Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 700: Sabermetrics, Australia-Style

Episode Date: June 29, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to Anthony Rescan about his statistical work with the Sydney Blue Sox of the Australian Baseball League.

We'll surf like they do in the USA. We'll fly down to Sydney for a holiday. On a sunny Christmas day. Australia. Australia. Good morning and welcome to episode 700 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. Quick PSA, if you are a Hang Up and Listen listener, the Slate podcast, and you should be.

Sam and I did a sort of segment. Josh and Mike and Stefan asked us to fill in. We're one of a few podcasts filling in for the regular host today. So you can go over there and listen to us talk about Jose Fernandez and Matt Moore and Tommy John surgeries. And you should listen to Hang Up and Listen anyway when we're not on it because it is one of our favorite podcasts and we listen every week. So we were flattered to be asked. So that's another place that you can find us this week. But today we are talking to Anthony Reskin. And every now and then I like to talk to a sabermetrician abroad. We've talked to people in Cuba about how they use stats there.

And I was contacted by Anthony and he works for the Sydney Blue Sox of the Australian Baseball League. And he is sort of the informal director of baseball analytics. And we wanted to talk to him about how he uses stats there, how stats are used there generally.

Hello, Anthony. Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. Happy to. So we briefly talked about Australian baseball in episode 334. I think we talked about the Canberra Cavalry. We talked to Drew Samuelson, and he gave us a little bit of the lowdown about Australian baseball. But just to refresh people's memories, can you tell us a little bit about the ABL? When did it start? How many teams are there? Who plays in it?

That sort of thing. Yeah, so this is sort of the second iteration of the league. First iteration of the league ran through the 90s. Had some couple significant players. I think Vernon Wells was probably the most significant one to play in that iteration of the league. But it folded for financial reasons. And since then, the MLB's brought it

back. Six teams. 48 game schedule. It lasts during winter ball. So, we see a lot of guys coming from farm systems that maybe got hurt. Maybe need some more at-bats just in general or in warnings pitched. So we'll see those guys down there.

We'll see any ball guys, and we'll see our Australian players. And, yeah, I mean, it's definitely a different kind of experience for a lot of guys because, you know, you're coming out of your comfort zone if you're not Australian. And if you are, you know, it's definitely nice for those guys to get home or get to play baseball in the summer. Did you say Vernon Wells? Yes, I'm Googling frantically.

I can't find evidences. Vernon Wells. Because Vernon Wells was like an elite prospect from like age 17 on. When did he find time in his busy schedule of ultimately disappointing everybody in the world to go to australia it popped up on wikipedia and somebody told me that when i was down there too yeah he he played as a 19 year old he played the 1998 to 99 australian baseball league season with the sydney storm so he was a 1997 draft pick so So he just went down there for seasoning, I guess,

in the offseason. He went to the ABL. That's interesting. Let's stop talking about everything we are going to talk about. All three of us simultaneous deep dive into this. This is odd. So when does the ABL season run? This is odd. So when does the ABL season run? It runs generally November, December, January. That time period, playoffs in February.

Off the top of my head, but yeah. Yeah, so we had some people who emailed us wanting to play for the Stompers who had played in Australia. In fact, it was somewhat common that it seemed like a lot of guys had either played in Germany or Australia at some point. And we never quite knew what to make of that. Do you have an idea of what the level of play is? It seemed like, in some cases, it seemed like a good league, because players who who played well

in in higher leagues went to australia and then in other cases it'd be like uh some guy who we wouldn't sign was playing like you know like out of position in australia and hitting like 360 and so we couldn't figure out exactly how to adjust for that yeah Yeah, I mean, generally it's thrown around it's like double A quality. You get a lot of interesting sort of things. Like one of the more interesting guys I saw Morgan Coombs pitched for Adelaide and he's a

he plays for the Gary Railcats, I think, which is by me, but he throws like 79 and he is ERA, I don't know if his dip is off the top of my head, but he throws like 79, and he is ERA. I don't know if his FIP is off the top of my head, but his ERA was like 1.6 this year, something insane. But you see those things, and it's just like, how does that even happen? But at the same time, I mean, I think that's a reflection of how kind of the thinking

in this league is kind of grounded in that more traditional, like, this guy's a real gamer, he's got that real baseball player type attitude, and also just plain getting guys to come to Australia. What is sort of the standard velocity in that league? Is it like a mid-80s league? Is it a high-80s league? I'd say mid or high. Because a lot of the broadcasts don't have velocity, and we don't really have a ton of information on how our guys throw. We have a couple

guys who throw mid-90s. Sookie, he was a prospect with the Angels, and he had some control issues, I think, when he was with the Angels. But he throws mid-90s. And Louis Thorpe, who he had some control issues, I think, when he was with the Angels, but he throws mid-90s. And Louis Thorpe, who didn't pitch last year, but he's a big prospect for the Twins, and he's, I think, low in the mid-90s. And what is the, do you know what the BABIP is? I can pull it out. Yeah, I don't have it off the top of my head, but I can pull it out.

Kevin Millwood played for the ABL in 1997, which is strange. Kevin Millwood in the peak of his career? Just strange ABL cameos in the late 90s. I don't know what was going on. That's weird, because Kevin Millwood in 1997 was a major leaguer. Yeah. So you sadly do not. Now I want to do one.

Royce Clayton played in the ABL in 1995. That's totally made up. Jeff Blum did in 1995. That's a real one. I just want to know if Royce Clayton appeared as Miguel Tejada in Australia. Jeff Blum is basically an Australian name. Yeah, that makes sense. So you sadly do not have an Australian accent, much to the dismay of our listeners.

So how did you end up working for an Australian baseball league team uh study abroad uh-huh it uh set up an internship and I put I like baseball and I know stats and you know stuff like that and they set it up and it snowballed it was really just an internship and then I still didn't get paid, but I had a whole big responsibility of setting up this whole system. I really hadn't done a lot of work with the actual numbers before then, so it was learning programs, too, and really investing a lot of my free time into developing the system, coaxing our coaches who were really open to the system, you know, coaxing our coaches who were, you know, really open to the concept, but I had to explain these, you know, stats and methodology

and stuff to them and how we would use them and sort of the caution that we had to take with them and at the same time, you know, how to weigh these things and make these player decisions. So, I mean, you know know and now i do everything from chicago so like we have um every week we try to go over you know line how to construct a lineup how how we want to leverage the bullpen uh what guys we want to throw out there and stuff like that and it's all being done over a facebook chat in chicago and sydney wow so were the blue socks looking for a statistical analyst or were they just looking for someone and you happen to be that someone and you push this i think it would be more uh the latter but i think uh once i got, they kind of talked to me.

It's stuff I'm interested in, how I could help the club. And right when I said I was good with sabermetrics and knew how to identify the numbers, kind of apply them and stuff like that, our manager just grabbed me by the arm and said, you're coming with me and we're going to work on this. And who's your manager? Jason Pospisil. So this was not a tough sell, it sounds like. Not at all.

But at the same time, you know, it was a lot of teaching and a lot of just kind of getting everyone sort of on the same page. So what kind of information is available to me if I were to go look up stats from the Australian Baseball League or to the teams themselves? What did you have to work with when you got there? Well, for me, I had the Major League, Minor League stats portal. So that's private and we have access to that. It's really simple. It gives us a decent amount of detail to go into but at the same time

it's not anywhere near what you would have in a major league or really even a minor league club because we don't have any pitch FX we don't have any way to really track velocity or any other sort of things that might really help us that aren't on your play-by-play or your just general aggregations from the games. So that's definitely a hurdle, something we have to consider.

We don't really have the money even to go out and get any of that. So a lot of it has to be done just with me kind of typing stuff into the computer and using my skills to basically squeeze this data and get as much as we can get out of it. Right, I was going to ask. So the budgets for these teams are not big. You cannot necessarily go out and buy an expensive radar gun even, let alone a tracking system.

Though you could sign Vernon Wells at this point. He probably could. He's been there once. Wait, so, I'm sorry, Ben said that the budget is not big enough for a radar gun, and you're agreeing, you're consenting to that premise?

We might be able to get a radar gun, but I don't think anyone wants to point the radar gun and actually do it. Yeah, that is the problem that we've been through. Do you guys have a salary gap? We do, we do. Although, it gets a little fishy when Perth wins it every year, and we sit there and go, how do they keep all these guys? But, yeah, yeah i mean there are

teams that have more money than us adelaide and perth have a ton of money and then the way the league's set up too is we're kind of set up as the the big market team and we're not because our stadium is about an hour out of sydney hour and a half really by train that's how far i had to travel every day when i was there. So we don't really get a lot of gate action and we can't really advertise and do stuff like that. Whereas in Perth, the heat are huge and Melbourne's not very good, but Canberra has gotten every single

opportunity to be good. They're a lot of the most amount of minor leaguers on their team, and we just started an ABL draft where you kind of have to protect guys, and they were given, I think, the first six picks. So, yeah, we kind of get stumped down on the ground, and everyone else is kind of up in the sky with all these advantages over us. We have to kind of work with it. What's the makeup of a typical ABL team or your team specifically as far as what nationalities are these players and what experience do they have in other leagues? So the way the roster is generally broken up is you have your Australian players

make up the bulk of your roster and pretty much, not completely, but almost all of your returning players each year. On top of that, each team gets a certain amount of guys from minor league clubs. They're generally guys that are more fringy. I know Kevin Kiermaier played over there with Canberra. Didi Gregorius.

Jacob May played with us, not this past season, but the season before. I can go on and on about how much I love Jacob May. He had a great season for us. And, you know, a lot of these guys come from different countries. I know last year we had Marcus Solbach. He's with the Diamondback system, in the Diamondback system, but he is also German. Rinku Singh played for Adelaide for a while. He is obviously one of the famous Jon Hamm recruits.

And then there's other guys from Korea, Japan, China, a couple Italians I've seen, and then the rest are American, Australian, and a couple Latin players and some Canadians. Didi Gregorius in his season in Australia hit 189 with a 532 OPS. Yeah, he was awful. Wow. So what are you doing over the offseason then from Chicago? So a lot of what I do is, since we kind of know which Australian guys we like and which ones we want to keep and stuff like that, what I'm doing is usually we'll get guys that my manager will send me

that are in a team system that we have a relationship with that he wants me to take a look at. So I'll look at them. I'll try to watch video. I'll go over their stats. I'll try to get a better idea of what we would be getting and how that would fill our needs. On top of that, we have guys from any of our teams. So I have to look over their statistics, try to get a better idea about them um and then if they play games around here i'll go see them and try to get you know a good live look at them and evaluate them from there so you are competing with us for players i guess not

really because our seasons don't overlap otherwise you would be yeah you should you should give us players right do you generally find that if you identify a player in the States, are you able to convince him to come out there, or is it generally a lot harder to convince someone to travel 18,000 miles than it is for us to get them to travel, say, 1,000 miles? Well, the minor leaguers, they just kind of get sent over here, so those guys aren't exactly our job to convince. But the indie ball guys, yeah.

You know, it's usually guys that have a relationship with guys who have played in the ADL. So they'll talk, you know, like one of our guys, Luke Wilkins, plays indie ball right now. And he tries to talk it up as much as he can. And, you know, going to Australia I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. now and he tries to talk it up as much as he can. Going to Australia I don't think is necessarily a bad thing, but at the same time it's easy to understand why someone would have trepidation going all the way across the world to play baseball for a couple months and not make very much money. But at the same time, it's really just a player-by-player basis.

It's not like we really have problems with talent every year, but there certainly can be some problems in just getting every guy that we want. So how have the stats been most helpful for you in recruiting and targeting players or in in-game tactics? I mean, it's a mix of both. I think first and foremost was just getting the guys that we want to keep in the first season that I was there and the biggest question for us that year that I got there was around our starting shortstop Michael Lysa. He could he started off his career really well in the ABL and just fell every single year until he was pretty much D.D. Gregorius in his season there at the plate. And then he played good defense, but it only really could provide us so much

when he couldn't do anything at the plate. And we had a guy, Jacob Yunus, who was in the Twins organization and was released the year before, who had played a little bit for us in the past two years, I think, before then. But the three years back, he had some consistent playing time and played pretty well for us and rated out well in our system and stuff like that. And I had kind of really pushed hard to keep him. I wanted Eunice in the lineup. And this year he played a good chunk of our games,

was a really key contributor, a guy that kind of went up the plate every time and took a lot of pitches and fought a lot of pitches off, and that's one of the things that really helped us later in games when we kind of scored most of our runs. But at the same time, identifying guys has helped us really prepare for this offseason and going into this season because we've had more time and actually have gotten a decent amount of names thrown at us from teams,

and we've gotten a decent amount of names in any ball that we wanted to look at. Whereas last season, we had a couple spots to fill, and those kind of really got filled pretty quickly with some quality players. And then the in-game stuff is generally different from what you see in any Australian team. We have our best entertaining second. We kind of don't really have a closer, but we kind of do. It kind of switches, and we kind of try to leverage our bullpen pieces. And it's generally, I think, provided a little bit of a push

that we needed to get us into the playoffs last year. It was such a razor-thin race. So does it generate a lot of curiosity among your opponents when you're doing whatever you're doing, shifting, not using a closer, whatever it is, are people taken aback by any of it? You know, I haven't really asked Pops that. It's something you'd probably have to ask him. I haven't really heard anything, but at the same time, you know, I'm not there in the dugout, you know, talking to the other manager and stuff like that.

So compared to what I can look up right now about a Major League Baseball player at Baseball Reference or Baseball Perspectives or Fangraphs or wherever, what depth of information is available to you if you go to an Australian Baseball League player page, whatever the equivalent of that is. Well, you know, it's managed by Major League Baseball. We're a Major League Baseball property, so we have, you know, all the basic stuff on there on the regular website. I think some of our guys have, I think Baseball Reference is starting hosting, you know, the basic data, but, you know, it's really nothing beyond what you would have had in the 90s

where it was there's your slash and home runs, RBIs, single, double, triple, all that stuff. What have you been able to add to that as a supplement? I mean, working with linear weights was really the first step. Defensive independent statistics with pitching and rate statistics have really been helpful too. We've been trying to really push. We want to lock more, we want to strike out less, and we want the inverse of that with our pitchers, stuff like that.

It's really not super deep, but at the same time we don't have a ton of data to go into pitch FX data, and we don't have a ton of data signifying how hang time on balls and stuff like that. We've been gathering other things like general shifts. We shift off of just where we get the hitter ball type and we get where it's been hit. So we can generally make assumptions on where the balls are being hit. We've generated a shift score, which I actually swiped off of the on-the-box score. They came up with a simple shift score, and it's really helped us kind of get an idea of that. Okay, so you made the playoffs last year, just barely. So you are competing despite the

lower payroll than Perth. Perth is clearly doing something dodgy with their payroll, it sounds to me. And Adelaide likes stealing our players every year. That's a compliment. That's flattering. That means you must have good players. So how did you pick this stuff up, or how did it become an interest for you? I think it was just really gradual. I love baseball. I sit on the internet all day, really.

I wasn't that good at baseball. But you get exposed to a lot of stuff and find fan graphs find bp start reading stuff start going hey this stuff is you know really helpful uh the red sox winning the world series kind of helped probably you know and that kind of getting it more exposure and stuff like that um so yeah i mean and then beyond that it was just really me learning software. It was me getting really just into how the numbers are generated by someone like me or someone like you guys to really make decisions. And is there anything about the league there that is so different that the normal sabermetric principles don't apply

or that you've had to adjust what you would normally think or recommend because the conditions there are different? Are there weird ballparks? I don't know. Is it different because pitchers don't throw as hard? Is there anything that has not really gelled with the traditional sabermetric understanding because this is not the traditional sabermetric league?

Well, I think two things stand out first it's simple thing but when you have some australian guys some of them who aren't really prospects and stuff like that have day jobs so sometimes they can only play on the weekends so sometimes we have to make decisions based on that but one of the big things and this is huge for us there's some ballpark issues. So ours is a great park. It's your normal minor league park, the one that was used in the Olympics in 2000. So if you wanted to look up pictures, those are the ones you might find.

But the ball just dies when you hit it high enough. Our park factor was 79 over the past three years. Wow. Yeah, no one hits home runs there. I think the only guys who really could consistently do that are guys like Trenol, Jen, and guys who have some decent amount of major league experience. On top of that, Adelaide is in a park

that is normally an Australian rules football oval. So down the lines, I think it's 282 there. Wow. So do they stack their lineup with guys who can hit it out there, or do you do anything differently in your home park, just a bunch of ground ball hitters or bunts or something like that? I try to advocate guys who are ground ball, gap-to-gap kind of guys. We like guys generally,

if you hit it on the line, down the lines, it could go out. So we had a guy, Guy Edmonds, that did that in 28, not this past year, but the year before, and we kind of kept him around, but he ended up getting suspended for steroids, so I think that's why he was hitting those home runs.

But, you know, yeah, we kind of try to make those adjustments at home, and those are generally the types of guys that we want. Also, I almost forgot, there's a third thing that we have to adjust for. The umpiring is god-awful. We have a guy, Zach Shepard, he is a very patient hitter. He's in the Tiger system. I think he OPSed like 972 in rookie ball last season.

And he comes down to Australia, and he's a good player for us. He's really good. And he's 19 or 18 or something like that. And I'll watch him take a ball about a foot outside the strike zone and call for a strike. And he'll just look back at pops and be like, what the hell? But yeah, I mean, I think those things are definitely in the way we consider how we build our team. And because we are beholden to what teams send us, we're not always in control of that. But at the same time, the guys that we can get, we'd like for them to fit those kind of roles, fit kind of what's going on there, basically.

All right. Well well thank you for filling us in. I always like to check in with people who are applying this stuff in different places and finding that it works differently when they do. So Anthony is on Twitter

at Anthony Rescan R-E-S-C-A-N. Sydney Blue Sox are on Twitter at Sydney Blue Sox, and their games can be streamed online or their home games can be streamed online during the season. So you can watch them and you can follow them. What's the outlook for next season? I'm really hopeful.

We haven't gotten our guys who are getting from the minors yet, but, you know, yeah, I mean, it's hard not to be hopeful when you kind of got a little bit of an extra push against the other teams. So when do you find out who you're getting? Is it the draft or is it you just get sent people? I think we kind of got our names in August last year when we really kind of knew who we were getting. You know, last year we got some lofty names thrown around before guys that

are in the major leagues right now that are, you know, or have been playing well. And, you know, that would have been awesome. But, you know, we got some guys that, like Will Swander didn't really fit our ballpark, struck out a lot for the powerheader. And eventually he was sent home, I think, for some family issues, but it's just kind of the luck of the draw, and we see what we get, and we kind of just adapt to it.

Yeah, I mean, we try to make the best of a good or a bad situation. Alright, well, good luck. Thank you for filling us in. Yeah, thanks. Good luck to you guys, too. Thank you. Alright, thanks. Yeah, good luck to you guys too. Thank you. All right. So our email address is

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