Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 642: The Gambling, Brackets, and Bonds Edition

Episode Date: March 25, 2015

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about players out of position, pace-of-play rules, Bonds vs. Clemens, gambling, and more.

They don't know, they don't know, like I know, like I know. Do you know, they don't know, I don't know, I don't know. What my baby, what my baby, put it down, put it down. What my baby, what my baby, put it down, put it down. Good morning and welcome to episode 642 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello.

Indeed you are. Yeah, it's the listener email show. Anything to talk about before we talk about emails? Well, we haven't talked about the banished to the pen bracket, but I don't know if that's intentional or not. I don't know. I told people to listen to it at the tail end of one of the previews the other day. So people should go read it at banishedtothepen.com. It's a bracket March madness themed bracket of effectively wild recurring characters and jokes. And it's funny and you can vote on the things that you want to see advance

and you might enjoy reading it regardless. So go check it out. Are you rooting for anything? Not really. I don't have a favorite. Let the people decide. Yeah. I,

I try not to acknowledge these things, but I got swept up by this one. I couldn't help it. Try not to acknowledge your fans, you mean? I try not to acknowledge. No, it's not that. I try not to acknowledge that any of this is for consumption. for consumption. I really try to avoid thinking about anybody listening to it because it's much harder to do

when you do. I like to just keep it between you and me. If I start doing things like reading the Facebook page or getting a Facebook password that makes it more complicated.

But this one, I just couldn't help it. It is intimidating when you think about how many people listen to a podcast if you put them all in a room. Oh my gosh. The biggest room that I have ever spoken in front of would pale in comparison to how many people are listening to this right now. So that's something to think about. Give us the yips for the rest of this episode.

Yeah. I have one I'm rooting for, but I don't think it's going to win. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Okay. Well, go check out the series. It's up there all week. All right. Anything else?

No. No X-Files theories? What? X-Files is coming back. I did not know that. Now you know. Okay. Okay.

Emails. We've got lots of emails. I guess we should start with an email that you have pre-answered. This is a question from Steve in Duluth, Minnesota. He says, In episode 627, you answered a question regarding drafting a team of all catchers. I've been thinking about two related questions. If there was a team of all catchers and also a team of all first basemen, and each of the nine position players ignoring the DH,

which of the nine teams would you think would be the best? For this example, the choice of players on the pitcher's team would be much larger. That's the one you answered, right? It was a two-parter? I did. I answered that one, yeah. So what did you find? Did you read?

Have you read? I have not. You just wrote it. So this is a question that we have been asked in various formats over and over and over again. I feel like there's something about the team of all blanks against team of all blanks that certainly predates this podcast even. I remember when I was a kid, Beckett Baseball, I think, if I recall correctly, or maybe it was Baseball Digest,

or maybe it was Sport, one of the magazines that I read, would put together teams based on like, uh, initials. There'd be like the, the team of players with all MM initials, things like that. And I would sit in class and I would make these teams and I'd try to make them as powerful as possible and all that. So there is something about formulating a team based on, um, some arbitrary category that is appealing, but also, uh, particularly when the category is not quite arbitrary as this one is. And so we've gotten, I think we answered Trouts versus Kershaw's at one point. And I think we answered Trouts versus Harper's maybe at some point. And we've been

asked position versus position. So I just finally, I had a little bit of time this afternoon. So I went and I went, I did every position and I put together a roster, uh, based on, I don't know, like nothing. I tried to, as much as possible, I tried to keep it realistic. So like, um, Buster Posey is the shortstop because as we talked about when we talked about the all catcher team, he played shortstop in college and I believe that he could probably play shortstop better than most catchers and maybe better than all of them except russell martin but i put martin in center because i think he moves better than any other catchers and uh i tried to get guys who had minor league experience the very least uh some positions it's just impossible like there is not a single, for instance, right fielder who has played shortstop in the

past year. By right fielder, I mean played at least 50% of his games there last year. And so you had to guess and you'd use proxies and you'd make things up. And that's how Robinson Cano ended up pitching. I don't know why, but Robinson Cano ended up pitching. I put these teams up against each other, and it was interesting. The first baseman beat the catchers. Tell me when you're surprised

by this, or maybe I'll make you guess the rest, but the first baseman beat the catchers. The only reason that a catcher would have an advantage over a first baseman is that catching is part of the game. Everybody could at least credibly stand at shortstop without getting injured, but it's not clear to me that Paul Goldschmidt could catch no matter how many pads you put on him. However, the first basemen were blessed by the presence of Steven Vogt.

I also could have gone with Mike Napoli there, but I didn't need to because their bats were so good. So the first baseman beat the catchers. That one seemed pretty clear to me. All right, so then I did the guys who were moved down the defensive spectrum from their original position. The second baseman against the left fielders. Do you have a guess? So how did you do defense with this?

Did you do defense? No, I didn't do anything. I put together the rosters and then I named a winner. Okay. I acknowledged the weak and strong spots defensively. I didn't estimate. I didn't call this in like an hour and 40 minutes. I didn't estimate the defense using any method.

I do have their collective projected true averages, but no. I also did not, for instance, try to speculate on what Bryce Harper's ERA would be. I just sort of said whether I thought he'd be good or not. So second baseman, left fielders, go. Left fielders. Left fielders win, yes. I do like the idea of an outfield of Dee Gordon, Jose Altuve, and Ben Zobrist. I feel like that could be a very good outfield. And the left fielder's infield is very poor. But there's an offensive edge, and second basemen don't have arms.

That's the big thing is that most guys are at second basemen because they don't throw very well. So getting a right fielder and a third baseman and a pitcher is not all that easy after all. And so I went with the left fielder. All right. Not that left fielders are known for their arms either. That's true, but a lot of sometimes players play left field just because of circumstances.

So like Starling Marte might have the best arm in the game, And sometimes players play left field just because of circumstances. So like Starling Marte might have the best arm in the game, and he's a left fielder last year. And Bryce Harper has an elite arm, and he was a left fielder last year. And Alex Gordon moved to left field from third base, so you know he's got the arm. And Justin Upton was now a left fielder last year. He's got a right fielder's arm.

Ryan Zimmerman was a left fielder last year. He used to have a third baseman's arm. So, in fact, it's not that hard to find arms in left field. It's very hard to find arms at second base. RJ and I had a long discussion about who had good arms at second base, and it basically came down to Neil Walker and Robinson Cano. And that was it.

So, alright. And Walker had to catch because he caught in the minors. If you caught in the minors, you are catching. Yes. If you caught a game, Paul Goldschmidt played center field on this team, by the way, because he played one game in center field in his first season in the minors. He knows the angles out there. Exactly.

All right, the flip side of that, they stayed at their original positions. Teams, center fielders, short stops. Who you got? Take shortstops. So this one was hard because I don't believe there is any centerfielder or shortstop who qualifies for these teams who has ever caught a professional game at catcher. And so that one I had to just make things up.

And there's nobody who really profiles as a catcher. I don't know who does profile as a catcher, but none of these guys do. At least we had Billy Hamilton could go back to shortstop, and Mookie Bett could go back to the infield, and Danny Santana could go back to the infield. So they were hanging in there in center field. But I went with the shortstops mainly because it was fairly close, but to me this was one of the places where the fake pitcher against fake pitcher was lopsided.

You have Andrelton Simmons against Mike Trout. I don't feel confident about projecting any of these position players as pitchers, but I've seen those guys' arms. If Simmons decided to be a pitcher tomorrow how many pitchers in the world do you think are better than him or how many pitchers in organized baseball remind me of his pitching bona fides he pitched in college he was drafted as a possible pitcher he threw 95 or something 98 i would say if he became a pitcher tomorrow, I'd probably take every major league pitcher over him, at least in the short term. And I'd take probably, huh, I'd take maybe 40% of AAA pitchers.

Okay. Something like that. And then you can decrease the percentages from there as you go down the levels. Yeah, so I was going to say 600, and it sounds like you're pretty close to that, just doing the math in my head. Yeah, well, I think there were 600-something pitchers in the majors last year, but some of them were AAA back-and-forth types. Presumably those would comprise most of the 40%. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

All right. And then we have the strong arms region, the third baseman, and the right fielders. Right fielders sounds pretty good to me. I like right fielders. All right. I went with third baseman. Third baseman was the surprise of the tournament to me because there's actually a lot of flexibility here. There's a lot of guys who, like you have Manny Machado, who's a legit shortstop, and Matt Carpenter, who's a legit second.

I mean, these aren't guys who you can force them back to a position. They recently played those positions at a pretty high level. And then you have Josh Harrison, who's a legitimate outfielder, and Prado is a legitimate outfielder. You know you've got an arm for every position. And surprisingly good hitters. They were the third best hitters. Better hitters than the left fielders, even.

So it does, there is the, oh, and you also have, this is a blessing, and I think this is probably not a fluke. I think that usually there is a recent catcher who's playing third base. And right now that recent catcher is Josh Donaldson. You've got an MVP, basically, at catcher. And so this turned out to be a really good team. The right fielders had no infield. Shane Victorino's playing second because he played there as a 19-year-old.

Jose Bautista, is it short because he played some short? No, because he played some third. Ryan Braun is back in the infield. How well that went. it short because he played some short uh no because he played some third uh ryan braun is back in the infield how well that went jason worth was a catcher once so he's got a catch i mean it's really ugly the only way that this could uh close if each row is a significantly better pitcher than pablo sandoval then it would close the gap but to me it was a landslide third baseman definitely take it so in the second round i put third baseman past first baseman shortstop past left field third round i put third base past shortstop the whole thing if simmons is really good at pitcher then i would go with shortstop

but i don't have enough evidence to say that and to me the teams are the third baseman are clearly better than the shortstop otherwise and so then a third baseman against pitchers. I made some estimates. I have some estimates here, Ben. Okay. Using log five, using Clayton Kershaw's actual results against the league, using pitchers as hitters' actual results, and then bumping it upward for the fact that I'm selecting guys who I think would be better, using position players pitching results and then adjusting that downward

because I think Sandoval might be worse than the average, and using my projected third base roster true average. And then putting that all into log five formulas, I get the hitters hitting for a 220 true average against Kershaw and the pitchers having a 190 true average against Sandoval. I think that the 190 might be low. I think if I had more time, I probably would have figured out a reason to just fudge that and get it up higher. Maybe it's the same, but I think the third baseman have a roughly 150 run edge on defense,

and also an edge on base running. I don't think it would be that close. I think the third baseman would crush pitchers. Just crush them. Like maybe win 75% in games they play. Maybe 90-70. Wow. Well, I'm glad you applied the level of rigor to this exercise

that listeners of this podcast have become accustomed to from our previous debates about teams out of position. So never ask a question about this again. Yeah, Steve just covered like 10 future listener email shows in one question. So that was very efficient. Thank you, Steve. Yeah. All right.

And I will link to that post if people want to go look at the rosters. It's up at BP. All right. Question from Henry. Really a comment from Henry and really a comment from henry and then a question from henry i think the pace of play rules may backfire spectacularly the game is not slowing down because pitchers are slower because joe madden shifts a lot or because david ortiz has a short attention span the game is slowing down because the stakes of winning and

losing are going up the dollar value of a win keeps increasing, and with it, the pressure on every decision that has an effect on the outcome of the game. Decades ago, teams used to talk about offense as an inning-by-inning concept, then they started talking about working every at-bat, now David Ortiz talks about the battle of every pitch. The tactical unit of measure is now very small, so tactics take more time. And this progression makes sense. If every win is worth five bajillion dollars, then it's economically worth it to spend a great deal of time on the minutia. I'd try to get a one percentage too, if one percent was a million bucks. And if there is data to inform even the smallest decisions, then of course it will be used.

And if there isn't data, it's worth another statistician's salary to create that missing info. The game has slowed down because of television, money, and data. So that's a long preamble to my question, which is, is there any rule governing how quickly the catcher must return the ball to the pitcher, or governing how often a pitcher can clean his cleats with the tongue depressor? Or if Joe Peralta wants to slow down, can Yasmany Grandal hold onto the ball longer? Or can Peralta develop an addiction to the rosin bag? At $500 per offense, I think teams will pay their sluggers fines when the batter steps out of the box.

If slowing down has a positive impact on a team's win probability, won't they find ways to do it, no matter the consequences? Good comment and question by Henry. So I find his argument plausible, right? That it's the increased stakes in some sense driving the increased time of game or the slower pace of game.

Does that make sense to you? It definitely does. And left to their own devices, teams will, yeah, certainly players and teams will always choose to win over to entertain. They will choose that tact that makes them more likely to win, even if it makes the game worse. That's why there are rules, and that's why there is a league to enforce them. So, yeah, go ahead.

You were going to talk. I interrupted you. Well, so there aren't really rules about governing the time that every action on the field takes. So the penalty, the 20-second rule is the pitcher has to deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball with the bases unoccupied. So right, if he never receives the ball, then that timer doesn't start, presumably. And then you'd have to install a separate timer for how long the catcher has to return the ball to the pitcher. And you'd have to keep subdividing and adding timers for subsets of actions until you had covered every possible action that a player could take so so yes there are there are certainly

loopholes there are ways that teams could get around this if they wanted to but i guess the hope is that there will be a subtle social pressure of some sort, that even if a $500 fine is insignificant to a player, that, I don't know, maybe just the act of being fined, of being chastised in that way, is enough to correct the behavior or at least stop the inflation of game length just just sort of the the message that is sent that it's important to major league baseball the people who make the rules that

games be faster or quicker that maybe that would just sort of rub off on players somehow that it would you know influence them even if any particular $500 fine means almost nothing to someone who's making many, many thousands of dollars a day. Yeah. You know, Matt Corey once wrote about Pat Ben-D-D. Dang it. We're supposed to practice these things. Couldn't have to figure that out soon, possibly. And when he was writing about it, he sort of made the point that there are ways, because he was writing about the time that he and the batter switched hands. He just kept switching back and forth, and that's why they had to make the rule about

it, because they spent like five minutes just going back and forth. And he was making the point that there are all sorts of cases where there is nothing that forces action, and that if you wanted to, you could take longer as long as you wanted if there was some advantage. And he mentioned that, for instance, the catcher could go to the mound every pitch. There's no rule that says you can't go to the mound. If he wanted, he could go back to hand the ball to the pitcher every time and make sure that he didn't have the one in a million case of the ball getting away from the pitcher and the baserunner advancing. And he could talk to the pitcher on every pitch

so that nobody could ever steal his signs and so on. But they don't do it. And I wonder why, well, first of all, I was going to say I wonder why that hasn't happened. And maybe it has. So do you think that catchers go back to the mound way more than they need to and way more than they used to? Like, is that also a place that the game has slowed down or is that sort of held steady in your estimation? I don't know. I'd have trouble estimating. It seems to me that just everything is slower and everything that could cause slowdowns happens more often. But I don't know.

I'd have to go back and watch old games or something, as some people have done. Yeah. Okay. Well, the point that I was making, though, beyond that is that there is something about the batter stepping out of the box and the pitcher taking a long time on the mound that I don't think they feel like they're slowing down the game. I don't think they feel like they're delaying anything. They're just like it's only a couple of seconds here and there. They're just taking a moment to look around and get settled. And it's just a drip, you know, like they're just one drip in the ocean. And so they probably don't actually think that it is boring for us to watch them step out of the box or to watch them staring at the mound. Because the game is paced differently for them.

They are working on a different clock than we are. even if the fine was $5.75, is a reminder that, in fact, you are slow. And everybody is thinking about it, about you all the time. And maybe some guys will take that as a challenge. I kind of think that they won't. I think that David Ortiz's big talk aside, maybe I'm wrong. Actually, now that I think about it, there are a lot of cases. Well, maybe, I don't know if I'm wrong or I'm right. Just do a podcast where you argue with yourself before saying anything.

Well, David Ortiz just doesn't have this clock going in his head. He steps out of the box and he's not thinking tick-tock, tick-tock. And even if he doesn't care about the fine, just having it be in his head that there is a clock that people are watching and judging him about, I could see that just being enough. Like once it's – like I don't know. I'm trying to think. So like I didn't – I had a car that didn't have seatbelts.

My first car didn't have seatbelts because it was a 1940 truck and they didn't have seatbelts and my understanding uh i believe this to be true is that if you had a car that predated the seatbelt laws uh you you were grandfathered and you didn't that is true as you know i've recently read the dmv guide to driving in new york state i think it's pre-1965 if you have a car from before then you don't need seatbelts because it presumably doesn't have seatbelts. Yeah, so I didn't need to wear a seatbelt. I couldn't wear a seatbelt. I didn't have a seatbelt.

And yet, even as a 16-year-old, there was something weird about not having a seatbelt on that I was aware of because I knew that seatbelt rules are rules that people follow. Like it had been put in my head that you wear a seatbelt. And I feel like just having a rule that you're aware of changes behavior. I think we tend to, in a lot of ways, outsource morality to lawmakers. Instead of dealing with the very difficult questions of what is moral or what is ethical. We simply lean on what is legal. And to just have a rule, I think will change people's kind of ethics to some degree and probably will speed a lot of players up. Although there is an incentive to have seatbelts other than social pressure. There is not just- Not dying, but yes, maybe not to a teenager. It is interesting, though, if a team did determine that taking more time was beneficial,

and we talked to Adam Sabzi last week about how the Rays had the longest games and the slowest pitchers, and who knows, maybe they determined somehow that that actually is beneficial. It would be hard to do that. I don't think I've seen a study that suggests that going slow helps you, but you could imagine that it might. If a team thought that was worth even one run, that would be like $1,400, $500 fines. So if you thought that it were going to help you, you would just tell your team, right? You would go down to the clubhouse and say, hey, don't tell the commissioner's office that we told you this, but we'll pick up your fines because we think it'll

help us win. And you pick up hundreds and hundreds of fines. And if you're willing to pay whatever it is, $7 million for a win on the free agent market, then a run is $700,000 and that's $1,400, $500 fines. And that would kind of remove the social pressure, at least partially, because you'd have your team would be collectively breaking this rule and you'd be told that it was okay. Your team, but not the world. I don't know if you could totally block out that there's a wide world out there beyond your team. Totally block out that there's a wide world out there beyond your team. And yeah, so why not just make the third offense $5 million? Yeah, lifetime ban.

Yes. All right, question from Scott. After reading Grant Brisby's projecting Brandon Crawford's 2015 season post, I got lost in the rabbit hole that is the ELO Raider on Baseball Reference. After a little while making my voice heard, I looked at the rankings. What do you think accounts for Roger Clemens ranking in the top 10, number 8 as I write this, and Barry Lamar Bonds ranking out of the top 100, number 119 as of this writing? Even A-Rod is ranked higher, number 82 today bobby bonds is higher even so this is the the elo raider on baseball reference which i have not actually used i don't think but it's a it's a cool feature where where visitors to baseball reference can just vote on a head-to-head

matchup between players say which one they think is better. And over time of many people visiting the site and voting on players, there is a hierarchy that is established where, you know, one guy is better than this other guy. And so he's ranked higher and over many votes, it all comes out into this ranking of who the best baseball players ever are, according to the visitors or readers of Baseball Reference. And so Scott noticed that roger clemens is among the top 10 barry bonds is not among the top 100 even though they are both on

the short list statistically of best players ever and are often lumped together as ped people from the ped era and their hall of fame votes have been almost in lockstep. We've talked about how there'll be like two or three votes separated every year and why that's interesting. But for the most part, it seems like the public opinion about them is fairly similar. And yet the ELO Raider disagrees. Do you have a theory for this? I actually don't.

And I really genuinely don't i i have no idea i have noticed the bonds thing and uh throughout the years because i look up bonds baseball reference page four or five times a day i have not noticed that clemens though was so high and i don't have a hypothesis and i wonder wonder if you do. I don't really. I linked Scott to some research that Louis Paulus wrote up for BP where he compared public perception or public opinion of those two players specifically and of Bonds alone to try to see whether there was evidence of racism in the way that those players are perceived. And he concluded that there is some evidence to suggest that there is, or that there is a significant divide in the way those two players are perceived, especially when broken down by the ethnicity of the people being polled. So I guess you could say that that's not a non-zero factor but i i don't

know i mean i guess bonds has a maybe has a higher profile these days just from being on instagram and taking weird pictures and i don't know whether that keeps his transgressions fresher in the mind of people voting at baseball reference, but that doesn't seem like a very satisfying theory to me. So I don't know. you could make the case that Bonds was the worst offender. Not that we know for sure what either of them did, but just based on what is out there, you could say that. Or maybe just the fact that Bonds was not particularly well-liked, especially outside of San Francisco, was not the most warm and friendly player. So maybe that has something to do with it.

But Clemens. Clemens was not at the other end of that spectrum no but maybe closer to the center than bonds but i don't know i mean statistically speaking if ideally the elo raider would would just be based on how good the players actually were there's not much of a separation between them, so I don't know how to explain that big gap. I don't either. I don't either. It's hard.

If I'm understanding... Unless, I mean, is it possible that just some virulent Bonds hater is just voting Bonds down against everyone over and over? I mean, I'm looking and i'm like i just i wonder that too and so like i'm looking to see whether you can do that and it doesn't seem like you can really choose your matchups and there are hundreds of hundreds of players so you'd have to click you know 150 times just to vote once on bonds uh i don't know i'm not well versed in how the elo uh rankings work like i don't know the the technicalities so i'm i'm not sure this is accurate or not but so each as you as you described it you get to vote you get two players you choose which one is better that's your vote

and that's a matchup right and so babe ruth has has been in 8,200 of these, 8,300 of these and he has won 3,200 of the matchups which is 78% of the matchups. He wins 78% of the time and there's a matchup, okay? And Bonds is – Oh, I just see that win more than that. Well, maybe he's going up against Bonds. Anyway, and Walter Johnson is the highest for the pitchers. He's at 79%, and

Greg Maddox is at 70%, and so on. So Bonds is at 59%, which is obviously low. It's clearly suppressed, but it's not crazy low. He's ranked 119th on this, but

for instance, Johnny Damon is ranked ahead of him at 118, but Bonds has won more of his match-ups than Johnny Damon. Strength of opponent matters here. I assume, I'm assuming that's the case. I wonder if it's just that if you figure 80% of people are voting in good faith and Bonds wins most of those, and the 20% are not voting in good faith and they're just going to vote against Bonds no matter what, I wonder if this is just a quirk of the opponent rating system, because now we're talking about a fairly small sample. If Bonds is losing regularly to Mickey Morandini and Joe Girardi and Scott Hairston and Deona Navarro and Ronnie Cedeno,

if his 20% of bad faith voters have come against Joe Dugans and things like that, whereas Roger Clemens, who doesn't have a much higher winning percentage in these matchups, but maybe his 20% have just by chance, because again, we're talking about a much smaller sample, have by chance been against a higher quality of opponent. His ranking, his rating is higher, but his matchup results aren't all that different. I think Clemens' matchup results are like 64%, 65%. We're only talking about five extra votes out of 100 that Clemens gets. It looks a lot different when they're ranked using this ELO method, but it's not a big difference in terms of voters. It's five votes, right?

Yeah. Out of 100. Okay. I don't know. Just a guess. Go vote for Bonds. All right. Play index?

All right. Play index? All right. So I started by just wondering who had the best bad season where best did the most to help his team via win probability added. And bad is his overall numbers were very bad. And so I just started looking to see who had these very high WPA seasons with very bad numbers. And I think the king of this, probably after doing a few of these different searches, I think I landed on the king of this being Troy O'Leary in 1996. Troy O'Leary that year had a OPS plus of like 87 or something like that. He was 88. Yeah, he hit 260, 327, 427 in a high offense era, in a high offense park. And yet he managed to have a very good win probability added of about three wins. And just for the sake of completion, I'm going to tell you

where that ranked league wide, which would have made him sort of a down-ballot MVP candidate. It was the same as, for instance, he had the same almost identical win probability added as Ken Griffey Jr., who that year hit 49 home runs and probably won the MVP. I don't know if he did or not, but he probably did. It seemed like he always did. Yeah, he finished fourth. Sorry.

All right. So, Troy O'Leary, bad season, good win probability added. I looked at all of his plate appearances that year, sorted them by leverage index to see how he did, how he managed this. appearances, he had like a walk-off double, a walk-off triple, a walk-off single. He walked a bunch of times. In those 20 plate appearances with the highest leverage he had, he reached base 12 of the 20 times. He hit almost 500. He slugged almost 1,000. He also was the beneficiary of an error that turned an out into a rally and was also a big help for him. So that explains it, right? So then I wanted to go a little further and this got me wondering if anybody has performed extremely well in high leverage situations in his career compared relative to his overall performance. So I took all the players from since 1988 who had I think 1,000 played appearances or

more in high leverage situations. I compared their OPS in those situations, their OPS overall. I sorted by whose was the highest relative to his normal. And the champion is Brian Roberts. The champion on the other side, the unchampion, the worst, was Royce Clayton. Brian Roberts' OPS in high leverage was 13% higher than his OPS overall. Royce Clayton's was about 30% lower. Do you have any names you want to... I have the spreadsheet. Do you have any names you're curious about?

Pat Tabler. Okay. I don't know if Pat Tabler got the play-in appearances. He didn't get the play-in appearances. Then no. He was the only one. David Ortiz. You're interested in David Ortiz? Sure. All right. So David Ortiz's OPS in high leverage situations is two percentage points higher. So David Ortiz's OPS in high leverage situations is two percentage points higher.

To answer a few questions you might have, the median is almost exactly the same. It's almost exactly 0% higher. It's like a half a percent higher in high leverage situations than in lower leverage situations. And the correlation between batter's OPS in high leverage and batters OPS overall is 91, which is strong, very strong. And the correlation between the ratio of OPS in high leverage situations to OPS overall and overall talent. So if you were wondering if good hitters tend to be at the top of this or bad hitters tend to be at the top of this or what, there is zero correlation.

It's completely random or uncorrelated. So, those are a couple of questions. But anyway, Brian Roberts. So, Brian Roberts, this surprised me because Brian Roberts doesn't have, like, a reputation for being, like, super-duper clutch. And yet, in his career, in high-leverage situations of which are many hundreds, more than a thousand, he has an 850 something OPS with the game on the line, and overall it's only a 750 OPS. Or I guess in the other situations, it's only a 750 OPS. That is huge, right? It's a big difference. It's actually 858 in high leverage, 736 in medium and low combined. So 120 points of OPS in a very large sample, or I guess a kind of large sample.

So you wonder, wow, this guy is like the super clutch king of the world. We should be hearing about him. So the reason that we should be hearing about him. So the reason that we don't, two things. One, I broke down his performance in high and non-high leverage situations. And so his strikeout rate is identical. It's 13.5% in both situations. His unintentional walk rate is identical. It's 9.2% in high leverage,

9.3% otherwise. His extra base hit percentage is identical. It's 6.6% in high leverage. It's 6.5% in everything else. The only thing that's different is that he has a 50-point BABIP increase in high leverage situations, which you might give him credit for except that we've already established that he's not really hitting the ball any harder and he's not really doing anything different with his approach. And so it's probably a fluke and that's when you realize that a sample size of 1,000 seems like a lot when it's a guy's entire career and he's been a veteran for a long time. But in fact, 1,000 plate appearances is still only 1,000 plate appearances and it's still prone to Babbitt fluctuations and that's what's going on here.

The other reason that you don't hear about Brian Roberts being clutch is that I then went and looked at every plate appearance he's ever had and I did the same thing. I sorted by leverage index and I looked at his highest leverage situations. So we know that in high leverage, generally speaking, he hits very well. But not all high leverage is the same. You could have, like for instance, high leverage is anything over one. So for instance, a head by one run in the top of the seventh is technically high leverage. As is, bases loaded, two outs, down by two in the bottom of the ninth, which is also high leverage,

but is much, much, much, much, much, much higher leverage. So, if we look just at the very high end of his plate appearances, in his top 10 leveraged at-bats in his career, he went 0 for 10. So, that was not very good. If you go down to 25,

he went 3 for 25 with one double and two singles. And really, if you go even further than that, it takes a while before you start to see the uptake. It's really not until you're getting down to barely noticeably high leverage that these stats start to pick up. So Brian Roberts is the perfect guy to use if you want to convince somebody that clutch hitting exists. And he is the perfect guy to use if you want to prove to somebody that clutch hitting doesn't exist he's kind of clutch and also a secret choker he is he is that's exactly right it just depends which he's just like a clutch compiler or something he's he chokes when it's a clutch all right well baseball All right. Well, baseball reference play index coupon code BP. Get the reduced subscription price of $30 on a one-year subscription. We highly recommend it as always.

match-fixing accusations recently, including one discussed on a recent episode of Hang Up and Listen, which got me wondering about the likelihood of a baseball gambling scandal. I tried to imagine scenarios in which games could be fixed. I think that umpires are the most likely culprits for involvement in such a scandal. In the post linked above, and he links to a post that he wrote, I wrote, so even though the days of many umps having trademark strike zones seem to be numbered, an umpire still has the power to alter key moments in the game in order to affect the outcome for bettors. And just like the fringy tennis player doesn't throw every match, if umps were strategic about spreading out their favoritism across MLB's long season,

they could potentially get away with it. However, I concluded that players probably make too much money, managers have too little control, and umpires face too much accountability for any of those groups to fix the outcome of games. What do you guys think? Are umps the most likely culprits? Could you ever imagine a player throwing a game? Am I missing any potential scenarios? This has come up a lot lately because of the Pete Rose application for reinstatement and the discussion about whether to unban him from baseball because of the potential deterrent value of banning someone for life and whether there's any cost to removing that ban.

And that presupposes that there is a chance that there could be another game fixing scandal in the future so have conditions evolved to the extent that it's not a realistic fear anymore or or maybe i guess you could say if it is realistic does banning from baseball act as any sort of deterrent because at this point as francis points out players make an extraordinary amount of money they have no no real reason to throw a game as far as day-to-day living goes or or even rest of life living goes. When players were actually fixing games and throwing games, they were not making all that much more than the average American citizen, and they were working off-season jobs, and it could be a life-changing amount of money.

Whereas now it would be pretty hard for it to be a life-changing amount of money. It could be, I suppose, because the sums involved would be much larger than they ever were. Also, they could just be, you know, instant retirement and buy your own island money. But if the money's that big, then I don't know whether banning from baseball would actually be a disincentive anyway. I guess he's right that umpires would be the best candidates just because of their ratio of earnings to impact on outcome. Although, then again, how often does an umpire get the opportunity to really change the outcome of a game? Probably not that often. I mean, it happens, but you couldn't really predict that it could happen.

Probably not that often. I mean, it happens, but you couldn't really predict that it could happen. We could have reviewed Nate Silver's piece about umpires throwing games that he wrote in 2008, I think, if we'd wanted to. But we didn't. I think that Nate found not much opportunity, as I recall. But that was before we really had the framing data that we had that predated all the framing stuff. True.

And so I don't know if that affects things or not. Yeah, I mean, they probably have... I mean, other than the pitcher, the umpire might have more power than anybody in the park. And like you say, Like you say, by far he has the most financial incentive too. Although, I guess to some degree, if you're an umpire, you're pretty much an umpire for life. If you're making $280,000 or whatever they make for 30 years, that's more total earning than the scrub third baseman who might be in the league for three years or less. And who is going to, in some games when he does start, he will have an opportunity to make a difference. So yeah, maybe the scrub third baseman. Who

could do it without being suspicious? Who can do it with the least amount of suspicion? We don't find it suspicious when a pitcher gives up four runs in a relief appearance. If you only do it once or a couple times. We don't find it suspicious when a batter goes over four.

Although the batter going over four is almost the most likely outcome already, and so it probably doesn't move the odds all that much. We don't find it suspicious when a third baseman throws the ball away or when the base runner gets caught stealing. So all these things are fairly easy to camouflage. The thing that was interesting about the tennis fixing stuff

is that the examples they gave weren't like, oh, he lost, or he lost in straight sets, which is a very specific thing to bet and a very specific thing to have happen. Yeah, it was bets on individual points, right? Individual points, yeah, things like that. And so anyway, I don't know. I'm not sure I know the answer to this. I would feel like, yeah, I guess I'd expect an umpire scandal in my lifetime.

Why not? Why wouldn't there be? I mean, if you, well, the other thing, too, is that the thing that made the tennis one both doable and obvious is that they were betting on basically like very small uh small profile tennis tournaments that hardly anybody was betting on yeah but that you could bet on like you could bet all over the world on this random stupid little tennis tournament and i don't know does anybody bet on minor league baseball or college baseball or anything like that i don't know you would you would think if they were betting on tennis matches

between the number 300 ranked guy and the number 280 ranked guy, you'd think that there would be everything, right? But I don't know. Googling. Can I bet on minor league baseball? Minor league baseball betting lines. I don't see anything. Nothing has shown up. I don't know. I don't have a good answer to this. It's a good question. I don't see anything. Nothing has shown up.

I don't know. I don't have a good answer to this. It's a good question. It's a better question than I have an answer. I wish I had thought about it. Yeah. Ask again. Ask it again next week.

We'll take a crack at it every week from now on. It can be in next year's bracket. Uh-huh. This question asked over and over and over again. Right. Okay. This is an answer. Somebody asked if any sports books offer minor league baseball odds.

And this is on a message board, and here's the answer. No, 15 periods. At least I don't know, and I really don't want to know as well. Seven periods. Minor league baseball, eight periods. A crap emoji. It seems definitive. Yeah.

All right. Put it on that tab. All right. Well, yeah, I don't know. Someone will tell us, but I would imagine that it's like a rule 34 type thing. Like if you can think about it, you can bet on it. But someone will tell us.

Sean in Atlanta asked whether the thing that we talked about during the Giants preview podcast about when Grant used Marco Scudero as an example of an unreasonable contract that Brian Sabian had given to a veteran. And you pointed out that it was 20 million and it was three years, but the combination of those two things is not all that exorbitant. Three years, 20 million is pretty reasonable. So Sean wanted to know if that aspect of deals is an underreported part of baseball contracts, the length, because it seems from a player's perspective, at least in some cases, he would be more concerned about how much money he's making rather than how long he's going to be employed by a certain team.

Obviously, being an MLB player involves a lot of travel, and there isn't all that much stability and certainty regarding settling in one place anyway. And with guaranteed contracts, why not go for the money and more or less ignore the years? Would approaching and thinking about contracts this way benefit the team or the player? In Scudero's case, perhaps it benefited the team. In some cases, maybe spreading out the years to get the most money is beneficial to the player if he's not going to get that much money otherwise,

and a team is willing to spread out that money, essentially deferring money. I think that we've mentioned this before, but I think that cases where it applies are fairly rare. I think that in most cases, the dollar per year is more or less agreed on, and then you negotiate the years. And so it's fairly rare, I think, that a player kind of leaves, gets off track of what you would expect him to get per year or anything like that. So it would be, I think that it is maybe perhaps is under negotiated. Like I'm surprised that more players don't choose to get a longer contract for less money or a shorter contract with more money per year. There are very few contracts that just sort of

vary from what similar players get in their own contracts, in their contracts. And so I'm surprised that some players, depending on their life stage or depending on what they want or depending on how confident they are, don't take advantage of that. But they don't really, and so I find it's not really that relevant of a conversation for us to have. What was the contract that you pointed out maybe this offseason was kind of an anomaly in that players of that type or of that production level don't sign contracts like that like for a certain length of time oh right uh nick marcakis uh because he got four years and um yeah i looked at basically what did i i looked at players who make as much as marcakis does relative to the rest of the league, virtually never get four-year contracts. You basically don't go to four years for mediocre players,

which you would think, well, hey, if they're worth $3 million this year, why not give them $12 million over four years or whatever? Why wouldn't you give that guy who you want this year a four-year deal if the price is right? But for reasons that maybe we could speculate on or maybe reasons that we already know, they very rarely do. There's basically only, I think, three players that I found who signed four-year deals with an adjusted average annual value that was lower than Marquegas. And they were Omar Infante, Jason Vargas, and Luis Castillo.

So yeah, he was the example of a guy whose length was very surprising. It must have been in recognition of his best player without an MVP vote status. Or all-star appearance. All-star appearance, right. Either one. Maybe that's part of the marketing clause. Maybe if he is going to cash in finally a vote.

They're already printing up, finally a vote. Maybe he loses money. He has contract disincentives if he gets to do an all-star team. I'm surprised that that wasn't on the banish to the pen bracket. Nick Markekis. Alright, so that is it for today.

Good questions. Other good ones we didn't get to that I will save for next week. You can also keep questions coming at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Join the discussion at our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. We'll be back tomorrow with the St. Louis Cardinals preview.