Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 754: The Royals Are Reading Your Mind

Episode Date: October 29, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about the brilliance of Roger Angell, then discuss the latest Ned Yost news, Jacob deGrom’s supposed pitch-tipping, and more.

Like a robin upon a tree, like a sailor that goes to sea, like an unwritten melody, I'm free, that's me. So bring on the big attraction, my decks are cleared for action, I'm fancy free, and free for anything fancy. Good morning and welcome to episode 754 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by The Play Index, BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Hello. How are you?

The same. So that's good, if I remember correctly. Mm-hmm. Good. You reading Roger Angel? Am I reading Roger Angel? Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Good. You're reading Roger Angel? Am I reading Roger Angel? Yeah. Like as he's currently writing, like am I reading the things he's writing about baseball this month? Yeah. I have not been. Well, you should.

I want to recommend to everyone that they read Roger Angel. I mean, it's always a joy to read Roger Angel, but usually he writes maybe a few times a year, and it's always exciting when it happens. But during the postseason, one of the great joys of the postseason is that he writes a few times a week generally. Well, really does he? Because I always think about his postseason coverage as being as coming in like mid-December. Like there's always that. He always has like this 18,000 word article about the season and the World Series that comes out in print in mid-December.

So to me, him writing in real time this year, I don't know this, but I felt like this was new, that this was a new thing he was doing. Has he been doing this for a few years? I think he did this last year too. Maybe he'll still do the end of year thing, but he's basically blogging during the playoffs, just writes about the interesting games, or when a series ends, he writes something. It's a nice change of pace from the sort of stuff that you might read elsewhere.

I mean, you're not going to get strike probabilities and stat cast exit speeds and pitch type percentages but there are no gifs but you get that from other places obviously and there are great pleasures to this that you don't get in the more statistical sort of articles and the great thing about him is that he doesn't say anything wrong like he he's not super statistical but he also doesn't just fall back on cliches or say things that are demonstrably demonstrably untrue he says true things he just says them in words which is nice and they're they're usually pretty short pieces, but there's always a sentence or two that makes me smile in each one. And he makes these analogies that no one else would make because no one else was born early

enough to make them. He compared game one of the World Series to an amusement park that burned down in 1944, which probably no one else would do. And it's just a pleasure. So it's kind of like, you know, when people praise Vin Scully and venerate Vin Scully, it's nice that he is not only a legend, but he is still a pleasure to listen to. And Roger Angel is eight years older than Vin Scully, but he is still a pleasure to read. Yeah, no doubt. All right. There's nothing bad you could say about to read. Yeah, no doubt. All right.

There's nothing bad you could say about Roger Angel. There's nothing bad. That's true. I think that you, there are people who don't like Vin Scully currently that think, oh, yeah, sure, he was great. Right, there are people who say he slipped. But he slipped, and that's fine. I don't think anybody minds that a person slips. But it can be frustrating, I think, sometimes to, if you feel like the whole world is pretending or not pretending, either pretending or not, that there's a different reality than the one you experience.

So if you see Vince Scully as being like, oh, a great legend, good for the world, good for the game, glad he's still around. But, you know, a median broadcaster, as some the game, glad he's still around but you know a median broadcaster as some people think or even worse and everybody still acts like he is the best, which maybe he is I'm not saying he's not, then that can be frustrating and then people fight that is how we end up with two parties but there's no

there's no Roger Angel backlash and maybe that's because you have to, you seek out, I mean Roger Angel is. And maybe that's because you have to, you seek out, I mean, Roger Angel is probably writing for one, one 40th of the audience that Vince Goli is and tends to be the one 40th that is prone to appreciate him. But there's, yeah, I have not heard anybody say he's slipping in any way. And in fact, if anything, like, I think that the last couple years have, to me, been significantly better than the previous few before that. He's kind of gone through – there's like a little bit of a Johnny Cash kind of thing going where like, oh, yeah, he was still doing things in the 90s. It was fine.

It was technically sound and it was better than most things. But now all of a sudden he's back to doing, he's writing classics. And that thing that he wrote. And when you talk about the 90s with Roger Angel, he's 95, so that kind of 90s. Yeah, well, I also meant the decade. And I mean, I think the piece that he wrote

about being in his 90s about a year ago is like a top 10 written thing this decade yeah and uh in any form format any genre by any author in any medium and so uh yeah i mean he's really as good as ever i also learned very recently that he was woody allen's editor in the 60s yeah and that's an amazing thing to have on your resume. Like his humor editor. Like he edited his humor pieces. I guess we both learned that in the same place.

We both learned that in John McPhee's piece about editing, right? Yeah, I don't know. I read a Roger Angel book where he talked about the authors he's worked with. So he probably mentioned it in there somewhere. But yeah, he's worked on all sorts of stuff. anyway uh maybe i will if i have time i will go read them but everybody else should make time yes all right well game two of the world series

so you recapped this game and you focused on some more esky magic because there's always new esky magic to discuss but this was also yost magic and the incredible revelation that ned yost manages even less than we thought it's incredible right not very much managing so that came up during the broadcast yesterday that ned yost doesn't call for bunts he doesn't call for non-bunts he just lets his players play he really doesn't do anything so he's what he's signaled for three or four bunts all year or something it was and the royals have bunted many more times than that so all the other times are times that players just took it upon themselves and he just sat back and watched with his mask like face i want to go back and find i want to go relive what ned yost was like as a player

because ned yost was such a blank slate basically before this i mean he was a he was a fairly generic manager who came from a very unmemorable background as a player that predates me, predates most of us except Roger Angel. But now he's become the most fascinating person in baseball. Like what kind of manager? I mean the criticism I think of managers, of managing that is most ingrained in BP throughout BP's history is just this idea that managers are hammers that see nails everywhere, right? A lot of what we think of as strategy is managers trying to maybe

subconsciously stay relevant in the game, that they're looking for things to do, that there's not a lot to do. And so when you get a chance to make four pitching moves in an inning, then by golly, you're going to do it. That's how you earn your paycheck. That's how you earn your feeling of accomplishment in a day. And not only does Ned Yost, as you have, I want to say documented, but more discovered. I don't think anybody knew this about Ned Yost really, but he is such a non-actor as a manager. As you use the word

non-meddling, manager is already interesting and extraordinary. You could already have a very interesting profile of a manager who simply doesn't do any of the things that other managers do. And not like he doesn't do them like he does other things. Like he just doesn't do them like he does other things like he just doesn't do them like do is not his verb yeah and so already you're interesting already it'd be a fun profile but the idea that a manager would give up his bunt power that he would just give to congress the power to declare war basically or to command the military is incredible because the bunt is the manager's number one power right it's like the number one job of a manager is to decide when to bunt it sort of seems like it is like the it is the the moment they get to shine it is the one moment when

they essentially get to say baseball is not going to be played like it's played usually it's going to be played like i say it's going to be played and you're going to try to hit it not very far they get to make out the lineup card which is kind of a power move and yet he makes out the same day after day after day yeah and so yeah i i just think it's incredible that he has taken such a lead from behind kind of mentality toward managing. I really wish that – so the New York Times Magazine wrote a big long profile about him a couple weeks ago. But I really want somebody else to, to be honest. And maybe I'd like Roger Angel to actually. Anybody, Jeffrey Toobin could do it.

Anybody could do it. Just name a New Yorker writer and it'd be good. And so anyway, this is the John Lester discovery of this year to me, that Ned Yost doesn't call bunts. Especially because if you Google bunting Ned or something, I bet you'll get a lot of results. Yeah, everyone thinks he bunts all the time. Exactly. Like the Ned Yost bunting baseball card. Remember that? Last year it was like a full-on meme that Ned Yost is like some fanatical bunter.

And in fact, not only – I mean that's already misleading because his team doesn't bunt any more than average. But he doesn't bunt ever. It's an amazing thing ben it's an amazing it totally remains makes me rethink this series this team and baseball in 2015 i wonder if when we found out for instance that greg holland was pitching with a uh sprained ucl for a year and we're like wow it like it opens up this view that maybe the whole world is pitchers pitching with sprained UCLs. And then like, you wonder like how many pitchers need Tommy John and are pitching through it. And I didn't think you could pitch through a UCL in need of Tommy John surgery and do it, you know, moderately effectively. And that sort

of changed what I thought about baseball and pitching. But I wonder now if there are other managers who don't manage. I mean obviously you do manage, like Ned Yost manages. He just manages in a way that is so much, like I don't know, both more multilayered and flatter at the same time. I mean he is like, I don't know. and flatter at the same time. I mean, he is like, I don't know. I feel like he's like you try to read Faulkner and you hate it,

and then you try to read Faulkner again and you hate it, and then one day it clicks. That never happened with me. But I feel like he is the moment that it clicks. Like, oh, now I get Ned Yost, and I love it. It is hard to see it was hard to understand and and it was non-narrative and then all of a sudden it clicked and made sense and it's amazing yeah well you can see why it would work i mean in theory because players love

him and we can maybe assume we can draw some kind of connection between the fact that they love him and the fact that he doesn't make them do anything he never like that's a source of friction for managers is when you move guys up or down in the lineup or you make them do you take them out of a game or you make them drop down a bunt when they don't want to drop down a bunt or whatever every one of those decisions you're potentially going against something that the player wants to do. And then he harbors that as resentment and it builds and builds and the manager gets blamed for things that go wrong. So he just completely removes all of the friction from the relationship by not telling them to do anything. It's it's kind of smart i guess you could say that it works with a good team that is really just good anyway and and obviously i mean he he does active

managing i think in you know personality wise i mean when the like you know helping keep word away from edinson volquez that his father had died and sort of briefing the team on how that was going to go and talking to Chris Young and all that sort of stuff is something that a manager could have screwed up easily and he didn't screw it up. So there's something to that. But maybe there just really is something to letting the players play because they will like you and play for you more although you could also interpret that as just a lack of assertiveness like maybe with a different manager it would backfire because the player players start wondering what he's even doing there

and why he should even have the power to tell them to do these things because he never exercises it so maybe it's just something that works with his personality because he exudes command and so he doesn't actually have to flaunt it yeah i wonder how many bunts i wonder how many bunts are made that wouldn't be otherwise and how many bunts are not made that would be otherwise compared to a typical manager. Because like you alluded to yesterday, the Stompers for part of the season had essentially no bunt sign and yet bunts would get laid down by players. And the idea, the manager's idea behind this

was they know how to play. They don't need me to tell them when to bunt. It was expected. And I always felt like that led to more bunts than would otherwise happen because there's more backlash if you don't bunt in a bunt situation than if you do bunt in a no bunt situation. made or if he's more likely to grind his teeth because bunts are not made or if in fact like baseball is baseball quote-unquote strategy is so predictable and by the numbers in this way that it's almost completely indistinguishable from any other uh bunting manager's strategy

or yeah or maybe things have just gotten to the point where small ball is smaller than it used to be. I mean, there are a lot fewer sacrifice bunts now. There are fewer sacrifice bunts than there have ever been. There are fewer intentional walks than there have ever been. There are fewer pitch outs than there have ever been. the norm is not doing anything. And so the manager thinks he can just sit back and it's not like players will go bunt crazy because this generation of players is not conditioned to go bunt crazy. But it would be interesting to know whether he secretly hates these bunts sometimes, but just goes along with it because he thinks in the long run, it'll pay off in other softer factor ways. So that was the revelation about Ned Yost. So most of the other conversation about that game and probably about the series so far has been about the Royals hitting fastballs and that matchup playing out exactly as every series preview seemed to indicate that it would. Jacob deGrom not missing a bat with his fastball

for the first time in any of his games, and the Royals swinging and missing three times, and the Mets also swinging and missing three times, I think, but not getting hit, so no one really talked about it. But that seems to be happening, that like the worst nightmare of Mets fans coming into this series was that the Mets would just keep firing those fastballs in there and the Royals would just make contact with all of them and that is kind of coming true but I wondered what you thought of DeGrom last night because there was kind of a Twitter conflict about what was actually happening in that game whether it was the Royals showing this preternatural ability

to put the bat on the ball and spoiling good pitches, or whether it was more that DeGrom wasn't making good pitches and that he was missing over the middle and that anyone could have been expected to make contact with those pitches. What seemed like the more accurate interpretation to you? Well, first, Ben, I just want to note that the 30 most popular articles on newyorker.com right now include no Roger Angel. So I feel like baseball really might actually be dying. Like there are two Andy Borowitz pieces on this top 30. There is an article on the end of the Kirchner era in Argentina

that is more popular. And nothing against Argentina, but it's the World Series and it's Roger Angel. I'm surprised. All right. It's kind of buried on the, you kind of have to go looking for it. And it's like each one is like four paragraphs.

It's not like a big story that you promote. It's just this little vignette. I see. Okay. Yeah. it and it's like each one is like four paragraphs it's not like a big story that you promote it's just this little vignette i see okay yeah i don't i think that de grom didn't throw good pitches i i'm squarely on the didn't throw good pitches side now that's it's still hard to hit bad pitches sometimes and particularly because a bad pitch can often be a effective pitch. If you're trying to throw it a fastball outside and you throw a fastball inside, well, you might as well have been trying to throw a fastball inside. Like sometimes that's a really good pitch, especially if the batter is thinking along with you and was looking outside. So there was no guarantee that

the Royals or any team would hit Jacob deGrom on an off night. And so full credit to them for doing that. But I thought that, yeah, it was pretty clear that he didn't know where to throw his fastball and that he wasn't sharp enough with the other pitches to lean on those either. And yet people are sort of reaching for these almost mystical Royals reasons that this is happening. I assume you saw the Adam Rubin report slash rumor that the Roy out yet, but they have something on DeGrom out of the stretch. They better figure it out or they can't win this series. And then another XMET who had read the first XMET's comment said he must speed up on his heater and a tad slower with other stuff, but I think it's in his facial expression, seriously. So are we just reaching? Yeah. Yeah. We're just, the royals make contact and therefore they are in everyone's head or they can read our souls and they can, they're expert body language and facial expression perceptionists. Yeah.

Okay. Totally. Probably nothing to do with this. Yeah, they've got a reputation that precedes them to the point that now people are going to go to that explanation quickly. But, I mean, to me, that's the extraordinary explanation, and you need to have evidence before that's your explanation. I mean, there are 2,430 baseball games a year with two pitchers on each side, and you almost never hear about a pitcher getting bombed because he was tipping his pitches.

And it happens a lot, and we just don't find out about it. But it seems to me fairly rare that a team wins because they found a tell in the pitcher. There might be little tells here and there that don't always end up helping that much, but there might be little tells from here and there that don't always necessarily mean much, but I don't know. If this were

a world where the Royals could just pick up pitchers' tells this reliably and beat up on all the best, they've probably done a lot better this year. They did pretty well. They did pretty well, but, you know, they're not like, like these are, these were a couple, this is a good game against a good pitcher.

Yeah, well, it makes sense that, A, that it would happen more at this time of year, probably, and B, that we would hear about it more in that there is more focus on advanced scouting so you're trying harder yeah yeah you're trying harder to pick these things up i guess you could also say that the pitchers are better at this time of year and so they're less likely to have tells well and also and also there's all yes there's more advanced scouting but it they also have never seen DeGrom before.

And you'd think that more valuable than advanced scouting for finding a tip would be facing a pitcher 10 times. If that makes sense? Yeah. Right? I mean, don't you think that... If you wanted to pick up a tell, a pitcher's tip, would you think it's more likely the fifth time that the Royals play the Tigers and see Shane Green, or would you think it's more likely the first time they've ever seen Shane Green but they've had three advanced scouts

sitting on the Tigers for a month? Probably fifth time. Yeah, me too. So that's – anyway. Yeah. I'm guessing it's not that. I'm guessing it's just a bad game from a good pitcher and a good game from a good team. Those things intersecting.

Were there any managerial moves that rose to the level of mentioning? Did you mind either of the non-hooks in this game? Well, it's easy to say that the one that worked was a good non-hook and the one that didn't work was a bad non-hooks in this game well it's easy to say that the one that worked was a good non-hook and the one that didn't work was a bad non-hook um but it's also it's also partly easy to say that because the royals had the margin to to let cueto basically go batter by batter yeah which i think in an ideal world you don't pull your pitcher necessarily after 18 batters every time if you can avoid it you you do let him go as you know deeper when he can as long as you're not putting yourself in a position where it's too late so i thought it was kind of

okay once the royals had a little margin that they decided to let cueto go real deep um it seems fairly obvious that john neese should have been pitching against the lefties in the fifth inning. That seems like probably one of the most egregious non-hooks of the year. And I don't know. I don't know if DeGrom had... I don't know what went into that. Maybe if DeGrom had allowed two hits in the first inning, then he does get pulled in the fifth. There was this lingering, well, he's got a no-hitter in the fourth.

How can I pull him in the fifth kind of a thing? Maybe not. I'm not sure. But yeah, he wasn't pitching very well. The game was very clearly in the balance. And the Royals make it kind of easy for you by putting, I guess Moustakas doesn't have a big platoon split, but they make it kind of easy by putting Hosmer, Morales, Moustakis, 4-5-6 like that. That is going to one moment where they need a lefty,

and they do have a stack of three guys right after each other. And so they had a chance, seems like a pretty chance, to go quickly to Nice, and they didn't. So that seems like an easy mistake. What do you think? Yeah, I thought so too. didn't so that seems like an easy mistake what do you think yeah i thought so too and i'm still sort of waiting for the for them to take the leash off of danny duffy too we've seen him for a couple batters at a time and i keep expecting to see him for a bunch of lefties not that that was really

needed last night but he and niece have turned weapons. And probably you could have guessed that would happen with Duffy, at least certainly coming into the series, whereas Nese's may be more of a surprise that his stuff has played up to the extent that it has in the bullpen. But they have both deepened the relievers available to both managers, and both managers haven't really used them all that much. So is there anything else to say about this game? You know, you mentioned Duffy.

Hang on, I'm looking up. Because, yeah, I'm sort of surprised that Duffy hasn't been a bigger part of this postseason, now that you mention it. Maybe they haven't. I mean, obviously, they're in the World Series, and they're up two games to none. So they've done what they've needed to do to win a bunch of baseball games. But I thought that coming into this postseason that Duffy was going to be potentially a really big story. He seemed like a pitcher who had the potential to be extremely good out of the bullpen.

They had set him up so that he was was prepared for it and he had a lot of success in september and he is kind of the the one lefty in their bullpen who uh can be both extremely dominant against lefties but also potentially like a real like revelation or going to the bullpen and uh he's appeared four times thus far and uh and like i think once for a full minute and that's kind of interesting kind of surprising i'm not sure if that's just because it hasn't been necessary i mean obviously the blue jays don't come at you with a ton of left-handed power for instance and who do they play in the first series the The Astros. Astros, yeah. They've got some left-handed power. And so I'm not saying, I'm not making it this controversial,

just noting that it's a surprise. In my preview of the postseason, it was like Danny Duffy might be a thing, and then he wasn't, that's all. Yeah, and Cueto, other than the fourth, was just, he was never really in trouble. I mean, only Lucas Dudak got hits in the game. So he was just kind of cruising and he threw lots of pitches, but there was never really a pressing reason to take him out. So he just kept going, just did the Ned Yost thing, just sit back and watch the players play and you win the game. So that's how that worked out. And I don't know what else there

is to say about this series. The Mets are not hitting and the Royals are doing their contact thing. And the surprising thing is that the Royals have pitched as well as they have. I mean, the Royals starters, at least, particularly Cueto, obviously, who had maybe the best postseason start in Royals history or certainly up there. So that was not something that we could have anticipated. Obviously, they felt like he would be better at home. Maybe he wouldn't be rattled by the crowd or whatever, as he seemed to sort of be in Toronto. And who knows whether that is actually the case or not, but he appeared to be very comfortable last night. So two, nothing. And the Royals seem sort of unbeatable right now. Of course they are not actually unbeatable, but if both teams continue to play

the way they have been playing, then they will be unbeatable. So that's my analysis of this series. All right. So tomorrow we'll maybe preview the weekend games. Maybe we'll take some emails. So you can send us some of those at podcast at baseballperspect.com you can join our Facebook group and discuss anything we didn't get to discuss at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on

iTunes and you can support our sponsor the 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. By the way, there's been a ton of non-World Series news happening. So if there was any sort of disapproval of news coming out during the World Series, that seems to have eroded entirely. Between Mattingly and Anthopolis and the Padres hiring a manager,

I don't know whether reporters are getting better At finding leaks Or whether teams are getting leakier Or whether there just isn't so much Of a stigma about releasing things At this time of year Or maybe It's probably not

But the postseason is a little longer It's certainly longer than it was before 1993 And it's slightly longer now It might just be that Teams want to do business is a little longer. I mean, it's certainly longer than it was before 1993, and it's slightly longer now. True. It might just be that teams want to do business, and they don't want to wait until four rounds of playoffs, basically, before they, or individuals themselves don't want to wait until four rounds of playoffs before they do the thing

that affects their life to a great degree. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. So we'll have lots of baseball news backlog to discuss when we're out of actual baseball to watch. By the way, one last thing about our boy, your boy, sort of my boy, Verducci. Do you find his propensity toward one-liners distracting? Yeah. toward one-liners distracting.

Yeah. He's perfect in every way, and then he just comes out with these lines that sound pre-prepared or they just sound like he put too much thought into them and they're just too intricate and kind of corny. Oh, and they're really bad. They're not even good. They're corny. They're really bad.

Yeah, I think this is his version of the pundit trap. I think that, uh, he's, uh, you, anytime you're, you're in a role that is in public and you're getting some sort of public feedback to the role, you end up, uh, trying to make today slightly bigger or better or more memorable than yesterday. And, uh, I think that he's probably going going to bed at night nervous that tomorrow he's not going to be interesting enough. And so he's scribbling down prepared winners. Murphy bed. Murphy bed was the worst. Oh, my gosh.

Murphy bed was so bad. Oh, so bad. Yeah, that was bad. It's not even that no one has Murphy pads anymore. Kids can Google it, but it didn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense, yeah. Did it mean he was more comfortable in the batter's box, or he was just going to sleep in there?

It didn't really make sense. There were a bunch of those. I don't know. He's like a pitcher with a great strike-out-to-walk ratio who just grooves one every now and then and has a high home-run rate. He's like the Joe Blanton of broadcasting. He's better than that, but he has great peripherals,

and then he'll just come along with these super corny lines that distracts you from all the good stuff he's doing. Yeah. I don't even find them charming the bad the bad puns no yeah i'd rather he stopped it i do too all right okay so we'll be back tomorrow