Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 860: Week One in Baseball Confirmation Bias

Episode Date: April 12, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about the most popular picks in BP’s “Beat PECOTA” game, then discuss Rich Hill, the Cubs’ strong start, Ray Searage’s promising pupils, and more.

If I knew then, what I know now, I'd do it all again with you anyhow. Confirmation when I look at you. Confirmation that this thing is true. Confirmation that we got it right. Confirmation that you're here tonight. Good morning and welcome to episode 860 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by our supporters at Patreon. Thank you very much to each and every one of you. Also by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you?

Very well, thank you. Good. Anything you want to talk about today? Not particularly. I'm up for whatever you want to talk about. Yikes. I was really hoping you had like 40 minutes of banter. We can brainstorm together. brainstorm together. So the season's about a week old and I wanted to talk to you about some of

our, some potential areas of confirmation bias, I guess. Ways that the season has gone just how we expected them to. Maybe one or the other of us expected it to or the world did or whatever. Could we banter about your article today for a minute? Yeah, sure.

I haven't read it yet, but I'm curious about what it says. You, you sort of summarize the beat Picota contest results. Well, not the results, but, but what,

what people picked. Yes, this is the contest where you can pick Picota projections that you think are too optimistic or pessimistic, and you can try to beat those projections. So you have looked at which players people picked, and I'm curious what they are. Yeah, I also I was curious to see how many, I guess I was curious to see how similarly we would all behave, whether there would be players that were, you know, close to unanimous,

whether there'd be players that were extremely popular unanimous, whether there'd be players that were extremely popular, besides Wade Davis, who I told everybody to pick and seemed pretty obvious to me. And in fact, there were a lot of players for whom the consensus was overwhelming. And I'm glad about that. It's a much more fun test of everything, of the world of baseball as a system, as well

as of us as a group of fans. If we have a kind of clear hive mind, because it's fun to test the hive mind. We all mock the hive mind, but maybe the hive mind adds value. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it leads us all into the same dark alley. But like, for instance, Bryce Harper, 66 players chose him for either over or under, and 66 players chose him for over, all 66. There is not one single person that thinks Bryce Harper is going to regress. And Harper was also one of my picks, so I don't consider this an

outlandish position for us to have. I also mentioned, I think when I think I mentioned when I was on MLB network last month, that Harper is an interesting guy to project because he wasn't that good before a year ago, we sort of forget how like, I mean, he was young, he was amazing for his age, he was historically good for his age but this version of Bryce Harper where he is you know the best hitter in the league uh and um maybe in a maybe not even close like it's conceivable that in a few weeks we won't even consider that to be something that you can have a decent conversation about because it'll just be so obvious. But before last year, he was basically 15% better than league average. A whole bunch of not very good players were as good as he was at the plate.

Some of those guys are out of the league now. But Bryce Harper is such an individual case because, of course, we know that Bryce Harper, the Bryce Harper story is not just four years of major league stats. It's what he was, what he was doing when he was 14. Like he's like, it's, it's funny because, you know, we often talk about cases like Wade Davis, where we speculate that, you know, maybe Pocota's long memory makes it, uh, or maybe our short memory in this case, uh, is an advantage over Pocota because we can see the thing that has

changed. We recognize the role change. We recognize some of these details that, that it can't this case uh is an advantage over pakoda because we can see the thing that has changed we recognize the role change we recognize some of these details that that it can't necessarily identify with harper our advantage arguably if we have an advantage we'll see if we're right is that we have a very long memory we remember when he was 14 we know that he is a uh jet i'm using the i'm using the phrase a generational talent and, um, and always has been. And how many generational talents do you think are out there at any one time? How many players do you think, how many current MLB players have been described as generational talents? I don't think certainly too. I don't think that many have, like I would guess more than one,

but I would bet that if you put together one of your super cuts uh you would have trouble finding i wouldn't even think i would guess maybe six to twelve active players who have described right which i guess is a little bit of uh more than they're supposed to be generational talent inflation but uh anyway but with yeah so with Harper, it's not it doesn't seem to I think, to most of us, it doesn't seem irrelevant that he was able to hit a ball 560 feet or whatever with a metal bat when he was 14. So you know, we're we were we were ready, we were ready to see the corner turned the mid the second the corner was turned. Like we we were talking about it days after, right?

Yeah, it's funny because a few years ago, Harper was a guy who, I guess you were still asked to defend his projection or called upon to defend his projection this year. But a few years ago, I remember the same being true. I think I was asked about it maybe on MLB Network. And I remember maybe Colin Wires wrote about it, and I was asking him how I should justify the projection that said that Harper wasn't going

to get better or was going to get worse after his rookie season when he was, by BP's current stats, at least a five-win player. And some of that was defense, but he was great. And he was 19, and everyone expected him to continue getting greater every year. And then at 20, he got better on a rate basis, but didn't play as much. And then in 2014, he got worse than he was in 2013 on a per plate appearance basis. And he also played even less because he got hurt. And so for a couple of years there, it looked like Dakota's, you know, not pessimism, but restraint had been wise. Yeah. And for most players who are really great at 19 or 20 or 21

or 22, I think it does underwhelm people to see the projected career growth. Some players genuinely do peak at 21. You know, we know that as a population, baseball players peak a little later, but that's not true for everybody. And when you see a player who is extremely good at a young age, the most likely thing is actually that he's, that's how good he's going to get because there's a limit to how good baseball players generally do get. And it's, you know, more likely that you've found the aging curve outlier than that you've found the better than Mickey Mantle outlier. And so that's always a fairly decent bet if a guy puts up, you know, a seven-win season at 21.

Well, he's a Hall of Famer for sure, but he's probably not going to be putting up. It's not like you can put the standard aging curve on him and say well he's going to be a 16 win player someday with harper it's not totally clear that he won't be though and um and also i don't know how we i don't know what it what it means for harper that he essentially had to had he skipped all the development that other players have like he didn't have 400 at bats against high a 400 at bats against double a 400 at bats against triple a he kind of by being in the majors that young his development was unnatural and the comping players sort of implies that their lives that the basis of that, the philosophical premise of that is saying, well, people have shared experiences and shared attributes with

others who have come before them. And what happened to similar players is a pretty good guide for what will happen to them. But when you're a player like Harper, whose development is so unusual, it's unclear how much those little developmental gremlins are waiting to come out in the form of a unique aging curve. Anyway, I think Harper was projected to be something like the seventh best player in baseball this year, which is really phenomenal and also really easy to see why everybody took the over. Yeah. Because he's probably, I think that, you know, most people would probably say he's at worst the second or third. Yes. So I, you know, I also took Harper. Manny Machado was 45 overs and one under, and this was an odd one. A lot of, as I concluded, a lot of the overwhelming picks are essentially come down to Guy had a relatively consistent level of performance for his career, had a great year or a horrible year last year. Pakoda is weighing the larger sample and expecting some regression to his career norms while we think the

corner was turned and so we don't want to give we don't want to regress that much uh and machado is not necessarily this case there is some regression to his offense from last year uh but not much mostly um you know picota really likes machado as a as a hitter and machado last year, but not much. Mostly, you know, Picotta really likes Machado as a hitter. And Machado last year, it's not like he was, you know, the best hitter in the league. He was, for instance, considerably worse than Picotta projects Bryce Harper for, but he adds so much value. I mean, part of what makes him a superstar is that he is one of the, you know, half dozen most valuable defensive players in baseball. And he's a great base runner. And those things add to his MVP caliber warps. But he's a good hitter. He

hasn't yet established, though, that he is or is going to be a Miguel Cabrera type hitter. And it seems like everybody who picked this thinks that, in fact, he is going to be a Miguel Cabrera type hitter. And so even though there's not a lot of regression in Pagoda's projection, people refused any regression whatsoever. So Mike Moustakis was an overwhelming over. Sonny Gray was an overwhelming over. Addison Russell, surprisingly to me, a little bit because he hasn't demonstrated it, was an overwhelming over. And Zach Granke was an overwhelming over. Pablo Sandoval, overwhelming under, which is not surprising.

We all know that Pablo Sandoval is a big fat guy whose team lost confidence in him, which is, you know, seems like relevant data. And projection darling Steven Souza was the most popular unanimous under. 33 people took the under, not one person took the over. And Steven Souza, every generation gets its quad A slugger. And some

of Pakoda's favorite players who have whiffed in the past have been quad A sluggers. And it's hard to identify, I think a quad a slugger until they've already proven themselves to be quad a slugger. Some of them do genuinely turn out to be very good Paul players.

But you know, there is a type there, there is a type of player that for some reason or another is able to destroy a certain level of pitching and fall off the cliff. When that level of pitching gets just a little bit better uh and uh suza i don't think is proven one way or another what he is but he was a huge projection darling last year uh badly underperformed and pakoda dropped its its opinion of him quite a bit but not enough for you all and uh we'll see that that's the there are a few of these that are unanimous that

I think we could pretty much all be wrong on. I think Sousa is a, I would take the under, I didn't take the under, but I would take the under on Sousa. But to me, it's not overwhelming. That's an easy one for, I think everyone to get wrong. There's a real possibility that he, that he does put up a 300 true average uh john lester i think is tremendously uh overwhelming under and i don't i don't know that seems like something that'd be easy to get wrong so all right well i will link to the article so people can go check it out yeah it's interesting that there was such unanimity on certain guys. Kenta Maeda was an overwhelming under. And he was projected to be pretty good.

Pretty good. Yeah. Like a little bit worse than Lester was. Uh-huh. Although I guess everybody thought that Lester was too high. Yeah. All right. Okay.

So let's see. First off, Rich Hill. Yes. Rich Hill had another great start uh he has now made six and four of them were just completely elite like since since last september 1st or something yes exactly double-digit strikeouts one walk or fewer and uh he is now, look, he's undeniably the best pitcher in baseball over his six starts. And so I don't know when it starts to get real, but it's a very different conversation than we had three days ago. Yeah. So you were way, way down to $22 million.

22 and a half. 22 and a half for Rich Hill. So how much did that one start? How much was that worth? Back up to 30. Uh-huh. Very lucrative start for Mr. Hill. Well, people have, you know.

It is reassuring because it's like, oh, he can do it in 2016 too now. It's not just an ability that he magically had in 2015 and and left when the calendar turned well there are there are three there are three ways that a person's great performance can be discarded um based on sample size one is to say that his performance uh actually depended on luck and fluke and that he wasn't actually that good. So you could throw a perfect game, but all 27 balls could be line drives right to the third baseman.

If you give up 27 line drives in a row, you're probably not going to throw many perfect games. And Rich Hill is absolutely not that. It's not like he just has a good ERA. There are always pitchers who have incredible eras over six start spans um but that's not him he is i tweeted this out but he has more 10 strikeout one walk games you know double digit or more strikeouts one walk or fewer starts in the last two years than all but, I think, six pitchers in baseball.

And he's only made six starts. Like, the people who are above him on this list are your six Cy Young favorites for this year. And he's, you know, basically pitched like them two-thirds of the time. And, you know, again, in the two starts that were not that one was a perfectly good start. It was, there was nothing wrong with it. And the other was two good innings with one bad inning. So he's essentially had one bad inning in, in six starts. So that leads you to the second thing. The second way to marginalize a great performance is just that, uh, bad players sometimes have play well, you know, if you're

a golfer and you shoot 90, well, you probably have, you know, seven great shots around. And then the rest of them are pretty, you know, mediocre or worse, but you have demonstrated the ability to make a great, a great shot seven times even. And so there's no reason that you couldn't roll the right dice whatever uh and have those those shots all come in a row and you just keep doing it and you can't keep it going for your whole life but it is very conceivable that that your good performances could bunch up in a way that looks like a trend even though it's's really just random events clustering. And so Rich Hill still only has six starts. If he had four good starts spread out over five years, we wouldn't think anything of it. It is conceivable that he has just managed to clump his five years worth of good starts

altogether, or that he's, you know, hot, whatever hot means, and that he will fall out. And the third is that no matter how good he is, he's just one, he's going to get hurt hot means and that he will fall out and the third is that no matter how good he is he's just one he's going to get hurt he's injury prone he's josh johnson he's brandon morrow maybe he's rich hill uh and he has to prove that uh but i mean you just couldn't be more impressive than his four impressive starts so i guess he could strike out 17 and so now of course now he's he's done this enough that we're starting to get the you know the a nice little wave of why is rich hill good articles and i'm always a little bit cautious about uh looking at a guy who's pitching well seeing what

changed and crediting the success to the change because there's always good if you look there's always changes there's changes when he's good There's changes when he's good. There's changes when he's bad. Sometimes they're coincidental and they don't cause. So, uh, you know, I think Colin also made this point that, uh, finding, looking at a player who's had a lot of success recently, it, those articles are often tautological. It's like, oh, well look, he's, he's hit 17 home runs in the last two months. What's he doing differently? well, he's hit 17 home runs in the last two months. What's he doing differently? Well, he's hitting home runs on fastballs away. Well, yeah, sure. We know he's hitting home runs. It was already established that he's hitting home runs.

And so identifying the success in different words or more specifically doesn't necessarily mean that he's figured anything out. And then you want to try to trace it back to, you know, he's standing closer to the plate and now he's able to hit those pitches or he changed his stance or he's, you know, looking for outside pitches or there's something different. And it does, I mean, it does make it more likely that it's real if you can find something. But the problem always is that you can almost always find something.

Like if you couldn't come up with any reason, if he said, I haven't done anything differently, no one talked to me, no one said anything, then you might discount it more than if he says, I have a new swing or I have a new approach or whatever. But at the same time, you're right. Almost everyone has a new approach every few months, whether it's working or not. And so you can very easily get, you know, lulled into buying it as a real thing. Yeah. Depending on what the explanation is, I'm not even totally sure that an explanation is more convincing than no explanation. You know, I don't know.

Maybe you just get good, you know? Maybe you just get good. Maybe the ball feels better on your fingers than it used to. It's hard to know. But yes, there are enough variables in a player's performance that it's like can what it's like the nate silver example of what like frog breeding rates can be correlated to the economy right yeah because there's enough variables that if you just plug all these things and look for high correlations you can find statistically

significant relationships between the frog breeding rate and next year's dow or whatever but uh with rich hill i I would say that probably the most convincing thing that you can show me for a pitcher besides he's throwing harder, throwing harder is, is the, is certain, you know, certain if you're throwing harder than I believe it. But his release point is a focus of many analyses, even within like the A's radio broadcasters are talking about his release point. It seems like everybody has kind of identified that Rich Hill at this point is a pitcher

who has an insanely good curveball, is able to throw that curveball like half the time and still nobody can hit it. But he lives and dies on his release point. Nobody can hit it, but he lives and dies on his release point. And something close to predictive is that, you know, his release point was off in the spring, and then it was off in his first start, and he struggled, and then it was back. It was not all the way back, but it was pretty much back to where it was last year when he had this good start. And so I don't know, that doesn't necessarily answer the question of whether Rich Hill is in such good control of his body that he can keep his release point.

Yeah. If a guy is losing his release point. Yeah, right. The inability to repeat one's release point is a pretty negative indicator in a lot of cases. So knowing what you need to do and being able to do it is not the same thing. It's better than not knowing what to do. Right. It adds some element of realness to his good performances.

It just goes further to the point that this is not like is not uh like the universe is whimsy uh like it's not it's not random it's not fluke uh it's not out of uh out of any out of our ability to to explain it's just can he keep his release point and uh so that yeah that doesn't necessarily make him a safer bet, but it makes the last six starts look like something that you can hold on to. Yeah. So I'm excited. What about you? What's your Rich Hill offer?

Well, that one start did bump it up because it showed me that he could sustain it across multiple seasons. Like it's harder to imagine if it is a hot streak where a player is just he just has everything working right then his mechanics his release point whatever is just working really well over a four start stretch it does make me more confident that he could have a you know six month off season and then a spring training and then he could come back and find it again so uh i don't i didn't give a number last time we talked about this but i was surprised that the a's only gave six million i think i i probably would have given more at the time even though i was if i recall much more pessimistic about his innings total than you were. I can't remember

for sure, but I think I, didn't I project him for something like 75 innings or something? I don't know. It's hard to remember what we said because we say so many things, but I'd probably go give 10 million? Oh, geez. Yeah. I wish that I was a rich hill collector and that there were a lot of rich hills on the market right now. I would be like, it'd be the big short. I'd be the guy in the big short. listening to my to my metal and uh playing my drums and collecting every rich hill while the world uh uh tried to get their uh their your your investors would be trying to get rid of you exactly uh rich hill in two years now six starts 11.7 strikeouts per nine clayton kershaw last year 11.6 1.7 walks per nine clayton kershaw last year 1.6 and 0.7 home runs per nine Clayton Kershaw last year 0.6 all right it's pretty good it's pretty good all right uh

and uh let's see Chicago Cubs uh-huh not just that they're six and one uh but that they have almost three times as many runs scored as runs allowed yeah they have almost three times as many runs scored as runs a lot like that to put this in perspective the orioles are undefeated and they have a run differential of 14 the cubs are six and one and have a run differential of 29 classic show out there, Orioles, beating their Pythag. They have the best run differential in baseball by quite a bit. They have done this even though they suffered one of the biggest losses, probably the biggest loss so far with the Kyle Schwarber injury. And yet, in a way, the Kylewarber injury was the terrible news that reinforced

how good the cubs are it right they you've got it is it was fowler and he's slugging 1359 you've got it was there yeah no it's sort of it's almost a shocking reminder that they had jorge soler as a bench player. Is there another team in baseball, maybe the Pirates, where Jorge Soler isn't already the starter and your number five hitter? Yeah, probably not. And so they were able to slot him in. By the way, Kyle Schwarber, in the beat Dakota,

pretty much the overs skewed tremendously toward young players and the unders skewed tremendously toward old players and the under skewed tremendously toward old players but kyle schwarber 23 unders two overs yeah well that makes sort of sense i i would have taken the under on him on a per plate appearance basis just because he was so good last year well yeah but you know it's a projection i'm sure that he was regressed somewhat uh he also probably had stats that reflected what he had done while he was catching and he should get the no catcher bump. But anyway, Kyle Schwarber, we'll see you next year. Uh, but the Cubs are, um, are doing extremely well. And again, this is the confirmation bias episode. We know that we are taking things that

we already believed and then making too much out of small samples, confirming them. So are the Cubs the warriors of baseball? No, I don't think so. It would be fun if they were, but I don't think there is a warriors of baseball, is there? I don't know that any team really feels that dominant, that in control of the game or of the sport. Well, what would it? I mean, there's that Mike Francesa call not long ago where someone called up and speculated about the possibility of a 162-0 team and didn't seem to dismiss it at all. the possibility of a 162 and 0 team and didn't seem to dismiss it at all. But I guess maybe like if you're the 98 Yankees, if you're the, you know, dynasty Yankees, if you're a dynasty and you seem

to have cracked the code for winning every year, which in the Yankees case back then was, you know, develop some good players, but also just spend a ton of money at a time when not everyone could spend a lot of money, then maybe you kind of feel like you have the same sort of control. But on a day in day out basis, it doesn't seem like that's, I mean, you know, the Warriors are going to win like 89% of their games or something, which in baseball. Yeah. But so, I mean, obviously you have to adjust for the, for the sport, but what would it take to be the warriors what would be the equivalent it because i was actually thinking

about the mariners won what 116 in 2001 and that's the the record if if a team were set to win the warriors uh game on wednesday is gonna be just bananas like it's gonna be like it'll be it might be more it might be more, it might be watched more than, you know, the NBA finals games. I don't, I don't know if that's true, but like court side seats are selling for, you know, $20,000 and, you know, nosebleed seats are selling for 500. And like, it is a huge, huge thing that the Warriors might break this record. We're all going to be watching. If a team had 116 going into the last game of the season would anybody pay that much attention like how big a deal would it be how big a story would it be you and i would talk about it but

how big a story would it be would it be on the front page of that team's local paper or would it only be on the sports section front page of that team's local paper i think it might be on the main page of that team's local paper but it wouldn wouldn't be on main pages of any other paper, which the Warriors probably are or will be. Yeah, I don't think it's, I don't know, would it be that exciting? 117? I mean, it'd be exciting to have a team that good, but the actual number, I mean, baseball is a sport where there are so many hallowed numbers and famous numbers that people are interested whenever anyone gets close to, but that doesn't really seem like one of them. Maybe it's just because no one ever gets close to it. But I mean, no one even really remembers the 2001 Mariners as

like that great a team, really. I mean, people, you know, say, well, they got a little lucky and they didn't go anywhere in the playoffs and it's not forgotten, but it's not really made that much of. So when you say there is no Warriors of baseball, you don't have an idea of... It's not that the Cubs aren't good enough. It's that you just don't think that it's something that the sport is set up to have. Yeah. I mean, you can sport adjust it, that whatever that level of dominance is in basketball, you could figure out what the baseball equivalent level of dominance would be. And then maybe some teams have achieved that. But it's just the inevitability or the feeling that they're just toying with people or that they're playing an entirely different sport. I don't really think you ever get that kind of thing in baseball. 11-0 in the postseason? Would 11-0 in the postseason be the...

Maybe. I mean, when the Royals were just coming back and winning every game and winning postseason series, were they that kind of... Well, they didn't go 11-0 in the postseason. No. Yeah. So I don't know. in the postseason no yeah so i don't know maybe that would be it but uh it just yeah that sort of just feels like you're a hot team right uh well unless you could somehow construct yourself to be a great postseason team but i don't know how you would do that i'm gonna say uh having the best offense in baseball having the best pitching in baseball and winning uh 117 makes you the warriors baseball uh-huh all right so anyway uh specifics though with the cubs one specific is their bullpen currently in um 19 combined appearances 20 20 strikeouts, one walk.

It's good. It's really good. It's Rich Hill-esque. Yeah, it's Kerry Wood-esque. That's what it is. Jake Arrieta has made two starts. He has a 1.93 ERA. He has a strikeout 12 and walked one. And Arrieta is, you know, obviously is a superstar.

And probably everybody would have said he was a top 10 pitcher in baseball coming into the year. I think that there was some room for controversy though, both because his greatness was still relatively short-lived, longer than Rich Hill, shorter than Clayton Kershaw. And because he threw so many innings last year and had never really thrown that many innings before, so you had that as well. And it seemed like a lot of people saw him wearing down at the end of last year, and he's got an injury past.

And I could have seen taking an under. I don't know if I would have taken the under against Dakota, but taking an under wherever you set it on Arrieta. And so far he has answered any kind of conservative outlook that I might have had for him. And he also hit a gigantic home run. He did. I think a pitcher hitting a home run like that

is just the most impressive thing that could happen in baseball to me right now. It's, I mean, Madison Bumgarner, what he's doing, I think ESPN Stats and Info had a tweet. Did you see their fun fact that he is, since 2014, he's hit a home run every 8.4 at bats at AT&T and Park. And Barry Bonds' career at bats per homer at AT&T is 8.8. So over the last, I guess, two seasons plus, he has hit home runs at a higher rate at home than Barry Bonds did. That's a pretty good one. That is a good one. Yeah. I mean, what he's doing is, I don't want to get sidetracked here, but it might be the most impressive thing in baseball to me right now to be that good at hitting at a time when hitting is so hard and most pitchers are completely

terrible at it is incredible. All right. Let's starting right now. What will Madison Bumgarner's slash line be for the rest of the year? Because I always have this belief, which has been slightly disproven by my own research, but I always have this belief that, uh, pitchers numbers are even, even bad, but good or bad, they're inflated by other pitchers, not taking them seriously and just trying to avoid walking them. Uh, and that there is a point where the league will, you know, wake up and quit letting you do what you're doing. Again, this is a hypothesis hypothesis with actual counter evidence against it but nonetheless uh madison bumgarner going forward what will he hit i think jeff sullivan wrote about that last season or someone did and looked at how pitchers were pitching to bumgarner and it seemed like they had already adjusted they weren't

throwing him so many you know meatballs basically like they do to most pitchers and they were throwing harder and all that sort of stuff so it seems like they already are treating him like a hitter now the the home run that he hit against clayton kershaw the other night was like the most meatball meatball ever but that was probably a mistake more so than it was lack of respect but i mean at this point he this point, I'm pretty much buying it. I mean, it's still a small sample. It's two plus seasons, but it's like 160 play appearances or something like that, that he has been this great hitter. And of course, his breakout as a hitter came with this sort of story

about doing things differently and dedicating yourself to it and the whole origin story that sort of lent some doing things differently and dedicating yourself to it and the whole origin story that sort of lent some credence to it. But yeah, I mean, I'm basically buying it at this point. So, you know, he's gone from a 755 OPS to a 743 OPS to, you know, he had a home run in his first game. I would say he'll pretty much sustain that. I, you know, maybe i'll go 700 okay i'll uh i'll say 580 all right and the last thing uh that we can talk about is ray searidge the uh latest greatest pitching coach in major league baseball and he got three prominent new students this offseason uh neftali Feliz, John Neese, and Juan Nicasio. Feliz, five innings, six strikeouts, no base runners. Well, I guess he hit a batter. And then I think he doubled them up, maybe. I

think he has faced the minimum. But no walks, no hits. Juan Nicasio had a very, very strong first start. Six innings, struck out six, walked nobody. And in fact, Juan Nicasio in his career, in his entire career, which is longer than you think, had only previously had three starts where he went five innings and didn't walk anybody. So this is a significant outlier in his career. And John Neese has not been as good. He has two starts and he's already close to six, but he is striking out 10 batters per nine. He has good control. He has simply given up a bunch of home runs. And one might think that that is a thing that would stabilize, or one might think that it is a sign that he's not

very good. Anyway, you can take from all three of those, but particularly two of them, early signs that Ray Searge is actually the genius that we would believe him to be. What do you think? Well, I don't know the full extent of all the changes that he made with all three guys. I know that Felice has been excellent. It would be harder to have a better start than he has had. You know, he's not throwing harder. He doesn't seem to be throwing different pitches. I'm not sure if there have been major mechanical changes or anything, but I guess Nicasio is maybe the most encouraging. He had a very good spring training too, peripheral-wise,

and he looked very good in his first start, and efficiency had been his problem really in Colorado, and of course part of that is just being in Colorado, but he also had trouble going deep into games, And he was very efficient in his first outing. And it was encouraging. He still seems like sort of a two-pitch guy. I mean, he threw fastballs and sliders almost exclusively. He mixed in a couple change-ups.

So he still seems like a guy who maybe would be a reliever on some teams or some teams would see him as more of a reliever, which he was for part of last season. So I'm not sure I'm buying that yet. It's not as if he has developed a great third pitch and turned into a more complete pitcher. I mean, I'm sure there have been improvements, but there were also seemingly improvements when he was in the bullpen with the Dodgers. So I'm not sure how much Sirich gets sole credit for that too. Like he changed his pitch mix a bit

and stopped throwing a sinker that wasn't really working for him and everything. So still too early, I think, for me to pronounce that Sirich has had a huge effect. I haven't really paid that much attention to Nese, so I don't know what's different about him other than that he struck out some guys, which is sort of unusual for him. maybe the smartest, you know, the team with Andrew Friedman and the team with six GMs and a team that's buying up all these injury experts to try to steal a march on the rest of the league. If they had won Nicasio and, you know, got a good look at him and chose not to bring him back, didn't want him, didn't see any more in him. And then Ray Searidge still turned him into a great pitcher. That would be even more impressive than if he had just been coming from, say, Colorado directly,

where they've had a lot of problems developing players and seemed to not be the best run organization. So it would be even more impressive if he came from the Dodgers and still Searidge managed to dig deeper. Yeah. There's the Searidge factor with, with Nicosio, which we'll be watching. And, you know, the, the one indication there is the walks. He's, he's been a guy who's had problems with walks his whole career, even last year. And, you know, it's only one start, but if for instance, he were to cut his walks in half, that'd be a pretty big deal that you might credit to the pitching coach. But there's also, aside from Searidge, just simply the fact that Nicosio was a starter who gained a lot of velocity when he moved to the bullpen. And what's surprising about his first

start is that he held that velocity in the rotation or in the start. He averaged 95 with his four seamer. He hit 99. And matt trueblood wrote about this and i think that you can take this in a positive or a negative way trueblood was uh sort of pumping the brakes a little bit by noting that nicasio um feels weird to call him trueblood and so does matt but nicasio was at 96 in the first three innings and then uh kind of weakened or tired or wavered or whatever and by the end he was kind of more at his career average and so you could maybe say well okay the the 96s in the you know the 99 that he touched might have been uh him you know it might have been adrenaline from making his first start of the year it might have been that he just came out

as though he were a reliever and but he couldn't hold it. But you could also, I think that you could say that it's notable that he did manage to hold 95 as an average throughout an entire 100-pitch start. And that if you just look at the cumulative pitches, this is a guy who know a little bit of a career bump last year when he was able to to add velocity two miles an hour of velocity and in the bullpen and if he holds it doesn't really matter whether Ray Searidge is the cause or or not if he does manage to hold it just knowing that a okay or you know even poor starter adds two miles an hour of velocity, that gives you a much better forecast for his future. So it'll be interesting to see whether A, he does continue to average 95, and B, whether he does continue to throw much harder early in games than later in games. Because if it's the latter, that could be maybe a problem.

Yes. It was actually only, what, an 84 pitch start, I think, which is impressive in a different way in that he managed to get through six innings in 84 pitches, which is not something that maybe the old Juan Nicasio could have done. Yeah. But yeah, the leader in baseball prospectus wins above replacement player is Gene Segura right now. So it's probably safe to pump the brakes on just about everyone. Except for Gene Segura. Yeah, he's totally for real.

For real. Confirmation bias. We expected Segura to be the NL MVP this year. Exactly. He's merely playing as we expected. Okay, so that is it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five people who have become patrons of the podcast already. Steve Schneider, Matt Ittingson, Brian Riley, Alex Dox, and John Papaparitis. Thank you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, which comes out on May 3rd. It is the story of how Sam and I ran the Independent

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