Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 875: The Pedro-Kershaw Peak Comparison

Episode Date: May 3, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about their book release, Dylan Bundy, and juiced baseballs, then revisit the Pedro Martinez-Clayton Kershaw comparison.

Can I get a, can I get a, running her hands through my fro, bouncing on 24s, that's why they say I'm ready It's the remix to Ignition, hot and fresh out the kitchen, mama ruling that body, got every man in here wishing Sipping on coke and rum, I'm like so what I'm drunk, it's the freaking weekend, baby I'm about to have me some fun It's the remix to Ignition, it's hot and fresh out the kitchen I'm a rule and that body got every man in here wishing I'm sippin' on coke and rum, I'm like the one I'm drunk It's the freaking weekend, baby, I'm about to have me some fun Good morning and welcome to episode 875 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives brought to you by our Patreon supporters

and the Play Index, baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg, the co-author of The Only Rule Is It Has To Work. Hi, Ben. Hi. How are you? I'm great. Good.

Do you think that we could make a case that our book is in the conversation for the best-selling sports book on Amazon right now? The data supports it. Yeah. Okay. All right. Hey, now that the book is out and now that the not particularly secret fact that Theo Fightmaster was the name of our employer,

I wanted to ask you, do you, like me, when you're sitting around bored or walking around the streets of Sonoma, find yourself thinking about even better names than Theo Fightmaster? I don't. I couldn't even begin to try. I think I've already seen several tweets to the effect that it is the best name ever. Well, I believe, I mean, I think that there are better. And so I'm going to give you the five, my five that I keep coming back to, if that's okay. All right. Theo Fortmaker. Okay. Theo Fright Monster. That'd be pretty good. That'd be pretty good. Theo French Monsieur.

Okay. Theo Flash Mobster. Ooh, that's good. That might be the best. And then this one is actually first and last name, Mento Freshmaker. Yeah, I mean, that'd be pretty good. It's better than Phelant Lentini, even another character in our book slash human being. Phelant Lentini is a great name. I prefer having that name in my – like Theo Fightmaster is a great name,

but I actually think Phelan Lentini is the truly great name in the book. Yeah. And, well, one of the great things about Theo is that if you know him, it's even better because he is not a very martial person. He is a very gentle soul And yet he has the most aggressive name Yeah, that's true So we won't dwell on the book too much

Right now, we were just discussing That we will probably do some book-specific Shows over the next few weeks And maybe we'll take questions Or we'll just go over some of the Things from the book that we Don't talk about the book Or we'll just go over some of the things from the book that we don't talk about the book. Or we'll do some sort of spoilery behind-the-scenes, making-of sort of episodes.

And we'll have people from the book on to do that. So you can start reading if you have your books. And we'll give people a little time to do that. But we'll be doing some sort of book-related content. But you can find everything that there is to know about the book on the website for the book. The only rule is it has to work.com. There are reviews and interviews and excerpts and photos and videos and stats and just a ton of bonus content and DVD extra sort of stuff that you'll enjoy if you've read the book. So you can go there to find all of that and events also. Great. Looking forward to it. Yeah. All right.

Quickly, an update on something that we talked about during the off season. It was one of our play indexes and it was about players who debuted in the majors at 19 and never appeared in the majors again. Appearing in the majors at 19 is usually a pretty good indicator that you're going to be a superstar. And in fact, you have a decent chance of making the Hall of Fame, but occasionally a player will just never, never come back. And we looked at those stories, but the reason we were talking about it is that dylan bundy was in a position where it could have happened to him he appeared in the majors at age 19 in 2013 and then he missed the next couple years and um he had to prove he was healthy to make the team this year and so just uh just as an update he he is pitching. That storyline is now concluded.

And he's having an odd season. Have you looked at his season by chance? Have you noticed it? No. He's thrown nine innings as a reliever. He's allowed two runs. Pretty good. Yeah.

Pretty good. Good for him. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, but the odd part is that he has struck out two and walked four In that time He also has given up Many more fly balls than grounders

And that's Usually a bad combination Yeah, less good for him So we will see He's kind of basically got In relief he's put together Two good weeks of Chris Young. And so it'll be interesting to see. Yeah. All right. Let's see then. The next thing is kind

of banter and kind of a full topic, depending, probably more like banter. But do you have any banter that you want to sneak in before we get into the potentially slippery slope banter? I don't think so. We're both sleep deprived and a little loopy today. I did a 4 a.m. interview with the Irish Times, so I'm ready to go right ahead. Cool. So I'm about to do an interview actually with a football team. You're taking over an independent league football team for your next act? No. Right after we record this, I'm doing an interview with an expansion arena football team in the IFL. I'm not sure what the IFL is, but it's probably the—I don't know what the I is for. Maybe it's Irish. Maybe it's Irish, too. Anyway, they are—I suppose I'll be learning more about this ranging from like, you know, hypothetically ranging from the uniform colors to what you should do on on fourth down in the fourth quarter. But you have to the more as you as it was explained to me, as you as you vote or as you participate, you get points depending on, I guess, how good your votes are or maybe how often your votes are. So not every fan will get to do the fourth down thing, but every fan can do like the low stakes one.

And then you earn, you basically are competing for a greater share of decision making power. Anyway, interesting, right? Indoor football league, by the way. And yeah, that sounds fun. So I'm doing an interview with them where they're interviewing me. Uh-huh. Just to be clear of who the interview is. All right. So Ben. Yeah. The banter part, banter-ish, is did you see Jeff Passan's piece on juiced ball suspicions? Sure did. All right. So I think a fair way of summarizing Jeff's piece is that it is easy to believe conspiracy theories

right now. It is maybe even more than easy. It's tempting. It's just tempting as a person watching the game to think, huh, I wonder if the ball is juiced. And probably the four pieces of logic that would make you find that easy to believe are that, one, there was a big, big spike in offense and power midway through last season that came out of nowhere, which I will ask you about your research into that, but that came out of nowhere and has persisted for like three months. And suddenly, and in the middle of the season and with no clear explanation. Two is that that spike seems to be traced not to atmospherics, but rather to the velocity of baseballs coming off bats. As Dr. Alan Nathan is quoted in Jeff's piece, you can basically explain all of the extra home runs by exit velocity, which suggests not that there's

something happening with the wind or the weather, but that the ball truly is flying faster off bats. Three is that this was on a list of ideas that Major League Baseball sent to the union last year that Ken Rosenthal wrote about. And it was not a list of ideas that were to be acted on or that, you know, that went to any, that we know that went to any second stage or anything. As Rosenthal put it, it was in a, quote, package of data that it recently presented to the players union, but nothing formal was discussed or proposed according to a source with knowledge

of the exchange. So you have the, at least you have a memo. There always has to be a damning memo and preferably some trip hop in your conspiracy video. And finally, the fourth is that we are always suspicious of the league doctoring the ball. I don't particularly want to talk about whether it is, although I do want to, since we never really talked about your barn burner of a piece that you co-wrote with Rob Arthur I would like you to summarize that so What did you guys find?

Yeah so we looked Into this because there was that spike In exit velocity And also in home run rate Last summer and it really just sort of seemed To happen all at once it seemed to happen Almost right at the all-star break which Seemed suspicious because as we found out while writing that piece, some teams refresh their supply of

baseballs at the all-star break. And so you'd think that if some change had been made to the manufacturing process, maybe it would have started to show up then. So we just tried to eliminate every explanation we could think of. We didn't really delve too much Into PEDs or steroids Which we got many tweets about Of course because it just didn't Seem plausible to us really That everyone in the league Could have suddenly started taking something

At the same time and that something Only helped hitters and that something Was undetectable by testing So it just And not even rumored. It's not like there's whispers from players saying that they're seeing it more in the clubhouse or anything like that. Yeah, so we couldn't come up with a way that made sense.

But we looked into temperature and weather because the ball does travel farther if it's warmer. And it was warmer, but not nearly enough to explain what was happening. And we looked into changing talent level because that was probably the most compelling theory that a lot of teams had been out of it early last year because races were wrapped up. And so they shut down good starters or good starters got hurt or whatever it was. And they just sort of ran rookies out there like the Reds did for a really long period of time at the end of last season. And of course, there were an unprecedented arrival of rookie hitters and rookie players, really, but rookie hitters

specifically, and just very talented, slugging young players who just hit the ground running and were great right away. And that accounted for part of it, but that still just didn't seem to answer it. And then we actually tested baseballs, and we couldn't find any statistical difference between the one batch of balls that we sent to a lab for testing and another batch of balls that we sent to the same lab from the year before. It was like a dozen Bud Selig balls and a dozen Rob Manford balls. And there was no smoking gun there. There was no sign that there was anything different.

But it wasn't really conclusive enough to rule that out as an explanation. For one thing, it was just a dozen balls that we bought from Rawlings and wasn't necessarily representative of all the balls that were used in the game. And even if some of the balls were different, you could, you know, it's possible that you could just get a dozen that weren't different. And statistically, probably testing a dozen wasn't enough to prove that there couldn't be more variation in the ball. And we didn't test the seam height, which can also affect how far the ball flies. And all this stuff is very expensive, unfortunately, to fire these balls through these cannons at plates

and then see how they rebound. So it's not really something that you can do with dozens and dozens of balls. So we kind of did the best we could within our budget, but it wasn't quite enough to silence the tinfoil hat crowd, which, you know, we sort of belonged to when we started the article because it really seemed like the only plausible explanation. And it sort of still did even after we wrote that and failed to detect any difference. Yeah. Jay Jaffe wrote in the Baseball Perspectives compendium, extra innings a few years ago, about the variance from ball to ball.

And even within a batch, there can be considerable variance, which is a fun—by the once in a while I will think about because you do wonder what percentage of home run variance for players is just explained by the fact that they got a bad ball thrown to them or a good ball thrown to them. Anyway, so thank you. That's good. That's a good summary. It's a really great piece. It's funny because Hang Up and Listen did an episode on that piece, but we did not. That's right. But it's great. Everybody should read it. And I especially liked Rob's contribution.

Yes. The reason that I bring this up, though, is not because I'm going to answer the question of whether the ball is juiced or not, or even whether I think the ball is juiced or not, but to ask you why it has to be a secret, why don't we just accept that Major League Baseball would adjust the baseball depending on the climate, depending on the offensive climate, in order to keep a fairly predictable game, fairly predictable style of game that is popular and consistent? I mean, clearly, if it were revealed that the ball was being juiced right now,

it would be a scandal. If it were revealed that the ball was being juiced in 1941, it would be a scandal. Even 75 years later, there would still be some crazy taking going on. But it seems like it's the secrecy of it that creates the scandal. Would it be a scandal if Major League Baseball simply put out a memo saying that they're going to fix this by – fix it, change it.

What it – fix maybe is the wrong word. But they're going to use their role as the organization that oversees the good of the game and the integrity of competition by choosing a different baseball, by slightly adjusting the baseball so that it creates a style of game that they think is truer to the spirit of the game. Yeah, I wouldn't mind in the slightest. So why? Why has this been a century of them denying it? And I mean, even like it almost seems like by denying it, Major League Baseball for a century has opened themselves up to extreme skepticism and constant conspiracy theories and like lots of accusations of the ball being uh livelier or deader instead of embracing their role as the overseer of the baseball and saying yeah we added two percent this year or we took

off four percent this year it seems so much easier to just say that. Yeah, they're going to do that. That's part of their job. Like, why? Why? Why fight that? Do you think? Why is it such a something that has been so resisted? Do you suppose? quality of the sport, the ball. And so people might resent the idea that it might make people uncomfortable that you can just tamper with something so central to the game as how far the ball goes. I mean, it works the same way for everyone. So it's not like it favors one team in particular. So it doesn't bother me. And if you're just trying to restore some offense-defense balance, then I think it's perfectly reasonable. I wouldn't mind. And doing it the way they have done it or haven't done it over the last century hasn't really quelled announced it, no one has ever suspected them of doing it. If they were to announce it, then we'd probably be even less suspicious when they didn't announce it. So I don't know. I think it's probably just some reverence for tradition and not wanting to tamper with the way the game is played, but it really wouldn't bother me if they came out and did that. And I think it probably wouldn't bother most people all that much.

There was a sort of a scandal in Japanese professional baseball a few years ago. A big scandal. It cost the commissioner his job. The commissioner resigned. He said that he wasn't aware that someone below him had decided to change the ball. And he resigned over that later. But yeah, I mean, that was why it was such a scandal was because they didn't say it and they even denied it maybe. And so I wouldn't mind if they came out and said, hey, offense is down and this seems like a pretty unobtrusive way

to change things. It won't really alter how the game is played. It'll just sort of change how often people score. I wouldn't mind. Yeah. When you say that it's a reverence for tradition, I mean, at this point, it is now tradition that no offensive environment holds, that we have these huge swings from era to era. But really, I mean, a lot of people, when they say that they have a reverence for tradition, it's the ability to compare stats from one generation to the next. And if they had decided in 1920 that they were going to try to enforce a fairly steady level of offense, it actually would have arguably built a more cohesive sense of tradition. Although at this point now, that's hardly worth pursuing unless you start expanding the bounds of the sports stats in a way

like we arguably saw with Barry Bonds, then that becomes problematic. But otherwise, as long as you're kind of within the range of things we've seen before. And maybe the problem is that with strikeouts now, we're not in the range of things that we've seen before. And so maybe the common fan would actually consider it less disruptive to tradition to affect the baseball rather than seeing stats and style of play vary so dramatically from the previous century. Although you would think that that would be more of a seams issue or a mound issue than a compression issue if we're talking about strikeouts.

Now, the other thing, the last thing about this is that Major League Baseball did approve essentially tampering with the baseball in Colorado with the humidor. Colorado with the humidor. And if you put those two choices side by side, what we're talking about with the league kind of monitoring the compression of the ball versus one team out of 30 getting to soak baseballs in water, like which one of those sounds like the scandal? Like this, the Coors Field one one obviously it's on the up and up everybody knows that it's happening it's not done in secret but it sounds way weirder and way less natural and way more deflate gaty than what you know we're all creating conspiracy theories about maybe having happened it's it's very odd to me that it's you know it's just it's odd to me how how it became third rail. This thing that seems

totally un-third rail-y became a third rail. I don't know why. It'd be interesting to read a piece about juiced ball conspiracies through the years and to see what the conversation was like initially when the sport was young, when the modern sport in particular was young, and what the objection was or what drew people to the conspiracies. All right. Anyway. All right. Now to the topic, Ben. Okay. A year and a half ago, you wrote a piece for Grantland about how lousy Clayton Kershaw is relative to Pedro Martinez. Right. Not really. I'm not really relative to Pedro Martinez. I'm not really exaggerating. It was hot fire aimed at Clayton Kershaw. And first of all, I want to know before we get into the topic, I want to know what response did you get to that piece? Dodgers fans were mad at me, but everyone else seemed to enjoy it.

Oh, really? Interesting. I mean, it was tongue-in-cheek it was more an attempt to elevate pedro than it was an attempt to denigrate kershaw but it was in pedro's fake voice because i thought that would be funny and so yeah uh yeah it wasn't intended to be mean-spirited or anything no no of course not but because it was in pedro's fake voice and it wasn't even in pedro's. It was in the voice of Pedro's season. It was in the voice of an abstract collection of performances. And the character of Pedro's season that you wrote, that you created is a very condescending one with a lot of bait and switches, a lot of false compliments, I would say, sarcasm and so on.

And so I agree with you that it was much more about elevating Pedro than denigrating Kershaw. I don't generally have, especially for long pieces, a lot of faith, especially for long pieces that appear on the front page of major national sports sites, I don't have a ton of faith in all readers to suss out the nuance of the author's intent. So I'm actually sort of surprised that you didn't get a lot more widespread hatred either over your use of advanced stats or over just denigrating this, you know, the greatest in the sport at the moment? Yeah, no, I remember angry Dodgers fans, but on the whole, I think people got it and it totally didn't, you know, like the condescending Pedro attitude was not at all Pedro's actual attitude. I think he had tweeted or said something very complimentary about Kershaw shortly before I wrote that piece. So yeah, I think people mostly took it in the spirit it was intended. But that was one of my first pieces for Grantland, I think. And so there was some backlash and comments section. I think Grantland still had a comments section at that point, perhaps, maybe.

And so there definitely was some like dawning awakening in me that this was a larger audience and that the reception to this piece was not the same as it would have been at Baseball Perspectives. But overall, it was not too painful. All right. So that ran on September 16th, 2014 in his final two starts

of that year, he won both games, which pushed his record to 21 and three, uh, which is, uh, which looks different than 19 and three on a baseball card. He struck out 20 in 13 innings in those two starts and walked only three. He then went on to last year have a season that was from May on, I would argue, the greatest he's ever been. And I have argued might be the greatest any pitcher has ever been. Yeah. And over a four-month span. And this year he has started six games. He has struck out 54 and walked three. He has struck out 54 batters and walked three batters. He has a 1.96 ERA and he's going on. I don't have the fun fact in front of me, but I think he's I think he's geez, I don't remember if I tweeted this or if I was waiting for him to get to 1,000, but I believe he's now got more than 1,000 innings with a sub-2 ERA.

In fact, let's see. Probably not. I think you can only go like 925 innings with a sub-2 ERA at this point. And this, in a sense, like I said, in a sense, last year was maybe arguably the best he's ever been. And in one sense, you could argue that maybe this year is the best he's ever been. He's even better. He's got the highest ERA plus of his career at the moment. He's got a 1.83 FIP, which is only two hundredths higher than it was in 2014 and adjusted.

For the offensive context, it's actually actually better he's got the lowest whip of his career by a ton his whip right now is 0.72 as a starter and he has struck out 18 batters for every walk and so i just wanted to bring this uh this column up because i wanted to know if you're if if if it's worth reconsidering worth reconsider reconsidering the Pedro versus Kershaw argument, prime. Yeah, I guess one way of saying it is yes, that. Would you still, if you had thought of this idea yesterday instead of in September 16th, 2014, do you think you could still get away with writing it? 16th, 2014, do you think you could still get away with writing it? And I guess secondarily, is it really, I guess, I guess I want to know, is it fair to say that anybody is better,

has been better than Kershaw? I mean, I'm not saying that you have to argue that Kershaw's the greatest of all time or anything like that, but is really there anything that Kershaw hasn't done? And I'll leave that out there because I know your answer and I have a response to it. Okay. I'm not sure what it is yet. When BP did that Kershaw day, I think about six months after the Pedro Kershaw article we're talking about, there was one article I remember about how Kershaw was getting better. Yeah. Was it Jeff Long who wrote that?

It was. Yeah, I think it was Jeff Long. Yeah. And at the time it just seemed like, it seemed unrealistic sort of. I mean, it was a fun, compelling argument, but it seemed hard to imagine that he could actually still be evolving and improving as a pitcher based on what we know about how pitchers typically age and how incredible he had been to that point. I mean, I guess his last season was not really better than his 2014.

No, the season as a whole wasn't. Although, like I said, I think that the first month was so abnormal, particularly on batted ball stuff, that we all knew. Like we were all like wildly disregarding it. And then just as you might start to go, wait a minute, is there something here? He became something better, I would say, than he's ever been. I'll read. I'm going to read Jeff Long's paragraph. Not long ago,

I was looking at which pitchers improved their K percentage minus walk percentage the most from 2013 to 2014. I wasn't shocked to see many great pitchers near the top of the list, but I was shocked to see Clayton Kershaw right up there at the top. From 2013 to last season, Kershaw improved his K minus walk by eight percentage points, going from 20% to 28%. He was both the best pitcher in baseball in 2013 and also among the most improved pitchers in baseball in 2014. Holy crap, he's getting better. And yes, this fact has gone overlooked. Right, yeah.

And he arguably, I'm arguing, not everybody would, I'm arguing has also gotten better since that was written. Yeah, well, certainly his start to the season has been about as good as he's ever been. So I wouldn't think to write about that topic today. I don't think it would occur to me as easily as it did at the time. And I think I had, I don't know if there was one inspiration for that piece, but I sort of used as a foil an article that I think was on the Washington Post website, maybe, about like how Kershaw was, you know, the best pitcher ever and how no one else compared. And I think the Post didn't even mention Pedro for some reason, and so I sort of used that as the imagined affront that my fictional Pedro would be responding to.

But yeah, I don't think—I mean, the longer Kershaw does this, the less interesting it is to make any kind of argument that someone was better. I mean, a week ago we were talking about whether Jake Arrieta is better, right, than Pedro's peak. Yeah, for a year or so. But Kershaw's sustained dominance for three-plus seasons, and that's not even counting his two-plus elite seasons before that and his two-plus really good seasons before that and his two plus really good seasons before that is getting to the point where even if maybe the very very pinnacle of his performance was not quite up to the level of Pedro's I mean it's just once you era and ballpark adjust and do all that to Pedro's stats it's just really hard to have any equal for him. He was outpacing the league by such a dramatic extent at the time.

But Kershaw's is maybe lasting longer than Pedro did at a similar level. I don't know. I mean, Pedro was great for quite a while, but his greatest was, what, two seasons was his like otherworldly. Yeah. Yeah. He had the two that it you just cannot win an argument arguing against them. Yeah. They're so far beyond every other two seasons.

But the peak was really six or seven. Yeah. Right. So I mean maybe Kershaw is more durable by the standards of his era than Pedro was, but I don't know. I mean, Pedro broke down eventually, but he wasn't not durable for most of his peak. So as I said, right now, it wouldn't be a really fun comparison to do because he's made it pretty close or at least close enough that it's no fun to poke holes in it by comparing him to Pedro. He's also, over the course of his career, and this was part of what we talked about during Kershaw Day, he developed into a good hitter after being a horrible hitter early on, and he now adds roughly half a win compared to the average pitcher with his bat. And, of course, he's got one of the great

pickoff moves he's got one of the great base running suppression uh games in the sport too i don't know how much you factor those in or how much you would you should it's harder to do because you have to look at different sections of the stat page in some cases but but yeah i mean that counts yeah okay so then um so here's the, here's, here's what I want to ask you. Um, so if you look at Pedro's peak, which, uh, I'll just define as 1997 to 2003, which was seven years from age 25 to 31, he had a 2.20 ERA and a 2.26 FIP, which are both very good. Now, if you look at Kershaw's currently six-year run in which he's finished first, second, first, first, third in Cy Young voting, and then this year. By the way, first, second, first, first, third.

I mean, really, R.A. Dickey having a good year is like the least predictable way for his Cy Young streak to be broken up. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, if you look at that six-year run, he's got a 2.11 ERA and a 2.30 FIP. So, you know, he's got a slightly better ERA and a very slightly worse FIP. And then, of course, we would have to adjust for the league, for the level of competition, for the ballpark, and more than anything else for the era. And so if you look at Kershaw, his ERA plus in that time is 173. And if you look at Pedro Martinez, his ERA plus during his peak is 213. And those aren't that close. That's like 40%. That's like 40. That's a lot. That's a big, big, big, big difference.

And the point of bringing this up is that I'm wondering if there is a case to be made that that's misleading, that it's not necessarily always accurate to compare using error-adjusted stats, that it's good, that it's better than not usually, but that it's not always accurate. And I don't have a... I'm really bringing it up as a question. I don't have a great reason for it but let me give you a hypothetical say you had two guys who were who were clones one was clayton kershaw and the other was he's also clayton kershaw they're clones okay right and one of them stays on earth and pitches in the national league just like he's doing. And another one goes to some other universe far away where all the hitters are exactly like all the hitters here.

Okay? All right. So you've got Clayton Kershaw and you've got an exact identical group of hitters. So Clayton Kershaw's ERA on Earth is going to be 2.11. And his FIP is going to be 2.30, right? And on the other planet, his RA is going to be 2.11 and his FIP is going to be 2.30. Okay. Everything is identical. Okay. Yeah. Now the only thing is that on this other planet, all the pitchers are better. This,

this planet has figured out pitching. This planet understands pitching in a way that we simple earthlings just cannot. They are a far more advanced species, but they put all their effort into pitching. And so Clayton Kershaw on earth is competing against 600 earthlings. And Clayton Kershaw on the other planet is competing against 600 other planetlings. And those guys are all insanely good. So Kershaw with the 2.20 ERA here has an ERA plus of 173. But on that other planet, he's only average relative to other pitchers. So in this scenario, is Kershaw on the other planet actually worse? Is it fair to say that he's worse? Maybe less valuable. Maybe there's less of a scarce resource there, but he is just as good. By definition, he is just as good. And his competition in the batter's box is just as good.

It is only that there is more good pitching. And so is it possible that what we were seeing in the 90s with Pedro was not necessarily that Pedro was that much better than the hitters relative to Kershaw is to this generation's hitters, but that in fact it was a bad era for pitching, that this was the height of the 10-staff era, that they could not develop a good pitch. Nobody knew how to develop a good hard-throwing pitcher. And so there just was bad pitching. There was bad pitching everywhere. There were a few guys who broke through because they were invulnerable. Randy Johnson, one of the

greatest of all time. Greg Maddox, one of the greatest of all time, Roger Clemens, one of the greatest of all time. Uh, but the league as a whole was just bad at pitching, not bad at hitting, bad at pitching and that the hitters today are not bad at hitting, but they're, the pitchers are better at pitching. So in this analogy, the earth other planet analogy, can we say that era-adjusted stats are doing—are sort of an illusion, are misleading us? That they're telling us—that we think they're telling us a story about Kershaw or about the offense. But in fact, they're telling us a completely different story about Jeremy Bonderman versus—name a good young pitcher, any Garrett Cole.

Yeah, I think that's possible. I've seen some research and I think done some research, and I know that during Pedro's era, there was more variance between players than there is now. Like the standard deviation was bigger. So you had really good players and you had really bad players. Whereas today, everyone is more tightly grouped together. And I've seen some speculation that maybe that had to do with PEDs and those being so prevalent in the game at the time.

And maybe they really benefited some players and other players they didn't or those players weren't taking them. And other players, they didn't, or those players weren't taking them. And so maybe that artificially increased the separation between players in some way. Or maybe it's just a quality of competition thing. And teams and players are just better today. And they're better at filling all of the roster spots on their teams with good players as opposed to just filler Or maybe it was Just a cyclical thing where There were some really ridiculously Great pitchers or at least they looked ridiculously Great because there were also some bad pitchers So yeah I think There's probably some difference Between eras that

Something like ERA Plus doesn't quite Capture and of course if you go back Far enough as we've done on other episodes Then you're basically asking the How good would Babe Ruth be today question, right? Just, you know, how much has the overall talent level improved? And would that guy, that's not, to me that is a line of logic separate from the one that I am trying to get at. Yeah, but even the one that you are getting at, I think it's possible, yeah, that maybe that was just a weird time he was in that allowed the best pitchers to look even better relative to the typical pitcher. For Kershaw to match Pedro on an ERA plus level, at this point in this era, at that ballpark that he pitches in and against NL offenses,

I suspect that you would have to see him putting up maybe even sub-1 ERAs. In fact, I suspect you would. I bet to match Pedro's two best seasons, he would need to have sub-1 ERAs. And I wonder if there's just something in the sport that makes that essentially impossible that other than Jake Arrieta, other than Jake Arrieta, who is so far beyond my comprehension, that I don't think that that's necessarily a mold that I'm willing to, to treat as realistic. I don't know that that's necessarily a mold that I'm willing to treat as realistic. I don't know what to say about Jake Arrieta still.

But do you think that that is – let me put it this way, Ben. If Pedro were pitching in this environment, do you think he would have had sub-one ERAs? Or is it just impossible? Is BABIP too much a part of the game and too predictably unpredictable and too out of the pitcher's control? And are there various forces, invisible forces and sometimes visible forces in the game that create this kind of parity or gravity toward certain median performances that just make it impossible? You know, I asked you the question, would Pedro, would that Pedro in an era like this one, everything the same, have had sub one ERAs?

Well, that was such an extreme outlier that it does seem like if you change the conditions at all, that it would increase the chance that the outcome would be different somehow. So I don't know what it would be exactly, unless it's the possibilities that we've sort of touched on in this episode. But yeah, I mean, it seems improbable that he could have been that good, I guess is just one way to say it, which is why we love him and appreciate him and marvel at his stats from that era. But it just I'm open to the possibility just because it was so extreme and crazy and unparalleled that there is something subtle that maybe would make it slightly less crazy and extreme if conditions had been different in some way. crazy and extreme if conditions had been different in some way. All right. Well, I wrote about Kershaw today at Baseball Perspectives. So if you want a little bit more on Kershaw's greatness, you can go read about that.

It's specifically about his quote unquote mistakes. And I think otherwise, that's it. This was pretty fun. Yeah, I do. I want more on Kershaw's greatness. All right. I want an unlimited amount on that. Okay, so that is it for today. You can, as always, support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. And today's five Patreon salutes go to John Fairfield, Leah DiBrali, Russell Bryce, Charles Johnson, and Olaf Jorgensen. Thank you. Again, our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, is out now. You can just stroll into any bookstore and buy it.

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