Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 706: Go-Go-Gadget Greinke

Episode Date: July 23, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about the Astros and then discuss the possible interpretations of Zack Greinke’s scoreless innings streak.

Oh, honey, got a mean streak. Oh, baby, got a mean streak. Well, if you want to stay with me, be my loving honey, because you might lose your mean streak. Good morning, and welcome to episode 706 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from baseball perspectives, brought to you by Playindex at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of Grantland Hi-Bed. Hi.

How are you? I'm well. That was my Mike Peska impression. Oh. I'll do my Mike Peska impression. Okay. Say, hang on, hang on. Is it going to be a pun?

No. Okay. Okay. I've just given you instructions. Okay. Thanks for being here, by the way. You're welcome. All right. Those are good. We should take those on tour all right uh all right so then let's talk about baseball i have a couple quick things

you might have quick things i'm not sure okay uh we talked about trading within the division and whether it should be done and how often it should be done or whether there's some incentive to do it less often. And Russell Carlton dove into the math and wrote a piece at baseball prospectus answering just this very question. And, and I enjoyed it. So that's a thing people can read at baseball prospectus. And I was thinking about the Astros who earlier this year when they were off

to their extremely hot start, we talked in great detail about which parts were sustainable or weren't and whether we had changed our view dramatically. And I think Pocota at the time projected a 485 winning percentage for them. And I think we both thought that we were not convinced they were a great team or a particularly good team. We thought both, I think we both thought that they would win around half of their games.

And I think you were maybe trying to get me to say more than half without yourself going that far. But we were basically, anyway, so I just checked. And since that show, they are exactly 500. And so I just wanted to quickly ask whether your opinion of the Astros has changed since that show. Yeah, I think it probably has a little bit. Even though they have just done the thing that you, at that show, said that you expected them to do. Yeah, because it seemed like maybe there was a greater possibility

that they would do more than that thing. Although, I mean, you know, they've brought up McCullers and Velasquez and Correa. I guess Correa was post that podcast, possibly. Yeah, they probably all were. Maybe they, well, I don't know. Yeah, McCullers was early. Correa definitely was. Yeah, and those guys have been impressive.

And those guys have plugged the holes that they had, really. And they're about to get Lowry back. He's on a rehab assignment, or he's just about to be. So it's not like they have a ton of weaknesses. Maybe infield corners have been kind of iffy. But I'm still mostly buying. And they seem like a team that could upgrade more. And their playoff odds are almost 80% even now.

Well, yeah, right. But the question is whether they've... You thought they were about a 500 team then. And they've played as a 500 team since then. Right. But you now think they're better than a 500 team slightly maybe yeah pakoda has them at 520 now expected win percentage for the rest of the year that's that's impressive it is that's it's a big jump that's a big jump yeah it was so it was 485 back then yeah Yeah, I guess it's Correa. Pocota must like Correa.

Yeah, well, that's... I don't blame Pocota. That's probably part of it. All right, good. Okay, so we're now buying the Astros. Yeah, sure. All right. Okay, that's what I have. Okay, I'm ready to proceed.

All right, so let's talk about Zach Granke. Mm-hmm. Zach Granke, of course, has, what has he done? He's got a 1.3 ERA, which is not really as close to 1.12 as you think it is. No, it's, yeah, it's still on a percentage basis, it's still sort of far away. So let's say he's going to have 13 more starts this away. So let's say he's going to have 13 more starts this year. So let's say he's going to have 95 innings in those 13 starts. Is that fair?

Yeah, sure. So that would put him at 226 innings. And to get 226 innings with a 1.11 ERA would be... Hang on, I'm going to do some math here. Okay. So if he gets to 226 innings, to have a 1.12 ERA, he will need to allow 28 earned runs, which means that he can only allow

nine earned runs in those 95 innings. And nine earned runs in those 95 innings and nine earned runs in 95 innings is a zero a 0.85 era so all he has to do to close the gap is to have a 0.85 era as a starter for almost an entire half of a baseball season that's a pretty tall order. That is, like, really, like, this is, I think that it is fun to watch records be chased, and if a guy is hitting 395, I'm super into it. I'll admit it.

I like records. But this one is just, it's not, it's really misleading to see that number and think that he's close. He is not at all close. Anyway, but that's not the point. No one's saying, hey, Zach Greinke is 95 innings away and nine earned runs away from a 1.12 ERA.

That's true. No one is saying that. The record that is closer at hand and that is probably much more realistic is that he has he's basically two starts away from potentially breaking Oral Hirschheiser's record for scoreless innings.

Yes. That is the thing people have been saying. That is the thing people have been saying. And in those 40, you know, he's pitched his last six starts. He hasn't allowed a run. He struck out 42, walked four, 19 hits, no runs, ERA zero. And that's really good. That's really impressive. And so I guess I don't have a theme for this, but I guess the simplest question is, has Zach Granke actually taken a huge step forward in your mind? Is he a different pitcher than he used to be? Or is this just one of those years? I think he is different. He's definitely doing things differently. I don't know

whether those things have made him the best Zach Granke ever. I think the best Zach Granke ever is probably still Royals Cy Young year Zach Granke. But he has done some things to compensate for the fact that he's older now and doesn't have quite the same stuff that he did. And there were some good things written about the streak. And interestingly, all of those things sort of had different takeaways or pinned the credit for the streak on different things that he's doing. So I read a Joe Sheehan post about it. Jonah Carey did a good post at Grantland. Jeff Sullivan did multiple posts on it. And they all sort of had different things that they noticed and focused on. So Joe kind of talked about the opponents

that Granke has faced. And obviously he has not faced the best opponents during this run he has faced a lot of not great hitting teams in pitchers parks for the most part so if you look at where the the league offenses rank that he's faced during this stretch then they haven't been great and obviously i mean it's almost pointless to point out because any pitcher who is on a crazy scoreless streak is going to have a super low BABIP because you can't have a crazy scoreless streak if you have a high BABIP. If you're allowing lots of hits, you will not allow no runs. So you almost have to have things going your way to a certain extent to have a streak like this but uh but you also you also though would expect to have in addition to the crazy low bab if you would expect also to have crazy dominant performance yeah overall and i think that's if you wanted to make any case against

cranky i mean it's a pretty simple one it's a pretty simple one. It's a pretty familiar one. This year, overall, he hasn't really been, you know, like by FIP, he hasn't been notably better than anybody else in the league. You know, he's not having his career best year as far as peripherals go. He's, even in this streak, he's, you know, striking out less than a batter an inning. They're good. They're good numbers, as you would expect from somebody who hasn't allowed a run in 43 innings. But they're not, like Kershaw, for instance, over the same stretch, if you weren't looking at ERA, if you were just looking at every other number on the line except for runs allowed,

you would bet that Kershaw was having this streak, right? Yeah, and i don't think cranky himself has really been better during the streak than he was prior to the streak at least not notably and i think he has even said as much because zach cranky will say things like that which is why everyone loves zach cranky rightfully so but But so a couple of the things that people have highlighted, Jonah focused on the outer thirdness of new Zach Greinke. So he stays away now. His fastball is still fine, but it's not what it once was.

It's not mid-90s anymore. And so he's staying away and he's throwing more pitches on the outer third of the plate and away than anyone else. And he's getting really good results on those pitches. I was just going to ask if you found that convincing. Sort of. I feel like this season, I feel like the outer third is getting rehabilitated this year. Thanks to Dallas Keuchel.

Because it's like the last few years, inner third or pitching in. I mean, you know, in and out have always been two of the top options, the top places for pitchers to pitch both ahead of middle. But there's been a lot in the last few years about pitching in and the Pirates and cutters in and getting grounders. And that's kind of been the hot area. And now there's just been so much focus on Dallas Keuchel and his pitching away and how well that's worked for him.

And away is good. Away, if you miss away, you're probably less likely to miss over the middle, and guys can't hit away. Away is far away. It's hard to not hit away pitches off the end of your bat. So if you can actually hit the glove, and if you're throwing to Yasmany Grandal, who's maybe been the best framing catcher in baseball, and he can get you some extra inches on that outside corner, then that's great. And if you have Zach Granke's command and Dallas Keuchel's command, that should make sense. That'd be a good place to throw

your pitches by the way what do you think of keitel angelo as a nickname uh because he paints the the corner yeah um i think i like it yeah i think i like it a lot yeah i do too it's clever yeah it is uh so here's the here's here's the the reason that it might not be convincing. And this is the simplest argument possible. But Granke was already throwing a lot of pitches away. He was already near the top of the leaderboard. And he has thrown considerably fewer pitches away during the streak, as Jonah pointed out, than he did in the first half of the first half. But still more than in a previous season still more however if you look at his year year year by year 2012 he was almost the exact

almost the same rate in 2012 i mean we're basically talking about the difference between 2012 and the streak right now is like one extra pitch out of 100 on the outer third. I mean, that's not a big deal, right? No. It maybe is two pitches out of 100. Yeah. I mean, we're looking for things that he's doing differently because he's on this crazy streak. Whereas 90% of the streak is Zach Greinke is a really good pitcher, so he's more likely to have a really good streak, and he's had things go his way. So that's most of it, and that's not all that fun to talk about, really.

And we talk about things that maybe make it slightly less improbable because he's doing them well. So the other thing, I guess Jeff focused more on not so much the outer thirdness as the non-middleness of where his pitches have been over this streak. And he showed a great gif of pitch plots from Baseball Savant that show a very Mariano Rivera-like bimodal distribution, I guess would be the technical term. But basically, he's throwing pitches on the outside corner and the inside corner, and a little bit out off the plate and in off the plate, out off the plate, but nothing in the middle. There's just a swath of blue in this Baseball Savant graph where there are no pitches. Pitches are green. There are no pitches there.

And that's a really good thing. If you can avoid the middle of the plate, that's a pretty good explanation for why you haven't been hit very hard over that stretch. whether he is now suddenly a guy who never hits the middle of the plate like Mariano Rivera was, or whether he's just happened to have a stretch of really good command and his mechanics have been in sync. And maybe there's some randomness to command also where you just miss by a certain amount just unavoidably. And he hasn't happened to do that over this stretch. just unavoidably, and he hasn't happened to do that over this stretch. So that's as good an explanation as any, is that he's just avoided hard contact by avoiding the places where pitches result in hard contact,

which is probably not something that he can keep doing as well as he has during the streak over the rest of the season. But that's why it's a streak. That's why it stands out. And obviously, I mean, he's in Dodger Stadium, and it's a season when offense is low, and it's more likely for that to happen in a season like this also. But those are good reasons. And Jeff wrote a whole post about Zach Granke's changeup and how his separation between his changeup and his fastball has been less than ever before.

And really only Felix Hernandez can compare to that. And it was interesting. I didn't know that about Zach Greinke, that he used to have a huge separation between his fastball and his changeup. And now it's a tiny one. And his changeup is working really well. And that's one of those things that no one would have said coming into the season. He needs to get less separation between his fastball and his changeup, because that's generally not regarded as a good thing. There's sort of a spectrum. Harry Pavlidis did a good series on what makes

a good changeup at BP a couple years ago. And he found, I think, that the closer they are together, the more likely the changeup is to be a ground ball pitch, whereas the bigger the separation, the more likely it is to be a strikeout pitch. And that like Steven Strasburg was the best guy at getting grounders and also getting whiffs. that like Steven Strasburg was the best guy at getting grounders and also getting whiffs. And so I don't know that there's any correlation between what the separation is and how good the changeup is. It's just sort of a different changeup depending on what the separation is. So no one would have said if Zach Granke could just get his fastball changeup separation to like three miles per hour, he'll be an ace and he'll have

a great scoreless streak and we don't even know if it's necessarily a good thing or whether he should be doing that but he is doing that and it's different and it's working so far so it's worth pointing out but that's another thing that is different about him if not necessarily better yeah and so there are basically three there are three um i don't know frames by which you can enjoy a streak one is just the fact that it is happening it is exciting to watch a thing happening so if like if i saw a guy who was flipping coins and he got to like 85 heads in a row i would be pretty excited, I'd be excited to see the 86. Like, the whole, like, it'd be like watching a guy play craps, right?

Like, you'd get into it even if it's just whatever. It's like, it's an anomaly, and it's fun to see anomalies, okay? So that one, we can agree that this great, impressive, amazing record is threatened, is exciting and fun, and I will absolutely like to watch him go for that, right? Yep. Okay, number two is it's an opportunity to see a guy who is completely dominating the sport. And so the question is, is that cranky at this point? And I would argue that from my not having really been engaged

with this view, with this streak view, it doesn't feel like this is actually the most dominant stretch of pitching in baseball this year. It is definitely dominant enough to be enjoyable, but it is... I would probably, like, again, probably if I could go back and re-watch every one of Kershaw's last 10 starts instead of this, from a dominance perspective, I probably would choose that over this. Or Max Scherzer's best stretch of starts this year.

Yes. So, very, very, very good, but I don't think quite the level of dominance that the record chase completely suggests. The third one and the most interesting one is, again, it's the corner turn. Is Granke a better pitcher now than he was a year ago? And this one is the most important one because this is the one that has the most truth in it, at least subjectivity, and also because Zach Granke is very likely going to be a free agent in three months, right? He's got an opt-out in his contract, and most guys do prefer to hit free agency after their 1.30 ERA season.

Most guys, given the choice, will hit free agency after that year. So presumably he will opt out, presumably he will opt out. Presumably he will opt out and then the Dodgers will probably just do what the Yankees did with Sabathia and throw him a ton of money before he actually hits the market. But I don't know, maybe Granke doesn't want that. Who knows? But anyway, it matters because a bunch of teams are going to have to decide what pitcher Zach Reinke is right now. And I would say coming into this year that he would have been on the low end of the list of aces in the league. And he doesn't have the traditional indicators of an ace, and hasn't for the last few years.

He's been very good, but he's become something less than the pitcher he was in his Cy Young season in Kansas City. And this, on some level, looks like a return to that. He has been arguably one of the best pitchers in baseball this year. So the question I have for you, Ben, two-part question. You have a game to start tomorrow, and every pitcher in baseball is fresh, and it's a must win how many pitchers do you start ahead of granky tomorrow and same question but let's say for september

28th 2015 so we're taking the potential hotness out of the equation and looking at his current true talent ability, uh, but separated by just a couple of months. I am going to say there'd be at least five guys I'd start before Grinky now. Can I guess? Well, I don't even know that I have them in my head right now, but you know, uh, sure.

Uh, sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Uh,

Clayton, Chris, uh, Max Scherzer, Chris sale. Yeah, probably, probably Kluber. Okay. Felix and Jose Fernandez?

I don't know if I'd go Fernandez right now. Maybe. Probably not quite yet. But, yeah, that's about it, really. You know Fernandez has a 1.56 fit since coming back. Yeah, it's pretty good. Okay. You know Fernandez has a 1.56 fitness. Yeah, it's pretty good. Just making sure you do that. Did we say Chris Sale?

I did say Chris Sale, yeah. So that would be five or six. Yeah, it's in that range. Madison Bumgarner? No. Okay. Who else can I think of? Keichel.

Keichel, yeah. I don't think think of? Keichel. Keichel, yeah. I don't think I would start Keichel before him. It depends on my defense, maybe. Okay. All right. And maybe somebody we're forgetting. Okay, so five or six. Does the answer change at all if we bump it to September?

David Price, maybe. David Price, maybe for September, but not. Maybe for now September Maybe for now Maybe for now Are you saying that the answer does not change for September Like you don't think that the hotness is a factor Well I mean Not hitting the middle of the plate

Part is Kind of compelling to me But I don't know that there is I don't know that I necessarily Buy that he can avoid the middle Of the plate tomorrow much better than he can in September. But I guess, I guess I would say there's a slightly better chance that he could, right? Like assuming that that, it's not purely randomness, right? It can't be purely randomness that he has not hit the middle of the plate over this span of time.

randomness that he has not hit the middle of the plate over this span of time. It might not be predictive, but you would think that during this stretch, he must have been just more put together mechanically or mentally or whatever it is that would allow him to do something like that over a fairly substantial stretch. So it's probably less likely that he would lose whatever that is tomorrow than you know months from now when lots of things can happen in the interim but i don't know that the stats would necessarily say that but i'll i'll say i want him now slightly more than i would at the end of september but probably not enough to really move him on the leaderboard of guys I would want. And just to clarify, just to make sure that none of these are names you've forgotten, I don't think they are, but you would choose him over Sonny Gray, Jacob deGrom, Jake Arrieta,

Garrett Cole, Johnny Cueto? I don't think I would take any of those guys over. Cueto might be close. DeGrom has been just incredible for a couple seasons now. So kind of hard to argue against DeGrom. But yeah, I'd go with Granke. And I don't think there's any clear separation between Granke and a couple of those guys. But Granke, sure.

Okay, two more questions, two quick ones. Would you bet that Zach Granke's ERA will be lower than his FIP for the rest of the year over his next nine starts? Yeah, that's a good question because that's basically asking if I think that he can allow weaker contact than the average pitcher, basically. And it's asking, yes, and it's asking whether you think that the ERA is more predictive than the F pitcher basically and it's asking yes and it's asking whether you think that the era is more predictive than the fip which changes i mean if you think that the fip is the best era indicator or predictor for him then you know de grom and arietta and a couple of other guys are really right there with him gary right there with him and he's not historically a

guy who beats his fip or underperforms the eraRA or whatever. He's not Chris Young, really. He wasn't for most of his career. In fact, he was the opposite. And then since he's been in L.A., he has been for the last three years. And not by massive margins the first two years but but since he's been in la it's been every year yeah i'm gonna say no i would i would not bet on one to be higher or lower than the other all right and then last question if he were stretched out as a starter, who would you want starting a game tomorrow? Zach Granke or Aroldis Chapman? Granke. Okay. So you think that if the Reds had put Chapman in the rotation to start the year or last year or three years ago or whatever,

he wouldn't be as good as Granke? There's definitely a lot more uncertainty surrounding my expectation for Chapman, right? Because we haven't seen him start. I don't know how he can start. Yeah. So. I think you're right. I mean, I would also take Cranky. I mean, you wouldn't bet on the guy to be better.

You wouldn't bet on really any pitcher in the world. Hey, you didn't say Harvey. Is Harvey definitely not a guy either? Yeah, not Harvey. Okay. You basically would not bet on any human being to be as good as Cranky. Now, we have more than zero information about Chapman. We know how he does as a reliever. Yes.

But all the same, just imagine that you're starting from a blank slate. You would probably not bet on him. All right. Good. Okay. I'm trying to come up with a question based on aging because the encouraging thing about Cranky is that he has lost stuff, but he has gotten better or has not gotten worse, which is good. Like he doesn't fall into the Lincecum, Verlander, Sabathia camp of guys who lost velocity and fell apart. And maybe he hasn't lost as much as some of those guys have. He still throws fairly hard. But the fact that he has become a different pitcher without really becoming a worse pitcher is encouraging, right? I don't know how to capture that in a question, but the fact that he has

lost stuff and not lost results, lost effectiveness, it makes you more optimistic about him as a 35 year old or something, right? Like if you, if you're the team, if he does opt out and you're the team that's trying to decide whether to sign him as a free agent this year, you're probably more... Well, we talked about this once, right? Would you rather have the guy who hasn't lost any stuff or the guy who has already lost some stuff but has made adjustments and has done really well despite losing the stuff?

Because you never know. We know that everyone's going to lose stuff, but we don't know how guys's going to lose stuff, but we don't know how guys are going to respond to it. So it's possible that the guy who loses stuff might be Verlander and not know how to respond to it or not have a second gear or a plan B or whatever. And he might just go from being great to terrible. Whereas the guy who's had the gentle decline and stuff, but has made adjustments, we know he's probably not going to fall apart if he loses a little more stuff. And I think when we talked about that,

I still said I'd prefer to have the guy who hasn't lost any stuff yet. I also would prefer to have the guy who hasn't lost any stuff yet. I think the question with Granke, or the reason that Granke is, you'd be optimistic about him, is that he is the type of profile of a guy who you would think would handle it well, right? He's got a very broad repertoire. He's always had good command. And so, you know, that's the sort of guy.

He's never been reliant on the velocity in a way that some pitchers are. So you would think if anybody could, like you would bet on him over Linscombe, like minus five miles an hour, right? Yeah, I think so so it's it's less surprising that he has managed to make all these adjustments and it's kind of not surprising at all that he has managed to make these adjustments i would still rather he i would rather i would rather have cranky with the two miles an hour than without right. Right, yeah. Are there any relevant Molly Knight book anecdotes about Cranky here?

Any favorites that haven't been done to death in the media? They've been done to death. The one about the washing your hands was an all-timer, but it's been done. The Poznanski one from a few years ago, which has also been done to death. Which one? Refresh my memory.

All right. So the one from Poznanski a few years ago, which has also been done to death. Which one? Refresh my memory. The one from Poznanski a few years ago I think is the all-timer. I'm just going to read it. Royals relief pitcher Jeremy Affelt gave up a home run. He was upset in the dugout, of course, and he stormed around muttering it himself. That wasn't even that bad of a pitch.

Right, I remember this one now. Actually, Zach zach said it was a pretty bad pitch affelt looked up at granky thanks zach affelt said his voice dripping with sarcasm no zach said really i went back to the clubhouse and looked at the pitch on video it was a really bad pitch right over the middle of the plate and you got it up. I mean, it was a bad pitch. Thanks, Zach, Affelt said again. Right down the middle, Granke said. I could have hit it out. Affelt looked into Granke's eager face and just shook his head.

Thanks, Zach, he said. Yeah, Granke said, and he walked back to his seat in the dugout. Very good. Very good. All right. So that's it for today. You can send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives dot com. I apologize for the somewhat unpredictable nature of our podcast schedule these days,

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