Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 886: Take My Pujols, Please

Episode Date: May 18, 2016

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about trading Mike Trout, David Ortiz’s impending retirement, analyzing scouts, judging batted balls on TV, Clayton Kershaw and more.

My makeup's on now Who am I? A magician, a maker Who am I? Who am I? Hello. Hey. How are you today? Pretty good. I'm great. I'm wearing my TV makeup still, so I feel like I can conquer the world. I leave it on for hours whenever I get back from MLB Network. I just admire myself and my fake complexion. You should just walk the streets of New York trying to be a man on the street, just looking for TV crews.

You could be like in Nightcrawler Except instead of the cameraman You're just trying to be the witness Yeah You just get a police scanner Hunt down accidents And then be the guy who's like Yeah, I heard a loud boom Just a loiter

Exactly He seems so quiet I never thought he would be the one Yeah, exactly And they just marvel at how telegenic I look Yeah, I look like Snooki from the chin up and Ben Lindbergh from the neck down. So I'll be sad when I remove it later and remember how pale I am. Anything you want to banter about before we get to emails?

No. Okay, then we will get to emails. All right, we got a couple trout trade emails, responses to when we talked about a trout trade But these are asking about Albert Pujols and his potential Inclusion in such a trade So one is from Jeff The other is from Nathan

I will read Nathan's Because it's shorter How does the discourse surrounding hypothetical Trout trades change if it is Framed as a salary dump rather than a prospect gathering venture. The Angels owe Trout and Pujols a combined $260 million after this season ends. Would the Angels be willing to accept less in return for Trout, if they could unburden themselves, of Pujols' contract? If so, how much less is acceptable?

Is there a team out there willing to pay Pujols until he is 41 just so they can have Trout in his prime? What would the Angels do with all this money? And Jeff was essentially asking the same thing about the Cardinals specifically, but if the trade is just we'll give you Mike Trout and you have to take Albert Pujols, who says no? What's the math? Well, so we did the Trout math the last time we talked about this, and you figured that teams will be paying them something like $3.5 million per win

over the next four-plus seasons. And Pujols would go a long way toward balancing that out in the other direction, right? He is owed $25 million this season, and then $26, $27, $28, $29, $30 in the five seasons after that. And what would he be projected to produce? Do you have a long-term Pocota forecast for the rest of his contract? Yeah, I probably do. But first, do that math for me too. So he's owed owed 140 million over the next five seasons plus say uh 20 million the rest of this year so 160 or so due to him on his contract and that's through 2021 yes okay so pakoda's long-term forecast for him is that he would add about four wins uh in total which that including the rest of this season that includes the rest of this season uh-huh let's see he uh he's at replacement level

by both uh warp and by uh baseball references model of war this year although was uh you know a relatively valuable ball player the previous two seasons he's been a two or three win player those seasons but he's old so we're got uh we've got uh roughly 40 wins at 135 million and roughly four wins at 160 million so we're talking 44 wins at 300 million that's a that's a relative bargain yeah 6.8 million per win yeah On the other hand, nobody pays market value for players as good as Mike Trout. The weird twist in the market logic is that the very, very high-end players don't get paid enough per win. And so Trout would probably be worth $300 million if he were out looking for a four-and-a-half-year deal right now, but he wouldn't get it. if he were out looking for a four and a half year deal right now,

but he wouldn't get it. And I don't know if a team would think, well, this is a great way of sneaking such a move past my owner, and they would really love to pay Mike Trout $300 million for four and a half years, but they just can't convince their owner or their fellow owners to do it, and this is a crafty way to do it. Or if they would still think that Trout is not worth that much It would be interesting to know how much Albert Pujols would get if he were a free agent right now

Because he's a four win player Over the next five years In total But he'd get a lot more than $30 million Right? If he were a free agent right now Do you think? I don't think so

I mean I don't think there's any way a team would give him a contract of that length. Right, yeah. But don't you think that he would, if he were a free agent right now, you don't think he'd get like 3 and 51 or something? I don't think so. Okay, all right. Yeah, I mean, I think of him now as sort of fragile, but, I mean, he's played almost the entire season the last two years.

It was just the year before that, but, of course, he's been hobbled a lot of the time that he's been playing. He was an all-star last year. He hit 40 home runs last year. Yeah, he was, but he still wasn't all that valuable. I mean— He was three wins valuable. Three wins, yeah, yeah okay and four wins

the year before that that's not nothing but that's a lot more than nothing in fact it's seven more than nothing yeah so 351 ah man i don't think so i think people would be so scared off by the foot thing and in his past and just how durable he'd be. And I don't know. I don't see it. Anyway, the point is that I think that if you were willing to take Pujols' contract in full, you'd still have to give up something to get Trout. And that's even assuming that the Angels would have any interest in selling this type of trade to their fan base or to their owner. And I don't think they would.

I think that it's a much, much harder sell for them if all they're getting back is the loss of a player that they've been marketing aggressively as a Hall of Fame superstar. Yeah, right. I mean, that's two banners you have to take down. Yeah, they'd have to redo that whole airport mural. Yeah. So even in a fantasy trade world, I don't think that pools cancels out trout. But I think in reality— If you were going to do it, though, just to wrap up the math.

So we said $6.8 million per win is projected what you'd be paying. And say over the next four plus years, I don't know what the market value of a win will be, but 9 million, 10 million. And so you're talking about a surplus value of, gosh, I don't know. 100 million plus. That much? Yeah. Well, if it's 9 million at 44 wins at nine million is 400 million and they're getting paid 300 million so you're still talking about you're still talking you're both contracts combined we're talking about 300 6.8 million per win yeah you're talking about 300

million for 44 wins yeah and so if you if you're paying nine million a win then you'd pay 400 million for those wins and so that's a surplus value of $100 million. So that's two top 10 prospects. You're still, you would need to give up. You would need to take on Pujols and still give up two very, very, very good prospects. Yeah. I don't think this trade is going to happen. If you were, let's say that your fans didn't matter and your owner was all aboard.

going to happen. If you were, let's say that your fans didn't matter and your owner was all aboard, if you wanted to rebuild a team, would you rather have this kind of package for your Trout? Would you rather have a clear $300 million in space before the 2017 Superclass and still get a couple of very, very good prospects? Or would you rather have the type of package that we've talked about that's like six or seven great names, young players. I wonder whether it changes anything that the Angels system is so thin. You know, you just kind of want to reseed that with bodies to replace the just waste of space that's there now. Yeah. I don't know whether that changes anything.

Maybe it does because it's just harder to use money to acquire young talent now because of all the spending restrictions. So you probably still want the prospects, I would think. Yeah, I would rather want the prospects too. All right. This question, you might be a good person to answer this question because you've done some articles that were sort of about this in a way. It's from another Sam who is a Patreon supporter. It's from another Sam who is a Patreon supporter. And he says,

When a batter makes contact with a pitch for the duration of the shot prior to when the camera cuts to the ball, how much weight does the experienced baseball TV broadcast viewer place on the following in order to gauge the likely outcome of that contact, foul balls included? And he has a bullet point list here. The appearance of the ball off the bat, speed and trajectory. The sound of the ball off the bat. speed and trajectory. The sound of the ball off the bat. The announcer's words and tone of voice. The body language of the batter, pitcher, and catcher. The crowd noise or other.

And he goes on to say, note the announcer and crowd sometimes are not quick enough. If that is the case, the question becomes, at what point does the viewer form a confident opinion? Also, has the viewer learned to specifically Ignore any of these crowd noise They're awful how often are these Indicators as perceived by the viewer In direct conflict There's one other thing that he doesn't

Mention but it is simply The sight of the Appearance of the ball on the bat You get to see the ball Hit the bat and I do i i think that you can kind of tell if it's near the barrel right yeah i think so okay and also you can uh there's how squared up the batter is just how good the swing looks so what ben's referring to i think is that i did a couple of uh blind babbip tests where i took pitchers starts and I made gifs of every batted ball they allowed,

but I cut the gif off at the moment of contact. So you saw the pitch. You saw whether it was a good pitch or a bad pitch, whether the catcher had to move his glove a lot or not, and how square the batter seemed to be at contact. And then you had to guess whether It was a hit or whether It was an out and I think the point of this Was that Babip is

Extremely fluky in small samples I think though I can't remember So that's what Ben's talking about So now as to the answer There's a baseball game on in front of me right now That is muted and I have not found myself Being misled by the lack of sound.

Uh-huh. Well, you often look at crowd reactions in your articles and it seems like the crowd is way too slow to give you much of an indicator before the camera cuts to the ball, right? No, there's a split second. There are three stages of identifying the outcome of the ball. The first is the first shot, the establishing shot. The batter hits the ball and it leaves the screen. Like I just saw, okay, line drive, all right. Then you've got the shot of the fielder reacting to the ball, and that's the third. But in between, there is a moment, a microsecond, when you're influenced by the sound.

a moment, a microsecond, when you're influenced by the sound. And I know this because a couple days ago, I found myself being very frustrated by the Wrigley fans this year. And they've been horrible. They've been really disorientingly bad on fly balls. And I asked Sahadev whether there's a good explanation for this. And somebody offered a very good explanation, which is that Wrigley has a higher than normal number of fans that are under overhangs. So when there's a ball hitting the air, they actually can't see it. And that makes a lot of sense to me. But I wouldn't be upset about it just for elitist reasons. I was upset because I wanted a ball to be a home run or not be a home run. I had a rooting interest at that moment. And the crowd misled me. And I was annoyed that something had been robbed from me when I discovered that the crowd was wrong. So I don't think the crowd or the broadcaster's reaction is

totally helpless, especially because for a lot of fly balls, if you're talking about fly balls that could be 15 feet in front of the warning track or could be over the wall by 15 feet, you're not going to see that ball come down and you can't necessarily really tell even by how the outfielder is moving back. So you need the announcer in particular to give you an idea. And so I think in that particular, in that specific type of play, I think the announcer plays a huge role. Whereas for a lot of, man, who is that? Wow. I'm looking at a guy on the Reds who does not look like a baseball player at all. I want to see who this is. This guy has got the least ball player hair and facial hair. All right. We talked about the Reds on a podcast. Yeah. Mark. Yeah. Cross it off. I will say though, that it's close to 90% the appearance of the ball

off the bat speed and trajectory. Uh, I think it's the, it's the, the way that the ball leaves the frame. You can pretty much tell. I don't, I'd love to, now I need to, to do a, I need to do a new experiment now where instead of cutting it off at the moment of contact, I cut it off. The moment the camera cuts it off. Exactly. And see how we do. But that's a less interesting, because I wouldn't have a point there. I had a point about the BABIP test. I wouldn't have a point here, but I'm curious. And I think we're pretty good at it. I think we're pretty good. Like you can't tell the difference between a grounder to the third basementeman and a grounder in the hole that's always a misleading one there are certainly fly balls like this one is wow you guys i can't believe

you're listening to me watch a baseball game mike navoli just uh seemed to pop one up and uh it took a leaping catch at the wall uh for it to an out. So I was misled on that one. And I was and I was literally just about to say that there are pop ups to center field that I misled on where I think that it's a pop up and it ends up being a huge home run. Like there's a particular swing in a particular kind of fly ball when a guy squares one up to center field that you think that it's popped up and really it's a home run i was about to say that and mike napoli hit it um so yeah the ground or that and then that's about it line drive caught by the first baseman is a frequent surprise

and sometimes a flare the flare into the outfield it's hard to know whether it's going to be enough of a flare or whether it's going to carry Otherwise I think we're pretty good So I'll say mostly ball off the bat, speed and trajectory I would agree I think I'm probably better I think most people who watched A lot of baseball on TV are probably

Better at gauging From that second Than they would be from an equivalent second In the park, would you agree with that? I mean, it depends where you're sitting, obviously. But if you are off to the side and you have some oblique angle, it's relatively easy to be misled by the ball off the bat. Whereas if you are used to the center field or near center field angle,

you really get a good read on it almost every time. center field angle, you really get a good read on it almost every time. Yeah, watching a baseball game on TV is much better than watching from really any part of the field for both batted ball detection and for pitch calling. So yeah, I would agree. The view from where we are is the best. And I don't know if the view from where we are is the best or if we just have off his retirement. Why would he do that? Wouldn't he want to go out on top with a great final year instead of dwindling away like many stars of the past? The way I see it, there are two options. Option one, announce his final season, kills it this year. Red Sox have a good year. We all celebrate Ortiz and how great he is. Sure, we question if it could be continued. What if? Yada yada. Option two, renounces retirement, comes back and has great he is. Sure, we question if it could be continued. What if? Yada, yada.

Option two, renounces retirement, comes back and has a mediocre season. We're all disappointed. Say we would have relished him going out on top. So I think there are a few reasons why it would be in his interest to stay. I mean, one, he would continue to make lots of money. I don't know whether that makes a difference to David Ortiz At this point but I won't Answer for him and say that it doesn't So obviously he has lots of earning Potential left if he continues to play

Like a superstar so that's one thing And another thing Is that you know he probably just really likes Playing baseball it's probably fun To play baseball that's his career And a lot of players don't know Exactly what they want to do post-career and they miss playing. And so if you can continue to play at a high level and have a

higher percentage of your life, be big league baseball player, then that's maybe a good thing for your general happiness. Of course, he also has the Hall of Fame case coming up, which will probably be somewhat divisive, I would think. I don't know. It's one where the stats, the Hall of Fame benchmarks still say he's probably not there yet. But he has excelled so much in the postseason and been such a high profile player and so much fun to watch that I think people are looking for a reason To put him in really not just Red Sox Fans but everyone I'd like to see David Ortiz in the Hall of Fame If I could you know justify that To myself so the longer he plays

At a high level and the more Value he accumulates The easier it is to sign off On him being a Hall of Famer And then there's the potential for Doubt or regret about whether he retired too soon. If he's spring training next year and he's coming off a great season and suddenly he thinks, maybe I could have played another year. Maybe that would have been fun.

And you'll never know. He'll never know what would have happened. And so that's kind of a risk of retiring too early. But on the other hand there's something to be said for going out on top and for never looking bad on a baseball field yeah i uh i think that going out on top is is overrated so do i you don't get any points for it yeah like nobody you don't that doesn't count it doesn't count for anything like it's maybe some people will remember it but like to what end i i mean to what end all of this obviously is is the question i mean all of it is to no end but but particularly i think that there's i think that it feels like it'll be cool to go out on top but then it just it happens and then

you're you're still out of the limelight. I mean, you still like, it doesn't really extend your, your viability in the world any longer. So I, I would, I would guess that most people who go out on top would have a hard time after the fact articulating what they got out of that. Now the benefit of going out on top is if you're, if you've been driven your whole life by a intense fear of failure, it's just a complete drive to not fail, to not ever have to lose. And you're basically just, you wake up every morning because you are so anxious that today is going to be the day figure that the world figures out you're a fraud. Uh, then there is something to cashing out your chips

and going home. And so I could see that. I don't get the sense that that's David Ortiz, but maybe that's all of us. And so, you know, that would maybe make some sense. And certainly nobody wants to go through a terrible season, which if you play long enough, either you will go through a terrible season or you will be rejected by the industry. And both of those are going to be bad feelings. So simply in avoiding that feeling, uh, sure. But then the question is, uh, well, why not do that when you're 31? He could have left when he was 31. You could have,

if that's what you're, if that's, what's driving you, uh, then you're probably going to be, uh, the type of person who ends up with regrets anyway. So two food analogies, kind of food analogies come to mind here. One is when you're a kid and you don't want to finish your green beans and your mom or dad says, there are children starving in China. And I mean, that's kind of a nonsensical. I mean, it is a non sequitur in a sense, because it's not like mom's shipping those beans to children in China. And in fact, if that's an option, probably she should because you're well fed and the kid in China or anywhere else were starving in 1985 was not affected one way or the other by whether you finished your food. But the idea was that you should be grateful for what you have because life is scarce resources and you are lucky enough to not be one of the people

affected by that scarcity. And at the very least, the very least, the very least you can do is not waste and to not take that for granted. And David Ortiz, I think has probably heard or been around or even said this sort of cliche that goes around baseball that most guys don't get to decide when to hang them up. The game tells them when they're done. And there's this omnipresent fear that the game is going to tell you when you're done, that there's this grim reaper that goes around baseball telling players when they're done. And all players want after that day, after they're told they're done, is another chance, is another game. They miss it. And so for David Ortiz to say, I've had enough food, I'm going to throw this food away. No reason he should feel this way, but I wonder if some players might consider that to be

wasteful or disrespectful to all the people who are trying so hard, all the players, all their peers, all their teammates who wanted so desperately to keep playing. If you have a gift, if you have been given a gift, you should use it. I wonder if that's a philosophy that baseball players ascribe to. The other one is the, I think it's like a Groucho Marx thing or something, but maybe it's Yogi. It might be Yogi. Such small portions. Yeah, exactly. If you get to the point that you're not good at baseball anymore and it's not fun to play anymore, then you can stop. If you're fearful that it's going to get bad, you can always stop. You don't have to keep going. And he's clearly not there yet. Maybe he's bored by the whole thing. Maybe he doesn't like playing. And that's a different question. But if the question is why go out on

top to avoid the bad season next year, well, you can always stop next season. It's simpler to say that. It seems to me that there used to be a lot more mid-year retirements. It seems like that used to be a thing that would happen. Like Mike Schmidt, for instance, retired in the middle of a year. I can't remember really anybody good retiring mid-year anymore Yeah, you can't cut off the retirement tour mid-year

Gotta get everywhere Yeah, so maybe he can't do that because he wants to get the tour And once you lock yourself into a tour Then you've gotta play through the whole year But yeah, I'm pretty good at predicting hits It turns out, even on mute, just so you know Such small portions, yeah I'm pretty good at predicting hits, it turns out, even on mute, just so you know. Such small portions, yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think I've said this before. I've said it somewhere that I don't really believe in the concept of legacy tarnishing. Right. I don't think that's really something that happens. I think even the athletes or anyone in any field who we remember for their final act that was not up to their previous standards, whether it's Willie Mays or Michael Jordan or Derek Jeter, you know, notice that I just named like three of the most famous, revered, respected athletes in the last 50 years. So it doesn't really matter how you go out. We might remember that that was part of your career, too, but it doesn't really tarnish what came before. We will still remember you as the guy who was the best player before he stopped being the best player.

So that's fine. I don't think there's really any cost to that. It's different if you're talking about learning about a personality flaw or something. If you get in some horrible legal trouble or we find out that you were a bad person the entire time, that's different. But if we're just talking about your on-field performance, I don't think it really matters. Maybe it matters to some players if they're really hyper-competitive and the thought of failing and being exposed in front of everyone, like the Joe DiMaggio idea about how he always wanted to be his best because there might be someone in the stands seeing him for the first time. That's something

that really bothers you. And the idea of struggling and looking bad is just unpalatable to you. Then maybe it would be worth retiring before that happens. Otherwise, if you're just talking about your perception, I don't think it really really matters I still lament Mike Messina's retirement He was, I don't know whether he has regretted it For a single instant But he retired after his age 39 season Which was great He got Cy Young votes

He threw 200 innings He was a 5-win pitcher And I lament it just because He was one of my favorite pitchers to watch But also because I think he's a clear Hall of Famer, but the rest of the voters don't seem to agree. And you never know if another year or two of decent pitching might have pushed him over the top for some of those pitchers. So I would have liked him to hang on. Then again, that was his first 200-inning season in four or five years, and he'd been an average or below average pitcher in three of the previous

four years. So maybe he figured that he was going to regress, that he wasn't going to be able to duplicate this performance. Maybe he was just honest in his self-evaluation. I don't know. I'd like David Ortiz to continue to be good at baseball for as long as he has the ability to do that. I also wonder whether we should support the idea that a player who isn't good at baseball ceases to have value in baseball. Because I think you could maybe make the case that Jason Giambi's final three years, he contributed more to the game in those final three years than he did in his career before that, in his entire career before that. And he was terrible in those final three years. I think that I'd be interested to ask Jason Giambi if, in fact, he found those three years to be more fulfilling

or certainly adding to his experience as a major league ballplayer. You got the sense that he did, that it would have been a regret to him if he hadn't played those three final years, even though he was contributing nothing. And I mean, certainly if you look at the amount of love that we have for our old ballplayers, for our Bartolos, for our Ichiro pitching, you know, for our Giambis, for our Moyers, the sport doesn't stop loving you. The sport actually really loves the young and really loves the elderly more than anybody else. Unless the elderly are making lots of money, maybe that might hurt. Yeah. If you're making a lot of money in your bed, then you're less lovable. Yeah. But otherwise, those can really be your golden years. By the way, Sam didn't mention,

but I've thought of another category that is, I think, maybe even more important for determining whether the ball is a hit. And that category, it's actually a binary. Is Alfredo Simone the pitcher? And if he is, it's usually a hit, I'm finding. That's true. We are probably biased in a good way just by knowing who the batter is and who the pitcher is. biased in a in a good way just by knowing who the batter is and who the pitcher is so i'm looking at alfredo simone simon's baseball reference page and it's got a pronunciation guide yeah s-i-g-h in all caps and then m-u-h-n uh in lowercase so simon simon okay it's also got his name though

which is s-i-m-o-n with an accent mark over oh see Spanish Spanish it has a pronunciation guide it's a perfectly phonetic language that has accent marks over the syllable that is to be stressed uh-huh and so I'm now very torn yeah that's a tough one I think I'd lean toward the accent mark. Okay. Oh my goodness. Alfredo Simone, you are so bad at pitching. Yep. I thought it was a home run and it was actually off the yellow line at the top of the wall. So you do need- I'm going to give you that one. Okay.

All right. Play index. All right. So win probability added at a career level, especially for pitchers, is interesting because at the top of the leaderboard you have, what do you have? All the best pitchers, right? Yeah. Just like, for instance, home runs. You would have all the best hitters at the top. But at the very bottom of home runs, you have all the worst hitters. You have basically all the guys who had zero home runs.

And for OPS or batting average or anything like that, you'd have all the worst hitters. You have basically all the guys who had zero home runs. And for OPS or batting average or anything like that, you'd have all the worst hitters. You'd have the very worst hitters who ever played. You'd have your John Lesters and your Justin Verlanders and Bartolo Colons and your other pitchers. But when probability added at a career level, you have all the best pitchers at the top, but you don't necessarily have all the worst pitchers at the bottom because it's a counting stat in both directions. And in order to accrue negative win probability added, you have to be playing. And in order to be playing, you have to be good enough to be playing. And so I – it's all hits.

They're all hits. So I wondered who – what the profile is of the guy at the bottom of the crew and probability at it. I had a few different guesses for what it could be. Like I thought maybe it actually is just the worst guy and maybe you can do enough damage in a couple of years, or maybe it's somebody who we think of as pretty good. Like maybe it's Freddie Garcia. I don't know. Maybe it is Freddie Garcia. So I look to see who the all-time negative win probability added leader is for a pitcher. And I'm curious who you have in mind. Who is your guess? And I'll just ask you the, let's say the active leader in negative win probability added. Who would you have in mind?

Give me a picture. An innings eater who is not all that good so name name one of the rotation type guy name one i was thinking of like levon hernandez or someone of that ilk for the last several seasons of his career okay but uh he is not an active pitcher i'll say uh aaron harang all right aaron harang good guys let me see where a Aaron Horang is. Aaron Horang is not in the top 300 all time. Sorry, not in the top 200 all time hasn't pitched this year, but the active leader is Kevin Correa. And so Kevin Correa is, is Aaron Horang, but worse. Yeah, that's a good one. And so that kind of answers it. It is someone who's an innings eater, but is, is really bad. And so not even, not even kind of good. Aaron Horang, you'll recall was really good for a few years. Not even that. Kyle Kendrick is, I think, number three in active pitchers behind only Roberto Hernandez

in between them. Of pitchers who have any chance of catching Correa, I would say Bud Norris has a chance. He's, I think, fourth or fifth in active pitchers. Edwin Jackson is around there. fourth or fifth inactive pitchers. Edwin Jackson is around there. And maybe Jordan Lyles might actually be my pick for who's most likely to catch Kevin Correa. He's at minus 7.4 right now. Correa is at minus 11. So he's done most of the work and he's only 25. So Jordan Lyles has a chance. Another answer is a different answer because Kevin Correa is a starter, was mostly a starter in his career. And I wonder if a reliever could get anywhere close to those levels. And in fact, a reliever is virtually tied with him. Correa is seventh all time. Brian Williams is eighth all time and was primarily a reliever in his career.

Do you remember Brian Williams at all? I don't really. Brian Williams was a former first round pick with, I think, the Astros. He was certainly a player whose rookie card I would have put in a protective shell at the time, but just not a very good career. Right-hander, pitched a fairly long time, 250 career appearances. And the main thing with Brian Williams, the problem with Brian Williams, is that in high leverage situations, he allowed a 336-404-511 line, which is really quite the line. He was a better pitcher otherwise.

I mean, his OPS was over 100 points lower in either of the other two leverage states. So he probably was not that bad. And it's only about 400 plate appearances, so that you could even argue that that was just a sample size issue, but it doesn't matter. It defines his career in such a way that he can never recover. But the all-timer, the all-timer way above Kevin Correa even at 16 wins lost is a guy named Jack Fisher. And Jack Fisher pitched from 1959 to 1969. I know a little bit about Jack Fisher now. His Sabre bio written by Bill Pruden, which is just as good as all the other Sabre bios, begins, Jack Fisher, a pitcher whose lowly one loss record was a poor indicator of his ability.

Unfortunately, it was actually just the right indicator of his ability in this, in not only the Sabre bio, but in other things written about him. There's always mention of, of him getting very poor run support that he was a guy who would throw a ton of innings for his teams, but always got poor run support and therefore lost a lot of games. But he also lost a lot of games because according to win probability added, he was doing a lot of games, but he also lost a lot of games because according to win probability added, he was doing a lot of damage to his team's chances. And just to be sure that even win probability added is not distorting things. No pit. I looked on the play index. I sorted for everybody with an ERA plus below 89 sorted by most career innings. And Jack Fisher has more innings

with that bad of an ERA in history. No pitcher has ever thrown more innings with a worse ERA plus than Jack Fisher. So, you know, his black ink on his page, he's got quite a bit. He led the league in losses twice, in runs three times, and in wild pitches once. So that's his black ink. I don't want to make too big a deal out of Jack Fisher for Jack Fisher's sake, but somebody's got to be last and he's last. He's another guy who was much worse in high leverage. His OPS allowed was about 90 points higher in high leverage. And he did pitch a few times in relief in his career. And between those appearances and his starting appearances, his worst inning was the eighth by far, which is a bad inning to have be your worst if you're playing

the win probability added game. So Jack Fisher played mostly for the Orioles, also for the Mets. Those, uh, the Mets of course, in the sixties were horrible. He was on a couple of really bad Orioles teams. He was on a really bad, uh, White Sox team. And I think that to some degree, it wasn't so much that he was getting bad run support as that he was getting bad team support. They didn't have a good enough fifth starter, or I guess maybe fourth starter, to keep him from having to start. He was pretty okay as a reliever in his career, but he was miscast as a starter. Or maybe he wasn't.

Maybe the fact that he ate all those innings. Well, there's a point where your innings are not helping, and the negative 16 career wpa is probably that point um so he ate a lot of innings gave up a lot of runs let's see he's well known for two things before this now he's very well known for three things i'm sure but he's well known for allowing uh roger maris's 60th home run and for allowing ted will' final home run, his final at bat, those cost him 0.11 and 0.12 win probability added respectively of the Williams home run. Quote, I really thought I could throw a fastball by him. And here's how he reacted to that. This is from a piece in the

New Yorker some years later. We went back to Baltimore, probably by train, and got to the hotel room. And I thought I knew what hotel he stayed at in Boston. So I gave him a call and I asked for Ted Williams' room. And I'll be damned, they hooked me up. And Ted answered the phone. And I said, well, I guess I got to congratulate you for, you know, retiring on a home run and everything. He pretty much told me at the time, hey, I want to thank you for challenging me and not really pitching around me or anything. And I said, hell, I'm two runs up in the game. What am I pitching around you for? In fact, footnote, he actually said that the guy on deck was a righty and with Fenway's short left porch, left field porch, he thought, no way I'm pitching around Ted Williams to face a righty. I have never heard of the righty, so maybe he showed up. So I did get to talk to him that night after we got home. One of the sports writers looked it up and he said

that Williams' lifetime was two for 13 off me. So I did all right against him. That's actually not true. Williams was two for eight off him. And Fisher was quoted later in his life as saying two for eight. So somewhere he got bad information from a sports writer. But I'm still not to what I like about Jack Fisher. Jack Fisher was known as Fat Jack. Fat Jack. Fat Jack. You want to guess how fat Fat Jack was in 1960? Like in the 30th percentile of the average today?

He was 6'1 and 215. Sorry, 6'2. 6'2 and 215. 6'2, 215. Fat Jack. I looked up Jack Fisher in the Nyer James Guide to Pitchers because I want to see what he threw. And below him is Freddie Fitzsimmons. And Fitzsimmons was apparently also considered quite fat because this is a piece of writing that they quote that was written in 1946 of Freddie Fitzsimmons. Here we go. Athletically speaking, more like the circumferential dimensions of a short-winded entry in a fat men's bowling league, Fitz was out to lunch when necks were handed out. His head plumped. This is written in public. His head plumps squarely between wide shoulders of a bulging torso that dwarfs short legs.

Pigeon-toed feet held up X number of pounds. As you could see, any time Fat Freddy waddled out, his face aglow like a neon sign. So we've got Fat Jack and Fat Freddy on the same page of this. How fat do you think Fat Freddy was? I mean, he was out to lunch when necks were handed out. So I would guess that he was fatter. He had a worse BMI than Fat Jack. 5'11", 185. There just wasn't much food in those days. Well, there was food. There was more food after fat jack retired because fat jack opened up a bar

he opened up a sports bar called fat jacks in eastern pennsylvania by the way in his wikipedia fisher settled in eastern pennsylvania where he currently lives five blocks from former world heavyweight boxing champion larry holmes in his wikipedia page uh so he Wikipedia page. So he opened Fat Jack's in 1998. I spent a lot of time this afternoon researching Fat Jack's, the restaurant. He has sold it. And so he can't be held accountable for anything. It's a darling little standalone place that's on a residential avenue. And it has 10 Yelp reviews. The one that represents the rest best is Work in the area, go there for lunch for years Great burgers, warm beer The owner sucks, makes the whole time bad

She IDs me every time, every day for years She truly sucks, but the place has a great cheap burger The reason that I am talking about Fat Jacks, Ben Is not just because I wanted to tell you about the Dutchman Fried cabbage seasoned with sea salt, fresh cracked pepper, and finely diced onion incorporated with wide egg noodles, but rather because I want to talk about the name Fat Jacks. How would you spell Fat Jacks? How would you punctuate it? Oh, well, I would put the apostrophe after the K.

After the K. They put it after the S. Really? It's Fat Jacks, so implying multiple jacks you own it and they're both fat uh and i have tried i have tried really hard to figure out whether i can blame jack for this in every article that talks about him and there are a lot because he allowed the last the home run to ted williams in his last at bat there are a lot of articles about jack fisher in fact one that noted letters roll in more than a dozen

a week from baseball buffs seeking his autograph. Most of them start out, you are my favorite pitcher, Fisher said laughing, but I don't believe them. He acknowledged they're signing, they're writing him because they want the guy who gave up Ted Williams' final home run. But in every one of these articles, they refer to his bar and every single one gets the pronunciation J-A-C-K apostrophe S. But the signage of the building I looked, the apostrophe is after the S. And so I think it's possible that the owner, maybe the owner who sucks, I'm not sure, changed the name after he left. I don't really know. The other thing about Fat Jacks is that the full name is Fat Jacks, the sports gathering place.

Sounds like something John Boyce would name a sports bar Yeah The sports gathering place So anyway, Fat Jack's, apostrophe after the S All right, possibly the longest play index ever And really, when you break it down, what did I say? Nothing Didn't say a thing

You learned nothing about baseball Kevin Curry is a bad pitcher All right, you can use the coupon code BP To get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. But really, you can just use Yelp for free and find Fat Jacks. So that's all you need. The menu looked pretty good to me. The specials, I should say.

I looked at about three months' worth of specials. They post them on Facebook. And the specials are pretty good. Go ahead. All right. Question from Scott Do teams have ways of rating scouts the way scouts rate players? Like, is it common knowledge which scouts

Are substandard in terms of evaluating certain tools? Oh, that Jim, he's always giving 80 speed ratings to 65 runners If so, is there some sort of Metametric world wherein front office Folks use data to project which scouts Will be right about which players, or at least retroactively analyze performance to determine which scouts get which

assignments, or are there too many layers of subjectivity at that point? And Russell Carlton wrote about this once, about how teams can or should use scouting data and work with it as data. And so yes, they do. They do do these things. There are scouts who are known for inflating grades and scouts who are known for being particularly stingy. And so you want to sort of normalize these things and put them on a level baseline so that you can use them and compare them accurately. So I think teams will do that. They will maybe just mentally in some cases, or if they are incorporating it into some sort of projection system, then they could actually do that based on just the average rating that Scout gives out and, you know, comparing that Scout's ratings to his own ratings instead of just some average.

So that definitely happens. And as scouting director told me once that he thinks of some scouts as pitching specialists or hitting specialists. So if he wants someone to scout a pitcher, he'll send a certain scout to see him. And if it's a hitter, then he'll send someone else because he just trusts their evaluation on that type of player more. So that happens too. But really the scouting grades are already numbers. So it's not that hard to make them into stats that you can use, that you can incorporate into a projection system

and use that to project players. And I would bet that that would make our projection systems way better. Maybe that might even be one of the biggest advantages that teams have over public projection systems is that not only do they have the same stats and maybe more stats in some cases, but they can also incorporate scouting reports and look at what a typical player who's gotten a certain scouting grade has done, what the career outcome and career arc tends to be for that type of player. And you can factor that into your statistical projection system and blend them both and probably get a much more accurate picture of the player. So I think teams are doing this and should be doing this and will probably do it even more in the future. Yeah, the thing, occasionally someone will try to do this with public information and the limitations are are always acknowledged and

they're massive but when you think about what a team would be able to do i mean they don't just have the scouts the players that are signed by the scout they have hundreds and hundreds of reports on guys that the team didn't draft uh and quite often maybe even multiple reports on guys that they didn't drive i mean you could it'd interesting to, to see even just how much I like if I, if, if I were hired to do an analysis of scouts, uh, performance within, you know, on a team and had access to all their reports, besides wanting to look and see how well their evaluations correlated to, you know, future performance, I would be very interested to see how different scouts are in terms of having a range of assessments

for each player. I wonder if, for instance, if you had a scout who pegged a guy who saw a high school arm, say, five times over the course of two years and had his fastball at 70 all five times. And then you had another guy who had his fastball at 60, five times. And then you had another guy who had his fastball at 60,

60, 70, 60, 80. I'm not sure which one of those would be better. Like is one of the guys clearly bringing too much personal knowledge into it and all he's doing is looking for things that reinforce what he already decided about a guy? Or is the other one inconsistent and can't see the true qualities within that arm? But But I would be interested just to see little pocket questions like that. And of course, after you have enough of a sample, you can

start evaluating your scouts. If you want to do that, you can look at all the reports they've turned in on players who've panned out and all the reports they've turned in on players who haven't panned out. And after enough reports have been turned in, then you can start to get some sense of just which scouts are better. So that's something you can do. And I wanted to do a long article about this once, but teams just weren't all that willing to talk about it for obvious reasons. They didn't

want to describe exactly how they rate their scouts Scouts probably don't want to Think about the fact that they're being rated And if teams think they have some edge In applying this information Then they don't want to talk about it to Everyone in the world so I don't know everything about the details But it's definitely going on

And it should be going on I don't know how much reporting At all you got to do on that. The impression I get from a totally uninformed standpoint, like I haven't done any reporting on this, but the impression I get from talking to people is that scouts in the most basic way, scouts are sort of informally casually assessed by whether they missed guys who are good, like if it's your area and you don't even write up a guy like if you if you didn't write up Paul Goldschmidt or something like that, that is kind of what ends up being the big black mark that it's not so much that your guys, the guys that you do write up don't turn out good. turn out good it's not even so much that you put 70 and really they're 60 or you put 16 really there's 70 but it's did you write up this guy and it yeah and maybe that's because if you write them up then now at least it's in the scouting director's hands or it's in the cross checkers

hands and and really what you're doing is just bumping it up the um the chain and and then maybe it's ultimately their decision and maybe you'll fight for him more or less than you ultimately should have. But, you know, it's their call. And if you don't even write him up, then you're then you're really like that's what makes your scouting director like fire you. I don't know if I'm right about that. Like I said, I preface this by saying that's the impression I've gotten from very, very, very limited information. OK, last one from a Patreon supporter Amos says

It strikes me as inefficient That Kershaw pitches basically the same Amount as the guys in the Dodgers Fifth spot should the Dodgers Get Clayton Kershaw more innings Not by going deeper into games But by pitching more often Three options jump out at me from most likely

But still unlikely to least One Kershaw pitches every fourth game But by pitching more often. Each of these would get him 20 to 30% more innings, which would be worth well over a win per season, more than a four or five starter at his recent levels. What other options might there be? Which would be your preference, if any? spot. It's whether Kershaw is pitching as much as Kershaw can pitch. And that's, I mean, don't baseball people basically feel like they've got the system that uses Clayton Kershaw as much as he can pitch? Yeah. And then the fifth guy pitches almost as much because the fifth guy is deemed better than the sixth guy. And you want to have him pitching as much as he can pitch unless you have a better option. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Kershaw being better at pitching doesn't also mean that he's necessarily more durable. So it doesn't mean that you can use him more. You can definitely make the case that teams would be better off if they tried to condition pitchers to pitch more so that you could only use the best pitcher on the staff and cut out the last guy on your staff and just never have to Use him but then you Wouldn't just do that with your ace You would do that with all of your Best pitchers and Kershaw still wouldn't

Pitch more relative to The other guys in the rotation Yeah generally I'm on board with the Throw day experiment I like that we sort of did that A little bit with the Stompers last year And if a pitcher is okay With it then I'd be willing to try it

And if you want to really try something Adventurous and try to Bring back four-man rotations or something Then it's worth thinking about At least, but yeah I don't think there's anything you could do to condition Kershaw to use him more Without just doing the same thing

To your other pitchers So yeah Okay Okay All right that's it for today You can support the podcast on Patreon By going to patreon.com slash effectively wild Five people who have made the decision to do so Everett Case, Terry Spencer, Daniel Herman, David Lizerbrom

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