Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 895: The Chain Letters Edition

Episode Date: June 1, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about old business, then answer listener emails about deceptive defenders, gold chains, nature vs. nurture, strikeout records and more.

Hello and welcome to episode 895 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com I'm Ben Lindberg of 538 Joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Howdy. I saw you tweeting about Christian Bethencourt Yesterday. The Padres catcher Who got into a game as a pitcher

If you were his agent Would you advise him to switch Positions? I think that he Is probably a better catcher than most of us still think. Like he's still young. He hit in AAA. He's still got, you know, some things going on. And so I will acknowledge that I probably, like most people, probably have a greater

sense of him being a bust than is anywhere close to fair or accurate. So probably the answer is no. That said, I would be surprised if he couldn't. I mean, I'd be very surprised if he couldn't have a nice long career as a relief pitcher. And those guys make money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he looked he looked unpracticed.

He looked like he looked like a position player pitching kind of, but he hit mid 90s easy and he had a I don't even know what you would call it. People were calling it a knuckleball or a curveball or a something, an Ephus something in the mid-50s. But obviously he can get it up there. And I'm sure that if he were a full-time pitcher, he would throw even harder and they would refine his delivery. And so I would think that he'd be quite a good reliever. And he, I mean, he has a, he's, you know, he's young and hasn't played all that much, but he has a, what, a career 252 on base in the majors. He did hit a little in AAA, but the, he's had the best arm among catchers, of course, which is why you would think that he could be a decent pitcher even before we actually saw him pitch. And he wasn't a great framer or blocker. Like, he didn't really seem to be that great

at other aspects of catching. And the Braves traded him, even though he was young and cheap. And they signed AJ Persinski for $3 million instead of playing Bethencourt, which makes me think that they had certainly seen enough of him so i would probably convert him pretty soon unless unless he really breaks through yeah there's a a real potential for a cruel irony in his life if he keeps being just good enough to keep at catcher and and never does convert and ultimately ends up basically washing out of the game because he was too good of a hitter that basically like the difference between like it's possible that we'll look back and say the difference between Bethancourt,

the career major leaguer who makes $36 million and Bethancourt, the washout who, you know, is a AAA veteran at 29 is that he was too good a hitter If he had just been born Unable to hit so well He'd be a much more successful person I would suppose that it's probably rare In life that you are Doomed by your

By how good you are at things Yeah That might happen It could be making closer money Alright a couple other Things a few people Yeah, that might happen. It might. He could be making closer money. All right, a couple other things. A few people emailed us. Alex emailed us and some other people, I think, mentioned in the Facebook group our conversation on last week's email show about how long a leash a starting pitcher would get

if he gave up home runs on every pitch to start the game. And you and I thought it would be something like four or maybe three if it were a rookie who you didn't want to scar forever. And people pointed out that one thing that we didn't really take into account was that no one would have anyone warming up in this situation and no one would even be stretching or thinking about warming up at that point. So you would need some time. I don't know that you could stall enough to actually have a pitcher ready unless you were going to say it was an injury or something and pull the guy and then the reliever gets warmup pitches on the mound. Otherwise you would need to allow some time.

So Alex emailed in that he thinks the minimum is six, and other people came in with even higher estimates of how long it would take someone to get warmed up when no one is remotely prepared for that possibility. It's possible. And I'm not – I take this very seriously, and I think that this concern might be exactly right. I'm not totally willing to concede it, though. You know, you don't have to necessarily bring in a long man to relieve the guy. As, you know, I think we've seen some managers do recently in this situation, not this exact situation, but in the situation where you bring your long man in, you sometimes see them now bring in a non-long man, a specialist or something,

just to get you through that inning so that your long man, who's maybe more used to having a long warm-up window, can sort of start the next inning fresh, take his time, not feel rushed. And so I don't exactly know. In fact, someone write this piece. Should I? I don't exactly know. In fact, someone write this piece. Should I? I don't know. I would like to see a warm-up clock put on kind of every pitcher, like how much time from their first warm-up throw that is, you know, shown or mentioned on broadcast to when they stop throwing.

There's probably too many complicating factors to really zero in on it. But, like, I think, you know, some of these specialist I, I bet it's like seven, eight pitches in the, in the pen. And then, um, you know, you get your nine on the mound and, uh, so, you know, a home run, as you noted, a home run is not only is it 20 some seconds, um, for the play to resolve, but there's sort of a certain amount of pump after a home run where, you know, it's sort of expected that the catcher is going to come out to talk to the pitcher, that you're going to wander around. You sort of reset the game a little bit. And so after the third one, if you were a manager and you had a rookie on the mound,

I would think that you get a guy stretching, maybe throwing. And then you get your two visits. You get all the ways that you can stall. And so I'm not totally conceding that you would have to have that, but it is possible. All right. And to follow up to what we talked about yesterday, the play at the plate between the Brewers and the Reds, where Chase Anderson beamed Alfredo Simon as Tyler Holt was trying to steal home. Alex Kaposinskas, who is a Patreon supporter, says, I wanted to follow up on your discussion in the last podcast about what I just said. In regard to whether it was intentional or not, I have some amount of personal experience With a similar play

When I played in high school Which wasn't terribly long ago Our coach instructed our pitchers That in the event that the batter or runner on third Showed his hand a little too early On a suicide squeeze attempt They were to throw the pitch at the batter To thwart their effort

This play even ended up happening once While I was catching My point being, assuming my coach wasn't too abnormal, I'm sure many other coaches and players have thought about this before, especially the professionals. As long as it was on Anderson's mind, I wouldn't find it hard to believe at all that he adjusted mid-windup and intentionally threw at Alfredo Simon. In fact, I'd be surprised if it was not intentional. Yeah, that is a, that is, I think, common advice for a suicide squeeze play. But this was not a suicide squeeze play. There were there were two outs in the inning.

Now, maybe Anderson wasn't thinking it through and just went, well, this seems like a suicide squeeze, and did that by instinct. But this was not a suicide squeeze. If Simon were truly bunting, instinct. But this was not a suicide. So if Simon were truly bunting, then he would be doing, you know, a huge favor for the defense. And he'd be doing a huge favor for the defense because, of course, he would be bunting into the third out of the inning and the run wouldn't score. If you thought it was a straight steal of home, I don't know why it would be the advice on a straight steal of home because the batter is presumably not swinging. You get a freebie and you want to make the throw straight to the catcher so that he just has to lay the glove down. So it wouldn't really make sense at all on a straight steal of home.

It wasn't a suicide squeeze. It was a straight steal of home. So I don't know that I – I think that if Anderson did this, then for that reason it changes it from smart play to dumb play. It's actually the completely wrong way of implementing this situational advice because that was not the situation. And also, you're not trying to hit the guy either. When you throw it at him in the suicide squeeze, I don't think you're trying to hit him. I think you do that because it's hard to get the bunt down. And that's a way of sort of defending against it. I don't know that you, maybe you do want to hit him, but you, you know, still,

you're putting a guy on base, even in a suicide squeeze, you're still putting a guy on base. And so I would think that if the plan is to hit him, then the smarter plan would be to throw a pitch really high. If the plan is not to hit him, then then that's a smart play And I think the plan is not to hit him And lastly Terry wrote In to follow up on our Jose Bautista Rognad Odor Discussion and he says So in one of your recent episodes you spoke about

Odor trying to throw the ball at Bautista And how there isn't a precedent For punishment in that case This was partly because he didn't actually succeed In hitting Bautista and so the commissioner Could kind of address the fact that he tried by suspending him for the punch, but not acknowledging it publicly. They probably don't want to acknowledge it and make it a thing, but now that Bautista is openly accusing Odor of throwing at him, does this change anything? Maybe by forcing the league to acknowledge it. And so the comments were Batista told Tom Verducci,

I know exactly what he was trying to do when he threw the ball. He tried 100% to hit me in the face. And it's not the first time he's done it against me or some of my teammates. And there's video to prove that. And I don't know that it changes anything at this point, because it's probably too late to add another suspension onto things now that one has already been put in place. So I don't know that it changes anything in this case, but maybe in a future case, people will be watching Odor even more closely now or other fielders. Okay. All right. Let's take a question from Henry, who says, I don't trust fielding stats email. I believe the stats, but I don't know how to watch the game with the stats in mind. I'm a Mets fan, and our new shortstop, Estrubel Cabrera,

is one of those guys who, quote, makes all the plays. The announcers, the talk radio guys all love him, and he's fun to watch, smooth, balanced, steady, sure-handed. But the fan graphs and baseball reference stats say he's terrible, like worse than Jeter terrible. So how do we watch fielders with the stats in mind? From the stands or from your living room, what do you look for in the game to see if the guy is having a good day or a bad day?

How do you watch a player's strengths and weaknesses? When one shortstop's web gem is another man's routine grounder, how do you eyeball a guy's value in the field? Not easy. It's very deceptive sometimes. And it even seems to fool practiced observers of the field. Not easy. It's very deceptive sometimes, and it even seems to fool practiced observers of the game. So Ben, let's rephrase this, or let me ask you a question that is along these lines. But if you didn't have defensive metrics, but you were now aware of them,

you were aware of the spread of value, maybe even you had the last hundred years of defensive metrics, including the last decade of really pretty advanced ones. But all of a sudden, going forward, they quit getting recorded. And so you didn't know anything. And let's further stipulate that it's a whole new group of major leaguers so you can't you can't even rely on what you knew about estruo cabreras or anybody else's previous defensive metrics how close do you think you would be to a player's say defensive run saved just eyeballing it and and let's say you you can watch as much as you want but probably you'd watch you know as you do a dozen or a couple dozen games from the player in a year. Yeah.

So they are recording this, but they're not publishing it. So you don't get to see it. You have no exposure to it, no access to it. And at the end of it, you're going to put a number on every guy. What's the correlation? And I'm watching on TV, presumably, mostly. You could answer that however you want want Do you think it would help you To not watch it on TV

I think it would help me If I actually went to a game every day And I were watching for this I think it would help So you can be Ben Lindberg Beat writer for a team And then you can also be Ben Lindberg

Fan of team watching every game on TV And then you can also be Ben Lindbergh fan of team watching every game on TV. And then finally you can be Ben Lindbergh general surveyor of the sport who might see Carlos Correa play a snippets of 11 games a year. How I am. So now I'm curious to know first off how, how close you'd be, but second, I'm kind of curious to know how,

know, first off, how close you'd be. But second, I'm kind of curious to know how much better you think you'd be in the kind of high information situations compared to the low information situations. Yeah, it's hard because even if you are a beat writer, I think that would really help my evaluations of the players on the team I was covering and seeing every day, I think, but I'm not sure how much it would help my evaluations of the guys who were coming in and I was seeing somewhere between, you know, three and 19 times a year. Not sure it would make that much of a difference for those guys. Okay. I'm only asking you for the guy that you're covering though. Okay. So I think I'd be, I don't know how to express how much better I would be, but I think I would be significantly better being in the ballpark every day. Because it's really hard, I think, on TV.

You can get deceived so easily by how athletic someone looks and also just how sure-handed they are, as Henry is saying about Estrubo Cabrera, because that's really easy to tell. If someone makes an error and bobbles a ball and throws the ball away, very easy to tell. And if he never does that, also very easy to tell. Whereas range and how many balls you get to is tough. I mean, you could just, I guess, count how many balls a guy fields, and that's not the worst indication of range. But it's really hard when you're watching on TV and you don't get to see the starting point. And often you don't really get to see a frame of reference for where the person is. If you can't see another fielder or he's not right next to the base or

something, you might not exactly know where he is in space. And so it's really tough, I think, to tell. So I think I would be pretty bad at evaluating guys just if I were watching on TV all the time. I think it might help that I am aware of these biases. And so I would question myself more than say, if we had never had defensive stats that had said that Derek Jeter was bad or Estreba Cabrera was bad, I know that it's possible to get fooled. And so I would examine my assumptions. But even so, I think I'd probably be pretty bad. I mean, there are still so many guys who the stats disagree with the traditional evaluators and at least, you know, in smaller samples. And so I'm not I'm not sure I could really do a good job of distinguishing between the guys who look good and the guys who actually are good. So there's a 50% chance basically that the guy's going to be a positive defender by whatever metric.

And a 50% chance he's going to be a negative defender. And so simply by flipping a coin, you at least have a 50-50 chance of correctly identifying whether he is a positive or a negative contributor. So what percentage chance would you have in these scenarios of getting just positive negative correct? All right. I guess if that's the standard, I just have to be directionally correct. Then watching my team's fielders every day, I think I could get up to say 80% on TV. Okay. Yeah. So you 80% on TV. Okay. Yeah. So you'd be pretty good.

Yeah. If that's the standard, it's a pretty low bar, but if I just have to say good or bad or, you know, useful or not useful, then yeah. Okay. Let me ask you one more question. And this one, I have to do a very, very brief bit of math. Thanks to the plate index for making this possible. Okay. So last thing, I think I did this right, but the, I looked at, I took, I used play index to get defensive runs saved for all shortstops who qualified for the batting title in individual

seasons going back to 2012. So I have 99 shortstops and the standard deviation is 10 runs for these shortstops. Okay. By what average margin would you miss the players true defensive runs saved? Would you guess? Four. Okay. All right. So that's pretty good. All right. I think that's about right. I think we'd do pretty well. Okay. Personally, I think. I don't think, actually, I say I think we'd do pretty, I don't think that is, I don't think that that's well or not well. It's all relative. Yeah. So I don't want to say we'd do well. I think that for the most part, we'd have a pretty good idea who's good and who's not to answer the question specifically in lieu of in absence of fielding stats or history with a guy's fielding stats. I think I generally look at whether the guy

has a good arm and whether he seems quick. And I think probably there would be guys I'd miss on like I probably I don't know, I would I probably would have missed on JJ Hardy. There's probably certain body types that I'm biased against for short stops, for instance, bigger short stops. But I don't know, I think I probably overweight arm in my mind. A guy who has a good arm, as long as he's not completely botching everything, I generally think is a good short stop. And a guy who has a bad arm, I generally think is a bad short stop.

That's, I'm not recommending other people do that, but to answer the question. Yeah, it'd also be a different answer, I generally think is a bad short sub. I'm not recommending other people do that, but to answer the question. Yeah. It'd also be a different answer probably if you were watching the game on mute and if you were listening to the commentary, because if you listen to a full season of commentary, then your opinions are influenced by what you're hearing. So guys who are good at defense or have good defensive reputations will get all kinds of acclaim for their defensive performance from broadcasters or from what you read.

So it's hard to avoid having your opinions colored by other people's opinions. And I would guess that for the most part, people who are regarded as good defenders tend to be good defenders. There are exceptions, but I think that's mostly true. And so you kind of get an accidental wisdom of crowds just following the game and hearing what other people say about players. Definitely. All right. Question from Brett.

I guess this is relevant. Brett is a Patreon supporter. He says, you've talked a few times, and I think he's mostly referring to you, about how baseball skills correlate to each other. Those who are good at hitting tend to be good at catching, throwing, and running. I'm curious to hear why you think that is. Are those skills built on a common foundation, strength, or general athleticism? general athleticism? Or are players who exhibit one outlier skill more likely to get training in others so that by the time they reach the professional level, those players have well-rounded skill sets? Put another way, if nature were less nurtured, how nurtured would it be?

I think those skills are built on a common foundation of strength and general athleticism. Yes. Okay. I agree. And the other thing is probably a factor, too. If you're really good at one thing, then people will invest more time in getting you up to a level of competence in other things. True. Yeah. So it's nature and nurture, as always. All right. James in Sarasota. Actually, all right. Well, since we're doing lots of questions about appearances, let's take a question from Mike. doing lots of questions about appearances. Let's take a question from Mike. Presume we live in a world where no one knows who Jorge Soler is.

If you conduct an experiment where you took this video, and he sends us a link to a video of Jorge Soler hitting a very long home run, and you were able to edit out completely Jorge Soler's bouncing gold chain in one version of the video, and then you conducted an experiment where you showed the two versions of the video to a statistically significant number of groups of scouts, writers, evaluators, etc., and then asked them to estimate Solaire's OPS Plus for the full year, which version of the video would get a higher number, and how much higher would it be? I don't have any idea how to answer this question.

And it's a sort of a scary question um and so you could really go either way right i mean that's the the thing about it is that i don't think i think a lot of people in the game have strong opinions about things like giant gold chains or extreme aggro intensity or cerebral natures. The problem is that all of those extremely strong opinions are influenced by the other things that they see in the player. And so the many times the strength and weakness of the gold chain depends on the player. It is either you are cocky, you don't take it seriously, or you are confident you don't fear failure. And it really does depend partly on what else they see in you. And it depends partly on whether the results are there. And if the results are there, all sorts of great things are used after the fact to explain what made you so great. And if they're not there, they're used to explain why you failed. And so it's really hard to say, to answer the Jorge Soler question

without also knowing how good Jorge Soler is and without knowing how much else you know about Jorge Soler. So rather than say positive or negative, because I don't think you can say, do you, what do you think is the, do you think that there would be a change in either direction or how big a change do you think there would be in either direction? And so just do absolutes. We're not talking positive or negative. Would it affect the average scout, writer, evaluator? Would it affect their

estimate for Solaire's OPS plus in either direction? Yes. I think it would. Okay. Significantly by more or by greater or fewer than nine points of OPS plus. We're going OPS plus. So let's say by greater or fewer than nine points of OPS+. We're going OPS+.

So let's say by greater or less than four points of OPS+. I'll say more. Wow. Okay. Yeah. really that really gets make you know gets nerve-wracking is then imagining that how much the question would differ based on solaire's cultural background and race uh and so like i could have an idea of what i like like for instance i don't think i'm going into dangerous territory here but i it's always possible i am um so forgive me I'm doing my best but I think that Solaire just based

on what I know about the sport I think that Solaire's evaluations would go up because I agree and I think that if it were John Lackey wearing it it would go down just because I think you're the the part of the the thing is that everybody's looking for They're trying to compare a player to A version of that player that they have seen succeed or fail before And the race-based comps are Lazy and misleading and reductive But I assume that they happen because

People see a guy and go, oh, he reminds me of another guy that I saw who succeeded, and therefore I think he'll succeed, or who failed, and therefore I think he'll fail. And to me, the Solaire gold chain would probably be used to find successes. I don't know. I think, I mean, jewelry in general throughout human history, whether it's man or woman or regardless of race, it's a status symbol,

right? That's why it's a popular thing. I mean, people might think it's aesthetically pleasing or it might serve some purpose like a wedding ring, but it's a display of wealth and status. I can afford this rare item and you can't. And so if someone is wearing some flashy jewelry, I would guess that in most situations people would revise their estimate upward of that person's status and and worth even if it's unconscious so i i think maybe you know if he were like this is clearly a a big leaguer so maybe you would have some some prejudices come in with a younger guy where you know you think that he hasn't earned that status or something and and and the makeup is bad and it will backfire but once he's made the major leagues if he's still confident enough in his abilities to flash the chain then uh that speaks to some some confidence and and confidence can be a a good element of makeup even if it's

i don't know even if it borders on brashness like the the bryce harper kind of makeup, even if it's, I don't know, even if it borders on brashness, like the Bryce Harper kind of makeup, that can often be a positive attribute for a player who has to compete against other players. So yeah, I would revise my estimates upward, maybe for almost anyone. You would revise your estimates upward or you think that... My estimate of other people's estimates. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. Yeah, I don't know.

It's a good question. Okay. Play index? Sure. Play index comes from a listener named Rob who asks me a win streak question. Rob asks, I've always been curious about the distribution of winning streaks. In theory, one would think slightly more than half of all one game win streaks turn into two game win streaks. And this trend would continue until infinity. I don't think this is necessarily true,

especially once win streaks get high enough. Perhaps pressure increases with more wins or teams get worn down quicker because they are trying so hard. The problem for me with those reasons is that I could flip them the other way. Pressure should drop because your position in the standings is increasing, or you can afford to take more plays slash games off due to your success. Do you have any insight on whether it's harder to win game number 10 in a win streak than number five? And if it's more difficult, any thoughts as to why this might be? So I use Playindex to basically look at how long all streaks are and see basically what percentage continue and grow. And so this required a few different Playindex searches because there are tens of thousands of one game streaks over a long period of time, but not very many 16 game

win streaks in the course of baseball history. And I wanted to get the largest sample possible without getting totally overwhelmed with, well, an overwhelming play index. So I have a few different time periods, but basically all the time periods, the short of the streak, the short of the time period I used, but I basically kept on moving it so that I would get a large, as large a sample as I could handle with this. So the first thing though, and the first thing I did not use Playindex for, the first thing I used Russell Carlton for, and that is simply to answer the question of how often the team that wins today should win tomorrow. And I wasn't sure philosophically how to answer this. And if there is

a way to answer it any other way than empirically, like if you simply know the nature of baseball, the nature of, you know, the wind distribution, the spread of winds from good teams to bad, the home field advantage, do you have enough math to figure out what it should be? And I didn't know how to do that. So I asked Russell to get it empirically for me. He did. But let me first, before I tell you, ask you to think of a number and tell me what that number is.

What do you think is the probability of a team winning today, winning tomorrow? 52%. 52%. That's a little lower than I would have said. I mean, just simply knowing home field advantage is 54%. You've got to figure that since the good teams win enough more of the time than they lose, the team that wins today is more likely to be the better team and therefore is going to be

much more likely, you know, is going to be more likely to win tomorrow, particularly when you have good teams playing bad teams and you have three game series. so you're very often getting the same matchup between games. So when you have the Cubs and the Reds, for instance, today, they're not playing today, but if you did, if you had the Cubs and the Reds playing today, the Cubs would be like, you know, 80-some percent likely to win that game, maybe, arguably. And once they win that, then they're far greater than 52% to win tomorrow. Now, of course, they're 20% likely to lose that game, and then they're considerably less likely to lose the next day as well. But I wasn't sure anyway. I would have guessed higher. I probably would have guessed like 55.5%. And the

answer surprised both Russell and I, although it won't surprise you as much, it is 51.1%. It's actually very, very close to a true coin flip, which surprised me. Yeah. So we have now our baseline. And you have to assume that in Rob's question, there's no extra pressure on the team that has just won one game. They're not worried about this burgeoning win streak. They're not thinking, oh, no, if we lose tomorrow. So that's a fairly pure test, I would think. So 51.1% is how often the team that wins today should win tomorrow.

And as Rob notes, that number should go up with each additional win because the better teams are even more likely to win two games in a row or three games in a row or four games in a row. There are a few things that I think complicate this. And this might actually be part of the reason that we ended up with 51.1, which is a somewhat lower percentage. Baseball is not like basketball, where you have essentially the same resources available to you every game. And you are more likely to win, you know, a team could be a 650 or 700 winning percentage team one day and a 380 winning percentage team the next day

simply because of the one change in their lineup, the person on the mound. And you're also, I don't know how much this matters, but you're also more likely, you're less likely to use your bullpen in a win, but you're much more likely to use the best part of your bullpen. And so you're a lot more likely to use your bullpen in a win, but you're much more likely to use the best part of your bullpen. And so you're a lot more likely to have your closer pitching a second or third or even fourth straight day if you just won. But mainly the starter question. And so it could be that the teams that win are more likely to have just used their ace. And so we know by definition that they are not using their ace the next day. And maybe the team they beat was less likely to lose their ace.

And so we know that by definition, they're more likely to be using their ace the next day. So maybe that's why. And so you would think that that might show up in some of the lower number winning streaks and probably should wash out the higher you get. And you start going through the rotation multiple times because who knows where you're on the rotation at that point.

But to answer the question, Ben, 51.1% of teams that win game one, win game two. All right. 57% of teams that win game two, win game three. And that's pretty much where the trend ends. It gets a little bit noisy beyond that because we're talking about samples of, you know, six, seven, 800 games, but still only six, seven, 800 games. So three game win streaks are only 49% likely to become four game win streaks. And five game win streaks are only 48% likely to become six game win streaks. Those are two cases where you're actually less likely to win, or you have been less likely to win in the samples that I've drawn from. They're the outliers. 11 game win streaks are exactly 50% likely to become 12 game win streaks. And 16 game

win streaks are exactly 50% likely to become 17 game win streaks. Every other situation, the team has been more likely to win and quite often much more likely to win. For instance, once we get past five games, if you win six games, you're 55% likely to win the seventh and then 55% likely to win the eighth and then 55% likely to win the ninth and then 57% likely to win the 10th. So you're not seeing a, uh, you're not seeing a, a line going upward where as we might've hypothesized, you'd be ever more likely to win. However, you are more likely to win. Not increasingly likely, but more likely to win.

Taken as a whole, lumping all of these together, so the 19-game win streak and the two-game win streak are treated the same. Once you have a winning streak going, you are 54% likely to win the next game, which is more than 51%, of course, and does suggest that, in fact, the pressure does not get to teams. It may not, I don't know, there might be something there, but it does not get to teams. They tend to keep winning more often than not. And maybe the curiosity here is that since 1947, which is the oldest, which is the longest sample I've used, there have been no 17-game win streaks in history. There's been one 18-game win streak. There's been one 19-game win streak. And there's been one 20-game win streak. But nobody has ever won 17. You win 17 in a row, you're pretty much

guaranteed to win 18 in a row. So you just got to get there. You just got to make it to 17, folks. 12-game win streak, by the way, is the peak. 60 other than 17-game win streak. 64% of 12-game win streaks become 13-game win streaks. But again, 11-game win streaks at the high level are the most likely to be snapped. And so that all washes out.

It's all just noise. The question has been answered. Follow-ups not welcome. Well, I always like when we have a conclusive answer to a play index question. 51% though is what I'll remember from this more than anything else. 51%. Yeah. As soon as I said it and you started talking, I started regretting my initial estimate.

But I shouldn't have. Uh-huh. All right. As soon as I said it and you started talking, I started regretting my initial estimate, but I shouldn't have. All right. Oh, by the way, one very small detail is that, in fact, all those numbers that I gave you are slightly lower than they should be, because if you end a season with a winning streak, then my means of querying it would treat it as snapped at that point. But of course, the season just ended. And so I don't think that affects many. There aren't a lot of seasons ending on 20 game win streaks or 12 game win streaks or

anything like that. But you would revise everything slightly higher. And we might, if I did this right, I might even get the three and the five game win streaks up to 50%. Although probably three game win streaks, probably not five game win streaks up to 50 although probably three three game win streaks probably not five game win streaks all right all right question from patreon supporter matt armstrong in comparison to the rich hill contract conundrum what would you have paid tim lincecum if he had thrown 95 miles per hour in his tryout i don't trust tryouts right so there'd definitely be more uncertainty than if he had done it in a game

situation. But how hard did, I mean, even young Tim Lincecum, well, he averaged, what, 94 or something. So he'd be, if he could demonstrate that he could throw as hard as peak Lincecum for a few pitches in a tryout, which is something that he could not have done these last few years when he was averaging 80 something. What would that be worth? Boy, I mean, a five or six mile an hour bump from a guy who had known health issues and presumably no longer does and who has... And who was, you know, the best pitcher in the league when he was throwing that hard.

Exactly. And who we know has the great secondary pitch. But, man, it's so hard to trust five throws on a gun. Yeah. So I would say I'd give him one year and $12.5 million. Okay. Yeah, that sounds about right. Does it?

I think it does. I mean, I'm assuming that you're not going to just blame it on a hot gun. Let's say you can actually trust that he is throwing that hard. You have multiple guns or you have pitch effects set up in the bullpen or whatever it is. So he is actually throwing that hard. You don't know whether he could throw that hard for more than 10 pitches or whether he'll throw that hard next time you see him, but he is throwing that hard for that one day. And we know what Tim Lincecum can do if he could throw that hard. So I think I'd be willing to bite on the fact that maybe the layoff

fixed something. Who do you think provides the baseballs? Because wouldn't you be sort of suspicious that he was throwing a baseball that was a couple ounces light? Yeah. Like somebody, I wonder if somebody manufactures for like $15,000 the fraudulent tryout baseball. And you like, you bring your own ball. You're, you know, you show up. I got mine. I'm good.

I got mine. I brought mine. I'm good. I got mine. I brought mine. And you throw this slightly lighter ball. Get an extra couple ticks. Yeah. Who's checking that? Yeah. Good question.

All right. And last question from James in Sarasota who says, Picture this. It's October 2, 2016, the last day of the regular season. All of the playoff spots and their seedings have been determined. It says, record. They do this by refusing to field any balls put in play such that the only outs recorded would be via strikeout. Each team uses its best starting pitcher in this effort and keeps him in the game without fielding any batted balls until one of the following things occurs. The starting pitcher records his 21st strikeout. The starting pitcher throws 140 pitches in the game. The starting pitcher throws 40 pitches in an inning. Or lastly,

it becomes mathematically impossible for the starter to record 21 strikeouts within the 140 pitch limit. Possibly to help with the pitch count, the team fields a batted ball once every couple innings or so if it's put in play on the first pitch. If 20 teams are trying this, what are the odds of at least one of them succeeding? How many of the starting pitchers would even make it through the fifth inning? Did you do any math? It seems like if we're going to do that, I mean, this one feels like we should have done a little math. Yeah, I guess math would have been helpful here. All right, I'll do a quick, I'm going to do a very quick play index. I'm looking at, so from team, I'm looking at this year in team games, 35 to 39. So I basically picked at random. I took all the starters. I'm going to

take all of their starting their, their lines, drop them into a spreadsheet and divide the number of pitches by the number of strikeouts. I'm not going to give them extra credit for pitching for the strikeout and you presumably they would get extra credit and they would do better because they'd be pitching for the strikeout. But otherwise, I'm basically just going to treat everything as either a strikeout or not a strikeout, which is in this scenario is what we're talking about. Everything that's not a strikeout is not going to be an out. So this guy is going to get to go until he runs out of pitches.

And all that matters is whether he can strike out a batter in, seven pitches on average roughly yeah so uh i have a hundred ish starts here sorting by pitches per strikeout smallest to largest not one pitcher struck out a batter every seven pitches the best was clayton kershaw who against the mets on may 12th struck out a batter every 8.3 pitches, 8.4 pitches. Then Michael Pineda every nine pitches, David Price every 9.4. And those aren't even, those don't even get you close. Even if you treated every batted ball as a hit and gave him infinite chances to get 27 outs via strikeout, the pitches would become prohibitive.

So unless these guys could really, really, really turn on the strikeout magic, I don't think it would be likely to happen. It would be a lot more likely to happen than on a regular day. Yes. And I wouldn't put it past Kershaw, for instance Or, you know, some other pitchers But I think the odds are On a given day, though, if you only have 20 shots Oh, Kershaw wouldn't be pitching

Kershaw wouldn't be pitching, right? Well, he might be now He'd still have some really good starters going But the best starters on non-playoff teams Yeah, well, the Dodgers are a non-playoff team right now Right now, yeah So Kershaw might be starting But, I mean, I don't know.

Given only one day at this, given 20 starts from non-playoff teams, I would put your chances at something like 2% or 3%. Not of any individual pitcher, but of anybody in the whole league doing it. Unless the hitters are, you know, accomplices, in which case, who cares to the whole thing?

But then really, really, really who cares? Right. All right. That was just a play to sneak in a second play index. Third. Third. Third play index. All right.

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