Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 756: The Unwritten Rules of Syndergaard-Escobar

Episode Date: October 31, 2015

Ben and Sam do a quick bonus Saturday episode on Mets starter Noah Syndergaard’s first pitch of World Series Game 3.

Good morning and welcome to episode 756 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg. Of ESPN. Of ESPN. We're doing a quick and special Saturday episode, our first, I believe, ever Saturday episode featuring me. And we're going to do it because we want to talk about the unwritten rules or not of Noah Syndergaard's

first pitch against Alcides Escobar, and we want to do it before it's woefully outdated. So here we are. Hi, Ben. Hi. I don't know whether it's stranger that we're doing our first ever weekend episode or that you're the one who suggested it. Yeah, well, it won't seem strange when 13 minutes in I say, and that's the end. Okay. This one will be quick. All right.

So just in case you tuned into the game a little late, Noah Syndergaard kind of said before the game that he had a trick up his sleeve or some tricks up his sleeve to deal with Alcides Escobar swinging at the first pitch every time. And that trick turned out to be a fastball that was very high and fairly tight. I've seen some defenses of it saying it wasn't that far inside. We can talk about that, but it definitely made Alcides Escobar jump out of the way. It made the Royals very mad and it dominated the conversation after the game once reporters got to go in because the Royals were very unhappy. Escobar called it stupid. Alex Rios called it some other thing and some other player said some

other thing. And then Noah Syndergaard asked about that, said if they have a problem with me, they can meet me 60 feet, six inches away, by which he means he will fight. And so I wanted to talk about this because I feel like, A, there are multiple levels to the unwritten rules aspect of this, and B, because Brandon McCarthy summed it up in his mind quite succinctly in a tweet. Are both sides not right in the Syndergaard affair, by the way? He does what he has to do. Royals are sides not right in the Syndergaard affair, by the way? He does what he has to do. Royals are allowed to be angry.

Syndergaard would be crazy. This is the second tweet. Syndergaard would be crazy to just let Escobar continue taking batting practice, and it would be unlike Royals to not take up for their guy. So right off the top, do you have anything that you disagree with there? No, not in principle. I mean, I definitely think he would have been crazy to continue throwing fastballs down the middle, which is what everyone had thrown to him. We

talked about that on the podcast. I wrote about that in my last article for Grantland. It was strange that the Mets basically threw the ball right down the middle of the plate in the first two games of the series, despite the clear knowledge that Escobar is swinging at almost anything in the first pitch. So yes, it would have been crazy to do that again. And it would also be crazy for the Royals not to object to what Syndergaard did do. So the only question is whether Syndergaard took it too far, essentially, whether he went too far to the other side of the spectrum, where one end is throwing him a strike down the middle, and the other end is hitting him. Did he hit him the wrong way? Yeah, try to hit him or at least throw a pitch in a place where it could

have easily hit him. Yeah. And whether I think there's two, maybe sort of sub-aspects to this. One is whether Syndergaard did this with hate in his heart, whether he was in some way trying to punish Alcides Escobar for swinging at first pitches, which is kind of the feeling you get the way that the conversation elevated and the way that he kind of bragged that he, in a way, sort of bragged in advance that this was going to happen. It does sort of feel weird. It feels like the most, maybe the most unwritten rules thing of all time to say,

this guy, we're trying to throw fastballs right down the middle and this guy's swinging at him. Who does he think he is? That's the thing though. There's kind of this covenant between hitters and pitchers on the first pitch of the game that no one's going to do anything. And it's really weird. Like, I had the numbers in my article. On all pitches thrown this season, hitters swung at 47% of pitches. And basically pitchers threw pitches in the strike zone at the same rate, 47%.

And people threw fastballs about 64% of the time. If you look at the first pitch of plate appearances, all plate appearances, the swing rate goes down, the called strike probability goes up, the fastball rate goes up. But if you look at the first pitch of games, it's very dramatic. So hitters swing at 24% of first pitches of games, so like almost half the rate of all pitches. The called strike probability of all those pitches is almost 60%, so basically 6 out of 10 first pitches of the game would be strikes if they weren't swung at. And the fastball rate is 97.2%, so almost unfailingly, the first pitch of the game is a fastball and most of the time

it's a strike and yet hitters don't swing almost you know they swing a quarter of the time even though you would think that they'd swing much more often because it's always a fastball and it's almost always a strike and they know that so it just seems like they both like to take some time to kind of get adjusted to their surroundings. Okay, I'm on the mound. I'm in the batter's box. It's a baseball game. We can just remember how this works and watch a pitch and throw a pitch. Thing is, though, that that kind of favors the pitchers because usually it's a strike.

And so what Escobar has done is kind of take his natural aggressiveness and channeled it into this really productive strategy of swinging at this pitch that's always going to be a strike. And so he's kind of breaking this unwritten agreement that hitters just aren't going to swing at this free meatball, basically. I mean, as with all unwritten rules, it's completely nuts. It's completely absurd and is a way of gaining an advantage over your opponent for pure pressure reasons. And so while your first reaction is to think unwritten rules are stupid and this doesn't make any sense, from a strategic standpoint, it's not stupid and it makes a lot of sense. If he is enforcing a rule, a unwritten rule that is to his benefit, it's all part of the game. It's all part of the interpersonal sort of emotional game theory involved here. And it's kind of smart. So I don't particularly have an issue with invoking, even though it's absurd, invoking unwritten rules

there. Now, if I were Alcides Escobar, I would hope that I was mentally strong enough to say, you know, LOL, I'm not falling for that one again, and keep doing what he's doing. But I certainly see why a pitcher or why the Mets would go from, would take a situation where clearly they're being beat because they're sort of playing in a kind of dumb and simplistic way and trying to turn that into a situation where they can pressure the other team into beating themselves. they're being beat because they're sort of playing in a kind of dumb and simplistic way and trying to turn that into a situation where they can pressure the other team into beating themselves. But then the second question is always whether the enforcement of unwritten rules

via a potentially life-threatening act of terror is appropriate at all. And you could make the case that if your strategy is essentially physical bullying, then it ceases to be part of the game and becomes something kind of tacky and inhuman. And so I guess then that goes to the second part of this question, which is if Noah Syndergaard wants to take advantage of Escobar's aggressiveness or make it clear that Escobar can't dig in. I mean, as Brandon McCarthy says, that he can't take batting practice. Well, are there not tools in his toolbox that are more civil than this and that are kind of more within the actual rules of the game? I mean, pitchers like you alluded to, they have a lot of area around the strike zone that they're allowed to foot to, and they have more than one pitch. And so you could, if you have a lot of tricks up your sleeve, one of those tricks is starting in with a slider. Another is starting in with a fastball inside,

but not necessarily high and inside. It seems like once you go high, it's not just that that is its own violation of an unwritten rule, but once you go high, you're clearly stating that this is no longer about controlling the strike zone and changing the batter's ability to sit on a pitch and it is much more about putting fear into him and making him feel actual physical fear and i don't know i think that's where the argument that cinder guard is just doing what he needs to do becomes a little different and becomes Syndergaard is using a emotion that I don't really see. Now, I will, in fairness to everybody involved, this is not a Mets thing. This is not a unique thing to the Mets or to Syndergaard. It's not even unique to them in

this series. The Royals have talked about, explicitly have talked about, making Daniel Murphy uncomfortable with pitches inside. I'm trying to find the exact quote, but the word was uncomfortable with high and inside pitches. It's weird because to make a guy uncomfortable, like you can make a guy uncomfortable in chess, for instance, by playing with a certain aggressive way that then the guy, within the context of the game,

within the context of the strategy of the game, makes him uncomfortable because now he has to defend against this particularly within the game threatening style of play or threat that you're going to beat him in some way. And so you can be uncomfortable because you don't know where the pitcher is going to pitch it, and it's really hard to hit when you're trying to cover all of this part of the play. This would be, the equivalent would be hard to hit when you're trying to cover all of this part of the play. This would be the equivalent would be though that if you're playing chess, you're making him uncomfortable by holding a gun under the table, pointing it at him and saying, you sure you want to do that?

Like actually I'm reading Infinite Jest and there's actually a character in this book. There's actually a character in Infinite Jest, a youth tennis player, who goes to tennis matches and he's not very good at tennis. And when he starts to lose, he pulls out a gun and puts it to his temple and says if he loses, he's going to blow his brains out on court. And nobody really wants to be the guy who causes him to. And so they just let him win. He's just this guy who uses this weird threat of violence

to impose on the game. It is no longer part of the game. It is bringing a fear into the game from outside the game. And it does sort of feel like the fear of being hit by a pitch is part of baseball naturally, because a pitcher doesn't have perfect control at all times. And it's you're always in some danger and pitchers take advantage of that. But I don't know. If your goal is to go up there and make him be afraid for his life, that doesn't feel right to me. That doesn't feel like it is sporting to me. Yeah, well, Escobar said, if he wants to, he can throw it at my feet, he can throw it at any part of my body, but not at my head. I'm guessing if Syndergaguard had hit him in the back or the butt or whatever, he still would have been hearing it from the Royal Stugout. Like they wouldn't have just been, well, that's the game.

They still would have stepped up and they would have defended their player. But maybe they would have been a little less vehement about it. And maybe just the general audience would have been also. But if he just wanted to exploit Escobar's aggressiveness, as I wrote, I mean, he could have just thrown a ball way outside and just seen if he could have gotten a free strike because this was all about intimidation, obviously. I mean, in the plate appearance, it put Syndergaard behind in the count. It was 1-0. And so in that sense, it favors Escobar. Now, I think there is some evidence that if you throw an inside pitch, that at least some players are sort of susceptible to that, like the Pirates' entire strategy for the last

couple of years. Their pitchers have led the majors in hit-by-pitches the last couple of years. And from what they've told me, it's a conscious strategy that they think that if they throw inside and then say go away, I mean, that's a classic baseball pitching strategy. That's what Syndergaard did. He threw a curveball on the next pitch and got a called strike. I mean, that's pitching, basically. And the numbers support that from what the Pirates statistical people told me. That's something that their coaches said, hey, hey would this work it seems like this would work and the numbers that they looked up supported it so obviously there was an intimidation aspect to this you could have just thrown an outside

fastball to Escobar and gotten him to swing and miss or foul it off or hit it weakly somewhere and that would have been a victory in a sense. He would have used Escobar's aggressiveness against him just the same way that Escobar had used his aggressiveness in his own favor earlier in the postseason, but he didn't do that. He went inside, so there was this intimidation aspect to it, and, you know, obviously I think it's far too simplistic to say that this set the tone for the game or that, you know, it showed the Mets that they could stand up to the Royals or anything. I mean, Sundergaard gave up a run in that inning and then the Mets were losing. So obviously this was not something that just like set the Royals so far back on the heels that on their heels that they couldn't compete. So, but maybe it has an effect on Escobar in future plate appearances or

future first pitches of the game where he'll be less comfortable. So in that sense, it could have a sort of ripple effect that extends throughout the rest of the series. So, so yeah, it's just, are you comfortable with an intimidation effect that actually puts a person in danger? And look, he got out of the way of the pitch fairly easily. I think if he hadn't moved at all, it's hard to tell because of the camera angles and it's hard to judge the height of the pitch. I mean, it looked like if Escobar just had stood still,

it could have hit him in a dangerous place. And Syndergaard throws, you know, that was like an off-speed fastball for him, I guess. It was only 98. But still, I mean, fastball 98 in the head region is something that, in a perfect world, no pitcher would do intentionally. Yeah, and right. And I'm not that sympathetic to the idea that it was only close and not super duper close.

I mean, I think you can argue about whether it actually was super duper close, but I don't think pitchers have that great a control and particularly when they're throwing it in an unusual angle. So I think that there's a great deal of danger to that type of pitch regardless. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm not like, I don't think that Noah Syndergaard is a villain and is necessarily like, I don't hate him or anything like that. And like Pedro Martinez is probably one of my – everybody – not mine. Everybody's two favorite pitchers ever and this was definitely something that he took advantage of, the actual putting of actual fear into actual people's actual heads for their actual heads. But then I also think about everybody else's other,

everybody's other favorite pitcher, Greg Maddux. And I just feel like Greg Maddux would have had a smart, would have had a more imaginative way of doing this. Like it just feels like there's a lot of pitchers would be able to think of something to do other than this. It does feel a little bit like, like, you know, hitting somebody with a club. It's just, it's the easiest way to do other than this. It does feel a little bit like, like, you know, hitting somebody with a club. It's just, it's the easiest way to do something and it's the kind of least advanced way to do something.

And I don't particularly see a great justification for Syndergaard to do it in this case. Yeah, the one thing that McCarthy said that I would disagree with is that he did what he had to do. That was not what he had to do. It was a viable option. Maybe some people would say it was the best option. It was not what he had to do. He had to not throw Escobar a pitch right down the middle, but it didn't have to be where it was. Syndergaard looks a little worse because he's talking a lot about this. I think that talking about it is probably – I don't judge that.

You're trying to get the maximum effect from the decision you've chosen and not talking about it seems to – once you've decided to do the dangerous thing, then it doesn't really do any good to then deny it and uh so i don't know i i feel like a commitment to the character uh is good and of course the royals are going to be upset they would be upset even if it was totally unintentional because uh they are going to rally around this and i think that i think they're probably right to be upset in this case and um yeah i'm a little and i'm surprised that when calvin herrera was in there down five runs with a 100-mile-an-hour fastball that there wasn't a pitch thrown then. Yeah.

The idea that, I think as Harold Reynolds said on the broadcast, that Syndergaard was waking a sleeping dog seemed sort of laughable in that the Royals were very much awake for the first couple games of the series. It was not like the Mets had a two nothing lead and we're just walking all over the Royals and they did this to inflame them. It was exactly the opposite. So I don't put any stock in that interpretation of what happened. What if Syndergaard had said before the game, I'm going to throw at his head, and then when Escobar walked out there syndergaard pointed at him and and then simply threw the oh one curveball that he threw i would have loved that see that to me would have been much better yeah i would have loved that a lot close to the same effect do you think or does escobar see right through that i think that

might have i think it might have had some effect. I think if he had just thrown that curveball by itself, I think that like without saying or doing anything, because Escobar was very locked in on fastball and he kept getting fastballs and that's the whole thing. No pitcher throws a curveball on the first pitch of the game. So even just doing that probably would have had the effect of getting a strike and confusing Escobar and making him know that he can't count on getting a certain pitch in that situation. And if he had really wanted to damage Escobar, in his fairness, if he had really wanted to damage Escobar, then he'd have thrown the curveball first and the fastball second. Because then we'd

probably have a corpse. I mean, if he's looking, if he's seen the curveball and is now looking there, and then you throw the pitch, I mean, brutal. Yeah. All right. And that's our first Saturday episode. So are we assigning a certain level of, are we pronouncing guilt, or are we just talking about it and ending the episode? Talking about it and ending the episode. I would, as Noah Syndergaard's counsel, spiritual counsel, I would have advised him not to do that. And I would tell him that he erred and should seek amends.

But I forgive him. Yeah, I guess I basically feel the same way. Escobar, A++ all the way around. I mean, you know, I think it's appropriate to call the guy stupid. I think it's appropriate to swing at the first pitch. And he didn't seem to do anything crazy or irrational. And so, good for him. Good for him. As I recall, we were pretty hard on Escobar earlier this year in Unwritten Rules Off, weren't we?

Yeah, I guess everyone on the Royals. But he was the guy, he was the Laurie guy. He was the one who, he drove 90% of the Laurie fight, right? Uh-huh, yeah. Okay, good. Okay. All right, so first ever weekend episode. Don't get used to it.

Thanks for listening. You can send us emails at podcast.baseballperspectives.com and rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes and find our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And as always, support our sponsor, The Play Index, by going to baseballreference.com, using the coupon code BP, and getting the discounted price of $30 on one-year subscription. We'll be back in the upcoming week. Take it down to L.A. Find a place to call my own and try to fix up.

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