Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 9: Homer and Marge

Episode Date: July 30, 2012

After a weekend sweep of the Giants by the Dodgers, Ben and Sam size up the NL West and discuss a hot Matt Moore-on-Mike Trout match-up.

You know, Homer, it's very easy to criticize. Fun, too. Good morning. Good Monday morning. And welcome to Episode 9 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Baseball Perspectives podcast. In Vancouver, Canada, I am Ben Lindberg. And in Long Beach, California, in the same time zone as I am for once,

it is Sam Miller joining me this morning. Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. How are you? I am well. You survived without me. You flourished without me, even, I would say. You survived without me. I mean, you didn't make a podcast, but you're still alive. Yeah. And I thank Ian Miller for doing a great job of filling in after I was unable to perform. after I was unable to perform. And it was close, and we had a really poignant interaction on Thursday night where I was in the remote Canadian wilderness,

and I did have an Internet connection, and I did get on Skype, and I walked out to the end of this long dock and called Sam and we found that we could not conduct a conversation. We had a several second delay between our responses and it was unworkable so close and so far. It was very nearly a great idea for a bit. a great idea for a bit. Yeah. Have you ever read the book Hatchet by Gary Paulsen? No.

Oh, yeah. It's one of those late 80s Newbery Award winning books that kids read and develop a lifelong fear of flying. Yeah, maybe the best of those books. Yeah, it was good. Either that or Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Right. So it's this book where this kid is on the way to visit his father somewhere in northern Canada, and he gets on this little two-person prop plane. And I guess I'm spoiling it for all the people who haven't read it, but if they're listening now, they probably never will. And the pilot is an older guy who has a heart attack, and the plane goes down, and whoever the protagonist of Hatchet was

has to survive in the Canadian wilderness by himself for some time. So I had some Hatchet flashbacks on that day because I was flying in a small prop plane with a pilot and no one else. And a hatchet? Did you bring a hatchet? I did not bring a hatchet. I was trying to locate the emergency beacon and everything that he finds after months when the plane washes up so I could be ahead of him, ahead of where he was in the book. But everything went smoothly and I'm now back

in civilization, if you consider Vancouver to be civilization, which I do, and I'm ready to record. So, what is your topic for today? My topic is going to be Matt Moore against Mike Trout. All right, and my topic is the NL West. Why don't you start? All right, and my topic is the NL West. Why don't you start? Okay, so the NL West is a division where generally I have no idea what is going on or what will be going on.

My predictions for the NL West are always wrong. So I thought we could do some predictions for the NL West. This weekend, the Dodgers swept the Giants. Hanley Ramirez, since the trade, is hitting very well. Clayton Kershaw continued to pitch very well, as he always does. And now, with a couple months to go, the two teams are tied at the top of the division. Arizona is, I think, four and a half games back, and according to our adjusted standings, has actually been the best team in the division. So, who you got?

Well, I don't know that our adjusted standings have really had time to absorb the effect that Marco Scudero is going to have on that race i think uh i mean i still think that the giants are the best team uh in that division um i've never really bought the dodgers and sometime uh around late april i suggested to somebody that the padres would outperform the Dodgers from that point forward. And they haven't, but it's really close. I, I, last I checked, I think it was a one, one game difference since May 1st between the Padres and the Dodgers. So obviously they get to bank that 17 and seven starter or whatever they had.

But I'm not really convinced about that team. The Diamondbacks, I didn't think were all that good last year, even as they were rolling to 94 wins. And I still don't particularly think they are. And the Giants aren't that great, but they're a team that has won 80, I think 88 games or more three years in a row. They're on pace to do it again this year. I think 88 games or more three years in a row. They're on pace to do it again this year.

And it wouldn't surprise me if they made a trade in the next couple days and got even better. Man, you just really gave every NL Central team a rave review, or NL West team there. That was don't hold back in your positive reviews. I raved about the Padres. Yeah, I was actually thinking of bringing up the Padres as a topic. Just what they're doing or not doing

at the deadline is sort of interesting. But I hadn't thought too much about how much they've actually played. I would have picked the Giants, I think, before the season, or I'd like to think that I would have. I could have gone back and checked to see if I did, but I didn't. Because I did expect the season, or I'd like to think that I would have, I could have gone back and checked to see if I did, but I didn't.

Because I did expect the Diamondbacks to, to fall back a bit. Like you, I thought they were maybe a little lucky last year and not quite as good as their record seemed to suggest they were. But the giant, I mean, the Dodgers are looking a little more real maybe these days than they were for some time there when Kemp was injured and Ether was injured. And now Hanley looks sort of like old Hanley in this extremely small sample size. extremely small sample size. And you're right, maybe it would have been better to bring this up in a couple days when we know what these teams are definitely going to look like for the rest of the season because it seems possible that the Dodgers could do something else

and maybe less possible that the Giants will, although they don't seem to have anything like the budget room that the Dodgers have. So if the Dodgers do succeed in adding a starter, which it seems that they've been trying to do, I still think their first base hole is the biggest hole, the most gaping hole to bring back an old podcast reference in episode nine. And it would be nice if they could do something to improve on James Loney there. But their lineup looks a little more real than it has at times this year. Yeah, you're right. It looks a lot more real. And I could be, it's possible that I've been swayed by those five or six weeks where, like, Bobby Abreu was the only guy I'd heard of in the lineup.

And you're right. Now they have Kemp and Hanley Ramirez in the middle of the order. Hanley Ramirez is not only a potentially exciting addition, but at another one of those spots that I think you had identified in your piece about the easiest upgrades for contenders, basically. It's a huge upgrade over what they were getting. So you probably would be right to chastise me for having an overly simplistic look on the Dodgers based on May and June.

Are you a believer in the change of scenery trade as a thing? I don't know. I would say I'm probably more a believer in it long term than I am short term. I think that there's so much fluctuation from over the course of a couple months that any, you know, almost any performance from about, you know, 400 OPS to about a 1400 OPS is possible at this point, change of scenery or not. is possible at this point, change of scenery or not. And I think that it could be the case that long-term the change of scenery will have a pretty big or a decent effect on Hanley Ramirez and that that will end up making the trade look better for the Dodgers. I probably just wouldn't put a whole lot of stock in that for the next two months.

Yeah, I'm sure there's something to it in some cases, but I would suspect that more often than not, if there is an improvement, it's the sort of improvement that you'd expect any underperforming player to make. So who you got? I was hoping you wouldn't ask. I would probably go with the Giants, I think, just because of the pitching.

But I reserve the right to change my answer if the Dodgers of Wednesday look different from the Dodgers of Monday in some meaningful way. So shall we move on? We might as well. So Saturday night, Matt Moore and Mike Trout faced each other. I love when Matt Moore faces people. I do. I almost wrote about it, and then I wondered whether it would just be redundant,

so now I'm just talking about it. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think it's the first time they've ever faced each other. They play spring training in different parts of the country they were never in the same league together in the minors they were never in the same league at all i don't think in fact and uh this is the first time they've met as big leaguers and so more facedout three times. He threw him 10 pitches. Nine of them were strikes. He struck him out.

He got a pop-up from him, and he got a weak ground ball that the third baseman misplayed, and Trout reached via error. But Moore won that battle, and it was kind of fun to watch because, you know, 16, 17, 18 years of this ahead. And it was the first time in July that Mike Trout didn't reach base. And it was also interesting. I mean, it was, I don't know, it was interesting for a few reasons. It was interesting because, of course, none of the prospect lists reached a consensus preseason on which of those two, as well as Bryce Harper, was the best prospect in baseball.

Which is surprising to me. The greater certainty of the position player, to me, would have made those two guys rank well above Moore. Regardless of how good you think Moore was going to be, I would always take those two guys over the pitcher. Yeah, I think that's a very prudent position. And I think after, I mean, it took about two or three months. It probably took quite a bit less than that, but three months into the season. I think everybody says, I guess we're four months into the season now, everybody would say that Trout and probably Harper are ahead of Moore. So it does not take long for us to get more certain about these guys,

and I think everybody now is more certain that Mike Trout is a better bet than Matt Moore going forward. And probably the only argument left is Trout or Harper, which I think is still an open bet. And may be for a very long time. Was there anything interesting about the way Moore went after him or how he approached him in the at-bats? It was interesting to me because so far as I can tell, different teams have actually had very different approaches toward Trout. It really hasn't been the case that all the teams have settled on a way to pitch him. The most common way that teams pitch him has been a lot of high and inside fastballs.

And that, to some degree, is a remnant of last year when he came up and he was slow on big league fastballs and um he also has such a uh kind of up the middle and to right field approach that um teams were trying to jam him to keep him from doing that and so that's probably the most common way but um like uh the royals really worked him low the idea they had was was to to throw him everything at the knees or below. And the Yankees threw him breaking balls inside and low. And Moore threw him mostly sliders. I think he threw him, of the 10 pitches, probably five sliders, two change-ups, and three fastballs. pitches probably five sliders two change-ups and three fastballs the first pitch he saw was a fastball down the middle which is pretty typical too because uh trout's leading off the game and

he usually takes that pitch and then after that he pretty much just threw him um a lot of sliders and different looks on the slider and uh i haven't really seen a pitcher throw such a high percentage of breaking balls to Trout lately. So that was interesting as well. And I don't really think about Moore's slider as being his best pitch either. But it was very effective. Yeah, I am still surprised at the number of fastballs Trout has seen. I wrote, I guess it was in, I don't know whether it was in May or around then, about how few fastballs Harper had seen and how many Trout had seen, and someone emailed me to follow up and rerun those numbers about a week ago, and they hadn't

really changed significantly at all. Trout was definitely still among the top five, maybe the top three in percentage of fastball scene, which was surprising, I thought, because if that approach had been based on his struggles last year in his rookie season, you'd think half a season of playing like an MVP would have advanced scouts changing their tune a little bit. It doesn't seem that that's been the case in a dramatic way around the league. I wonder if that will change for the rest of this season. You would think so. I don't think they're throwing him fastballs because they're not afraid of him. I think they're throwing him fastballs because they think that's the best way

to get him out. And he handles freaking balls really well. He handles changeups well. And he handles fastballs well too. But it does seem to be the case that when he does look bad in an at-bat, it is more likely to be on a fastball. You can jam him a bit. And not only did he strike out against Moore, but in the seventh or eighth, he faced McGee

and struck out on a fastball there as well. So it wasn't his best game. That's actually a dumb way to phrase it. It was his worst game. Well, if pitchers are already taking the optimal approach against Mike Trout and this is what Mike Trout is doing, that's not going to be fun for pitchers. No, no. Fun for us. Yes. Okay. So that's episode nine in the books. I will be back tomorrow. We will both be back tomorrow, but I will be in New York again while Sam will still be in Long Beach.

So, Episode 10 on Tuesday morning. Episode 9 is over. Thank you, Sam. Thank you.