Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 87: Baseball and the BCS/Halladay vs. Lee/Does the “Success Cycle” Still Exist?

Episode Date: November 21, 2012

Ben and Sam answer selected listener emails in a pre-Thanksgiving episode.

Good morning and welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. Today we are celebrating episode 87, the last before a long weekend. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. I'm with Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. Ben, it is an email Wednesday. We got a lot of emails. We will get to some of them. We apologize to those that we can't get to. Some of them might be reborn in later episodes,

and some of them we will just forget about. Yes, a lot of them are off-season topics that are evergreen, or at least green for the next few months. So we will get to them. We'll circle back. I don't know whether anyone's listening because it's the day before Thanksgiving or whether more people are listening and depending on us to get them through 20 minutes of their trip home or wherever they're going.

But we will get to the questions, I guess. So the first question is from Tim in Seattle. He says, the Giants likely wouldn't have played in the World Series if a combination of the media and computer rankings chose who played the World Series. I don't believe the Giants would have been in the discussion. I think the Giants earned their place in history by their epic comebacks against the Reds and Cardinals. Still, if there existed a BCS type in the discussion. I think the Giants earned their place in history by their epic comebacks against the Reds and Cardinals. Still, if there existed a BCS-type system in baseball, I think the Nationals and the Yankees would have been the highest ranked. Should baseball adopt a system like the one college football is abandoning?

And then he asks, do people smarter than me think baseball should adopt such a system? Are people smarter than me satisfied with the way baseball chooses a champion? I don't know why he's asking us. We don't even know how smart he is. Timothy is going to need to email us back and let us know how smart he is before we can answer those questions. He asks, does this discussion matter? I don't know, but we'll have it briefly anyway.

And he asks, does this discussion matter? And I don't know, but we'll have it briefly anyway. So what do you think? Yeah, well, the thing is that the BCS, the idea behind the BCS is that it will – essentially it uses various inputs to try to determine who are the best teams. And that's necessary in college football because you're playing 10 games against radically different competition from team to team and conference to conference. And so the BCS is supposed to give you an accurate idea of who the best teams are. And baseball kind of has a BCS, which is that it's a 162-game schedule with not a perfectly even schedule for each team, but pretty close. And by the end of the year, there's not a perfectly even schedule for each team, but pretty close.

And by the end of the year, there's not a huge amount of controversy, I think, over the best team or the best two teams in each league over the course of the season. So I guess basically the question is, does the World Series, does the playoff format that weeds teams out actually get the best team? And the answer is, I think, obviously no, as he notes that the Giants would not have been anybody's best team in the National League before the playoffs. The Tigers probably, well, no, the Tigers certainly wouldn't have been anybody's best team in the AL. They probably wouldn't have been anybody's top three or four, maybe five teams in the AL. I think that it is, I mean, it's just, it's a philosophical question of whether you think that

the last game of the season should tell you who the best team is, or if the last game of the season should simply be exciting. And baseball, I think, would probably not be nearly as exciting if we simply crowned the best team at the end of the season the best team. I think in a lot of ways that best team would be a lot less memorable because, you know, there would be very little suspense most of the time. Exactly. There wouldn't really be many heightened moments that we would remember. And the way that baseball works, we very rarely share games together as a country in the way that we do with the postseason. So I think that for dramatic reasons, the playoffs are great.

add a new team to the playoffs, of course, it lessens the correlation between actual skill and eventual champion. And I think that that's sort of a thing that feels troubling in advance. I mean, it always feels like they're watering down the competitive pool of October. But I think we're long past the idea that this is supposed to be reflective of the best team. It's really just a tournament. All tournaments are by their nature not going to give you the best team. The BCS, as they move to a playoff, is not going to give you the best team either. March Madness certainly doesn't give you the best team. The idea is not to give you the best team.

The idea is to play a tournament, and tournaments are fun. We like tournaments as Americans, and I's a – I don't know. I think it's a good tournament. Yeah, I agree. That was a lot of other sports for us by our standards. Yeah. But yeah, I agree. I have very little – Charlotte Hornets.

Right. I have little to add to that, mostly because I don't know that much about the BCS system, except that I know everyone thinks it's evil incarnate and that it's not very precise. And in baseball, it probably would be very precise. We can, I guess, tell which the best teams are a lot more easily for some of the reasons you mentioned. But yeah, I don't know that we want to. I mean, you do sort of feel for like the 2001 Mariners that maybe was the best regular season team of our entire lives. Yes, definitely.

I mean, especially now that there's a one-game playoff as an institutionalized thing. I mean, you kind of felt bad for the Braves maybe this year? I didn't. No? Okay. Not even a little bit. Braves fans probably did. Yeah, probably.

So. All right. All right, next. Next question comes from Baseball Perspectives author and former podcast co-host, or, yeah, Jason Wojciechowski. He asks, Would you prefer Roy Holiday plus creamy peanut butter or Cliff Lee plus chunky? Note, the peanut butter did not actually be put on the plate or anything gross like that.

You just get the pitcher plus a nice jar. I think, can we agree that probably the answer is not going to come down to which peanut butter it is? I guess so. So we're going to come down to which peanut butter it is? I guess so. So we're going to just ignore that element of it? We don't have to reveal our peanut butter preferences at this time? Well, I prefer creamy, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I feel like that's maybe the less popular opinion. No, no, creamy is much better.

Yeah, okay. It's a lot easier to eat too. It's like the difference between saying the vowel eh and the vowel ah. It's hard to say ah. It's not fun to say ah. I was hoping we could disagree over the peanut butter because we rarely disagree. Disagree about anything. I was hoping we could inject some tension about peanut butter preference. Lee or Halliday? What do you think? I would say probably Halliday. And I can certainly see either way because of how Halliday's season went and you wrote about that

and how he wasn't really the same Halliday that he has been before. But I guess I would just kind of go with the track record and I guess, well, what's the age comparison? He's older, right? But not by much. A couple of years. So Lee just finished his age 33 season. Halliday's like 34 or something. Let's see. Halliday is 35. So, huh. Which is weird because doesn't it kind of feel like Lee is older?

Yeah, sort of. But he's not. I guess that's maybe because of the type of pitchers they are, and there's always been this sort of sense that maybe Cliff Lee wouldn't age that well because his velocity was never all that impressive, and maybe if his control slipped a little, suddenly he wouldn't look like a special pitcher anymore. Maybe that sort of started to happen last year.

I don't know. He gave up a lot of home runs, but otherwise was kind of the same Cliff Lee. Halladay is an interesting guy because I think Halladay probably would have been, if you'd polled everybody before the season started, Halladay probably would have been the, I would guess, second best pitcher in baseball by consensus. Maybe as high as first, maybe as low as third. I doubt that he would be fourth. I think it probably would be Verlander, Halladay,

and maybe Strasburg above Halladay on an inning-by-inning basis. The question is, I think Halladay brings up an interesting question, which is how much damage can the second best pitcher in baseball do to his reputation in one year? Halladay had a very poor year. He had a 4.49 ERA. He had an 89 ERA plus. He only threw 150 innings. He didn't throw a complete game after leading the league five years in a row in complete games and seven of the previous nine.

years in a row in complete games and seven of the previous nine. Pretty much Halliday was just about, I would say, as below expectations as Tim Lincecum was. And so the question is, how far can you drop in one season? Can you go from two to 15? Or is simple regression to your mean going to limit you to maybe falling to sixth or eighth or something like that. And so if it's okay with you, as my boss, I looked at the early Pocotas for these guys and I would like to reveal a little bit about them if that's okay. Yes, sure. guys and I would like to reveal a little bit about them if that's okay. Yes, sure. So,

Pocota largely believes that Halladay, well, Pocota believes that Cliff Lee is the fifth best pitcher in baseball right now if you're measuring by warp and that Halladay is the 14th best pitcher if you're measuring by warp. However, that's largely influenced by innings. It sees Halladay basically repeating his innings total from last year, which might be a fair assumption given his age and the fact that he had the shoulder injury. But if you go by ERA, Halladay is now the third best pitcher. Sorry, by fair run average. Halladay is now the third best pitcher, sorry, by fair run average. Halladay is now the third best pitcher and Cliff Lee is now the fourth. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah, so maybe the peanut butter preference does decide it. I guess, I mean, the shoulder injury is the most worrisome part of it. It's not just that he had a four and a half ERA, uh, for no

particular reason, or, I mean, the injury certainly affects what you expect him to do. I don't know whether Jason didn't specify whether we're talking about for one single start or one single season or long-term. Um, but I don't know. know uh the injury is the scary thing and maybe it would be silly to take a pitcher who had a fairly serious shoulder injury over one who didn't when it's fairly close otherwise it just didn't i didn't really get the sense at any point that the phillies were suggesting it was very serious. It seemed like it was a non-serious injury. He missed a decent amount of time.

But yes, they didn't seem to say that it would be something that would affect him long term. And they let him... Did he start at the end of the season? Yeah, he did. He started 25 games, in the end of the season? Yeah, he did. Yeah, he did, right. Yeah. He started 25 games, in fact, in the season. He started the 158th game with the Phillies schedule. Uh-huh.

Well, it surprises me that it projects him for so few innings given that the last several seasons he was at like 220, 230, 250 every year. Yeah. I take Lee. Yeah. To 230, 250 every year. I take Lee. Yeah. To me, it's Lee. I like Lee more at this point. I have one thing I want to point out about Lee. We talked earlier this year about the Phillies' strike-out-to-walk ratios

and how they had just by far the best strike-out-to-walk ratios, but they weren't a very good pitching staff and how it was sort of challenging our notions of the predictive element or the predictive value of that. So Cliff Lee, when he got traded from Cleveland to the Phillies, he had a 3.24 strike-out-to-walk ratio with the Indians. And then when he moved to the Phillies, he had a 7.4 ratio, which is enough to lead the league almost every year. The next year he was 10.2. The next year in Seattle he was 14.8, and then 8 with Texas, and he's been about 7 since then. So I just wonder whether this is actually,

whether it all comes from the Phillies. This is something the Phillies are teaching their guys. I wonder if they did something to him when he switched leagues. Well, if they could teach all their guys to stop walking people. Well, they basically have. That would be pretty valuable. Yeah, it's a good thing. I mean, yeah, well, I don't know, maybe.

Okay, next question. Yeah, all right. Scott from Pelham, New York Asks us A Fangraphs piece posits We do not have the forecasting Capabilities to look at a 75 win team And tell them that they can't be a 90 win team In the following year

He's talking about a Dave Cameron post From a couple days ago So, do you believe that's true? If so, what are the implications for Jonah Carey's 2002 BP piece about the success cycle? At the extremes, the answer is that nobody expects the Astros, AL West, thank you for the reminder, to contend in 2013. Fewer still would expect next year's Yankees to win only 55 games. In other words, is it folly for a GM to identify a window for contention, or should more teams be trying to win 85 games every year?

I guess we've kind of touched on this in previous episodes. I wrote a piece about this. Yeah. And we did talk about it. We have talked about it. It comes up probably every dozen episodes or so. I don't know your thoughts, though. I've told you my thoughts.

That's the context that it usually comes up in. What do you think? Well, I agree with the idea that we can't forecast with any great precision. I don't know how you could possibly disagree with that, really, given how off the consensus was about certain teams this past year. I think that with most teams, we could get within 10 or 15 wins, certainly. But as we've discussed, I mean, with the second wildcard, there's just a lower barrier to contention now. And so, yes, I think it's a lot harder to rule a team out for any particular season.

I don't know that the idea of windows is out the window, so to speak, completely. I think there's still something to be said for building from within and identifying a time when all your young guys are going to be under team control and cheap and productive and trying to make the most of that window.

But yeah, maybe the window closes more slowly than it used to or opens more quickly. Yeah. So I think – well, the premise of Dave's piece and I think to sort of less technical degree mine is that it's not – the argument is not whether the 87th, 88th and 89th win is more valuable. It is.

The argument is not whether the 87th, 88th, and 89th win is more valuable. It is. It's just that essentially when you're trying to predict what a team is going to do, there are layers upon layers upon layers for you to miss. You can actually misread the talent, and then if you get that right, you can still misread how well the talent kind of forms to create runs and prevent runs so like you might actually get there um you know they're offensive and and pitching production correct but that might not actually add up to the number of runs that you had calculated because there's sort of a an element of error in that as well and then even if you get the amount of runs

correct you could um still miss by eight to 10 wins just on Pythagorean factors. And so it's really just extremely difficult to actually predict which team is going to be at 87 wins. So I'm reading this book right now by Joe Pita, which comes out in a few months. And it's about his um his attempt to bet on baseball for a season and and win to you know to to create a model that could consistently successfully bet on daily baseball games and he um he arranges each day's games by how confident his model is that it can uh beat the you know beat vegas and so there are games where uh he's so there are games where he's very confident and games where he's a little confident and games where he's just slightly confident.

And what he does is he bets a lot on the games where he's very confident, but he also bets a little bit on the ones where he's only a little confident. And that seemed at first counterintuitive to me because I thought, well, why not just put all your money on the confident, the ones where you're most confident. But he's a Wall Street guy. And I guess if I'm reading it correctly, what he's doing is essentially creating a hedge in how he spreads his money around. And I think that probably that's a lot of information that you don't actually need to know but i just want to use it as an analogy i think that for a team that thinks that it's um on the cusp of contention a team like maybe the blue jays that feels like it is likely to be at 85 86 87 88 wins then you do bet more that's when you that's when you put more into it but but if you think you're

a team at 72 it doesn't mean that you don't bet anything. You do bet something because it's better to have a lot of little chances than to simply have no chances and then put all your eggs into one basket, which is I think what some teams maybe either have done or what maybe StatHead Orthodoxy has suggested teams have done. Dave had an interesting back and forth with Eno Saris today about the Marlins. And Eno was kind of holding the Marlins up as a successful example of the build and destroy model. And I think Dave pointed out quite accurately that a lot of our impression of the Marlins, the way that we evaluate the Marlins cycles, is based on the fact that they won those two World Series. They didn't have to win those World Series.

They could have very easily lost in the first round of each playoff series. And in which case, in the entire course of their 20-year franchise history, they would have had two first round exits. And I don't think anybody would be holding them up as a successful model of team building. There's a certain amount of flukishness to the way that history played out with the Marlins. And if you don't give them those two World Series because they weren't automatic, then you don't necessarily come to the same conclusions. And I think that's right.

Yeah, I guess so. Although, should we think of them any differently because they won the World Series? Or should we just appreciate the fact that they were good teams? It's not like they fluked into a World Series somehow. Those were pretty good teams. No, we can think about them as successes. Those are two successful teams that they had, and I think that the Marlins franchise is, you know, there were good years to be a Marlins fan for sure.

But it's not a process that you could replicate everywhere. And I just, I think that as long as we're talking about process, that's where it comes in. Yeah, and I think it was Keith Law made the point on ESPN's Baseball Today podcast last week that the Marlins have only really had one successful fire sale. They've had two fire sales and they've won two World Series, but the first one was really the one that worked

and enabled them to build that second World Series team. The second sell-off hasn't really led to the same sort of success. And he is of the opinion that their most recent sell-off will not lead to that success either because he doesn't see that they really built any sort of foundation for a contender with this trade. I was trying to figure out how good their farm system is right now after this trade and I'm not the farm system guy so it's a little bit harder for me to do it. But it doesn't seem to me like a blow you away system by any means right now.

It's probably top half but I wouldn't expect it's going to be top five. Yes. Yeah, I think that's about what Keith said and what the consensus seems to be with our minor league guys. Okay. Well, all right. So that was Zmail Wednesday. We hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving. We'll be back on Monday with some topics of our own.