. No?

No? You don't think? Maybe? Nope. Don't think so. At this point, it's probably more fun if I don't get it. Just reveal all. It's Joaquin Benoit.

Oh. Wow. Huh. Yeah, 6.06 is a starter, 3.03 as a reliever, and going down. So he could pad. He's the only pitcher with three runs difference. I didn't actually think he had pitched enough as a starter, but I guess he did. Yeah, if you'd asked me how many games he'd started, I might have guessed zero.

As soon as I looked, I remembered that, oh, yes, he did. The leader in the opposite direction is Dustin Hermanson. He's got a ERA almost a run better as a starter, but it's too bad because he narrowly edges the champion on the other side who is much more fitting, and that is Johan Santana, who has a 3-1-4 ERA as a starter and 3-9-6 as a reliever. And about 30 of these guys were better as starters than relievers, although that can be sometimes because they started at different times in their career.

They might have relieved later in their career when they were terrible, or they might have learned a pitch like R.A. Dickey and become good. So I don't think it's a matter of saying, oh, well, they were suited to starting necessarily. But yeah, we've got about 30 of those guys. All right. Good one. Including Norm Charlton, which is odd. Isn't that an odd one?

He seems like a fastball-reliant sort of guy. Well, he seems like a relief ace. Who remembers him as a starter? And everyone remembers him as a reliever. Kurt Schilling is on the reverse list. Is Ron Vallone somewhere on that list, on the reverse list, close to the reverse? I feel like he was not a whole lot better as a reliever. No, he's not really close to the reverse list.

He's around the median. Okay. All right. Well, we named lots of relievers. Cool. So play index, coupon code BP. Get your discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. All right.

Let's do a question from Eric Hartman, who says, how would baseball be different if Moneyball were never published? Number one way is that my microphone is currently resting on a copy of Moneyball. So you would probably be hearing slightly more hum from my computer transmitted through my table if moneyball had never been published actually i'd probably just be resting it on a different book huh i don't i mean it's a good question it is a good question i it it seems like you could sort of spoil the question by saying

that if moneyball had never been published someone else would have written the equivalent of moneyball within a couple of years it wouldn't have been as good no it wouldn't have been a hit i mean it wouldn't have been a hit like moneyball was a hit i think that that it would have been probably almost irrelevant within the industry uh i don't quite mean that because i think there are ways that um like i don't know that i don't know that quite so many many BP staff would have been hired for instance. And I don't know that BP would have ever been as big as it was. And I don't know if – like I think that there are a lot of people whose lives would be very different.

Like I could see Nate Silver's life being very different and I could certainly see mine being very different because that's reading the excerpt that ran in the New York Times Magazine was really what got me into baseball prospectus way back. Yeah, lots of people fit into that bucket. Like Farhan Zaidi, right? He read Moneyball and sent his resume to this. So I think there's probably a ton of individual lives that would be very different. I don't think that it would have been hugely different, though, as far as leagues adopting it or strategies that became prevalent or technology that developed.

It would just be different people playing with them in slightly different ways at maybe a slight, I don't know, maybe a slightly different pace and maybe not quite as confrontational maybe. I don't know. Do you think that the weird stats scouts war of 2005 to 2008 would have happened? Well, it was already sort of a subtext, right? I mean, BP predated Moneyball and there were people at BP at the time who sort of had the, you know, stats versus scouts mentality to some small degree, at least just as a reaction to kind of the scouting-dominated norm that was there before.

So, I don't know, that sort of existed. It wouldn't have been blown up into famous scenes about throwing chairs or talking about players' girlfriends and the scenes that were exaggerated and immortalized in the movie so yeah might not be as well known but it was i mean it was it was a real tension for a while where people were breaking into the game and new new positions and potentially threatening the jobs of other people or so it seemed at the time so there would have been i think some some friction there regardless yeah i think there would have definitely been some

friction there would definitely have been some and probably a lot it felt like to me though that when if it if the power was like 90 10 then it would just be like the stat side would have just always been this somewhat marginalized, scrappy underdog who knew his place. And instead it got to be sort of almost 50-50. Like the mainstreaming of it made everybody really bold and made it much more threatening and turned it into, you know, a fight between two heavyweights instead of like a fight between uh you know i don't know if this analogy quite works but between like a you know a big dude and a little dude and the little dude knows enough to start fights with a big dude and he just sort of talks about the big dude behind

his back and then tries not to get beat up probably not i would say the analogy probably does not work. But I don't know. It felt like the way that it became really, really huge and where you could plausibly surround yourself with so many people who were like-minded that you could convince yourself that the other side was idiotic and without any redeeming qualities probably made the tone a little bit more toxic, maybe. Yeah. It's hard to remember. It's really hard to remember any of those years. It's such a good story,

and there are so many millions of baseball books published that someone would have come along within, I don't know, a couple of years and written the same thing about someone, I would think, but that problem, that that person wouldn't have been Michael Lewis and it wouldn't have had such mass appeal. I would imagine that everything would have happened a little bit later and a little bit more slowly.

And we probably would not be doing this podcast for one reason or another, but the end result would have been the same. Yeah. A little more slowly is not a factor that matters in a long scheme of things it's the old question about if baseball were different how different would it be it's not that question at all well it turns out again that it probably wouldn't be that different i say yeah um Well, we've talked long enough. There's one topical question since it's arbitration season.

Andy asked, why does the arbitration system use such dumb criteria for awarding salaries? From what he understands, it has a heavy dose of playing time along with old-fashioned stats like RBI and wins. Even a system just based on playing time alone would probably be fairer or at least simpler. But why does Josh Donaldson, the seventh most valuable position player over the last three seasons, lose his case for a measly 5.7 million? Wouldn't be hard for MLB to instruct arbitrators to use more sophisticated criteria. Who is benefiting from the current system and why isn't there an effort to more strongly link ARB salaries with production? Is there someone who has the incentive to keep arbitrators ignorant? I mean, the basic idea, right, is that these arbitrators are not full-time baseball arbitrators. They're not necessarily experts in baseball. They're not necessarily well versed in advanced stats and so you have a limited time to argue your cases and so you don't want to spend a bunch of that time explaining

what war is or how war is calculated or assuaging the doubts of the arbitrator that this stat that they have never heard of is actually a legitimate thing that reflects actual player value and then there's the whole comp system it's based on what players have made in the past and the whole history of arbitration is based on these traditional stats and so if you suddenly broke with that you'd have players with the same amount of service time and playing time but different productivity that would maybe not work as comps anymore and it would get complicated i think i mean things are moving toward a greater acceptance of advanced stats but i guess those are still the the hurdles i don't know if there's one side that has much more incentive to make sure that these stats are not admissible? I'm not prepared to answer.

I'm still thinking about it. Yeah, I don't know. Your mom is an arbiter, an arbitrator. I mean, she doesn't arbitrate in a narrow field of only things that she understands, right? She did baseball arbitration at Baseball Perspectives, right? When we did our arbitration series last year, or was it last year? When we did our arbitration series last year. Or was it last year? Maybe two years ago. Yeah, it was. But yeah, professionally, I don't know.

I guess she probably focuses on things that she knows more so than a baseball arbitrator typically does, I think. Does she? Yeah. Maybe Jason knows. Maybe he does. i don't know why it would favor one side or another they're individual cases where it helps one side or another but i don't know if it would help the team side more often than the player side or vice versa i don't know i think the the thing that i like about it or or the thing I might like about it if I were either side,

is that if you made them baseball experts, and your arbitrators were always baseball experts who were capable of hearing this advanced discussion, like an umpire would, for instance, then you'd sort of have, they would quickly be part of the game, part of the, I don't know, part of the ongoing story. And I just would feel like after a couple years, everybody would think that the guys were against them. They would feel like they were somehow too sympathetic to one side or the other, that you kind of knew this guy's bias and so on. And so there's something, I don't know, something maybe that's nice about having just this guy who shows up who doesn't have anything to do with your life any other day. And he's there just to be fair and just to listen to you. And sure, he's kind of a dummy

compared to you about the topic and you have to speak slowly to him. And that's annoying. And maybe it feels nice because you think, oh, he's dumb. I can take advantage of him, but so does the other side. But at least he's only there to be fair. He's not there to be pals with one side or the other. He's not there to be part of baseball. He's not there to be pals with one side or the other. He's not there to be part of baseball. He's not there for any ulterior motive other than just to be fair and get his $350 an hour or whatever. I don't know. I think there's something a little bit lower stress about knowing that. It's a simpler interaction. lower stress about knowing that.

It's a simpler interaction. Okay. Good. We answered some questions. So back to business tomorrow with more team previews. So please keep the questions coming for podcasts at baseballprospectus.com. We will get to more next Wednesday. Join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild there are some

really good threads going on there 70 comment thread about which hitters swing people like to watch the most from both sides of the plate or a 60 comment thread about the inclusiveness of baseball websites or it's become my designated place that i go when i need a break from writing because there are so many people in there all over the world that at all hours someone is posting something interesting. So check it out and rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. We've already told you to use the coupon code BP to subscribe to the Baseball Reference Play Index and we will be back with another show tomorrow.