Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 714: The 2015 MLB Debuts Draft

Episode Date: August 10, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about last week’s banter and the Dodgers’ speed camp, then draft players who made their big league debuts in 2015.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, new sensations Ooh, ooh, ooh, new sensations Talking about your new sensations Good morning and welcome to episode 714 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Hello. How was your weekend? You should know. I shouldn't.

I went to a wedding. We weren't together. It was good. We swept. Yeah, that I did know. Okay. Anything you want to discuss? Two quick things.

One, a lot of burning boats action on the Facebook group. And so in case you're not on the Facebook group, it was all started with a picture that was tweeted of the Missouri football team's locker room or some school in Missouri. I think Missouri, but you never know. Maybe it's some

Missouri sub-campus. Who knows? Anyway, Missouri's football locker room says, burn your boats! And yeah. The thing about it too is that it's really a management thing, if anything else, right? The boat burning was Cortez doing it. His men didn't want the boats burned. True, right. So it doesn't really feel like something that should be used to motivate the players.

It seems like something you maybe should tell the manager, but not the players. The players would, anyway. All right. Burn your boats. And there's a T-shirt being sold that says burn the ships. And there is a, Jordan points out that in Big Data Baseball, Travis Sawchuk's book about the Pirates, which we both read this offseason,

Clint Hurdle also thinks about the story of Cortez, who burned the ships or didn't. And he did it. I think this is probably the most appropriate message. It's how Travis sums up. He gave them no alternative but to go forward. There was only one way to avoid a mutiny. Eliminate an option.

And that's really what it's about. It's about avoiding mutiny. It's about the manager, right? It's about the players. And then, frankly, the rest of the page in Big Data Baseball seems to steer away from the meaning of the story,, the story, I think a little bit, uh, but all the same, uh, not as bad as any, as the others. This is probably the best encapsulation of it. Anyway, I just am pointing this out mainly because I hate sports people. Like I just hate how, like, like how everything

has to be used by every team there's there's like there's one anecdote at any given time and they all use it and they all think that they're original there's one you know way to grow facial hair and they all use it and they think they're cool that i love i love sports people i do they're great they do things to entertain us. But this is just a thing that kills me. The copycatting just kills me. Ben? Well, it's easy to criticize. It's tough to come up with a better way.

So we should come up with a better historical anecdote that could be used by teams that are looking to motivate their players. But are we as uncreative in our industry as they are in theirs i i'd like to think not i i i'd like to think not to i mean i try i try really hard not to copy people when i'm doing my job yeah well i also did i i don't know if this counts, but I did write a piece about historical team collapses. And I feel like you could use any of, not team collapses, but civilization collapses. I feel like you could use any of those as a team motivation analogy. Yeah, those were long-term collapses.

Those were the declines and falls of empires and civilizations this needs to be a snappy story this needs to be one one event all right well okay send us some suggestions at podcast at baseball perspectives.com send us a better historical anecdote that teams could use in pregame speeches not teams team singular i don't want every team using it okay well if it's good enough they will inevitably uh just it's the it's fine that they ought look when they say the 110 percent things and they take it one day at a time that's cliche cliche intentionally. And I don't mind that. I don't mind intentional cliche. They have a reason to be, uh, to, to, to kind of be boring and to stay within themselves, which is also a cliche. Uh, but I don't like the idea that everybody who stands up

and tells this story in a locker room in March or, uh, on a spring training field in March thinks that they're clever. The, uh, the clever. The unoriginal person who thinks he's clever is a pet peeve of mine. Maybe that's really what this all comes down to. What do you think the ideal percentage to tell people to give is? Is our manager with the Stompers used 120, which to me is a little high. It's a lot to expect anyone to give 120, little high it's a lot to expect anyone to give 120 aside from the the usual explanation the usual complaint that you can't give more than 100 you could you could ask people to give some percentage that's higher than their usual percentage over a short amount of time but to me 120 is a little steep to me i don't think you can ask for 120. Yeah, I don't think most people are very good at visualizing numbers anyway.

And so I'm not sure that it matters whether you say 101% or 105% or 158%. It's all fairly abstract. I think that the metaphor or whatever that probably has the most resonance in my mind and that I can actually get behind, and it's also a cliche but I like it, is the leaving it all on the field idea. To me, there is something about that that is very clear and effective. So I wouldn't say percent. I would just stress that you only get one shot. Do not miss your chance to blow. The opportunity comes once in a lifetime.

Leave it all on the field. Right. Okay. A quick update on our last podcast from last week, the Joe Girardi strategy that we were discussing. We're in a 4-3 game against the Red Sox. He removed left-handed reliever Justin Wilson with left-handed hitter Jackie Bradley at the plate with a 1-2 count and brought in right-handed reliever Delon Batonsas immediately following

a stolen base by the runner who had been on first, Ruzny Castillo, and Girardi refused to explain why he did this unorthodox thing. He just said it was strategy. And we puzzled over why he might have done this, and we didn't come up with what is probably the best explanation, which a couple people suggested after the podcast, which is that with the runner on first, he wanted the left-handed reliever in to hold the runner on first. And once that runner stole second base anyway, he went with the better reliever. So he would have maybe been thinking that even though Batances is better than Wilson, probably despite the platoon disadvantage that he would have, the advantage that Wilson had holding the runner on might have canceled that out. And so

once the runner was no longer on first, there was no reason to have the inferior reliever in, which makes sense. I would say that the gain is probably still small enough that, I don't know, it's sort of a stretch to bring in a pitcher with a one-two count when pitchers are not used to doing that. And it seemed like Batances was not totally comfortable doing that, unless it seemed like Batances was not totally comfortable doing that. Unless it's a thing that you do regularly and you've prepped your pitchers to do, which didn't seem to be the case,

it was still sort of a strange move, but probably makes sense statistically at least, and I applaud him for thinking that way if that was what he was thinking. I think that it was a good move. Okay. I think both decisions were good decisions. All right.

The thing about it, Ben, is that if they all cited, if somebody said, you know, Ned Colletti told me this story about Hernan Cortez years ago, and I want to tell it to you guys, that would be fine. years ago, and I want to tell it to you guys, that would be fine. It's that they all act like they discovered this great historical tidbit. That they're the ones who found the Cortez not true story. And I don't know, it kind of reminds me of like, if you say you write a really great blog post about some like post about something and you have a great gif in that blog post. And somebody else goes, Ben Lindbergh wrote this great blog post and here's this great gif that he had. Well, that's okay.

But they're not that person. Or you can flip the story and you could be the person who does it a second time. It's fine. That person is not being original or if you flip the story and you could be the person who does it a second time, it's fine. That person is not being original or creative. They're just relaying a thing that they thought was interesting, but there's no flaw there. There's nothing wrong with that. But when people start just taking the GIF and posting it, that's annoying, right? And so I don't know. I just feel like tell people the origin story of this story. They should link to previous speeches.

Or they should hand out a references page, an appendix with previous citations. Yeah. Jeez, Ben. I'm going to spend an afternoon trying to hunt down the first person to use this, aren't I? Probably. At some point. Wait until the book is done, though. All right.

The only other thing. Did you read about the Dodgers speed camp? No. So this was pretty cool. Bill Shakin wrote a good article in the Los Angeles Times, no surprise. And he found an interesting story. The Dodgers are sort of building dedicated postseason pinch runner types, which is, I know, a favorite type of yours. And we've talked about this in the past. We probably talked about it when the Royals used Terrence Gore this way. I think you wrote about

it and we maybe did a podcast about candidates for this role, like Freddie Guzman, the guy who just comes up in September or October after not playing in the majors all season and is just the dedicated, fast guy. And you've talked about whether it makes sense to do like a Herb Washington style thing where you just get a track star and teach him how to run in baseball ways and use him in this role. And so the Dodgers are doing this in more of a systematic way than anyone has done recently, sort of almost like a Royals Baseball Academy kind of way, where they picked five players and they got these players in various ways. There's one guy who is the second cousin of Clyde Drexler, and Dodgers

scouts were supposed to find a potential designated runner, and they chose this guy in the third to last round of the draft. He's a 23-year-old, and they thought he would be fast and have the makings of someone who would do well in this role, so they drafted him. There's another guy, Robbie Garvey, a 26-year-old who'd played six seasons in the minor leagues, never got past A-ball, but had been a competitive sprinter in the past. There's a guy named Kyle Hudson who's 28, and he had briefly made the majors once and had over 2,000 at-bats in the minors, but had given up baseball and become an assistant coach at the university of illinois and the dodgers found him and told him they wanted to do this so those were

the three of the five guys in the speed camp who have survived i guess a couple guys washed out of speed camp and so they just had them like give up their gloves and their bats and not even play baseball for a while just work on running only getting good reads and you know the proper technique and stealing bases and everything and then they started putting them into minor league games again just as pinch runners and uh shaken says that they have the three of them together have played 40 minor league games. They have not had an at-bat yet, and they've stolen 27 bases in 36 attempts. That's not very good, by the way. That's pretty poor.

No, no, no, Ben, that's very poor. Maybe it's not great if your only job is this. For a guy whose entire roster spot is being able to come in and steal bases uh with near invincibility right that's very bad yeah that so that's a 75 success rate which means you know you're probably helping the team but you are hurting the team in the sense that you're costing a roster spot that could go to an actual player and you're you're frankly you're probably not helping the team because you're replacing a person who's now not in the game anymore for the rest of the game true yeah and of course everyone

is aware that these guys are going to steal because that's their sole purpose on the roster and so so that that hurts if i mean but that's always going to be the case. We're also talking about minor leaguers. Yes, true. Yeah. So it may be that none of these guys ever makes it. None of these guys ever plays in the majors. This experiment might be a dud. None of these guys might turn out to be good enough to justify the roster spot even once rosters expand. I mean, playoff rosters don't expand and that's when you really want one or what you're really developing them with in mind. So it's an

interesting experiment that was evidently the brainchild of our friend Gabe Kapler. And it'll be interesting to see how it works or how it doesn't work. But they're doing this in a more systematic way than it seems that most teams have tried to. I'm very jealous of the idea. It's smart and a good idea. And it doesn't sound like the first group is remotely working based on what you just described to me. And I'm both, well, I'm mostly not surprised. I think it's definitely worth the investment in trying to see if it works. And I think there will come a time at some point where it can work. But there are a lot of obstacles, one of which is cultural, I imagine. I don't know if the minor

leaguers care, but one of the things about the Herb Washington experience was that the team just hated him. And when you get thrown out as the designated fast guy who doesn't even own a glove, they resent you. They don't like being pinch run for. They don't like that you're taking a roster spot of a guy who, in the rest of the team's mind, could have been hitting.350. Who knows? So I don't know if that would still be a factor in this day and age,

but it certainly was back then. And yeah, I did the piece I did about whether 90 feet was still long enough in this day and age to prevent something like this from somebody like this being invincible, I concluded that we're not there yet. And so my guess is that 90 feet is still long enough and probably always will be. But anyway, I'm proud of that piece, so link to it. Okay.

And Shaken mentions that the Dodgers didn't really have a speedy guy. A lot of teams might just have one already, but the Dodgers didn't until they acquired Jose Peraza, who is an actual player and can play multiple positions and play them well and run. And so he says someone like that might end up on the roster instead of these dedicated runners now that they have someone like that. So yeah, it might not work. But if you're the Dodgers, then you might as well try it because it might work. So it's interesting. All right. So we haven't done a draft in a while. So we're going to do a draft today. And I've written and we've talked about how great a year this has been for top prospect debuts.

And not just the debuts, but the performances and players playing well shortly after debuting. It's just been a great year for young talent all across the league, but particularly for people who've come up this year. So we're just going to do a draft of 2015 debuts and not not the 2015 performances but the players so we're going to draft players who have debuted this year and i don't know how we're going to decide who wins we're going to what check back in 20 years and see who had the best careers or are we doing a time frame or how many people are we picking we didn't decide any of these important things before we started recording your game all right so should we just do uh let's do like team control years let's do the first what six years of of the guy's career uh fine okay and so so pre-free agency or pre what would have been free agency for guys who sign

extensions and there are a lot of players who have debuted this year and we're not even into roster expansion period there are 187 new baseball players this year we're not going to draft all of them so how many should we draft what's your preference your preference is probably three there's 187 i don't have 187 in my spreadsheet you checked both tabs yeah well i have 68 in batters and have uh oh i have 121 in pitchers uh never mind that's 187 yeah yeah so we have a spreadsheet of these guys ordered by their wins above replacement player this season. Although that is deceptive in some cases. There are some guys who have barely played who might be high draft picks in this draft.

So I don't know. At what point will we start to bore each other and others? I guess partly it depends how quickly we go. Yeah. We could do speed. We could do haul 187, except you only have three seconds per pick. Should we do that? No.

I don't think so. Too bad. Yeah, no. We could go away for 10 minutes and order these. And then just rapid fire yell out the name. Exactly. Just scream at each other. Let's do that.

Okay. It sounds like a nightmare to listen to. Just people saying names for... Yeah, probably. But also, listening to us think about it is going to be a nightmare that's true i mean if we did the uh everyone just yells out names it would still be over nine minutes of just saying names yeah nine minutes That sounds about right. I'll just pick a guy. Yeah.

How many guys? I don't know. Let's do 20 each. Oh, geez. Okay. As quick as we can. Okay. All right.

Who goes first? I don't care. Carlos Correa. All right. That's the obvious first pick. I will take Chris Bryant. Okay. I'll take Addison Russell.

All right. That's who I would have taken too, I think. I think I'll take Buxton. Okay. I'll take Gallo. All right. I'm going to have trouble keeping track of who has been taken and who has not. All right. So we've got five picks so far.

I'm leaning toward a pitcher, but I don't know if i want to go with a pitcher this early since we're talking about long term here but we're not talking about career we're just talking about several years so maybe i'll i'll just go with cinder guard okay i'll take miguel snow Okay I think I will take Austin Hedges Who has not hit at all I'm actually surprised that he Has an above replacement level Wins above replacement

Player score which he does Because I guess because of his Defense except framing is not Taken into account in warp yet And he has been as excellent at framing as advertised. And he's also caught 50% of base stealers, and he has a 40 OPS plus, so it's impressive that he has done this well statistically.

But I'm going to guess he's going to hit better than that eventually. I mean, you're really betting that Warp, that his his warp is going to include his framing by then, right? Yeah. Because otherwise that's a terrible pick. Yeah. Yeah. So we didn't even say how we're going to decide who wins, but I guess warp is the obvious thing.

Okay. So yeah, hedges. All right. Kyle Schwarber. Okay. And so there's a run on catchers here. Maybe I should take Kevin Ploiecki. I. Maybe I should take Kevin Ploiecki. I'm not going to take Kevin Ploiecki.

I'm going to take Lance McCullers. Okay. I will take Michael Conforto. All right. I think I will take Kevin Ploiecki. Okay. I will take Francisco Lindor. Oh. Should have taken him earlier. I just skipped Francisco Lindor. Oh.

Should have taken him earlier. I just skipped over him. All right. Yeah, his framing sucks. Yeah. All right. I'll take Steven Piscotty. All right.

I'll take Blake Sweetheart. Okay. How old is Kong? I don't know. 30? Yeah. That's a risky one. Kong is 28. That's tempting. Since we're only going several years here, maybe I'll take Kong.

Okay. All right. I'll take Joe Ross. Okay. I'll take Kettle Marte. Okay. I'll take Steven Matz. All right. I'll take Eduardo Rodriguez. I don't know who that is. Who's that? Red Sox lefty, rookie pitcher, throws very hard. Oh yeah, that guy. Yeah.

He's the guy they got for Andrew Miller. Yes. Okay. Oh wow, look at him. He's been playing well while I've been stomping. Yeah. He's really good. He's pretty good. Good baseball knowledge on this show.

All right. Aaron Nola. Taylor Youngman. Number one on the pitchers list as far as value this year. He sure is. Preston Tucker. Okay. Any idea how many we picked? 23.

All right. So we're more than halfway all right i'm running out of people who i like there's a large group of people i know but can't really keep straight like i've gotten to that point like the first ones i know you know like i know whether he was seventh or fourteenth but now i'm just like, oh, I know him. Where from? Is this guy I know from high school, or was he the grocery bagger in my college supermarket? I can't quite remember. Okay, I'm going to take Yasmani Tomas, who has been a pretty good hitter, above league average hitter as a 24-year-old rookie.

Okay. I'll take Severino. Okay. All right. Maybe I'll take, I'll get the other Yankee off the board. I'll take Rob Refsnyder. Okay. I'll take Archie Bradley.

Oh, Archie Bradley. Probably like the, what number, what was he coming into this year? He was a top 20 prospect? Top 10 prospect? He was up there. All right. I will take, I guess I'll take Devin Travis. You'll take Devin Travis?

Yeah. Okay. I'll take Carlos Rodon. Hmm. Man, you're finding some guys who fell for no particular reason other than I didn't look far enough on the leaderboard. Yeah, I actually searched Rodon. Uh-huh. That's how low he is.

I actually thought I better, I did control F. Yeah, all right. Maybe I'll do that with a guy. I'll take Alex Meyer. Yeah, okay. I'll take players. I don't I'll take Alex Meyer. Yeah. Okay. I'll take players. I don't know who any of you are anymore. Jeez.

I'll take Wilmer Defoe. What? I don't know. That's not how you pronounce his name. I think it is. Why wouldn't I take him? You just sounded pretty upset about it. No, I was not at all upset.

Okay. All right. I'll take Vincent Velasquez. Okay. I'll take Bryce Harper. You'd win this in a walk if you could. Mason Williams. Okay.

Let's see. There's still some interesting pitchers on the board. Neither of us has taken Pat Vendetti yet. I'll take Henry Owens. Okay. I'll take Chichi. Mm-hmm. Okay.

And I'll take Tim Cooney. Okay. I'll take Jonathan Gray. Oh, all right. Did neither of us take A.J. Cole? Is A.J. Cole on here? A.J. Cole's on Did neither of us take A.J. Cole? Is A.J. Cole on here? A.J. Cole's on here. I will take A.J. Cole.

All right. Hang on. I'm catching up. All right. So this is our last pick each then. All right. Thank heavens. I'll take Roberto Ozuna.

Okay. For my last pick, I'm torn between two people who've done really well in AAA this year, Richie Schaefer and Matt Boyd. I think I'll take Boyd. Okay. All right. A lot of talent left on the board. I think I'll take Boyd. Okay.

So a lot of talent left on the board. Still Richie Schaefer, Eddie Rosario, Giovanni Urshela, some pretty good pitchers, Delano DeShields, etc. Yeah. But I think that was Zach Lee. We didn't take Zach Lee. We didn't take Zach Lee. But I think that was about the right amount of talent that we could take without a huge drop off although maybe too many for people to actually listen to now so uh so here's the thing ben yeah the whole premise of this is that tons of great players have debuted this year people just heard us name 40 legit

major leaguers probably or something like that um And so I wondered what the best year for debuts. And so I looked at the play index to see how many players' first years, how many Hall of Famers' first years were in each season going back to 1924 or whatever. So a few things about this. First of all, there are a handful of years, not many, but a handful of years that produced no Hall of Famers. 1933, 34, 35 was a three-year run where no Hall of Famers created, which is amazing, right? I guess maybe. I mean, that was just when the Hall of Fame was starting. Maybe there was a backlog of guys that they had to get in, and so

there were people who were passed over. No, because these guys wouldn't have been elected until like 1960 or 1965. Yeah, you're right. It's quite a drought. Yeah, so strangely three-year. I wonder if there's something war-related about it. I don't know. 1944, 1949, 1957, 1971, 1980, 83, and 85. So basically, for all the years that should have produced Hall of Famers by now,

there's 10 years that produced none. And then there are a couple of years that produced six, but really those are old years, and the guys were Veterans Committee guys, so they don't really hardly count. And so really the best years produced four Hall of Fame debuts. And so those would be 67 with Johnny Bench, Rod Carew, Reggie Jackson, and Tom Seaver. 65 with Steve Carlton, Catfish Hunter, Fergie Jenkins, and Jim Palmer. All pitchers, interestingly enough.

Although one not very good pitcher 1956 apparicio drysdale mazaroski frank robinson 55 in fact 55 bunning clementi kopecks and brooks robinson two-year period eight hall of famers uh which is something and eight legit hall of famers uh and uh uh actually i guess bunning was bunning was a veterans committee guy so seven ish legit hall of famers actually yeah okay anyway the point is that there's one year that i haven't said yet and that year is 1988 in 1988 had four hall of famers and 1988 just happened you know like Roberto Alomar, Craig Biggio, Randy Johnson and John Smoltz those were recent

inductees and so it's conceivable it could actually break the modern record if Curt Schilling gets elected and Curt Schilling had a by our by war and by war had a better year than all those guys except for Randy Johnson a better year than all those guys

except for Andy Johnson, a better career than all those guys except for Andy Johnson. He's not getting a lot of support, but you'd like to think that he will before his 15 years are up. And then Gary Sheffield is a fringe Hall of Fame deserving guy,

but isn't going to get there for multiple reasons. But also, it's hard to make a case that he definitely should be uh but if shilling gets there than five so anyway uh my question for you ben is having just read all these names uh how many hall of famers say six six i think it's gonna be a big year You're saying it's the record, huh? Wait, six is the record? I thought there were, weren't there sevens in there? No.

No? No. Oh. This is four. 88 is, 88 is, had four. Four and counting. Four and counting. So four and potentially five is basically the modern record.

Oh, I see. There were a couple sixes, but they were discarding those because they're skewed by the Veterans Committee. Oh, well, okay. I'm not discarding those. But all right. So we're saying BBWA inductees? Well, who knows what the Veterans Committee will look like in 35 years. Right.

At this point, you can't really count on any player ever being elected by the Veterans Committee again. Yeah. And so it's hard to say okay so that was high i guess it's still gonna be a big year i'll say four yeah uh probably that's you should probably never bet on four probably not but but it's been a big year uh it has been a big year and you could make the case that it's the best year Probably it will disappoint us And so I'll say two Okay Alright so we're finished You can send us emails at podcasts at baseballperspectives.com

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