Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 871: The Braves Are Bad Edition

Episode Date: April 27, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about the Braves and Rich Hill, then answer listener emails about fun-fact distortion, Adrian Beltre vs. Chipper Jones, assessing broadcaster quality, and more.

And would you say Rich Hill has been effectively wild this year? Yeah, that's a good point. Not wild as in all over the place can't throw a strike, but maybe just sometimes missing his spots with his fastball, but still able to do damage with his breaking ball. back. Could have a lot of women, I'm not like some other guy. I could find one to hold me tight, but I could never believe it's right. Six days on the road, I'm gonna see my baby tonight. Hello and welcome to episode 871 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com.

I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Howdy. It's an email show. Anything you'd like to talk about before that? Did you see the thing about the Braves and the replay process? I did, yes. The Braves are unhappy with their replay reviewer because he didn't challenge in last night's game in a play that was certainly debatable and possibly would have been overturned.

Yeah, that's the whole story. Craig Calcaterra says Quote Others have speculated that the decision Will be used as an overall basis For making wholesale changes Including the possible firing of Freddy Gonzalez That's a very

Loosely sourced Sentence however I wouldn't mind if a manager got fired For failing to ask for a replay Being a little slow on the replay Trigger seems like the least of the Braves Problems I wouldn't mind if a manager got fired for failing to ask for a replay. Being a little slow on the replay trigger seems like the least of the Braves' problems right now. Seems like they have some more pressing concerns, although I guess that is one that they could actually address, as opposed to the never hitting a home run problem,

which might be more difficult to rectify. Probably a bigger problem, though. Yeah, well, this is actually a test of a thing that I said when we in the offseason, you and I talked about how wobbly Freddy Gonzalez chair was. Yeah. And you initially posited that it was not very wobbly, that there were no expectations for the Braves. And therefore, there was nothing that could really be done to not live up to those expectations. And I argue that, in fact, in situations like this, you sometimes keep the manager around specifically to scapegoat and fire when things get bad and to sort of signal a shift toward

better days ahead. And the Braves have been so bad this season, this season so far, that my claim will be disproven if he is not fired at some point soon, I think. Yeah. And if I had known that they would be slugging 280 as a team on April 27th, I probably would have agreed with you. I don't know that he can be blamed for that, but man, the Braves are really bad. Pretty bad, yeah. Really bad. And we were just talking last week

about how tanking, the term tanking, is overapplied and how there really isn't a clear case of tanking this season in the sort of Astros and Cubs model and that often what is called tanking this season in the sort of Astros and Cubs model, and that often what is called tanking is really just being bad at baseball accidentally, being bad without trying, or just normal being bad, as every team is bad occasionally. But if the Braves are this bad, and granted, they can't be this bad all season but would that change your view of whether they qualify as tanking or not or is it not fair to judge by the results and you're going by how they have put this team together uh not fair to judge on the results i think that lineup Mm-hmm. That lineup.

Look, if they start—when I wrote about the 2013 Astros and the moral reckoning that that season demanded of us, I had a paragraph where I conceded that the Astros were trying in September. They weren't necessarily, you know, they weren't adding players for a playoff push, but Altuve was in the lineup and VR was in the lineup. And the, you know, the few players that you considered major league contributors were playing every day. It's not like they were pulling them in the third inning, like a spring training game or anything like that. And so, uh, you know, if the, if you started to see signs that the Braves were actually not interested in winning the game that you're watching on the field, then that would be something. But generally speaking, once the game starts, you never really see a team that isn't trying to win.

And if you ever see that, then that would be the moment that we would all get to talk about something new. Yeah. Well, that would certainly be tanking, but it's probably fair in some cases to talk about what the team does before the game starts and putting themselves in a position to win or not win. No, definitely. I think that is true. I think specifically with regards to the results of a season in which they were projected to win 68 games or something like that. To me, if you're projected to win 68 games and you try your hardest and you only win 58, it doesn't change the calculus. And so, yeah.

And if they start demoting players who are otherwise good enough because they want to push off their service time or if they there are a bunch of guys getting shut down in August or if there were I don't know, you could imagine situations where personnel moves

would make you think that they've shifted even away from the 68 win forecast but right now i just think they're a team that's doing poorly yeah i'm not sure if they have any players good enough to raise my raise the red flag if they were to bench them i they've already they benched freddie freeman who was you know their best player and has been awful so there's nowhere else they can go with that really i guess if we talk about promoting or not promoting prospects at some point that could be something but right now they seem to lack anyone good enough to make

much of a difference anyway no rich hill update three Three years, $42 million. It's a new high. Yep. And he's earned it. He certainly has. Another brilliant outing last night. Seven innings, eight strikeouts. Eight strikeouts, no walks. No walks, shutout innings.

He is now five starts into this season with a 2.42 ERA, a 2.25 whip, not whip, FIP, a 156 ERA plus. He is striking out 13 batters per nine. And in his nine starts since his return, he has a 1.96 ERA, a 2.26 FIP, and a 207 ERA plus. He is pretty close to Pete Pedro over a nine start stretch. I'm just saying he is over that nine start stretch. And, uh, it's, it's, it's just stubbornness now that you wouldn't join me. I just played a clip at the beginning of the show of the A's announcers calling Rich Hill effectively wild last night. That is exactly what he is, too. He really is.

That's why he's become the patron player of this podcast, in part. It's how he's done it as much as what he's done. He has not hit a batter in three straight starts, though. I believe that hunt is over. We can quit watching. He leads baseball, but the pace has just fallen off completely. Okay. All right.

Time for emails? Yeah, sure. Okay. By the way, by the way, nine starts, two wins above replacement for Rich Hill. So that just, I mean, you know, that's a $15, $16 million return right there. Now, of course, that includes the four last year. You don't get those if you sign him in the offseason. But you don't have to do that much to be worth $40 million.

And he's right now... That's a seven-win season. Exactly. He's on a full season pace to basically be what Kershaw was in the last few years. And you don't need him to do it for very long for it to be worthwhile. If you get him for three years and you can get, you know, one year of that, you've totally cashed out. Okay, go ahead. Okay. Don't want you to leave any Rich Hill insights on the table.

All right. So Josh O says, In the Jake Arrieta no-hitter highlight video on ESPN's website, the announcer mentioned that the two previous teams to throw a no-hitter while also scoring at least 13 runs in the World Series era went on to win the World Series. My question is, is this the worst World Series predictor ever? well you know something actually this is a this is a pretty this is a good one too i saw this one uh in my head two seconds ago and i'm now saying it out loud uh since world war ii all 71 teams that started the season as the cubs did not go on to win the world's that's true that has been highly predictive in the past whether a team

is the cubs statistically significant i believe yes yeah that's that's among the worst you could imagine i don't know there's probably some some astrological sign world series indicator that you could use that that would be just as bad but pretty bad. Yeah. It's got everything. It's got everything. It's got the, uh, incredibly, uh, narrow parameters. It's got the incredibly tiny sample, but more than that, it's got the complete illogic of it. There is no, there is no like cause and effect where you would see the connection between one or the other. It is very much the rock that keeps the tiger away. Well, you're outscoring a team by 13 runs. Once.

That's an indicator of team quality. You have someone who threw a no-hitter. Maybe you've got an ace. Yeah. No, I know. That's not enough. That's not... No.

You could replace all those words with slightly different words and they would be you know basically the exact same sentiment except you would not have the connection to the world series right by the way rich hill entered entered last season with a 96 career era plus and has lifted it to 101 this guy has gone from below average major league career to above average major league career in these nine starts. Like if he were to retire today, he could say an above average major leaguer. Yeah, that's true. I'm just bringing it up because it doesn't matter how disappointing you think your life is right

now. It only takes nine starts. You can be the next Rich Hill. Or you could be the Bra Rich Hill Or you could be The Braves that's ruin everything All right question From Jeff also Vaguely Arietta related Hey guys just got done listening to Your podcast that concluded by talking about

Fun facts and how we all add or subtract Certain things to make our fun facts more Clearly fit a given narrative I Get it I do it too but one thing that I don't understand is why virtually nobody ever calls anyone out on eliminating the most important pieces of information on certain fun facts and streaks. For instance, with Jake Arrieta, you mentioned that people leave out a series of eight games during which he had a 1.5 ERA or something close to it because that ruined the narrative, but also left out is his 19 and

two-thirds innings pitched in the 2015 playoffs, during which he gave up eight runs. I understand postseason is different, but why is it left out of streaks and fun facts like this? The narrative is that Arrieta has been totally untouched since, insert time frame, in 2015 until now here, but the truth is, in two of his three most important starts since said time frame he posted an era of 3.66 hardly awful at all and not bashing him as you cannot argue with what he's done but why do we leave out playoff games when they are more important than anything yeah that's fair it the answer in a sort of boring procedural sense is just that it's not in the search filters that we're using. Yeah.

Like, there's plenty of good reason to leave playoff stuff out of a lot of stats. Like, if you wanted to see who had, like, it's not necessarily fair, especially when you can now play 20 extra postseason games. fair, especially when you can now play 20 extra postseason games, it's not fair to compare, you know, a guy's season home run totals, for instance, counting stats, uh, and say, well, he, you know, he had more home runs than this other guy, but he, you know, his season was 20 games longer. I think we would all appreciate that that wouldn't make much sense. Uh, so, you know, you don't have the black ink going to the guy who, you know, who played in the postseason and you include his postseason. And so with that though, then you have to like figure out a way to present a website that isn't ridiculously crowded and sloppy. And so it's just

always been the norm that, that postseason stats are separate, that they're not included, that you don't have to have some explanation for which ones you're including it on or whatever. And so when Ben and I go looking for stats, it's like a whole extra two or three steps, sometimes more, to add it up. And if you're looking at something that's kind of indexed, like if you're trying to do OPS Plus or something, then you can't do it. It's impossible to include the playoff stats. And so it's just easier. And I find that most of the time that doesn't matter.

Some of the time it does. I did a piece after the postseason in 2012 that mentioned the guys whose season stats changed the most if you include their postseason stats. And there were some guys who went from having not great seasons to great seasons just by including their postseason stats. And there were some guys who went from having, you know, not great seasons to great seasons just by including the postseason stats into their raw totals, their rate stats. And then, of course, you have the Arrieta example. But the Arrieta example is the rare one where it tremendously changes your fun fact. It's also, though, I will agree with the writer. Everybody, including me, who's tweeting these fun facts about Jake Arrieta is quite aware.

Just like we were aware, for instance, of whoever it was who hit the first home run off of Kershaw's curveball. Remember that one? But then I think there were like two that had been hit in the postseason. And it just totally changes the fun fact. And most, I think, probably a lot fewer people knew about the Kershaw one, but we all sort of know and are in denial about the Arrieta starts. So is there now, is there any reason, is there any good reason to exclude Arrieta's postseason starts from a stat like this or from a fun fact like this, or is it just like this or from a fun fact like this or is it just pure convenient lazy deceptive fun fact dishonesty yeah i think in this case it's it's probably pretty close to fun fact gerrymandering

it's just uh i mean in some cases if you're talking about counting stats or something then maybe you want to compare everyone on the same footing. So certain players get to play in the playoffs and others don't. So you want to compare regular seasons because it's the same time span for everyone, same opportunity, and some guys don't get the postseason opportunity. But when you're talking about just a string of starts and a run of dominance, there's no particular reason to omit those postseason starts other than convenience. I think obviously the conditions are different. I mean, the playoff competition is better and there's more pressure and the weather is colder and all those things, but we're not really adjusting fun fact stats for, you know,

quality of opposition or anything, because you could do that with regular season stats too. of opposition or anything because you could do that with regular season stats too. So it's different. I'll sound like an old school baseball guy saying the postseason is a different animal or something, but there's no real reason when you're talking about consecutive starts to omit starts. Yeah, no, you're right. I think that there was a general consensus though that jake arietta was totally gassed by the postseason that yeah like people just watching people just watching

him could were saying it even before he was getting hit like even in i think even in the pittsburgh game the wild card game which he threw a five hit shutout struck out 11 and walked none i might be giving him too much credit. But I think even then, Sahadev made mention of the fact that he looked more tired. Or maybe it was just in the first inning of the next start or something. And so maybe we're editorializing in a way by saying that we don't think that that— it was so deep into the season. He hadn't thrown anywhere close to that many innings in his life before. And maybe we're just saying, trust us, it doesn't, it's not

the same. He shouldn't be penalized, and neither should his fun fact, for this example of a start that clearly stretched him beyond normal conditions now that's a slippery slope then could you could we then throw out the last start in september if he had gotten bombed in that or could we throw out all of september because he hadn't pitched in september before or something like that it becomes dangerous and also there's the fact that even in the two starts that we are conveniently ignoring where he gave up four runs apiece he in 11 innings struck out 17 and walked four and the difference between those being great jake arietta starts and what they were bad anomalies is basically one pitch each that got hit over the fence in each of those starts

and so maybe we're unnecessarily giving him that leeway. Maybe he wasn't gassed at all. It's tough to say, but you're right. I think that this is an accurate criticism, and I think we should all apologize. Arrieta, when I just Googled him to get his baseball reference page, I see two headlines for him. Jake Arrieta says he's flattered by accusations of PED use and Jake Arrieta sounds off on PED rumblings. Some people are idiots, which seem like two very different articles. They sure do. They seem like, like I'm imagining Jake Arrieta, like two different people named Jake Arrieta responding very differently to this. Internet articles have sometimes deceptive headlines.

New discovery on this podcast. Yeah. All right. Question from Alex Coopersmith. I was in an argument with my friend about who the better third baseman was, Adrian Beltre or Chipper Jones. And I found out that Beltre had only made the All-Star game four times, and not in 2004 when he got second in MVP voting. Jones was an All-Star eight times, but not in 1999 when he won the MVP.

I know All-Star appearances is in no way reflective of a player's all-time value, but I'm incredibly surprised how few appearances Beltre has had, and how neither player made the All-Star game in their best year. Are All-Star voters just incredibly stupid stupid or was there some other factor? Also, and this is probably the more interesting question, is Beltre or Chipper Jones the better third baseman? And they're really, really close, actually. Right now, right now, quote unquote.

Well, it's relevant because Adrian Beltre is active. Yes. Okay. Well, it's relevant because Adrian Beltre is active. Yes. Okay. Adrian Beltre has a career 85.1 baseball reference war and Chipper Jones has an 85.0 baseball reference war. So they have essentially had the same career value. Of course, Beltre is still playing and still productive. Beltre is still playing and still productive, but I guess you could say that Jones had the higher peak, probably. Beltre started younger and took a while to become a superstar, whereas Jones was pretty great early on. So it's certainly, I think, a lot closer than maybe the average fan would acknowledge. I think Jones is sort of a no doubt Hall of Famer, first ballot type of guy, probably for most people, and Beltre is not, but they are essentially the same player. Yeah, it's not enough to make a big difference,

but I think Jones' career war is somewhat penalized by the mid-career move of him to left field, which doesn't seem like that was, that wasn't a reflection of his inability to play third base. He played a lot of third base after that, including some fine seasons defensively. But I guess it was the Braves needs. And so he loses a couple of wins because of that. He wasn't a good left fielder and the positional adjustment is much harsher for left field.

Yeah, I mean, I think that I... It's funny because I think you and I would both probably guess that we like Adrian Beltre much more than the average baseball fan. Like, you would walk into a party expecting to have to convince somebody that Adrian Beltre is better than they think that he is. And yet I, I also consider Chipper Jones to be a lot better than him. And,

and, and so that, and, and I'm, as you just listed, I have no real great reason for that. Yeah. I guess the,

what would be, like Beltre has a strange career shape he had the the one fantastic season when he was 25 with the dodgers 2004 that was a seven win season that was his best season but well it's it look it's the reason that we think that chipper jones is better is because even those of us who completely buy into the war model still prefer an offense heavy war to a defense heavy war. We trust it more. We notice it more. We see it in action more. It covers black ink on the page and it gets you all the MVP and all star all MVP votes and all star appearances that make up this sort of second tier of black ink that, as Meg Rowley wrote in this great piece on Cole Hamels not long ago, I'll just explain.

She wrote a piece about how Cole Hamels has been like the bad luck pitcher of his era as far as run support and wins and losses. And we're all so smart that we don't even care about wins and losses. We would never look at that. But we are, without realizing

it affected by seeing guys cy young votes and hearing him in the cy young conversation and seeing his all-star appearances and when we click on his baseball reference page that is a kind of black ink that affects us and affects our perception of a player and since those voters and since those accolades tend to come with things like wins and losses, we are sort of second, second hand wins affected, if that makes sense, right? And so it's the same, I think, with the type of wins that Chipper Jones produced and the type of wins that Adrian Beltre produced. One creates this page that is completely blasted with black ink and accolades, and Adrian Beltre is much less.

And the wars are the same. The defensive wars are 25 wins difference. So if we believe all of this, we're saying that Chipper Jones was worth 25 more wins with his bat, and Adrian Beltre was worth 25 more wins with his glove. And I still think that even though we maybe probably shouldn't, I think that for the most part, I believe defensive metrics, especially over a long career. And if you're in for the system, you got to be in for the system. But I still choose the offense guy most times. And so that's probably why I'm probably more wrong than I think. Yeah, Chipper Jones played four times as many postseason games, if that's something that you think should count in his favor. He was always in the playoffs because the Braves were always

in the playoffs. And for Beltre, that's been a rarer occurrence. And yeah, the career shape, like if you took Chipper Jones's peak, his best seven seasons, which I think is what Jay Jaffe's JAWS system does when it balances career versus peak value. I think his best seven season stretch would be from age 24 to 30, which is very typical. It's probably the most common best seven season stretch. And by the way, he was a very productive old player too. He had two of his best seasons at 35 and 36. He was great at that time, even though he wasn't particularly durable, but his prime was the typical prime. Whereas Adrian Beltre, if you took his best seven season stretch, he's probably in it right now. He's probably still in his peak or his prime because he, yeah, I mean, he had the great one season at age 25, but then he just sort of scuffled along as a decent player for a while. And then at age 31, he became a superstar. So his age 31 through 37 seasons

Will probably end up being his best seven season stretch And maybe that's something that makes it harder to see him As the kind of player that Chipper Jones was Because we had already watched Adrian Beltre Be a Major League Baseball player For, you know, over a decade Before he really broke out other than that one exception season. So for the first decade of his career, it looked like he was going to be a guy

who just had one weird outlier season. And then he took that and became a Hall of Famer. So maybe it's hard to change our minds at that point. Yeah, just to reinforce your point, his best season was 2004. And then, yes, his next six best individual seasons, not just as a group, but discrete seasons, his next six individual best seasons have been the last six. He's currently on pace to be just as good to join those this year although that's mainly driven by 21 games of off the charts defense so uh i think it's fitting because you know so often when we talk about underrated overrated which is a completely unmeasurable social construct that is like often means nothing it makes no sense but we talk about how a guy becomes is is called underrated for so long that he sometimes becomes under uh overrated or vice

versa and it is nice to think that adrian beltré is so underrated that he's actually still underrated like there there isn't. He didn't back. You know it didn't backlash. It didn't come back around. He's still like. Even the people who are leading the Adrian Beltre's underrated brigade. Are still underrating him. Uh huh.

So I think I'm happy about that. Yeah. It's weird that a player who is so much fun. And also so good. Could be underrated. Because that's the thing. He's not like some under-the-radar guy personality-wise. He doesn't really just blend into the pack.

He's got the touching his head thing. He's got the Albus Andrus thing. He is delightful. He is the subject of many highlight videos. And he also gets credit as a team leader, veteran mentor type. So he has all of that going for him. So there's really no reason why he should be underrated. All right, Playindex?

Yeah, so I want to tell you about three pitching lines this year that had never happened before. One of them was discussed at the time. before. One of them was discussed at the time. It was Chris Archer's 5-5-3-2-3-12. That's five innings, five hits, three runs, two earned, three walks, 12 strikeouts. That was on opening night. Another one came in Jose Fernandez's first start of the year, 5.2-5-5 five and two-thirds innings, five hits, five runs, all earned, one walk, 13 strikeouts. And the last one came just a couple days ago, and this is what inspired this play index. It was Tanner Roark, who had the seven innings, two hits, no runs, three walks, 15 strikeouts, 15 strikeouts, and the individual number in each of those that makes them so unique,

well, I guess it's two numbers. It's the number of strikeouts and the number of innings. Very few pitchers strike out 12 in five innings. Very few, and even fewer leave the game at that point. Very few strike out 13 in five and two-thirds. Very few strike out 13 and 5 and 2 thirds. Very few strikeout 15 and 7. And we've talked, we in fact talked at great length last year when Corey Kluber was pulled from a game after striking out 18 in 8 innings. It is the position of this show, or at least one half of this show, that a 20 strikeout, and particularly a 21 strikeout performance,

is of far greater historical significance than a no-hitter, and yet managers give great leeway to pitchers with high pitch counts in one case and don't in the other. Michael Bowman wrote a great piece about whether the 19-20-21 strikeout game, which is considerably rarer than a perfect game, is in fact more impressive than a perfect game, and it's a very complicated question, in fact, for various reasons that are worth reading, but as Michael notes, it's actually pretty hard to strike out 20, uh, without, uh, create without a huge pitch count, unless you're totally utterly dominant. Um, and if you are on pace, uh, to strike out that many without being totally, utterly dominant, you're in danger of getting pulled by your manager mid-start.

And so what I wanted to see was how common these games are where a guy is on a reasonable pace to strike out 20 or 21, but is pulled anyway. So I went to Play Index. I went to the Game Finder, Pitching Game Finder. I selected for starters only. I selected for at least three and a third innings. And I chose to have strikeouts be at least 2.1 times greater than innings. So if your strikeouts are at least 2.1 times greater than your innings, at the very worst, you're going to have 17 strikeouts are at least 2.1 times greater than your innings, at the very worst, you're going to have 17 strikeouts through eight innings and have a clear shot at striking out 20.

So first, just to get a little business out of the way, I named three that have happened this year, which is, yes, is more than you would normally expect of these starts, as probably you're not at all surprised in a long timeline, these types of starts are going up, which makes sense because there are, of course, far more strikeouts these days and also far lower pitch count limits these days. And so if a guy has 12 through 5 innings as Chris Archer does,

but he's already thrown 100 pitches Well, there's no real point And so in the early 90s There were very few 0 or 1 per year In the early 2000s There were more, 3 or 4 per year That's actually pretty much through the 2000s And then starting in 2010

2, 4, 6, 11, 5, 6, and this year 3. So 3 in the first month. You might think that these would be front-loaded to the beginning of the year. They are not, in fact. And so you cannot say, well, it's early in the year. That's when these happen. They don't generally happen. 3 in the first month is a lot. It is on pace to be the most ever. Only once have there been more than eight of these starts in a season. Only twice have there been more than six. This year might join them. But to the larger question, are managers generally pulling pitchers from games in which this is realistic? So I took the number of outs that the pitcher had gotten.

I subtracted that number from 27 to see how many outs remained in the start for them to get their strikeouts. I chose the number 4.2 as how many pitches per out I'm going to estimate for them. That's low. Probably more fair would be something like 5. But, you know, if you're going to break a record you're going to do some things really well so I want to give I want to be optimistic and so I have 4.2 pitches per out so maybe that's you know two strikeouts and and a second pitch ground out or something like that and I can do it so I added that the remaining, to the pitches they've thrown and looked to see how many pitches roughly that pitcher might have thrown

if a manager had let him in to chase history. So first off, let me ask you a question. What is a worthwhile pitch count for a pitcher to strike out 20 or 21? And let's assume that it's not Michael Pineda coming back from shoulder injury. Let's assume that it's not, let's see, Alex Cobb in his rookie year. Let's just assume that, you know, normal pitcher. Normal pitcher. It's not Matt Moore in 2011.

It's a normal pitcher. What's a good number of pitches? If you're a manager, how deep would you let him go? If a guy has a realistic shot. Not forget realistic shot. He's done. He made it, okay? He struck out 20.

He did it. Everybody's celebrating. And then I show you the pitches, all right? I show you, Ben Lindberg, smart guy, the pitches. How many before you go, he shouldn't have done that. That was too many. 125? Really?

That's where I'd start to wonder. You'd start to wonder But that's not the same as saying that it was a bad idea For I'd condemn it If it's a healthy guy In the prime of his career With no injury indicator I'd say 135

Alright, you're probably a little 135 is probably good Okay, so we've got here I mean, no one gets there anymore, ever. No, right. Very, very rarely, unless they're throwing a no-hitter. Yeah. And in the case of a no-hitter, I assume that you would condemn at the same levels?

Yeah, I guess so, just because that's the way that baseball has always worked, even though I don't necessarily agree that the achievements are comparable. So you, if, wait, so you would. I'd rather see the 21 strikeouts. So would you allow, would you allow the 21 strikeout guy to pitch deeper into a game than the no hitter guy? Yes. Okay.

So, um, all right. So anyway, to get to the point, I wanted to see if we're, if we're missing a bunch of these potential achievements because managers, uh, don't respect the achievement the way that I do. And if we are setting 125 as the raised eyebrows and 135 as the condemned, there are actually very, very few, if any, instances where a guy could have done this without raising Ben's eyebrows. And there are a few. So I'll give you a few that would have potentially done it without raising Ben's eyebrows. Felix Hernandez, June 2014, seven innings pitched,

15 strikeouts, no runs allowed, pulled after 100 pitches. My pitch estimate would have been 125.2. I don't know why he was pulled in that game. That's weird. Because he was throwing a shutout, too. Strug out 15, walked one through seven innings. They pulled him at 100 pitches exactly.

All right. I'll see if I can find any reason. Yeah, okay. So then to find another one that could potentially have done it without raising Ben's eyebrows, you have to go all the way back to 2007, Johan Santana, August 9th, through eight innings, struck out 17. It was a shutout. He walked nobody. It was a two hitter and he won that start one to nothing, but they did not let him go out and pitch the ninth. But they did not let him go out and pitch the ninth. I had his pitch estimate at 124.6.

He had already thrown 112. And so that one might have happened without raising Ben's eyebrows, although maybe it is your position that Johan Santana does not meet the qualifications of healthy mid-career pitcher with no injury markers. I'm not sure. He basically had won the Cy Young except everything but winning it two years earlier so he was a veteran um by that measure it's not like he was new to the sport um but you know he was little all right uh and ironically i mean i guess super duper ironically he maybe did ruin his career by throwing too many pitches in pursuit of a single game achievement that we value less. Although Mets fans maybe don't value it less.

Yeah. I looked at the Fernandez start. He was facing Chris Archer in that game, by the way. The article in the Seattle Times says with his ace at 100 laborious pitches. Oh, come on. What? Come on. Laborious? He had just had his toughest inning. He gave up a leadoff single.

Then he got a strikeout. And then the guy who got on stole second, advanced to third on a wild pitch. There was some rally against him. McClendon said he was spent. He used everything he had in that seventh inning to get us out of that inning. When you have an emotional inning like that, you are usually going to have a letdown that next inning. That sounds like a Russell Carlton article topic.

And I just didn't want that to happen. I'd seen enough. Like always, Hernandez wanted to stay in the game, but he didn't put up much of a fight. Quote, he told me that was a stressful inning for you. That's good enough. And I said, all right, you are the boss. That is, ah. Now, it was, I don't know, I can't remember if you read this or not, but the game was tied 0-0 at the time.

Yes, yes. He did not yet have the lead. It wasn't a 5-0. It ended up being a 5-0 game, game not close but it was close at the time so it was more stressful and there was if you believe that the reliever is better than the starter even the dominant starter uh then there was reason to go to the bullpen that said never have i been more retroactively happy that a manager got fired. Okay. What a, what a bad move for me, for me, bad move for my enjoyment of this sport in his seven 15. He could have even got 21. I don't like 20 as much as I like 21. So my standard goes way down when only 20 is possible. All right. Josh Beckett, 2004. I, by my estimate, could have done it in 119 pitches.

However, he was pulled with two outs in the fourth inning of a game he was throwing a shutout, so I'm assuming that that was some sort of injury or rain delay. He had struck out eight in three and two-thirds. Let's see, and that was 2004. And then 2001, Randy Johnson. No, he threw a complete game and struck out 20. All right. He did it in 124 pitches.

So that shows you how rare, in fact, these types of managerial decisions are. And so I'm willing to give managers the benefit of the doubt that they are not cowardly and running away from this. Unless they are Lloyd McLennan. However, yeah, unless they're – however, and then did I say Kluber? Of course there's Kluber, the Kluber case. Yeah. However, if we switch from Ben's eyebrows raised to Ben's concerns, I'm going to eliminate Michael Pineda, who might have done it in 136. There's Anibal Sanchez in 2013, who had 17 through 8 innings, and by my estimate,

had a chance to do it in 134. There's Matt Moore in 2011, who had struck out 11 in five innings and could have done it in 134, but was a rookie. And otherwise, pretty much everybody else, I mean, there are lots of these. There are dozens of these starts, and they all pretty much math out to somewhere between 140 and 160 pitches. And so unless you're willing to let a pitcher throw 140 to 160 pitches, in fact, these generally don't turn out to be worth pursuing. Chris Archer, by my extra pitches estimated, would have thrown 157 even if things had gone well. Jose Fernandez, 148 even if things had gone well. Tanner Roark, 146 even if things had gone well. I think those are all out of the question. At least Fernandez and Archer are undeniably out of the question.

And so, you know, I think it's still an indictment of the way that managers let pitchers pursue no-hitters to these extreme pitch counts. Indictment, I mean, if the pitchers want to do it, whatever. But an indictment of that. But there's not really a serious call for letting more pitchers go for 20, in my opinion, at this point. can get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. All right, last one from Rich, who essentially wants to ask how quickly announcing stabilizes. He says, how many games or innings do you have to listen to before you know if a radio announcer or team is worth listening to?

I have found a couple play-by-play guys that only took me about two innings for me to switch my feed, but overall, I feel like I need about a whole game's worth of listening before knowing if they are any good. I think this is one of those situations where to give a, to go to the book that you and I wrote a little bit, I think we had this conversation about scouting after our first day scouting, which is if you take a look at 100 athletes, 100 baseball players from a representative sample of the population, it's not that hard to find the best five, the 95th percentile players, really even before they've done anything. We were joking, joking? I don't remember if we were joking, that you could tell almost when they were registering which guys were the good ones.

At the tryout, yeah. there's, there really, you can tell in the way they interact with each other, for instance, in the way that they warm up, in the way that they stretch, in the logo on the shirt that they wore, uh, in all sorts of these ways that are pretty obvious. Like you don't need an eight day tryout, eight hour tryout to identify with pretty good confidence. You know, the, if you had 10 picks, you could probably pick the five best. Now, that's the easy part. The hard part of scouting is differentiating between those five. And there's a huge difference between those five that is not apparent until you've studied them for a while. And particularly if you're trying to project what they're going to do in 10 years, then it's even harder. And that's where the genius of scouting acumen comes in.

It's differentiating between the 97th percentile and the 99th, which is really just differentiating between two standard deviations and three standard deviations. It doesn't seem like that big a deal, but it's the whole deal, right? And so for announcers, I think you know within an inning that you might be listening to a garbage announcer. It doesn't take long to say, don't like him, do like him, don't like her, do like her. That's not that hard to know whether they're above or below average.

To really know who the very best is, who you want to spend not just one season with, but 35 seasons with, though, I would guess takes three to six weeks. And so I would say that there are two time frames, the one inning time frame and the three to six weeks time frame. Okay. Yeah, I think that's roughly right. You can definitely tell the ones that you don't want to listen to really fast. It's like one pitcher's fastball or something. If you can throw 95, then you just have that ability. Maybe you can't repeat it as well as some other guys can, but you kind of know that you can throw hard.

It's sort of the same with announcers. If you listen to one inning of play-by-play, you sort of know if the play-by-play person is doing it in the style that you would want it to be done. you know, hearing them in blowouts, messing around and not talking about baseball or giving anecdotes about players when they come to the plate or the banter between broadcasters, which might not always be immediately apparent. So I would say you can rule out the best case scenario in about two innings. And yeah, you're right.

If it's a lifelong attachment standard, I think you need at least a couple weeks Alright So that is it for today You can support the podcast On Patreon by going to Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild Hundreds of you have done so

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