Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 716: Appreciating Carlos Correa

Episode Date: August 17, 2015

Ben, Sam, and Erik Malinowski banter about Madison Bumgarner the batter, then discuss Astros rookie Carlos Correa’s early achievements.

So far, so good, doing what we could. Taking chances, those chances, and I'm alive. Oh, so far, so good, doing what we should. Taking chances, those chances are out loud Good morning and welcome to episode 716 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives Brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland, as well as Eric Malinowski of the Internet Hi Eric

Hi guys Do you have The Play Hi, Eric. Hi, guys. Do you have the Play Index, Eric? I do have the Play Index. That's good, isn't it? It's an invaluable resource. I would not be able to write any of the baseball stories I do. Everybody should subscribe to the Play Index. Do you have Harry's Razors?

I am not a patron of Harry's Razors. Stamps.com scale? I do have my own personal in-home scale, but it is not from a promotion of Stamps.com, I'm sorry to say. Is it just a scale like you step on to weigh yourself, or is it actually a stamp scale? No, it's the kind of scale that is geared toward people that ship small things online. No, not the stamps.

Maybe I should check out stamps.com. I haven't shipped a thing in years. I'm not the target audience for those ads, I don't think. Yeah, shipping things is dying, except for stamps.com. I don't have stamps.com. But I did get Harry's Razors just almost exclusively to support the gist, because I hardly ever shave. And it's great. It's really good. Harry's Razors, legit, full support. Mike Peska really appreciates the book.

Use the coupon code the gist. The gist, yeah. Or maybe just gist. Not for this podcast, but for this one. The gist. The gist, yeah. Or maybe just gist. Not for this podcast. Probably just gist. Yeah.

But seriously, not as good as the Play Index. The Play Index is the legitest. It's the best. Eric, you've written for many, many, many, many, many places that people love, but currently most often at Sports on Earth and Rolling Stone, correct? Correct. All right. Good.

We have you here to talk about something, but before we have you talk about that, or we all talk about that, Ben, Eric, Banter, anybody? I will ask you something. So Madison Bumgarner had another good game with the bat. He hit a home run. He also struck out 14. He's good all around. He's been excellent lately. But the hitting is particularly remarkable In that he's the only pitcher who can hit

And he is now hitting 245, 273, 491 This year That's in 56 plate appearances And that's about twice as good As any other pitcher has been this year And we all think, oh, Zach Granke is a good hitter. And he homered yesterday too. And he is a good hitter and he

takes pride in his hitting and everything. And he's the second best hitting pitcher this year. And it's not even close. Just using weighted runs created plus where 100 is league average. I put a minimum of 30 plate appearances in there, and Bumgarner is at 116, and Granke is at 62, and Granke's in second place. So Bumgarner about twice as good. He's the only pitcher anywhere close to league average as a hitter, and if we were going to project Bumgarnerarner we would probably regress him just about all the way down to the the typical pitcher statistically but you guys have watched a fair amount of bum garner hitting and he obviously has made an effort to hit so what do you think true talent bum garner the batter is right now eric you go first i don't

want to oh i don't want to overwhelm you with my authority on this topic um well true talent so assuming that i mean how would he sort of prorate out if you were to give him like a number of at bats or the amount of potential like a regular sort of position player like that sort of thing yeah i should yeah and i should mention that last year he was exactly the same actually by weighted runs created plus 116 he was also the only pitcher who was league average or above that year he hit 258 286 470 with four homers last year in 78 plate appearances. So he has sustained this level of hitting for a while. A while. What qualifies as a while for a pitcher.

Yeah, the year before and all the years before that, he wasn't good. So this is 120 plate appearances. Yeah. I mean, he still doesn't reach Bartolo Colon in terms of pure entertainment value. I think we can all agree about that. But, I mean, with the right amount of at-bats, like if he was sort of like an everyday, late-order kind of guy, I mean, I think he could hit, you could plug him in right now. If he had a position to play, if he had the skill set to play in the field,

he would be a 250, 260 guy, I think, with the amount of time. I mean, if you were to up the sample size, I would, you know, that's perfectly serviceable. I mean, there's a lot of teams I would like to enter like that. Well, so I don't want to set his true talent at what he's doing. So let's just pick a number for the sake of this hypothetical. let's just pick a number and for the sake of this hypothetical, let's say that he's true talent is a 220, 260, uh, three 80 guy. Okay. Uh, that's a little too high. The three 60 guy. Okay. So anyways, like a six 30 ish OPS heavy on the slug low on the OEP. Let's just say that's it. Now, do you think that if he played every day that would go up or that would go down?

Because you could argue that it would go up because he would get more reps, he would get better at it. You could maybe argue that it would go down because he wouldn't be pitched like a pitcher anymore, which I've hypothesized in the past and then tried to find evidence of that and didn't. And so you could say, well, that's not a thing. But, I mean, I still do kind of believe that pitchers get pitched like pitchers in a lot of bats. Not in all of them, not if they come up with the bases loaded and one out or whatever. But when they come up with, you know, a couple guys on, nobody on and a couple guys out, I think that they get pipe shots.

And so... They do. That's a thing, isn't it? They don't see fastballs. They see more fastballs and slower fastballs or something and a higher zone rate. I think those things are true.

Yeah, so let's say that he suddenly became a hitter. Numbers go up or numbers go down. I'm saying numbers based on what i set as the true talent level i think they would go down because i think that you have to regress what he's done somewhat right well i think uh first of all the there is a you know kind of a reason why he has gotten better maybe maybe it's maybe it's significant that he has actually been better in the last couple years like he he re-devoted himself to hitting or he devoted himself to

hitting for the first time and he worked on it a lot and there was some intentionality or it seems like there was some cause and effect there so maybe he actually just really did make himself that much better all of a sudden or part of that much better and Jeff Sullivan wrote about him recently and his hitting and I think he wrote and found that Bumgarner is pitched less like a pitcher than most pitchers I don't know if he's pitched quite like a position player but whatever sets pitching to pitchers apart from pitching to position players, he's closer to the position player side of the spectrum. So pitchers are respecting him to some extent already. But I would say it's tempting to say he would get better because he would just see so many more pitches he'd have so much more experience because even as it is you know he's taking bp

sometimes and he gets to hit every fifth game for two three plate appearances but that's not that's not much and suddenly he'd be playing every day on the other hand opponents would probably put a lot more effort into getting him out yeah what would let me interrupt real quick what would you guess how detailed do you think the advanced scouting report on him is? It probably only says can hit for a pitcher, no pipe shots, right? Like there's probably not zone profiles for him or sequencing advice or tendencies. Right, it probably just hits well. Yeah, probably.

Yeah, if it comes to a playoff series this year, I'm sure there would be something more sophisticated than that. But on the other hand, there's not that much data, really. So I guess it would be a scout pointing things out more than the numbers. I just feel like he's shown probably just enough power at this point that you probably would have to hold off for the 20% or 30% chance that the Rick Ankeel effect, where if you take him out of an environment where he's focusing on trying to throw 250 innings a year and just on hitting home runs i mean there's a there's a

percentile chance there that he could you know he could hit 20 home runs he could he could show off that kind of power on a regular basis i mean it would it's a huge minority it's a small chance it would happen but uh i think that we've seen enough from his skill set, it's a huge minority. It's a small chance it would happen, but I think that we've seen enough from his skill set that it's a chance. It's also, his particular line doesn't really exist for anybody. The OBP that low and the slug that high is... Is it like a Kingman line? there a kingman season maybe there uh there are seasons to be sure i mean it's not a it's not a total statistical anomaly but that sort of

ballplayer rarely exists in nature and so you have to assume that um that well for for one thing, he's probably, if he were a real threat, the walk rate suggests that he could be exploited pretty easily with non-strikes. It's actually a very Ankeel line when you look at it. Ankeel drew some more walks than that. But like when Ankeel, I guess he was a little bit, he was better when he started, but in Kiel's age 29 season, 231, 285, 387, kind of comparable. His career line, 240, 302, 422, which isn't quite right. But is there a Kingman line in here like that? Yeah, 1977, 221, 276, 444 with 26 homers.

The year before that, he finished 18th in MVP voting with a 286 on base and a 506 slug. Hit 37 homers. The year before that, 19th in MVP voting with a 284 on base, 494 slug. So, yeah, that's who he is. But that was a different era. That was a different time. Yeah. And he's not as strong as Kingman.

I'm just going to go ahead and say it. I don't care how hot that take is. Madison Bumgarner is not as strong as Dave Kingman. All right. Done with that. All right. So on to the topic. And I'm going to start, intro it with a little story,

a quick little story. A year ago, i was talking to a friend of mine and at the time there was a a rapper who you might be able to deduce who it is pretty quickly who had at that point two albums to his name one of which was a great album the other one was a masterpiece and at this point last year and a little bit before he was like providing the best guest guest verse on pretty much everybody's songs. He was so far and above everybody else that I felt bold enough to say that even though he was like 22 years old or maybe, that he was one of the five greatest rappers in history.

And this led to a long discussion about whether you can say that after two albums, whether it's ever appropriate to say that. And that applies, I think, to Carlos Correa, who Eric wrote about this weekend, this weekend, maybe last week, as a player that we should not hold off celebrating, that we should be appreciating him already for what he is, which is perhaps the greatest shortstop in baseball, even though he has only 56 games under his belt and had even fewer when Eric was writing those words. Or maybe not. Maybe 56. I might have gotten that from Eric's article. Anyway, so the question, I guess, that we're talking about today is, A, how good is Carlos Correa? And B,

is A, how good is Carlos Correa? And B, whether it's any better to, or any worse, to be too soon declaring a guy great than too late declaring a guy great. So, Eric, talk about Carlos Correa. Well, yeah, I clearly don't think that it's too soon to be appreciating his greatness or whatever that word entails. But the fact of the matter is that ever since they called him up,

he's been, you know, one of the best, arguably the best shortstop in baseball and one of the best all around players in the game. He, in the second half through, I wrote about him on Friday. So, and he had a really good weekend. So all of these stats are just a few ticks better than what I'm going to say. But, you know, as of Friday through, since the second half started through all players, at least 100 plate appearances, he had an OPS of 975, which ranked 12th in all the baseball and was better than Bryce Harper and Paul Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt, he had a 2.8 war, which ranked him already amongst the top 20 rookie shortstops in history in the rookie season. And I think now he's up to 3.2 B war after the weekend. He was before the weekend.

He ranked fourth in war amongst all major league baseball shortstops. And I think now he's tied for third or alone in third. And as Giants fans saw, he put on some really good defensive shows during the last season, during the last series, and he's still only 20 years old, but he's had the seasoning. He's been in the minors for a few years now, so it's not exactly like he's come out of nowhere, but obviously we have a tendency to try to sort of, you know, wait these things out. One of the comparisons I made in my Sports on Earth piece was how when new presidents start, we always kind of have this

benchmark for 100 days in office. And, you know, people like to sort of wait until that's completed, and then sort of take a look back and sort of see how he's started off. And I think that we should hold off on some of those limitations with Correa. We should try to jump in now and appreciate what we have, see where he's at, try to put it into a historical context, which is what I tried to do in the Sports on Earth piece, and also try to think, I mean, where is he going to go from here? I don't think there's any question that, you know, he's not at least going to keep doing this for the foreseeable future. I don't think you could define this as fluky or anything like that. And so if you submit that that's true, then it's fair to say, where is he going to take

this and how much better is he going to get? It's interesting because people were talking about the weakness of the shortstop position for much of this year. We had an email show question about why shortstops don't hit anymore and what's going on. And we sort of said it was probably a cyclical thing. And now it's cycled into Carlos Correa, who is great at everything. But it also cycled in. I mean, at the time, I think four of the top five prospects or something like that were shortstops last winter, something like that.

And Addison Russell hasn't taken the lead by storm. I mean, if you'd had to bet on one of those two guys a year ago to be better this year, I think you probably would have bet on Russell at the time. It seemed like he had, in some ways, more developed offensive game, and he's a year older. And in a way, I mean, he's been fine. He's been good. He might still be a star.

It's crazy to talk about him being disappointing, so I'm not going to say he's disappointing. But it's weird that one of those guys is an immediate superstar, and the other one is like, oh, yeah, hey, look look it's a rookie let's hope he gets better right so i don't know yeah yeah that's all well well he didn't have long i mean how long was he he was in triple a for 24 games and he didn't hit particularly well there i mean he you know he hit well for a 20 year old shortstop but

he hit 276 345 449 that's a sub 800 ops in the pcl so it wasn't like he was totally tearing things up there and yet the astros promoted him anyway which was. And he has more than rewarded that decision by just being a superstar from day one, more or less. So I don't know that we would have expected this off the bat. I mean, it's interesting because the Astros actually had, you know, in terms of, you know, overall win loss percentage, they actually had a better record when they called him up as opposed to what they do now. I think they're only maybe like two, possibly three games over 500 since they actually called him up.

And one of the things I point out in the story is that, you know, I was prepared to look at it and say that, oh, he's revitalized them or he's, you know, he's taken them to a new level or something like that. It was my preconception. And what actually it turned out to be is that he's basically kept them afloat. You know, there's been, there's been some sort of regression there. They've come off of sort of the peak is what they were back in, you know, mid June or whatever. And, you know, I think about, you know, how we construct narratives and things that reminded me of the A's last year when they made the John Lester trade and, you know, everybody said, said all the season went downhill after they did that they barely qualified for the

playoffs and there's that trade that sort of you know cratered their season but I you know I think that the truth was you know the John Lester trade actually saved their season it actually made them just good enough to actually just get into that wild card game and I feel like you know bringing in Correa sort of had the same effect except he he's obviously as a position player, he can have a much greater impact on the day to day. You mentioned the AAA performance and Ben. And so, I mean, it does sort of feel like we really want this to be real. It's really fun to be watching him. We want him to be the best player. But I mean, realistically, if we weren't having so much fun with this, we'd throw a lot of cold water on it, right? And say, well, it's only been 56 games. Anybody can be hot in 56 games. I mean, all you have to do is look at Brett Laurie, who came up as a rookie and was even better on a game-by-game

basis and was even better as a hitter and was similarly young and was similarly highly touted, if not quite so young and not quite so highly touted, and spent the offseason as like the toast of the sport and has never really been a star ever since. So, I mean, how much do you think that we're just enjoying this and not actually thinking it through? I'll go. No, I think that we're just enjoying this and not actually thinking it through?

I'll go. No, I think that he, why, why should we wait is, is the point. I mean, why,

you know, he's doing this now, he's doing this in the moment. He's, you know, like Ben said before, you know, it's been sort of a note this season that shortstop is kind of way more

shallow than sort of, we're used to it being over the past 10 or 15 years now and so he is standing out um you know there's there's positional scarcity when it comes to really good shortstops out there um and there's a lot to like about him he's he's 20 years old he's got a good personality i mean you know we obsess every offseason especially the last one about face of baseball and things like that and he could be in the new phase of baseball. He could, he could stand with a lot of the young superstars of this game.

He's, I think, you know, we talked about how his AAA performance was not perhaps quite up to snuff or was very small sample or whatnot, but maybe this was a case where, you know, the Astros knew what they had.

They looked at, you know, his, you know, his intangibles and the peripher. They looked at, you know, his, you know, his intangibles and the peripherals and things like that. And it wasn't, it wasn't so much a matter of having to have him excel at AAA. It was just, you just need to get the games under your belt. And, and what else were the Astros going to be waiting for at this point?

I mean, they're, they're playing for this season. There's no guarantee that they're going to be able to repeat this next season the year after, as the Nationals showed from a few years ago when they shut down Strasburg. That was probably their best chance in a while. So they've got to play for this year. And he's certainly showing that he can perform. I think the question is that is he going to maintain this,

and what can he realistically help them do in the playoffs? Then we'll find out so in 2012 when i was uh reporting and writing about mike trout for esp in the magazine he was similarly astounding similarly young and amazing and everybody around him wanted to talk about how great he was but then also everybody around him wanted to walk back everybody else talking about how great he was is like everybody wanted to have the best story about him. But then if you told a story about how great he was or if you – the worst thing you could do was either drop the name's mantle or maze. And then everybody would freak out and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on.

And there was, I think, a feeling like, well, you don't want to do that to the kid. It's too much pressure. It sets it up for disappointment. Anything at that point after, short of an all-time top 10 career, which Mike Trout seems now to be having, is a disappointment. And so you see Carlos Correa, like on ESPN, they always have these graphics showing how he's doing compared to Cal Ripken in the first number of games or compared to Alex Rodriguez in the first number of games and you could sort of see that same objection applying

here like that's the reason you don't do it you don't want to set it up where every baseball player is doomed to failure because you are going to constantly, consistently find the highest possible future for him and then be disappointed when it doesn't happen. Does that matter? Are we cruel? Or ultimately, does it not matter? And from day one is part of what makes his career great. I mean, I don't think that really matters so much.

I mean, I feel like if a ball player is doing really well and then it's going to slide because people are talking about him too much, I feel like that's kind of a lame excuse, personally. And with Correa, I don't think that we really know. I don't think that we get perhaps a really good sense of how this is really affecting him, or at the very least it doesn't appear to be affecting him greatly. I mean, his numbers pretty quickly rose to kind of like a 350 on base, around a 900 OPS, give or take.

And that's basically where they've been for the last few weeks now. They've sort of leveled off, and he's keeping them there. So obviously you must know that people are talking about him, and it doesn't seem to be affecting him so far. few weeks now they've sort of leveled off and and he's keeping them there so um you know obviously you must know that people are talking about him and it doesn't seem to be affecting him so far i mean the playoffs could be something completely different but at the same time it's not like people are just going to be talking about carlos correa once the astros make the playoffs they're going to be talking about the astros making the playoffs and you know there's going to be a whole bunch of storylines for people to cover so um but i you say that he's comping well to Rodriguez or Ripken,

I mean, that's just the statement of fact. I don't think that we should shy away from that because we're worried about how that's going to affect him psychologically. I mean, it's a statement of fact, but it's also kind of a bad statement of fact because ripken and a rod weren't ripken and a rod because of what they did in their first 50 games they were what they did over the next 15 years sure and uh so you know picking the best case i mean it's like survivorship bias or whatever you if you pick the best career and ignore all the other guys who did things over 50 games, some good, some bad, some who developed into great players and some who didn't, you're sort of always looking. It's kind of like with scouting comps where people complain about scouting comps because nobody ever gets comped to the hot prospect that looked the same 28 years ago but failed out, fizzled out.

It's always thinking about, okay, who made it that he looks like? And so it creates like a, a, a great inflation, comp inflation. Yeah. I, you know, Chris Shelton also had a really good couple of months too. So, yes. Um, but I, I guess he had a really good like couple of weeks, but yeah, just enough for somebody in my fantasy league to, uh, trade him for someone who did better. Um, know i mean i guess i guess it's you look at the whole package you know he's

it's not just that he's his offensive numbers are really good he's his defense is excellent it's or at the very least it's above league average percentage wise um and he you know he's got you know he's got the physical makeup to to you know to make you think that he, you know, he's got, you know, he's got the physical makeup to, you know, to make you think that he can, you know, keep doing this. You know, he's 6'4", 220. You got to think that, you know, he's probably, he's not going to grow anymore, but he's probably going to put on some more muscle as he, you know, gets older because he is only 20 years old. So, and we all put on masks as we get older. So, you know, I, yeah, it's a know, yeah, it's a little bit of cherry picking. It's a little bit of, you know, being selective.

But, you know, also just considering the number one pick in the draft stats. I mean, he's got – I feel like at this point in time we acknowledge that he has more going for him than against him, at least in the historical sense. So I think as long as we're honest about that, then know we just kind of see where it goes he's already leading al rookies in war so i assume he has the al rookie of the year race sewn up even though he came up part what a week into june or so and I think the I think the latest anyone has come up and won the rookie of the year race Isaac Bennett who's a BP Wrigleyville writer found that at least since 1950 the latest was Willie McCovey in 1959 who came up on July 30th and got 219 plate appearances and won the NL rookieookie of the Year award that year. So it's not that extraordinary if Correa wins it this year.

But is there any sense yet? Is it too soon to have a sense of his charisma rating? Not to make him sound like a D&D character, but is there a sense of whether he has future endorsement superstar potential as well as on-field superstar potential? I think so. I mean, I was poking around on the MLB video archive and I found a video of him addressing his minor league teammates recently. Maybe it was a video from like 2014 or something like that. And he seems very polished.

You know, he's, I feel like, you know, once, you know, once he gets to be known sort of on a national status, I feel like you're going to see, you know, there's going to be a, this is SportsCenter commercial probably or something like that. Or, you know, he's going to do magazine ads. I feel like, you know, this off season, like somebody is going to write the, you know, the sort of definitive Carlos Correa, you know he's going to do magazine ads I feel like you know this off season like somebody is going to write the um you know the sort of definitive Carlos Correa you know glossy magazine breakout profile kind of piece and you know that's probably going to do a lot for his status and you

might see him on a cover or two somewhere so um you know that's I feel like you know I feel like in a few years, maybe not in terms of statistics, but in a few years we'll be sort of talking about him in the same way that we're kind of talking about Like they don't, I guess, what is the thing that agents or PR people use? The Q rating or something like that? Like, you know, sort of recognizability factor and things like that. And you could argue that both of those guys are sort of on the precipice of that, perhaps, you know, with another break or two. Either of them could do that. But I feel like in a few years, we're going to probably be talking about Correa sort of in that same sense that we talk about those guys right now.

All right. Are we finished here? I'm finished here okay so thanks for joining us Eric I know you're a long time listener it's good to have you on big fan of the show thanks guys and you can find Eric's writing everywhere you can subscribe to well him on Twitter At Eric Mal That's Eric with a K And you can also subscribe to his newsletter Which I do Mostly to see if I'm in there But also other people And how can people subscribe to you? They can just go to

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