Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 715: Strand Me in St. Louis

Episode Date: August 13, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about casting news, then discuss the St. Louis Cardinals’ seemingly incredible luck.

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You have signed our death warrants. Good morning, and welcome to Episode 715 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Hey, Ben. How are you? I'm okay. I appreciate you taking a break from doing dishes to talk to me today.

You're welcome. I mean, I'm not taking a break so much as I'm multitasking, but you're welcome. So last night I discovered that there are sprinklers in the outfield at Arnold Field in the middle of the night at inopportune times. Why were you at Arnold Field in the middle of the night? I mean, I could do that, but... I was watching the Perseids. It was peak Perseid night, the meteor shower, and Jessie and I went over there after we got back from the Stompers game, and she asked me if there would be outfield sprinklers, and I said I didn't think so.

And because the grass was already wet, which I assumed meant that the watering was over, so were lying there Under the stars And then the sprinklers activated On top of us Wow And we've never talked about What baseball would be like if the sprinklers came on At random That would be interesting I'd like that

On a hot day Wouldn't be the worst thing Outfielders might not mind They might shift to be in the spring they might all right uh a lot of a lot of casting news that's of interest to us these days we should just talk about casting do you read the deadwood movie rumors i saw reference to deadwood movie rumors yeah there are deadwood movie rumors, which I guess is nothing new. But there are confirmed preliminary discussions, which sounds non-revelatory. You like Deadwood, but how much do you like Deadwood?

Not as much as you do, but a lot. The rumors came from Garrett Dillahunt, an unlikely source who played Francis Wolcott. He was my favorite part of Deadwood. He played more than Francis Wolcott. I like he was my favorite part of Deadwood. He played more than Francis Wolcott. He played. Yeah, that's right. Characters. Uh huh. That's true. The weirdest thing about that show is that the same actor for two characters a season apart. Yeah. Although the other thing he tweeted was come on HBO, you made Entourage movie give the Deadwood fans some closure too which doesn't seem like the best strategy to remind hbo of the movie that kind of bombed and barely broke even

ian mcshane gonna be on game of thrones yeah i'm talking about that either he should be on everything he's the most criminally underused actor he's like shane on game of thrones that's quite a match yeah well he's like uh i think of him as like when Roger Clemens was, he would sign in July for the PEN race, you know? Right. Why waste your bullets on spring training and April games? I mean, they'll pay you the same amount, basically, if you just sign in June.

So, yeah, he saves it up. But I guess I'm happy about that. I guess I'm happy about that. don't i think i guess i'm happy about that one of the nice things about game of thrones is that you don't normally have any actors that you think of as the actor they're just they're characters right and al swear engine is going to show up in game of thrones and it's going to be al swear engine in game of thrones yeah it's going to be Al Swearengin in Game of Thrones. Yeah. It's going to take me out of it. In Game of Thrones, every character is Al Swearengin, basically. Yeah. That's my favorite show of all time.

And it depends where you set the minimum played appearances. If you set the minimum played appearances at one season, then Three Peaks is. I'm with you on that. If you set it at two seasons, then Deadwood is. And Peter Gallagher is going to be on Good Wife. I don't know if that's as exciting to you as it was to me, but extremely exciting to me.

Yeah. We should have Kendra Mendez on and ask him about that. We should. All right. So you've not stumbled across an entertainment news podcast. This is still a baseball podcast. Although many of you seem to prefer that we take tangents. But is there anything that you want to talk about before we talk about the thing that we're talking about today?

No, sir. Okay, so we're going to talk about the Cardinals because I wrote about the Cardinals and we're reusing my material. And this is something that people have noticed about the Cardinals and we're reusing my material. And this is something that people have noticed about the Cardinals earlier this season. Jonah Carey mentioned it in a Grantland Post in mid-May, I think, and Matt Truebud wrote an article about it for BP later in the season. But it's one of those things that usually, as time goes on, stops happening or stops being so interesting. The Cardinals are obviously having a great season. They're the best team in baseball.

They're five games ahead of the next closest team, the Royals. And it's not a surprise that the Cardinals are good. The Cardinals are always good. But I don't think anyone saw the Cardinals being the best team in baseball by far, particularly after they lost Adam Wainwright in April. And even though they lost Adam Wainwright in April, it's been the pitching that has really driven their success. And it's really, I mean, it's a historic pitching performance to this point in the season. And despite all the flaws about ERA, occasionally ERA is a useful thing to cite just because it goes back forever and it's not the worst thing

when you're talking about past performance. The Cardinals have a 2.60 staff ERA. Their entire pitching staff has the same performance as Matt Harvey, basically. They're always Matt Harvey. And no team has had a staff ERA that low since 1972, which was like the second lowest scoring season since the dead ball era. That was the season that made the AL start using the DH. So this is something we haven't seen in a long time. The next closest team, the Mets, are about six tenths of a run behind. They're an extreme outlier. And you look at their peripherals and nothing stands out. They're not striking out a ton of guys. They don't walk fewer guys than anyone else. They've, you know, got a decent ground ball rate, but they're not leading the league or anything.

And it's sequencing. It seems to be the times when they are allowing their hits and not allowing their hits so cardinals with the bases empty have allowed a 700 ops which is almost exactly league average now so bases empty cardinals pitchers league average with men on 584 OPS allowed and with runners in scoring position 552 OPS allowed 193 276 276 is their slash line allowed in over a thousand plate appearances with the runners in scoring position so wait help me out here uh can you give me an idea of what percentage of that gap is Babbitt, what percentage is walk rate, and what percentage is isolated power? I can, yes.

So with runners in scoring position, the league is hitting like Billy Hamilton against the Cardinals. Since I made the Matt Harvey comp, I'll make the Billy Hamilton comp too. So Billy Hamilton without speed, which is like the worst player imaginable. So Billy Hamilton without speed, which is like the worst player imaginable. So the split of their runners in scoring position versus bases empty, I will tell you. So they do strike out more batters. Their strikeout rate with the bases empty is 21.1%. With runners in scoring position, it's 24.8%, which is actually the highest of any team with runners in scoring position.

But they also allow more walks, and most teams allow more walks with runners in scoring position. That's the thing that makes this even more incredible, is that pitchers generally do worse with runners in scoring position, I guess because they're trying to be careful or because they're already in trouble, and that's how the bases how runners got in scoring position or better batters are up because top of the order tends to be on more often that sort of thing so the the league hits 40 ops points better with runners in scoring position so even more incredible that the cardinals have gone completely the other way but most of the difference is babbitt it's a 75-point BABIP difference.

So bases empty, 314. Runners in scoring position, 239. And that is backed up by contact quality indicators. Fewer line drives, more pop-ups, more soft contact and less hard contact. So it does seem as if they are actually allowing weaker contact but that itself could be a luck thing so so the total impact of this is that they have been anywhere from six to eight run or wins better than you would think that they would be just on defense and pitching alone just on the timing of that so they're they're cluster luck which is one way to to term it ed fang who's a grantland contributor calculates cluster luck which i think is a joe

pita term that he coined and it basically just you know the difference between a team that happens to cluster all its hits in in bunches and drives in a lot of runners versus a team that just parcels out its hits one per inning and never drives anyone in whether luck related or not so he thinks he calculates that it's an 84 run difference just on that alone. If you go by base runs, it's a 61 run difference. And I think BP's adjusted standings have the Cardinals something like eight wins better than their underlying stats say that they should be. So it's not as if the Cardinals have been a great team and they

would have been a bad team. They still would have been a really good team. But much of the difference in the NL Central over the Pirates and over the Cubs, who haven't really had any luck on their side, can be explained by this. So if the NL Central race comes down to a couple games in the end, then the Cardinals, you could say, won because of how they have clustered their hits. And so the obvious question is whether there is anything meaningful in it, whether it is... Hang on, hang on, hang on. Yeah.

I want to just, two quick things. One, what is the league BABIP split? Because I know that we've talked about with individual players and individual teams, you can't shift as efficiently with runners on generally. So you would think in this day and age, BABIP would go up a bit more. I will look. All right. The league BABIP split is actually very small with bases empty, pitchers have allowed a 292 BABIP,

and with runners in scoring position, 298, and with men on, 305. Did you say that's small? Yeah, well, I mean, it's small compared to the Cardinals. It's not nothing. That's 13 points. Yeah, that's pretty big. Okay, all right. Secondly, are you—and so that just makes it even more.

That's all. That's all I'm saying. Right, right. It should go the other way, so. Yes. Right, yeah. So, secondly, did you mention in your article, and are you going to mention here, the 2013-2014 Cardinals-Haters? I did mention that, and I will mention that. Go on.

that so go on okay so that is the thing that comes to mind when you point out that the Cardinals have been lucky is that they've been lucky before notably lucky before so they had the same thing going on with their offense in 2013 I don't know whether we talked about it at the time Russell Carlton wrote an article about it trying to see if you could find anything real in it. But it was the same thing with the hitters. That year, Cardinals hitters hit 330, 402, 463 with runners in scoring position in 1,600 played appearances. And you could say that that's why the Cardinals won the NL Central that year. They beat the Pirates by three games. And that three games is more than explained by their crazy hitting with runners in scoring position. And so yeah, a lot of people tried to figure out whether that meant anything because statistically speaking, it doesn't. There's no, there's very little correlation from year to year with how a team does in high leverage spots or runners in scoring position or

close and late or however you want to define clutch situations, there's not much consistency from year to year. But because it's the Cardinals, people tried to come up with reasons why it meant something. And it was the Cardinals way. And it was, you know, developing clutch guys or having some sort of different approach. And the next year, there was nothing. 2014 cardinals showed basically no ability to hit better with runners in scoring position i think they probably hit less better than the league in those situations last year so that is the thing that informs this discussion because and some people have tweeted at me you know yeah but the cardinals always seem to be lucky in some way and they're thinking of 2013 which was extreme luck but a totally different

kind of extreme luck so i don't know whether you can say there's some common ground between the two things and then you can point to 2014 and say that that didn't carry over at all. And so maybe we shouldn't expect this to carry over at all either. Good, good, good summation. Okay. And the weird thing is that it just keeps getting more extreme as the season goes on, because this is the sort of thing that you point out in May or June, and then the rest of the year it's normal or it regresses. And that hasn't happened with

the Cardinals at all. In fact, their strand rate, which is just the percentage of runners left on base, is 81.5% now, which would be by far the highest ever for a team. The 1968 year of the pitcher Tigers finished at 79.6, and that's the highest ever. And the Cardinals have stranded more runners in the second half of the season. And just even as I was writing the article, like they just finished a 38 inning scoreless streak over the weekend, which during that time, there were 11 runners in scoring position and none of them scored. during that time there were 11 runners in scoring position and none of them scored and so that kind of goosed the numbers a little bit you'd think but then even after i wrote the article and had to update it for what happened last night all of the splits got even more extreme

in my last update because the cardinals beat the pirates and the pirates went 0 for 10 with runners in scoring position last night and so i had to make the stats even more extreme. So it's the opposite of what you normally see with something weird early in the season. Kind of. I mean, normally when you see a team that's doing something that seemingly can't be explained and will regress, half the time it regresses immediately and half the time it continues unabated, right? I mean, if you flip 35 coins in a row and they're all heads and you expect regression,

well, there's a decent chance you're still going to flip five heads in a row the next five times just by chance. So it's not like regression is not like a certainty. You're still prone to the same laws of dice rolling that you always are. Yes. And so play enough seasons and have enough teams. Mm-hmm.

And eventually. But you're not satisfied with that. You tested. You looked. You watched tape. I did. It's Yadier Molina, right? It's all Yadier.

I mean, I would be satisfied with that, but my editor probably wouldn't be satisfied with that. If I want to write an article, I have to at least try to confirm or reject some other alternate hypotheses for what this might mean. And this is like the most extreme version of this thing. I don't know. version of this thing. I don't know. The cluster luck calculations only go back to 2001, but in that time, this is by far the most extreme cluster luck on the run prevention side that we've seen. So let me ask you this. If I were going to debunk this, I would look to see if their pitches were of the same quality. If velocity is the same, if movement is the same, if command is the same, if pitch selection is the same.

You can't really do much about sequencing, probably. And I would expect the pitches all to be basically the same. Yeah, right. So I did that. And the velocity is pretty much the same like with the bases empty they average 92.6 miles per hour with runners in scoring position they average 92.9 which seems like an increase except that the entire league throws harder with runners in scoring position by 0.4 miles per hour so this is not at all unusual what the cardinals are doing in that

respect i looked at location i looked at pitch selection the percentage of the time that they use each pitch is almost identical like they throw the biggest difference was throwing more sliders and it was like 17 instead of 14 or something was the biggest difference. And is that, I would guess that's also common throughout the league. Yeah, yeah, yes, right. Because you're going for strikeouts and you throw strikeout stuff. And so there was an example of a philosophy that seemed like it might be real. Last year, Jonah Carey wrote about the Cardinals and about Dave Duncan's continued legacy with the team. And one of the things he pointed out was that

the Cardinals seemed to have an approach with runners in scoring position that was different from the rest of baseball in that the one thing that's different about hitters really with runners in scoring position is that they're more aggressive because they really want to drive in those runs and they swing more often and they swing at the first pitch significantly more often and so the cardinals had this approach where they would throw fewer fastballs on the first pitch with runners in scoring position than a typical team would or the difference between their fastball rates on the first pitch of plate appearances with the bases empty and with runners in scoring position was much larger than the league difference because they were trying to throw soft stuff you got

hitters coming up they're all geared up to drive in these runs and they're going to be swinging and they're going to want to see fastballs and then you throw them a slider or something and they're going to be swinging and they're going to want to see fastballs. And then you throw them a slider or something and they swing over it theoretically, or they hit it weakly. And that was really a pretty dramatic trend from like 2008 to 2011. The Cardinals had a gap in fastball usage on the first pitch that was over twice as large as the league's. It really stood out. But then 2012, it was smaller. And 2013, 14, and 15, the gap has been smaller than the rest of the league. So that philosophy that they had under Duncan and under La Russa, it seems that they abandoned just about as soon as those guys were gone. so there's now really no perceptible pattern in pitches they throw on the first pitch or overall that i could see there could be some sort of

sequencing difference and i don't know the only difference you could say is that they throw fewer pitches in the strike zone than the typical team does, or they don't actually, but they decrease their zone rate with runners in scoring position more than the typical team does, but it's not a huge amount. Maybe that accounts for the fact that they have more strikeouts in these situations. Maybe they trust Molina more to block pitches, and so they're slightly more willing to throw balls in the dirt, and maybe they get slightly better outcomes because of that but it wouldn't explain anything this enormous and so yeah that was kind of a nothing and i thought maybe it was double plays because they still get a decent amount of ground balls their fourth and ground ball rate overall and fifth and ground ball

rate with runners in scoring position so i figure you get a lot of grounders maybe They're fourth in ground ball rate overall and fifth in ground ball rate with runners in scoring position. So I figure you get a lot of grounders. Maybe you get a lot of double plays and you get out of these situations. And that hasn't been the case. They are 22nd in double play percentage, which is the percentage of double play opportunities in which they have turned to double play. So they haven't excelled in that respect. And the only other thing I could think of is holding runners. And that is something they seem to be good at, as you would expect, with Molina and with some pitchers who seem to pay attention to that. So they've allowed the lowest stolen base total in the majors

with a 64 success rate and maybe you could and and bp has all these advanced base running stats now and those base running stats seem to confirm what you would expect that lena does kind of depress the running game and so do the cardinals pitchers but it's not huge and if you look at the overall base running performance, the base running runs of Cardinals opponents, it's basically average. So it doesn't seem like they're really stopping guys from going first to third or second to home or first to home really all that more often than anyone else. So I don't know that that explains it either. So I don't know. don't know that that explains it either so i don't know like if there were just a a clutchness even if there were a clutchness and maybe there's a clutchness we can't really disprove or prove that

but a clutchness that infects the whole team yes that's the thing that makes it like a step further right right i mean it's possible to imagine that that there are outliers to and that within all Right. it just requires a kind of slightly more complicated narrative than probably most of us are usually willing to go without extraordinary evidence yeah and i guess the response to that would be the cardinals have this coherent organizational philosophy from top to bottom and you hear about that all the time and so show up until this year right and that's the that's the problem is that they've been better with runners in scoring position in some years but nothing nearly this extreme and i don't and even if it were just a clutchness that would still show up in something like i don't know

how it would manifest itself but you should be able to detect that somehow. If the clutchness were guys throwing faster pitches or throwing different pitches or whatever it would be, you would still see it somehow. And I don't even really know what the point is in looking for something like this because I don't know what a possible answer would be, really. something like this because i don't know what a possible answer would be really like if you what could you do to make yourself this much better with runners in scoring position that you shouldn't just do all the time yeah unless unless it was unless there's some aspect of saving your best pitch you know best pitch right now and you don't do it you don't want to give it away but no you're right if you can if you can produce a 276 279 obp slug against a huge group of hitters in a given situation you should do that and then look to expand yes yeah whatever you're doing

in that situation you should do in in most situations or all situations. So anyway, I looked, I tried to find something. I couldn't find anything. I didn't really expect to find anything. And it doesn't matter. It's an interesting thing that's happening anyway, whether it's random or not. When it's this extreme, you want to look for a reason and come up with a reason but so let's say okay so there's no reason we are not giving we don't think there's a reason we're not going reason okay now the uh the the person who is upset by this article doesn't like that you're using the word lucky and we can do something to satisfy that person. We could say, you're right, maybe they're this good and that the stats without runners on are the wrong ones. I mean, if we're looking at something as happening fluky, maybe those are the non-representative ones. More likely they're somewhere in the middle.

Yeah. And that their true talent level is somewhere in the middle. Yeah. And that their true talent level is somewhere in the middle. Yeah. Although, I mean, they lost Wainwright and they're not necessarily acting like a team that thinks that they have the best pitching in 40 years. I mean, they just traded for a couple of former closers at the deadline. They traded for Broxton. They traded for C-Sheck. So it's not like they seem to think that they are so well stocked that they don't need any pitching help so yeah i would maybe buy that they're a little bit better than what they've been in non-runners in scoring position situations but i don't know their

peripherals in those situations don't really indicate that they are more overpowering than their era has well who cares you got it you know and i expected to get a bunch of pushback on this i expected to get a bunch of tweets saying you know you national media people always saying the Cardinals are lucky, and yet here we are winning every year. And I haven't actually gotten any of those tweets, which I'm thinking is maybe even Cardinals fans realize that this is just so extreme that it can't possibly be a sustainable long-term thing. I mean, if you see this all season and them just wriggling out of jam after jam,

I think probably even they must realize that there's something strange going on here as much as they are enjoying it. And there are ways in which, like we've probably talked about the Cardinal success in the draft, and the draft is definitely largely dependent on luck and player development, and Russell Carlton has written things about the draft and randomness also, and how there's seemingly little correlation from year to year. And the Cardinals have done well in that respect too, so there must be some luck there, but we also know that the Cardinals, at least for a while while seem to be evaluating amateur prospects in a way that other clubs weren't and maybe they were getting information that other

clubs weren't and making decisions based on that and so you could at least point to that and say that's why or that's part of why and i don't know that there is an equivalent thing that you can point to with the runners in scoring position and say that that's why this is happening. But it's almost unfair that the Cardinals, who are so well run for the most part and very successful over a long period of time, also get all this luck on top of that. But that is what's happening. All right. of that, but that is what's happening. All right. Okay. So we'll see if it gets even more extreme as the rest of the season goes on. I would expect it not to, but even the extreme stuff that has happened thus far might be enough to lock up another division title and maybe send them to

another pennant like it did in 2013. Anyway, one of the more interesting stories statistically of the season. Okay, so that's it. You can email us your complaints about us calling the Cardinals lucky at podcast at baseball prospectus.com. Join the Facebook group. Almost 3000 members now at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and rate and review and subscribe to the show on itunes support our sponsor play index at baseball reference.com use the coupon code bp when you do to get the discounted price of 30 on a one-year subscription

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