Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 64: Should Joe Girardi Have Pinch-Hit in Game Three?

Episode Date: October 17, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss Joe Girardi’s decision(s) not to pinch-hit for any of his left-handed hitters late in Game Three of the ALCS.

which of us is starting i was going to let you start okay then let's start okay this is effectively wild the daily podcast from baseball prospectus we are on episode 64 i'm with ben lindbergh who is in new york new york I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. We are coming to you Wednesday morning after game three of the ALCS, in which the Yankees have fallen behind three games to none, which is an interesting way of phrasing it, I notice. Why didn't I say the Tigers have gone ahead three games tonight? Yeah, I was kind of doing the same thing in my recap. I don't know. East Coast bias. So I imagine there are a lot of factors about this game that could provide interesting conversation, but I think all anybody is going to be talking about today,

for the most part, and so we might as well participate, is the last inning of the game in which joe gerardi uh did not go to his bench in any instance to uh send a right hander or switch hitter up against phil coke despite having right handers and switch hitters who are very famous um and uh so that has caused a lot of debate. Well, I guess debate, although it seems to be a… One-sided. Yeah, I think most of the debate is who can be more hostile toward the decision, although there is some, I guess there is some debate. I'm right now looking at Jason Park's Twitter feed,

and in a number of replies to people, he is defending Girardi's decision to give you a sense of his perspective. A few of his tweets are like, A-Rod is a complete mess right now. Not only can he not square velocity, but he has to be rattled by the demotion. Managers are tasked with knowing their personnel. Considering A-Rod can't square velocity right now anywhere near the belt and above, I'm not sure he represented an upgrade. That's why they play the game. Why not just sim the game? You can't say it was probably never going to work. No way of knowing that. So that's Jason Park's perspective. Do you have a perspective? I don't think it is quite as open and shut as some people

are making it out to be, or I don't think it's necessarily one of the worst managerial moves that we've seen in recent years, which is something I saw someone say. I think on paper, someone say. I think on paper, he probably should have pinch hit. There are a lot of different factors involved. And I mean, of course, the platoon advantage in this case is not as large as it might be in other cases. I mean, I agree that Ibanez versus Koch is not a good matchup. It was not likely to lead to a good outcome at all. Ibanez is bad against lefties. Koch is good against lefties. So that wasn't, I mean, that's not what you want to see, down one run with two outs.

But, I mean, the fact that Joaquin Benoit, who would have faced A-Rod or Swisher, is excellent against opposite-handed hitters. The platoon advantage is not quite so dramatic against him. And then there's the pinch hit penalty to factor in. And then, of course, there's the fact that A-Rod and Swisher have been awful. And I guess mostly the debate comes down to what you think that means. Do you think that a manager, I mean, assuming that they're both healthy, there's been some speculation that A-Rod is maybe feeling some after effects of the broken hand that he had earlier this year. Obviously, none of us has really any information about that.

But even if you assume he's fully healthy, I guess the question comes down to what Jason was tweeting about. If you think that the fact that A-Rod has looked like a mess lately, and he absolutely has, he's 0-for-18 against right-handers this postseason with 10 strikeouts and had a pretty lousy year against right-handers overall. It's just, you know, what do you think it means if a, if a guy looks absolutely awful and is swinging through pitches right down the middle, does that impact your projection for him going forward?

And I don't know. Uh, I mean, I think that's something that managers are maybe paid to know. I don't know that it's possible. They're certainly paid to make a decision. I don't know if they're paid to know. I don't, I mean, they're, they're supposed to try to know. Yeah. It's, it's awfully, awfully, awfully hard to say that. So who knows whether they know? I don't know. Um, I mean, if, if it was just a pure gut feeling and he didn't have a great he just kind of had a bad feeling about it uh i guess i'd

be less inclined to forgive it or condone it than i would be if there were some sort of data behind it or if not numerical data at least um meaningful scouting data and i honestly don't know i guess the the default position is just to assume that there isn't or that it's not as meaningful as the numbers um i don't know do you think that i mean if you look at at studies of hot streaks you see that a hitter who's cold isn't necessarily likely to continue to be cold, that he's just as likely to start hitting as not. At least if you're looking at the whole population of players, it's not necessarily true looking at an individual player. I suppose it's possible that a manager could look at one particular player and see that he's doing

something that would lead to less success. I don't know. Do you think that that's possible, or is it just magical thinking? roundabout way if I even do answer it, which I probably won't. But when we talked about the Ibanez game, when he brought in Ibanez for the first time against A-Rod, you wrote and then we talked about how he said, Girardi said it was a gut decision, a stomach decision, a heart decision, not a binder decision. And we sort of talked about how sometimes, you know, the gut turns out to be supported by the numbers and maybe the gut isn't worthless. And in the, not to imply that it is, but whatever. In the week since then, I've actually been kind of, I've sort of come to think that actually Girardi was probably just maybe just saying that it was from the gut because there's there's certainly I think a a trend in baseball since

the scouts stats merger of maybe a half decade or so ago um to nonetheless uh if you're a stat savvy uh executive GM whatever to nonetheless kind of downplay that part of your personality and upplay the scouts part, which makes sense because you're running an organization of people who might still be a little leery of that, and certainly the players might still be a little leery of that. So the default position, no matter how stat-heady your team's GM is, no matter how stat heady your team's GM is, you will never see him not give at least equal weight to scouting and all that stuff in his public speech. And I think that, I mean, that maybe

that's just because scouting is such a huge part of decision making. But also, I think just from a PR perspective, there's really an effort to bend over backwards to show that you're not only on stats in a way that I think that a scout focused GM does not have that same pressure to display balance. So Girardi gets mocked for years over his binder. And he you know, he knows that the mental perspective of his players. So, you know, he's got a lot of he's got a lot of incentive to say that it's gut gut is a more in that context, in the context of a baseball team, gut is a more defensible position for a manager than binder. And so I came to just sort of believe that he actually was making a binder decision. But then last night, I would think that the numbers would justify pinch hitting for gardner even with a righty against verlander would have made more sense uh given the value of um of extra bases in that

situation i thought that pinch hitting for each row made a ton of sense given that um you couldn't pinch hit or you couldn't replace coke after coke had come in so you're guaranteed to get the platoon split there and again the value of power is greater than the value of an Itaro single, I would think, especially because there's not a real huge difference in OBP there. I thought that and then I thought that the Ibanez situation is just absolutely a no-brainer. In my perspective, I mean, I'm not ruling out that it's not a no-brainer and that probably all baseball decisions worth debating about are more nuanced and closer than we think. But I mean, the fact is that the platoon split was, the platoon disadvantage for the

Yankees was massive. And the idea that Benoit is good against lefties and so you wouldn't even get that platoon split back with with switcher i don't know there's there seems to be a kind of a lionizing of benoit in this conversation that people are having where it's like oh well you don't want to get benoit in the game benoit allowed 14 home runs this year um you know some of some of home runs uh some some some home run per fly ball rate is of course due to fluct. But 14 home runs from a reliever who pitched 70 innings, 10 in the second half. I mean, Benoit had basically a league average season as a reliever. He's not the guy who the Tigers signed who had the insane season with the Rays two years ago.

Benoit's a good pitcher. I like him. I wouldn't mind if he were closing you know, closing for my low budget team, but it's not as though Benoit was like, you don't manage to avoid Benoit at this point. I don't remember what the question was. I don't remember going where I was going. I guess the question was whether you believe that a manager can, through talking to a player or through observing a player in combination with consulting with his front office? Oh, I remember. No, I remember where I was going now. Okay, keep going.

So I'm going to tie this into what I wrote in the pre-game series, the pre-series preview, I should say, which was that Girardi had this great moment of gut success. And there's a little bit of a danger because as cool as it is to have a smart gut and to be able to have the years of expertise that Girardi has to be able to internalize these decisions and make these decisions that would overwhelm all of us, you still don't want to have too much faith in your gut. You never want to start believing in your own magic. And I think that there's always a risk that, I mean, yeah, I think probably Girardi does see better than we do when his players are slumping or when they're in a good place. But I think there's such a bias toward overvaluing your own evaluative skills that I think that probably when you start making increasingly

kind of out there decisions, you get into a danger. It's sort of like with punditry, where if you're a pundit, the incentive is for you to make increasingly outlandish claims or predictions. And I think if you're a manager and you start managing too much from the gut and you start, I don't know, believing too much in the power of the idiosyncratic decision, then you can end up looking sort of foolish. I think that I personally think that Girardi looked foolish in this game. And I think that Dave Cameron made a great point a moment ago where he said, look, if A-Rod or Swisher had started this game, would anybody have been calling for a Bonyas to pinch hit for them against Koch in the ninth? And there's just no way that that's

true. And I think framing it that way makes it clear yeah I guess so although I'm sure there would be some segment of the Yankees fan base who would call for that if A-Rod had gone 0 for 3 with three ugly strikeouts um I don't know but I mean for me I guess the fact that he wasn't starting the game is a is well against a righty though is a meaningful thing against a righty though I mean not starting against a right hander is a meaningful thing. Against a righty, though. I mean, not starting against a right-hander is a different thing. Yeah.

I mean, by that logic, no one would ever be pinch-hit for. I don't know. It's tough because you see certain people defer completely to the theory that a manager or that a team knows something we don't and that whenever they do something that seems silly to us, it's because we don't know all the facts. And then there's people on the other side of the spectrum completely who think that that's silly and that teams are not all-know knowing and that the other people are giving them too much credit and that if they think they know something, they might actually not know something. And that really we're pretty close in overall knowledge or ability to evaluate these sorts of decisions. And I'm not sure exactly where on this spectrum I am. I guess I'm kind of in the

middle. I don't know. I mean, I've talked to front office people who have been displeased with something that their team's manager did and didn't defer to that manager. So I don't know. That seems to suggest that even someone who kind of does know all the facts in the background can still disagree with what a manager does, unless then you want to say that, well, maybe the manager knows different things than the front office person does because he has looked into his players' eyes and gauged their confidence somehow that way. I don't know. It's something that there are many ways to approach, and I guess most of the ways that we would approach them suggest that it was not

an optimal decision. Well, let me ask one more thing. Everybody has pointed to Rodriguez's struggles against right-handers this year as kind of a reason to sit him for a Banez or Chavez. to sit him for a bonyas or or chavez and um you know similarly his his numbers against left-handers would suggest that he would have been a good person to bring in against coke um a rod curiously um or i guess this isn't all that interesting it's just sort of uh quirky but he has a one point platoon split in his career um and in three before this year um he actually had sizable reverse splits in each of the previous three um do you think that that's a factor i mean we if you didn't know anything um well i guess if if not for – how to put this? Okay, so the split this year that shows him being still good against lefties is a very small sample because splits against lefties by nature are. Do the previous three years, do you think, create a more compelling reason for the Yankees not to even think that he can hit lefties.

And sorry about the chainsaw. If you can hit the chainsaw, let's see if I can move. I mean, so you're saying that the three years before this year he didn't – he was fine against righties, you're saying? He was fine against righties and he was poor against lefties, yeah. Yeah, well – I don't know if it matters. I don't know.

Splits are so dangerous. I don't know. it matters. I don't know. Splits are so dangerous. I don't know. I guess I'm. Do you think A-Rod is, at his core, actually better against righties because of those three years of splits? Or do you think those were just a fluke? Yeah, I don't think I would believe that he's better against righties. I don't either. I wouldn't either.

I am willing to believe that during those 18 at-bats where he struck out in over half of them, I'm talking about the at-bats against righties this postseason, I'm willing to believe that during those at-bats he was less likely to succeed against righties than his platoon splits would suggest. I am not necessarily willing to believe that that means that he is still less likely to succeed against them. I misspoke a little bit. It was actually – before this year, it was sizable reverse split in 2011, sizable reverse split in 2010, sizable reverse split in 2008. So three of the previous four years, and then the fourth year, they were almost identical.

So did I put that clearly? I mean, I'm willing to believe that while he was looking so terrible, as Jason was saying, and he was swinging at bad pitches and not swinging at good pitches and swinging at good pitches and missing them completely. I'm willing to believe that during that period, I guess his true talent against righties was less than his career splits would suggest. I don't know whether it's safe to say that it still is or that it would be tonight or tomorrow. Does that make sense? It does make sense. Okay. So I thought that after the first couple days of – after the Abanez game, I thought in a way it sort of almost made Alex Rodriguez kind of more sympathetic. I thought it made Girardi look good because Girardi stood up to this superstar and got a great result out of it and played his gut and whatever, all that.

and got a great result out of it and played his gut and whatever, all that. And A-Rod kind of looked good for, you know, not making a big deal out of it for, you know, I think you could feel a little bit of sympathy for the guy. Um,

and so now though, Girardi has, I think just totally mangled this thing, maybe for good reason, maybe to win games, but, uh, this is now way past the point of no return, right?

I mean, this is going to be. Yeah, I think so, but disastrous for her, but A-Rod has of mean, this is going to be disastrous for him. Yeah, I think so, but A-Rod has, of course, completely erased any sympathy there was for him, too, with the autographed ball thing. Yeah, I don't even know what that is. I saw the most recent game, I guess, at Yankee Stadium, had been flirting with some women a couple rows behind the dugout and sending them a ball with his autograph and phone number and had generally been not focusing on the game. People were outraged of course um so wouldn't it be great if

we found out that a rod actually was unavailable to pinch hit because he was taking a nap in the locker room griffey style yeah um so anyway that kind of that i think erased any tendency people would have had towards sympathy for him so but yes it certainly is hard to imagine the Yankees going into 2013 with both A-Rod and Girardi at this point, which I wouldn't have said certainly a couple weeks ago. But as much as they've both said that it hasn't damaged their relationship, it's kind of hard to imagine that someone who's accustomed to being a superstar can swallow this and forget about it and let it go. All right.

Well, that's the end of this show. More baseball today. We'll be back tomorrow.