Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 851: The Squid is Fried Edition

Episode Date: March 30, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about a listener-suggested expression, then answer listener emails about Albert Pujols’ impact on the Cardinals, rooting against incentive clauses, what a lack of analytics looks like, and more.

The night is over, the day has come. You're growing older, I'm only young. You're never sleeping, you're wide awake, forgetting all the plans you made. Oh no, I never wanted to find out. Oh, I wish you hadn't fried out. Good morning and welcome to episode 851 of Effectively Wild, You had it fried out you'd care to tell the listeners go play beat pakoda where can people go to play beat pakoda pretty much anywhere on the internet just open a browser type in a string of any seven or eight letters it's probably their home page already uh yeah it'll take you there uh i might recommend going to the facebook page going to any of uh you know look at my last dozen or so tweets it's probably mentioned there or if you go to the website baseballrespectus.com and ctrl f the word beat you will find it at the moment or if you go up to the

fantasy tab and hover your little cursor over it it'll give you an option in the drop down or if none of those work uh design your own version of it uh Do the engineering and web design necessary to create your own game and then play a parallel version. Yeah, that seems unnecessarily difficult. How long do people have to do this? We will freeze rosters upon first pitch on Sunday. Okay. This is, by the way, a game where you can pick players that you think will be over or under their Pocota projection. There's a competition and someone will win and they're bragging rights at stake and perhaps other things. Season's about to start. Yeah, really close.

Yeah, it snuck up on me. It snuck up on me so much that like four days ago, for a brief second, I thought, is the World Baseball Classic this year? And then I realized, probably not. Yeah, it's close. We've got two team previews left, and then there will be actual baseball. So we're going to do an email show. Oh, quick correction. I have to figure out how I did this wrong. I did something wrong, though, in my play index last week, which is my fault, not play indexes. But Ken Griffey Jr. did not homer after his 40th birthday.

He homered after his 39th birthday, but not after his 40th. So we have to remove him from our list of pre- and post- pre-20, post-40 homers. And that leaves us at, what, four now? Staub, Cobb, A-Rod, and Sheffod. Right. Yeah, after his 40th birthday, Ken Griffey Jr. was mostly just taking naps in the clubhouse. Good reference. Yeah. Zing. What do you think are the odds that Adrian

Beltre homers after his 40th birthday? He wants a contract extension that will take him after his 40th birthday right now. So he believes he will homer after his 40th birthday, but he's got to go. Let's see. His birthday is in April. He will turn 37 in a week. So he would have to Homer in. Well, he is far better preserved through an equivalent age than Ken Griffey Jr. was. Yeah. He would have to Homer in 2019, in the season 2019. And he was a six win player last year. Yeah. So that would So that would suggest that he's got a long way to go before a team quits giving him chances. However, his bat particularly showed signs of decline, and his power specifically showed signs of decline even before that. It's true, although he really rebounded in the second half.

Would you take 50-50? Yeah, I think I would. Wait, so which side i would take i would take exactly 50 50 and no other percentages all right all right so we got an email from jeff in taipei that i will read before we get to actual questions this is a submission of an unfamiliar expression that jeff is suggesting that we add to our lexicon for when people are getting fired or are in danger of getting fired. He says, now that the wobbly chair has really become a mainstay on your podcast, I can no longer resist

the urge to chime in. Several weeks ago, you explained how the wobbly chair expression actually already exists in German. As a native speaker of English who has lived in Taiwan for over 20 years and as a linguist slash language teacher, I have often had fun with intentionally using the expressions from my native English and Mandarin Chinese. It can be a fun teaching tool. Today, I want to give you guys one from Mandarin. Maybe you can fact check this one with your wife. In Mandarin Chinese, when someone gets fired from a job, the expression commonly used is chow you, which literally means fried squid. The origin of this phrase is pretty interesting. In the olden days, workers lived in the places where they worked. They would carry a bedroll and simply lay it out at night when it was time to sleep.

When they got fired, they were told to gather up the bedroll. This is easy enough to understand. Now here comes the leap. When you cook squid, a common food in China, the larger body pieces roll up in the pan, and someone somewhere sometime remarked that it looked just like a rolled up bedroll. So the expression was born. When a worker was seen passing through the streets with his bedroll in hand,

he was said to have had his squid fried. So maybe when the first manager on a wobbly chair hits the floor this year, and as a Boston-born Sox fan, I think I know who it might be, you guys will be ready to seamlessly integrate fried squid into the Effectively Wild menu. You like it? Yeah, it's a little bit awkward syntax-wise in English. You're saying he's not... Yeah, because it's like a passive voice. You're not saying he is fried squid. You're saying his squid fried. Yeah, his squid is fried. But then like when I'm looking, because it does seem like this is correct, like a lot of explainers of this idiom say why fried squid in Chinese means

to be fired from a job. But then what is fried squid? Like how do you use fried squid? Like, that guy is fried squid. That guy's job is fried squid. That guy's job prospects are fried squid. It's not, it would take some practice. I like it.

I like it conceptually. It would take some practice to use it in a sentence. Sort of like the word atavistic. Yes, you are right. I like it. We will perhaps add it to our repertoire, our lexicon, but well, we chair works and it has a history with us, so it'll be hard to displace. I just realized that there is a great potential here because Freddy Gonzalez spells his name in

such a way that it is an anagram for fried. So we're close. Freddy's fried squid. All right. If there is a Braves opportunity to use this, we'll use it for him. You would think that he would be, his chair, I would guess that his chair is the wobbliest

in the National League at the moment. I suppose. But what could he even do to have his chair tip over? Have his team be bad? Yeah. No, it happens though. it happens you know all the time I mean if they sometimes you want to you just want sometimes you keep a manager on like this just so that you can fire him just because at some point in the season you need you want to do

something to shift the conversation a little bit and uh so you know you fire him and then you give the new guy uh A little bit of momentum Going into the season when you actually Care I'm not saying I mean if they really Genuinely like him and think That like if their commitment to him Thus far is based on the idea that There is no manager in the world better for them when they're good

Then they probably won't fire him but You know if he's just a placeholder a big part Of what a placeholder exists for is to be scapegoated. Yeah, that's true. He was a Frank Wren hire and Frank Wren is no longer around. Although of course, John Capolella was around at the time also. A lot of times you see a team fire its manager when it goes from being really bad to being good again, because you have like a developmental manager and then you have a, okay, we actually have to win some games now manager and doesn't seem like they're that close

to making that leap. But yeah, maybe. Yeah, and I would say I'm also wrong. I would guess that Brian Price has the wobbliest chair in the National League. Yeah. Right now. Yeah, that sounds right.

And Walt Weiss's can't be too firm. So otherwise, I'm not sure who else would yeah their squids are are marinating for now all right see now we're referring to the squid as their job security now the squid has become just a completely abstract concept yeah uh don't you don't you throw squids on the ice when someone scores a hat trick? Or is that an octopus? Or are octopi and squids different? I don't know. Lots of questions. Okay. Brett says, the underrated trout question from last year had me thinking about the reverse. Are the Cardinals of the last 15 years overrated simply due to one player? They got Albert Pujols with a 13th round pick, and he put up something over 80 wins above replacement player. The Cardinals received the 19th pick from the Angels,

which they used for Michael Wacca and the 36th sandwich pick for Steven Piscotty. That's when Pujols left via free agency. Is the Cardinals' 2001-2015 run pretty much hitting the longest of long shots, a guy who challenged to be the best in the league for many years out of the 13th round? That's a really good question. And yeah, Pujols was about as good as Trout was for an extended period of time. And even, I mean, at least you can say the Angels did something. Like they got Trout the first chance they could. And they, you know, if you believe them, they definitely saw this coming, not this, but they

saw, they saw his talent. Uh, whereas you could kind of knock the Cardinals for letting pools drop 12 rounds and say, they did not see this coming at all. If they had even an inkling that he'd be a major league regular, they would have drafted him certainly many rounds higher to avoid some other team from swooping in and getting him. And so, yeah, if you look at the Cardinals and you remove seven to nine wins every year, I have not looked specifically, but certainly the year that they won the World Series in 2006, they're nowhere near the playoffs. That was the year they weren't very good anyway because they only won 83 games. So the Wolves debuted in 2001 and left in 2011.

And in those 11 seasons, they made seven postseasons and won two World Series. And I haven't looked, but yeah you if you remove seven to nine wins they probably miss three or four of those so it's a good question yeah i don't know if are they a 500 team are they a 500 team without him let me see yeah they are they would be a over that time they would have been a 500 team but not by not by much. So I don't remember all the specifics of the Pujols origin story. Do they get, how much credit do the Cardinals get for Pujols? Because a lot of scouts discounted him and passed him over and the Cardinals post Pujols have certainly demonstrated an ability to find underrated guys in the draft

and people that other teams had written off and turned into stars or productive players for them. So if they got Pujols through their own intelligence and ingenuity, then it's hard to say that they are overrated because he succeeded. Yeah, I mean, again, though, as a 13th round pick, that seems like a lot. That's the information you need, right? It doesn't, I don't.

True, if they knew he was going to be Pujols, they wouldn't have waited for the 13th round. What could they tell you, or what could a scouting report say that wait 13 rounds doesn't say louder? Yeah. And the other thing about P about pools is a lot like the trout example, more than the Goldschmidt example too, where he was immediately extremely good. I don't know how much credit you give to their player development because he came in as a

20 year old, uh, in his first pro season, uh, and destroyed the Midwest League, was in the majors to start opening day the next year. And so it's not like there was a player development period where like Paul Goldschmidt became a totally different player than everybody saw. He showed up and was already a totally different player than people saw. You could certainly convince me, well, I don't know if you could convince me,

but you could make an argument that yes, Albert Pujols was seen differently by the Cardinals than anybody else, and they deserve credit for identifying him. And you could even convince me maybe that they did something that he showed up and they said, hey, your shoes are three sizes too small. That turned him into the fact that they waited 13 rounds to take him and the fact that there's no apparent point where their hand is significant in his development to immediate superstar. I mean, this guy was one of the great rookies of all time a year after he got drafted. And so it's just that the facts don't really look great for their case. Yeah. We don't see all the facts. We don't know all the facts. We could be wrong, but they don't look great. I wouldn't say that their 15-year run is pretty much Pujols. I would say that it definitely takes it from what might have been a

good run to a great run or an all-time run. Maybe there would be less talk about them being the best organization and so brilliant and flawless at team building if they hadn't had Pujols. I mean, they'd still have been a good team. There were years where they might not have made the playoffs. They might not have won the World Series. But they found good players. They signed good players. They made smart deals since Pujols left. Yes, they got Waka and Piscati, but that's a small fraction of their team and their success in those five seasons since he left. And they've been excellent since then? Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't give the, the post pool holes years, I feel like are completely to their credit. Like you can't, I wouldn't even say, oh, well,

they drafted pools. That's why they have Waka. I mean, you know, Waka and Piscotty, they were, you know, they were compensation picks, but they also, you know, if pools had been, if they don't have pools, maybe they sign Michael Kadiar, and Michael Kadiar walks, and Michael Kadiar, who isn't pools, maybe he brings back the draft picks. Or maybe they get Waka or Piscotti anyway and pass over whoever they drafted with their non-compensation picks. I mean, to me, tying the player to his compensation pick in that way isn't really fair. I mean, teams are pretty, there are enough players in the draft that when a team signs a player with a compensation pick, I figure there's a pretty good chance they were going to get that player anyway. They wanted it. That was the guy that they targeted and nobody else targeted him. And that is, you know, that is to their credit.

So from 2012 onward, I think they've completely earned it. They are an extremely well-run organization, without a doubt. And their success over the last four years has been extremely, you know, at the top of the sport, without a doubt. And nothing about the decision to take Pujols in the 13th round or pass him over in the 12th round 15 years ago affects that, to my mind. I do think, though, that, and maybe this is just, it's a thought experiment more than anything else. But I do think you can say that if they didn't get pools, if somebody else had drafted him in between the 12th and the 13th round, or if we believe the story of the Rays scout who wanted to draft him in the first round and got ignored and ended up quitting or whatever.

It's interesting. They went 994 and 787 in Pujols' eight seasons. I mean, 11 seasons. Pujols was an 86 win player during that time. If you turn 86 of those wins into losses, they are almost exactly a 500 team. Yeah. Well, you'd probably assume that he'd be replaced by an average player. No, no, you wouldn't. You assume he'd be replaced by a 13th rounder. Well, I mean, they might have found someone else to play first base who was an average

player. No, they could have signed somebody, but they would have signed somebody anyway. I mean, pools was also making way below market for most of that time. So it's not like they would have had a lot more money available. And so they would have, you know, sure, they would have gotten a first baseman, but it would have come out of whatever they were. Maybe they don't have Jim Edmonds because they've signed a first baseman instead. Maybe they don't have Scott Rowland because they traded for a first baseman instead.

So I don't think you can assume that they would have. If they could just add talent at will, then they would have done it anyway. I don't think you can assume that they would have If they could just add talent at will Then they would have done it Anyway I don't know I don't think you can assume that I mean if we're saying they're smart Which I think we generally are I don't think you assume that he'd be replaced by

A replacement player Or that whoever he had been replaced by Would have you know made them worse in some other area The same amount I would guess that if you don't have poo holes then you get creative and you figure out some other way to make a team good if you're a good team well then wait if once you have pools though then why didn't they do that at shortstop why did they have pete cosma playing shortstop why didn't they get creative uh well they really

like pete cosma for some reason. They were thrilled with him, but they would never want to replace him. But yeah, I don't know. You can't subtract the whole 86. Why not? I don't think that's fair. How is it not fair? You're just making things up.

I don't think you can assume that it would have just been a black hole if he wasn't there. I'm not saying – yeah, I'm not either. I'm saying they probably would have signed a first baseman or traded for a first baseman and that would have taken their resources. Maybe they just would have spent a little more or something. Well, maybe they would have or maybe they would have had even less income because Albert Pujols was a— I mean, how much money did they get because of Albert Pujols? You could argue that they would have had a lot less money to spend on first base if they weren't making so many postseason appearances and cashing in those $30, $40, $50 million extra that they were getting every year because of their success.

That's true. I mean, I'm not saying that they're going to have—that they would have put Hisap Choi at first base and left him there to play replacement level for 11 years. They would have gotten a first baseman who would have been worth somewhere between one and five wins a year probably, but it would have come at the expense of the other eight spots on the field because it would have drawn from their resources. So you wouldn't have noticed it, but it's, you know, a worse loogie. It's a worse fourth starter. It's a worse center fielder. It's all over the field a little bit worse because they've had to pour so many, you know, to pour some of those resources

into getting a first baseman. Maybe. I still think it's a, it's a stretch to subtract all 86. I don't, I don't understand logically how you're saying that. Like, I don't. I think if you have Albert Pujols, you operate in a way that is consistent with your having Albert Pujols, which maybe means you... And you're right, it's true. If they had made fewer playoff appearances, maybe that would have hurt them in some other ways. There's a whole spiraling chain of events that's hard to anticipate. But I think if you have that superstar, then you don't do other things that you wouldn't do if you didn't have the superstar.

Like if you're just determined to have a competitive baseball team every year, if you have the superstar who's cheap, then maybe you spend a little less than you'd be willing to. You get to the point where, okay, we're a 92 win team or something. We think we're good enough to make the playoffs. We're not going to eliminate all uncertainty. We're not going to spend twice as much so that we can have a 102-win team. We're okay with having a 92-win team or something. And so you go into the season like that.

And if you have poo holes, then it takes less to get to that point. If you don't have poo holes, then it takes more. Maybe you spend more. Maybe you make some other move. Maybe, I don't know, maybe someone was blocked in the system and they traded him at some point. You could go back and look. I just think if it's a good organization, if you take away, if you wipe away the Hall of Fame player that they had, I think they adjust in some way that makes the fall off less than going from Pujols to nothing. So here's, but here's where, then here's where this problem, where our argument gets circular.

I'm not assuming they're a good organization because as evidence, I'm pointing out that without Pujols, they're a 500 team. But we can use the post Pujols years to inform our evaluation of what they were in the Pujols year. I would say that it is undeniable that in the post-Jockety years after Moseley Lock had some experience and built an organization around the guys that are there now or the guys that have left, they are a good organization. I don't know that in the years before that, I mean, I don't think we have necessarily conclusive evidence that they were, I always thought they were a very good organization. They probably are. If you ask me, honestly, outside of the context of this conversation, I will say, of course, the Cardinals are a good organization. I'm just pointing out that a key piece of evidence for that claim has just been taken away from us.

They had a way the entire time. They did. That's true. So that's all I need to know. All right. All right. It's a good question. It is a good question.

Okay. All right. Let's do one from Joe G. in Pittsburgh. The recent news of Anthony Davis missing the remainder of the NBA season and possibly missing out on a $24 million bonus if he isn't selected to any of the all-NBA teams this year got me wondering about this from a front office perspective. Do you think owners and general managers secretly root against these types of arbitrary contract provisions being reached? Since there is no salary cap in baseball as there is in other sports, this is a little less black and white. In a hypothetical situation, say Andrew McCutcheon

had a clause paying him an extra $5 million if he finishes in the top five of the MVP ballot. I can't imagine why Bob Nutting and Neil Huntington would actively pimp his candidacy and credentials. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Nutting released cryptic, passive-aggressive statements like Andrew had a great season, was a valuable member of the Pirates organization, even if his stolen base success rate has gone down each of the last three years and his defensive metrics aren't quite as good as other centerfielders in the National League. So I guess the question is, if a GM is told by the owner, you have X amount of money to spend next offseason on free agents, and there are Y amounts of millions tied up in

provisional bonuses based on voting accomplishments. Wouldn't the GM want these provisions not to be reached, especially since a lot of voting accomplishments are more like popularity contests and don't necessarily correlate to more wins on the field from an overall team perspective? I think that the key here and what makes this different from our discussion about sort of a similar incentives issue last week is that usually these are not huge bonuses. They're usually fairly small. It's a quarter million dollars. A-Rod is the exception with his 7 million or whatever bonuses that he gets for hitting certain home run achievements. But generally, it's $250,000 or $50,000, things of that nature. So I think at that level, it's more like, well, when you're eating at a restaurant,

are you hoping that your waiter will suck so that you don't have to tip him as much? And you don't. You're kind of happy to get good service and pay the guy a little bit more because of it. You're sort of happy to chip in a little to a guy who did well by you. So I don't think that that would be an issue. If Andrew McCutcheon's bonuses for, if he did have a clause paying him an extra $5 million, if he finishes in the top five of the MVP ballot, I think he would, because I think $5 million is a significant impediment to the Pirates being able to go about their business and win games. But he doesn't have a $5 million bonus for that. Yeah, it obviously depends on the size of the bonus.

I mean, if you had a sizable bonus and you've already banked the production, like in advance, it might be easier to stomach because you say, well, if the guy has an MVP award, that means he had an MVP season and I'd be happy to have that. So it's worth it. Whereas once the season happens, you already have the production and the vote is yet to happen, or at least the announcement is yet to happen. So at that point, you might hope that the voters just get it wrong or they choose someone else or something so that you get the production and you

don't have to spend the money. I could understand thinking that. I guess it also comes down to whether you think there's some sort of marquee value that the team derives from having an MVP or a Cy Young winner or whatever it is, whether it's just the publicity that the team gets from the announcements or being able to build your promotional strategy for the following season around a big award winner. Obviously, that player's profile goes up. You can put them on the front of your calendars and whatever,

and you can have a bobblehead night and you can have all of that stuff. And having some sort of celebrity player probably helps you to some extent, and maybe that offsets what you're paying for the bonus. I think also it is the case that the front office, the owner, they also feel pride in that award being won. I mean, there are a lot of ways to be successful in baseball to win. One is obviously to win a World Series, but we don't look at a season as a complete failure just because our team, either that we're rooting for, playing for, or owning, or putting together as general manager, didn't win the world series. There are various ways that you can find different degrees of

success. And one is to make the playoffs and one is to win on April 14th. It's nice to win on April 14th. Even if you don't win the world series, still wanted to win that one. And one is to win on April 14th. It's nice to win on April 14th. Even if you don't win the World Series, still wanted to win that one. And one is to have kind of achievements that you feel pride in for a long time. And I think that the team as a whole takes pride in their players winning awards.

Ben and I felt pride when some of our players won post-season awards with the Stompers. We didn't have to pay for those awards, and so maybe that helped. Maybe we would feel a little bit more conflicted if it had come out of our pocket. But these players are part of, this is how they measure their, how front offices measure their performances. Are the players doing well? Are they achieving things?

Are they being successful? And I think that they're completely rooting from their own sort of prideful self-interest. They're rooting for these awards to be won by the players that they signed, developed, played, and have relationships with. Now, again, going back to the 5 million, if it were 5 million, then you could certainly, I think the Pirates would be in a tougher situation. They don't have $5 million. They do not have the money. They would be in trouble. But for a quarter million, just yeah, win. Okay. Play index? Sure. So did we have a conversation not long ago about whether a particular instance where a outfielder should have let the ball drop foul

instead of catching it and allowing a run to score yeah maybe last year's playoff yeah it might have been last time there was actual baseball yeah it might have been last year's playoffs i know that we talked about it with grant brisby uh during a dustin moore segment once some years ago but yeah i think we did recently. And at the time, I think in that case, we decided that the math, it was too close for us to expect the outfielder to have done the math, as well as the ball was literally too close to being fair

for him to even necessarily know for sure that it was going to even be foul. And so we gave the outfielder credit for catching it or we didn't blame him for catching it, I guess. So I wanted to see, though, what the worst example of a fielder catching a ball in foul territory is in the past decade. And so first, though, I do want to just go on a quick little tangent about language. In baseball, a fielder's choice is when you throw the ball to get the lead runner out instead of throwing the ball to first to get the trail runner out. I've always found this to be a stupid phrase because it's not like the fielder gets the ball and goes, how do I feel today? Am I a lead runner guy or am I a trail runner guy? It's not like there are players who are known around the game for liking to get the lead runner every time you can. There's no choice. It's like going, well, he hit a double.

He could have homered. He could have singled. But it was a hitter's choice. He took the double. Like you get the best you can, right? Yeah, although it's a judgment call. It's a judgment call. You might not have the guts to go for the lead runner. Sure.

Another guy might. Right, just like the base runner's choice. It's a base runner's choice. He went. He stole second. We don't call those stolen bases anymore. We call them base runner's choices. He chose to go.

No, we call it a stolen base. That's what you get. You get a stolen base. The pitcher threw a high fastball and struck him out swinging. It's not a strikeout. It's a pitcher's choice. He chose to go for the out swinging. It's not a strikeout. It's a pitcher's choice. He chose to go for the strikeout. It's a pitcher's choice.

How many pitcher's choices did you have this year? It's a stupid phrase. Okay? Okay. Now, what is a fielder's choice, Ben, is this right here. When you are standing in foul territory and there's a runner on third and less than two outs and you have to choose whether to catch the ball or not catch the ball you have a choice do you have a suggestion for how to replace fielder's choice with something that makes more

sense yeah i mean what anything just say cut down the lead runner just say you know force you got a force yeah okay uh although sometimes it's not a force sometimes it's a tag play but anyways it's Say, cut down the lead runner. Say, you know, force. You got to force. Yeah, okay. Although sometimes it's not a force. Sometimes it's a tag play. But anyway, it's lead runner cut down. Okay. Lurked. Sure.

And I would probably, look, it's not a good phrase in any sense to describe what it is, but I probably would let it go except for we have a shortage of phrases in baseball. And this play here where the outfielder has to decide whether to catch the ball when it's foul or not desperately needs to be called a fielder's choice. And we can't use it because somebody is squatting on that URL. We need it back. Let it go. And give it to me for this play. So outfielder making a fielder's choice on a foul ball possible tag situation, possible sacrifice fly situation.

So what I did is I went to the play index. I went back to 2005. I looked at every sacrifice fly. And this obviously will ignore any time where the fielder chose to let the ball drop. That just goes down as a strike. But what I do have is every time there was a sacrifice fly, I set parameters where the lead is two or fewer in either direction. Uh, and the ball was fielded by somebody other than the center fielder because the center fielder is obviously never going to have this fielder's choice to make. And I got, you know, 25,000 sacrifice flies or whatever.

And I just then deleted all except the ones that are described as foul fly ball or foul pop fly or foul line out or walk off foul fly ball., so far as I can tell, there has not been a walk off in this situation in the regular season in the past 10 years. If I'm wrong about that, if for some reason on walk offs, these just don't get labeled that way, someone might have one in mind. It seems like the kind of play you would remember. So if it has happened, I'm guessing that one of you will point it out to me. But so far as I can tell, it has not occurred in a walk-off over the past decade. So I have 83 instances of foul sacrifice

flies in what are essentially high leverage situations. Okay. All right. Sorted them by win probability added. And of my 83, 23 of them helped the defense. The defense clearly made the right play. Another 15 of them had no win probability added shift. They were a push, so also a good idea to catch them. And then, you know, like 45 helped the offense. 45? 40. About 40 helped the offense. That in a win probability added way of looking at it,

it would have been better off to let the ball drop. Now, there are details that are not included here. If peak Albert Pujols is hitting, then you probably take the out. If the pitcher is hitting, then maybe you especially don't take the out. In some of these cases, maybe the ball landed one-inch foul, and there's no way of knowing that that was going to happen. And maybe it was a 3-0 count or a 3-1 count, and the hitter had a little extra advantage there. And so I wouldn't say, by my way of looking at this, if the win probability added for the offense is, say,.01, I'm saying, no, the fielder probably should have caught it.

It's too much to expect him to let it go. For.02, probably the same. For.03, probably the same. There's probably some detail that justifies it. There are seven plays over the past decade where the fielder chose to catch the ball and it cost his team.05 win probability or more. And again, we don't know. Maybe they were only an inch foul, but there are seven of those plays. And the king of these plays, the one that is indisputably the worst decision by the

fielder on the surface, came on April 16th, 2008, when Mike Lamb was hitting for the Twins with Delman Young on third for the Twins just after he had been traded from the Rays. They were playing the Rays. Dan Wheeler was on the mound. It was a 5-5 game in the eighth inning. There was one out, and it was the the first pitch and Lamb hit a fly ball into left field. Carl Crawford caught it. The run scored. The twins brought in Joe Nathan for the ninth and Joe Nathan at the time was arguably better than Mariano Rivera, but if not, then he was definitely one of the three best closers in the game. At that point, he shut him down. So on the surface, this doesn't look good. It cost the Twins or cost the Rays 0.1 wins in win probability added. It's the highest WPA shift

of a foul sacrifice fly in this era. But I don't know, maybe Karl Crawford had no way of knowing. So I went and I looked up about 10 versions of the game story at the time. And they all mentioned that it was foul. On the one hand, you have Karl Crawford made a spectacular sliding catch, which makes you think, oh, well, if it was spectacular and sliding, that might have been tough to know whether it was foul at that point. Although also, if you have to slide, you know for a fact that that run is scoring. There's not even going to be a throw.

But that doesn't seem to be a defense for Crawford. He seems to have known that it was foul. It was described a couple times as four feet foul. And Crawford specifically said, yeah, he knew it was foul. He said he decided to go for the out, figuring Tampa Bay still had enough time to make up the deficit. it was foul. He said he decided to go for the out, figuring Tampa Bay still had enough time to make up the deficit. He was wrong. That's the game story. Carl Crawford decided to go

for the out, figuring Tampa Bay still had enough time to make up the deficit. He was wrong. Crawford, I still figured it was just one run. Hopefully we could come back and get two runs, Crawford said, acknowledging that he knows how baseball scoring works. The thing is that there's no situation just about where you have less of a chance of scoring one or two runs. It's the bottom of the eighth. The closer is coming in. It's not the sixth. There's no calculus here where you go, well, usually I would let it go, or in some cases I'd let it go.

But in this case specifically, I'll catch it because we have a lot of time. It is the least amount of time you can possibly have and still have time left. And it is the best pitcher or the pitcher that you least want to see coming up. But he decided to give him the run. Crawford said, we're trying to win the game. It doesn't matter what happens. You've got to win the game. You've got to do whatever it takes.

None of these words mean anything. but that's what he said. I wasn't really worried about the run too much, which is crazy. It's the go ahead run in the bottom of the eighth. You're crazy. But I understood what I did. But by then it was too late, which is too late. What do you mean? You just said there was plenty of time. Anyway, Lamb's fly ball was slicing toward foul ground. Left fielder Crawford slid and caught it about four feet in territory, allowing Young to score easily. This was Mike Lamb's, by win probability added, fifth biggest hit all year.

It was neither a hit nor fair, but it was his fifth biggest hit all year by win probability added. Lamb hit 235, 276, 322 that year. So you basically did have a pitcher batting. He was going to be behind 01 if1 if the ball dropped foul. You know, I think that Crawford's defense should have been, it was slicing and it's really hard to make that call when it's happening. But it was obviously a tough one to lose. He chose to go with the, we had time to come back. And I just think he was wrong. I think that he should have let it drop. I think this is an instance where on the surface, as well as in the details, this holds up as the worst fielder's choice of the past decade. Almost came back to cost them. They won the division by two games that year. Yeah. They've lost a couple of games somewhere along the way

there. They could have been talking about the Karl Crawford Fielder's Choice for years to come. All right. Good catch, though. Yeah. You know, it's a good catch. If he'd been a little worse defender, he would have made a better play. I don't suppose the catch is online anymore. It's not.

That's a shame. Yeah. All right. Well, it's always nice when the Play Index yields an answer and a satisfying answer. All right. You can use the coupon code BP when you subscribe to the Playindex to get the discounted price of $30 on that one-year subscription. All right. Alex says, I've seen a few generic articles this year about teams that place a lesser emphasis on analytics. analytics. Arizona, of course, with gratuitous Dave Stewart quotes and a weird one about Boston's direction under Dave Dombrowski, in which owner John Henry said the team was too reliant on

analytics. Scouting versus analytics is obviously a false dichotomy, but even if you indulge it and focus primarily on scouting, you still need a decision-making framework. After the Red Sox article came out, I remember Jeff Sullivan tweeting something like, I honestly don't know what analytics means anymore. If a team's really not using analytics very much, however you define that, how would we see that inform their decision-making process? Beyond writers, we like hating their moves. Is it just a matter of how those teams value individual players relative to the analytics community or something bigger? to the analytics community or something bigger? So yeah, I mean, to some degree, because there's not a huge spread in the methods for projecting player performance, statistically, I think that you probably see enough similarities between teams projections, Pocota, Zips, any other,

that it's kind of usually sort of easy to tell which teams are putting an emphasis on those projections in the way they sign players. And like, you know, when the Royals sign guys that projections really don't like, I mean, I think that that's a pretty good indication that in player acquisition, the major league level, in that specific area of how they put their team together, they put less emphasis on analytics than a team like the rays that seems to always get the stat head, darling projection player, even sometimes unsuccessfully.

But as far as like strategy, it's kind of hard to tell because while we know certain signatures of, of analytic strategies, like, you strategies like Joe Maddon pulling the pitcher the third time through the order, or Davey Johnson never pitching out, or the Pirates putting shifts on, there's not a very strong correlation throughout the 30 leagues of which teams do those things. You know, there are some stat head teams that do bunt a lot. And there are some non-stat head teams that shift a ton. And I put stat head and non-stat head kind of in quotation marks because we don't really even necessarily have a great way of ranking all 30 of those teams.

But we kind of know, right? We kind of know that, you know the a's are one uh and um you know the diamondbacks are not one like we kind of know so it's good enough and you know we talked about this with intentional walks i wrote a piece a couple years ago where i looked at the intentional walk to try to figure out whether it is a stat head move or a non-stat head move. Because there doesn't seem to be any consistency among the teams that we identify as being particularly keen on analytics and how they treat the intentional walk. And same for the teams that don't.

And you have Ned Yost, who seems like the oldest of old school in a lot of our minds, and yet bunts fairly infrequently and doesn't pitch out at all and doesn't do things that we would normally associate with Davy Johnson. So I guess what I'm saying is that for these types of tactics, there seems to be a lot of variance within philosophical schools as far as application. And it would be hard to know just by looking that it wasn't just noise. Yeah, I think it would be really hard to tell without the proclamations about being less into analytics, without quotes from the media, from statements from front office people. I don't think you could say conclusively. There are maybe some times where I don't even know. I mean, now that scouting and data, other sorts of data are kind of converging in a

way that they're almost indistinguishable, whether it's StatCast or whatever. I mean, that's statistics, but it's also what was traditionally scouting information. So it's really hard to draw that distinction. I guess maybe you could still say that a preference for tools versus performance might possibly be something that you would see a difference in. Even then, I mean, if you were doing analysis that suggested that tools are valuable or something, then you would expect the StatHead team to like tools. I mean, so I don't know. I mean, teams are using scouting reports and kind of turning them into data that you can use in

analysis. So I don't know. Maybe it just kind of means like making mistakes or that's kind of how it's generally used. And maybe that's not fair, but something like with Arizona, often it kind of manifests itself like, you know, in their draft pick valuation or something. Analytics say that draft picks are worth a certain amount of money and the Diamondbacks don't seem to act that way or believe that. And so if you believe the analysis, then they're just wrong about that, I guess, would be one way to look at it. And in the Red Sox case, we talked about this on the Red Sox preview, but like the initial offer that the Red Sox extended to John Lester was based on their statistical projections for him. And it was such a lowball offer that he would never sign it, even though maybe it was a sound offer in a sense, or, you

know, least likely to blow up in their faces or something. So I don't know that you could tell without getting the backstories on these things. If you and me and 50 other people all ranked all 30 teams by how strong their adherence to analytics are. Here's my guess of what would influence our decisions based on the share of how much they influence our decisions. I would say that 35% of our rankings would be based on the words that they say publicly about analytics, but also not about analytics and just what they reveal about the way they think. 35% is their market size, which might be.

17.5% would be are assessing their moves. Do they get Steven Souza or do they get Ian Kennedy? 7.5% would be assessing their tactics. Do they shift? Do they bunt? And 35% would be, do they hire our friends or go to our conferences and and i i think that just looking at that i don't think those are great ways necessarily to make these decisions to make these rankings um particularly the last one um which isn't probably

well maybe it's it's worth something but it probably, it reveals our biases a little bit, a lot. And then what they say isn't great because you know that all this is going through a filter and it's through a media filter and that it's designed to affect the way we view them more than it necessarily is designed to accurately reflect how they are. And we've just talked about the limitations of assessing them based on their moves or their tactics. So somehow we put it together and we feel like we have a pretty confident opinion about each of these 30 teams, but I'm not sure that we should. We should probably be a lot more kind of cautious about labeling teams one way or the other in a lot of cases. In some cases, we really don't have to be more cautious. Like the Astros or the A's make it

pretty easy, but in a lot of cases. And in some cases it could just be a long con where Ruben Amaro only pretends not to be interested in analytics to throw all the other teams off the scent or so he says. All right. That is it for today. You can support the podcast by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and becoming a patron. Five people who've done that already. Lee Domingue, Nicholas Bergeljung, Andrew Lindsay, Scott French,

and Jean. Thank you. You can also buy our book, which is called the only rule is it has to work. It comes out May 3rd and you can preorder it now on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If you order it early, you might get it early.

It's the story of how Sam and I ran the Sonoma Stompers, an independent league baseball team, last summer. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Keep the questions coming at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or through Patreon if you are a supporter. We will be back tomorrow with the penultimate preview of our 30 team series. We'll be talking about the Chicago Cubs. Don't analyze, don't analyze Don't go that way, don't live that way That would paralyze your evolution