Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 658: Playoff Odds Changes and the Meaning in Small Samples

Episode Date: April 16, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to Matt Trueblood about the teams that have hurt or improved their odds the most, and the aspects of performance that are significant in small samples.

Small sample size, small sample size, sample size. It's a small sample size, small sample size. It's a small sample size. It's a small sample size. Good morning and welcome to episode 658 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Howdy. Anything to say before we begin? No, sir. Okay. Well, we are joined by another guest, Matt Trueblood, who last time he was on this podcast was a

Banished to the Pen writer, or was that before Banished to the Pen? But he has since moved on to become a regular voice at Baseball Prospectus, where he is doing an excellent job. Hello, Matt. Hi. So you wrote an article the other day. It's kind of an article that someone writes every year at this time, looking at playoff odds changes. And I wanted to talk to you about things that you look at in small sample sizes or things that are meaningful in small sample sizes. So we can start with playoff odds and you have the updated numbers.

So I'm going to ask you to kind of run down what the biggest changes are so far and explain how it happened and whether we actually know anything more about these teams than we did a couple weeks ago. Well, the biggest changes really haven't...the identities of the teams who have swung the most haven't changed since I wrote the article. So we're talking about the Royals and Tigers rising a lot, the Red Sox and Cubs rising some, the Indians, Mariners, and Giants cratering, and the Marlins fading some. And what's the magnitude of the biggest changes?

The Tigers are all the way up to over 71% now. The change there is, yeah, it's about 12% or 13%, which is right where the Royals were. They finally lost yesterday, so they're a step back from that. But that's about the maximum. The Indians are down over 13%, so we're working within that band. So I feel a little bit better about my pick to have the Tigers win the central, which I was not at all confident about. Way to rub in the fact that my most radical pick was the Tigers in fourth.

Yeah. Wow. That's fun. So you tried to get interesting with your predictions. We're talking about absolute changes here. So the Royals went from like 11% to 24% or something like that. But the Tigers went from like 59% to 72%. So those are both 13 percentage point changes or whatever, but one doubled and the other just sort of edged toward the already likely outcome. Do you guys think that one of these is a bigger change or is it good talking about it in just raw number of change, number change?

I think the Tigers is probably a bigger change in a way. The raw number change is the better thing to look at right now, I would think. But I don't know the math angle that well. But I would think the raw number is better to look at. But the Tigers have made a more significant difference. Before the season started, we had them with less than a 50% chance of actually winning the division. They were the highest team, but not technically likely to. Now they're over 60% for the division alone. That feels like a bigger difference to me than the Royals going from 1-8 to 1-4 or 5 to make the playoffs. And are we talking adjusted playoff odds?

We have both the likelihood of making the playoffs on our site, and we also have what is the adjusted likelihood of making the playoffs, which basically is the chances of winning division plus half of your wildcard chance because we're looking at the chances that you'll get to a division series. Which one are you looking at? I went with unadjusted. Unadjusted, okay. So the Tigers actually now have moved up to 72% from a starting point of 53%.

So they're actually almost 20% up now, which is greater than it was when you wrote your article. So they're having a day. So do we know anything about these teams? I guess someone asked in the comments of your article what the change is based on, whether it's solely that they have banked the wins or that they have changed Pakoda's mind on how good they are, and it is almost entirely the former. I don't know if you have expected winning

percentages from you do okay so the tigers and the royals have the biggest uh as far as i can tell the biggest expected winning percentage change and it's about four thousandths uh in the you know if winning percentage is 518 uh now the top for the tigers it used to be 514. So it's gone up really only a little for what Pakoda thinks of them as a team, as a true talent team. So basically 4,000th is a little less than a win per year. So basically

it went from thinking the Tigers were like an 84 win true talent team to an 85 win true talent team, basically. And the Royals are the same and the Marlins dropping was a little bit less than that. So it's to answer that question for Matt format. It's mostly most of these changes are that some portion of the season is completed and that those wins never disappear.

So Matt, have you have any of these teams changed your mental expected winning percentage by a greater margin than that? No, I wouldn't say so. The other thing that's cooked in besides just the performance maybe changing Pakoda's mind or whatever is injuries happening. And so I think the Indians might be already suffering from that, just Jan Gomes going down. But in terms of what they're actually doing on the field, making me think they're better or worse than when the season started, I almost can't imagine what change would make me think that. And I don't see any here in reality this year.

And I don't see any here in reality this year. So you mentioned the sort of Joshian idea that, you know, it'd be better for everyone if we just didn't make any conclusions, didn't write anything until Memorial Day, because everything early in the season is just so deceptive and misleading and not enough to base conclusions on. And, and Joe Sheehan himself has mentioned that article in recent days in his newsletter. So do you still subscribe to that or what do you, what do you look at this early in the year? Is there anything that you can place your confidence in or anything that you were looking forward to see, seeing coming into the year and you've

been tracking it and it actually means something? I am a firm no on actually drawing conclusions from things. I don't totally subscribe to what Joe says because now I get paid to write about baseball, so I'm not going to give back my paycheck for two months. But guys make a lot of adjustments. And those adjustments are real while they're happening. And they're interesting. And they're really promising. And I kind of feel like two weeks later, muscle memory can take back over. A guy just wakes up one morning and doesn't have it or starts to feel like he's fighting his swing and falls back into the same habit he used to have.

I don't know. Probably there are real changes, but you look at 10 guys who say they've made real changes, they start the season looking like they've made real changes, maybe three of them hold on to those changes. Really subtweeting Anthony Gossier. Yeah. And slightly wallowing in the fact that Mike Zunino has not fulfilled my prediction that he would break out. Can we, I want to talk about, let's talk about the Tigers in a little bit more detail, because you say that nothing has changed

your mind about any teams and you don't think anything could, but even if it could, it isn't this year. So there are a few players in particular who are responsible for this Tigers outbreak. And so there's like five-ish, maybe six-ish, and I want to just bring them each up and talk about the narrative and see whether you really stand by that nothing has changed. Okay. So Miguel Cabrera is hitting 432. He is not going to hit 432. However, last year, there was a sort of a feeling like he was breaking down and was really ever since his late 2013 hip, was it hip or was it knee? Knee?

What did he hurt in his leg? Something in his leg. There was a feeling that he was just not really at full strength anymore and that we were seeing a decline. And he, at least in the very small amount we have, he has appeared to, for now, arrest that decline. Is that not relevant information? Can we not draw a little bit more optimism

about Miguel Cabrera than we would have had nine days ago? Aren't you more optimistic about Miguel Cabrera than you were nine days ago? I'm not, but I probably was higher on Miguel Cabrera nine days ago than most people. I think sometimes we get too excited looking at, well, not excited, but too worried about guys who start to obviously decline, and there's a physical reason for it, and they're on the wrong side at 30,

and they're not in good shape. But, I mean, his production didn't sag that badly last year. I don't think he's going to that badly last year. It was, you know, I don't think he's going to be 2012 Miguel Cabrera again, but I don't see why he can't repeat last season more or less, you know, minus 3% for aging. And so that's, that's what I came in expecting. And I still think that's probably where he's going to go. You know, he doesn't look like 23 year old Miguel Cabrera to me. He just looks uninjured. Okay.

So, Jose Iglesias, great defender, horrible, horrible hitter. We've all known this for a very long time. And his 2013 quote-unquote breakout is well-known to just be a Babbitt fluke, except some hitters actually have persistently high Babbitts. He has an extremely high BABIP. Is there nothing about this that makes you a little bit more hopeful that he is a guy who is going to be able to put enough base hits on the ground to sustain a higher level of offense than you might have thought nine days ago? I'm not buying it yet.

That's a decent argument. I like this game where you just you bring up a player and matt says nope yeah i mean it's a it's not a bad argument it's just that jose iglesias doesn't really remind me of the guys who have tended to have really high babbitts um you know austin jackson david freeze chris john. These are right-handed hitters with some good power and a lot of line drives and doubles, which has never been Iglesias during his professional career. Maybe it'll start being him, but I'm two months from thinking that.

Also strangely leads the league in stolen bases. Stole five bases in his entire 2013 season. Had six in his career. And suddenly leads the league in stolen bases. That's odd. I'm not even going to ask you. That one's nothing. Okay. Anthony Gose. Hey, look.

He has 23 plate appearances. I'm not going to put too much of my credibility on the line for Anthony Gose. However, this was a guy who was seen as something of a post-type sleeper there were articles being written about how he he could be due to break out offensively how there were things that he changed how it might be his time to hit and he does have four extra base hits in those 23 plate appearances extra base hits are you know considerably harder to fluke into than any other part of it. Are you not even 1% more optimistic

about Anthony Ghost than you were 9 days ago? I don't know. This is the hardest question by far. Make Ben answer some of these questions. Ben's here. This is why I got Matt to come on. After I answered. He's copping out.

The thing with Ghost is his problem was always approach, right? I mean, that's what I understood it to be anyway. He has nine strikeouts and no walks in 23 plate appearances. Maybe that's going to radically change. The Tigers lead the major leagues in stolen bases as a team this year. Which is weird. They were last last year, right? No, actually, they were

last in 2013, so maybe that's what we all think of them as. And last year, they were actually seventh. Okay. By the way, if Ghost keeps hitting, slugging 696, I bet he'll draw a walk. Maybe a walk.

All right. J.D. Martinez, huge superstar season last year. Still hard to buy it. Just couldn't quite get over the flukishness, the Ryan Ludwickian nature of it. And he is crushing the ball. He has four home runs. He's doing good things with baseballs. More optimistic than you were nine days ago that he can do something like repeat or that he's not a total fluke?

Do you want me to make – Ben, Ben. Yeah, I don't know if it's rational, but I just kind of have this fear with guys like that who make some major mechanical change in a year and it goes really well. And then they have six months of nothing. And I have this probably irrational fear that like that time off will just, you know, as if they don't sit there and, you know, practice baseball all winter in some capacity. you know practice baseball all winter in some capacity but just just kind of a fear that they were always one way and maybe they will just relapse or backslide into what they were before because they'll be i don't know confident that that they're good now and they won't work as hard and and they'll just forget it and it'll be like a flowers for Algernon kind of thing where he goes back to being the old J.D. Martinez and it's very sad.

So I guess in that sense, it's good that he still appears to be 2014 J.D. Martinez. I guess if that is a real thing, and I don't know whether that is a real thing that I am afraid of, then I am not afraid of that thing anymore. Yeah, in a few minutes, I'm going to actually blow your minds with some actual data that Russell Carlton gave me, even though I didn't know this was the topic today. I still managed to have brand new breaking research from Russell Carlton because he submitted something to publish today. But I also feel like to get away from the specifics for a minute. I know that nine games is worthless.

I mean, I know that I'm an idiot. Nine mean, I know that. I'm not an idiot. Nine games is worthless. I hardly look at any of this at all. I'm definitely on the true blood Sheehan end of the spectrum here. However, if you're getting a nine-game sample, I'd rather have this one than any other because I really do feel like those six months, things happen.

Guys do age. You keep aging even when the games aren't playing right so guys are aging guys are developing guys are working on things sometimes that's when a guy can get healthy or that's when a guy can really dedicate himself to a new swing or dedicate himself to a new uh lifestyle or or whatever the case may be or that's a lot of guys changing teams which i feel like in ways that we can't anticipate but is nonetheless true, does affect some players. And guys get new coaching. So I do feel like the nine games that we play at the start of the season

contain all this bottled up information that is finally getting a chance to be seen. And I would take this nine games by a mile, generally speaking, particularly for individual players, over any other nine games. So the question is, well, does that raise it to the level of worthwhileness or not, given our dumb, dumb, dumb little brains and the capacity to overfit everything? Probably safer not to. It's probably the Sheehan inclination is probably pretty good.

But, I mean, it's not just any nine games. You know what I mean? Like, we're learning about these guys. Like, it's like the it's like you, I don't know, you go, you leave your wife for six months to go you know,

hike in Nepal and then you come back. And those nine days that you come back to her are heightened. It's a different nine days than the rest of your boring slog of a life. Am I wrong? You find out whether she still loves you or she left you while you were gone. Right. Those nine days are when you poke through her drawers to see if some guy left his keychain there.

That's a lot of relevant data that you find out in those nine days. Oh, look, she's got a new routine. She cooks bacon differently. Who taught her that? I'm actually coming down less toward the she-in side these days. I mean, on the team level, sure, it probably makes sense. But just the more granular data we get, the more legitimate it is to draw some conclusions from smaller sample sizes. Like, you know, when he started writing at BP 20 years ago, we had some stuff. We had RetroSheet.

We had Play-by-Play. But there was no PitchFX. Now we have PitchFX. sheet we had play by play but there was no pitch fx now we have pitch fx we've got easy access to video so that we can go watch any game and compare it to what a player looked like before we have now stat cast stuff so that we can see how guys are hitting the ball i mean it's getting to the point where you can draw some kind of conclusion about guys or at least affect your opinion of guys from a single play right like from a from a single swing if a guy hits the ball 115 miles per hour on a swing you know that he can do that and probably not every hitter can do that and so you have concluded

something about that guy from a single swing or i don't know if a if like if a catcher gets a gets a really low probability strike or something maybe you can you know start to wonder whether he's a guy who can receive pitches well or if a pitcher throws a new pitch and I wrote about some new pitches for today if you now that we have this several season sample of pitch fx you don't need to wait to see how guys hit that pitch you can compare the pitches characteristics to you know similar pitches that other guys have thrown and seen how those pitches worked and then you can conclude something about this guy's pitch that you've seen him throw three times and and we have velocity data so we can

look at guys who've gained velocity or lost velocity over the winter so there's a lot that you can do now that we couldn't have done even 10 years ago or you know if there's a mechanical change you can you can test it you can see whether it's true you can load up mlb tv from last year and this year and do the side by side frame by frame analysis and and at least see whether there is something genuinely different there whether it actually works or whether the guy manages to retain it is another question but you can at least see if this is a different guy so there's so much stuff that we can do on day one of the season that we couldn't have done a decade ago that theoretically we should be able to adjust our expectations for guys. And if we can do it for individual players, then we can also do it for which if we ever get that, then he might be able to tell how good a defender is

based on a couple of plays and how fast he runs and how quickly he reacts. So we're getting to that point where just ignoring April seems like it's not a safe decision. I don't want to interrupt you, Matt, if you're dying to respond to that, but I will say that I'm much less interested in the we can learn a lot in a short period of time idea at the team level.

Because half a win to J.D. Martinez' performance is a big deal. It's like 25% increase to his projection. I mean, it's a big reassessment of who he is, and certainly two wins would be two. But to a team level, I feel like it does kind of wash out, and there's no reason to think that the team level, there would be the same sort of off-season growth. There's not a water, something in the water effect in real life.

Yeah, I mean, you guys made a lot of good points i still don't agree at all just to talk about martinez for a second he had over a thousand plate appearances before he got to the major leagues and an ops over 900 he was never a bad hitter he was a hitter who kind of got lost making the adjustment from the minors to the majors. The Astros didn't handle him well and then cut him for no good reason. He was a good player who just didn't get good until last year. He also had a 389 bad hit last year, and he's not that guy. He had a 307 in a thousand played appearances before that. So he's going to be good.

I never thought he wasn't going to be good. I probably didn't quite share the fear that other people had about him. I just don't think that these nine games and four home runs. Home runs are especially like a ball flies over a fence and it's a home run. A ball lands in a batter's glove and it's in a fielder's glove and it's a home run, a ball lands in a batter's glove and it's in, or in a fielder's glove and it's an out, it doesn't hardly change anything in mid-July, but in mid-April, it's like 70 points of your OPS. But what if you can look up the hit data and say that he hit the ball 110 miles per hour at 30 degrees or whatever leads to a home run a large percentage of the time. And then if a,

if a guy jumped over the wall to catch it, then he still gets credit for doing something that would normally be a home run. It's still, it's a, still a fraction of an inch though on the, on the, on the bat.

And it's still, we're still talking about the, the difference between like Matt says, there's between four and two here is the entire conversation about JG Martinez. If two of those balls missed by a fraction of an inch, or if the pitcher just hadn't thrown in that pitch, we forget that there's a flukishness, especially at this level, to what quality of pitch you're getting thrown. And, you know, those home runs did not have to happen.

And it is true that the margin that we're talking about here is ridiculous i do think that your odds of winning your bet with andy mccullough for alex rodriguez breaking the all-time home run record have increased from 0.1 to at least 0.3 uh-huh i feel better about that my bryce harper what he's he's Bryce Harper, not as good. I mean, he's hitting the ball hard, but so far I need him to, I basically need him to be at like, you know, 25 by the end of May. That's not going to happen. All right. Shane Green, man, Shane Green, two great starts, eight innings a piece,

one walk in the whole thing. Hasn't allowed an earned, and comes with a story, throws his change up more, perfected it last year or whatever, and now he throws it a lot more. He's a guy who's shown growth. You're not more optimistic about Shane Green than you were two starts ago? One start ago, plus he pitched against the Twins. So, no.

All right, Ben Ben are you more optimistic About Shane Green I don't know about I don't know about Shane Green Specifically but I Wrote an article for Grantland Today which is up now on New pitches and I tried to

Look at how much a new pitch Matters just like an average New pitch and so With the help of people at BP to look at how much a new pitch matters, just like an average new pitch. And so with the help of people at BP and Harry Pavlidis and the excellent pitch tagging data that he has, went back and looked at the last six seasons of guys adding new pitches. And I limited it to guys who threw that new pitch at least like 5% of the time because I figured that a new pitch that shows up a few times could just be a pitch FX fluke.

It could be a bad version of another pitch or something. Or just if you don't throw it enough, it isn't enough of a presence in batter's minds to actually make a difference. So I looked at guys who threw a new pitch that they had never thrown before, at least in the PitchFX record, or had barely thrown before, and made it a major part of their repertoire and compared their projections before the season, their retro projections, rerunning their projections now

to what they actually did. And so it's about 20 guys a year who fit this description. And if you look at those guys' projections versus actual stats in the year before they added their new pitches, so they didn't do anything different, or at least that thing different, the projections are dead on, uh within fractions of a single point of true average allowed so when they didn't add a new pitch projections nailed them perfectly as a group after they added a new pitch they outperformed the projections by like six seven points which is kind of a lot i mean it's a huge sample. It's pretty significant. And it's not, you know, enormous,

but it's like over a full season of facing batters. If you get that six or so point advantage of true average allowed, it's about half a win, which, you know, is something, right? It's somewhat significant. And obviously, in an individual case, you could be more or less optimistic based on how good the pitch appears to be and how it complements the pitcher's repertoire. But on the whole, on average, just adding a new pitch that a guy is actually willing to throw does make him better as far as I can tell. So in that sense, I am more optimistic about Shane Green. I think that even undersells it too because you're adding – so simply adding a pitch in general makes pitchers a little bit better.

But to me, it's the after the fact, the is this real thing. If – I mean this is not true, but if all breakouts came with a new pitch and some new pitches led to breakouts, then if you know a guy is having a good – has with a new pitch, and some new pitches led to breakouts. Then if you know a guy is having a good, has added a new pitch, you might be like 2% more optimistic about him. But then if you see him pitch and he has what appears to be a breakout, and you know that adding a new pitch is a prerequisite to a breakout, then that might make you significantly more confident

that the breakout you're seeing is real. If he didn't have a pitch, you might say, and that obviously is an extreme example, but if he didn't have the breakout, then you'd go, oh, well, it's not real because all breakouts have a new pitch. So to me, having a ready, there's so many ready explanations that I discard them, but I mean, there is, I don't know,

it is nice to have one that is credible. Anyway, Shane Green, I don't know it is nice to have one that that is credible anyway Shane Green I don't know about Shane Green I already liked Shane Green I don't think I like him anymore to be honest but I liked him a lot already uh all right last one this one is not the same as the others but Joe Nathan is not closing baseball games S Soria is. That's got to be worth something. Yeah, it probably is. You mean just a lack of vote of confidence, vote of unconfidence in the manager's part? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. As the first nine days go, personnel decisions, good or bad, is certainly relevant information that we can draw from the first nine days go uh personnel decisions good or bad is certainly relevant information that we can draw from the first nine games there have been a bunch of those like super fast closer losing job stories right like uh brent cecil because his velocity was down i mean yeah that was a that was about as fast as i can remember one. I'm trying to think of one that was faster. That was super fast.

Latroy Hawkins lost his job in one appearance or something, which maybe he shouldn't have had that job anyway. But yeah, the Cecil one was super fast. That was not a results-based decision. It didn't appear to be. Uh-oh. I see a uh-oh. Uh-oh. It's still uh-oh. Uh-oh. It's still the plan.

Nathan, when he returns, it's still the plan. Even though Soria has been great, it is still the plan that Nathan will be the closer coming back. So I guess nine days isn't enough to tell you that even. All right. Like there are certain, like if you didn't know that the Phillies were going to be bad, if you had seen their lineup card on Wednesday

and seen Jeff Rancourt batting cleanup, that would be a tell. But I guess that doesn't tell us anything that we didn't know about the Phillies because they seemed like a team that would have Jeff Rancourt batting cleanup, if any team would. Well, thanks for playing. Nothing matters and samples are too small, Matt. Yeah, I'm happy to be the curmudgeon. At what point could we have you on and get a different answer, do you think?

It's probably different for every different player. I really do kind of start taking the standing seriously. We're talking team level now, Memorial Day or so. seriously. We're talking team level now, Memorial Day or so. A couple of weeks before that, I'll at least explore what's happening with a player. But, you know, the rest of this month to me is still guys catching up because they were hurt and teams missing the other team's best pitcher because he had a dead arm in spring training or whatever. So early to mid-May. Is there anything interesting that's happened that you are waiting for a larger sample to believe in?

Yeah, well, like a million things. I just don't, you know, I'm watching it all and these games matter as the, you know, as we saw with the swings and playoff odds. I just don't know what to what to buy yet by the way i i forgot to to do the russell the reveal oh yeah so he looked at um he looked at seven game winning streaks because the royals have a seven game winning streak to start the season to see uh which seven game winning streak to start the season, to see which seven-game winning streaks throughout the season, like if you look at where in the season the seven-game winning streak happens, is it more strongly correlated with team success, winning percentage in the year?

And the first seven games, the start of the season, it actually does start pretty high, like near the higher end. And then after, it pretty quickly drops down and stays pretty down. And then it's actually around the trade deadline that those winning streaks have a much bigger effect on team winning percentage. So in fact, there's like a tiny hint that the first seven games are more important than say games 32 to 38. But not a strong hint, and it looks like if you were going to make that argument, which I don't know, you might not anyway.

But if you were going to, you would probably make that argument about games in July and around the trade deadline. Okay. So there you go. All right. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, thanks. You can find Matt on Twitter at matrueblood, and you can find him on BP virtually every day these days, it seems,

and all of his articles are worth checking out. We will be back tomorrow. The usual, send us emails for next week at podcast at baseball perspectives.com facebook group is at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and we appreciate your reviews and ratings and subscriptions on itunes please support our sponsor the play index by going to baseball reference.com and using the coupon code bp when you subscribe to the play index to get the discounted price of 30 on a one-year subscription we will be back tomorrow